When the fog cleared and the people of Town could gaze up at the new form of the Palace, changes were thereby wrought in their minds, but somehow it was easier this way; Egdod did not have to do the work of it, for the world was simply telling them all what was there and what was not. As a further trial of this idea, he waited until night, when the people of Town were wont to go inside their houses. He went down to the park and found no one there to watch. Just to be sure of that, he drew a mist around the place, then returned to the ill-formed stump of rock he had left there earlier. With ease he was able to draw the stone up out of the grass and shape it into a little tower that echoed the shape of the ones he had made at the corners of his Palace.

After this matters became more settled, for a time, in both Town and Palace. Speaksall took up residence in his antechamber, and Freewander made her home in the new tower above the Gatehouse.

Summer passed into fall. Egdod made a practice of walking down the Street from time to time and strolling in the Park to observe the doings of the souls who now frequented it, but also to be observed by them. He came to recognize more souls who had distinguished themselves in some way. There was one who liked to perch on the top of the little tower in the middle of the Park and simply look about for days at a time; Egdod named her Long Regard and made her a chamber in the top of the Palace’s fourth tower, the one that most directly overlooked Town. Another had made his house extraordinarily complicated and handsome; Egdod named him Thingor and afforded him an outbuilding attached to the Palace’s side wall, where he could work on the making of new things away from the stifling gaze of other souls.

Egdod taught Freewander the art of flying great distances and showed her how to pierce the storm wall surrounding the Fastness. This became extraordinarily fierce as winter set in, but Freewander’s supple body and nimble wings were equal to it. Thingor, by contrast, was a poor flyer whose wings got smaller and smaller the less he used them. Egdod carried him to the Fastness from time to time, and left him there for weeks at a stretch to better it. There Thingor learned new arts of fashioning things from diverse metals, sheets of transparent rock, and novel varieties of stone, all of which he discovered in the deranged underpinnings of the Knot, where Pluto had thought it good to place them. Thingor quarried those minerals from the depths with the help of other souls whom Longregard had made note of in Town for their interest in delving and shaping the earth.