“Of course it does!” Arian felt as if she were arguing with her mother. “But how can I go down, if she cannot come up?”

“Ah. Well, it will be another strange journey. Are you ready?”

Clinging to the roof of the dragon’s mouth while it pierced earth and the rock ceiling of the great hall—carefully, to cause the least damage—and then riding the dragon’s tongue down and down into the silvery elf-light to confront a very angry elven queen—would not have been Arian’s chosen activity for the day, but she had no choice.

Arian caught only a few details of the glittering mosaic in the upper part of the great hall, simulating the leaves of an early-summer forest, or the great columns like tree trunks, before the dragon’s tongue set her down and withdrew. At one end of the long hall a dais rose four steps from the smooth stone floor, and there the Lady stood, surrounded by attendant elves.

“You!” said the Lady, as if everything were Arian’s fault. Her anger, thick with enchantment, pressed on Arian’s mind. Everything she could think of to say sounded ridiculous. The Lady’s own escort and the elves who had been working underground formed a solid mass behind the Lady herself. All glowered at her. “You traitor,” the Lady said. “You figured out some way to trap us here—”

“No,” Arian said. “You trapped yourself by your rudeness to the rockfolk.” She could hardly believe those words were coming out of her mouth, or that she held off the Lady’s enchantment so easily.

“How could you—?”

“We have little time,” Arian said. “The taig needs you, Lady, and I must repair the … the pattern.” She could not make the sound the dragon made.

“You can’t; it’s broken. It was not of my making.” The Lady drew herself up and folded her arms.

“I can repair it.”

“You’re only a half-elf, daughter of a—” The arms came down; the Lady scowled.

Arian kept her own voice level. “You have said you do not know the pattern: I do. Will you sulk here under stone and let your forest burn?”

“It will not burn—I would know if—”

“It is burning now,” Arian said. “The Pargunese brought scathefire from stolen dragon eggs.”

The Lady swayed where she stood; Arian could see the shock on all the elves’ faces. “I didn’t know—how could I not know? I can’t reach it—”

Arian felt a grim satisfaction: the Lady now felt what she had imposed on Arian. “Will you come, or no?”

“If you can repair the pattern—do so!” one of the other elves said.

The Lady moved aside, and Arian came forward. Once the dais had been inlaid with patterns done in mosaic, some purely elven in origin, but the most important—for the moment—the one the dragon had shown her. Now that pattern—and those within an arm’s length of it—were gone, revealing rough gray stone. Heaps of colored stone chips, each heap a different shade of blue or red or green, filled the back of the dais.