On the table, she unfolded the cloth. Centered on the cloth’s design, a many-pointed star, alternating gold and silver points against the blue, was an obvious crown, itself glittering with sapphires and diamonds but for one blank spot.

Joy burst over Dorrin like a wave; the light in the room shimmered, and without her intent, the crown rose off the table and hung in the air before her.

You are the one. At last I am free.

“Not now,” Dorrin said aloud. Magery ran like fire through her veins; she could scarcely see Paks, though the silver circle on her brow burned brightly. Dorrin reached out, nonetheless, and took the crown in her hands, setting it back in its wrappings.

“Was that what I—what was that?” Paks said. She did not sound alarmed, just interested. Her calmness steadied Dorrin.

“It talked to me,” Dorrin said. “Did you hear it?”

“No. What was it saying?”

“From the first—the goblet—” Dorrin nodded at the goblet. “It said it was mine. And so did the crown.” She drew a long breath. “If—if my family heard such voices, and believed them, it would explain—”

Nothing. The voice was implacable. They bound us with blood we did not want. You are different. We are yours. Dorrin shivered.

“It said something else?” Paks said.

“Yes. It said they—my family—bound these things with blood—blood it did not want. That I am different, and these things belong to me.”

“There was more,” Paks said, looking at the jewels in the unfolded box. “See this space here?” She pointed to an empty space with the slight impression of something in the velvet lining. She looked at Dorrin, brow wrinkled around the circle. “I’ve seen something—somewhere—that’s like these. A necklace. I know—” She looked excited now. “Brewersbridge, when I was there before I went to Fin Panir. Arvid—that thief—gave it to me. I gave it to the Girdish treasury when they chose me for paladin’s training.”

Dorrin smoothed the cloth that had been around the crown. Not a worn stitch, not a frayed edge. “I wish I knew what this meant.” She touched the star-figure inside the arc of the crown. “It must be symbolic, but—”

“I saw it in Luap’s Stronghold,” Paks said. “A cloth something like this, but I don’t know what it means. It was in a small chamber, empty but for the cloth laid on the sleeping shelf. I wasn’t thinking about that, then. I was already falling into Achrya’s spell.”

“Do you think these things are evil?” Dorrin’s own magery insisted NO but she did not trust it. “The voices from an evil spirit, tempting me?”

Paks touched them one by one. “No. Whatever evil has been here has not corrupted them, not that I can tell. I felt evil in the room—the remnants of that picture and its frame among them—but not these things. Yet they have a power—”

“That I do not understand,” Dorrin said. “Falk and the High Lord give us wisdom to understand what this means.”