“I do not know what happened,” Chaven said to Chert as they turned the bench right-side-up and sat on it. Chert poured them both a mug of mossbrew out of a jug. “Never before…” He frowned. “Something has been done to that boy. Behind the Shadowline, perhaps.”

Chert laughed, but it was not one of the pleasant kind. “We did not need any mirror-magic to know that.”

“Yes, yes, but there is more here than I ever thought. You heard him. He did not merely wander across the Shadowline—he was taken. Something strange was done to him there, I have no doubt.”

Chert thought of the boy as he had found him just days before, lying at the foot of the Shining Man at the very center of the Funderling Mysteries, with the little mirror clutched in his fingers. And then that terrifying fairy-woman had taken the mirror from Chert in turn. What was it all about? Was she the queen the boy was shouting about? He had said something about a hole, and Chert could see how a heart with a hole in it might describe her.

“I don’t understand,” Chaven said. “Not any of it. But I cannot help feeling that I need to.”

“Well enough.” Chert stood, wincing at the ache in his knees. “Me, I have more pressing things to worry about, like where we are going to go and how we are going to find something to eat without anyone noticing you.”

“What are you talking about?” Chaven asked.

“Because not only isn’t Opal going to feed us today,” Chert told him, “I think it’s pretty plain that you and I will be a lot healthier if we’re not sitting here when she comes out.”

“Ah,” said the physician, and hastily drained his mug. “Yes, I see what you mean. Let us be going.”

16

Night Fires

Pale Daughter told her father Thunder that she had seen a handsome lord dressed all in pearly armor, with hair like moonlight on snow, and that her heart now rode with him. Thunder knew that it was his half brother Silvergleam, one of the children of Breeze, and forbade her to go out of the house again. The music between father and daughter lost its purest note. The sky above the god’s house filled with clouds.

—from One Hundred Considerations
out of the Qar’s Book of Regret

AFTER SO MANY CENTURIES, it was hard for Yasammez to accustom herself to true daylight again. Even this shy, cloud-blanketed winter sun seemed to blaze into her eyes from the moment it rose until it slid down behind the hills. She disliked it, but also felt a sort of wonder: had it really been like this once, walking in these southern lands, moving beneath Whitefire’s orb every day in light so bright that it turned shadows into stark black stripes? She could scarcely remember it.

She had taken the mortals’ city, but it was meaningless without the castle—worse than meaningless, because time was against her. Yasammez had prepared herself for fire and blood, for her own long-forestalled death, for meaningless victory or the finality of defeat, but she could never have prepared herself for this…waiting. The dragging stalemate was beginning to feel as though it might last until the unfamiliar sun burned out and the world went dark. She cursed the Pact of the Glass and her own foolishness for agreeing—she should never have let her hands be tied. Even if it worked, it would buy the one she loved only a few more moons of life and make the eventual loss even more heartbreaking.