—from The Beginnings of Things
The Book of the Trigon

IT TOOK SISTER UTTA LONGER than she would have liked to clear away the books and rolls of parchment on the least cluttered chair, but when she had finished Merolanna sank into it gladly. Once she saw that the duchess was only light-headed—and no surprise; Utta was feeling a bit dizzy herself—she cleared herself a place to sit, too. This task was not made any easier by the fact that a pentecount of miniature soldiers standing at attention on the floor had been joined by at least that number of tiny courtiers, so that there was almost nowhere Sister Utta could put her foot or anything else down without first having to wait for finger-high people to clear the way. King Olin’s study now looked like the grandest and most elaborate game of dolls a little girl could ever imagine. At the center of it all, as poised and graceful as if she were the ordinary-sized one and Utta and the duchess were the inexplicable atomies, sat Queen Upsteeplebat on her hanging platform in the fireplace.

Merolanna fanned herself with a sheaf of parchments. “What did you mean, you can tell me about my son? What do you know about my son?”

Utta could make no sense of this: she had lived more than twenty years in the castle, and to the best of her knowledge Merolanna was childless. “Are you all right, Your Grace?”

Merolanna waved a hand at her. “Losing my mind, there is no doubt about that, but otherwise I am well enough. I am more grateful than I can say that you are here with me. You are seeing and hearing the same things I am, aren’t you?”

“Tiny people? Yes, I’m afraid I am.”

Upsteeplebat raised her arms in a gesture of support, or perhaps apology. “I am sorry if I shocked you, Duchess Merolanna. I cannot explain how we know about your son, but I can promise you it was not by deliberately intruding on your privacy.” The queen showed them a smile tinier than a baby’s fingernail. “Although I must confess we have been guilty of that in other circumstances with other folk. But I can tell you no more about any of it, because we are offering you a bargain.”

“What sort?” asked Utta.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Merolanna. “You don’t have to bargain with me. Tell me what you want and I’ll get it for you—food? You must live a dreadful, poor life hiding in the shadows if all the old stories now turn out to be true. Surely you can’t want money…”

The Rooftopper queen smiled again. “We eat better than you would suppose, Duchess. In fact, we could triple our numbers and still barely dent what is thrown away or ignored in this great household. But what we want is something a bit less obvious. And we do not want it for ourselves.”

“Please,” said Merolanna with an edge of anger in her voice, “do not play at games with me, madam. You tease me with the prospect of learning something about my son, which if you know of his existence at all, you must know I would do anything to achieve. Just tell me what you want.”