“Watch tha foot!” cried Beetledown. Utta looked down to see that she had nearly stepped on a ramp that led from the floor to an old rosewood chest no higher than the middle of her thigh. The lid was flung back and the hinges, badly rusted, had given way, so that the lid hung unevenly, half resting on the ground, but it was the inside of the chest that caught her eye. A row of tiny houses had been built inside it, along the back—half a dozen simple but beautifully constructed three-story houses.

“Merciful Zoria,” said Utta. “Is this where your people live?”

“Nay,” said Beetledown, “only those as tend the Ears.”

“Tend the ears?”

“Step careful, please. And watch tha head, too.”

Utta looked up just before walking into one of the hanging bridges. Up close, she could see it was much less simple than she had thought: the knot-work was regular and decorative, the wooden planks clearly finished by hand with love and care. She resolved to move even more slowly. Just the loss of one of these bridges to her clumsiness would be a shame.

“Did you ever imagine such a thing was here, under our noses?” she asked Merolanna.

“This castle has always been full of secrets,” the other woman said, sounding oddly mournful.

They moved deeper into what might have once been a simple storeroom but had long since become a weird, magical place of miniature bridges and ladders, of furniture turned into houses, with small wonders of fittings and drapery inside them that Utta could only glimpse, and tiny lanterns glowing in the windows like fireflies.

“Where are all your people?” she asked.

“There be only few of we folk who live in this place—only those who serve the Lord of the Peak direct and personal,” the little man explained. “Those stay inside, so as not to be trod on by giants.” He coughed, a sound like a bird sniffing. “Beggin’ tha pardon, ma’am.”

Utta smiled. “No, that sounds very sensible. How long have your people been here, hiding from us blundering giants?”

“Forever, ma’am. Long as remembered. The Lord of the Peak, he made us and gave us this place for our own. Well, not this place, ’haps—this room we took for ours in my great-grands’ day. But our lands, our walls, our roofs, we have had forever.”

“But then why is your god named the Lord of the Peak?” Utta asked. “If you have always been here, what mountain can you know?”

“Why, the great peak your folk do call Wolfstooth,” Beetledown said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world—which, to him, it doubtless was. “That is where the Lord lives.”

Utta shook her head, but gently, so as not to dislodge the little man. Wolfstooth Spire, the castle’s central tower, was the Rooftopper’s Xandos—the home of their god! What a world this was, both his and hers. What a strange, wonderful world.

The queen now appeared from a hidden door somewhere on the far side of the room, riding in a chariot drawn by a herd of white mice, with a small phalanx of soldiers behind her. She waved in an imperial sort of way, then led Utta and Merolanna a little farther down what was clearly the attic room’s main thoroughfare, between rows of chests and other furniture—each, Utta had no doubt, converted into temples or mantiseries or congregations of sisters, all in service to the god who they believed lived at the top of a nearby tower.