He hesitated, unsure of whether to go or not.

“A poet,” she said suddenly. “Truly?”

He suppressed a boast and thus surprised himself. “I have long called myself so. Sometimes I doubt my skills.”

She turned again and looked at him with a little more interest. “But surely this is a poet’s world, Master…”

“Tinwright.”

“Master Tinwright. Surely this your time of glory. Legends of the old days walk beneath the sun. Men are killed and no one can say why. Ghosts walk the battlements.” She smiled, but it was not pleasant to see. Tinwright took a step back. “Do you know, I have even heard that mariners have lately returned with tales of a new continent in the west beyond the Smoking Islands, a great, unexplored land full of savages and gold. Think of it! Perhaps there are places where life still runs strong, where people are full of hope.”

“Why should that not be true of this place, Lady Elan? Are we truly so weak and hopeless?”

She laughed, a small sound like scissors cutting string. “This place? Our world is old, Master Tinwright. Old and palsied—doddering, and even the young ones gasping in their cots. The end is coming soon, don’t you think?”

While he was considering what to say to this strange assertion, he heard noises and looked up to see two young women hurrying along the battlements toward them, slipping a little on the wet stones in their haste. He recognized them as Princess Briony’s ladies-in-waiting—the yellow-haired one was Rose or some other such flower name. They looked at Tinwright suspiciously as they approached, and for the first time he wished he was wearing better clothes. Oddly, it had not occurred to him during his conversation with Elan M’Cory.

“Lady Elan,” the dark one cried, “you should not be walking here by yourself! Not after what happened to the princess!’

She laughed. “What, you think someone will climb the wall of the Inner Keep and steal me away? I can promise you, I have nothing to offer any kidnapper.”

Ah, but you are wrong, thought Tinwright: if Briony Eddon was the bright morning sun, Elan M’Cory was the sullen, alluring moon. In truth, he thought, his mind as always leaping to the tropes of myth and story, the goddess Mesiya must look much like this, so pale and mysterious, she who walks the night sky with her retinue of clouds.

He remembered then that Mesiya was the wife of Erivor and mother of the Eddon family line, or so it was claimed, her wolf their battle-standard. How quickly these poetic thoughts grew muddled…

“Come with us,” the two ladies-in-waiting were saying, tugging gently at the black-clad Elan’s arms. “It is damp here—you will catch your death.”

“Ho!” a voice cried from below, lazy and cheerful. “There you are.”

“Never fear,” Elan M’Cory said, but so quietly that only Tinwright heard her. “It has caught me instead.”

Hendon Tolly stood at the base of the wall on the Inner Keep side, a small crowd of guardsmen in Tolly livery standing near him but at a respectful distance. “Come down, good lady. I have been looking for you.”