Chandler had uploaded his playlists as well as his songs to the house computer, so he had his favorite dance playlist for exercising. He ran on the treadmill in the gym. He walked around the outside of the house, this time keeping his shoes on— It was cold enough to turn his breath to fog, and he was glad that he was getting some warmer clothes.

He practiced his guitar. Without worrying about anyone listening—except John Va and the goons at the gatehouse, who didn’t bother him—he was able to relax into the music, and the arpeggio practice resolved itself into a fragile melody. He fingerpicked it out, slow first, then faster, tapping the rhythm on the soundboard as he played. It was a wistful little song, flamenco-inflected but sadder, and he played with it for hours, trying this and that variation, until Lily brought him a bowl of stir-fry and rice and told him to stop and eat.

Finally, he gave in to the temptation that had nagged him since Oberon left, and snuck into the envoy’s room.

Long before he’d had any association with Oberon, he and Marissa had wondered why the elf-lord always wore the same clothes: did he have twenty black shirts, twenty pairs of black pants? How many pairs of shiny black leather dress shoes did he have? Did he own anything else? Now Ángel had an opportunity to snoop in Oberon’s closet—his very closet, as Marissa would say, in his indubitable bedroom. He would look, and describe it to her in an email, and then she would write back.

Not sneaking, he told himself, padding down the empty hallway to the last door on the left. It wasn’t like he hadn’t been invited.

Oberon’s room was different from the rest of the house. Clearly it had been redecorated. Whatever fanciful décor had originally adorned this chamber had been stripped away, down to white plaster walls and bare windows overlooking the distant forest. Somewhere Oberon had collected a lot of oriental-style rugs and laid them over every inch of the hardwood floor, several deep, overlapping and at odd angles, some rug corners curled up the wall. As a result the floor was a soft, uneven, lumpy mass of carpeted pattern: red and blue, purple and green. The bed was unmade, piled with an overabundance of duvets and throws: brown, indigo, blue, green. You couldn’t lie down on that bed, you’d have to crawl into it, and be surrounded by softness.

Nervously, Ángel peeked into the closet. Sure enough, there were ranks of black shirts, black pants, black shoes. A tidy hanger of black belts. The clothes seemed at odds with the colorful carpets and mounds of soft bedding.

But one item—back behind the shirts—didn’t. A turquoise silk kimono, embroidered with green and orange and pink leaves.