So that’s a day wasted. She makes a note on parchment she may eventually need to boil and chew herself, though it has five layers of ink on it now, written in different colors and different directions. She can still read all five layers, if she gets enough light on it, but she thinks another iteration will finally obscure the first.

Perhaps she will take to writing in the bound volume of copied alchemical texts and treatises she has accumulated over the last several years. But it pains her to imagine writing over even the parts she has memorized: true and shining, certain and most true, that high and low are in truth the same in each direction . . .

There has been no sign of Ser Voyne, at least, and Phosyne has entertained the hope that, perhaps, the king has thought better of his threat. Perhaps the knight is more needed elsewhere. Exhausted, she stretches out on the threadbare rug on the floor, presses one ear to it so she can hear the liquid sloshing of the cistern below, as somebody in the kitchens opens the valve and siphons off a little of the remaining rain.

Pneio and Ornuo hop down from where they were perched on top of her corkindrill and circle her, then come close enough for her to stroke. They nip at her fingertips. She thinks it is meant playfully. She thinks that if they wanted to eat her, they wouldn’t hesitate to sever a finger.

Strange creatures, these boys, like nothing she has ever seen or read about. They appeared in her chambers some four months ago, and she couldn’t explain to save her life where they came from. She had been working on something—she can’t remember what, not anymore, and thinks it must not have been that important—and there had been cracking, a whiff of sulfur on the air, and though she has no hearth or chimney in her rooms, she had felt a blazing heat.

Then one of her bookshelves had crashed to the floor, and Ornuo had looked up at her from on top of it, blinking wide, golden eyes.

She’d been terrified for weeks, of course. Terrified she had caused some great calamity. Terrified she would be found out and hanged. But the two slippery creatures had stuck close to her and caused no more mischief than a pair of tomcats. Aside from the incident with the chicken, they had brought her, ultimately, only comfort.

“Have you decided to tell me what you are?” she asks Ornuo as he flops onto his side and presses his spine into her ribs. He wears a coy expression, and bares his teeth just a little so that she might rub one finger along them. The sound he makes is like embers crackling. “Or at least listen to reason? Provide me with a miracle?”