She never had, but she could not bring herself to confirm the statement. Such knowledge was dangerous. It could get a person burned. No wonder Kem was angry. She’d kept so much hidden from him. Because he was too young, that was a good enough reason, or it had been. Nevertheless, Kem had grown old enough to make decisions for himself, to see the world in a complex way, through his own eyes and not just through the gaze of his mother and aunt. Even if she wasn’t really his aunt, though she was in every way that mattered. Surely.

“Pay attention,” the haunt whispered.

He eased open a gate that let them through into a part of the temple she’d never seen.

“I don’t think we’re allowed—”

“Princes may walk wherever they will. That much I’ve learned in my sojourn so far. This way.”

He took a circuitous route around the dining hall and kitchen, past the sleeping wing, and all the way to the back of the temple, where a garden courtyard had been paved and planted right up against the cliffside of a steep hill. The air was cold, and yet, beside him, she had a sense of being enveloped in an aura of summer.

At the edge of the courtyard, a bas relief of a tree had been carved into the cliff face. The water oozing down its branches gleamed as if it were starlight turned liquid, sliding into a circular stone basin as wide across as her outstretched arms.

She studied the outlines of the sculpture. “Is this meant to be the same tree as the stone one up on the ridge?”

He raised a hand for silence. They stood together, neither moving, as slow ripples spread across the basin like the wash of time, as the wind soughed in the leaves, as the moon rose high enough that her light caught at last in the basin’s shallow waters. The surface turned as if to a sheet of thinnest silver.

Stepping forward, the haunt swept both arms open. The sheen hardened to become a mirror in which the stars twinkled but the moon was not visible, although it was the moon’s light that made the mirror.

“Look.” He made the word an offer, a request, not a command.

With her first step forward, she could see his reflection although not yet her own. Prince Gevulin’s face had fine bones and pleasing eyes. The embroidery that ran along the shoulders and collar of his warden’s tunic glowed as if sewn with magic thread, and there was writing down the sleeves of the tunic that wasn’t visible, except in the water’s mirror. Skeins of protection, perhaps, or secret oaths. She had no idea.