“Did it really happen? Did one of your kind—the other human-faced statue, perhaps—possess a youth and walk away inside his body? Can a haunt like you take over the body of a person like me?”

His shadowy eyes glittered as with sparks. “Do you want to find out?”

She smiled back, meeting him blade for blade. “I want an answer.”

His gaze widened as if she had surprised him. A flash of unfathomable emotion stirred in his face, and after a drawn-out pause he spoke, with reluctance. “Not without consent. And the passage is intended to be only temporary.”

“That’s what I would say if I were intending something more permanent,” she said with a scoffing chuckle, “but it was a good try. Why are you really here, this night, if you have glimpsed me before, yet never manifested like this?”

He cocked his head to one side, gaze sliding past her to the walls and up the length of a spire to the sky. Stars kindled one by one, although it was hard to see them because the moon was so bright. “A voice has called to me.”

“Not my voice!” But he was no longer listening to her.

“Strange to hear the life-eating knell after all this time. I had hoped never to hear the knell of sorcery again.” His words disturbed her more than everything that had gone before. All at once, a thickening sense of dread and expectation gathered, as if a web were about to be cast around the world that would tighten by degrees until it strangled all life.

“Are you a sorcerer?” she whispered, and was immediately sorry the dreadful term had passed her lips, lest he smite her for guessing the truth.

He went on as if she’d not spoken. “But it’s odd, for there’s a messy, scattered tone to its resonance. Almost more a hiss rising like steam through the cracks in the lid of a pot.”

“Steam through cracks? That’s a mundane comparison for words that sound so ominous.”

His gaze dropped to pierce her as with the point of a claw. Almost, she took a step back, but she stopped herself before she showed any such weakness.

“You would be less entertained if you understood the danger,” he said harshly. “But I fear that those who walk the lands now have forgotten all that passed before.”

“Before when?”

“Before the Shivering Tide and the Hollow Wind. Before the Spear-Driven Storm cut away the bones and sinews of our lives to defeat our enemy. It was the only way to save what we could, and to leave a remnant to guard our descendants.”

“None of those things mean anything to me.”

“Can it be the distance of time has so thoroughly erased the truth from the memories of our descendants?”