She snatched up her old hand-mirror, speckled and rusty where the backing was wearing away, and held it before him. Hissune caught a faint distorted glimpse of himself, looking very unfamiliar, all pomp and splendor, as though decked out for a pageant. The costume felt theatrical, stagy, unreal. And yet he was aware of a new kind of poise and authority seeping inward to his soul from his clothing. How odd, he thought, that a hasty fitting at a fancy Place of Masks tailor could produce such an instant transformation of personality—no longer Hissune the ragged hustling street-boy, no longer Hissune the restless and uncertain young clerk, but now Hissune the popinjay, Hissune the peacock, Hissune the proud companion of the Coronal.

And Hissune the unpunctual. If he hurried, though, he might still reach the Great Hall of the Pontifex on time.

But just then his mother Elsinome returned from work, and there was another small delay. She came into his room, a slight, dark-haired woman, pale and weary-looking, and stared at him in awe and wonder, as though someone had captured a comet and set it loose to whirl about her dismal flat. Her eyes were glowing, her features had a radiance he had never seen before.

"How magnificent you look, Hissune! How splendid!"

He grinned and spun about, better to show off his imperial finery. "It's almost absurd, isn't it? I look like a knight just down from Castle Mount!"

"You look like a prince! You look like a Coronal!"

"Ah, yes, Lord Hissune. But I'd need an ermine robe for that, I think, and a fine green doublet, and perhaps a great gaudy starburst pendant on my chest. Yet this is good enough for the moment, eh, mother?"

They laughed; and, for all her weariness, she seized him and swung him about in a wild little three-step dance. Then she released him and said, "But it grows late. You should have been off to the feast by this time!"

"I should have been, yes." He moved toward the door. "How strange all this is, eh, mother? To be going off to dine at the Coronal's table—to sit at his elbow—to journey with him on the grand processional—to dwell on Castle Mount—"

"So very strange, yes," said Elsinome quietly.

They all lined up—Elsinome, Ailimoor, his younger sister Maraune—and solemnly Hissune kissed them, and squeezed their hands, and sidestepped them when they tried to hug him, fearing they would rumple his robes; and he saw them staring at him again as though he were some godlike being, or at the very least the Coronal himself. It was quite as if he were no longer one of this family, or as if he never had been, but had descended from the sky to strut about these dreary rooms for a little while this afternoon. At times he almost felt that way himself—that he had not spent these eighteen years of his life in a few dingy rooms in the first ring of the Labyrinth, but indeed was and always had been Hissune of the Castle, knight and initiate, frequenter of the royal court, connoisseur of all its pleasures.