“Ooo!” Lacie squealed, and Rothesay directly beside her barely heard her over the storm of astonishment thundering below and beside them.

“That’s—I mean, Aristande invited everybody, right?” Rothesay bent to shout in Lacie’s ear. “And, she must have thought they were coming. So, this is some huge insult, then; just to the Princess, or—?”

“Oh, don’t be so ordinary!” Lacie shouted back, suddenly sounding far older than almost-thirteen. “Or, well, you might as well, I guess, because of course that’s what they’ll be thinking,” she waved a scornful hand at the assembly below, “and you always need to know what the Dedekos think. But, really—”

“Who?” Rothesay broke in with a bellow. “What’s ‘Dedekos’?”

Lacie glanced up, surprised. After a moment, she shrugged. “There’s no explaining in this racket! But, really, think! What if something’s happened up there? What if Rhyllandon can’t answer?”

“You think that’s what it is? Aaow!”

Lacie had stomped on her toes. “No! I don’t! I’m too busy thinking ‘I don’t know what it is so why don’t I find out’! Sssh—”

Peace had returned on the floor below, if a softly grumbling one. The Herald, alone once more at the center, shivered the sistrum and intoned, “Pass, Rhyllandon!”

Flushed, with effort or chagrin, his lips set in a hard line, he turned now to the dark throne upholstered in every shade and hue of red. His sistrum bells rang, his hand summoned, the pallid flames swept up and rushed together, twisted into a searing white star that flung shadows to the walls and vanished.

A soft cry of surprise rushed through the hall. The Herald himself suffered a fleeting pause before tolling his announcement. Rothesay mistook this at first for shared revulsion, as she recoiled into the stone at her back from the face of Treskiel na Cathforrow.

But Lacie pointed excitedly. “Look! Look at that!”

“At what?” Rothesay murmured under the Herald’s introduction of the Fourth-born Second-daughter’s House and lord.

“He’s made two! Two! And—dragonsblood! Look! The other one can see, too! Gods, that’s work!”

‘The other one’ evidently meant the older man standing behind the prince’s right shoulder, and clearly looking about him, with dignified attention.

“They say he does all his own magical work. A real wizard, this Ristover. Doesn’t he look just like Shoni, though!” Lacie had pressed up to the railing as though two fewer feet of distance would improve her view. Most of the other students about them also leaned towards the amazing eidolons of Ristover. “Ooo, he knows he’s good, too: just look at him pretending not to be smug—oh! Ha, ha!”

“What?”

Lacie glanced back to where she slouched trying to disavow interest. The blue eyes danced like flames of mischief. “He’s just seen Rhyllandon’s not here. And he was miffed before he was surprised—the showoff!”

Rothesay looked down. Cathforrow appeared to scrutinize the crowd, perhaps to veil an excessive interest in Rhyllandon. There was something odd, subtly wrong about him, and his aide—his chamberlain, a somebody Kelforth, with a cargo of titles of his own to keep the Herald busy. After a moment, she worked it out with a start, then wondered at her own surprise. The light fell differently in Ristover’s hall than here under the Dome of Stars. The highlights and shadow upon the two men lay at odds with the direction and quality of the light here, making them look as if they had been cut out of one painting and pasted upon another. In a way, they had.

“You wrinkle up your face when you’re thinking; did you know that?” Lacie whispered. “You need to stop making yourself so easy to read!”

Rothesay failed to blush, being already too flushed with heat, but she smoothed her face to neutrality. Eidolons, being only images, could not be hurt by, say, arrows. But, “Could you throw magic at him?” she whispered back.

“At Cathforrow?” Lacie squeaked, as shocked as Rothesay would have been at a suggestion that she waylay Master Leoff.

Rothesay waved impatiently. “At whomever! Through an eidolon, I mean. I know weapons won’t hurt them, but—”

Lacie twisted a blonde curl meditatively. “Ye-es. Sure. You’d get the spellcaster, though, rather than . . . no, wait, you could get the one imaged, too. . . . “

“And you play with your hair when you’re thinking!”

Lacie dropped her hand hastily.

“Welcome, Treskiel Alan, Ristovredan; honor us with your counsel!”

The prince broke off his study of the crowd to nod graciously. Now he glanced upwards, searching the servants, musicians, pages and students who filled the gallery. His gaze took in Rothesay with a flicker of recognition but nothing more, then passed on.

“You’re eye-catching, all right,” Lacie observed, mistaking him. “But leave him alone: he’s got an awful reputation as a woman-eater.”

“A what?” Rothesay squawked. Then she ground her teeth against her ignorance: ‘what?’ seemed the whole of her vocabulary since leaving Harrowater.

“Oh, nothing gruesome, I don’t mean that. It’s just, well, like having a sweetmeat: you eat it, you like it, you forget about it and go get a new one. See?”

“I wasn’t going to anyway,” Rothesay retorted obliquely.

Lacie sighed. “I just don’t understand you.”

Like falling, the rush and tingle of air flashing past, but on the inside of the skin, and nothing but vast airy hollowness where the mass of bone and muscle should be: the exhilaration of sluicing the Dragon’s magic through a spell and doubly and trebly violent, the greater the spell. An icy gale, so cold it burned, poured through Cathforrow.

None of this rapture would Treskiel permit to show in his countenance as he appeared in Andrastir, no more than he would have permitted a spectator in his bedroom. Though the mages among them must know how he felt—must envy how he felt—that was no cause to expose it. Slowly he unlidded his eyes as the gale flowed away. Astounding, that he still sat his seat like a lion on its rock, and did not lie in a boneless giggling heap upon the floor. Like an artist adding that one last deft line of pigment, Treskiel donned a small, perhaps faintly bored, smile.

He flicked a glance sidelong to catch the look on Princess Clar Meyl’s face—and stiffened in anger as he was denied the triumph: the black-green throne was empty. Rhyllandon had not come.

She had not come? His eyes darted to Aristande in surprise, and alarm. Aristande gazed back, hard and grim. He turned away in disgust.

She thinks she’s so damned inscrutable, he thought wearily. But she is offended. Offended! Demons take all military minds and their self-centered pride! Did she, could she know Clar Meyl so poorly? For himself, Treskiel felt the stirrings of fear. Not that Rhyllandon’s rocky Sparca had been overthrown; Dorrocan’s Wall was a formidable line to cross, and the northern barbarians too unsubtle to have concealed the massing of the forces necessary to break it. That far line was bloody indeed, but with skirmishing, not conquest.

No. She had chosen to stand away from Council, the canny old Princess of Rhyllandon. She knows, he thought; she knows us well, knows that we will meet to bicker and gabble over ancient precedents and slights, whose the duty to do thus, whose the right to that, till we come to no more in the end than this body has done since the head of Talherne Last-king fell from the battlements of Feillantir.

She has left us.

Treskiel looked up dark-eyed at the towering Dragon, and the chill of his own thoughts shocked him. Clar Meyl, Clar Meyl! Now we are truly broken! The floor rocked beneath him, and his command of his eidolon-spell flickered. In a different panic to recover it, all his attention turned to his magic, and for some endless time he busied himself with its intricate pattern, shunning any thought beyond it.

Yet he could not remain preoccupied forever. Slowly his gaze passed over the crowd about him, as if he looked on something already far away and long ago, a mere memory of a High Council in a world long dead. Sad little images, so solemn and pompous, unaware that they no longer mattered. Above them, students in the high gallery: youths and maids, the budding fruit of a dead tree—among them that Darian Runedaur, hah! we are indeed no longer the people that we were! What world are they doomed to look upon, to live in, now that our world crumbles before they can walk it? Who shall name their lands and lords?

He stared, scornful and despairing, over the crowd, heedless of the Herald. Cringing bureaucrats; squabbling collegians; the pedlars of divine favors, pimping for Heaven, the various clergy; Residential staff of the several Houses (including Rhyllandon’s; he could not now tell if their sovereign’s defection had also surprised them); Runedaur.

As Treskiel picked out Dav in the crowd, the Master’s gaze, truly inscrutable, met the prince’s.

Whose world comes to pass now?

Not yours, Treskiel vowed in sudden fire, hoping, almost praying, that the rumor of Runedaur soul-reading actually fell short of the truth. Not you!

Dav looked away first. Treskiel exulted. Then he sat through the formalities, most of them, with the absorption of a general at an unpromising troop review. What was left to work with?

Not much, he sighed, looking at the faces of the great lords he knew, and knew how bitterly they would fight to restore the ancient ways—a kind of necromancy, he reflected with a black chuckle, an attempt to revive the dead, or at least reanimate it. Alas, if there was much to work with, we would have no need for such work at all!

His gaze drifted again to the balcony full of students, and as his mind wandered, bleak and grim over barren history, he himself saw not the seed deep below the surface of his thoughts.

Beside Treskiel, the fifth throne, lavishly enamelled in marigold yellow and studded with amethysts, stood empty also, save for a branch of ash-wood dyed black, leaf and twig. The Herald raised his hand, but not in magic. A lone trumpet played one sweet clear note; then another joined it on the third, flatted; another sounded the fifth, and the last horn took the octave of the first. The mournful chord strengthened like a cry, and fell away.

“Fifth-born and Third-daughter, Morag!” the Herald wailed through the echoes. “Your people are scattered from hearths long cold, and ghosts watch from the sea-cliffs.” He spun back to the statue of Marennin and boomed, “Avenge them, Majesty!”

And the people in the Hall echoed as one, “Avenge them!” Lacie and Rothesay, taken by surprise, missed the cue.

The Princess Aristande was a big-voiced woman. In the breathless pause after the shout, what was meant to be a personal grumble carried clearly: “That is the point of today, after all!”

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Rothesay sickened. Her family lived up there, among the Moraigh ghosts. War, she thought, is a ring with no end.

“Sixth-born and Third-son, Tregaron!”

Tregaron attended in person. Or, Rothesay amended, in not-quite person. She had noted him before, a shrivelled dotard gumming his lips as though trying to eat his own silvery beard. In his enveloping silks of brown spangled with silver, he looked as though he had just popped his head up out of a drift of dewy autumn leaves, and a ridiculous little brown hat made it worse. For all her pity and youthful horror, she had to fight off a regrettable laugh. The watery eyes seemed to grope through fog towards the Herald at the sound of the prince’s names, but wandered off into unguessed realms once it passed. His attendant, his son, perhaps, not young himself but still hale, stood grimly by. The prosperity of Tregaron’s people had not depended on poor old Vannin Teag, the Tregarthan, for a long time now.

The Herald turned again. “Seventh-born and Fourth-son, Celtannan!” he bellowed at the throne that shimmered with opals and mother-of-pearl, twined with green, blue, and violet.

Wham! Metal slammed stone.

“Celtannan is a myth!” thundered a new voice. Cathforrow’s staff struck the floor as he snapped to his feet. “Never, in all the ages of our power, has there ever been a backside to warm that chair, never has there been so much as an impostor of an eidolon within its circle! Highness!” he turned to Aristande, and swung his staff wide—causing many to flinch instinctively away, and Rothesay to wonder if the prince could indeed cast spells through his eidolon. “A very real enemy reaves through our lands in this living hour; may we—please!—forgo the pleasantry of invoking a Perian House that never existed!”

Aristande regarded him steadily, ignoring the retainers of the child-prince and the dotard, and the two as-yet-uncalled Houses with living representatives. Rothesay leaned her elbows on the railing and thought, Good idea. According to tradition, Celtannan had been the wanderer of his family, and the legend was that, some time before the founding of the empire, his entire House set sail on a voyage of discovery from which none had ever returned. All the Houses held—or once held—regions of Peria as their own, little countries within the greater; all but Celtannan.

Presently the Andreissel nodded. “Pass, Celtannan,” she agreed, her voice like gravel.

The Herald grimaced, but, “Pass, Celtannan!” he repeated, an echo far louder than the original.

Palest sprucewood made the eighth throne, and its cushions were grass-green and white-trimmed: the colors of Kinnaith, Raian’s mother’s House. Rothesay looked forward to seeing again the prince with the emeralds in his white beard, and eyed the gallery about her, looking for a way to slip over to the west side so she could see his face.

But the Herald turned past Kinnaith’s seat without a flicker, turned to the ninth circle and the slight young woman as golden-blonde as Lacie amid robes of grey and wine. “Ninth-born and Fourth-daughter, Felindras! Your people prosper under the lawful rule of Her Radiant Highness Kelianna—”

But wait, Rothesay thought desperately, missing the names and titles of the ninth House. What happened to Kinnaith? You’d call a myth, but leave out a real House? Maybe Lacie knew something.

“Kinnaith?” Lacie snorted softly. “They haven’t called Kinnaith since the Conquest! Didn’t you know? That lot went and married the enemy. They’re almost considered non-Sferan.”

Rothesay stared at her. “No wonder they’re losing,” she said at last.

“Mmmmm-hm,” Lacie agreed with cool contempt.

At last came another eidolon, of the House of the Tenth-born, Fifth-daughter Gariel. The image appeared uneventfully, a lone man, dark-haired, slouched and dishevelled, a silver goblet perched in his fingers on the armrest. He, too, startled at the sight of Rhyllandon’s empty seat, but he turned his questioning gaze not to Aristande, but to Treskiel, or so Rothesay guessed from the set of his head.

“Welcome, Ddonan Tamhair, Gareidan!” The Herald hesitated fractionally, set his lips and defiantly went on, “What news of Celtannan, Gariel?” Gariel had been the favorite sister of the wandering Celtannan and she had almost always known of his whereabouts, or so the story went. Thus the custom of asking the sovereign of the one House about the other, as if the affection continued.

“Oh, for the love of the under-gods,” the Prince of Gariel muttered. “Why, none. Fancy that. And for why? Maybe because—?”

“Thank you, Gareidan,” Aristande interjected. “We did that already.”

Ddonan belched. “And who anointed you high-king? What the hell do you want? That if we wag our tongues enough, the heat of our breath will burn our lands clean?” He flung out an arm, the one unencumbered by his drink. The summer-sleeve, Rhostial-blue silk trimmed rose and gold, fell away, exposing a thick white wrapping streaked with a spreading black-red stain. “Talk fast, woman. We have little blood left to spill for you here.”

“You are assailed?” Aristande demanded in quick concern.

“When are we not?” he bellowed back. “Get on with it!” He drained his cup noisily, and it vanished from his hand, to reappear in a moment once again full.

Aristande nodded to the Herald, who sidled uneasily away from Gariel, and addressed the black-and-orange throne of Lostforth Last-son.

Rothesay, followed by Lacie, had nudged and wormed her way to the south, just over the problematic seat of Celtannan; thus she had a good view of the eidolon of a young man, in black robes lined with flaming orange, that appeared there. Thin, long-faced and scruffy-bearded, he had the earnest, uncertain look of one appointed to an unfamiliar task: uncertain what was expected of him or what he should do, but anxious to do it well—whatever it was.

The Hall was struck silent. The dumbfounded Herald blurted, “Who are you?”

He clutched at a book in his lap. “Uhhh—actually, I’m, I’m—” He glanced about, caught sight of the astonished retinue of Lostforth-in-Andrastir. “Oh, I guess you, erm, didn’t get, uh, the message. Well, you see—”

Ddonan leaned over, thrusting the image of his wounded arm lance-like at the image of the youth. “Don’t. Ex. Plain,” he growled. “Some godsbedamned philosophical bollocks, get started on it, you’ll never shut up. Name?”

“What?”

“Nnnaaaymmmuh. What people call you?”

“Mwyllin a Gau.”

“Fine. Your people prosper, and all that offal. Welcome to the Futility Festival.” He belched again, and pointed the Herald firmly at the sky-blue-clad matron awaiting her introduction as the Princess of Listas Last-born. Lacie grabbed Rothesay’s sleeve and dragged her to the back stairs and out.

Once outside, the younger girl collapsed in pealing laughter.

So Rothesay ‘killed’ her. It took more work than she expected since Lacie, having been born into the booby traps and ambushes of Colderwild Hall, seldom was truly as off her guard as she let herself appear, and she was quick with a dagger. Furthermore, since they had come here on ceremony, Lacie had not brought a training knife but a real one. Rothesay lost her head at the sight of live bronze, Arngas took over and she won but, sulky and frustrated, she had no stomach to claim a prize.

“Why not?” her victim inquired solicitously.

“I want to learn this stuff,” Rothesay grumbled. “I: me, Rothesay. But how can I, if Arngas keeps jumping in and doing it for me?”

“Mmm,” Lacie replied noncommittally. “Oh! Let’s go back down to the cisterns, shall we? It’s ever so much cooler down there, and I’ve seen all I want of the Council; how about you?” Rothesay followed with a will.

“Soooo, what is it?” Lacie whispered later as they hid in a cupboard in one of the palace’s many kitchens, waiting for an argument of cooks to disperse. “You think it’s cheating, having Arngas’s powers?”

“Isn’t it?”

“But it’s only cheating when you’re not playing by the same rules—”

“Shhh.”

The cooks, in a final burst of shouting, stormed out of the kitchen. The girls eased out of the cupboard, slipped through the cave-like depths of the kitchen, crept down the narrow stone steps to the water. Rothesay made a magelight, partly because they needed one, but mostly to show that she could.

Its golden glow revealed a forest of fluted columns running off into darkness, holding a ribbed and vaulted ceiling not more than ten feet above the level of the water. Inverted arches, ribbing, and vaults drooped ten feet below in the mirror-land of the obsidian surface, but the true footings of the columns stood twice that deep, or so it was said. Along the walls just above the water ran a ledge, barely wide enough for one person to walk comfortably; the girls followed it till they were out of sight of the steps, then as one kicked off their sandals and sat and splashed their feet in the cold water. They leaned together against the chilly, damp wall and pulled deep draughts of cool air into their chests.

“Anyway,” Lacie went on, offering a biscuit from her belt-pouch, “if we were to run a race, and I went the racetrack and you cut along by some other way—and pretended you hadn’t, by the way—that’s cheating ’cos we’re not actually running the same race but one of us is pretending we are. See? But in the game of survival—it’s kind of the point, that you use whatever you’ve got. That’s what the game is, right? And not everybody’s got the same things. Some are stronger, faster—” she paused, and smirked a little, “—or prettier!” and she laughed. “And—big point, here—you can’t pretend to win! You either pull it off or you’re dead.”

Rothesay bent forward to scoop a handful of water to her mouth, half-expecting Lacie to attempt to shove her on in. It felt so lovely and cool down here, that her spirits perked up like a watered flower, and she hoped the girl did try. She was ready for it. But Lacie, perhaps disinclined to risk soaking the rest of her treats, forbore.

“Win by whatever means possible?” she echoed after her drink.

“Oh, that’s just survival,” Lacie shrugged. “Almost no one plays just survival. Just about everyone’s got something—something!—they’d rather die than do, or die than permit, or whatever it is. Just survival really isn’t much of a prize. There are blind fish in here, you know,” she said, crumbling a bit of biscuit into the cistern.

“It isn’t?” Rothesay asked again, and again Lacie shrugged.

“Survive bedridden? hoping someone remembers to come and take your piss and shit away, and clean you off?”

“Erm.”

“Survive hated by whoever it is you wanted to love you?”

“Ah, er—”

“Survive hated by the one person you can’t ever escape? Oh, gods, do I sound like I’ve grown up among teachers, or what?”

“Yes, but thanks.”

“Well, that’s something, I guess.”

After another biscuit, Rothesay mused out loud, “Very well, so it’s not cheat-ing to have Arngas’s gifts. I guess it’s that I feel cheat-ed.”

“What!”

“Well, look: I want to know what I can do, my own self. But it’s as if I keep getting rescued by somebody else at the last minute. Damn it, sometimes even at the first minute. You can’t learn anything if someone keeps doing it for you!”

“Oh. I get it. Yeah. I want my own glory, too.” Lacie looked at her hands, then raised them up, and out, spread like two fans, and sent ten threads of brilliant blue light streaming towards the ceiling. Where they struck stone, they shattered, scattered, each fragment growing as fast as flight over every edge and line till the ceiling seemed drawn by the finest pen in luminescent blue ink out to thirty feet away.

“Oooo, that’s pretty.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s not reflected in the water.”

“Yeah. I wonder why.”

“Is it good for anything?” Rothesay could not tell if the hair-thin lines might be bright enough to read by.

“Well, you can see how the stones go—look, you can see where some of the brickwork’s fallen away. I made it up to go caving under the Hall—didn’t you know about the caves? I’ll show you when we get back—and it shows the edges of big nasty deep holes and stuff.” They watched the blue lines fade slowly. “But, you,” Lacie went on, “you might just have to put up with Arngas, and try and find something else to be yours. You could study magic with me, and we could have a competition.”

“Huh.” Rothesay sulked, resenting the idea of having to ‘put up with’ anything and privately vowing to find some way of beating Arngas. As for competing with Lacie in magic, she suspected she had a further unfair advantage, being not wholly human. She writhed at that, glanced uneasily about for any sign of a jewelled black whisker, and changed the subject. “Hey, who was that, in the Sky Hall—the one from Lostforth? That wasn’t their prince?”

“Gods only know. Probably not. Lostforth keeps trying out different philosophies, and you just never know, with them. I heard a rumor that they’d once tried rulership-by-lottery: you drew the short straw, you were in charge. I don’t believe it; I don’t think even they are that mad; but it shows you the sort of talk they, um, inspire.”

Rothesay laughed. “They sound interesting.”

Lacie grinned slyly. “Well, that’s Kahan’s House.”

Rothesay pushed her in.