“This place looks so sad,” I murmured.


    stellar, that I found myself forgiving the artist’s ignorance.


    flitted into the room, wearing a simple black and gold halfrobe covering her breast and falling over her forelegs.


    Her secretary would eat you if you looked at them the wrong way. I cleared my eyes and jerked my gaze back to the star mosaic.


    cheerful?


    must be important if you want to bother the faer with it! Why not tell it to me and I shall judge if it is important enough to bother her?”


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    The blue-green wiver slinked back up the ramp. In her wing-digits, she grasped a rolled up scroll of papyrus, and an inkwell. Her frills narrowed at Hinte, who’d inched closer to the corridor while the secretary was gone, but she said nothing, only dragging her claws along the carpet, beckoning us. Like that, she led us down the middle corridor.


    deep, and the yellows were bright. You knew those dyes would cost far more than a few day’s meals.


    glass and secrets, it was a sight.


    what?”


    else happen?”


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    ‘Adwyn,’ I half-murmured to myself. Did it have to be Adwyn? The Dyfnderi’s eyescales never clouded when he looked at me, and I had been indebted to him since the moment I walked through the stone gates of Gwymr/Frina. That debt hung, a dark cloud on the horizon.


    brandish it. My tongue waved further, and I caught a strange, cloying scent on the high guard that I didn’t know how to place.


    old; and there had been no likeness between the black and gold armor he wore and the red and yellow sashes of the guards I passed on the streets of town.


    Specter???—??but the difference was I did not care, something I doubted held for Rhyfel here. It must weigh.


    know of the spooky new sky-dweller in town. With nobility no less???—??and don’t look like that, you don’t have a reputation. Not yet, I’d say.”


    * * *