Westbridge Manor stood behind a high white wall with a bridge worked in black iron over its gate, and beyond the gate a long drive went up between clipped yews to a house that was mostly columns. Every one of its tall windows was lit. From inside came music—strings, a quartet, something light and quick—and the sound of a great many people laughing at nothing in particular, and the ring of glass on glass.Servants in dove-grey met them at the foot of the steps with silver trays of sparkling wine. Ethan took a glass because it seemed rude not to, and gave Celestia his arm, and they went up the steps and in.The entrance hall was a cavern of marble. A staircase swept up one side of it in a long curve. Chandeliers hung overhead like frozen fountains, every crystal throwing light. Men and women in silk and velvet stood about in knots, and as the party came in, heads turned—quick glances, then longer ones. Adventurers were not often asked into houses like this one. Several of the looks went

The late-afternoon sun lay long and gold across the market square, and people kept pointing at them."There—the Labyrinth heroes!" A woman with a basket on her hip. A boy who ran alongside for a few steps and then ran off to tell somebody. It had been like this all day. Ethan smiled and nodded and kept walking, and all the while the skin on the back of his neck kept creeping, and would not stop.He stopped at a fruit stall and picked up an apple and turned it over as though its skin were the most interesting thing in Avelline. Celestia leaned in beside him to look at the pears."You feel it too," she murmured, not looking up.He nodded very slightly. He'd felt it since they came out through Malric's gate the night before—a sense of eyes, always, somewhere just out of sight. He kept hearing that pleasant voice on the balcony. You still owe me a second dance, my lady. I'm in no hurry. I find I very rarely need to be. Celestia had looked the man in the eye when he said it and not moved a

They had told Regnas all of it that same night—climbed the back stair to his rooms at midnight, and woken him, and told him about the crimson wax and the warehouse and the seven men and what the dying one had said. All of it but the square of leather, which stayed in the pouch at Celestia's belt. She didn't mention it, and so Ethan didn't either.The Guild Master had listened without interrupting, sitting on the edge of his bed in his nightshirt with his great grey beard on his chest, and at the end of it he had said very little. Two days later, he found them work outside the walls."A caravan wants escorting," he told them. "Glassware, to Harrowby and back. A dull job. Dull's what I want for you. Get out of the city for a few days where he can't put his hand on you, and let me ask some questions while you're gone."So on that second morning they were walking along a winding trade road through the hills beyond Avelline, beside a single wagon loaded with straw-packed crates of fine glas

Seraphina had been waiting at the tannery with two horses and a sack of bread and cheese, standing in the rain in the dark with her hood down because she had forgotten to put it up. She would not come with them. She said so before Ethan had finished asking, in the same plain voice she used for dosages."The Silverleaf opens at seven," she said. "Alden can't do the tinctures on his own yet. He gets the order wrong." Then she pushed something into his hand, a little bag that crackled, and he knew by the smell of it what it was before he looked. Dried lily petals. The last time she had given him one of those he had been walking down the cathedral steps, the day after they carried him in with a curse in his leg."You're going to be sick again," she said. "You always are, after. It helps."They had ridden hard since then, south and east through the rain, off the high road and back onto it, until the horses were stumbling and Celestia said enough in the tone that meant it. The inn was the fi

It took them sixteen days.The fords were high after the rain, and the second one had a toll-keeper who wanted three times the posted rate from anyone with a sword, and a ferryman on the fifth day heard Celestia's real name slip out between them on the landing and would not take their money at all. He stood in the stern of his flat boat and looked at her horns and said, "Draconyx," the way an old man says the name of a war. "Whitewood's lot." Then he poled them across without another word and would not meet anyone's eye until they were off.He did not ask her about it, then or later. He had learned by now which questions she would answer and which she would let fall to the ground between them and step over.On the sixteenth day, in the middle of the afternoon, they came over a low ridge and saw Carosso.It was bigger than Avelline. That was the first thing. It sprawled across both banks of a broad brown river and up the hills on either side, walls within walls, towers and spires and th