“I have a gift,” he said, speaking quickly, not sure how much time he had. “I always used to think it was a curse, but now I am not sure, because maybe it’s like the goats from the god, and one just has to know what name to call it.” He had to take short steps, but quick ones, to match her pace. “My gift is that I always know when I’ve made an ass of myself.”

Eddis’s eyes glanced briefly in his direction and away again. She did not slow. As she turned a corner, Sounis thought it was marvelous that she knew so surely where she was going.

“Whenever I went to my uncle’s megaron, whenever I met with my tutor, tripped over something that wasn’t there, said something inane, I knew it. I used to watch other people making idiots of themselves, and they never seemed to know it, but I always have. All my life I’ve wished that if I was going to be an ass, I could just be an oblivious one.” Eddis still hadn’t looked at him again. “I was stupid. I’m sorry. It was wrong of me to think that I could allow or disallow anything you choose to do. You are Eddis.”

She slowed finally and turned to give him a smile. He experienced a brief moment of relief before he realized that it was artificial. She walked on.

Sounis stood as everyone else brushed past him and watched her move farther and farther away. Long years of experience told him to turn and go back to his own apartments, but more recent events kept his feet rooted to the floor.

“We all make mistakes,” he said loudly. Eddis surged on without looking back, but he knew he had caught her ear. “You sent him to Attolia, didn’t you?” He called after her, deliberately cruel. “He told you it was dangerous, and you sent him anyway. Was it worth it?”

Eddis walked even faster, furious. Sounis pushed past her guards, who flinched but didn’t stop him, and seized her by the arm. She swung around so sharply he stepped back, but he didn’t let go. “I do not care,” he said, “how much of an ass I am right now. Because every night that I dreamed in Hanaktos, I dreamed of you. Every night. When I dreamed about my library, you were there, reading a book, looking from the windows, never speaking, but always there. And I knew that everything was just the way it should be, do you understand?” He said, “I’m sorry. I should have had more faith in you. I understand why you are angry with me: because I disappointed you, and also we don’t all throw things when we are angry, I understand that now, too. But we all make mistakes, Helen,” he said again, “all of us. And I think, I really think you will regret it if this one time you could forgive me, and you don’t.

“Please,” he added.

Eddis stared at him for a long time, knowing that forgiving someone because you have to is not forgiving him at all.

“Come with me,” she said at last. She led him through Attolia’s palace to a double set of carved doors. At her signal, the guards pulled them open, and she passed through. Inside the room, she turned and waited. Sounis stood paralyzed on the threshold.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

THE room was Attolia’s library.

“You have not seen it before,” said Eddis.

“No,” whispered Sounis.

“I did not think you had, or you would have recognized it. Gen made sure no meetings were held here.”

It was a long room lined with books. High windows let in light all day, but none that would reach to damage the delicate contents of the shelves. The glass-paneled doors on the opposite side of the room faced north, not toward a view of snowcapped mountains but toward a perfectly ordinary view of the city of Attolia. The ceiling above was coffered and white; the cases along the walls were carved with familiar figures. Sounis recognized a lion and then a rabbit. He looked for the fox and found it. He moved to touch its pointed ears with a hesitant finger.

“Who made this place?” he said in a choked voice.

Eddis hesitated. “The architect was Iktenos, Gen’s great-great-grandfather and the Thief of Eddis, though that is not well known in Attolia, even now.”

“He dreamed of my library.”

“It would seem so.”

Slowly, Sounis turned away from the carving of the fox. He reached for a tabletop and ran his hands over it, clutching the edge until his knuckles turned white.

He wanted to know that it was solid. Eddis knew that all the world would seem to him insubstantial, as if it might tear away and reveal something else infinitely larger and more terrifying.

“I broke the truce at Elisa,” he said, wild-eyed.

“Pay your fine,” she said reassuringly. “Had you offended them you would know by now.”

“My tutor?”

“Moira, I think. She is nearest to mortals.”

“They are real?”

Eddis said nothing.

“Do they appear only in dreams? Or do they have physical properties? Can you touch them? Can they—” He looked up. “Can they bring bolts of lightning?”

Eddis shrugged.

“Tell me!” cried Sounis.

“Answer your own questions!” Eddis shouted back, and he blinked.

“You don’t know?”

Eddis shook her head.

Sounis sat.

“Write it down,” Eddis said. “It will grow less clear. First, it will begin to seem that it really was just a dream and a mere coincidence that this library is so familiar. Then it will be a memory you have of a dream you can’t quite remember, and then even that will be gone.”

Sounis considered the authority in her voice. “What have you dreamed?” he asked.

“I dreamed of you,” Eddis said, her eyes bright. “In the library, talking to your tutor.” She wrapped her arms around herself and turned away as he rose from his chair. “And I dream of the Sacred Mountain exploding and see people clutch their throats and fall to the ground and fire fall out of the air and everything begin to burn. A river of fire washes down the slopes of the mountain, and the reservoir explodes in a huge cloud of steam, but the fire doesn’t stop until it has devoured the city of Eddis entirely.”

Horrified, Sounis didn’t know what to do, or say. Then he remembered his father in the forecourt of Eddis’s megaron in the mountains, and he put a hand on Eddis’s shoulder. He did not take her in his arms so much as he offered them to her, and when she moved into this embrace, he held her tightly.

“I need to empty the city of Eddis,” she said, laying her head on his chest. “I need to give every man and woman and child a reason to think that life would be better for them away from the mountain, down in the lowlands, out on the islands. Anywhere but Eddis.”

“You need to marry me,” he said.

“Yes,” said Eddis.

“And I am a pig, like my uncle.”

Eddis laughed. Her head fit just under his chin, and Sounis could feel the chuckle in his chest. “No, you are not, or I would not love you as I do.”

“I loved you the first time I saw you.”

Eddis laughed again. “You were four,” she said, without lifting her head.

Startled, Sounis said, “I was?”

“My father who was Eddis paid a visit to the court of Sounis. My brothers and I accompanied him.”

“I don’t remember,” said Sounis. “Unless, perhaps, I do,” he added, wincing, as hazy recollections grew clearer.