“We will see him very soon. But, as always, there are things that must be done, my good Eolair, and they must be done certain ways. You understand that, I think?”

“I think I understand that as well as any mortal man alive,” he said, and laughed at the truth of it. “I have lived most of my life waiting for things to be done in their certain ways, in every capital in every country. As I look back, I marvel at how much ceremony I have endured without going mad.”

“Our ceremonies are very different than yours,” Aditu began, then interrupted herself. “Oh! Please, Prince Morgan, I ask your pardon. Count Eolair is an old friend and my heart was very full. It made me forget my manners! Welcome to H’ran Go-jao, the most easterly of the Go-jao’e.”

“Go . . . jow . . .?” said Morgan.

Eolair suspected the prince was repeating the word so slowly not because he was particularly interested in it, but because he was fascinated with Aditu and a bit befuddled by her. It showed that the young man had good judgement in at least one respect, anyway.

“Go-jao’e—little boats,” Aditu explained. “You will learn about them soon, I think, but now I see my brother waving to us. Come!” She sprang to her feet so nimbly despite her large belly that Eolair could only smile again. “I think that you, of all people, Count Eolair, are a person who understands ceremony, and the difference between those which are empty or only for show, and those which have true meaning.”

“I’d like to think I do, my lady.”

Aditu smiled. “So formal! Remember, we are to dispense with such things. In any case, now that my brother is ready, I think that it would be fitting for you to see our mother again.”

“Likimeya?” He would never forget Jiriki’s and Aditu’s fierce parent, although even in memory, the leader of the Sithi still made him uneasy. “Of course. I would be grateful for the chance to pay my respects.”

“Then you shall have it. Prince Morgan, you come too.” Aditu placed herself between them, took the prince’s arm and Eolair’s, and moved toward Jiriki, who waited beside a wide crevice in the tumbled rocks of the hillside. When he saw them coming, Jiriki ducked back through the opening.

“They will be confused by you,” Aditu warned them as they approached the crevice. “Do not be startled.”

“Your pardon, lady,” Eolair asked, “but who are are ‘they’?” The black crack before him looked like the entrance to one of the old hill-tombs on the eastern part of Nad Mullach, tombs the local inhabitants claimed went back to Hern’s day, in the Dawn of Time.

Aditu did not answer his question. “Do not be startled,” she repeated.

She stepped ahead as they approached the opening and led them into the crevice. Eolair had only just ducked his head to follow her when suddenly the air seemed to burst into a thousand mad pieces around him. He would have shouted in surprise but so many flying things filled the air he feared they would get into his mouth. He stumbled back from the opening and the cloud of fluttering shapes followed him out, gushing past him like beer frothing out of a tumbled barrel.

Butterflies, he realized after the first few overwhelming instants. As the insects burst out into the sun they exploded into color—blue, brilliant orange, red and sunflower yellow, thousands upon thousands of butterflies all surging around and upward in a great maelstrom of shimmering wings. Beside him, Prince Morgan had stumbled backward and was now sitting on his rump, staring at the cloud as it seethed and fluttered all around them, filling the air so that Eolair could see little else. At last the creatures began to settle on the naked rock of the valley’s edge and in every tree and shrub.

“Brynioch’s rainbow!” said Eolair. It was not merely an oath, but also a description. On the ground beside him, Morgan goggled like a drunkard who had mistaken a second-floor window for a door.

“Come inside.” Aditu’s voice had an echo now.

Eolair moved forward once more, careful not to step on any of the bright gleams of color now gently fanning their wings on the ground around the entrance. After a moment, Morgan climbed to his feet and followed, but his face was pale and his progress cautiously slow. Eolair reached back and gently took the prince’s arm, pretending it was to steady himself.

When he had stepped through the entrance and could lift his head, the count found himself in a wide but low cavern, dark except for an open shaft that let daylight fall through the irregular stone ceiling. All together the irregular chamber was not much larger than his own bedroom back in Nad Mullach, a beloved place he had not visited in a long time, and for which he now felt a sudden, fierce longing. He felt Morgan flinch, but kept his grip on the prince’s arm. This time it was not only to steady the boy, but himself as well.

At the center of the small chamber lay a figure wrapped from head to foot in something like the kind of linen bandages in which the funeral priests of Erkynland wrapped their kings and queens for burial. Only the face was exposed—a face he recognized as that of Jiriki and Aditu’s mother, Likimeya, though her features seemed as still and lifeless as one of the statues from Nabban’s Age of Gold.

“By all the gods, what is this?” he asked, his voice quiet yet raw, even to his own ears. “She is dead?”

Jiriki, who waited beside his mother’s recumbent form, looked up. His face still had the same cold stillness Eolair had seen that morning. “No. Our mother sleeps the Long Sleep, but she is not dead. She has slept for a long time, though—for years—without recovering, and we do not harbor much hope she will ever wake again.”

“Recovering?” Eolair let go of Morgan’s arm and kneeled beside the shrouded figure. A few butterflies still remained on the cavern’s walls; a few more walked delicately across Likimeya’s body, slowly flexing their wings, seeming to burst into color once more whenever they crossed the shaft of falling sunlight that knifed down from the chamber’s roof. When Eolair drew a little closer he could see that Likimeya was wrapped not in bandages but in layer after layer of some shining white thread, an unimaginable length of the stuff. He saw the butterflies pick their way across her sleeping form and had a sudden idea who had actually shrouded Likimeya for this strange sort of entombment. “What happened to her?”

Jiriki gave him a sharp look, as though he had said something odd, then turned away. “She was shot with an arrow in the heart.”

“Murhagh’s Red Eye! Who did this?”

Aditu stepped forward, but her gaze did not leave her mother’s expressionless face. “We do not know for certain, except that the murderers were mortals.”

“Mortals?” The count was horrified. For a time he could only stare at Likimeya’s wan, golden face. “You say ‘murderers,’” he said at last, “but she has not died. The gods willing, perhaps she will still recover and identify those who attacked her so they can be punished.”

“They will still be murderers,” said Jiriki, his voice quiet but hard as the crypt’s stone walls. “They killed eleven more of our folk. Only our mother and one other survived the attack.”

“Oh, gods, no.” Eolair could not stare at Likimeya’s empty face any longer. “No. Tell me what happened.”

“We will, but not here,” said Aditu. “The Yásira—this gathering place—belongs to our mother now. We will not sully it with any more talk of the cowardly beasts who attacked her.”

As they moved toward the cavern’s entrance, Eolair saw a few butterflies drifting back in. He thought nothing of it at first, but then had to hang back for a moment as a handful more, then dozens, flew back in.

Jiriki said something sharp to Aditu in their own musical tongue. Butterflies streamed back into the cavern in force now, circling the count’s head, filling the spaces between floor and ceiling. But where was Prince Morgan? Eolair turned in sudden apprehension and saw him standing beside Likimeya’s body, staring down at her with sickened fascination, an expression he had never seen the prince wear. “Morgan! Come away,” he called. More and more butterflies were returning to the cavern, making it harder to see past the glimmer and shadow of their wings.