The prince said something Eolair could not hear.

“What? Come away!”

Morgan spoke louder this time. “She is trying to talk—!”

Jiriki sprang across the room and crouched beside his mother’s body. “Rabbit, come to me!” he cried. “It is true.”

Aditu hurried to join him. “But she has not spoken since she was first struck down, since she survived the first fever!”

Eolair too moved closer. He could see Likimeya’s face moving in her silken shroud, but barely, as though a mere tremor of dream made its way to the surface. Aditu leaned very close and put her hand on her mother’s breastbone, then put her ear next to Likimeya’s mouth. For a moment she remained, listening intently. Then at last Aditu straightened and stood up. She curled her hands around her belly as if to protect the child within, and again spoke to her brother in their own language.

“Could you understand what your mother said?” Eolair asked her.

“I could,” said Morgan, to the count’s utter astonishment. The youth looked as though his entire world had just turned downside-up; his eyes were wide and shocked, his face pale as parchment. “I could understand her, I swear! I heard it in my head! She said, ‘All the voices lie except the one that whispers. And that one will steal away the world.” The prince had an expression Eolair had not seen before, one of complete and frightened confusion.

Jiriki and his sister both stared at Morgan, then at each other. After an achingly long pause, Aditu turned back to Count Eolair, her face unusually blank.

“Our mother is silent again,” she announced. “I do not think she will speak more. We should go from this place. We have much that is new to think about—and you two still have much to learn about all that has happened between our peoples.”

Morgan could hardly feel his feet as he walked, or his head either. He might have been a smoldering flake of ash borne aloft by a fire, something lighter than air, drifting without choice or thought. The Sitha-woman’s voice had echoed in his head as though she somehow spoke from inside him—as though her words had made their way out of the marrow of his own treacherous bones. He had never felt anything like it and never wanted to feel such a thing again.

Count Eolair and the other two Sithi were talking busily but quietly. At any other time Morgan would have resented the way they kept their words from him, but at this precise instant he felt poured full as a pitcher whose contents would overspill if even one single drop was added.

“But what could she have meant by that?” Eolair asked.

“If we knew, I promise we would tell you what we could,” Aditu said. “As it is, we must consider this strange, unexpected message, and we must also speak to others of our people.” She wrapped her arms around her belly as they walked through the forest. “Our mother spoke much in the first days after the attack, as she struggled against the poisonous fever that threatened to consume her, but it was mostly meaningless—thoughts and memories torn loose by her deadly wound and the illness it brought.”

“You say poisonous.” Eolair was a little short of breath; Morgan could see that the pace was not easy for him. “Could it be anything like the envoy who was attacked—Tanahaya? She said she was poisoned too.”

“That is a question to be pondered,” said Jiriki. “But it is a painful, difficult subject, as I fear you will learn.”

“In any case, our mother has been silent since it happened,” Aditu resumed—rather quickly, Morgan thought, as though she wished to avoid any more talk about the envoy just now, “as she was when you first saw her today in the Yásira. Why she should choose that precise moment to break her silence, as well as the meaning of her words—and yes, young Prince Morgan heard the same strange warning that I heard, although in some different fashion, because the words we heard were in the tongue of the Zida’ya—I’m afraid that is also beyond our understanding at this moment.”

“But I fear I only have more questions for you,” Eolair said. “Questions my king and queen desperately want to have answered. What has happened to your people in these last years? Why have you been silent so long?”

“We cannot speak of it yet,” Jiriki told him, and would not explain further.

After the strange events in the butterfly cavern, Aditu, Jiriki, and several more Sithi had prepared quickly, almost feverishly, for a journey, gathering up water and food for Morgan and Eolair, as well as a few blankets and other things. As soon as the preparations were completed the small group—perhaps a dozen in all—had set out. Morgan thought they had been walking for at least an hour now, but was not quite sure. In fact, he was not quite sure of anything at the moment, except that the world was far stranger than he had ever guessed, stranger even than he had suspected when he looked down into the shadows of Hjeldin’s Tower and saw what he felt certain (but still did not want to believe) had been the red priest Pryrates’ restless, murderous spirit.

Is this what Grandfather means when he says you never know you’re in a story? Am I in a story?

The Aldheorte itself seemed different to Morgan now, older and deeper than the parts he had traversed before. The shadows seemed darker too, the moments of sun less frequent. Even the trees and other vegetation seemed to huddle closer together, as if for protection.

The Sithi, though, seemed not to notice, and it certainly didn’t slow them any. Jiriki walked so quickly it almost seemed like running, and his sister, despite her bulging belly, had no problem keeping up with him. But the one called Yeja’aro was the most agile of all, and also seemed in the greatest hurry. Morgan had the feeling that if Yeja’aro could have whipped them into greater speed, he would have. Not that anyone but another of his own folk could have kept up with him: at one point, while the rest trotted down into and then up out of a small canyon, Yeja’aro simply leapt from one side of the little valley to the other, dozens of paces away—an astonishing feat that none of Yeja’aro’s kin seemed to notice. Meanwhile, the mortal prince and the aged lord steward had to scramble over obstacles their companions seemed barely to notice.

Yeja’aro kept looking back to Aditu and her brother. Morgan could guess nothing of Sithi feelings by their faces, but there was something noteworthy just in the frequency with which the red-haired Sitha watched the siblings. Something complicated seemed to be going on there—love, anger, hatred, perhaps all three. Whatever it was, though, was strong; Morgan felt certain about that.

At last, he caught up to Aditu (or more likely, he knew, she slowed down for him) but he was too daunted to ask about the things he had been wondering. Instead, when he had mustered enough breath, he asked, “Where are we going?”

“To T’seya Go-jao,” she said. “Another of the little boats, as we call these more humble dwellings. Your grandfather saw Jao é-Tinukai’i, the Boat on the Ocean of trees, the greater refuge from which all the little boats came.”

“What direction is that? Because Eolair said he thought we were traveling west—back in the direction he and I first came.”

“That is true, more or less.”

“But then the sun should be in our eyes, at least when we can see it through all these bloody trees. It has to be far past noon and the sun’s been on the back of my neck for an hour!”

She adjusted her pace a little to match his. “Hm. Did your grandfather ever teach you to play shent?”

“He tried.” In truth, it had been one of the most frustrating things Morgan could remember. The game had far too many pieces, or at least the pieces had too many names, and the contest seemed to have no rules that made sense. Instead it was full of useless directions such as, “Consider the point from which you started,” or “Follow the wind.” In the few times he had played with King Simon he had won only once and did not understand why, except that a bored, blatant attempt at cheating on his part had made his grandfather laugh. The memory brought a pang of discomfort and anger. “I could never do it right.”