promising to find the essential tale, trying another and another like sweets offered from a tray, each sapping her will a little more, until everything of her former life was forgotten and remaining here was all she would ever want? He knew this because what he had felt in the pool was not only to bind to her but to live here with her everlastingly, and while that spell no longer bound him, its memory served as sufficient tocsin. Having been under their sorcery and then released seemed to give him a kind of immunity, although that might be only temporary. He might go to sleep now and wake up as dazzled as she. He wished desperately to leave before that happened; but she would not go with him, and if he left her behind he would surely never see her again. She would never go.
She rolled onto her back, and the pendant slithered up the pillow, coming level with his eyes. As it did, its own golden eyes opened and contemplated him. He realized that Leodora could not have roused it.
He sat up. “Will you answer me?” he whispered.
“Naturally,” it told him. “So long as you are in her dreams.” Then it became inanimate again.
With great care, he knelt and worked the necklace and the Brazen Head over her face and up above her hair, but he needed to lift her head to release it altogether.
Slowly, he slipped his fingers into the tangled fall of her hair, edging them beneath the back of her head. Ever so slightly, he raised her head up. She murmured his name, and both of her arms circled his neck. At the moment he drew the pendant free of her hair, her lips met his. She kissed him deeply. He tasted the wine on her breath and the tip of her tongue. She let go of him and sank back. Her eyes had opened a little, and now rolled up as her eyelids closed. She moaned softly, body shifting, and then lay still, her arms and legs pushed apart as if open to him. He ached to continue, to follow her desire—if only he could trust that it was hers. Instead, he made himself roll away, with his back to her, and then lay still, the Brazen Head clutched in one hand. He waited while her breathing settled, softened, became slow and regular. Then he rose and crept out beneath the blue curtain. He peered in each direction. There was no one to be seen anywhere among the columns. He scurried across the cold stone floor and ducked behind the nearest pillar.
The liquid sky above was still dark and shot with stars. Firelight flickered from the distant feast and from torches beside the still pool of nepenthe.
Diverus stole from column to column until he had reached the far side, near the tiny door where they had entered. No one was about there, either. He crouched against a column in the last row and held up the pendant so that the brass head dangled before him.
“All right,” he said. “Tell me.”
The eyes opened. “Your deepest desire is to know if she loves you.”
“I would hear of that, but not now. Not—”
“I couldn’t tell it to you anyway,” the head interjected.
That brought him up short. “What do you mean?”
“She loves stories. All else must needs occupy a second place.”
“I don’t care,” he answered, and for that moment he believed it. “I want to know how to get her away from here. I want to know what this place is about and how to find out why we came.”
“Time,” it replied. “Time is no more.”
“I don’t understand you. How is time no more? Here? Everywhere?”
“Here is everywhere. Your eyes play you as false here as does your heart. The rising and setting of suns and moons is illusory. You cannot trust what you know. What you sense. What you want.”
“I realize that,” he answered impatiently. “Why do you think I’m holding you? Why do you think we’re talking?”
The lion’s muzzle flexed as if perturbed, as if it might shut its eyes again.
“Please,” he implored. “What’s being withheld? How do we get away from here?”
“She needs one story for the battle to come, but be assured they will not serve it up until the day of that battle.”
“And how long till that day?”
“Forever, if you remain here. This world is its own spell, enchantment concretized. They don’t lie as you think of it, they merely act from the