once Levec had cleared the door, “I like him.”
“Adam?” Angel asked; he’d remained silent throughout Levec’s visit.
“Levec. He reminds me of my Oma—and there aren’t many men who can do that.” She turned to Avandar and removed the dress he was carrying from his arms. Lifting her arms, she allowed her domicis to lever the nightdress over her head. “How bad is it going to be?” she asked, some of the syllables muffled as the dress passed over her face.
“Survivable. The Kings, however, have expressed concern at your absence.”
She had slept through the command appearance with the Exalted in the Hall of Wise Counsel. “Did they send it through Duvari?”
“No, Terafin.” He glanced at the windows; dawn was slowly brightening the sky. “But there are several messages in the right-kin’s office, none of which can safely be consigned to the nebulous future.”
Jewel nodded absently and turned toward Angel. “Did the room always look like this? I mean—before the walls were shredded?”
Avandar’s brows rose. Angel’s didn’t, but the rest of his expression froze.
“. . . No,” Avandar replied.
Now that she was awake and no one was trying to kill her—or anyone else—she looked with care at the windows, the flooring, the bed itself. The walls were a mess, so it was harder to assess their original length. Or height. But the ceilings, she thought, looked wrong; they made her feel much shorter.
She glanced up, and up again. Angel caught her before she toppled backward.
What had once been ceiling in the normal sense of the word was gone; instead, the bowers of trees—or vines, it was hard to tell, they were so thick—now interceded between open sky and the rest of the bedroom. The leaves were of silver, gold, and diamond, but wound around and through them, the green and golden leaves of the trees in the Common, edged in a frill of ivory.
“I’m awake, aren’t I?” she asked.
Angel pushed her back to standing. “You’re awake.”
“When did this—”
“It wasn’t like this when you were sleeping, but given the choice, I’ll take this.”
“The window—”
“I wasn’t paying much attention to the window,” Angel admitted. “And I haven’t seen this room that often—”
“It is markedly different,” Avandar said.
“The wall—”
“It is my suspicion that the wall will correct itself overnight.”
“Have you been outside of this room? Did anything else change?”
“You are the person who can best answer that question.”
Clearly, she thought with some irritation, she couldn’t. She dressed quickly, allowing Avandar to fuss with her hair; he was neither as thorough nor as painful as Ellerson could be. Dressed, cleaned up to the degree that was possible when time was of the essence, Jewel approached the open doors of the room. The Chosen fell in behind her. In any other rooms in the manse, they would form up around her. Angel took up the right, leaving Avandar his customary position to the left.
Before she could leave the room—the glimpse of the hall implied that at least the hall was normal—the three cats sauntered in. They were still the wrong size, subtly the wrong shape, but were now hissing and squabbling, in admittedly lower voices.
Angel signed, moving his hands without raising his arms.
Night ignored him; Shadow gave him the evil eye, or the cat variant of same. Snow stepped on Night’s tail, and since they were blocking the door, it was not the optimum place for a scuffle. Not that that seemed to deter them on most days. “Gentlemen,” Jewel said, dropping hands to her hips and glaring.
Shadow tilted his head to the side. “Yessss?”
“We’re leaving. You’re in the way.”
The three cats stopped snapping at each other. Snow examined his paws; they were also larger. Night, however, pushed his head around the corner of the doorframe, hissed, and drew back. “Why are they allowed to scratch the walls?”
“They didn’t. The Warden of Dreams did. Anytime you’re the Warden of Dreams, I promise not to complain if you destroy the walls.”
Avandar cleared his throat.
“Cosmetically speaking.”
Night appeared to think about this, inasmuch as cats ever did. “So,” he said slyly, “if we try to—”
“No.” She exhaled. “You don’t seem hurt.”
“Of course not.”
Neither did Snow.
“Do you remember what happened?”
They all stared at her as if she had just said the most idiotic thing they had ever heard. Then again, on a bad day, every sentence she uttered was, by acclaim, the most idiotic thing they’d ever heard, and it seemed there was no lower limit to her idiocy.
“Did I change your shape?”
Once again a look bounced between the three of