as she walked the last few yards to the table itself. There were four chairs at this table; they were also unaltered by the transformation that had overtaken the rest of what could no longer be called a room.
“If you scratch this table,” Jewel told the much larger, gray cat, “I will kill you myself.”
Shadow hissed.
“The chairs?” Snow asked, sidling up on the right.
“The chairs, too.”
She approached the chair at the head of the table; it was the chair in which The Terafin sat when she desired privacy in which to work. Two months, more, she’d been buried—but death didn’t change the past, and the past was so strong here it was almost alive. Jewel could no more take that chair than she could have when The Terafin occupied it. She took, instead, the chair to the left—it was, on the occasions she’d been commanded to join The Terafin, hers.
There were almost no scratches on the table’s surface; it was oiled to a gleaming shine, especially beneath a midday sky—even a purple one. But there were books on the table, in a haphazard pile, one left open as if the person studying it had taken a momentary break from its dry, procedural words.
And she wanted that woman to come back from stretching her legs, to resume her seat, to focus once again on those words and the work at hand. Her eyes did sting; she closed them for a long moment. When she opened them again, the chair was occupied.
But it was not occupied by The Terafin. Not even her dreams would be that kind.
No, it was occupied by a woman she had seen only a handful of times in her life—and each was burned into memory, like a brand burned skin, claiming forever some part of what it touched.
“Evayne.”
“Terafin.”
Her face was hooded, but she lifted her hands and drew the folds of midnight from the contours of her face. She was a woman, not a girl; she was not quite of an age with Amarais at the height of her power, but she was close. Her eyes were violet and unblinking, but Jewel thought them a lesser shade of the same color that now adorned the sky—as if the seer were a window and Jewel was looking through its haze.
The cats, bickering and whining about how unfair Jewel was, fell instantly silent; they turned—as one, which was always disturbing—toward Evayne. Evayne, however, did not effect to notice their presence. Had she been anyone else, this would have been a poor choice—but there was something about this woman, with her raven hair and its one shock of white, her strong chin, her piercing gaze, that kept even the cats at bay.
Evayne rose. “My apologies,” she said. “It has been some time since I have seen this place.”
“It’s new, to me. New, now,” she added.
“And The Terafin’s death is also still fresh.”
Jewel swallowed and nodded. The desire to cry at the sight of the unexpected familiarity of a simple table and four chairs vanished; she could at least be grateful for that.
“Why are you here?”
Evayne frowned. “What is the date?”
“It’s the—” she glanced back at Avandar.
“It is the ninth day of Fabril, in the year four hundred and twenty-eight.”
Two days had passed in a landscape that allowed for no natural passage of time. Evayne nodded. “Terafin.” She offered Jewel a very correct bow. It felt wrong; Evayne had always seemed above the strictly procedural forms of etiquette, to Jewel. “Your surroundings have changed.”
“You noticed. Have you seen this room before?”
“I have seen the manse, both before and after. I am here, I believe, to ask your permission to cross your borders.”
Jewel blinked, and the older seer smiled.
“Is it required?”
“It will make my passage simpler, yes. At the moment, your borders are tenuous; they are ill-defined. It is not the gravest threat you will face—but the threat you will face is one I cannot clearly see.” As she spoke, she drew the orb from her robes. It rested in her hands like a luminous, crystal heart. “There are only two possible reasons that the path is so difficult to see or trace. The first is positive, the second, markedly less so.”
“Tell me about the second.”
Evayne lifted a brow. “That was—and is—your way; you dwell on the darkness.”
“I don’t. But if those are the two outcomes you sense, it’s the bad one I have to worry about. Or avoid.”
“Do you understand what has happened here?” She glanced at the distant shelves, made of