them, and the merchant I bought them from will shortly forget exactly what it was I bought, except that he came out ahead on the deal."
"Ah," he said and walked beside her for a while, gradually blending into the darkness until she couldn't see him if she looked straight on.
She caught glimpses of him sometimes when she wasn't quite looking. Sometimes she saw a man who looked like her husband, but more dangerous. At others she saw a dark animal that prowled on four legs. Sometimes if she turned her head and looked at him directly for too long, he disappeared into the night. It was only illusion, she knew, though he could take on shapes of animals if he chose. But illusion or not, it was disconcerting.
"What do they do?" he asked finally.
She set the last one in. "I'll show you. Come with me."
The meadow was set on a rise and she took her son to the highest point. She had never done this with so many before. At the Gathers, the elders from all the families would stand in a circle and chant together.
She held out both hands and shouted imperiously, "Ishavan shee davenadre hovena Hinnumadraun."
It had been so long since she'd allowed herself this much magic. She did only a little magic now and then - when they planted their crops, and when she warded the farm to keep the more dangerous creatures of the mountains away.
Even after so long, it came eagerly to her call, thrumming from her bones to the earth, reverberating through the dirt, rotting vegetation, and newborn sprigs of grass.
Jes let out a startled snarl as the meadow lit up with the windows of two hundred and twenty-four houses. Some were smaller than their cabin, but most were as large as the largest of the houses in Redern. By chance she'd put two in such a way that they blended into each other, sharing a wall - it looked so right that Seraph wondered if the houses might have stood in just such a relative location in Colossae. In the very corner of the meadow stood a small castle. The architecture of the houses was distinctly foreign, the windows open and rounded, the roofs covered with some kind of green pottery tiles.
"It's all right," she reassured Jes, though her eyes were held by the castle. "They are all illusion. The wizards could take only the most necessary of articles because they could not risk giving warning to the enemy before they fled. They couldn't take any of their libraries - So Hinnum created the mermori, which remember the homes of the wizards as they stood in Colossae so long ago. Come with me."
She led her son to one of the smaller ones, a brick-faced home no bigger than Alinath's bakery, though much more gracile. Ebony wood doors were worn near the latch, giving testimony of the age of the building. "This was the mermora my father carried from his father. It belonged to Isolda the Silent, who died when they sealed the city." Seraph pulled the door latch, felt the metal cool against her fingers. The door opened with a soft groan, and she stepped inside.
"Illusion?" Jes questioned, stepping in beside her. The light from Isolda's oil lamps showed a young man rather than a beast. "I can smell oil and herbs - some I know, like anise, henbane, but there are many I can't identify."
"Hinnum was a very great illusionist. Legend says he was four hundred years old when the city fell," she said, trailing her fingers over the familiar shawl that hung neatly on the back of a chair as if it only waited for Isolda to return from some errand.
"But all that this is, is illusion." She turned to her son. "If it is raining outside and you come in, you will not feel the rain - but when you walk out you will be wet. If you are freezing to death and come in, you'll feel warm and still die from the cold."
"How long ago did the city die?" asked Jes, touching a carved table.
For a moment Seraph allowed herself to see the house anew, recognizing how alien it appeared to him. Perhaps a lord's house would be furnished with wooden tables and shelves polished like the surface of a windless lake, but no dwelling in Redern held such treasures.
"I'm not certain," she replied. "It was long before the Shadowed came to rule - and that was about six