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I rubbed my aching eyes. “What is this place? A thieves’ den?”

“Careful where you step! Trolls are the most amiable creatures imaginable. Unless you take or break something that belongs to them. Come on.”Advertisement

We ducked under mirrors, sidestepped a column of pewter candlesticks, and traversed a labyrinth woven of wire. The path doubled back, dead-ended, and once rewound us back the way we had come. The mirrored reflections made my vision throb. I feared that if I brushed anything, the entire collection would crash down. Dizzied, I leaned on the banister as I descended.

The second floor had three doors standing open to bedchambers. We had reached the first-floor landing when a thunder of hooves rattled the entryway on the ground floor below us.

A shout: “That roof, there. Yes, this building. I saw someone up there, my lord.”

“The door is locked, my lord captain.”

“Break it down.”

“Camlodus’s Balls! It’s the militia.” Eurig turned. “Go up and hide. I’ll divert them.”

I knew better than to argue. I raced upstairs just as the front door was smashed open and soldiers exploded into the house. The maze seemed a bad bet for hiding, so I bolted into one of the second-floor bedchambers. The room looked as though a whirlwind had hit it, clothing scattered in heaps across six high square frames with mattresses, which looked like more like nests than beds. The bright patterned fabrics gave the beds a patchwork feel: here a gold-and-green floral extravagance that might have been a barrister’s robe suitable for law court, there a ruffed dash jacket sewn out of a cotton printed with orange bars, blue scallops, and elongated rose-colored spectacles winged with peacock feathers whose eyes watched me.

“Stop!” cried a martial voice.

On the landing below, Eurig replied, “Here, now, my lord captain, Your Mightiness. What gives you leave to come barging in here?”

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“I might ask what gives you leave to speak so disrespectfully to a man who holds both kinship to the prince, and a sword,” said a stentorian tenor. I recognized the voice of Lord Marius, whom I had first met at a ruined fort on a hill northeast of Adurnam, not more than a week before. Then, laughter had lightened his voice. Now, he blared.

“The prince of Tarrant?” retorted Eurig. “The man whose honor drains away drop by drop each day the Northgate poet refuses to eat? Our voices will be heard.”

“In the law courts, at least. What brings you to an empty troll’s nest?”

“They’re partners in a consortium with my employer.”

“I do believe you are lying. Are you angling for a ride on the plague ship, man?”

“Do you mean the one that’s sinking right now? So will injustice founder.”

“Arrest him,” said Lord Marius. “Search the premises.”

Threads of magic are woven through every part of the world because our world and the spirit world that lies athwart our own are intertwined. As footfalls approached the door, I drew the house’s shadows around me like a cloak and hid myself. Two men walked into the chamber. One was Lord Marius, a tall, lean Celt with a thick mustache, a clean-shaven chin, and short hair stiffened into lime-whitened spikes. His gaze swept the chamber with a smile of amusement brushing his lips, as Bee’s pencil might coax into life the humor of a man who prefers to laugh. He did not see me.

With him walked his brother by marriage, the young Roman legate Amadou Barry, whose father was both Roman patrician and West African prince and whose mother had been born into a noble Malian lineage. His Roman ambassadorial cape and the cut of his old-fashioned uniform certainly flattered him, although he had a frown on his handsome face.

“I admire his bravado,” Lord Marius was saying. “But I’ll have to have him fined for disrespect. I can’t challenge a laborer to a duel.”

“You Celts argue too much over fine points of honor. This seems like a chase after a wild goose, as you say up here in the north.” His gaze flowed right past me as he scanned the room. “Jupiter Magnus! Have you ever seen such a mess?”

Lord Marius had a hearty laugh. “Perhaps it merely belongs to a mind whose idea of tidiness isn’t the same as ours. It’s no worse than your sister’s dressing room.”

Amadou Barry halted three steps into the room. I eased back to the bed on which lay the peacock jacket. “Sissy was ever so. I’m amazed by the resourcefulness of those two girls.”

“Everyone has underestimated them, that is sure. Not least you, Amadou. Were you just that sure she would accept the—ah—position as your mistress?” pqdm.com