Nigredo: Sed Initium

On the first morning Magda had told the twins that the doors would want checking every day, and Summer had offered to keep a record of it. The record was in Magda’s hand now, a card for each day, and this afternoon she was walking it alone. The room the three of them shared in Circulation had been empty when she went back for her pen, the twins’ side of it untouched since morning, and nobody at the long tables had seen them.

That was no reason to stop. The doors declined her every day, and every day she wrote it down, because she held that a thing watched long enough would show what it was, and because her own room behind the tin door had begun to show her what it was. It held instruments she had made and never shown to a living soul, down to the marks of her own tools on them. Whatever furnished the Athanor knew things it had no business knowing, and it did its furnishing when no one was looking. Magda intended to be looking.

She tried the first walnut door on the left: the flat of her hand on the wood first, then the handle. It declined her. She took the pen from behind her ear and drew a short stroke on the top card. Then the door opposite. Then the next on the left, and the next on the right. Each handle turned as far as a handle ought to turn and stopped there, without a catch or a grind. Her heels made no sound on the obsidian. The cut black walls gave back nothing, and the light lay along them from a place she had long since stopped looking for.

At the eleventh door she squared the pile against her forearm, the short edge, then the long one. It had been straight before she began. She did it anyway, and only when she reached for the twelfth handle did she see that she wasn’t alone.

Chiara stood a pace behind her, a little to one side, in dark red velvet and a thread of gold through the coils of her hair. In this corridor nobody was ever heard coming. Her right hand was at her chin, two fingers along the jaw. At the table that meant she was weighing a remark. Here her shoulders were too straight for it, and she hadn’t stopped to arrange her skirts.

“Forgive me,” Magda said. “I did not hear you.”

“No one does, in here.” Chiara lowered the hand and folded it with the other in front of her. “I looked for you at your table first. You keep Amabilis’s rules on those cards, don’t you? All of them, as she gave them on the first day.”

“As she gave them. Not as she keeps them.”

“Is there anything in them about a passage in the wall of the Athenaeum where the bookshelf with the alembic is?”

“There is no passage in that wall of the Athenaeum.”

“There is now.” Chiara drew a breath through her nose, short and measured. “At the far end of the floor. No carving over it. Five people walked into it a little while ago. Andrea, then Oudemia, then Summer and Autumn. Amabilis went in last.” Her mouth tightened at the name, and smoothed. “I called him across the floor. Andrea. The opening gave back nothing. Not a footstep. And the light in it went dim once they were inside.”

Magda’s right hand had risen halfway to her forehead before she knew it was moving. She stopped it there and brought it down to the cards, and held them. Behind her the walnut door she had not yet tried stood shut, like all the others.

“The twins,” she said.

“Yes.”

“They were not in the room at noon.” She heard how that sounded, as if she were accounting for them to a magistrate, and let it go. “I thought they were with Drosia, in the Palaestra.”

“They were with him.” Chiara’s eyes went to the cards, and the pen, and came back to Magda’s face. “You go to the Axis on your own business. You told the table so. I thought he might have told you something of this.”

“He told me nothing.”

Chiara looked at her a moment longer, then her shoulders gave a fraction. “No,” she said. “He tells each of us a different piece. I hoped yours was this one.”

“Did Herr Rosenkreutz look back?”

Chiara’s mouth went tight at one corner and was smoothed again. “No. None of them did.”

Magda nodded once. “Thank you,” she said. “For coming to tell me.”

“You write things down,” Chiara said. “And they are your roommates. Someone who is not a golem should have told you.” She inclined her head a fraction, as if a debt had been entered on a page Magda would never see. “I am going to the Garden, to Nebet-Hedj. By day she will hear it and finish her row. At sunset it will be another thing, and I would rather she had it from me before then. Then I will wake Drosia. She will be angry to be woken, and angrier not to have been.”

“Go, then,” Magda said. “There is a door in this corridor whose owner should hear it as well.”

Chiara turned and walked back toward the mouth of the corridor and the warmer light beyond it. She didn’t hurry; Magda had never seen her hurry. After a few soundless steps she was simply gone, much sooner than the length of the corridor allowed. It was always that way, going back toward the Athenaeum.

Magda squared the pile again.

The solid silver door was halfway down the left side. Silver went with the Roman girl and the Moon, by the rules of alchemy and their Host's own actions. There was no handle she had any business trying, so she knocked with two knuckles. She raised her hand to knock a second time.

The door opened inward before she could, and Selene was there.

She filled the doorway as no one else in the Athanor did—a head taller than she had any natural reason to be, her skin holding that faint pearl light Magda had stopped trying to account for, her hair cropped close, a plain belted tunic of undyed linen on her. Below the belt the tail began, black and silver. Behind her, low and gold, lamplight moved on wet rock. Selene looked at Magda’s face, then at the cards under her arm, then at her face again, tilted her head, and waited.

“Herr Rosenkreutz has gone into an opening in the wall of the Athenaeum,” Magda said. “With Oudemia, and the twins. Chiara saw them go.”

Selene’s hand went to her throat. Her fingertips found the old scar there and stayed on it, pressing. For a breath nothing else in her moved.

Then she took the hand away. She cupped it in front of her chest, closed the thumb against two fingers and opened them again in a small flicker, a flame catching, and she turned the hand toward the room behind her. A lamp, Magda thought; she meant to light one. Selene drew the door wide and held it there with her palm flat against the silver.

“Yes,” Magda said. “Of course.” She lifted the pen from behind her ear and looked at the top card, at the line where she had written silver on the first day and nothing since. The nib hung over it. Then she put the pen back and stepped over the threshold.

Inside the door the floor was laid in small stones, and the pattern stopped her where she stood—a crossroads, three roads meeting, the arms worked out in darker tesserae under her shoes. She held the cards flat against her chest with both hands and looked.

It was not a room, but a cave, low enough that Selene had to lower herself or bend her head, its walls never cut or dressed; they were the rock as the rock had come. Clay lamps burned in rough niches all along them, small and honey-colored, their flames standing upright and still. At the back a long shallow pool lay under a slow drip from the ceiling, and beside it stood a row of clay pots with something green in them. Smaller niches were cut into the walls at the height of a woman’s hand, and in each was a cup. Oil in one. Dry bread in another. A few twists of silver wire. A pinch of salt. In a larger niche at the far end stood a figure of dark stone with three faces, the middle one stern, the left one smiling, the right one with its mouth shut as if it had been told a secret and meant to keep it.

The cards came down from her chest to her side.

“I have read of rooms like this,” Magda said. She heard her own voice and found it lower than she had meant. “In the Latin authors. And in the accounts of the diggings at the foot of Vesuvius, and the engravings they made of what they found.” She looked at the cups in their niches, at the figure in the dark. “This is the first kept one I have stood in.”

Selene had come to rest beside the pool, her coils gathered under her. She looked at Magda for a long moment, and the corner of her mouth moved, very slightly, and she turned one hand palm up toward the room, as if she were offering it.

Magda crouched, the lab coat pooling on the tiles around her knees. She set one fingertip where the roads met and followed the first arm out to its end, and the second, and the third, the stones cool and a little uneven, each one set by a hand. Then she straightened.

Her thumb ran along the edge of the cards, once, and again. She could already hear how it would sound: question after question, in her voice, in this room, each one shaped like an entry in a ledger.

“I should like to ask you some things,” she said. “They may sound like a catalogue of your faith. I ask in order to learn. If you would rather I did not, I will not.”

Selene reached out to the damp rock beside her and traced a slow spiral on it with one finger, from the outside in. Magda took it to mean she might go on, and hoped she had it right.

“Is it kept as your household in Cumae kept theirs?”

Selene nodded. She touched her own breastbone with one finger, then swept her arm wide in an arc that took in the cave and the corridor and, it seemed, a good deal more besides. Her old house, Magda supposed, or the life inside it—she couldn’t tell which, and suspected Selene wouldn’t have divided them.

Then she showed her. She touched the cup of oil and, after it, the nearest lamp. She touched the bread, pressed two fingers down as if setting something in a bowl, and pointed to the bowl at the foot of the stone figure where a dried date lay. She pinched a few grains of salt, drew a line with them across the air at the level of the threshold, and brushed the air beyond it away with the back of her hand. At the silver wire she stopped, and made a crescent with both hands, and tapped three times on her breastbone. Something given, Magda guessed. Something offered up.

“Oil for the lamps,” Magda said slowly. “Bread for her table, every day. Salt at the door, against whatever comes in on the air. I may have that one wrong.” Selene shook her head, small: not wrong. “And the silver is a present.” She looked along the niches again, at the plain cups, the low flames. “In the houses I read about, the shrine stood as often in the kitchen as in the atrium. I always thought that a strange place for gods. It seems less strange here.”

Her eyes went past Selene to the niche at the far end, and stayed there. From here she could see that the stone had been worked by someone who knew what a face was for and hadn’t troubled to make any of the three beautiful. The stern one looked straight down the room at the door. The smiling one looked at the pool. The third looked at nothing, with its lips pressed together.

“Your household,” she said. “What name did they give her? Virgil calls her Trivia. The goddess of the place where three roads meet.”

Selene followed her look to the figure. She nodded, and lifted one hand toward the three faces with the palm open, as a hostess might present a guest she didn’t intend to explain.

“Then I knew her name,” Magda said, “before I ever saw her face.”

Selene’s mouth moved again at the corner, and this time it stayed that way a little longer.

In the amphitheater, on the day of the polls, Amabilis had called Selene Hecate's handmaiden, and Magda had asked the whole room whether that was true, and been told that the goddess herself was not invoked. Only the pattern. Magda had written that down, but now wondered if the answer had changed.

“Does she hear you?”

Selene nodded. Then she went to the statue. The coils carried her over the crossroads and across the tiles with a soft sound, and she stopped before the three faces and stood there with her hands open and empty at her sides. She didn’t bow her head. For a while she did nothing else at all. Then she cupped her palms in front of her mouth and breathed into them, slowly, and held them out toward the figure.

The lamps barely moved. Somewhere at the back the drip found the pool, and after a long pause found it again.

“Such figures belonged to the customs of the age—” Magda began. She looked at Selene standing there with her hands held out, and stopped.

Selene hadn’t turned. Her shoulders, Magda saw, were perfectly easy, the way they were never easy at the table, and what Magda could see of her face in the lamplight had nothing guarded in it at all.

“May I stay here?” Magda said. “Where I stand.”

Her right hand had closed on the collar of her shirt. Her left held the cards against her side so hard the edges bit through the cloth.

Without turning, Selene lifted one hand a little from her side, fingers loose, and let it fall again. Magda took it for yes.

In Vienna Magda had known what to do with a woman at prayer. One lowered one’s eyes, kept still, and waited for her to finish, and the church told you all of it on every wall. Here there was no one to tell her whether waiting was courtesy or a kind of trespass. Magda was not a woman of faith, but she had no reason to dismiss Selene's beliefs, misguided or not. She stood on the crossroads with her hand on her belt and found that in this place, she couldn’t decide which.

Selene lowered her hands at last and came back along the wall, and Magda spoke before she could think better of it.

“Let me be of some use.”

Selene looked at her, then at the niche beside the entrance, where a jug stood with a flint beside it. She pointed.

Magda tucked the cards under her left arm and took the jug by its handle in her right. She carried it along the wall at Selene’s side, and at each lamp Selene took it from her just long enough to pour, a thread of oil, only enough to wet the wick, and gave it back. By the third lamp Magda had the order of it and was holding the jug out before Selene reached. By the fifth, Selene had stopped looking to see whether it would be there. A drop ran down the outside from the lip and Selene caught it on her thumb before it reached Magda’s fingers, and wiped the thumb on her own tunic, and went on.

The lamps stood wherever the rock had allowed a niche, high and low, and Selene had them all by heart. There was no window, and the light in here was the light Selene made.

Near the back, on a ledge above the pots, stood a small terracotta figure—a woman with most of her paint worn off and a heavy brow. Beside her the offering bowls stood in a row along the ledge, all of them in line but one, which sat a little apart, a finger’s width out of true. In the space it left lay a dried leaf, folded small into a triangle, its edges creased flat as if someone had pressed each fold with a nail.

Magda shifted the jug to her other hand. Her fingertip reached for the bowl to slide it back into line.

Selene’s hand closed on her wrist as the fingertip touched the rim.

It was not a hard grip, but there was no getting out of it. Selene’s fingers were cool from the oil, and they didn’t tighten and didn’t let go. Magda stopped moving altogether. Selene shook her head, once. Then, with one finger of her other hand, she eased the bowl back to where it had been, out of line, beside the folded leaf, and released Magda’s wrist.

Magda lowered her hand to her side. “Forgive me,” she said.

Selene gave one nod. Her face was entirely level. Then she turned back to the lamps.

Magda kept her free hand on her belt after that. Neither of them looked at the ledge again. Magda had the strong impression that it was a place being kept for someone, and the stronger one that it wasn’t her business whose.

At the end of the wall Selene took the jug from her. From the lowest shelf, where clay lamps stood crowded with glass bottles, she took a lamp that hadn’t been lit, filled it, and trimmed the wick against her thumbnail. She struck the flint once. The spark caught. A small flame stood up out of the clay, leaned, and settled.

Selene held it out to her.

Magda’s hands came up and stopped a little short of it. They stayed there, open, at the height of the flame, and went no farther.

Selene set the lamp in them. The clay was warm on the underside. Selene touched its rim with one finger, then turned and pointed past Magda to the door and the corridor beyond it, and made a small motion with two fingers, walking, going away.

“Of course,” Magda said. “For the twins.”

Selene shook her head. She pointed again, up the corridor, toward the Athenaeum, and then she laid her fingertips flat over her heart and left them there.

Magda looked at the hand on the heart. The lamp was warm between her palms and the flame stood very still.

“Herr Rosenkreutz,” she said. Her voice was not quite steady, and she let it be. “Herr Rosenkreutz. And Oudemia, and the twins. All four of them.” She swallowed. “If I have read you rightly.”

Selene nodded, slowly.

The flame shook.

It shook because her hands did, and under her arm the cards shifted and one slid loose. It turned once in the air and landed face down on the tiles. She didn’t look down. She kept both hands around the lamp.

Selene bent, lifted the card, and slid it back under Magda’s arm with the others, edge to edge.

Then she took the lamp out of Magda’s hands, carried it to the door, and set it down on the crossroads just inside the threshold, where the three roads met.

Magda breathed in. The air smelled of oil and wet stone. Her hands, empty now, didn’t know where to go, and she put one of them on the cards and held it there.

“We should be on the floor of the Athenaeum,” she said, “when Chiara brings Nebet-Hedj and Drosia.”

Selene nodded and drew the door open for her.

Magda stepped out into the corridor. Selene came after her, and turned, and drew the silver door shut behind them. Through the narrowing gap Magda saw the flame on the tiles, very small and very upright, and then the silver met the frame and there was only the corridor, silent and black, lit from nowhere.

They went up it together, Magda walking and Selene gliding at her side, past the walnut doors with their little strokes against them on her top card. It took only a few steps. Ahead, where the corridor opened onto the Athenaeum, the light had begun to change color—the gold of the afternoon going deeper, toward dusk.

---

The long window on the mezzanine looked out on the inside of the volcano, and the inside of the volcano was gold. It lay on the black walls of the caldera, and it had begun, very slowly, to deepen. At the top of the rim, where the rock met whatever the Athanor used for sky, a first thin edge of dark had appeared.

Nebet-Hedj stood with both palms flat against the glass and watched it.

The glass was cool and perfectly smooth. Her hands left no mark on it, though there was still soil under two of her nails from the afternoon. Behind her the Athenaeum was empty. The kyphi was in the Fixation Chamber, in its dish, not yet lit; on another evening she would have been there to light it. She had come up the stair after the planting was done, because this was where she had stood on the first evening of the round when the sun went down, and one place was as good as another for a thing that would happen wherever she was.

In the Garden that afternoon Chiara had found her among the cuttings and told her that Andronikos had walked into a gap of the Athenaeum with Oudemia and the twins, and that the wall had given back nothing. Nebet-Hedj had heard it, and thanked her, and finished the row. The cuttings had needed to go in before they dried.

The stair behind her took a light tread. It stopped two paces from her shoulder.

“Nebet-Hedj.”

“Chiara.” She kept her eyes on the glass.

Chiara’s scent arrived a moment after her voice, something warm and resinous that clung to her sleeves. She stayed where she had stopped. Nebet-Hedj noted the distance, and the reason for it, and let it go.

“You left the Garden,” Chiara said.

“The planting was finished.”

“Yes.” A pause, measured. “I would like to stay with you. Until the sun is down. If you will have me.”

“The woman at the window is indifferent to company,” Nebet-Hedj said. “It will matter to the woman who comes.”

Chiara was quiet for a moment. “Then I will stay for her,” she said.

She came to the glass two paces off and stood there, and folded her hands in front of her. In the glass Nebet-Hedj could see the faint shape of her, dark hair, a dark sleeve, the hands held very still. She kept her eyes past it, on the caldera, where the gold was thickening, and on the edge of dark along the rim, which was a little wider than it had been. Across the caldera the glass corridor to the Axis Mundi caught the light along its whole length, a bright line ruled over the dark, as if someone had drawn it there to measure by. No one was walking on it. Nebet-Hedj took that in as she had taken in the soil under her nails: a fact, set down where it belonged. Far down, the column of the Axis Mundi stood up out of the light like a post driven into a riverbed, and the light moved around it and left it where it was.

She was not waiting, but standing. Waiting belonged to the woman who came. Nebet-Hedj stood, and the light changed, and that was all.

The gold turned. It went red, a deep arterial red, thick, almost pulsing, poured into the bowl of the volcano from somewhere above—and the ba came back into her in one surge, the whole of it at once.

She heard her own heart, loud. Her fingers curled off the glass. They found the window frame and closed on it, and held, and held harder, until the ache climbed out of her hands and into her arms and her shoulders. The glass was cold under her knuckles. It was so cold. She hadn’t felt cold all day. The tang of lamp oil reached her from the lamps below, and Chiara’s perfume with it, both at once, too much, and her breath went in ragged and caught on the way out.

Her eyes stung. They filled, and spilled. Both her hands were on the frame, and she couldn’t have opened them if she had tried.

Beside her, Chiara moved half a step and stopped, two paces away, and stayed there.

Nebet-Hedj’s mouth was open. Her voice, when it came, was rough and too low.

“Where—” She swallowed. “Where is Andronikos?”

“He went into the wall,” Chiara said. Her voice was low and very even. “The opening at the far end of the floor. With Oudemia, and Summer and Autumn. Amabilis went with them. He has not come out.”

Nebet-Hedj pressed her forehead to the glass. It did no good. The cold went into the bone and the feeling went nowhere at all; it was in her chest and her throat and behind her eyes, and it was hers.

He was behind a wall. He had promised her every night, and he was behind a wall, and the night had come anyway. Perhaps he could hear none of this. Perhaps he did not even know.

“On the first night,” she said. The words came out in pieces, and she let them. “In the caldera. I asked him how. How it could be—mended. And he said—” Her breath hitched. “He said that I am loved. And was loved. And will be loved again.” She turned her head against the glass, enough to see Chiara with one eye. “He is not here to say it. Say it to me. In his place. Please.”

Chiara’s face did a small, careful thing, a drawing together, and then it smoothed.

“I think,” she began, “what he would want you to hear, if he were—”

She stopped.

Her right hand came up to her chin and rested there, two fingers along the line of the jaw. Then she took it down again and held it at her side. Nebet-Hedj watched her breathe. In, slowly, through the nose, and out. Again. A third time. A fourth.

Chiara looked at her.

“You are loved,” she said, “and were loved, and will be loved again.”

She said it plainly, without anything in front of it, and once.

The tears came harder. Nebet-Hedj couldn’t have stopped them and didn’t try; they ran down her face, black with the kohl from her eyes, and off her jaw and onto the linen at the collar of her dress, and she breathed through them in short catches.

“Yes,” she said. “I— yes.” She shut her eyes, and opened them. “I heard it. The other one keeps the words. I needed them said.” Her voice cracked on the last and came back. “Thank you.”

Chiara nodded, once. She stayed where she stood, but her hands, folded again in front of her, were holding each other hard enough that the knuckles had gone pale. For a while neither of them said anything. Below them, somewhere near the long tables, a lamp guttered and caught again; the oil smell came and went. Nebet-Hedj let the tears run until they began, on their own, to slow.

She made herself let go of the frame. Her fingers came away stiff, one at a time, and the ache ran out of them and into her wrists. She turned from the window to the edge of the mezzanine and wiped her face with the heel of her hand, first one cheek and then the other. It did very little. The red light lay over everything now, the long tables and the couches in their hollows and the pale stone of the floor, so that the whole Athenaeum looked steeped in it, the way linen looks when it has lain a night in the dye.

Below, someone was crossing the floor. Magda came out from the mouth of the Corridor of Ages at a walk so fast it was nearly something else, her white coat flaring behind her, and went straight across the hall toward the far wall. Three paces short of the opening there, she stopped. Her hands came together at the front of her coat and clasped, hard. A moment after her came Selene, gliding over the stone with her tail low and quick, and halted at Magda’s side with one hand at the scar on her throat. Both of them had their eyes on the wall.

Nebet-Hedj went to the head of the stair. Her legs weren’t quite steady yet. She took the first steps with a hand on the rail, feeling every one of them, the stone under her soles and the rail warm where the lamps had been near it, and went down. Chiara came down beside her, two paces off, matching her step for step.

They were halfway to the floor when Drosia came out of the corridor that led to the guest rooms. She was rubbing one eye with the knuckles of her hand, as if sleep were something she could scrub off, and her lips were moving, small and steady, on each stride. She crossed the floor toward the two women at the far wall without slowing, as a soldier crosses open ground toward the place where her unit has gathered.

---

Selene had always counted time by what came back.

The opening in the wall held its light, dim and even, with no lamp anywhere in it and no shadow on its floor. Above it the crystal dome was the color of wine held up to a fire, and the red came down over the long tables and the couches and the pale stone and lay on all of it alike; twice while she waited it deepened, and twice she marked it. Selene lay coiled on her tail a few paces from the mouth and stayed so. Magda stood at her shoulder, both hands closed together at her waist in the kind of grip that leaves its marks on the backs of the hands for an hour afterward, and Selene could hear, under the silence of the hall, every breath Magda took through her nose and let out again slowly.

Chiara and Nebet-Hedj had come down the stair and stood beside Magda now, Chiara upright and composed, Nebet-Hedj with her face washed by tears and her palms pressed flat against her sides, as though she had been told to keep her hands to herself and was doing it with all her strength. It was night in her; anyone could see it. Drosia came last, from the corridor of the bedrooms, and stopped at the edge of them, a little apart, and folded her arms.

Once, early, Magda began to say something about how long this might reasonably go on, choosing each word with care, and stopped halfway and let it go. Selene was grateful. She had nothing to answer with. She had the count of the dome, and the light in the opening, and her own heart going too fast for a woman sitting still on her own.

Nobody spoke now. Selene watched the light in the opening, and the light didn’t change, and then there was someone in it.

It was the Host. Amabilis came out first and alone, a few paces ahead of anyone else, and stopped on the threshold. Selene lowered her eyes, as she had been taught to lower them for anyone who could end her, and then raised them again, because the woman’s stillness was wrong. Amabilis’s eyes went past them. She looked back over her shoulder into the corridor she had just left, and her face was not the face Selene knew. It had no ruling in it at all. It was the face of a mistress who has just been told the house is to be sold, and is still standing in the hall with the letter in her hand.

Beside Selene, Magda’s breath stopped. At the edge, Drosia touched her forehead and her breast and one shoulder and then the other, quick, with three fingers held together. No one said anything to the Host, and the Host said nothing to anyone. She turned and walked away across the floor, quickly, not toward any of them, and went out by the corridor beside the stair, and the hall was quiet again except for the sound of her going, and then not even that.

Behind her the others came out, not one after another but in a knot, close, as if they had been holding on to one another in the corridor and had only just let go: Oudemia on one side and the twins on the other, and him between them. They were dressed for a feast. He wore dark cloth cut close to him, finer than anything Selene had seen him in; the twins were in something long and pale that had been made for them and fitted them no better than anything else did, a seam already open at the hip and the neckline sliding; Oudemia wore a long dress of pale linen that was not her chiton, and her feet were bare. They smelled of wine and smoke and crushed flowers. None of them looked like people coming from a feast.

They stopped a few steps onto the floor, all four at once, and looked about them at the long tables and the couches and the red dome, making sure of each one. The twins’ heads both turned after the Host, toward where she had gone, and stayed turned a moment too long.

Chiara stepped forward, and Magda with her. Selene lowered one hand behind her, flat, palm toward them, and held it there. They stayed.

She had learned in the old house that people coming home needed a moment to find the floor under their feet before anyone reached for them, and she gave them that moment and took it for herself as well, and looked.

At the edge of the group Drosia’s lips moved. Selene caught the shape of it: four, counted once, under her breath. Drosia’s arms came unfolded and hung at her sides, and she breathed out, long and slow, through her teeth.

The twins were breathing hard. Summer’s face had no color in it; Autumn’s had none either, but Autumn’s had been arranged, and Summer’s hadn’t. Oudemia stood a little apart from them, and she was drawing one palm slowly across the other, and then the other across the first, though there was nothing on either of them that Selene could see. And his face. Selene looked at his face last, because it was the one she wanted most to look at. It was drawn, the lines at the corners of his eyes cut deeper than she had ever seen them, his jaw set hard. His eyes were moving. They went from Drosia to Magda to Chiara to Nebet-Hedj to Selene herself, and back, and again, as a steward goes over the silver after a feast to be sure none of it has walked.

She wondered what he had seen, that two hours could do that to a face.

The twins found her first. They came straight across the floor to her, both heads already turned her way, and stopped so close that the smell of wine and flowers was all she could breathe. Selene lowered the flat hand. She gave her right hand to Summer’s left and her left hand to Autumn’s right, and their fingers closed on hers hard, hard enough to hurt a little, and didn’t loosen.

“You’re here,” Summer said. Her voice was too high and she heard it and didn’t care. “Okay. You’re here. Is everyone—are you all—” She was looking past Selene, from face to face. “Magda, Chiara, Drosia, Nebet-Hedj, you. Is that everybody? That’s everybody who stayed. Right? Nobody else—”

“Five,” Autumn said. She had counted too. Her voice was low and flat and very careful. “It’s five, Summer. Take a deep breath. It’s everyone.”

“Okay.” Summer breathed out. “Okay.”

Selene looked from one face to the other. She had no hands free, so she asked with her face: brows drawn together, chin lifted, her eyes going to the opening and back to them.

Summer understood her well enough. “Nothing,” she said. “I mean, we’re fine. We’re not hurt. It was just—there was a dinner, and it was nice, it was actually really nice, and they were about to bring out the cake, and then there was this bell. Way off. Not loud. Then we felt something coming, something bad. And people just—” Her hand, the one that was holding Selene’s, tightened again. “People started going. Table by table. They were there and then they weren’t. And then it was us, and we were in the corridor.”

“She was in front of us,” Autumn said, and Selene took her to mean the Host. “She didn’t say anything the whole way.”

Summer gave a laugh that came out wrong. “We didn’t even get cake.” Nobody laughed. Summer nodded at that, once, and let it go.

Selene’s fingers closed tighter on both their hands. She didn’t understand most of it. She understood people at a table, there and then not, and a bell no one wanted to hear, and the Host walking ahead of them in silence. In the old house, when the masters went quiet like that, the slaves had learned to go quiet too, and to watch the doors.

Behind the twins he went still at last. He was done counting. Selene watched him reach the end of it and find the number right, and watched it not help him as much as he had wanted it to. He turned his head toward the corridor where the Host had gone, and looked at it a long moment, and his mouth went thin and then, strangely, gentle, as though he pitied her. Then his face closed over it, and he turned back to them, and whatever it was, he kept.

Nebet-Hedj moved before anyone else did. She went to him across the stone in three long steps, her hands coming away from her sides at last, and she put her arms around him and held on. Her face went into his shoulder, and her own shoulders shook once and were still. He staggered half a pace with the weight of her and then his arms came up and held her too, one hand flat between her shoulder blades, and for a breath neither of them moved at all. Magda’s hand went to her own mouth. Drosia looked toward the stair.

“Andronikos,” she said into his coat. That was all.

“I’m here,” he said, low.

He let her hold on as long as she wanted. It wasn’t very long. She stepped back on her own, wiping her face with the heel of her hand, and stood at his side with her chin up and her eyes wet, and didn’t reach for him again. Over her head his eyes had already gone on, to Chiara, to Magda, to Drosia at the edge, to Oudemia and her slow hands, and stayed on each of them a moment, the same moment for each.

“Two days,” Summer said, to no one in particular. “Two whole days, and it ends like that. In the middle of dinner.”

“Two hours,” Chiara said.

Everyone looked at her. She hadn’t moved from where Selene’s hand had stopped her, and she stood there with her hands folded before her and her eyes on Summer’s face, quite calm.

“By my count you were gone two hours,” Chiara said. “I watched you go in. The dome was gold. It turned not long ago.” She paused, and Selene saw her doing it, the sum, before she spoke it. “Two days is forty-eight hours. Forty-eight against two.” Her right hand came up and rested at her chin, a finger along the line of her jaw, and stayed there.

Summer stared at her. “Two hours,” she said. “No. We slept there. We had breakfast. There was a whole—” She stopped. Her mouth opened and closed again. “Two hours.”

“Two,” Chiara said again, more gently than Selene had ever heard her say anything. “I counted.”

“So time runs differently in there,” Autumn said quietly, “or out here. One or the other.”

“Great.” Summer laughed, short and unhappy. “That’s great. That’s a great thing to find out at the end of a really long day that was apparently not a day.”

Selene let go of the twins’ hands then. She did it gently, one and then the other, because they had begun to loosen on their own and she could feel that they no longer needed holding so much as they needed something else.

Magda found it before she did. She had gone to the nearest of the tables while Chiara was counting, and she stood at it now with a loaf in both hands, and she was tearing a piece from it. Her hands were shaking. Selene could see it from where she was: the crust wouldn’t give, and Magda pulled at it harder than bread needed, and the loaf trembled in her grip.

“You will eat something,” Magda said to the twins, without looking up from the bread. Her voice was perfectly steady, which made the hands worse. “Both of you. You will sit, and you will eat something, before anyone asks you anything else.”

Selene crossed the space between them and laid two fingers on the inside of Magda’s wrist, lightly, where the cuff of the coat ended, and left them there.

Magda went still. She looked down at the two fingers and then at Selene, and for a moment her mouth was unguarded. Then the trembling went out of the hand under Selene’s touch, slowly, until it was only a hand holding bread. Selene took her fingers away. Magda drew one long breath through her nose, tore the piece clean, and held it out to the right, to Autumn’s side.

Autumn took it with her right hand and bowed her head over it for the space of a breath before she ate. “Thank you,” Summer said, since Autumn was already eating. Her eyes were very bright. “Seriously, Magda. Thank you. You’re—” Her voice did the thing it had done before and broke, and she waited, and started again. “You’re really good at this. You know that?”

Magda’s chin lifted. “I am good at a great many things,” she said, and turned back to the loaf to tear another piece, and her hand, Selene saw, held steady now.

Summer laughed, and this time it came out right, or nearly. Autumn went on eating with the bread held close under her chin, and swallowed, and said to Magda, quietly, “It’s good.” Magda kept her eyes on the loaf. Her ears went pink.

Across the group, Oudemia hadn’t stopped. She stood where she had stood since she came out, a little apart from the rest, and drew one palm across the other, slowly, and then the other across the first. Her hands were clean. There was nothing on them at all that Selene could see, no color in the creases, no dust; she was wiping them anyway, in the same unhurried order each time, as though the order mattered more than the hands.

Drosia had seen it too. She came off the edge of the group for the first time, two steps, no more, and stopped in front of Oudemia.

“You,” Drosia said. “Are you hurt?”

Oudemia looked at her. Her hands paused, palm on palm. “No,” she said. Then, after a moment: “There is nothing on them.”

Drosia looked down at the hands, and up again at the pale, flat face. “Good,” she said.

Oudemia’s eyes went past her, to Magda at the table, to Chiara, to Nebet-Hedj, to Selene, and came back. “All of you stayed here,” she said. “All five.”

“All five,” Drosia said. “Nobody went anywhere.” She sounded like she might have wished otherwise.

Selene folded her own hands before her and waited. All afternoon she waited for this, under the gold and then under the red, and she could wait a little longer. She wanted her turn not first but last, when he owed nothing more to anyone else on the floor. He was still looking at each of them in his way, one after another, and Selene let him. In the old house impatience was beaten out of slaves young. She kept the patience, and found better uses for it.

She watched him look at Oudemia’s hands, and saw his jaw ease a little when Drosia stayed. She watched him look at Magda tearing bread with a hand that held steady, and at the twins, Autumn chewing with her eyes half closed, Summer with her left hand pressed flat to her breastbone, breathing. Each time his eyes moved on, his shoulders came down a little further, and each time they stayed higher than Selene liked.

Chiara’s hand was still at her chin. His eyes reached her, and rested, and Chiara lowered the hand and gave him a small nod. He returned it.

Then he turned, and his eyes came to Selene, and stayed.

She went to him. The stone was cool under the length of her and she crossed it without hurry, until she was close enough to see the lines at the corners of his eyes again and the gray in his face that the red light couldn’t hide. She stopped there.

She lifted her hand and pointed at him. Then she turned the hand over, palm up, and laid it against her own breast, and held it there.

He looked at the hand a long moment, and his face changed under the tiredness.

“I said I would,” he said. His voice was low and rough, and very quiet, meant for no one else.

She nodded once. Her throat went tight around the place where her voice should have been. She reached out and took the edge of his sleeve between two fingers, the fine dark cloth of it, and held it. She had held it so once before, in a hall of doors, the day he went on without her. He let her. She held it until she was sure, and then she let it go. When she looked up, Nebet-Hedj was watching them with her wet eyes, and Autumn had stopped chewing.

Behind him the opening in the wall faded until it was gone. Selene looked at the wall over his shoulder and thought of the lamp she had lit in the Nymphaeum, burning behind the silver door with no one there to watch it. She would let it burn through the night.

Magda had turned from the table with the rest of the loaf under her arm. “The Refectory,” she said, to all of them at once. “There is food laid out there. Real food, and chairs. Come.”

She set off toward the corridor without waiting to see whether anyone followed, and Chiara fell in behind her, and Nebet-Hedj after Chiara, wiping her face once more and then letting her hands hang. The twins went next, Autumn still eating, Summer looking back over her shoulder at the corridor beside the stair where the Host had gone. She opened her mouth.

“Later,” he said, before she could speak. “At the table.”

Summer shut her mouth, and nodded, and turned to the front again. Oudemia came after the twins, her hands quieter now, and Drosia came last, two paces behind Oudemia, watching the backs of all of them.

Selene moved to his side. He matched his step to her pace without being asked, and they went together across the red floor after the others. Ahead of them the twins’ long pale skirts brushed the stone, and Oudemia’s bare feet made no sound on it at all. Once Nebet-Hedj looked back, over Chiara’s shoulder, to find him; she found him, and faced the front again. The dome burned on above them all, darker every moment, and the long tables they passed were set with bread and fruit that no one had touched all afternoon.

She thought again of the Host’s face on the threshold, and of how he looked after her and turned back to them with his face closed. What the Host had been afraid of, Selene couldn’t tell. She only knew that it followed them out of the corridor, and that he had seen it, and that he was carrying it now beside her, quietly, toward the light and the noise of the Refectory, and that she meant to walk beside him while he did.