Nigredo: Sub Cinere

The Refectory had kept its own hours while they were gone. The long hall was lit and warm with the low heat that came up through the stone, the buffet was laid out from one carved pillar to the next, and two golems stood behind it with their black obsidian faces turned toward nothing in particular, as though nine people coming in from a wall were no different from nine people coming in from breakfast. A third golem stood at the bar with a cloth folded over its arm, and it went on folding a second cloth into the same square while they came in. The smell of bread and oil and something slow-cooked reached Adrien before he was through the door, and his stomach answered it, which surprised him. By the only clock his body kept, he had been sitting at a wedding dinner less than an hour ago, and he hadn’t touched the plate.

Oudemia went first, and nobody remarked on it. She passed the chairs as if they belonged to someone else’s house, and at the end of the nearest table she folded herself down onto the stone with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up under the pale linen of a dress that wasn’t hers. Drosia went the other way. She walked the whole length of the table, took the chair at its far end, and sat with her forearms on the wood and her back to nothing but the room. In the Athenaeum she had stood a pace from Oudemia; here she had gone back to her end of the table, with three empty chairs between her and anyone.

Chiara chose the chair nearest Oudemia’s end and arranged her skirts before she sat, and Magda took the one beside her with the loaf still under her arm. Selene drew the next chair aside and settled her coils on the stone where it had been, and Nebet-Hedj sat beyond her with both hands flat on the table. Adrien went around to the other side with the twins, who lowered themselves onto a chair and sat carefully, the long pale wedding dress catching under them. He took the one beside it, the chair that faced the doorway. It was an old habit, and tonight he let himself have it.

Then he looked down the table, because he had decided that morning that he would look, and he might as well begin here. Drosia sat at one end, alone by three chairs, with her plate already full. Oudemia sat at the other, on the floor below a whole bench that nobody had offered her and that she wouldn’t have taken if they had. The rest of them sat between the two, and neither end looked at the other.

Magda hadn’t stayed seated for long. She went straight to the buffet, set the loaf down long enough to take up two plates, and came back and put the first in front of Adrien without a word—beans in oil, a heel of bread, olives, a spoonful of something green. The second she set in front of the twins, exactly in the middle of the space before them, as though she had measured it with a rule, and then she went back for a third. That one she carried to the end of the table and bent to set on the stone beside Oudemia’s knee. Oudemia looked at it for some time before she took a fig from it. Magda straightened, broke what was left of the loaf into the bread basket, set the basket in the middle of the table, and only then sat down again, with her hands folded on the wood where they could be seen to be steady.

Selene had found the water. She poured two cups for the twins. Summer said “Thanks” under her breath, and the twins bowed their heads together for the space of a breath before either of them touched the food. Across from them Selene broke a corner from her bread and laid it at the rim of her plate, apart from the rest, and left it there.

For a little while nobody said anything. Forks moved against the plates, and somewhere behind the buffet a golem set down a stack of bowls without a sound. Nebet-Hedj dipped her fingertips in her cup and touched them to her eyelids, below the smudged kohl, first one and then the other. Summer ate three mouthfuls fast, without looking up, then put her fork down and looked at the doorway, and then at Adrien.

“Okay,” Summer said. “It’s later. We’re at the table.” Her left hand found the edge of the plate and held it. “What was that? With her face. When she came out.”

Every head at the table turned toward him, Drosia’s included, at the far end. Chiara set down her knife. Adrien turned his cup a quarter turn on the wood. He found that he wanted to give them something larger than he had.

“I don’t know what she saw,” he said. “I saw her face too. Whatever it was, she was afraid of it. Or she was grieving it.” He looked at Summer and kept looking at her. “And I don’t think she’s going to tell us.”

Summer held his eyes a moment longer. Then she nodded, once, and picked up the fork again.

“That’s still something,” Autumn said. Her voice was low and level. “She doesn’t get afraid.”

“No,” Chiara said. “She does not.” Her eyes had not left Adrien. (You saw more than that. I will wait, but I am counting.) “Then I will ask what can be answered. Where did she take you? And why the four of you, and not the rest of us?”

It was Autumn who answered. “A wedding,” she said. “In another season of the game.” She moved her cup an inch with her right hand and left it there. “She said each guest was selected for a reason. She didn’t say what the reason was. I asked.”

“A reason, and nobody to tell it to.” Chiara tilted her head. “She keeps a closed ledger, our Host.” (Four names chosen and mine not among them. I want to know what she weighed.)

Magda had taken a piece of bread from the basket and was tearing it into smaller and smaller pieces without eating any of them. “Who was at this wedding?” she said. “Besides yourselves.”

Summer let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “Everybody. I mean, a lot of people. There was a woman with butterfly wings, and two women with dragon wings, multiple naked women, multiple women with animal ears and tails, a dragon man, a green woman, three lilac women, a handsome young half-naked man, one blue woman… It was like I always imagined Comic-Con to be.” She grinned, remembering. “We had a lovely breakfast, and for once no one looked at us. Then they took us to a spa, and then we had lunch. There were activities in honor of all the brides—”

“Brides?” Magda asked, raising an eyebrow. “Plural?”

“Yep! Seven of them,” Summer said, with Autumn nodding next to her. “The contestants in that season are fifteen or sixteen, I’m not sure.”

“Sixteen,” Autumn said quietly.

“Right. Two of the brides apparently can’t wear clothes, only one was covered by her hair, and the other one was green. One bride has six arms. One bride has three bodies. One is a catgirl. One has fox tails and ears. It was wild. And there was a bonfire.” She shifted on the chair, and the open seam at their hip shifted with her. “We were at the edge of it, making s’mores, which is—you put a marshmallow on a stick and burn it, and then you squash it with chocolate between two crackers. It’s a camping thing. And this woman sits down next to us, lilac skin, white hair, totally unbothered, and she introduces herself as Summer. Summer Copse-Wood. Sixth in line for a throne. Like that’s a normal thing to say at a fire.”

“Sixth,” Magda said.

“Sixth. And then her twin brother shows up, and his name is Winter. Which, come on.” Summer’s hand left the plate and turned palm up on the wood. “So now there are two Summers, one Autumn and one Winter at one fire, and we kind of hit it off, over the name, mostly.”

“She talks louder than she watches,” Autumn said. “Summer Copse-Wood. I told her so.”

“She liked it,” Summer said. “She actually liked it. Okay, and then the next day, in the morning, the wedding morning—” She stopped. Her fork had come to rest against the rim of the plate.

“The garden,” Autumn said.

“The garden.” Summer picked it up again, faster. “There was a garden with a fountain, and we met these people, the Martins, Shannon and Anthony, I think they were relatives of one of the brides, and a woman named Katherine, who was mute and naked, and Katherine had to pick the wedding flowers, and she couldn’t. So we helped, which mostly means we argued, me on one side and Autumn on the other, obviously, and then this woman Hana found us and broke the tie. Plumeria.”

“In Venice the families quarrel over the dowry,” Chiara said. “The flowers they leave to the bride.” Her hand had come up toward her chin and stopped halfway. (A garden, and a fountain, and flowers to choose. I would like to stand in it once.)

At the far end of the table Drosia set her fork down on her plate and didn’t pick it up again. She turned her head toward the twins and kept it there, and Adrien saw that she was watching their mouths, which had been going a little faster with every story, with the look of an officer who has heard recruits talk too quickly before a march and knows what it means.

“Oh,” Summer said, “and Oudemia painted.” She leaned so that she could see past the end of the bench to the floor. “There was this art thing, everybody painting at once, and she didn’t use a brush. Just her hands. She put her palms in the paint and pressed them on the canvases, and one of them was this woman Liesa’s seascape, it was half done, and she put her handprints right across it. And Liesa just—let them stay.”

On the floor at the end of the table, Oudemia drew one palm slowly across the other, and then the other across the first, in slow, even strokes. There was nothing on her hands. It was the same order she had kept on the floor of the Athenaeum, unhurried, and her eyes stayed on her hands while she did it.

Nebet-Hedj had sat still through all of it, her hands on the table. Now she turned in her chair toward the wall and the woman sitting against it.

“Oudemia,” she said. “Was anyone kind to you there?”

Oudemia’s hands paused, one palm resting on the other. “Someone stood between me and the lawn,” she said. “My friend.” She paused. “I do not know her name.”

Nebet-Hedj looked at her for a long moment. Then she pressed her fingertips once to her own breastbone, above the beaded collar of her dress. Oudemia’s hands lay still in her lap now, and after a while she reached for another fig from the plate beside her knee.

Chiara let the quiet sit for exactly as long as courtesy required. Then she turned in her chair, away from the wall and the woman on the floor, and folded her hands on the table in front of her.

“And you, Andrea,” she said. “They have told us their side of the wedding. What happened on yours?” (Everyone has given something but him. I want to see what he chooses to give.)

Adrien had been waiting for it, and he had already chosen: not the story that mattered, but the one that would let the table laugh.

“There was a roast,” he said. “The day before the wedding. It’s a custom where the groom’s friends stand up one after another and insult him in public, affectionately, with a drink in their hand.” He tore the heel of his bread in two. “The groom is called Andy. I was asked to give a toast, so I did. I said it was remarkable that Andy had managed to keep a whole harem’s promises at once, and that a man out of history had once tried something similar, with considerably fewer women and rather less success.”

Summer snorted into her water. Autumn’s mouth moved at one corner and was still again.

“That is a compliment with a blade in it, Herr Rosenkreutz,” Magda said. She had stopped tearing the bread. “Did he thank you for it?”

“He laughed. So did most of the room.” Adrien considered. “The rest of them were drinking.”

“They insult him at his own table,” Nebet-Hedj said, “and he laughs?” She had turned from the wall to listen, and there was a little color in her face now. “In Sebennytos, a man cursed at his own feast would have sent for the priest before the wine was poured.”

“It isn’t cursing,” Adrien said. “It’s nearer the opposite. They insult him because they love him and would rather not say so out loud.” He thought about it. “A great many people love him.”

Nebet-Hedj considered that with her head a little on one side. “Then it is a strange custom,” she said, “but not a cruel one.”

“And the man out of history?” Chiara said. “Who was he?” Her eyes stayed on his face, level and patient. (He has picked the smallest thing in his pocket to show us. I want the rest of what he is keeping.)

“It was a joke for a roast,” Adrien said. “It doesn’t need a name.” He held her look long enough that she would know he had heard both of the things she had asked him, and then he went on before she could ask either of them again.

“The morning of the first day, there was a contest,” he said. “Teams drawn from different seasons, all over an island, with a lock at the end of it that wanted a combination. A man called Van came and asked me for it.” He shrugged. “I gave it to him. His team won.”

“You gave a victory to a stranger,” Chiara said, “because he asked you for it.” (He gives to anyone who asks. I will remember that I have not yet asked him.)

“He asked politely,” Adrien said. “And my team was otherwise stuck.”

Summer laughed outright at that, a short, surprised sound, and put her hand over her mouth, and at the far end of the table Drosia’s head came around toward him again, slowly, as if on a stiff hinge, and stayed a moment before it went back to the twins.

Adrien ate a little, because the plate was in front of him and Magda would notice if he didn’t. The beans were good, better than they had any right to be in a hall run by golems, and the oil was green and sharp at the back of the throat, and for a few mouthfuls he let himself have nothing to do but that. He finished the heel of bread and laid the fork down, and then he looked across the table at Magda, who had gathered the pieces of her bread into a small neat heap and was squaring its edges with one finger.

“What did you do,” he said to her, “the five of you, while we were gone?”

Magda kept her eyes on the bread. “We waited,” she said. “It was dull.”

She reached for the jug, found it nearly empty, and poured what was left of it into his cup, all of it, until the water stood at the brim and she had to stop. Then she set the jug down very precisely beside her plate.

Adrien nodded. He lifted the cup, carefully, so that none of it spilled, and drank.

Across from him Selene had put down her bread. She lifted one hand and cupped it before her chest, closed the thumb against two fingers and opened them again in a small flicker, a flame catching. Then she laid her forefinger on the table and drew three short lines in the film of oil there, three roads meeting in a point, and looked at him to see whether he had it.

He thought he did. On her night she had shown him with her hands what she did there every day, the lamps to fill and the herbs to tend and the basin to clear of leaves, and he had not forgotten any of it. A lamp, then. And the shrine behind her silver door, where three roads met in the tiles just inside the threshold.

“The lamp needed holding,” Magda said. Her eyes were still on the bread.

Chiara turned her head and looked at Magda for a long moment, and then at Selene, with her hands folded very still on the wood. (They have lit something for him, and I have only walked the corridors telling people where he went. What would he think of that, I wonder?)

Adrien set the cup down. He looked at Selene first, at the three lines already fading, and he inclined his head to her, the small nod he gave her when no one else at a table would see it for anything. Then he looked at Magda, who still hadn’t raised her eyes. “I’m glad someone held it,” he said.

Magda’s chin lifted a fraction. Her ears had gone pink. “It was a small lamp,” she said, and squared the heap of bread again, though it was already square.

“The woman who keeps my days planted cuttings,” Nebet-Hedj said. She was looking at her own hands on the table, at the soil still dark under two of the nails. “Chiara came to the Garden and told her where you had gone, and she thanked her, and finished the row.” Her mouth tightened and let go. “I would not have finished it.”

Adrien looked at her hands, and then at her face, and didn’t try to answer that. He nodded to her as he had nodded to Selene, and she let out a breath and nodded back. Beside him Summer had begun watching the doorway again, and then Autumn, and Adrien saw them come to it together, with no word passed between them that he could hear. The bell was perhaps half an hour off, and tonight was theirs.

“We should go,” Summer said, low, to her sister. “We need—I don’t know. Clothes. Something that isn’t this.”

“Yes,” Autumn said. She looked past Summer at Adrien. “We’ll be at the door when the bell goes.”

It wasn’t a question, and he gave it the answer a statement wanted. “I’ll be there,” he said.

They stood, and the chair scraped back under them in one motion. As they rose Autumn’s right hand closed on the last two pieces of bread in the basket and took them with her, and Summer let her. They went down the length of the table, past the empty chairs, to the far end where Drosia sat with her fork laid on her plate. Drosia looked up at them and waited.

“Hey,” Summer said. “Could we borrow you? We’re going to the Garment Alcove before the bell, and you’ve—” She stopped and started again. “You’re the last one who went through that door before us. And you taught us stuff. You can totally say no.”

Drosia looked at her for a while, and at Autumn, and then down at the seam that had opened at their hip and the pale cloth hanging wrong around it. “Fine,” she said. “Walk, then. The bell won’t wait for you.”

She pushed back her chair and stood, and the three of them went out of the Refectory together, the twins first and Drosia a pace behind them on the side where Autumn’s hand was, without looking back at the table. Selene turned on the stone to watch them go, and went on watching the doorway after it was empty. Their footsteps went out into the corridor and thinned and were gone, and the hall settled behind them into the small sounds of bowls and cloth and the golems at the buffet.

The quiet the three of them left behind them was still in the hall, and Adrien was still looking at the doorway, when Amabilis came into it.

She didn’t come through it. She stood in it, in the middle of the frame, in the two-toned gown, with her hands folded at her waist and so still that the doorway might have been cut to her measure, and her face was the face he knew again, smooth and attentive, the ruling back in it. If anything of the threshold in the Athenaeum was left on her, it was this—she had stopped one step short of the Refectory’s floor, and she didn’t take the step.

At the bar the golem had stopped folding its cloth. Nebet-Hedj’s hands went flat on the wood. Selene lowered her eyes and raised them again. Magda’s right hand went to the belt of her coat and closed on it. On the floor at the end of the table Oudemia took another fig and kept her eyes on it.

Chiara rose. She smoothed her skirts once with both hands, and crossed the floor to the doorway at a pace that was neither quick nor slow, and stopped before the Host at the distance a woman of her standing kept from a woman of higher standing, and inclined her head.

“Signora,” she said. “Why those four, and not the rest of—” (I want to be one of the four.)

Amabilis was not looking at her. She was looking past her, down the length of the hall, to him.

“Adrien Moore,” she said.

---

Chiara’s sentence stopped where it was. She didn’t finish it and she didn’t take it back; she stood with it in the doorway, her chin a little raised, while the Host looked past her and down the hall as though there were no one standing between them. (She looks through me as if I were glass. I have not finished asking.)

Adrien pushed back his chair and stood. Behind him the room turned with him, Nebet-Hedj in her chair, Magda with her hand still at her belt, Selene lifting herself on her coils to see over the table. Only Oudemia went on with her fig and didn’t raise her eyes. He walked the length of the hall between the long tables, past the buffet and the golem with its cloth, and it took longer than a hall that size had any reason to take.

“Amabilis,” he said.

“Catalyst.” Amabilis kept her hands folded at her waist. “Tonight is the night of Summer and Autumn Weaver. You are expected in the Axis Mundi before the bell.”

“I know,” Adrien said. “I was going.”

Chiara stepped aside to let him pass, a half pace, so formal that it could have been a bow. Her eyes went to his face and held there as he went by, and her hand came up to her chin and stopped. (He is going with her again. Every time I come to the end of a question, he is going.)

Amabilis turned without another word, and he went out of the Refectory beside her, into the corridor that led back to the Athenaeum. Behind them nobody followed. The sound of the hall went small at their backs and then went out, and there was only the corridor, warm stone and even light, and the two of them walking in step. She kept half a pace ahead of him, her gown making no more sound on the stone than her feet did, and he watched the straight line of her shoulders and the back of her head and couldn’t have said, from either, that anything had happened to her tonight at all.

The Athenaeum had begun to be put away for the night. The crystal dome had gone from gold to the deep red of the evening and was darker every minute, and under it the golems were at work along the long tables, three of them, black obsidian faces bent to the boards, gathering up the bread and the fruit that had been laid out all afternoon and that nobody had touched. One stacked plates. One lifted the carafes one at a time and carried them away, holding each upright as if it were still full. The third was folding a cloth over a basket of figs with a care that would have looked like tenderness on anything with a face that moved. On the far wall the standing went on with its rings and its colored points, recording whatever it recorded, and none of the golems looked at it, or at him.

He counted the evenings as they crossed the floor, because they were few enough to count. On the first, Amabilis had told him to remain in the Axis until the morning, and he had. On each of the three nights since, he had cooked in his own kitchen for the woman whose night it was, Selene and then Nebet-Hedj and then Drosia, the last of whom hadn’t let him feed her. He had sat at their breakfast once, and carried soup to their table once. Tonight was the first time he had sat down to dinner with the women at their own table, and the Host had come for him with a quarter of an hour left before the bell.

It might have been nothing. A bell was a bell, and the first evening had been an evening when everything was new and someone had to tell him where to sleep. But he had spent a long life noticing when things were arranged, and he found he didn’t like what he was noticing.

“Amabilis,” he said. “Why do your arrangements never put me at dinner with them?”

She didn’t slow. “The Refectory is open to you at every hour,” she said. “The bell sounds one hour after sunset.”

Both of those things were true, and between them they explained nothing at all, which he supposed was the point, or wasn’t, and he couldn’t tell which. “That’s an answer to a different question,” he said.

Amabilis kept her pace toward the mezzanine stair and gave him nothing else. He hadn’t really expected anything else, and he walked beside her and let it go.

They climbed to the mezzanine. The long window there looked out over the caldera, and the red light lay in it like wine in a glass. Far below it the glass of the Axis Path ran out across the dark to the stone column of the Axis Mundi, and there was no one on it yet. At the head of the corridor to the Axis Staircase the golem stood where he had seen one stand before, unmoving, its black obsidian face and its flat amethyst eyes set toward the stair as if it had been placed there to keep the door and had never been told it could stop.

He looked at it as they passed, and it brought Mildred back to him whole.

She had sat beside him on a bench in a garden at the bachelor-party lunch, in the other season, and told him without being asked what she had been. The passenger, she had called it. She knew how his season ended. She was forbidden to tell him, she said, so that he would choose freely. She remembered Amabilis; she had mentioned that too, in passing, and that she didn’t expect to go home.

The golem didn’t turn its head. Its eyes were flat and violet and gave back the red window, and nothing else. He couldn’t have said whether anyone was behind them now.

Amabilis led him along the corridor beyond the mezzanine, where a faint line of light ran along the floor and showed the way to the Axis Staircase, and at the door at the end of it she opened the way and stood aside for him, and then followed. The stair went down in its wide, steep turns, the walls polished so smooth that his own shape went down beside him in them, and hers. The air cooled as they went. Their two shapes went down in the onyx turn after turn, dark against dark, hers always a little ahead of his. He kept his right hand on the wall as he walked, not because he needed it, but because the stone was there and it was something to hold.

On the third turn he thought of Andy.

The breakfast at the bachelor party, and the man he had once met in a library a very long time ago and hadn’t expected to see again. Andy had worked it out on his own—that the Host of Adrien’s season was an earlier persona of Arabella, the Host of Andy’s own. He had said so across the table, plainly, and Adrien had heard himself answer that it was probably so. He hadn’t had to think about it for long.

She was beside him now, on the stair, with her hands folded at her waist.

He went down another turn with that, and with the face she had worn on the threshold of the corridor less than an hour ago, the ruling gone out of it, as she looked back over her shoulder into the light she had just left. If she would become Arabella, then her end was already written somewhere, in a world that ran at another speed. And Mildred knew how his own season ended. So what was it for? What was any of this for, the bells and the nights and the women at their table, if the woman running it was already on her way to being someone else, and the one passenger who had seen the ending had been sent to sit beside him on a bench and say that she could not tell him?

He couldn’t ask her any of that, and he knew it before he had finished thinking it. There was one thing he could ask, a smaller one, and he asked it.

“What will this season change for you?”

Amabilis took two more steps before she answered. Her face, in the polished wall, didn’t change.

“From where I stand,” she said, “nothing about it is decided yet.”

He looked at her reflection, and then at her, and couldn’t tell whether he had been given the truth or only the part of it that faced him. Perhaps, from where she stood, those were the same thing.

“Then that makes two of us,” he said.

She didn’t answer that. They went down the rest of the way in silence.

Where the steps stopped, the glass of the Axis Path began, and Amabilis stopped with them. She didn’t step onto it. She stood on the last of the stone with her hands folded and the cool air coming up past her from the caldera, and waited for him to go on without her.

On the first evening she had come with him across the glass to the door of the Axis Mundi and opened it for him. Tonight she had come as far as the stone, and no farther, and he let her keep the reason. Adrien stood a moment longer than he needed to. He did not say goodbye; it was not a word he gave people, and he was not going to start on a staircase.

“We’ll speak again,” he said.

“We will, Catalyst.”

She turned and went back up the stair, and he listened to her steps go up and around the first turn and grow faint, until the stone had them and there was nothing to hear but the low sound that came up from below the glass.

He walked out onto the Axis Path alone.

The glass took his weight and gave under it a little, a flex so slight that he felt it in the backs of his knees more than in his feet. Under it, far down, the magma moved in its slow, heavy folds, and the cold came up through the glass in spite of it, into his shoes and his ankles, the kind of cold that seemed to belong to the glass and not to anything under it. At the far end the door of the Axis Mundi stood shut and square in its frame of rock, and as he walked he began to make out the mark cut into its brushed metal—the circle, and the cross drawn through it, set to fix a place in memory.

He passed the midpoint, where the Path bowed a little over the caldera and the rail curved with it. Beyond it, a golem came along the glass toward him, going back toward the stair. It moved without hurry and without a sound, and when it was a few paces off it folded itself aside against the rail to let him pass, its black obsidian face turned ahead, its flat amethyst eyes fixed on nothing he could see.

Adrien slowed as he came level with it. He didn’t stop. He looked at the smooth dark face, at the eyes that gave back the glow from below and nothing else, and he thought of Mildred behind a face like that, for however long it had been, seeing all of it and saying none of it.

Then he walked on toward the door. The bell was still minutes away, and behind him the golem unfolded itself from the rail and went on toward the stair without a sound.

---

The Concourse was as empty as a mall after closing, and about as cheerful. Summer had thought that the first time she saw it, and she thought it again now, walking it with Autumn’s right hand closed around the two pieces of bread she had taken from the table and Drosia a pace behind them and to the right, which was where Drosia walked in the Palaestra when she was watching their feet. The brass lines in the floor went by under them one after another, marking off stalls that weren’t really stalls, and the light came down even and white from the rock overhead and made everyone look like a suspect.

The Garment Alcove stood open to the hall. There were no walls to it, only tall dark frames set upright in rows, and on simple forms between them the clothes hung waiting, nothing on a mannequin, nothing with a face. The light was warmer in here, low and yellow from fixtures near the floor, and it was kinder to the cloth than to anybody who would end up wearing it. Off to one side the fitting niches stood half open to the room, shallow enough that anyone standing in the Concourse could have watched you change. Summer looked for a mirror out of habit and didn’t find one. There wasn’t one, there had never been one, and she didn’t know why she kept checking.

Drosia stopped in the open front with her arms folded and went no farther, not like someone who had come shopping, but like someone who had been posted there.

The golem stood among the frames, which as far as Summer could tell was where it always stood when you came in, whichever way you came. She and Autumn walked to it together, and on the way Autumn ate the last of the bread without hurrying, and brushed the crumbs from her fingers into her palm and ate those too. Up close the golem’s black face was very smooth, and its violet eyes had the lamplight in them and nothing behind it that Summer could find.

“Hi,” Summer said. She heard her own voice go polite and bright. Bank voice. “Um. Which section is for tonight?”

The golem raised one arm and pointed. The arm went past the daily clothes and past the ceremonial ones and stopped, with total certainty, at the section at the back, where the forms held almost nothing at all.

“Wow,” Summer said. “Okay. Straight there. No small talk.”

Autumn’s mouth moved at one corner, which on any other day would have been a laugh.

Drosia came in off the line then. She crossed past the golem without looking at it and went to the section nearest the niches, where the garments hung heavier and darker and had more buckles than anything at a wedding had any business having, and she lifted one from its form. It was a heavy coat, close-woven and gray-brown—cut to go over the shoulders and down to the hip. She took one of its seams between her two fists and pulled it taut, hard, and held it, and the seam held.

“Protection first,” she said. “Then you choose.”

“Sure,” Summer said. “Love that. Good luck with the seams, though. Ours explode. Like, on a schedule.”

Drosia held the garment out at arm’s length toward them, as if the joke had been something said in another room, and kept it there, and kept it there, until Autumn reached across with her right hand and took it. Autumn turned it over once and ran the back of her hand down the weave before she trusted it, the same test she gave a door or a bench or a bath.

“It’s heavy,” Autumn said. “Good.”

Summer let out a breath, and they turned together to the back section, because somebody had to. The hangers there held silk mostly, and something sheer that would have lasted on their body about as long as a soap bubble. She took the nearest piece with her left hand, something pale and soft with straps, and lifted it off its hanger, and stopped with it half raised.

Drosia was standing right there. Drosia had gone down those stairs and across that glass and through that door, the last one before them, and come back out of it in the morning, and Summer was standing in front of her holding up a nightgown.

She brought it down against her own shoulder and held it there.

“So, this is really unfair,” Summer said. “Asking you anything about the door. About him. I know it is. You can say no. Like, you can totally just say no, and we’ll pick something with sleeves and go.” She swallowed. “But what should we expect? In there.”

Drosia looked at her, and then at Autumn. Her eyes were red at the rims. She looked like someone who had been woken in the middle of the afternoon and hadn’t forgiven the afternoon for it yet.

“Ask,” Drosia said. “If I won’t answer, I’ll say so.”

She held up one hand with the fingers folded down, and put up the first.

“He keeps what you say to him before the door,” she said. “Every word of it. What you tell him you don’t want him to do, he doesn’t do.”

“Okay,” Autumn said quietly. Her right hand had tightened on the heavy garment. “That’s the important one.”

Drosia put up the second finger. “After the two bells, the door stays shut until morning. You can’t open it. Nobody can.” Her voice stayed exactly where it was. “I stood at it about three hundred breaths before it gave.”

Summer felt that one go into her stomach and sit there. “Three hundred,” she said. “That’s—okay. That’s like five minutes, standing at a door. Got it.” She had no idea what to do with it, so she nodded at it, several times, as if it were a price someone had quoted her.

The third finger came up. “He cooks,” Drosia said. “The food is real.”

“Oh, thank God,” Summer said, before she could stop herself. “I mean—not, like, symbolic food? Alchemical bread? Just food?”

“Food,” Drosia said.

“Great. Honestly, after today it can’t get worse than—” She stopped, and reached out with her left hand, and knocked twice on the nearest frame with her knuckles, because you didn’t say that out loud without paying for it. The frame was wood, or near enough. “That’s the best thing anybody’s told us all day. We can do food.”

Drosia watched the knock. One eyebrow went up a fraction and came down again.

Autumn was quiet for a little longer than the joke deserved. Then Summer saw Autumn’s right hand close on the heavy garment, hard, the knuckles going tight. Summer knew that grip.

“The next one,” Autumn said, “is the one you’ve got the most right to refuse.” She looked straight at Drosia. “What was your night like?”

Drosia’s face didn’t move. Nothing about her moved. “No,” she said. “That night is mine.”

“Okay,” Autumn said. “That’s fair.” Her hand eased on the garment slowly, one finger at a time. “Sorry.”

Drosia looked away from them, at the frames, at the forms with the clothes on them, at nothing in particular. Then she looked back. “Say your terms at the door,” she said. “Before anything. Before he takes your coat or gives you a cup. Mine were—” She had started counting again, on the same hand. “First. Nothing romantic. Not one—”

She stopped. The hand stayed up in the air with one finger raised, and then she closed it.

“Those were mine,” she said.

“Could we borrow—” Summer started, the joke already halfway out, could we borrow yours, they sound great, and then she saw Drosia’s face and the joke ran out of road and stopped, and she let it.

“Make your own,” Drosia said. “And say them first.”

The Alcove was very quiet. Out in the Concourse nobody went by. The golem stood where it stood, and the clothes hung on their forms, and Summer found that her left hand had come down without her deciding it and was holding the pale thing against her thigh like a dish towel.

She thought about home. About the old rule, the one they hadn’t needed in three years, where if Autumn said the word, pyrite, Summer got them out of whatever booth or bar or front porch they were on, politely, with some story about an early shift in the morning. This was that, sort of. Except there was no booth and no early shift, and nobody was going to be driving them home after.

“Okay,” Summer said. “Okay. Here’s one.” She looked at Autumn and Autumn looked back. “If either of us says stop, he stops. Right then. On the word. And it counts, it’s final, no matter which of us said it. He doesn’t get to check with the other one first.”

Drosia looked from one face to the other. “Good,” she said. “He’ll keep it.” Then, because she couldn’t seem to help it: “Say it standing. Both of you looking at him. You sit down after he agrees, not before.”

“Standing,” Summer said. “Okay. Yes, ma’am.” Drosia gave her a look, and Summer decided not to say ma’am again.

Autumn shifted the garment over her arm. “I have a second one,” she said. “It’s a suggestion. Not a rule.” She set the word suggestion down carefully, as though she were holding it up to the light first. “Before anything else, he tells us why we’re here. Why us. Or he tells us he doesn’t have an answer. One or the other. Out loud.”

Summer’s stomach turned over again, differently this time. The last time she had asked him anything close to that, in the Athenaeum, the answer had been that he didn’t know. Summer wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it twice in one day

Drosia was quiet for a moment. “That one’s yours to argue,” she said. “Not mine.”

“We can settle that one on the way,” Summer said, fast. “The second one. On the way down. We’ve got stairs.”

“The bell can’t be far off,” Autumn said.

The golem moved. Summer hadn’t seen it decide anything; it simply came out from among the frames and held out its hands, and after a second Summer understood and gave it the pale thing, and Autumn gave it the heavy one. It folded them both on its forearm, quick and flat and exact, the soft one inside the hard one, and held the bundle out to Autumn’s side. Autumn took it in her right arm and held it against them, and the pale strap that had worked loose from the fold lay across their wrist.

They turned to Drosia. Summer wanted to say a whole paragraph and had about four words. “Thank you,” she said. “Really. For coming. For—all of it.”

Drosia looked at her like she’d said something faintly embarrassing in church. “Eat whatever he sets down,” Drosia said. “All of it.” And she jerked her chin at the open front and the Concourse beyond it, the same jerk of the chin that ended a drill.

They went. On the way out Summer lifted two fingers of her left hand to the golem, the way you did to a truck you passed on a back road, and the golem’s violet eyes went with them as far as the line and no farther. They went out past the brass line and into the even white light together, one step and then the next, and the Concourse took them back. At the turn toward the Athenaeum Summer looked back over their shoulder, because she always looked back, and Drosia was still standing among the frames with her arms folded, beside the golem, the two of them keeping watch over the clothes.

Then the turn took her out of sight, and it was just the two of them, and the bundle, and the long way down.

---

Seven turns from the top, by Autumn’s count, and the walls still giving their faces back to them.

The Axis Staircase went down in wide, steep turns along the curve of the volcano, the steps worn smooth in the middle where every foot that had ever come this way had come, and the onyx on either side was polished so far past any use that their two faces went down beside them, a little warped, turn after turn. Autumn watched hers go by and didn’t like it. She watched Summer’s, which was easier. Summer’s left hand slid down the rail ahead of them, a hand’s width at a time, and Autumn’s right arm held the bundle the golem had folded against their side, and between the two of them they kept the body upright and moving without discussing it.

Eight.

“We could tell him about the lagoon,” Summer said. “Tonight. If there’s a—if we need something to say. The splash, and Oudemia, and how she just sat there, and then how she nodded at the end. That’s ours. He wasn’t there.” She glanced sideways, which in their case meant she glanced at Autumn’s cheek. “He’d want to know that one. I think.”

Autumn thought about it for a turn. The lagoon was theirs, and it was a good thing to give someone, and it cost nothing that wasn’t already theirs to spend.

“Okay,” Autumn said. “The lagoon. But the guest list waits. We keep that for later.”

She left it there. By the guest list she meant every person at that wedding who had been in a book before they had been in a garden, and whatever Adrien knew about them from reading those books, that they hadn’t told him themselves. She didn’t say it. “For later,” Summer said. “Sure. Okay.” She was quiet for a step. “You mean the—”

“Later,” Autumn said.

“Later.” Summer’s hand slid another width down the rail. “God, you’re fun.”

“I’m a delight,” Autumn said, and went on counting.

Nine, and ten, and the air was cooler with every turn, as if the stair were taking them down into a cellar and not into the middle of a volcano. Autumn was always cold, and on these stairs she felt it start in the back of her right arm and settle in.

Lower on the stairs Summer let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “You know what’s insane?” she said. “Today I got sent to a wedding as a guest, and I came home to a second date. Same day. Who does that?”

“It isn’t a date,” Autumn said.

“It’s literally called date night.”

“I know what it’s called.” Autumn shifted the bundle against their side. She had been turning it over since the Alcove, and on the stairs it had come down to one thing, small enough to carry. “I want one thing out of tonight. One. I want to ask him a question to his face. Not across a table. Not with anyone else in the room. To his face, where I can see it when he answers.”

Summer took two steps to get to her answer. Then she said, “Okay. And I’ve got ours. The term.” Her voice went careful, a reading-aloud voice, for something she meant to keep. “Either of us can say stop. And he stops. And he takes the word from whichever of us says it. He doesn’t get to ask the other one.”

“Either mouth,” Autumn said. “Final. Yes.”

Eleven, and the last turn, and the stone ran out.

The steps ended on glass. There was no door, no landing, nothing to mark it but the change underfoot, and then they were standing at the end of the Axis Path with the whole caldera opening out under them. Far below, the magma turned over on itself, sluggish and bright, and the glass glowed faintly with it from beneath. The cold came up through it anyway, straight into the soles of their feet, colder than the stairs had been, colder than anywhere else she had stood in the Athanor. At the far end of the glass, a long way off, the door of the Axis Mundi stood shut.

Summer reached across with her left hand and took Autumn’s right. Autumn let the bundle ride up under her arm, against their side, to give it to her. Summer’s palm was warm, warmer than it had any reason to be in this cold, and Autumn held on to that.

They started across. Ahead of them the column of the Axis Mundi stood up out of the glow, black against black, much taller from down here than Autumn had pictured it, and the glass ran out to it straight and narrow with nothing on either side but the rail and the drop. Autumn found that she was counting their steps now instead of turns, and made herself stop.

Halfway to the midpoint two golems stood along the rail, one on each side, black faces turned ahead. As the twins came level, the golems folded themselves aside against the glass to let them pass, smoothly, like doors. Autumn lowered her voice without meaning to, and a moment later Summer lowered hers to match.

“He’s kind to us,” Summer said. “Every time. You notice that? Every single time.” Her thumb moved on Autumn’s knuckles. “And it scares me. I don’t know why it scares me. Everybody else here wants something and you can see what it is. He’s just—kind. And I keep waiting for the part where I find out what it’s for.”

Autumn watched the door get no closer.

“The kindness is how he treats us,” she said. “That’s real. I believe that part.” She chose the next words one at a time. “What he knows is a different thing. One isn’t evidence for the other.”

“That’s not as comforting as you think it is.”

“It isn’t meant to be comforting.”

Summer’s grip tightened. It went tight enough that Autumn felt the bones of her own hand shift under it, and she let it, for as long as Summer needed it.

“I think he knows something about Ashcombe Vale,” Autumn said. “And he isn’t telling us.”

Summer let out a long breath, and it went white for an instant in the cold. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. Me too. I just didn’t want to be the one to say it.”

At the midpoint the Path bowed slightly, as if the glass had sagged a little over the caldera and set that way, and the rail bowed with it. They stopped there together, not because either of them decided to, but because the body did. Below the bow, the glow came up brighter.

Autumn took the two answers out and set them side by side. At home she would have laid two records out on the archive table like this, to see whether the dates agreed.

“The first day,” she said. “In the House of Weighing. I told him he looked familiar and asked if he’d been to Ashcombe Vale before. He said, ‘Maybe. A long time ago.’” She kept her eyes on the door. “And in the Athenaeum, when I asked if he knew we were there when he came looking for us, he said, ‘No. I didn’t even know who you were.’”

Summer was quiet. Then, slowly: “So he’d been to the town. Before. Before us. Whatever he knows, it’s about the town. Not about us.”

“That’s what it adds up to,” Autumn said. “It isn’t what he said. He didn’t say any of that. It’s an inference.”

“It’s a pretty good inference.”

“It’s still an inference.” Autumn moved her thumb once against Summer’s palm. “So here’s the question,” she said. “The first thing. Before anything else. We ask him if he’s worked out why Amabilis brought us.”

Summer’s step faltered, and Autumn felt it go through the body and caught it on her own side. “First? Like—first first? Before hello?”

“After hello.”

“Autumn, come on. We walk in there and the very first thing out of our mouths is, so, why are we in your magic volcano? He’s going to—I don’t know. We could ease into it. Eat something. He cooks, apparently.”

“If we eat first, it turns into a favor,” Autumn said. “Something he does for us after dinner, if we’re nice. I don’t want it to be a favor. I want it asked straight, while it’s still a question.” She didn’t loosen her hand. “He promised he’d tell us if he figured it out. So we ask if he has.”

Summer walked three more steps. Then she breathed out.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. But I ask it.”

Autumn turned her head.

“I ask it,” Summer said again. “You’re better at watching. So I ask, and you watch his face. The whole time. You don’t look at me, you don’t look at the food, you watch him. And then you tell me what you saw.”

It was a good plan, and it was the right way around, and Autumn could find nothing in it to correct.

“Okay,” Autumn said. And because it was a thing she meant to keep, she closed her right hand on Summer’s left, once, hard, and then let it ease again to an ordinary hold.

The door was close now. It was square and dark and set flush into the rock of the column, its brushed metal giving back the glow from below, and in it their shape came toward them, blurred: one body and two heads, the pale bundle, the long wedding dress hanging wrong at the hip. Summer looked at it, and Autumn felt her look and then look away. In the middle of the door the mark was cut clean and deep.

They were a few paces from it when the bell began to toll.

It came from somewhere above and behind them, from the whole height of the Athanor at once, one long note and then the next, and it went through the glass and into their feet. Beside her Summer’s breath caught and went on. Summer let go of Autumn’s hand. Autumn felt the warmth leave her palm and the cold come straight in after it, and she didn’t wait for it. She settled the bundle in the crook of her arm and lifted her right hand to knock.

The door swung inward before her knuckles touched it.