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and breathless, while she was alert and ready.
    It was warm under the cloth. The days had turned from thrilling cold to showing a hint of summer. The townspeople, the merely mundane, had thrown off their winter clothes, but, whatever the weather, the Order wore the same white robes, and that was all anyone ever saw.
    They saw it now as she approached the Witches’ Bridge. Nikoleta didn’t have to break stride, despite the road being busy. It was a centuries’-old concession, letting mundanes use the bridge, but the arrangement stood firm. Everyone had to get out of the way of a hexmaster or suffer the consequences.
    They parted before her, and made Loki’s horns at her behind her back. Even though the bridge was narrow, the mundanes pressed themselves against the parapets and tried not to pitch either themselves or their loads into the swiftly flowing river below.
    They weren’t to know that she wasn’t a hexmaster. They weren’t to know that they never saw a hexmaster, and that it was anonymous novices and adepts that passed among them. The hexmasters stayed in their tower – plotting, researching, writing – unless there was dire need for them. And that was what she wanted for herself. A woman master: there wasn’t even a word for what she wanted to become.
    Her life – her adult life, at least – had been one of control and concentration. She could blank her mind of external stimulus, recall information instantly and perfectly, even slow her own heartbeat by an act of will. Freeing herself from the internal storm was more difficult: that was the difference between being adept at the secret arts and true mastery.
    She used her learning song to calm herself; she sang it under her breath as she went, using the points of the simple, repetitive melody to inform her pace and fill her lungs. It was a song from Byzantium: that and her raw talent were the only two things she’d brought with her from the East.
    “Hoson zês, phainou,” she whispered, “mêden holôs su lupou.”
    It started to work. Not magic, exactly, but close.
    The mundanes continued to move out of her way. Of course they did. Even a bare-faced novice would find their path clear. How much more would they scatter for one fully robed, muttering unintelligible words from under her hood?
    “Pros oligon esti to zên, to telos ho chronos apaitei.” Over and over again. She was so deep in a trance, she was almost blind and deaf. Her feet carried her like tiny automata into the town-beyond-the-wall, and up the shaded trail to the summit of the Goat Mountain.
    Not a real mountain, more of a hill – steep, shrouded in trees – and no goats, either. The high peaks of the Alps that lay to the south dwarfed it, but it was more feared than any razor-sharp pinnacle. The slim tower balanced on its broad back was instantly recognisable by anyone who considered themselves wise.
    She climbed under tall trees all the way to the top. She didn’t know the route, had never before been permitted to approach the White Tower, let alone enter it. Yet it was easy: the slick black shine of the tower’s walls peeked at her through the canopy during her ascent. It was only when she neared the summit, and the trees grew gnarled and wrong, that its size became apparent.
    Her home city had inured her to architecture on a massive scale, but that was in the context of a city, the capital of an empire. The hexmasters had – not built, because that would imply the work of human hands – had raised themselves a spire that scratched at the heavens like a thorn.
    Or so it looked from its base. Smooth black rock, half melted, windows like teardrops. One way in, a doorway, but no door.
    An intruder would have to be completely insane to enter. There were things a sorcerer could do to a thief that were simply indescribable, and despite the fact she’d been summoned there and had express permission to go through the opening in the base of the tower, it was all she could do to prevent