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maestra and, leaning heavily on his cane, made his way across the hall.
    Bee tugged her slippers back on and cast
such
a look at me. “Are you going to help me or hinder me?” she murmured.
    I sighed, knowing I had no choice. Like obedient handmaidens in the old tales, we followed him out through the marble portico into the chill of the inner court, a central garden covered by a glass roof. The courtyard was surrounded on three sides by a two-storied stone building that housed classrooms, workshops, and tutors’ offices. No sun shone through the glass today; flakes of snow powdered the sloped roof. The noise of the hall behind us receded as a waiting servant opened the door to the library wing, and we entered a somewhat less chilly marble corridor. The headmaster took the wide stairs toward the upper floor, slow progress because of his infirmity. Bee’s gaze was fixed on the schoolbook under his arm in the manner of a stoat waiting for the prime instant to steal an egg.
    His office was behind the first set of doors in the upper corridor. The servant, who had paced us up the steps, moved around to open these doors so the headmaster could enter without altering his steady advance. The office was spacious, with one wall of windows facing the rose court, a door into an adjoining chamber, and the rest of the wall space lined with bookcases. Mirrors hung on the back of each door, creating corridors of reflecting vision that revealed most of the chamber before and behind me.
    The chamber was neither oppressively tidy nor unpleasantly messy but rather graced a middle ground between cluttered and neat. A chalkboard had been pushed in front of one bank of bookcases, facing four chairs. The large fireplace had been refitted with a circulating stove whose warmth radiated through the room. His desk had not a scrap of paper on its polished surface while the big table set beneath the windows formed a topographical masterpiece of stacked books, open books, two globes set on pedestals, and several half-unrolled maps with corners weighted down by scarabs carved out of green basalt. A longcase clock faced the table, its glass door revealing the steady motion of pendulum and weights within. Glass-doored bookcases held carefully labeled papyrus scrolls in cubbyholes classified according to chronology and subject matter.
    On a pedestal in one corner was fixed the severed head of the famous poet and legal scholar Bran Cof. A scan of the chamber, as I saw it reflected within the mirrors, showed me a glimmer of magic like a cowl around the poet’s sleeping head but no other sign of magic’s presence. I caught the headmaster watching me in the mirror, though. Could he see chains of magic in mirrors, as I could? It was said that mirrors reflect the binding threads of power that run between this world and the unseen spirit world, but the truth of that statement is a secret hoarded by the sorcerers who have the power to manipulate such chains of power, people like cold mages, fire mages, druas, master poets, and the bards and djeliw. I was not one of them. I could not manipulate or handle the chains of magic except on a purely personal level: I could use them to conceal myself, to hear better, and to see in the dark. And, of course, I could see them in mirrors.
    There was only one thing I remembered my mother saying to me, long, long ago, when I was five years old:
Don’t tell anyone what you can do or see, Cat. Tell no one. Not ever.
    I had obeyed her. I had never told anyone, except Bee, because Bee knew everything about me just as I knew everything about her.
    The headmaster smiled gently at me in the mirror’s normal reflection. I looked away, because it was proper that I look away, being the student and he the elder.
    “The cousins Hassi Barahal,” he observed in his dry voice, “certainly know of my admiration for the Hassi Barahal brothers.”
    Naturally we knew of it, since his admiration paid our tuition.
    “Your father, Beatrice, has