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there was no air in it.
    She stepped softly over Bertrada, the maid who shared the room. Bertrada did not even pause in her snoring.
    It was pitch dark in the passage, but Rowan knew her way. The stair caught her before she was ready. She stumbled, then steadied herself, picking her way down, watchful of the creak in the seventh step.
    The door at the bottom was latched but not bolted. She opened it just enough to admit a slender girl-body and slid softly out.
    No guard. There never was on this door. It opened near the midden, which was reeking splendidly in the heat, but after that was the wall and a postern gate and a moonlit corner of the garden.
    The cook’s old dog was sleeping near the gate. It raised its head, eyes gleaming, but did not bark.
    Rowan paused to scratch its mangy ears. It thumped the ground with its tail. “I’ll be back in a little while,” she said. “Keep watch for me.”
    The rest of the way was both lighter and sweeter-scented, going down a short steep slope to a wall that was much older than the other. Old Rome had raised these pale stones and these flat red bricks and carved the capitals on the columns. Old Aachen was inside of them, Aquisgranum of the Romans, dim whispering vaults filled with the lap of water and the stink of sulfur.
    In the daytime the baths were full of people. The Emperor was there as often and as long as he could manage, even holding court in the largest of the pools. That was disconcerting for people who had not been warned, foreigners who could not imagine where to look while the Emperor sat naked in the water, or swam back and forth thinking over their petitions.
    Now there were only echoes, and moonlight slanting through the louvers in the roof, and the glimmer of water in the pool. The first few times Rowan came alone to the baths at night, a long while ago, she had come with beating heart, terrified that someone would catch her.
    But no one ever had. If she was missed, people supposed that she had gone out to the privy, or at most to the garden: and that won her a lecture more than once on the mists and demons of the night. No one ever seemed to suspect the truth.
    In winter it was a shivering, teeth-chattering run through the snow-buried garden, and the bliss of warmth in the hottest pool at the end of it. In summer it was a promise of coolness, a long idle paddle in the coldest pool while the lamp burned down and the moon went its round and she thought her thoughts away from the clatter of the palace.
    She could talk to her mother here, if she was minded. Her mother very likely would not have approved when she was alive; she was the queen, after all, and the queen had appearances to keep up. But now that she was dead, she could come to Rowan as easily in the baths as in the chapel or the garden, and with much less fear of interruption.
    A lamp always burned by the keeper’s bench. Why it burned there, Rowan had never learned. The keeper did not come at night, nor did anyone else.
    Rowan used the lamp to light the one she had brought. It was convenient not to have to fret with flint and steel.
    The wick caught easily in the still air, flared and sank and settled to a steady flame. The room that had been black dark and white moonlight grew an island of pale-gold lamplight.
    â€œMaybe,” Rowan said to her mother, “the lamp is for me: the spirit who comes to bathe in the night.”
    Her mother said nothing. Rowan smiled, walking fearlessly through capering shadows. She had thought that she would swim in the coldest pool, but impulse turned her toward the largest one, the one that was both warm and cool. She set her lamp on one of the benches—she barely needed it here, with the moon shining in—and slipped out of her gown.
    Something moved.
    She froze. Mouse, she thought. Cat, maybe, hunting. There were plenty of both in this place.
    It was a very large cat, then, or a whole tribe of mice. And it walked on two