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his eye.
    Timou blinked and looked into the fire, and her father did not, perhaps, realize what she had seen. What she had seen was a word, a name, one that she knew he had not meant to give her. And a little while later, when her father went quietly up the stairs to his room, leaving her by the fire, Timou bent over the heavy book she held and whispered to it, “Lelienne.” And the book opened in her hands, the pages falling gently to one side and the other, with firelight running across its creamy vellum and its glittering illuminations.
    The illuminations surrounded an image, made with silver and powdered opal, of a man with harsh features and stark white hair. Startled and excited, Timou bent forward over the book, tracing the difficult slanted writing with the tip of her finger as she silently sounded out the unfamiliar words. The language was one she did not know. The script seemed harsh to her, the unknown words potent in themselves. She did not try to speak them aloud, but let them whisper to her if they would.
    Deserisien.
That was, she decided, probably the name of the mage pictured in these illuminations. She understood that he was, or had been, a mage. Or something like a mage. He had lived, she gathered, either long ago or far away, or perhaps both, in a brilliant, brutal, extraordinary Kingdom, a Kingdom where Kings were sacrificed as lightly as leaves in the fall, where mages ruled and practiced a strange dark sorcery of making and unmaking—she did not understand clearly all that the pictures showed, or what the inscriptions said. But she understood that the sorcerer Deserisien had gathered about himself a group of men and women almost as powerful as he. And she discovered, with a thin shock that was in an odd way not a shock at all, that one of the sorcerers smiling out of the illuminated pages was a woman who shared her face. She puzzled over the words on that page a long time, finding in it few answers and many questions.
    When Timou finally went up to her own bed, she took the book with her, laying it on a small table by her bedside. But in the morning the book was gone. Timou was startled by the quick resentment she felt; she tried to put it aside. But she did not know why her father had let the book come into her hand if he had not meant for her to open it. She looked for it in the days that followed, but she did not find it. The memory of the white-haired woman who had smiled from its pages troubled her. The smile, she thought, had been like that strange dark Kingdom itself: subtle and cruel and beautiful.
    She did not ask her father about the book, or about the Kingdom it had described. But she wanted to. She wanted to ask him about the woman with a face that mirrored hers. She wanted to ask him whose name he had used to lock the book that held such power and strangeness within its pages. She wanted to shout, to demand answers to the questions she had always held, which had once more changed their shapes in her mind and her heart. It was hard to trust her father’s wisdom and his teaching, though she had seldom doubted either in her life. When her father turned his searching gaze to her, Timou looked away, not allowing him to see the questions that gathered in her eyes. He must have guessed at them. But still she did not ask, nor did her father offer answers.
    When she turned over in her mind the new-changed questions the book had raised, she did so uneasily. Without quite admitting that unease to herself, Timou ceased trying to open her father’s remaining locked volumes and turned her attention back to the quickening life of the spring. She went to Taene’s house and helped Taene grind powders for her father or roll out bread dough for her mother; she helped eat the sweet rolls, too. Taene’s mother, an ample woman with a plain round face that was usually good-humored, welcomed Timou, pressed hot sweet tea on her, and showed the girls how to make a complicated pastry with honey and early mint