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smooth contours with a burin finer than the finest of the hairs it would portray.
    By now it was late at night, but for all his distrust of wearied mind and hands, he laboured on, driven as he had not been since his youth, singing still under his breath, hardly aware of it. It was not easy work, for the glabrous wax was not parchment to be inscribed, nor wood to be chiselled clean. Any mark caused its surface to swell and change; it might flake away where it was too brittle, or ooze where it was soft. Every stroke had to be incised with care and foresight, its shavings minutely cleaned away before the next. Flat lines had to be translated into incised channels or raised ridges, and the tapering of the hairs, the fine fluff at the feather's bases, represented; even the dark stain on the quill he sought to match by subtle texture. It was master's work, and in the mere precision of its detail it was fair. "As if already there is something of her in it," he thought, and was pleased; yet that pleasure only sharpened the spurs of fear. On and on he laboured, till he found the delicate tools slipping between fingers sweating or numbed; many times he managed to avoid damaging the work only at the cost of cuts and punctures, and it was his own blood made them slippery then. When at last some shred of sane caution told him to lay down the thing he held, to get it free of his trembling fingers before he ruined it, he felt almost sick with frustration. Only little by little did reason reassert itself as he hobbled back up towards the palace under skies whose stars were already beginning to pale; he told himself angrily that it was too easy to become obsessed with lonely work like this, easier still to ruin it with impatience. Yet he still could not be sure he would find Kara there awaiting him, that he would not find the chest broken, the cloak gone, and nothing save perhaps a black quill left him as a token. Along high stair and vaulted passage his thoughts haunted him; and though his relief at finding her curled beneath the covers, her hair a dark corona amid the white pillows, was great enough, it barely lasted him into sleep, and fled with waking.
    On the next day he hurried through his duties in the shipyards like a man possessed; that carving haunted him like a persistent irritation, an itch in the mind. Even when he found himself dangling head down from a masthead to free a salt-encrusted block, rather than reeve a whole new set of tackle, he could not stop running over and over the patterns in his mind until they made him dizzy. He swung himself upright on the little platform, and to avoid looking straight down to the deck he glanced out across the harbour, enjoying the cool breeze and the look of the town in late afternoon. Down here, walls were mostly half-timbered and limewashed, or timbers laid clinker-fashion and painted very much like those of his childhood village. Many had been repainted after the ravages of winter, and garlanded with flowers in hanging baskets and window shelves; they looked bright as toys clustered around the feet of the more august buildings of the upper town, in their rich shades of red and yellow stone. But inevitably, somehow, his glance was drawn across the lower rooftops again, towards the dark bulk, itself a little like a louring anvil, that was the hall of his guild; his sight seemed to pierce through those walls and down, down towards those half-formed secrets they held. He cursed; the joy had gone out of the scene for him, the irritation had infected it too. He hated what he was doing, yet it would not let him be. Moodily he lobbed the useless block into a cluster of seagulls bobbing on the harbour waters, and watched them explode upwards, cursing and squalling just as he wanted to. Then he shrugged guiltily. It would not have amused Kara, that; one of them might even have been Kara, if he had not… Very slowly he inched out along the shrouds and slid down with gloved hands. His duty was done