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something or someone I cannot see. She lifts her hand and her mouth makes a word—a name, I know, even though I don’t hear it.
    The glow begins to dim a bit, as the mirror’s hue returns. Later I try to tell myself that the copper shadows confused my Othersight; the shadows, and the beauty of the girl and her dress and her smile. “I never saw anything else,” I think later, or “I saw—but how could I have been expected to truly grasp what I saw? The vision was fading, after all. . . .”
    It is her throat—white and smooth and utterly unremarkable except for the cloudy opal in its hollow. But as my Othersight begins to lose its strength, I see her throat open. It opens side-to-side, the two edges curling outward like lycus blossoms. There is no blood.
    This is what I saw, and then I blinked, and all I saw was the shadow of my own face in the snow-dusted mirror.
    “Nola?” Chenn said.
    I looked up at her. A strand of long black hair had escaped from her headscarf and was looping over her shoulder.
    “What did you see?”
    I was already forgetting. Her eyes made me forget. “It was beautiful,” I said. Her smile wobbled because of my dizziness. The falling snow was the same colour as the beaded dress had been. “You were sitting on a golden throne, wearing a rich, green gown. There was an opal necklace, and maybe some rings. Your hair was all loose and shining. You were smiling at someone, and then you reached for him—I felt it was a ‘him,’ even though I couldn’t see. . . . You were happy,” I said. And that was all. I barely knew her, and yet I needed her to smile at me as she was. I needed her to be happy.
    “Thank you,” she said. “That is a heartening vision.”
    Yigranzi was frowning. “A wolf, a throne—take care, and remember that though neither is fixed in your Pattern, both are possible. Think, girl, and make no decision now. You remember: a seer must use patience in all things.”
    “I am not a seer any more,” Chenn said, with more steadiness this time. She gazed around her—at the tree, the balconies and walls, the heavy grey sky. “I sense the truth of both visions, but the gold is stronger. Take me back to the Lady now, please.”
    The Pattern thickened around us like the snow, and only Yigranzi knew to shiver.
CHAPTER FOUR
    Bardrem used to make lists. Words he thought of but could not yet make into poems; words that he needed to see together, rather than only hearing in his head. Sometimes he left these lists in strange places so that he would stumble upon them later, when the look and sound of them might seem new and surprise him. Rudicol would shout at him, when he found the little folded pieces of paper in seldom-used pots or spaces between the hearthstones. He would tear them into tiny pieces; several times he thrust them into the cookfire; once he threw one into a pot of soup, then scalded his fingers plucking it out again, and shouted until we thought his eyes would spring from his head. For a while after one of these episodes, Bardrem would write the words in or with the food itself. A boiled potato would have “belly” and “ire” carved in it; salted round beans would spell “conquered” and “moon” upon a plate.
    He’d leave me notes, too—in one of my shoes, or underneath the rag carpet, or wedged into a hole in the courtyard tree. I sometimes wouldn’t find the notes for days or even months. He needed to put himself onto little pieces of paper, and he needed to know that someone would find them. It’s beginning to be the same for me now, though my pages are bigger and (at last, this morning) arranged in a neat stack. I write these words for myself, but I think as I do that others might read them, too. Grasni and Sildio at least, and maybe some of my old students, when they’re grown—and oh, what a giddy rush of pride and selflessness and simple, yearning joy I feel, imagining this.
    But for now there is only me.
    Or rather: Chenn, Bardrem and me,