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wondered, bemused. He wanted to demand why, but the disorientation from the headache made it easier to go along with the master-at-arms for now. And it was pleasant in the evening garden, with the day’s warmth lingering in the bricks and the first moths dancing in the shadows.
    Balisan paced the length of the lilac walk, and then back again, while the twilight deepened and a half-moon glowed yellow above the garden wall. He stopped on the edge of the brick circle and studied the shadows of tree and flower, while Sigismund shifted from foot to foot beside him and wondered what the master-at-arms found so fascinating about this place. It was just a garden, after all, where Sigismund had run and played a hundred times. He could hear frogs calling from the pond, and soon the crickets would start their nighttime chorus.
    He straightened, determined to ask what they were doing here, but at the same moment Balisan turned his head. There was a glimpse of white further down the walk and a flutter of movement, soft as the beat of a moth’s wing. Sigismund stared, and thought the white might be the sweep of a skirt or a mantle trailing across the bricks, but he couldn’t think of anyone in the castle who would come here at this hour. A moment later, a spray of overhanging green was lifted back and a woman in a white dress stepped out onto the circle of bricks.
    It was the woman from his illness, Sigismund was sure of that, although she seemed younger, with dark curls piled on top of her head and falling in a cascade down her back. There was a pattern of leaves and flowers sprigged lightly across her white skirt, just as in the mosaic, but her expression was grave, her eyes dark as she looked at Balisan. The master-at-arms bowed low, pressing his palms together before his breast.
    “I felt your coming,” she said. Her voice dropped, clear as silver, into the stillness of the dusk. “And you use both eyes to see with. I have dwelt here for close to one hundred years now, but you are the first to suspect my presence.”
    “I see the lines and threads of power,” Balisan replied, “whether hidden in nature or the works of human beings. But I was also looking for you, since you revealed your presence when you cured the prince.”
    The lady turned, a glimmering through the dusk, and smiled at Sigismund. “And you are quite well now, I think?”
    There were no great ladies in the castle, and no other women as beautiful and graceful as this one. Sigismund felt shy and intensely curious at the same time. He bowed, a little clumsily compared with Balisan. “I am,” he said. “Thank you. But who, or what, are you?”
    The lady’s smile had a great deal of sweetness in it, but the gravity returned swiftly. “I am called Syrica,” she said. “I wait and I watch—over those who dwell in this castle and the Wood that is your neighbor. My purpose is to thwart the lady you met on the road.”
    “The Margravine
zu
Malvolin?” Sigismund asked. The name slipped from his tongue as easily as if he had never forgotten it, and this time he remembered her blue eyes smiling at him and the tinkle of her laughter.
    “Yes,” said Syrica. “She is my enemy, as she is yours. She will do you harm, if she can.”
    “She has already tried,” said Balisan. The hum that Sigismund remembered from the dream was back in his voice.
    Syrica looked at him and nodded. “The wards held her out—just. But I did not think she would act so openly. She took me by surprise.”
    “Not only you,” said Balisan. “She has been clever, stirring up trouble in the south and keeping all eyes focused there, on the strife against the King.”
    Sigismund looked from one to the other through the half night. “But who is this Margravine?” he asked them. “What does she want?”
    “She is of the faie, as I am,” Syrica told him. “But she desires power and dominion in this mortal world and has set her heart on the Kingdom of the Wood, since the palace there is