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“When we walked into the wood in the soft spring rain? Just the three of us? I was very small. All the white violets at the stream’s edge seemed like lovely, astonishing bits of treasure. And everything around us a mist of new green. Nemos picked a violet, put it in your hair. But it refused to stay, kept falling down again, and disappearing in the weeds...”

Ysabo’s hand, closing on the door latch, jerked away from it as though it had pricked her. Aveline glanced around at the rattle. A servant came forward swiftly to open the door, bowed Ysabo through. She kept her shoulders back, her pace even, until she turned a corner.

Then she slumped against the wall, blinking, her eyes gritty, swollen with memory.

Nemos, the stranger had said as he came into her world. Nemos Moore.

And then Ridley Dow was gone. Aislinn House had closed over him like water, and he had drowned in nothing.

Again she found the strength to move: nothing else to do. She followed the ritual path of her day as mindlessly as the sun, holding the goblets with Aveline and Maeve in the great hall for the knights, watching the doors close behind them. Opening this window, lighting that candle, locking the door at this end of the house, unlocking the door at that. Lighting the lantern, carrying it into the dark, leaving it on the boat to cast its frail light across the black water.

Someone spoke then, and she nearly reeled into the water with shock.

“Princess Ysabo.”

Ridley Dow was sitting on a ledge of stone, an outgrowth along the cavern wall. She could barely see his face, but she recognized the flash of his lenses.

“I thought—” Her voice had gone somewhere; she could only whisper. “I thought you were dead.”

“No.” He rose, came closer to her, but only as close as the edge of shadow around the light. He spoke very softly. “I’m sorry I startled you. I made myself disappear. I take after my ancestor in that I can learn to do such things. I thought it would be safer for both of us. I’ve been following you.”

“You should not—” Her voice, gaining strength, shook with urgency. “You should not be here, Ridley Dow. This house is no place for you.”

“I know.”

“If anyone sees you—If even the crows see you—You are not part of the ritual. The knights don’t understand anything that is not ritual. They punish it.”

“I understand.” He touched his spectacles with a forefinger, studying her. “I’ll be very careful.”

“But what is it you want?” she asked him desperately. “Why have you come at all? There is nothing for you here but trouble.”

“I know,” he said. “Exactly what I’ve come to find. How much trouble my ancestor caused through the centuries he’s been alive. How much I can cause him.”

She stared at him, wordless again. He shifted shape in front of her eyes, then, from the reckless innocent as unarmed as a maiden come to tweak the eyelid of the ancient sleeping monster, to a man with hidden powers who might possibly understand more about her life than she did.

“Nemos,” she whispered. “Maeve and Aveline talk about him. They make up tales with him in them. They ride with him to impossible places, to meadows and ancient ruins, to the court of a Queen Hydria, who seems to hold her court here in Aislinn House as well, because everyone says her name at supper. But no one ever sees her there. So how could Maeve and Aveline know her? How could they know Nemos Moore? They’ve been in Aislinn House all their lives.”

“And Nemos Moore,” Ridley said grimly, “has been in and out of this house at will. I don’t understand everything he did here, but he is very powerful and seems capable of any mischief, including riding into someone else’s tale.” He was silent a little, as though contemplating his wicked relation in the dark water. Then he seemed to see the water again. “I don’t suppose,” he added, “you know if there is any meaning whatsoever to this boat. The lantern.”

“Don’t ask.” The words came out with unexpected fierceness. “That is all I understand. All anyone has ever told me.”

“I see,” he breathed.

“I must go. The ritual doesn’t like to wait.” She turned her back to him, told him as she moved away, “If you follow me, don’t let me know.”

When she looked back before she left the underground chamber, he was nowhere to be seen.

He appeared again sometime later, when she unlocked the door to the east tower and went up the winding stairs to the top to turn the page in the book on its stand in the empty room. He was there suddenly, at her elbow, peering at the empty page.

“How very strange ... Is it simply cruelty, or some extreme subtlety of magic?”

“Ridley!” she exclaimed, her hands closing tightly onto the edges of the stand.

“Sorry,” he said penitently. “It’s a book. I have no common sense around them.” He reached out, to her horror, riffled through the blank pages. “I’ll have to study it more closely later.”

She stared at him again, this creature from some world beyond her comprehension. He bore her scrutiny with composure. No knight would ever have allowed her to study him like this, she thought. Their eyes would grow angry, warning her, as though her gaze had challenged them.

“Who are you?” she asked with wonder, and he smiled.

No knight would ever have smiled at a question from her.

“Ridley Dow,” he said. “I like to read, to lead a scholarly and eccentric life, to learn peculiar things. Why, for instance, a bell no one has ever seen has rung the sun down at Sealey Head every day for centuries.”

She drew back from him a little, puzzled. “The bell.”

“Do you ring it?” he asked, watching her steadily, the smile gone now.

“No.”

“Who does?”

“I don’t know. Maeve, maybe. One of the other ladies. It’s someone’s ritual; I don’t know whose.”

“What do you do when it rings? Where are you at that moment?”

“In my chambers waiting to be called for supper.”

He blinked. “It’s a dinner bell?”

“It’s the bell that rings when the sun disappears.”

He looked a little bewildered. “But you go to eat, then.”

“I continue my ritual,” she explained. “I go down to the great hall where the knights are gathered after their return. I light some candles but not others, place this chair here, fill this cup but not that. When I have finished everything, I sit where I am escorted by one or another of the knights. They usually speak only to one another unless it’s part of their ritual. For instance when the knight asked me to marry him.” She shook her head slightly, her eyes widening, stunned and bright with pain at the memory. “I didn’t know him. They change constantly, it seems. But it didn’t matter, since they barely see us. Any more than you would see a candle, which always changes and always looks the same until it dies and you replace it with another just like it. He spoke to me. Asked me that question. And I asked why? Why should I? I was just another candle in his eyes.” Her hand slid to her cheek. “So he hit me.”

“He—”

“It was ritual, Aveline told me later. It was ritual and I had stopped everything to ask why. He had no other answer. And then, two nights ago, he escorted me to the chair beside him, and told me we would marry when the moon is full.”

Ridley opened his mouth, found no words, either, for a moment. “What will you do?” he asked finally.

“Marry him. Have his child. That much is ritual. But not even he can tell me not to wonder, not to look for answers. He won’t ever care what I’m thinking, only that I continue the ritual. What I do outside of the ritual he will never ask.”

She heard his breath, softly loosed, as he gazed at her. “Emma’s mother told me something about this. But hearing it from you makes it so much more complex.”