“We went too fast,” he said.

“What else? I have waited.”

“You waited for me. Did you know that?”

“But now you’re here.”

“Cliro,” he said into her hair, as he lay on her, heavy, blissful, one cover she did not wish to push away.

They stayed like this for a short while, until she felt him stir again.

“Now we go more slowly,” he said gravely.

And with his hands and mouth he played her, exquisite as any master musician, the strings of her body flowing with boundless notes. In an agony of joy she held herself away from the brink. They rolled, still connected, and lying over him she now began to search out the melody of his flesh, tuning and waking him, torturing him to the peak of pleasure, casting herself over into the roiling sea only when she saw she had mastered him. The vast wave hurled them up again high as the moon, and over and slowly downward into the second valley of aftermath.

Clirando was cold. Winter—it was winter and she lay outdoors. Where was she? Thestus lay by her, she could hear his deep sleeper’s breathing. But she had slept as heavily, and now her skin seemed rimed with frost—

Clirando flung herself off the bed, panic-stricken, feral.

This was not Thestus. She was not on campaign. It was summer, not winter.

She did not sleep.

Night’s darkness was done with. A pallid, livid dawn was beginning over the village, and Clirando could make out how the sky was somberly whitened, for she had left the shutters open. But this white sky was far too white. The roofs around were also far too white.

She went to the window. A blast of freezing air met her naked body like pain.

Small wonder. Heavy snow had fallen in the night. It covered everything—trees, buildings, and on the narrow alley below, undisturbed, it made a flawless marble paving.

Not a sound rose from the village, either. Not a trickle of smoke from any hastily stoked hearth. No bird flew. No human thing was visible. Under the deadly blossom of the snow and ice, only an intermittent conifer showed any growing covering. The rest of the trees were bare as bones, and on a nearby wall, an Eastern rose-briar snaggled, skeletal black and white. Last night it had been smothered in red flowers.

She heard Zemetrios erupt from the bed behind her.

“In the name of all—”

They wrapped themselves in the formerly redundant furs, and both stood in the window.

“The village is empty,” he said. “Deserted.”

“The village is ruinous,” Clirando added.

It was true. The more she peered at the icy vista, the more she noticed the holes in the plaster, fallen stones, and gaps where roofs had given way, not the previous night, but long ago. The snowy trees had not all been cultivated in gardens and yards, but had rooted in the houses, and out of streets and alleyways.

Even in this room—that crack along the wall, the broken stool she had not seen yesterday. The balding furs were musty with age.

Looking across the room, she dismally noted the old carven door was half off its hinges.

“The snow,” he said with irony, “must have fallen down from the moon, if the moon’s covered in snow as the man said.”

“Perhaps it did. This place is a demonic trap. It’s accursed, as we are.”

He drew her around to face him.

“No longer. You and I are no more one alone to face the dangers and dirt of this world. Two together. Yes, Clirando?”

It did not go easy with her, even now, emotionally to bond with him so quickly. If a summer morning had woken them, very likely she would have felt otherwise. But now once more she was not sure she could trust Zemetrios, her beautiful and mesmerizing lover, the one she had “waited” for, her equal and her beloved.

Nevertheless, she nodded. And saw in his eyes he knew she put him off that way. For a moment his mouth thinned. Turning from her brusquely, he gathered up his gear and began to dress.

No longer twined, their two swords lay among the quilts, separate.

Around and below, the inn was as void as suspected. In the long main room, under a now partly broken staircase, bushes clawed from the floor and icicles hung where the onions and green herbs once had. The smoke chimney had fallen into the cooking hearth—a hundred years ago from the look of it.

They exchanged very few words. Brief comments on the wreck, warnings about treacherous places in the floor, and in the snowy hollows of the streets and alleys outside, when once they got there.

The village was desolate, and desolating.

She—and he, she had believed—had been happy here, nearly carefree. The good food, the well-mannered crowds, and the music, magic, friendship, the potent law-breaking of the four magicians in the square—all of it lies. Hallucinations.

Traps.

Nothing to do with life or enjoyment had gone on in this winter village for ten decades or more, nothing but loneliness and decay. Not even any animal laired here.

And the snow. The snow. Could it had fallen from the snow-covered midsummer moon? Was that likely—of course not. But then, neither was all the rest.

We were lovers. This demonstrates we were fools after all. Or I was a fool. And he, trustless, one more chancer and traitor.

For once a kinder inner voice, perhaps more rational—or less guilt-ridden, less involved—murmured within her: Do you react too harshly? What, after all, has he done that you should call him by such names?

But winter had shown her, with its unseasonal cruelty, that she must not soften. She had trusted before. Now she must raise her shield if not her blade. She must be forearmed.

They emerged from the village at another gate. In fact out of a hole in the wall.

Looking back, Clirando saw the remains of the slender tower, leaning like a smashed tooth on the sky.

Beyond the “gateway” was only a waste of white, in which groups of dead orchard trees huddled like black cages draped with ice.

The mountains rose ahead. They were solid now in snow, and the white land ran up to them. Pine forest still grew thickly at their bases.

“Moon’s Stair,” Zemetrios said. His voice was bleak.

Clirando scanned the middle peak.

It was not so high as she had thought, only a frigid hump. Who would want to go up there?

“Everything was deception,” she said. “The merchant lied, too. How can there be some supernatural doorway on that mountain that allows men to pass through, and walk on the moon’s globe—if a globe it truly even is. The moon is a lamp, that’s all, like the stars. The gods made them simply to give light.”

“In Rhoia,” he said, “we call the moon most often she. She’s frozen. She’s cold. Unjust. A bringer of regret.”

Clirando flung about. Before she could make some hard rejoinder, she thought confusedly, He spoke of the moon. He was not Thestus taunting me.

A wind woke suddenly from the island’s edges, where, invisible, the sea still coiled, its rim perhaps now layered with ice.

“What’s that sound?” he said.

“The wind blowing.”

“No.”

He pointed.

Along the snow, out of the nearest bundle of pine trees, something came striding with huge steps. On all the white it was night-dark. And it was giant-tall but narrow, a black banner blowing like a black flame from its top.

“The woman on stilts,” Clirando exclaimed.

“So it is.”

They waited.

Such was her speed, the striding stilt-walker reached them in less than a minute.

Last night she had lit torches in a ruin that had looked whole and living.

Now, passing them, the apparition bent her head to regard them.

“Moon’s Stair,” said the black woman in a remote tone. “That’s your path.”