“Yes. And it leads to our real home, more or less.”

“The castle? You live in that?”

“Most of the time-at least, since Tabaea’s death. Before that we spent most of our time in Dwomor Keep, where Tobas was the court wizard for Alorria’s father.”

Gresh remembered the story Karanissa had told him when she first came to his shop-that she had spent four hundred years trapped in a wizard’s castle, and Tobas had rescued her. That was presumably the castle he had saved her from. And she had later said that the Guild had ruined the tapestry that had been the only exit from the castle.

“How do you get out of it?” he asked. “I mean, if you’re planning to sleep there tonight…”

“We have another Transporting Tapestry in the castle,” Karanissa explained. “When the Guild ruined our old one while they were trying to stop Tabaea, they replaced it with another that comes out near here. That’s why we bought this house and relocated to Ethshar of the Sands-it’s where we can get out of the castle.” She sighed. “At first I thought I’d like that-I never really felt very welcome in Dwomor Keep, after all, since it’s Alorria’s home.”

Gresh started to ask a question about the relationship between the two women, then caught himself. He did not want to pry into their personal lives uninvited. “It hasn’t worked out?” he asked instead.

“We don’t really belong here,” she said. “Tobas is from a little village in the Pirate Towns, Alorria is a princess from the Small Kingdoms, I’m from the distant past-none of us really fits in a city like this. When I was here as a girl it wasn’t a city at all; it was General Torran’s staging area for the western campaign-they were still dredging the ship channel and drawing up plans for the city wall, and Grandgate was one tower called Grand Castle because there wasn’t a wall yet to put a gate in. There wasn’t any palace or city, just tents and wooden sheds.”

Gresh glanced out the window at the street and tried to imagine that; he failed.

“Now there are more people in the Grandgate district alone than in all of Dwomor, so Alorria is as lost here as I am,” Karanissa continued. “The Guild brought Tobas here because he’d been doing research in countercharms, trying to fix some of the things that had gone wrong back in the mountains, so someone thought he was some sort of expert and called him in to help against Tabaea’s magic Black Dagger, and he didn’t argue-he thought it would be fun, and that he might know something useful. He does have the formulas for plenty of spells, including some that had been lost for centuries, but all the same, he’s not really that good a wizard-more than good enough for Dwomor, or anywhere in the Small Kingdoms or outlying lands, but here in the three Ethshars he’s only up to journeyman level, really. He doesn’t know anyone except Telurinon and a few other wizards…” She let her voice trail off, and sighed.

“He seems to have the Guild’s respect,” Gresh said.

“Yes, he does, and he earned it,” she agreed. “He was the one who finally stopped Telurinon’s stupid miscalculation from destroying the whole city. They showed their respect by ordering him to find and stop the spriggan mirror-typical of them. If you do one impossible thing your reward is to be asked to do another.”

“But he made the mirror in the first place?”

“Which is why we didn’t argue when they told him to stop it. He does feel responsible. So he’s been running around the city talking to magicians and conferring with Lady Sarai and so on, until finally someone suggested we talk to you, and here we are. But when this is all done, we’re going to have to hold a family conference and decide just where and how we want to live.” She looked at the tapestry. “We may have to give that castle up-or at least, spend much less time there.”

Gresh glanced at the image and shuddered; he could not think of giving up that horror as a real loss.

Then Karanissa shook herself. “That’s all for later, though. Tonight we’ll be sleeping in the castle, so that Tobas can collect some things he needs from the workshop there, and you can have this place to yourself. We’ll be back out first thing in the morning and off to Dwomor.”

Gresh started to nod, then stopped. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Is that the workshop where the mirror was first enchanted?”

Karanissa looked at him. “Yes. Why?”

“There might be evidence…”

“No.” Karanissa held up a hand. “We checked, very carefully.”

“You’re absolutely certain the mirror isn’t still in there somewhere?”

“Oh, yes. We saw it go through the tapestry to the mountains. Besides, we haven’t seen any new spriggans in the castle in years-there are still about half a dozen that never left, but we only see those same ones, never any others.”

“Hmm.” He was not absolutely convinced. He had seen people lose things in plain sight often enough to have no faith at all in the human ability to see what was actually in front of them, and after his twenty questions a few days before he had far more respect for how deceptive spriggans could be. But Karanissa was a witch and probably knew what she was talking about.

Even a spriggan would know a castle was not a cave-or could there be a cave somewhere in that stone mass the castle sat upon?

“Are there any ruins in that…that place?” he asked.

“What place?” Karanissa glanced from him to the tapestry. “The void? No, there are the two stones-the little one at this end of the bridge, and the big one holding the castle. That’s all. There’s nothing a ruin could stand on, nowhere it could be.”

Then at any rate, the mirror had not been in there when that particular spriggan emerged from it, and it wasn’t likely it had gotten there since.

“Thank you.” Gresh gave the tapestry a final look, then turned away and headed back down the stairs to rejoin the others. Karanissa came close behind.

Alorria looked up from playing with Alris’s fingers. “Showing off the castle, Kara?”

“Just explaining where we’re going tonight, Ali.”

Alorria made a face. “The baby and I may just wait out here,” she said. “I hate crossing that bridge.”

Tobas exchanged glances with Karanissa, and Gresh thought that the two of them were not entirely displeased by Alorria’s words. “I thought you didn’t want to be alone,” Tobas said.

“I won’t be-I’ll have Gresh to protect me.”

That prompted an awkward silence that was finally broken by Alorria saying, “I assume we can trust him well enough. He doesn’t want to antagonize the Guild, after all. He won’t let anything happen to us.”

“Of course I won’t,” Gresh said.

“And I can manage the baby by myself for one night, Tobas.”

“Of course you can,” Tobas agreed.

“It’s not as if we’re in any danger of being eaten by a dragon or attacked by Vondish assassins here in the city.”

“You aren’t in any danger from them back in Dwomor, either,” Karanissa said.

“Well, you never know,” Alorria said.

It was plain from Karanissa’s expression that she thought you did know, but she didn’t say anything further on the subject.

“You can always change your mind, Ali,” Tobas said. “We’ll leave the door unlocked.”

“I’ll be fine here with Gresh.”

“All right, then. Let us see about finding some supper, shall we? Kara? I’d rather not deal with a crowded inn, if we have any food here.”

“We have wine and cheese in the kitchen and half a salted ham, but there’s no bread.”

“I saw a baker just across the street,” Gresh offered. “I could buy a loaf.”

“And bill the Guild for it, I suppose,” Tobas said.

“Of course!”

“I’ll see what I can do, then,” Karanissa said, heading for one of the two doors at the back.

Half an hour later the four adults sat down around the little table in the kitchen, where Karanissa had set out a simple but satisfactory meal. Gresh had purchased a few sweet cakes, as well as a loaf of good bread; Karanissa had boiled generous slices of ham; and Tobas had found the butter, cheese, and wine. During supper’s preparation the conversation had been casual and fragmented, but now Gresh turned to Tobas and said, “Tell me how you came to enchant the mirror in the first place, in as much detail as you can. You never know what information might turn out to be useful, and I’d like to have the story now, just to be sure that I don’t need to look around inside that haunted castle of yours before we go on to Dwomor.”