Gresh had barely had time to look around at the chamber within when a knock sounded on one of the carved doors. “Come in!” Tobas called.

The door swung inward, and a thin old man in an elaborately embroidered tunic leaned in. “Lord Tobas?” he asked.

“Yes. All of us, and a guest.”

“His Majesty the king wishes to invite you all to dine with him tonight.”

“Convey my best wishes to His Majesty, and we would be delighted.”

“Is there anything we can do for you in the meanwhile?”

“If you could give us a hand with the luggage, it would be welcome.”

“Of course. I’ll send footmen.” Then the door closed again.

“It’s good to be home!” Alorria said, smiling broadly and looking around happily, gently bouncing the baby in her arms.

“It is good to be back,” Karanissa agreed. “Home or not.”

“They seem to have kept it clean,” Tobas said. “I hope no one’s disturbed my workshop.”

“I thought you took everything dangerous with you,” Alorria said.

“I did. I still hope no one disturbed it-I want to be able to find things.”

“I didn’t think you left anything worth finding,” Karanissa said.

“This is your home?” Gresh asked.

All three of the other adults tried to answer simultaneously, Alorria saying “Yes,” Karanissa saying “No,” and Tobas saying, “When we’re in Dwomor.” The two women exchanged looks, and Karanissa added, “It used to be, before we bought the house in Ethshar of the Sands.”

“It still is,” Alorria said, with happy assurance. “We just don’t live here all the time.”

“It will be again,” Tobas said. “If we find the spriggan mirror and deal with it successfully.”

That sounded interesting. “Oh?” Gresh said.

Tobas grimaced. “I’m not as smart as you, Gresh-when the Wizards’ Guild ordered me to stop the spriggans, I demanded payment, and they agreed, but I didn’t think of asking for eternal youth. I asked for another Transporting Tapestry, one that comes out here in Dwomor Keep, so we could come back here permanently. I like being my father-in-law’s court wizard and don’t really want to live in a big city. They agreed to make one for us-though of course it will take a year or so, and no one’s even started on it yet. There aren’t very many wizards who can make one, and most of them aren’t willing to put in the time.”

“But when it’s made, you’ll live here again.”

“Yes.” Tobas sighed. “Eternal youth for Alorria and myself would have been clever, but I just didn’t think of it. I’ll just have to hope I can work my way up to doing it myself eventually.”

“I’m sure you’ll manage it,” Karanissa said.

“Plenty of wizards don’t,” Tobas said.

For a moment silence fell, as no one knew quite what to say, but then Alris awoke and began crying, and Alorria, cooing and rocking, carried her up the spiral staircase.

“We have the entire tower,” Tobas said. “The bedrooms are the next floor up, and my workshop above that.”

Gresh nodded. “Do you get many spriggans here?”

Tobas blinked foolishly at him for a moment. “What?”

“Are there many spriggans in Dwomor? Does your magic attract them to this tower?”

Tobas glanced upward. “It ought to, oughtn’t it?”

“Does it?”

“Not that I’ve noticed,” Tobas admitted.

“I’ve seen a few here and there in Dwomor,” Karanissa said. “But they’re no worse here than in the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars-perhaps not as bad.”

“But the mirror isn’t terribly far from here.”

“Well, we don’t know that…” Tobas began.

“I do,” Gresh interrupted. He was not ready to believe the spriggan he had interrogated had fooled him as completely as that.

“All right, then,” Tobas said, clearly nettled. “I don’t know why there aren’t more of them here; there just aren’t.”

Before Gresh could reply there was a knock at the door. Karanissa reached over to open it, revealing half a dozen young men in green-and-white uniforms.

There were several minutes of bustle and confusion as the footmen brought the luggage in from the landing platform and stowed it where Tobas and his wives directed them. Gresh tried to stay out of the way.

“I’m going to dress for dinner,” Alorria announced from the stairs, where she was blocking a footman’s way. He was balanced precariously, holding an immense leather trunk he had been carrying upstairs.

“Good,” Tobas said. “So will I.”

A moment later, when the luggage had all been dealt with, the six footmen brought in the carpet itself and spread it on the floor, exactly where Gresh had thought it should go. Then one of them bowed to Tobas and asked, “Will there be anything else?”

“No, thank you,” Tobas said. “Very good work, all of you.”

The footman bowed again, and the entire half-dozen quickly exited the suite.

“Pardon me a moment, Gresh,” Tobas said. Karanissa was already climbing the spiral stair, and Tobas followed her, leaving Gresh alone in the sitting room.

He glanced around, then shrugged and sank onto one of the settees. He had no intention of trying to unpack anything here; his most appropriate change of clothing for dining with a king was well down the bottomless bag. His Majesty Derneth II would just have to put up with a guest in traveling clothes.

He looked around the room again, but saw nothing of particular interest. No spriggans were in sight.

That was curious, really. If the mirror was generating spriggans somewhere within a few leagues, and the spriggans just wandered randomly, then their population density here should be several times what it was anywhere in the Hegemony, and it plainly wasn’t.

That meant that their wanderings weren’t random. It wasn’t simply an attraction to wizardry that motivated them, because if it were, then Tobas’s workshop would have been overrun with them when he was working as Dwomor’s court wizard.

Gresh wondered just what was really going on. Were spriggans more organized and more intelligent than they appeared? Was there some pattern to their behavior over the past few years? He felt a slight chill at the thought. What if they were not just an infestation, but an actual deliberate invasion? Was it really just a botched casting of Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm that had brought them into the World?

Then Karanissa came back down the stairs in a white silk gown that made Gresh forget about spriggans and mirrors and spells, not to mention the inconvenient fact that she was married to someone else. He rose quickly and bowed to her.

“You know, after so long in your company on the carpet, I can hear your thoughts,” she said, pausing at the foot of the stair. “Especially when they’re as clear as they are just now.”

For an instant Gresh hesitated. He did not want to offend a wizard’s wife.

On the other hand, Karanissa could have easily ignored his reaction. She had chosen not to, and that gave Gresh some latitude.

“Then you know there’s nothing I can do to control them,” he replied with a smile.

“I know you aren’t even trying. Really, do you feel no shame at all at lusting so blatantly for another man’s wife?”

“None,” Gresh replied. “For three reasons.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. First, you call it blatant, but you’re a witch-would an ordinary woman know what I am thinking? Look at my face, rather than the thoughts behind it, and I think you’ll see my expression is well within the bounds of mere polite admiration.”

“Ah. You’re right-and you do have a dozen years of practice, don’t you? And the advice of your sisters, as well.”

“Indeed. Second, lust is a natural and healthy response to a sight such as the one before me now. While it is the custom to disguise it in polite company, I know that it is the disguise that is unnatural, not the desire.”

“Most men are not as certain of that as you are.”

He nodded an acknowledgment. “You would know that better than I.”