…where Gretchen stood quite alive, naked and hugging herself, rapidly puckering into one gigantic goose-pimple.

"Hi," I said.

"Hi yourself." Her teeth chattered. "Could you, uhh…" She lifted one arm to gesture back into the room, then quickly went back to hugging herself. It took me a moment to realize what she wanted.

"The lights?" I said.

"Please."

I hurried back into the bedroom and collected shine-stones, dropping them into the thick velvet sack where Gretchen usually kept them. As I worked, I couldn't help chuckling-imagining Gretchen as she heard the knock at her door. She must have realized she was surrounded by more light than a summer afternoon… so she scuttled to the balcony to keep me from seeing her in the unforgiving glare. All those times I'd tried to get her outdoors, I'd been using the wrong tactics.

I laughed again.

Soon I was carrying a bag full of shine: all the stones except one. I'd left that one on the night stand and covered it with a scarf of turquoise gossamer that had been balled up on the vanity. The resulting light tinted the room either sickly green or sea-mist blue, depending on your tolerance for turquoise… but it seemed to satisfy Gretchen, for she immediately came back inside, and closed the doors behind her. For a count of three she tried to bluff out the moment, letting her arms fall to her sides and striking a pose of regal nudity, pretending to be unfazed by cold. Then the shivers hit her and she stumbled forward, ripping a comforter off the bed and wrapping herself as her body shook.

I took her into my arms. She was a tall woman, almost exactly my height, long-legged and lean… but at that moment she seemed much smaller, shrinking into me as she opened the comforter and wrapped it around the two of us. Her bare body pressed against my clothes. Milky skin, green eyes, russet hair-all of which seemed entirely natural, but when a woman's daddy has sorcerers on his payroll, one can never tell how much cosmetic help she had in her formative years. Kaylan's Chameleon isn't the only beauty spell cast on developing girls-sorcerers have plenty of "tuck 'n' tweak" enchantments, making eye color more vivid, hair more lush, and adolescent body development more in keeping with local fashion. There was a reason my cousin Hafsah had such memorable loveliness: my grandma the governor paid for it. For the same reason, Gretchen's creamy complexion showed no hint of the usual freckles, moles, and other punctuations that flesh is normally heir to.

Yet sorcery has its limitations-it can correct imperfections, but it can't stop time. Removing a mole just means banishing pigments from a specific area of tissue; removing a wrinkle from a forty-ish woman's face means fighting the whole course of physical development, all the ongoing changes that lead to dry skin, slowing hormones and declining glands. Aging isn't one thing, it's everything… and neither science nor sorcery has identified all the body's clocks, let alone figured out how to turn them back in unison. There are too many proteins and enzymes and secretions that have to be balanced: if you stop the formation of crow's feet by changing the quantity of a particular body chemical, other body chemicals shift too. Lots of chemicals. Next thing you know, there might be a rash, or sores, or an epileptic fit.

Aging isn't an aberration that can be set back on track… it's the track itself.

I looked at the woman in my arms, and despite the dimness of the light, I could see everything she didn't admit was there: the wrinkles, the crinkles, the lines. A puffiness around the jaw; lapses in the sleekness of her neck. All very subtle, what most of us would consider insignificant-anyone standing back a few steps would see a woman at the peak of her beauty. But that wasn't enough for Gretchen. When she invited a man to her boudoir, she had no intention of keeping him at arm's length.

"I'm glad you're here," she whispered. Her breath caressed my neck; a moment later, her lips did too.

"Gretchen," I said, "I can't stay."

"Don't be a silly billy." She kissed my neck again. "You just got here."

"I have some friends outside. There's been trouble at the school, and we need to borrow your boat."

"What?" She blinked as if I'd just pinched her.

"One of our students has run off. People are after him-dangerous people. We need a fast boat so we can find him before they do."

"You're just here to take my boat?" Her voice had an edge of outrage.

"It's important, Gretchen. A girl is dead. Murdered. And other people are dead too, thanks to a Spark Lord who-"

"A Spark Lord? Which Spark Lord?"

"The female Sorcery-Lord. Called Dreamsinger. She showed up at a tavern and-"

"You met a Spark Lord? When?"

"Tonight," I said. "Just a while ago. Now she's gone to Niagara Falls, and we need your boat to-"

"So this Sorcery-Lord is in Niagara Falls?"

"That's where she said she was going."

"And you want my boat to go there too?"

"Yes."

She drew away from me-not abruptly, but in typical Gretchen fashion: a squeeze of mock affection, then an ooze of regretful detachment, and finally a playful flash of her naked body before she closed the comforter around herself. "All right," she said, "we'll head for Niagara Falls."

"We?"

"Yes: we." She threw off the comforter and began to get dressed.

She'd probably claim that she dressed in a hurry… and she did abbreviate her usual routine of trying on half her wardrobe before deciding what suited her mood. But Gretchen was not one of those heroines from fiction who can switch instantly from pampered beauty to rugged adventurer. If her bedroom caught fire, she wouldn't leave until she'd tried on half a dozen outfits to see which matched the flames. As for being seen in public without rouge, mascara, perfume, et cetera-silly billy, what are you thinking?

So I sat on the bed and waited as patiently as I could. Trying to rush Gretchen was worse than useless-if you annoyed her, she slowed down to punish you. The woman had a knack for petty vindictiveness: entirely unconscious too. She'd be genuinely shocked if you suggested she was deliberately taking longer than necessary to redden her lips, pluck her eyebrows, and choose which garters went with which stockings inside which boots to wear on a muddy night in late thaw; and then she'd slow down even more.

Gretchen could drive a man mad in so many ways.

"Now tell me," she called as she rummaged through boxes in her closet, "what did this Dreamsinger look like?"

"Don't know," I answered. "She was hidden in Kaylan's Chameleon."

Gretchen stuck her head out of the closet. "Now I really want to know what she looked like. Me perhaps?"

"If you were my ideal sexual object, do you think I'd admit it?"

She laughed and disappeared back into the closet-no doubt convinced I couldn't possibly desire any woman besides herself.

I said, "You realize this trip might get dangerous? We aren't the only ones going to Niagara. Have you heard of the Ring of Knives?"

"God, those people? I swear, that dreadful Warwick Xavier spies on me with a telescope."

"He's a smuggler; he watches the lake for customs agents."

"He watches my windows for a glimpse of my booboos."

"Do you ever give him one?"

Gretchen laughed. "Of course. Every girl needs someone to torture."

"In addition to herself."

Gretchen didn't dignify that with an answer. For a while, the only sound from the closet was the squeal of metal hangers scraping sharply along clothes-rods.

"So," I finally said, "why so many shine-stones tonight?"

"Nothing, darling, just a whim."

"What kind of whim?"

"An idle one."

Since she couldn't see me, I rolled my eyes. "You weren't, for example, afraid of the dark and wanted as much light as possible? Or feeling so depressed, you thought the light would cheer you up?"