There was still quietness in the palace.
Maddy was down in the back garden under the weeping willows, and here the moonshine through the long and down-hanging leaves played gloomy streaks across her silk robe.
There was a heavy perfume of roses and night-thorn, of sweetness and danger. In the hedges crickets piped, and a little magic mirror floated about her, the surface shaken like smoke and shadow.
On her other hand she held a bundle of tiny black ash powdered with cursed coal which had been utilized in the ancient wars as they signed the blood-stipulated treaties. She dropped a pinch onto the mirror. It cracked dimly, and the mirror distorted, and the image fused itself into a blurred, hooded figure.
A voice was coming pipe-like out of the depths of the mirror. “You’re certain it’s
