Chapter 10 A Decision MadeSolstice had come. The Festival of Darkness. A time when family shared what meagre feasts they could create during winter’s harsh scarcity and waited for the change of seasons to bring renewal. No wonder silence blanketed the city. This was a season of quiet gatherings, not citywide celebrations as with the Festival of Light. No one would venture from their home tonight. The path veered again, and they left behind the menagerie enclosures, passing through a part of the garden filled with sculptures, frozen and silent in the winter night. As they passed one, something about its raised hand, as though it were beckoning someone, jolted Mina’s niggling thought, and she realised where else she had seen the face that haunted her in the masks. It had been in the cave of

