But she knew, knew right to her bones, that this was right. And so she passed hours with her calcinator, and in the end she was turning a flask containing a pale amber fluid that bent light oddly, as if it were a half a mile of liquid instead of a few inches.

“Well,” she said, sniffing it. Then she sighed. It felt right, smelled right—but Hecua’s warning was not to be taken lightly. This could be poison as easily as anything. Maybe if she just tasted a little …

At that moment she heard a sound on the stairs. She stayed still, listening for it to repeat itself.

“Annaïg?”

She sighed in relief. It was only her father. She remembered he had been bringing food home, and a glance out her small window proved it was near dinnertime.

“Coming, Taig,” she called, corking the potion and stuffing it in her right skirt pocket. She started up, then paused.

Where was Glim? He’d been gone an awfully long time.

She went to a polished cypress cabinet and withdrew two small objects wrapped in soft gecko skin. She unwrapped them carefully, revealing a locket on a chain and a life-sized likeness of a sparrow constructed of a fine metal the color of brass but as light as paper. Each individual feather had been fashioned exquisitely and separately, and its eyes were garnets set in ovals of some darker metal.

As her fingers touched it, it stirred, ruffling its metal wings.

“Hey, Coo,” she whispered.

She hesitated then. Coo was the only thing of value her mother had left her that hadn’t been stolen or sold. Sending her out was a risk she didn’t often take. But Glim had had more than enough time to get to the waterfront and back, hours and hours more. It was probably nothing—maybe he was drinking with his cousins or something—but she was eager to find out what the Psijic priest had to say.

“Go find Glim,” she whispered to the bird, conjuring the image of her friend in her secret eye. “Speak only to him, hear only at his touch.”

She purred, lifted her wings, and drifted more than flew out of the open window.

“Annaïg?”

Her father’s voice again, nearer. She went out, closing the door behind her.

She met him near the top of the winding flight. He was red in the face from wine or exertion or probably both.

“Why didn’t you just ring the bell, Taig?” she asked.

“Sometimes you don’t come down right away,” he said, stepping aside. “After you.”

“What’s the rush?” she asked, descending past him.

“We were going to talk,” he said.

“About the trip to Leyawiin?”

“That, and other things,” he replied.

The stair came to a landing, and then continued down.

“What other things?”

“I haven’t been a very good father, Thistle. I know that. Since your mother died—”

There was that annoying tone again. “It’s been fine, Taig. I’ve got no complaints.”

“Well, you should. I know that. I tell myself that I’ve been doing what’s needed to keep us alive, to keep this house …” He sighed. “And in the end, all meaningless.”

They passed the next landing.

“What do you mean, meaningless?” she asked. “I love this house.”

“You think I don’t know anything about you,” he said. “I do. You pine to leave here, this place. You dream of the Imperial City, of studying there.”

“I know we don’t have the money, Taig.”

He nodded. “That’s been the problem, yes. But I’ve sold some things.”

“Like what?”

“The house, for one.”

“What?” She stopped with her foot on the floor of the antechamber, just noticing the men there, four of them—an Imperial with a knobby nose, an orc with dark green hide and low, brushy brows, and two Bosmeri who might have been twins with their fine, narrow faces. She recognized the orc and the Imperial as members of the Thtachalxan, or “Drykillers,” the only non-Argonian guard unit in Lilmoth.

“What’s going on, Taig?” she whispered.

He rested his hand on her shoulder. “I wish I had more time, Thistle,” he murmured. “I wish I could go with you, but this is how it is. Your aunt will see you get to the Imperial City. She has friends there.”

“What’s happening, Taig? What do you know?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Best you not find out.”

She brushed his hand from her shoulder. “I’m not going to Leyawiin,” she said. “Certainly not without a better explanation and certainly not without you—and Glim.”

“Glim …” He exhaled, then his face changed into a visage utterly alien to her. “Don’t worry about Glim,” he said. “There’s nothing to be done there.”

“What do you mean?”

She could hear the panic building in her voice. It was as if it had pulled itself outside of her and become a thing of its own.

“Tell me!”

When he didn’t answer, she turned and strode for the door.

The orc stepped in her way.

“Don’t hurt her,” her father said.

Annaïg turned and ran, ran as fast as she could toward the kitchen and other door, the one that led to the garden.

She was only halfway there when hard, callused hands clamped on her arm.

“I owe yer father,” the orc growled. “So you’ll be coming with me, girl.”

She writhed in his grasp, but the others were all around her.

Her father leaned in and kissed her forehead. He stank of black rice wine.

“I love you,” he said. “Try to remember that, in the days and years to come. That in the end I did right by you.”

With half a bottle of Theilul sloshing in his belly, Mere-Glim made his wobbly way back toward the old Imperial district. He knew Annaïg was going to be irritated with him for not returning sooner, but at the moment he didn’t care that much. Anyway, it wasn’t much fun watching her concoct her smelly compounds, which is what she had surely been doing all afternoon. He hadn’t spent much time with his cousins lately—or with anyone except Annaïg, really. If he had, he might have known he wasn’t alone in feeling a bit cut off from the tree, that only the An-Xileel and other, even wilder people from the deep swamps seemed to enjoy complete rapport with it.

That was bothersome in a lot of ways, and perhaps most bothersome was that his mind—like many of his people—had a hard time believing in coincidence. If the tree was doing something strange at the same time a flying city appeared from nowhere, it seemed impossible that there wasn’t some connection.

Maybe Annaïg’s father was right—after all, the old man did work with the An-Xileel. Maybe it was time to go, away from Lilmoth and its rogue tree.

If it was rogue. If all the Hist weren’t involved. Because if they were, he would have to get out of Black Marsh entirely.

A light rain began splattering the mud-covered path as he passed beneath the pocked, eroded limestone arch that had once marked the boundary of the Imperial quarter. He whirl-jumped as a fluttering motion at the edge of his vision opened ancient templates—but what he saw there wasn’t a venin-bat or blood-moth. It took him a moment to sort out that it was Annaïg’s metal bird, Coo.

She must really be irritated, he thought. She rarely used Coo for anything.

He blew out some of the water that had collected in his nose and flipped open the little hatch that covered the mirror.

He didn’t find Annaïg gazing back at him, though. It was dark, which meant the locket was closed.

But it was emitting faint sounds.

He pressed the bird nearer his ear. At first he didn’t hear much—breathing, the muffled voices of two men. But then suddenly a man was shouting, and a woman shrieked.

He knew that shriek like he knew his own—it was Annaïg.

“Back here, girl!” a hoarse voice growled.

“Just tell my father you put me on the ship!” he heard Annaïg shout. “He’ll never know the difference.”

“Maybe he wouldn’t,” Hoarse Voice grunted. “But I would, yeah? So on the boat you go.”