tent of pink-and-lemon summer sky returned to illuminate the Mageguild’s fete?
Janni snarled and flushed with rage at the adepts’ dissembling, threatening to
go turn Torchholder (who had preceded them back among the celebrants,
disheveled, loudmouthed, but none the worse for wear) upside down to see if any
truth might fall out, but Niko cautioned him to let fools believe what fools
believe, and to make his farewells brief and polite-whatever they felt about the
mages, they had to live with them.
When at last they rode out of the Street of Arcana toward the Alekeep, to quench
their well-earned thirsts where Niko could check on the faring of a girl who
mattered to him, he was ponying the extra horse he had lent Askelon, since
neither the dream lord nor his companion Jihan had been anywhere to be found
among guests trying grimly to recapture at least a semblance of revelry.
For Niko, the slow ride through mercifully dark streets was a godsend, the deep
midnight sky a mask he desperately needed to keep between him and the world
awhile. In its cover, he could afford to let his composure, slipping away
inexorably of its own weight, fall from him altogether. As it happened, because
of the riderless horse, he was bringing up the rear. That, too, suited him, as
did their tortuous progress through the ways and intersections thronging
intermittently with upper-class (if there was such a distinction to be made
here) Ilsigs ushering in the new year. Personally, he did not like the start of
it: the events of the last twenty-four hours he considered somewhat less than