"Yes." "What happened to them?"

"They died in a sorcerous accident. They were both apprenticed to my grandfather at the time, working together, and apparently they made some sort of mis-take. He told me he never did determine exactly how it happened." She took a bite of the egg and chewed slowly, washing it down with a swallow of water. "I learned something from that, Cray Ormoru. I learned to follow instructions very carefully. I learned not to allow myself to be distracted."

"It must have been very hard on you," Cray said, "losing them so young."

"As I said, it was a long time ago."

"I wonder how well a man like your grandfather could have comforted you. Or was he different back then?"

She dropped the uneaten remains of her egg onto her plate and pushed it aside. "You're asking me about a time that is almost like someone else's life to me. Before I came to this place, before Regneniel took over my care. I was very young, after all. I only remember it as if it were a dream. My mother, my father-they're like phantoms. I don't even think about those times any more. They no longer have anything to do with what I am and what I wish to become."

Cray rubbed his chin against his interlaced fingers. "Don't you wonder, sometimes, what you've missed?

What your life would have been like if your parents had lived?"

"I can guess some of it. For one thing, I'd almost surely be apprenticed to one of them. And I'd proba-bly be living with them in an ordinary castle, practic-ing whatever sorcery they practiced. Demons, I assume. But they're dead, and my grandfather made my deci-sions for me instead. And he decided that I would learn a special kind of sorcery. I know how rare it is, I know that there are no other sorcerers capable of walking in Ice by themselves. I know that I will be the first to manipulate the very substance of Ice. An accident of sorcery has accomplished this for me; I had no control over it, but I am willing to use its fruits. I accept reality and do not yearn for anything that might have been. How foolish that would be!"

Cray sighed. "Foolish, perhaps, but a common mor-tal foolishness."

"I have no desire to be a fool," said Aliza, "or a common mortal."

He studied her face, so pale and composed, the eyes so steady, so self-assured. This was what loneliness accomplished, he thought-it wrapped you up so thor-oughly in yourself that only your goals became impor-tant, and all else was mere foolishness. What would she do, he wondered, when the entire world of Ice lay in her grasp and there was no more to learn? Or would there always be something more for her, always another goal beyond the one attained?

He said, "And so you believe you are happy with this reality that you accept so completely?"

"Happy. It's not a word I would use to describe myself," she said. "When I was a child I was happy, playing mindlessly with my toys. Now I would rather say that I am satisfied. My life is filled with interesting pursuits, and I am content with them. Can you say as much?"

He shrugged. "I suppose not. I have my pursuits, but if I were truly content with them, I would never have come looking for a new friend." "Perhaps you should find some new kind of sorcery, then, to refresh your enthusiasm for it."

He lowered his hands to the table, his palms flat against the smoothly polished oaken surface. His sen-sitive fingers could perceive the direction of the grain, though it had been buffed to a satiny finish. "I have practiced many kinds of sorcery in my life, my lady. I could have made this table myself, by sorcery-caused the tree to fell itself and peel its own bark away and split off a perfect plank from its very heart; caused cloths to rub it smooth with all the proper abrasives; caused saplings to grow precisely into the forms of these trestle-legs. It would have been a simple thing, the work of a day or two, perhaps.

A great many things come simply to a sorcerer of my strength-food, clothing, comforts. I could learn more, of course. Ido learn more, constantly. But ... " He frowned, trying for the first time to put into words the feelings that had haunted him for so many years. The impatience. The restlessness. The accomplishment that never turned out to be quite so satisfying, quite so desirable as he had hoped. The gold-shot tree. The golden blossom. The castle of living wood. "I learn constantly," he said, "but not because I have any need to learn more, not because it gives me any real pleasure. But simply because ...

I can think of nothing else to do with my time." He shook his head. "I suppose that must set me apart from other sorcerers."

Aliza gazed at him with puzzlement in her eyes. "Are you saying that you arebored with sorcery?"

He smiled wryly. "I am bored with the notion that sorcery is its own reward. You spoke of leaving your toys behind with your childhood. Yet what is sorcery but one more toy?"

"Sorcery is power," said Aliza.

"Power is a toy, isn't it? Mortal princes play with it frequently, striving against each other like children at king-of-the-mountain."

"But you must have enough power to protect yourself from your enemies."

He looked at her sadly. "Have you so very many enemies already?"

"I?" She seemed surprised at the question. "None that I know of. But one must be prepared."

"You expect to acquire some in the future?"

Lowering her gaze to the fruit tray, she fingered the stem of an apple, then twisted it between her thumb and forefinger. "I don't expect it, but I don't rule out the possibility. My grandfather has told me that the more powerful I become, the more other sorcerers will fear me. Under such an impetus as fear, anything could happen."

"Your very powerful grandfather-he has many enemies?"

She nodded.

"What an ironic situation it would be," said Cray. "Ten or twenty or a hundred years from now, when you have a host of enemies and not a single friend."

She looked up at him sharply. "I'll have my grandfather."

"Will you? Or will you have become so powerful that he, too, will be an enemy? Such things havehappened in sorcerous families before. And in ordi-nary mortal ones, too, for that matter. After all, you and he are notfriends now."

Her mouth became a thin, hard line. "And who is to say that afriendcould not also become an enemy?"

"It could happen," Cray admitted, "but not, I think, if there were good faith on both sides." He smiled at her. "My closest friend and I have had many a dis-agreement, but we are still friends."

Her eyes narrowed. "You've been a sorcerer for some time. Have you no enemies?"

He waved airily. "I lead a quiet life. I bother no one. If I do have any enemies just now, they have not made themselves known to me. Perhaps, by sorcerous standards, I don't really have so very much power. I can't move mountains or toss lightning about or drown the countryside with salt water. To make a tree grow, to cause a piece of cloth to walk about-these are such small things. Who could be afraid of them?"

"Don't you have any desire to learn those other skills?"

He laughed softly, shaking his head. "You don't understand, do you? You don't understand how one could have no real interest in such vast powers."

"No, I confess, I don't."

Cray stroked the tabletop with three fingers, back and forth, back and forth. "Perhaps we should just say that not everyone needs to be a king." He watched his fingers work upon the smooth wooden surface. "I almost wasn't a sorcerer at all," he said. "I was almost an ordinary mortal. As a boy, I wanted to be a knight. Just a common knight, with a sword and a shield and a suit of armor. I wanted to go about the countryside righting wrongs and punishing evildoers. That was what I dreamed of." He shrugged. "A child's dream. But I followed it for a time. I was even a squire, briefly. But I gave up the dream because sorcery was more appro-priate to my goals. It seems so very long ago." He sighed, and then he looked up at her. "I needed sorcery very much for a relatively short period of time, to vanquish an enemy. Yes, I did have an enemy once. Just the one. And I killed him. And after that I couldn't go back to being a knight. I was a sorcerer. My mind was ... different. A sorcerer's mind. But I've never forgotten what it was like to be something else. To besomeone else. More sorcerers should try it. It would give them a fresh perspective on life." He leaned forward and reached out to her, barely touch-ing her wrist with two fingers of his right hand. "You should go out, Aliza. You should go out into the human realm and see what you've missed by being locked into this palace all your life."

She looked down at his hand, and he realized abruptly that he was touching her, flesh to flesh, and she had raised no barrier between them to prevent it. It was the most tenuous of contacts, but it was real. He made no attempt to move his hand, and she made no attempt to move hers.

"I am not locked in," she said quietly. "I can go out whenever I like. I choose not to."

"The lock is of your own devisement, my lady, but it is there, nonetheless."

She pursed her lips, her eyes still focused on his fingers. "What is so wonderful about this human realm?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all. But it is reality. You were the one who said you accepted reality. Yet you don't, you truly don't." Her chin went up a little, and her eyes lifted, but not to his, not so far. "I remember visiting a mortal town once, with my mother," she said. "There were horses and dogs everywhere. And people, so many people. They stared at us; they knew we were sorcerers. And a one-legged beggar came up to us and tried to touch my hair. My mother gave him a piece of silver, I remember. He was very dirty, dressed in rags, barely dressed, and there were running sores all over his body." Now she did meet Cray's eyes.

"There's your reality."

"I never said reality was all pleasant. But it is instructive."

She shook her head. "No, I have no desire to expe-rience more of it. I have my own reality here. That is enough."

"There are other things besides beggars out there," Cray said. "There are great houses, handsome men and beautiful ladies, fields of grain and flowers of every color and shape. Rivers and lakes and the ocean.

Mountains and valleys. You miss so much being in here-much more than other sorcerers. They, at least, can look out their castle windows and see sky and earth and greenery."

She raised one eyebrow. "You think I can't see any of that, do you?"

He glanced about the room, and all he saw through the transparent walls was other rooms surrounding it, room upon room. "Not from here."

She stood up abruptly, knocking her chair back, so that it teetered on two legs and she had to catch it by one arm to keep it from falling over. "Of course not from here," she said. "Here we are in the heart of Ice. But you've only seen a small fraction of my palace. You think I never see the sky? You think I have no windows? How wrong you are, Cray Ormoru. Come along with me and I'll show you what I can see from my palace!"

He had to hurry to follow her, so swiftly did she stride from the room, never looking back once to see if he were behind her. She led him through the bed-chamber and then, with a sharp turn and a short climb of steps, into a room in which two parallel rows of shelves flanked a broad desk. Scattered upon the shelves, standing upright or lying on their sides, were many oversized volumes. Some were even open, though Cray passed them too quickly to judge their contents, except that they were handwritten. Several more books were piled on the desk, with quills and inkpots close beside them, and vessels of sand for blotting the wet ink. The absence of a chair at the desk, as well as the chamber's proximity to the dining hall, indicated that it was Aliza's study. She did not pause there.

Down a flight of steps at the far end of the study, through a doorway, and down a second stairway much steeper than the first she led Cray. Now they were in a sitting room, by far the smallest chamber he had yet seen, small enough to be called snug. A sumptuous divan occupied its center, an armless velvet lounge with one upcurling end, closely surrounded by low tables and cabinets, with only a tiny empty space at one side giving access to its well-upholstered seat. The tables and cabinets were of various kinds of woods, light and dark, but the divan, like the other couch, like the rugs, was a pale gray. Aliza strode through the door beyond it.

The next chamber, just one step up, was the most unusual he had yet seen. Unlike all the others, its boundaries were not transparent but rather suffused with a creamy cloudiness, as if they were made of water into which milk had been stirred. The room was tiny, scarcely six paces across, and seemed to be a storage area rather than any true living space. On one side of the narrow aisle that joined its two doors was a row of crystalline bins as cloudy as the walls, their contents only faintly visible through their translucent sides. Opposite these, crammed shoulder to shoulder in the limited space, were a woodentable and chair suitable for a child half Cray's height and a bed of comparable dimensions. The bed was made up with linens and a pillow. Behind it, just peeking out at one end, Cray thought he could glimpse the forequarters of a rocking horse. He had no chance to look closer, though, for Aliza hurried on.

They climbed next the steepest stairway Cray had yet encountered in the palace, and it, too, was cloudy, enclosed on all sides by cloudy crystalline walls, so that it was more like a tunnel than a stairway. Cray felt as though he were walking through mist held mag-ically at bay. At the top of the staircase was more mist-and then he realized, as Aliza reached it, that the top was barred by a mirror.

When he had joined her on the last step, Aliza swept her hand in an arc across the mirrored surface, and the solid wall drained away like water streaming from oiled wood. Abruptly, the light all about them changed, the blue-white radiance of Aliza's palace swamped by a golden light. Dazzled, Cray rocked back on his heels, barely keeping his balance, barely avoiding a fall down that long, steep flight of stairs.

He felt as though he had just emerged from a cave, just left subterranean autumn for the summer of the outer world. Even the air that flowed about him through the new-made doorway smelled different from the rest of the palace, smelled hot and close. He shaded his eyes against the glare and, blinking, tried to see something in the space before him.

"Come along," said Aliza, and she stepped forward.

Trailing after her, Cray found himself in an empty room much like any other in the palace-crystalline walls on all sides, separating it from other rooms, layers and layers of other rooms on all sides, all empty.

The cloudy-walled staircase had vanished as soon as he crossed its threshold, and along with it the storage room and the furnished portions of the palace-all had gone from his sight just as his own human realm did every time he and Gildrum used a demon portal to enter Fire. He knew there was such a portal somewhere behind that threshold, behind the mirror that Aliza had already recreated behind his back, that double-sided mirror that now gave him his own face instead of a view down those cloudy crystalline stairs. He was in Ice no longer, in the demon realm no longer, for beyond the numberless facets that sur-rounded him, beyond all the intervening transparent layers, far above his head, the summer sun shone bright and hot in a clear blue sky.

"The human realm," he said.

"Yes," said Aliza. "This is the part of my palace that lies there. Come. We have some distance to go yet."

They crossed the room, which was not very large, and entered another by way of the usual sort of stairway. That, Cray thought, and everything else about this part of the palace, save the light and the heat, were just the same as before.

"It's very warm here," he said, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of one hand.

"This is my source of heat," she replied. "The sun's own heat, collected in these rooms and flowing through all the walls of the palace. Even in deepest winter it keeps away the worst of Ice's chill."

"No doubt. But you and I will be roasted pheasants fairly soon if we have to stay in it."

"I've opened a wall in one of the outer rooms, and there will be a cool enough breeze waiting for us there. Walk a little faster and you'll reach it all the sooner." To set the example, she stepped up her own pace. The distance to the outer rooms of this portion of the palace was not so great as that in Ice, or perhaps it merely seemed so to Cray because they were moving fast. Even before they reached their goal, however, he began to notice the landscape beyond the building, distorted though it was by intervening crystal. He could see that great mountains rose in the distance, their flanks cloaked in greenery. Closer, the land appeared to be some sort of low, sun-bleached savannah.

He felt the breeze as they entered the next to the last room, and it was refreshing indeed. It puffed through the doorway at the far end of the room, spreading like a cool spring into a sun-warmed pond.

The final room was cooler yet, almost too cool. There, Cray shivered as his sweat-drenched clothing began to dry on his body.

Aliza, in her velvet gown, was not sweating at all. He wondered, looking at her, if her power over Ice included the ability to bring a pocket of its chill with her into the human realm.

In the outermost room a huge expanse of the outermost wall, a giant window with its transparent sill at waist height and its upper edge beyond any human reach, stood open to the elements. Wind gushed through it intermittently, now buffeting Cray and Aliza fiercely, now leaving them to walk in stillness. As they approached this window, Cray realized that they were far above the ground, higher than the topmost tower of Spinweb, higher than any building he had ever seen, sorcerous or not. From this vantage, he could see a landscape spread out before him that was unlike any he had ever encountered before. In every direc-tion, in a circle about the palace that must have been an hour's walk in extent, the earth was bare and dry and white. And flat. Flat as the surface of a pond on a quiet day. Beyond that was the greenery he had already noticed, and an unbroken line of mountains so rough and craggy that he could hardly believe anyone could cross them without demon assistance.

"I have seen clearings around sorcerers' castles," he said, leaning on the windowsill, "but never any that were quite so ... thorough."

"It's sand," said Aliza. "Coarse-grained quartz sand so heavily spell-laden that no wind can blow it away. Nothing living can cross it, not mortal or demon. No one can set foot on it. No one can fly in the air above it. Not unless I give permission."

"That's a strong spell, my lady."

"I used a stronger one to raise those mountains." Cray stared out at the jagged peaks so distant, their summits glistening whitely, as if snow-covered even in this mild season. "You raised them?" he said, his voice tinged with wonder.

"It was a simple task, really. They were two lines of hills already; I merely bade them grow a bit and com-pletely enclose this valley. All they needed was time. The human realm is easy enough to manipulate in such ways. It has so many crystalline properties. What are mountains, after all, but giant crystals?"

Cray shook his head. "I've never thought of them in that way."

Aliza turned her back on the vista that stretched out before them and leaned against the waist-high sill.

"So now you see that I do know about the sun and the sky and even green growing things. I'm even aware that leaves change color in the autumn, just as your tapestry shows. Though I must admit that those trees out there are not nearly as colorful as the ones your mother portrayed."

"The view has a certain magnificence," Cray said slowly, "because of the mountains. But, otherwise, it's ... rather barren, don't you think? I mean, noth-ing but sand, sand, for such a long way. Do you neveryearn to see something else outside these walls-shrubs or wildflowers, or even grass?"

"No. They couldn't grow on the sand, of course, but I have no interest in them anyway."

He gazed at her sidelong. "You don't spend much time here, I suppose."

"Not much."

"Have you ever crossed those sands?"

She shook her head.

"Not even to raise the mountains?"

"It wasn't necessary."

"You've never climbed them, then? Never flown over them?"

"Why should I?"

"To look down on the other side."

"I know what's there. Trees. Rocks. Rivers. And mortals. None of which have any importance in my life. I can't seem to convince you of that, can I?"

Cray shrugged. "You've convinced me that you don'twant them to have any importance in your life.

Here you've created two barriers between yourself and them, where one would have served. The magical sand keeps all living things away from these walls, yet you felt some need to raise those mountains as well. Not to keep anyone out, I think, but to keep yourself in. To isolate yourself in this valley, so that you don't even have tosee the human realm stretching out to the horizon. This isn't the human realm at all, Aliza. This whole valley has been so changed by your hand that it might as well be part of Ice."

"It is as close to the human realm as I wish to be," she said. "And if my palace could be totally within Ice, that would not displease me."

He shook his head slowly. "I've never heard of a sorcerer that didn't havesome interest in the human realm. If only for what it could yield him."

"What? Gold, silks, and furs? Power over other mortals?"

He nodded. "Suchlike things."

She gathered a handful of her velvet skirt in one fist. "You see this, Cray Ormoru? My grandfather gave me this. I would be as happy in plain linsey-woolsey as in velvet. I don't care what I wear, and I don't care for ornaments without use." She held the white sapphire out toward him, the golden chain pulled taut. "I wouldn't wear this except that it serves me. Everything I have serves me, and I have no desire for more ... objects. Let others have the human realm. I want only a bit of food and my studies."