"And if youshould want them to?" He smiled. "After all, here I am." She gazed at him levelly. "I think I'm dealing with you well enough."

"I'm remarkably easy to deal with."

"How fortunate for me. Perhaps, then, I'll never let anyone else in."

He looked down at his goblet. "You may say such things now. But every life is full of possibilities. You can't predict what you'll think and how you'll feel later on, perhaps a century or two from now, when you're no longer an apprentice, no longer young." He raised his eyes to hers. "A day may even come when you decide to venture beyond these walls and explore the human realm, to interact with other mortals. I know that sounds repellent to you, but ... a sorcerer's life is long."

She was frowning, turning her half-full goblet be-tween the thumb and middle finger of one hand, turn-ing it back and forth, back and forth where it rested on the glowing table. At last she said, "You are right, Cray Ormoru. I should not assume that the way I feel now will be the way I feel forever. Perhaps mortals will be of use to me someday. Perhaps. But as you said, a sorcerer's life is long, and I am young, and so there will be plenty of time for me to learn about mortals if and when I should decide to mingle with them."

"And yet," Cray said, "here I am, a vast reservoir of information on the subject, totally at your disposal.

When will you have a better opportunity to learn? Your demon surely cannot tell you more about mor-tals than I can. Nor, I would guess, can your grandfa-ther. Why waste me?"

She looked at him hard. "You wish to be my teacher?"

"Why not? I know myself that there is some advan-tage to having more than one."

"Have you ever had an apprentice?"

He shook his head.

"And you think it might be ... interesting."

"Yes. For both of us."

She played with her goblet a bit more, then drank lightly from it. "I am too busy."

"I don't ask for your full time, just for a supper like this now and then where we can talk. Surely you don't begrudge yourself a leisurely meal or two."

"I usually think about my studies while I eat."

Cray laughed softly. "Bend a little of that dedica-tion to understanding the human realm, and you shall be an expert in it sooner than you think."

"Shall I?" She pursed her lips. "Very well. For the sakeof my education. For the sake of my future needs, whatever they may be, tell me about ordinary mortals." She leaned forward, elbows on the luminous table. "Tell me about the men you trained with. They were knights, weren't they?"

"Knights and squires," said Cray. "And every one of them a better swordsman than I. They made me work, I can tell you. My muscles ache just to remem-berit." Only when dawn began to drown out the glow of the table did Cray realize how long they had been talking. He had ranged far from the knights and squires of the castle yard, beating at each other's shields with their wooden swords. He had spoken of the pages, just children skittering about on their elders'

errands; of the men-at-arms who walked the battlements day and night and slept there standing up, leaning against their pikes; of the stablehands with their huge and ponderous charges that wore plate mail heavy enough to crush a man; of the scullions who hung about the kitchen waiting for pots and pans to scrub and filching scraps from whatever joint was turning on the spit; of the lord and lady, elegantly clothed, gracious and gen-erous to all, even the crudest churl; of the hagglers in the weekly market, who never let a chicken pass from one person to another without an argument. And while he spoke, he recreated that winter in his memory-the sharp cold of the blustering wind up on the walls, the sparkling whiteness of new snow that accumulated in the yard and had to be shoveled into barrows for removal out the postern gate, and the cheerful sound of good fellowship pledged in ale about the blazing hearth. No one at that castle had known Cray was a child of the sorcerous breed; he was simply one of them, a plain person trying to muddle through life as best he could. What did the bruises of the practice-field matter to any of them? They had a roof over their heads, food in their bellies, a kind master and laughing friends.

How much more, Cray wondered, could anyone hope for?

He yawned behind his hand. "Have I really been talking all night?"

Aliza looked out to the eastern sky. "So it seems. It was a summer night, though-much shorter than those winter ones." She stifled a yawn with her fingers. "Your demons will be coming back for you soon.

Perhaps it would be a good idea for you to get some sleep before the long journey home."

He yawned again. "Not a bad idea."

"Did you find the couch comfortable enough?"

He grinned. "Quite comfortable, compared to my pallet that winter. But have you no guest bed for when your grandfather visits?"

"He never stays to sleep," said Aliza.

"Ah. Then the couch will do eminently well."

With his bundle of wool under one arm, he walked with her, back toward the heart of her palace, back toward Ice. Ahead of them, light grew in the ceilings, the floors, like sheets of cold flame, the familiar blue-white luminosity banishing the new rosiness of dawn, banishing the dark night and the strange stars.

Grad-ually the air about them grew warmer, though even in the room with the entry to Ice, it was never as stifling as it had been when the sun was high, it was only pleasant. The heat left over from the day, Cray real-ized, must have nearly all been used up in holding the cold of Ice at bay for a night; now, with the rising of the sun that heat would be replenished, and by midday these rooms would be too warm for human comfort once more. He wondered how well the system worked in winter, when the sun was low and cold and the days were short. He hoped Aliza would let him come back then and find out.

The mirrored door dissolved before them, revealing the steep, tunnel-like stairway that led down to the cloudy-walled room and the part of the palace that lay in Ice. They descended.

The room seemed smaller than ever to Cray, com-pared to the open, unfurnished spaces he had just come from. The child-sized furniture and the bins were still there, of course, crowding close to the nar-row aisle that connected the two doors. But this time Cray saw something else, something thattugged at his memory, something that made him pause while Aliza walked on. It was a boss on one of the walls, a projec-tion not much larger than his hand. It was one of a dozen such set a bit lower than the level of his shoul-ders at regular intervals along all six walls of the room. Apparently made of the same cloudy substance as the wall from which it protruded, the boss was a four-sided pyramid in shape, with apex toward the viewer and all sides marked by thin ribbons of copper running parallel to its base. The effect, for a person viewing oneof these objects straight on, was of a lozenge with copper strands repeating the lozenge shape five times concentrically. The mind flattened the protrusion, mak-ing the four triangular sides seem like the four quadrants of some bizarre coat of arms and the subtle differences in lighting from one facet to another repre-sent actual different shades of pale gray. This was what he had seen in the Mirror of Heart's Desire that first time, what-in that still and silent picture-he had not been able to make any other sense of. He had to smile at how completely his eyes had been fooled by the unfamiliar, by what he now perceived as just another manifestation of crystal in this so entirely crys-talline place.

Realizing that he was no longer following her, Aliza had stopped just beyond the next doorway. Now she came back into the room and looked at him inquir-ingly. "You've found something that interests you?"

He nodded. "This is the room you were in the first time I saw you in the mirror."

Her gaze swept the small room from one end to the other. "Yes, I suppose that would be the case. I spent most of my time here as a child. This is the cradle room."

Cray glanced at the child's bed, far too short for an adult but without any rockers that he could see.

"You threw the cradle out years ago, I suppose."

Her lips quirked. "No, there never was a cradle here; I was too old for such things by the time my grandfather apprenticed me. And I never throw anything out, as I think you can tell from all the rubbish that's in here. Look over in the corner and you can see the rocking horse I once rode." She gestured toward it. "No, I call this the cradle room becauseit was my cradle, back at the beginning, the very first room of the palace, the seed that Regneniel set in Ice, from which all the rest began to grow. It was quite cozy while I was very short. But it's been a long time since I was able to fit in that bed or that chair, and the table is just a trifle too low for comfortable eating these days."

"Why do you keep the walls cloudy?" asked Cray.

"I don't. That is their nature, the way Regneniel made them, and they can't be changed."

"But if this room was the seed, why is it so different from all the other rooms? How could these cloudy walls produce the perfectly transparent ones that are everywhere else?"

"Is the seed so like the plant that grows from it?" Aliza asked him.

"No, that's true enough."

"The cloudiness means nothing, structurally. It is merely an inclusion of air bubbles in the crystal ma-trix.

My grandfather had his demon make the walls like this because he thought the grandeur of Ice would be too disquieting for a child accustomed to the hu-man realm. This was the shelter he thought I would need, a place from which I could venture out and experience the sensations of infinite depth and infinite dark nothingness that are the true nature of Ice even though it is solid. A place to which I could retreat and find respite from that awesome experience." She shrugged. "Perhaps he allowed his own fears to govern him.I know that he finds the transparency of Ice ... disturbing. But I think he overestimated my un-easiness, for I found both Ice and this palace fascinat-ing. And yet, I did spend most of my childhood in this room."

She sat down on the lip of one of the translu-cent bins and let her fingers stray over the folds of fabric that filled it. Bed linen, Cray guessed that fabric to be, fine-woven but somewhat yellowed with age.

"Even when there were rooms aplenty waiting for me," Aliza said, "with some of the furniture you've already seen, chairs and cabinets and so on, I spent my time here. I felt comfortable here, everything I wanted was here. Look, there's my stuffed animal." She leaned over to the next bin and pulled it out from a jumble of small wooden cubes, rods, and pyramids. It was more bedraggled than Cray had ever seen it, and just as difficult to put a name to. It could have been a dog, a lamb, a horse, or one of the animals he had watched from Regneniel's feathered back, or it could have been none of them. Its neck was long, but not very long, its legs were short, but not extremely short, and its ears were tattered.

Aliza dropped it into her lap and rested one hand on it as she spoke. "And this room is special in another way, of course, for you can't get to the other side of the palace, the one in the human realm, without passing through it. This is the crossroads of the building, the heart of the building." She stroked the stuffed animal absently, without looking down at it. "I don't come here very often. I'm not a child anymore."

And then, as if suddenly realizing what her hand was doing, she stiffened and, grasping the stuffed toy firmly, thrust it back where it had come from. But even as she pulled her hand away from it, she hesitated, and her fingers brushed other objects in the bin. "Toys," she said, touching a perforated wooden cube here, a slen-der wooden rod there. "My grandfather was always giving me toys that could be used for building. Geo-metrical shapes at first, and then later pillars, lintels, arches. I built many a wooden castle right here on this floor. And when I tired of that, I'd duplicate the pieces in crystal and build castles of that. I became quite a good architect. He always praised me for that, almost as much as he praised me for my studies. He said every sorcerer should know how to build." She found a wooden archway no larger than her index finger and cradled it in the palm of her hand. "Of course, now I can raise an entire castle from the soil of the human realm without ever touching it, without ever stacking one block on top of another. Turrets, battlements, even a portcullis made entirely of crys-tal." She dropped the miniature arch back among the other toys.

"It's a great skill," said Cray. "Most sorcerers have to command demons to build their castles, or even human masons."

She looked up at him. "Spinweb, your mother's castle-in which fashion was it constructed?"

"Neither. Spiders built it for the first Ormoru, back when the world was young. They quarried the stone and dragged it to the site and piled it up block upon block until it stood as it stands today."

"Spiders?" said Aliza. "How could such tiny crea-tures build a castle of stone?"

He smiled at her. "Don't underestimate the strength of ten thousand spiders working together."

"Ten thousand!"

"Or more. In such numbers, they move in a thick carpet, and the heaviest boulder is nothing to them. All they need is time, and they can raise whatever castle their master may require." Dropping his bundle of wool to the floor, he sat down on the lip of the bin that held the toy building materials. "Would you like to see the kind of castle ten thousand spiders can build? I'm sure my mother would be pleased to have you visit. It's a large and airy place, and as unlike this palace as any structure I could imagine. We don't serve Maretian wine there, but I think we have one or two you might enjoy." "No," she said, shaking her head firmly. "I have my studies. I could never go as far as Spinweb, I could never spare the time."

"But there is so much that my mother and I could show you there," Cray said. "Her tower room, where she weaves spells into cloth. My workshop, where I smelt sorcerous metal, and the garden, where I blend that metal with living things. And more, much more."

She looked at him long and hard, her cool dark eyes narrow, as if she could see into him somehow, with only her ordinary senses. Her right hand slipped from her lap to the linen fabric in the bin, and she gripped a fold of it between her fingers and worked them, up and back, up and back, against that finely-textured surface. At last she said, "You have made me think, Cray Ormoru. You have come boldly into my life and shown me that what lies beyond these walls is not, after all, completely without interest for me. I admit that I found your tales of training for knighthood to be diverting, and I admit that perhaps it has been shortsighted of me to reject the human realm so thor-oughly. Yet for now I have my studies, and a master to answer to, and I must choose carefully how to spend my time. Spinweb is far away, and if I did go there the visit would keep me long. Too long. I must return to my work. You were an apprentice-you know how short-tempered a master can be with a dawdler."

"He can't punish you, surely; he can't even reach you, not with the spell on the sand and Ice all around you. Not now that you control the demon."

"His anger and his disappointment in me have always been punishment enough," said Aliza. She smiled slightly at the surprised expression on Cray's face. "Yes, I've disappointed him before through dawdling, though not lately. I don't want to do it again. I want him to be proud of me. Surely you can understand that. You must have wanted your mother to be proud of you."

"I was a willful child," Cray said. "Her pride was less important to me than my own. But I think I understand your attitude. Still, don't reject my invita-tion out of hand. Think about it. I'll leave it open until you're ready to accept it. And meanwhile ... " He leaned a little toward her. "I hope you'll let me come here another time and visit you."

She dropped her cool eyes. "Yes. Another time." A moment later she rose suddenly from the rim of the bin. "I'm very tired, Cray Ormoru. I'll lead you to your sleeping place now."

He nodded. But before he stood and gathered up his bundle of wool, he selected a rod as long as his hand and a perforated cube the size of his fist from the bin of toys. "Would you mind if I borrowed these for a little time?"

She cast him a puzzled glance. "What do you want them for?"

"Just to amuse myself with till I fall asleep." Aliza shrugged. "If you wish."

In the room of the tapestry, she turned the walls to mirrors and dimmed all the lights save for a glow, equal to a brace of candles, over one end of the couch. "You'll need this much light for your ...

amusement, won't you?" Her expression was still puzzled.

"Do you want to watch?" asked Cray.

"Watch what?" "Watch now." He fitted the rod tightly into one of the cube's perforations. "I hope you don't mind if I spoil this. I didn't think you'd be using it for anything in the future."

"Do as you will," said Aliza, her eyes on his hands.

With his knife, he cut a deep notch in the end of the rod opposite the cube. Then he opened the bundle of wool and pulled loose a generous handful, which he slung over his shoulder like some airy pelt.

Teasing a small amount of this half free of the mass, he twisted it into a string almost as long as his forearm and slipped the free end securely into the notch. Then, passing the string over one finger and letting the cube-weighted rod hang in mid-air by short tether, he gave the wooden contrivance a spin with his free hand. The rod twirled like a top, and as it did so, he began to pull more wool partly free of the mass on his shoulder; the wool twisted as he fed it out, and the rod dropped lower and lower, pulling the wool into a longer and longer thread. When the rod reached the floor, Cray paused, wound the new-made thread onto it, secured the last of the twisted part to the notch, and began again. "You're spinning yarn," Aliza said.

"The most ancient form of spinning," Cray replied. "My mother taught it to me when I was a child, more as a game than for any real production of thread. But it does have one advantage over the wheel-one can walk about while doing it." He strolled slowly around the ebony table. "I find it relaxing. After a day of working with metal I sometimes spin."

"Can't you do it by sorcery?"

"I could. But it wouldn't be much faster. And it wouldn't be relaxing."

"Very well," said Aliza. "I'll leave you to your relaxation. You'll be able to sleep with this much light?"

"Without difficulty, my lady."

She turned to go.

"One more thing, though," Cray called after her. She hesitated, looking back over her shoulder. "Please don't lock me in this time."

"It was for your own good,"she said. "To keep you from wandering about the palace alone and perhaps becoming lost. I know how confusing all these rooms must be to you. Even my grandfather has trouble finding his way around without me."

"I won't leave this room, except to visit the bathing chamber."

"Then I'll close off all but the passage between here and there."

"No. Please. I won't wander around."

"Then what difference will it make to you?"

"It will make a difference," he said. "Here." He tapped his chest, his heart. "It will make me think that you trust me."

She was silent a long moment, looking at him with those cool dark eyes, without any expression at all on her face, as if he were a book open to two blank pages. Then she said, "Very well." And she left. Verysoon the spindle was full, the wool on his shoulder was gone, and Cray judged that he had enough yarn for his real purpose. Cutting the thread into a score of equal lengths, he dropped them to the floor and directed them to stretch out there, all neatly par-allel, and begin to knot themselves in a complex pattern of linked lozenge shapes. Once they were well started, he lay down on the couch and went to sleep.

He awoke to bright light-the usual level of illumi-nation within the palace-and the sound of Aliza's voice.

"Your demons are here." She stood in the doorway she had left open. She wore a fresh dress, rose-colored velvet this time, and the color seemed to bring a flush to her cheeks that Cray had not noticed before.

"Good morning," he said. "I presume it is morning."

"I don't know. Does it matter?"

"No, not at all." He yawned and stretched his arms and sat up. The woolen ribbon, completed while he slept, lay on the floor at the foot of the couch, coiled like a serpent. He picked it up and examined it for flaws, expecting to find none, finding none. Its finished length exceeded that of his arm. He stood up. "I thought I might give you something before I go."

"I told your demons you'd be having breakfast before you left. You do want something to eat, don't you?"

"That's very kind of you, my lady." He walked toward her, holding the ribbon out in one hand, its two ends trailing from his fingers. "This is for you. I made it last night. From the thread you saw me spinning."

She looked at his offering, the slightest of frowns marring her brow. "What is it?"

"A ribbon to tie back your hair. Surely there must be times when you do tie it back."

She looked up at his face. "Yes, I suppose there are. When I bathe. Yes."

"A good practical time to use a hair ribbon. You might also want it when you cook."

"I don't cook," she said.

"Well, you might, someday."