He could always find her in the stone room in the forgotten part of the old Library. It was near the forest, and kept clean by the staff out of habit more than necessity. He knew she would be there, but he checked her office and her study and her living quarters before heading off down the dark path to the woods.

She was standing over a work table. Worry aged her face, each line appearing extended and deepened in the stingy lamplight. Shock made her features younger, momentarily.

"Back again, I see," said the Headmistress after she recovered, expertly wrapping the subtle quaver of her voice in a block of ice. Her lips were a thin line of stern reprimand, and she crossed the floor quietly, her boots tapping on the stone floor, turning her back to him. Expertly tailored robes traced a line up her spinal column and fluttered around her ankles. She was all efficiency, all poise and office, silvery and lovely as she reached for another leather-bound tome.

He gripped the table by its sides. "I told you I would be."

"I had stopped taking your word for it some time ago, Professor Devlin, as did your students and colleagues," she responded with a gentle snap. "I don't suppose there's any point in inquiring as to your whereabouts for the past few weeks, not for politeness' sake nor for posterity's."

Devlin didn't respond. He glanced down at his galdori clothes. They showed his age - patterns from twenty years ago, thin and anxious fabrics he had washed with care so that they would last. Nicer in any case than his human clothes, which he had burned.

"I haven't the time to discuss it," she added hastily, as though he had insisted on telling her every detail of his trip. "I've far too much to deal with already, and I don't fancy playing a mind game without a solution..."

"Trouble in paradise?" he asked, and the healed wound on his ribs seared as he remembered Emme's face.

She turned around and slapped a three-volume collection of atlases onto the table, which shook and threatened to crumble to dust under the weight. "The hatchers in the western territories have left. Gone. Migrated, I suppose. They're saying the city of Anhau is reachable by land, that some have done it, wicks. It came out that some of the Vienda officials were trying to sow discord between the Yellow Eye and Red Crow."

Devlin did his best to look baffled.

"Two of the large tribes," she explained. "Anyway, it was a childish conspiracy, one that was bound to come to light. This talk of Anhau, of re-establishing the old ways...the government is all afroth with fear. They're angry we meddled in their affairs. The inhabitants of Anhau..."

"Inhabitants? There are still people there?" He redoubled his efforts to look surprise, and it fooled her; she nodded.

"Oh yes," she said. "A few thousand, if these reports are correct...we have a source in the Yellow Eye, you see..."

She was talking about the government's fears, how she had spent all week quelling and calming them in meetings and lectures and speeches, how she had to travel to Vienda to meet with the sickly queen, but he was barely listening beyond the low-level note-taking his brain always did when he was otherwise occupied. An informant among the Yellow Eye.

"And it's been a real mess," she admitted, her shoulders drooping like a weary student frustrated with an unsolvable problem. His emotions felt like a contradiction. He forced out the question:

"The Queen requested you visit?"

"The Seventen, actually," she said, and if she thought it was odd that he was inquiring she didn't mention it or let on. "They're trying to put a whole swath of new laws on the books now, after that gaol debacle...or did you hear about that?"

He looked at her blankly.

"Where have you been?" she demanded, trying to catch him off guard.

"Muluku Islands," he responded promptly. Possibly too promptly - she lofted an eyebrow. "I had to sell the Crane."

"Sell it?" She looked sharply at him. "Why would you sell your ship?"

"Why does the Queen need you to be there personally?" he persisted. "Surely they know the lawmaking system by heart now...it's been a few centuries, after all!"

"These laws are invasive to galdori privacy, which is why I'm objecting - you love that ship, Castor, why would you ever get rid of it?"

He felt like he had been whipped raw when she called him by his first name. "I needed the money."

"Great goddess, none of that makes a bit of sense. You practically abandon your position here, which doesn't pay too poorly I might add, forgetting your stipend..."

"Without tenure there's no point in my teaching."

"As if I'd ever condemn you for a topic of discussion-"

He lowered his voice. "It's not you I'm worried about. The Chairs are champing at the bit to remove me for heresy. Harper has been feeling the same pressures."

It felt odd to talk about school matters, ordinary and dull, something that felt foreign in his mind like a half-remembered dream. Days ago he had been dying in a strange land, surrounded by enemies, fearing for the lives of his friends and his countrymen.

"And beyond that, I'm losing my touch," he said grimly, managing a self-deprecating half smile. "I told a young man that Louis Devonchild was a brilliant man who should be emulated. I confused him with-"

"Louis Dreyfus King, who discovered the seismonic force equation," recited Ophelia.

"Right, and Devonchild was convicted on charge of ritual abuse in '34. Part of that 'end of all times' cult."

Ophelia smiled at him, and it was like a sweet gift that he coveted madly but had to return to the shop anyway. He looked down at his boots again.

"I didn't half mind that ship," she said softly, moving imperceptibly closer. "Once you got up in the air, it wasn't all that bad. It felt like being free."

"You were scared," he muttered. He could count her eyelashes.

"No one really wants to be free," she reasoned. "Partial freedom, the kind that allows you to choose your clothes and your habits and what you eat and where you work and how many children you have, yes, that's nice. But the real thing? It's too difficult for most people. They will latch on to anyone and anything that promises them their freedom, as long as it won't actually be granted. Freedom means being alone."

She leveled with him, her brown eyes searching his grey ones for a scrap of insincerity.

"You believe that?" he asked, his voice quiet.

"Are you free, Castor?"

Was it nothing at all? Was he interpreting smoke signals from a burning building, or was she closer than usual, calmer, less filled with annoyance and worry and anger? Was her field radiating like the head from an ember, close to her body and subtle - would his skin boil before he touched her? These sensations might be the random coordinations of the mona, like ripples or wrinkles, no more significant than reflections in a witch's fortune-orb.

"As free as I want to be, for now," he replied, hating himself. Jon Serro would require a sacrifice, something to tame his rage for the loss of Emme Anders. He would have to return to Vienda, prodigal and disappointing, for a lashing he would have found insulting thirty years ago, let alone at his age; he would leave the comfortable confines of the Headmistress' protection and enter the forest once more, prickly and prepared for anything. Everything would go back to the way it was. Nothing that had happened was significant.

"But enough about me," he said, brushing away the fog of quiet and tenderness. "What could possibly be so important as to require your absence from Brunnhold? Rude bureaucrats assuming they own your time, again, is it?"

He was flattering her, and it felt like he was stabbing her; her trusting smile was like a death mask.

(( Comments welcome! Please comment in OOC format. ))