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“The gate closes?”

“Every sundown. Now let me do your hair.”

She brushes it dry and pins it up loosely. She leaves the right side of my face uncovered. I don’t ask her to change it. Then she takes my hand and leads me down the stairs.

Callum waits at the bottom. He isn’t wearing the black cloak from the road anymore. He’s in long ceremonial robes of white and gold, and the gold harp is pinned at his collar among heavy chains, jeweled ornaments, and pieces I don’t recognize – medallions and pendants that look holy rather than rich. He wears a ring on nearly every finger. He’s dressed the way a priest dresses for a great feast day.

He offers me his arm, and I take it.

“Did you sleep well?” he asks, his face turned to me so I can read his lips.

“I did. Thank you.”

He leads me outside. The streets are full of people and full of light. Lamps burn in every window, torches burn on posts along the avenue, and the smell of burning oil and wood reaches me on the steps. I stiffen at it on the top step, but I make myself walk on, hoping Callum didn’t notice. People stand along both sides of the street, and there are more of them at every corner as Callum walks me toward the center of the city.

We come into a great square, and beyond the square there’s a building.

It’s enormous. Its front rises higher than the houses around it. I can also tell it’s in ruin. Weathered statues stand in rows along the upper ledges, holding instruments in their stone hands – a lyre with no strings, a horn broken off at the bell, a violin with its neck snapped. Newer stone has been fitted into the lower walls, paler than the old, patching the doorway and the pillars. Above the second story, the walls stop in jagged edges, and the night sky shows through where the roof should be. Even broken, it’s grand. I know what it used to be, because I sang in a house built for the same purpose.

The people in the square are singing. I realize that’s what they’re doing when I notice they’re opening and closing their mouths in unison, their chests rising and falling in the same rhythm. I try to read the words, but I can’t make sense of them. The shapes repeat, but I still can’t catch a single one. Maybe they’re not singing in a language I know, or it’s simply that the light from the lamps and torches is too diffuse for my eyes to focus.

Then the strangest thing happens. The people nearest us go down on their knees, and the ones behind them follow, row after row as we walk, until every person I can see is kneeling. I look up at Callum, but he looks straight ahead with his face calm.

We climb the steps and pass through the doorway into the hall.

It was an auditorium once. The private boxes still line the walls in curved tiers, but their railings have been hung with cloth and set with candles and small figures. They look like chapels raised into the air. The seats are gone from the floor. The old stage stands at the far end under a great many lamps, and I can see it’s been built up into an altar, draped, stepped, and crowded with offerings.

I pull on Callum’s arm until he turns to me.

“What is this place?” I ask. I can’t tell if my voice is shaking, but it probably is.

“This is the House of Voices, and it is your new home.”

I don’t understand him. Because his house is my home. Isn’t it? He told me he’d take me to my new home in Nivallia, and he did. I slept there.

I keep my hand on his arm because I don’t know what else to do. I let him walk me down the length of the hall toward the stage, where several men and women in robes stand waiting.

We’re almost there when I see the pit.

The orchestra pit has fallen in. Where the musicians should sit, there’s an opening in the floor, and a gilded grille surrounds it, taller than my head. Its door stands open, and inside the grille there’s a platform of iron, held on rails. Past the edge of the platform there’s nothing, only a drop that the lamps don’t reach the bottom of.

There is a cage on the platform.

I let go of Callum’s arm and step back. He catches my arm above the elbow, and his fingers close hard enough to hurt.

He pushes me toward the cage.

Chapter Five

Mordred

Far above the lake, the counterweight drops and the pulleys begin to turn. I lift my head to listen.

The city should be asleep by now. There was a ceremony in the ruins earlier. I heard it from all the way here, as I hear all of them – the sounds of many feet and voices coming down through the passages and shafts to the water. I thought nothing of it. The people of Nivallia hold their ceremonies often, and in the past six months, they’ve held them more often still. The platform never comes down this late.

I hear everything that moves up there – a door in the backstage corridors, a step on the stairs to the boxes, a loose stone rolling in the caves under the stage. Each sound comes to me through the passages and across the water, and I know where it started and how far whoever made it would have to come before they reached me. That is how I’ve stayed out of sight for as long as I’ve been here. No one has ever come close without my knowing long before they did. The people of Nivallia began calling the ruins the House of Voices about fifty years ago. They know I’m under it. They have never seen me clearly.

I turn to Prima’s chair by the fire. We’ve been sitting in companiable silence for a few hours.