making singing roses, clockwork dragonflies, glass slippers, and other novelties for their Maglore masters. In Tarnburghâs great libraries and universities, the scholarly Grants and Wrynecks, bowed and ink-stained after centuries of study, drew elaborate star charts and leafed through ponderous old books on history, genealogy, and etiquetteâfor it was a characteristic of the long-lived races in those days that they delighted to look upward and inward, sideways and backward, but rarely more than a week or two forward in time .
But the beautiful Maglore in their mansions and palaces had little to do but amuse themselves, for tens of centuries had passed since they first created the intricate jeweled devices on which their power and their Empire rested. So they dreamed up endless tiny variations on spells they already knew by heart, became fanatic patrons of all the arts, and devoted themselves to those most elegant civilized pastimes: court intrigue, lovemaking, and delicate cruelty .
But when Mankind became restless, when they began to see the possibility of something more than poor rations, hard labor, and ignoranceâwhen Men throughout the Empire first sought that knowledge of lives and fates, time and the universe, which the Maglore had denied themâwhen at last they took arms against the Goblin races, overthrew the universities and slaughtered the ancient scholars, herded the inoffensive Padfoots and Ouphs? into the poorest parts of the cities and forced them to live ever afterward in damp cellars, drafty attics, and dingy small tenementsâwhen, armed with fire and salt, Mankind carried the battle against the Maglore into every city, village, and town, and vowed not to be satisfied with anything less than total exterminationâwhen Men remade the world according to a new and better pattern, when some cities faded and others appeared out of nowhereâTarnburgh, like Hawkesbridge, endured .
Naturally, she underwent changes. For all their outward similarities, Men differ greatly from Maglore: numbers and measurements fascinate them, and they love what is useful as well as beautiful. So the city of portrait-painters, dancing masters, courtiers, astrologers, and toymakers became instead a city of clerks and notaries, lens-grinders, cartographers, inn-keepers, tailors, and bookbinders .
The Maglore, meanwhile, gone but not precisely forgotten, had entered into legend, the heroes and (more often) the villains of a thousand fantastic tales: as false black knights and scheming queens, wicked stepmothers, magical godmothers, and the like. And some indefinable hint of their presence still lingered in Tarnburgh, lending that city of fine old buildings and curious small shops an indefinable air, suggesting the kind of place where any sort of marvelous unexpected thing might happen .
4
Tarnburgh, WinterscarâThirteen Months Earlier
29 Frimair (Midwinterâs Eve) 6536
T he palace was ablaze with light. From the latticed window of an attic room two miles distant, Ys could not actually see Lindenhoff, but she had passed the palace five days earlier on her way into Tarnburgh, and given the golden glow she could see on the north side of town, over the dark irregular roofline of the intervening shops and houses, it was easy to picture how enchanting King Jarredâs elegant white-and-gold jewel-box of a castle must look with the torches all lit.
The girl shivered and folded her arms across her chest. A square-necked grey taffeta gown, cut low across the bosom, with full skirts held stiffly out from her body by a set of baleen hoops, offered scant protection against the damps and drafts of this garret in the Goblin Quarter. But it was anticipation quite as much as the bitter cold of winter that nearly froze her already chilly blood.
She thought of the months just past, the long weeks of planning and scheming; she thought of the difficult years before that, the times when she had even lost faith in
But the beautiful Maglore in their mansions and palaces had little to do but amuse themselves, for tens of centuries had passed since they first created the intricate jeweled devices on which their power and their Empire rested. So they dreamed up endless tiny variations on spells they already knew by heart, became fanatic patrons of all the arts, and devoted themselves to those most elegant civilized pastimes: court intrigue, lovemaking, and delicate cruelty .
But when Mankind became restless, when they began to see the possibility of something more than poor rations, hard labor, and ignoranceâwhen Men throughout the Empire first sought that knowledge of lives and fates, time and the universe, which the Maglore had denied themâwhen at last they took arms against the Goblin races, overthrew the universities and slaughtered the ancient scholars, herded the inoffensive Padfoots and Ouphs? into the poorest parts of the cities and forced them to live ever afterward in damp cellars, drafty attics, and dingy small tenementsâwhen, armed with fire and salt, Mankind carried the battle against the Maglore into every city, village, and town, and vowed not to be satisfied with anything less than total exterminationâwhen Men remade the world according to a new and better pattern, when some cities faded and others appeared out of nowhereâTarnburgh, like Hawkesbridge, endured .
Naturally, she underwent changes. For all their outward similarities, Men differ greatly from Maglore: numbers and measurements fascinate them, and they love what is useful as well as beautiful. So the city of portrait-painters, dancing masters, courtiers, astrologers, and toymakers became instead a city of clerks and notaries, lens-grinders, cartographers, inn-keepers, tailors, and bookbinders .
The Maglore, meanwhile, gone but not precisely forgotten, had entered into legend, the heroes and (more often) the villains of a thousand fantastic tales: as false black knights and scheming queens, wicked stepmothers, magical godmothers, and the like. And some indefinable hint of their presence still lingered in Tarnburgh, lending that city of fine old buildings and curious small shops an indefinable air, suggesting the kind of place where any sort of marvelous unexpected thing might happen .
4
Tarnburgh, WinterscarâThirteen Months Earlier
29 Frimair (Midwinterâs Eve) 6536
T he palace was ablaze with light. From the latticed window of an attic room two miles distant, Ys could not actually see Lindenhoff, but she had passed the palace five days earlier on her way into Tarnburgh, and given the golden glow she could see on the north side of town, over the dark irregular roofline of the intervening shops and houses, it was easy to picture how enchanting King Jarredâs elegant white-and-gold jewel-box of a castle must look with the torches all lit.
The girl shivered and folded her arms across her chest. A square-necked grey taffeta gown, cut low across the bosom, with full skirts held stiffly out from her body by a set of baleen hoops, offered scant protection against the damps and drafts of this garret in the Goblin Quarter. But it was anticipation quite as much as the bitter cold of winter that nearly froze her already chilly blood.
She thought of the months just past, the long weeks of planning and scheming; she thought of the difficult years before that, the times when she had even lost faith in
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