“Remind me—” Her sister’s answering whisper seemed incredulous. “No! What place could possibly be like this?”
“Not like. Just… you know… not similar, but in sympathy?” Nemienne didn’t know how to express what she meant, and stopped. Without opening her eyes, she turned toward her sister. There was a faint greenish light that trailed out behind Karah and wavered away into the dark. It did not precisely illuminate a path, but perhaps, Nemienne thought, the echo of a path. She stepped sideways through the dark after that rippling light, drawing her sister after her into the echo of some other place, she did not know quite where… Karah made a surprised sound, but let herself be tugged along.
Nemienne’s foot came jarringly down on a surface that was not the stone of the cavern floor. She found gritty, dusty stone under her palm, in a tight-cramped space that pressed her down to her hands and knees. She would have lost her grip on Karah’s hand, except that her sister also clung tightly. The air in this place was nothing like the chill damp air of the dragon’s cavern. This place, whatever it was, smelled of ash and unfamiliar musky incense and, most strangely, flowers. Nemienne coughed. Ash rose around her, chokingly. She coughed again and couldn’t stop.
Then a voice exclaimed, and a strong, slim hand closed around hers, and Nemienne was dragged forward, hard. She crawled into a strange room. There was something strange about that grip as well, but Nemienne did not have time to consider what this oddness might be before she was released again. She was coughing, and her eyes were tearing, but there was suddenly space and air and light. Karah crowded forward after her, also coughing, their hands still linked. Nemienne, frightened despite herself, was glad her sister was with her in this… Where were they?
“What is this?” exclaimed the voice, and Nemienne blinked her sight clear and found herself on her knees, on the wide hearth of a great fireplace, in an unfamiliar chamber. She was facing a stern-faced young woman about Ananda’s age.
The room was a bedchamber, plain but painstakingly neat. The bed was narrow; in fact, the chamber itself was narrow and small. The coverlet on the bed, a good heavy one, was a rich blue, but dyed unevenly so that the blue was streaked all down one side. There was a slim vase on a small table at the foot of the bed, which held in this season only a few plumes of dried grass. There was no ornament in the room but this single vase.
A single long window was placed high on one side, beneath a slanting ceiling. Morning light came in through the window, rose and gold. It was later than Nemienne had thought—breakfast time, at least. Her heart sank. Mage Ankennes would certainly realize she had gone before she could get back. She didn’t exactly think he would be angry, but she also didn’t look forward to explaining that she had got herself lost beneath the mountain again. Well, at least this time she could say truthfully that she hadn’t deliberately gone through any doors into the dark.
Nemienne hoped Karah wasn’t in trouble. The young woman who had helped her clamber out of the fireplace looked angry. She was as austere as the room. She wore a plain overrobe of slate gray over an underrobe of a yellow so pale it was almost cream. Her hair, quite straight, had been put back into a severe knot at the back of her long neck. The comb that held the knot in place was not much of an adornment; it was a simple dark brown that almost vanished against the color of the hair itself. The woman’s eyes were a dark storm gray, their expression reserved. Her strong mouth was set in an unamused line.
Then it relaxed in astonishment. “Karah?” the woman said.
Karah said, in a voice only a little choked with ash and bewilderment, “Leilis? But—” and stopped again.
Nemienne said, “Oh, is this Cloisonné House, then?” That explained the scents of incense and flowers. The ash was self-explanatory. She began to make movements toward getting up off her knees, though she felt oddly insecure in her balance. Perhaps being dragged forcibly from a hidden cavern and back into the ordinary world of men through a fireplace was inherently unsettling. Why a fireplace, anyway? Though at that the taste of ashes in her mouth was a little like the taste of shadows and limestone…
Leilis did not offer a hand up. Instead, the young woman stood with her arms crossed over her chest and looked, to Nemienne, to be growing ever more severe. She said to Karah, “Rue told me you’d vanished again. This time I was half minded not to help her look for you—I thought Lily had lured you out again, and was once not enough? But I did. Only this time, neither of us could find you. Did you slip out to find your sister? You never should, not without permission; you may be new to the flower life, but you should know that.”