The voynix trotted effortlessly, pulling the carriole with only the gravel-hiss underped and the soft humming of ancient gyroscopes in the carriage body. Shadows crept across the valley, but the narrow lane went up over a ridge, caught the last bit of the sun—bisected as it was on the next ridge west—and then descended into a wider valley where fields of some low crop stretched out on either side. The tending servitors flitted above the field, Daeman thought, like so many levitating croquet balls.

The road turned south—left to Daeman—crossed a river on a wooden covered bridge and then switchbacked up a steeper hill and entered an older forest. Daeman vaguely remembered hunting for butterflies in that ancient forest ten years ago, later on the day he had seen young Ada nude in the mirror. He remembered his excitement at collecting a rare breed of mourning cloak near a waterfall, the memory mingling with the excitement at seeing the girl’s pale flesh and black hair. He remembered now the look Ada’s reflection had given him when the pale face looked up from her ablutions—disinterested, neither pleased nor angry, immodest but not brazen, vaguely clinical—looking at twenty-seven-year-old Daeman frozen by lust in the hallway much the way Daeman himself had studied his captured mourning cloak.

The carriole was nearing Ardis Hall. It was dark under the ancient oaks and elms and ash trees nearing the top of the hill, but yellow lanterns had been set along the roadway and lines of colored lanterns could be glimpsed in the primeval forest, perhaps outlining trails.

The voynix padded out of the woods and a twilight view opened up: Ardis Hall glowing on its hilltop; white gravel paths and roads winding away from it in every direction; the long, grassy sward extending down from the manor house for more than a quarter mile before the greenway was blocked by another forest; the river beyond, still glowing, reflecting the dying light in the sky; and through a gap in the hills to the southwest, glimpses of more forested hills—black, devoid of lights—and then more hills beyond that, until the black ridges blended with dark clouds on the horizon.