“Uncle!” I cried as I dismounted. “Greetings!”

Gryll stretched and shook himself as Suhuy rushed forward and embraced me carefully.

“Merlin,” he said at last, “welcome home. I regret the occasion but rejoice in your presence. Gryll has told you…?”

“Of the passing of His Highness? Yes. I’m sorry.”

He released me and stepped back a pace.

“It is not as if it were unanticipated,” he said. “Just the opposite. Too much so, in fact. Yet there is no proper time for such an event.”

“True,” I replied, massaging a certain stiffness out of my left shoulder and groping in my hip pocket after a comb.

“And he had been ailing for so long that I had grown used to it,” I said. “It was almost as if he’d come to terms with the weakness.”

Suhuy nodded. Then, “Are you going to transform?” he asked.

“It’s been a rough day,” I told him. “I’d as soon save my energy, unless there’s some demand of protocol.”

“None at all, just now,” he replied. “Have you eaten?”

“Not recently.”

“Come then,” he said. “Let’s find you some nourishment.”

He turned and walked toward the far wall. I followed him. There were no doors in the room, and he had to know all the local Shadow stress points, the Courts being opposite to Amber in this regard. While it’s awfully hard to pass through Shadow in Amber, the shadows are like frayed curtains in the Courts — often, you can look right through into another reality without even trying. And, sometimes, something in the other reality may be looking at you. Care must be taken, too, not to step through into a place where you will find yourself in the middle of the air, underwater, or in the path of a raging torrent. The Courts were never big on tourism.