I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Family,” Suhuy said, “intrigues and maddens. You are feeling the tyranny of affection at the moment, are you not?”

I nodded.

“Something Mark Twain said about being able to choose your friends but not your relatives,” I answered.

“I do not know what they are up to, though I have my suspicions,” he said. “There is nothing to do now but rest and wait. I would like to hear more of your story.”

“Thanks, Uncle. Yeah,” I said. “Why not?”

So I gave him all the rest of my tale. Partway through it, we adjourned to the kitchen for further sustenance, then took another way to a floating balcony above a lime-colored ocean breaking upon pink rocks and beaches under a twilit or otherwise indigo sky without stars. There, I finished my telling.

“This is more than a little interesting,” he said, at last.

“Oh? Do you see something in it all that I don’t?” I asked.

“You’ve given me too much to consider for me to give you a hasty judgment,” he said. “Let us leave it at that for now.”

“Very well.”

I leaned on the rail, looked down at the waters.

“You need rest,” he said after a time.

“I guess I do.”

“Come, I’ll show you to your room.”

He extended a hand and I took hold of it. Together, we sank through the floor.

And so I slept, surrounded by tapestries and heavy drapes, in a doorless chamber in the Ways of Suhuy. It might have been in a tower, as I could hear the winds passing beyond the walls. Sleeping, I dreamt…

I was back in the castle Amber, walking the sparkling length of the Corridor of Mirrors. Tapers flickered in tall holders. My footsteps made no sound. The mirrors came in all manner of shapes. They covered the walls at either hand, big ones, little ones. I passed myself within their depths, reflected, distorted, sometimes re-reflected…