"This is ridiculous."

"Honestly, Uachi of the North." Diarmán looked up at the wall of alcoves in Padréc's aviary, his hands on his hips. He was shatteringly lovely, the lines of his figure limned by the golden sun slanting in through the open window, stray curls framing his face.

How had Uachi ever seen this man without being halted in his tracks by his beauty? A world in which he had not loved Diarmán seemed impossible.

"Honestly what?" he asked, blinking away the haze of distraction.

"That you should think this ridiculous, when you've weathered more and worse in my company. We've turned princesses into cats and back again, my sweet—this is nothing."

"That isn't what I mean." Uachi shook his head, tearing his eyes away from Diarmán. He swept his gaze over the wall of alcoves, locked grille after locked grille, behind which huddled hundreds of frightened pheasants. They had been locked in this tower for nearly a week. A week during which Uachi had marveled at the strangely liminal atmosphere in House Eldran. A week during which he had spent little and less time with Diarmán, who spent much and more with his father.

"He means the wedding." Padréc was standing against the wall, his arms crossed. He had never looked so grim. He was not a somber man, but one would think he was prepared to attend a hanging, judging from the shadows in his eyes. "This isn't right, Di, and you know it."

"I know nothing of the sort." Diarmán scoffed. "It isn't as if it's a prison or a curse. 'Tis an offer, as any marriage proposal is."

"As his proposal to our mother was? Because—"

"That's in the past." Diarmán's voice was uncharacteristically flat. "Father has promised Mother her freedom, and now he is offering a noblewoman his hand in marriage. The same thing happens every turn of the moon in Narr, and it's celebrated. She is free to accept him or decline him."

Freedom. It was such a precious and fragile thing. When Ealin had kissed Uachi in the darkness of his bedchamber below the Imperial Palace, had she been free?

Had he?

Had his friends, Matei and Mhera, been free to refuse the yokes thrust upon them—yokes in the shape of royal circlets?

When Uachi had been a boy, he could have refused his mistress's advances. He'd been free to say no, at a great and terrible cost.

What, then, was freedom? Choices were never a knot in a single thread; they were a tug on a thread wrapped and knotted around dozens of other threads, an intricate network of influence and impact. Uachi did not believe that the noblewoman who would be blessed with Han Taín's proposal would feel as free as Diarmán seemed to think she would.

"It would be better to return all of these people to their homes," he said. "If he wishes to marry, let him court and woo as noblemen do every turning of the moon, to your point."

Diarmán waved his hand. "And waste time."

"What time will be wasted?" Padréc asked. "Look at him. Father has not aged a day since last we saw him. What time will he lose? He must—"

A footfall sounded at the top of the stairway. Han Taín stepped into the aviary, dressed in a snowy linen tunic. It was embroidered at the throat and wrist with a pattern that echoed the shape of a bird in the sky. His breeches were an impossible shade of deep blue. Despite himself, Uachi stepped back as Han Taín entered; his very presence crowded the room.

"I must what?" Han Taín asked, smiling at Padréc. It was an expression of interest, lightly amused, and yet his gaze was sharp.

Padréc looked back at his father. Something had shifted in his bearing, as if a part of him had withdrawn, shrinking back from the outsized presence of his father.

"Well? I suppose all of you have become used to giving orders—little lordlings all. Tell me."

"He is concerned for you, Father," said Diarmán. "You know what is said about men who marry in haste."

Han Taín laughed, throwing his head back. In that moment, he might have been his eldest son, so much did the gesture resemble Diarmán's amusement. "Oh, my son—you must not worry. I fell in love with your lady mother with one fated glance. You might think that impulsive, but look what good fortune was brought upon me. Whichever lady I choose, you may be assured I do not make any decision lightly."

Perhaps Han Taín felt that his bond with Lady Moigré had been good fortune. Uachi wondered if the lady would have the same opinion. He did not doubt that she loved her sons, but had she had the choice on that day, long ago, between her liberty and seven children yet unborn, he suspected she might have kept her freedom.

Padréc had lowered his eyes. "At least wait elsewhere, and let us call Brente to help them."

"Whatever for? Do you think they'll have forgotten how to walk?" Han Taín asked.

A muscle twitched in Padréc's cheek. "To help them dress," he said, his words slow and flat.

Unease crept down the back of Uachi's throat, coiling in his belly. When Han Taín had ensorcelled the castle's guests, they had slipped right out of their clothes. Until now, he had not thought of this particular difficulty. He remembered Uarria's transformation: she had come back to human form as naked as the day she had entered the world.

But she was a child and had been wrapped immediately in her father's arms. These were women—and men—surrounded by strangers, and there was a speculative gleam in Han Taín's eye.

"Brente." Han Taín glanced at Diarmán. "Which one is she?"

"The eldest of our servants," Diarmán replied. A couple of the estate's tenants had stayed on after the feast; there was no shortage of work, though Uachi did not know how Diarmán was conjuring the means to pay them. "She would never make it up the tower stairs. I'll call Aerte, and we will bring up some of the clothes our guests left behind."

"Padréc can call Aerte," said Han Taín, waving a hand. "And you—Uachi—help him to bring up the clothes."

Uachi stiffened. Han Taín had never directly addressed him prior to this order. He looked at Diarmán, who offered him a smile bordering on sympathy but said not a word.

What was there to do but obey? Uachi chafed under orders, but—without returning Diarmán's smile—he made his way to the stair.

At least things were moving in the right direction. Whether Uachi agreed with Han Taín's plan to secure himself a wife or not—and he most decidedly did not—he did not believe it possible to keep two hundred people trapped in birds' bodies, either. He'd asked Diarmán to return them to their human forms, and that was what would happen now, at least for some.

Never before had Uachi done something of his own volition that felt so wrong. He followed Padréc down the winding tower stairs, asking himself with every step why he was still here.

"She won't like this," muttered Padréc as they reached the bottom of the tower stair.

"Nobody does."

"I don't understand how Diarmán can be so casual. Nigh upon flippant. He, of all people..."

"You told me, that first night," said Uachi. "You said it was already too late."

"I feared that Father would want Mother's hand again. This is..." He stopped, turning to look at Uachi, who stopped a step in front of him. "I do not rightly know. Is it worse? Is it better?"

"Do not torture yourself with that question. It is not one any of us could answer." Uachi started walking again, turning down the hall that would take them to Aerte's bedchamber. Since Old Lord Eldran had died, she had kept mostly to herself, though it seemed she was still determined to stay on in the household. She had lifted some of Brente's burdens: mending, tending the household's herb garden. Uachi figured they could try her chamber first, then work their way through the other places she could be found.

Had he not been here through the dusk, midnight, dawn, and noon every day since he'd arrived, he would not have believed these halls were the same he had passed through on his arrival. Where once mold and moss had crept along the damp corners of the stone halls, there were now clean, fresh rushes. The cobwebs that had clung to the ceiling beams and corners of every room were nowhere to be seen.

One might have believed simply that Han Taín had commanded their temporary servants to clean the place, work that Brente alone had not been able to manage, but there was more: crumbling stair steps were whole again; rotting wood was no longer decaying; the upholstery and curtains and bed linens were fresher and brighter now, free of dust and signs of moths. The tapestries that Diarmán had frowned over now shone as if their final stitches had been set only the day before.

It was difficult to walk these transformed halls and not believe that Han Taín had brought with him good fortune. Diarmán had claimed that he'd sent them home with a curse. It followed that their reconciliation would break it.

"Father could answer it," said Padréc, his tone bitter. "He thinks he is doing us all a kindness, Mother most of all, by granting her freedom."

"It strikes me that many men believe they deserve adulation simply for doing what is right."

Padréc made a soft sound of disgust. "Or for what is not as brutal. He will choose a bride and give her back the human form he stole from her. He will offer her marriage rather than taking her captive. As if any woman in such a situation could have a choice."

"We must stop this," said Uachi. "We must stop him."

"I have thought on nothing else since I recognized him at the funeral feast."

"If only I might surprise him—"

"No." Padréc's tone was uncharacteristically sharp. "No, Uachi. This is not your fight."

"I think I made it clear, my friend, that it is. Diarmán might be muddle-headed and stupid at the moment, but I love him, and I cannot let him descend unchecked into this madness and take all of you with him."

"What can you do that you have not done already, appealing to his reason?"

"I don't know—that's why I've not done a damned thing yet. Absurd, isn't it? The world turned inside out a few days ago, and here we are, pretending it didn't."

"We pretend nothing. What do you think people do in times of disaster and war?"

Uachi looked at Padréc, raising his eyebrows sardonically.

"Ah. Well, yes, of course, you know better than many."

"They survive."

"Love, joy, and sorrow, cookery and cleaning and music and all—none of it stops unless it must. It changes where it needs to, but people persevere."

"You put things into perspective," said Uachi. He thought of the long years of the wars he had been through, most of which had been fought in shadow or afield, not touching the lives of most Penruans. When war had come to the layman's doorstep, it had brought hunger, blood, terror, fire, and death.

They were frightened here, yes, and they had a fight ahead of them—but what was House Eldran but a crumbling castle, one family and a handful of the highborn? This was no nation-shattering fight.

Yet.

"Will you go to get the clothes?" Padréc asked, after the somber silence had endured for a moment or two. Aerte's chamber was just ahead.

"Of course I will. If they mean to do this, we will grant those people what dignity we may. Even that arse, Lord Alrain."

Padréc chuckled.

"But they can wait. I am in no hurry to see this done."