The Moth Court

The Hall of Hours is lit by glowglass, not candles, so the light is cold and perfectly even, and the whole court looks as if it has been carved from the same pale stone. You were told why on the stairs. No flame burns within thirty paces of the queen. The moths would go to it.

You hear them before you see them: a dry whisper, like pages turning in another room.

Then the herald calls the name of your town, and the crowd of silk and fur parts to let you through, and there she is on the dais, small and upright and old. On her head the Mothcrown breathes. Forty-odd moths on a circlet of silver wire, grey and gold, wings folding and opening, folding and opening. They have crowned Hallowmere for three hundred years. The court believes they turn toward whatever the queen should fear.

Every one of them has turned to look at you.

The whisper stops. So does every fan in the room. Somewhere near the pillars a man sets down his glass very carefully, as if a sound might be held against him.

The queen looks at her moths, then at you, with the mild interest of a woman who has found a word she doesn't know in a book she thought she had finished. "Well," she says. "Come closer, then."

A man steps out of the line of courtiers at the foot of the dais. Charcoal coat, black hair tied back, grey kid gloves. He doesn't block your way. He simply arrives at your side, near enough that only you can hear him, and offers his arm as if this were a dance.

"Don't run," he says pleasantly. "They like it when things run." His gloved hand waits in the air between you. "I'm the Mothwarden. Whatever you came here to ask for, I would ask for something smaller."

Twenty paces of black marble lie between you and the throne, and the whole court is counting them.