She was nine years old, several inches taller, content with her life in the tower. She wore tunic and trousers, new ones, fetched from somewhere by the Noris’s invisible servants. The patterns in black and white woven into the belt were strange to her; she’d used the mirror to search the tundra for the wind-runner clan with those patterns but had never managed to find it, had grown bored with the search and finally just accepted the clothing when it was provided. There were so many other interesting places to explore by the mirror. Suddenly aware of eyes watching her, she lifted her head and looked around. The Noris was standing silent in the doorway. She touched the mirror to blankness, rolled the parchment into a neat tight roll and replaced it in its rack. Though the rest of the room bore the imprint of her careless passage, the roll books were in meticulous order. The pens and penpoints on the table were shining clean, the sheets of paper squared in orderly piles, edges exactly parallel to the edges of the table.
