Which sets him off too.

Between giggles, he says, "I want to make you a cake! Do you want a cake?"

"I'll make you a cake!"

And he jumps up and disappears out into the hall, presumably in a kitchenward direction.

Aya laughs some more.

She looks up a good description of an Aelare-magpie in the book, sets out inks, and gets started.

When she's got its outline (beak, wings, claws, long barbed lizard tail) all composed on the page how she likes after ruining her first attempt with an unsalvageable splotch of green, she decides to wander down the stairs to see what kind of cake is in the offing.

She catches the toe of her sandal on a stair, halfway down, and goes tumbling, hands flying up around her neck to protect her head but not doing too well themselves in the process.

She lands in a heap at the foot of the stairs, dizzy and bruised, and checks herself for anything worse. Her lip's bleeding, her ankle hurts badly enough to be sprained but she thinks not badly enough to be fractured, everything else seems to just be battered soft tissue. She gets up, succumbs to vertigo and shuts her eyes, grabs the banister, and decides to go up, not down; she can lie in her bed, back in her room, and he will probably make sure she doesn't have to walk anywhere for a while.

She realizes she's got the wrong flight of stairs when she trips, again, two steps from the top, and her arms fling out to try to catch something, and they do.

The right flight of stairs only has the wall treatments to catch.

The wrong one has a painting on the wall.

It makes an awful noise when she grabs it, and comes off the wall and cracks its frame on the landing.

Aya lies sprawled with the wrecked picture frame a few inches from her face and fills up with fear as though standing under a faucet of the stuff.

Meanwhile, a successful baker is on his way back to his rooms.

He's surprised when he finds Aya gone, but not worried. There's places she could be - the attic, the servants' quarters. He puts the cake down on a little table in the little room. It is a good cake. He's proud of it.

Aya makes judgments as quickly as she can while her head is still spinning.

She crawls - carefully, backwards - down the wrong flight of stairs. She finds her wrong turning and climbs - carefully, forwards - back up to the suite.

She does stand well enough to get at the door handle and let herself in.

"All right," he says.

He is sitting on a couch, near the cake. He gets up.

"I'll handle it. You don't have to worry."

"What are you going to do?"

"It's two flights down the back way you showed me, up the wrong flight from there, on the left."

And a little while later, he comes back, looking more cheerful.

"Well, that's that for now. I'll see what comes of it later, if anything does. How's the cake?"