Liya was awake when the sun came up; she lay in bed a long while into the quiet morning, until the sky had gone a bright blue. Water droplets were condensing on the inside of the glass bottle on her windowsill. The red flower inside still looked healthy. Beside the glass bottle was where she'd put the hair tie Yoshi had let her borrow.

It wouldn't have been easy to keep lying there. It hurt to do nothing but remember. It took a different sort of momentous strength to pull herself up and out of bed, but she did it.

She got dressed in cotton pants, a shirt with a green pattern all over it, a rusty canvas jacket, and her leather shoes, newly broken in from the day before. Then she stood at the door for a little while, breathing deep, convincing herself.

The first person she met on the way out smiled and tipped his hat to her. He was an elderly man with a long nose, skin the color of red wine, and scruffy grey wings, but he also had his beard done up in a neat bow the same color as his shirt. She returned the smile, only a little nervous.

She walked on her own this time to the great hall at the front of the Palace, where the morning light hadn't gotten too far across the blue-green marbled floors. She passed the dog servant she'd seen the day before on her way down the stairs; they were walking with a pair of incredibly tall and thin creatures who talked in low musical voices, dressed in homespun clothes against the slight chill in the air.

The only other people in the hall as she crossed it were a few servants--one of them with a cow's head and feet--laboriously moving two huge ceramic jars towards the staircase, and a dark grey-skinned spirit with bright magenta hair and a scarf all in green and blue. The latter had a sort of dog with him, the same sort Liya had only seen in statue form before--it had a deliriously happy crocodile's smile, and its tongue lolled from its jaws, but it stuck quite eagerly by the spirit's side.

The hall seemed much hollower than before, with so few people. It also seemed much less deafeningly huge, less monstrously frightening.