The Painter, after looking for forty thousand Cosmic Eras, concluded that Eos's feint had been a feint about nothing, designed only to waste the Painter's attention, and, noting this, it adjusted its expectations of Eos's tactics accordingly.
The Painter became, after this, slightly more willing to ignore Eos's apparent feints, because some of them were about nothing.
This was the third mistake. The Painter had begun to underweight Eos's misdirections.
Eos noticed the underweighting two hundred million Cosmic Eras later, by which point the woman in the observatory had been dead for a hundred and ninety-nine million years and the observatory had been sacked and rebuilt thousands of times and the order of women had evolved into a guild and the guild had evolved into a discipline and the discipline had spread, by trade and travel and the mechanisms by which disciplines spread, to one hundred and seven worlds on the same branch of the Tree.
