A Plague of Giants

“Drown that nonsense!” the man said, raising his voice instead of lowering it. I moaned and rose from my cot, blindly reaching out for the candles on my wardrobe while the Talker earned his nickname.

“You will not be drowning anything soon. You won’t be moving, in fact, until I wish it. The quicker you calm down and quietly discuss your presence here with me, the quicker I can let you go in peace.” This is what Priests of the Gale did: redirect violence aimed at them, immobilize their opponents, and then talk of peace until they were begged for mercy.

“I’m here to visit Master Dervan,” the man grated out. Fury in every word, but his volume was much lower.

“A friend of his, are you?”

“Yes.”

“Strange, then, that you picked the lock and snuck in rather than simply knock on the door. Is that how you commonly visit your friends?”

Silence. I got a candle lit and shuffled into the main room. The Priest of the Gale had his knee pressed down between the shoulder blades of a man much larger than he and his arms pinned to either side. The intruder had long hair coiled in snakelike ropes and queued in back with a blue band.

“Hello,” I said. “What’s all this?”

“Master Dervan,” Kindin said, eyes flicking briefly to me. “I’m sorry to wake you. Do you know this man? He claims to be your friend.”

“I’ve never seen him before.”

“I thought that might be the case. He broke in and had a knife.”

“He had?”

“It’s on the floor near the kitchen now,” the priest said. I took a few steps that way, candle held out far in front of me, and found it lying there, a nasty serrated piece. It appeared I needed a bodyguard after all.

Kindin questioned the man as to why he was really there, but he stubbornly refused to answer. In fact, he tried kicking himself free, and the priest found that amusing. He rolled off, let the man get to his feet, and stood in front of the door. I snatched up the knife to warn him against coming at me, but he didn’t care about me anymore. He just wanted to get out, and the priest was in the way. The intruder had at least a foot of height and probably thirty pounds on the Kaurian, and it didn’t look like a fair fight to me.

“No ambush this time,” he snarled. “Let’s see how you do when you’re not attacking me from behind!”

“Yes, let’s,” Kindin said, perfectly bright and pleasant, as if the intruder had suggested that they go pick wild raspberries or something else delightful instead of engaging in hand-to-hand combat. The fish head lunged at him, throwing a punch, which Kindin ducked while snatching his arm and pulling him forward to slam face-first into the door. He hammered the man’s ribs and midsection with his fists while he was stunned, and once he managed to turn around to attempt a counterattack, Kindin planted a leg and straight kicked him once in the stomach with the other, which caused a reflexive doubling over, and then recocked his leg and lashed out again, this time to the man’s jaw. Blood and teeth sprayed from his mouth, and he dropped. Kindin settled himself down on top of the man as he had before, knee in the back and arms pinned.

“A nice stretch of the legs can be invigorating,” he said in soothing tones as the man groaned. “I thought you might be laboring under the illusion you could defeat me if given a fair chance, and I hope we’ve settled that question now. But so many questions remain. And you will remain on this floor until you’ve answered them, sir.”

I fetched another couple of candles to provide some more light while the priest told the intruder he regretted the violence and pain deeply and hoped we could fetch him a hygienist soon. “And in truth, sir, you’ve done absolutely no harm to anyone tonight apart from depriving Master Dervan of some sleep. But I imagine he’ll forgive you. Won’t you, Master Dervan?”

“Already forgiven.” I pulled up a chair and eased myself onto it.

“There, you see? There’s no reason why we can’t simply let you go. But let’s talk in peace first. Are you ready to answer a few questions truthfully now?”

“Uhh,” the fish head moaned. The priest interpreted that as a yes.

“Excellent. Let’s begin with why you really came here tonight.”

“Man. Nentian man. Said he’d pay for the bard.”

“And you thought the bard was here?”

“No. This guy knows. Was going to ask him.”

I spoke up. “I don’t know where he is. Why do you think I’d know something like that?”

“Heard you work with him.” That wasn’t exactly a secret at the Wellspring, but this fellow didn’t look like he had acquaintances there.

“Who told you that?”

“Friend of mine. Elynea.”

I frowned. “Elynea is a friend of yours? What’s your name?”

He was slow to answer and Kindin did something to make him cry out. “Apologies, good sir! It pains me to trouble you when all I wish for is peace. I do wish I could apologize to you by name, however. What is your name?”

The man answered quickly now. “Garst du Wöllyr.”

My eyebrows shot up in recognition. “So you’re her employer? A furniture maker?”

“Not anymore.”

“No longer her employer or no longer making furniture?”

“She’s gone. Left a couple of days ago.”

“What?” I rose from my chair and demanded, “Where is she?”

“I don’t know, man; she didn’t leave a note.”

“Well, why did she leave?”

“Don’t know that either. Maybe if she’d left a note I’d have a clue, but like I said, she just took off.”

“She took her kids?”

“Yeah.”

Something in the way he said that raised my suspicions. “There must have been some reason you can think of. You were paying her and letting her live with you, right? So why would she leave without good reason?”

Garst du Wöllyr fell silent, and before I could goad him, Kindin spoke. “We were doing so well, Garst. Let’s not stop now. I’d like to refrain from hurting you anymore and escort you to a hygienist so we can all breathe peace again. Please answer Master Dervan.”

He sighed, coughed, and spat blood. “I didn’t mean to do it. I said I was sorry. But I hit her kid. Tamöd.”

“You disgusting pink skink—”

“Master Dervan!” The priest’s eyes flashed at me, and I pulled up short. “Put down the knife. We will have peace here.”

I looked down, surprised to find the knife in my hand. I couldn’t recall picking it up even though I must have just done so. I let it clatter on the table and took a deep breath. “You’re right. Thank you.” I returned to my seat and said, “Garst, thank you for telling the truth. I will tell you the truth also. I do work with the bard but have no idea where he is. He sleeps in a different place every night, and I’m not told where. Basic security measure. I can’t reveal what I don’t know. Now, do you have any ideas about where we might find Elynea?”

“None. I’m sorry.”

“Then I would like you to lead me to your house—it’s only fair since you know where I live—and I’ll begin my search for her there.”

“And what then?”

“And then we let you go. As the priest said, no harm was done here.”

“I don’t know, man; I’m feeling pretty harmed.”

“I’m not sympathetic. You might wish to consider how your pain and powerlessness is exactly what Tamöd felt when you hit him. I’d say that’s justice.”

He agreed to lead us to his home, and while I got prepared to go out, Kindin spoke softly about how he should behave and the impossibility of outrunning a Priest of the Gale.

I blew out the candles, Kindin allowed him to rise, and Garst du Wöllyr exited ahead of us. I kept his knife. We wound through the dimly lit streets to the northeastern slums, passing the Randy Goat Inn at one point. Garst’s dwelling was even more structurally decrepit, though the space above his workshop was more expansive than mine. It was dirty, though. Elynea wasn’t there or her kids or any sign of their belongings. We searched the workshop, too, and found nothing of interest—not even my stolen furniture. There wasn’t a lot of lumber or other pieces lying around either; if Garst was as successful as Elynea claimed at first, I would have expected to see more.

“All right,” I told him. “I’ll leave your knife with the baker across the street.” I’d seen lights through his windows; he was baking the morning’s loaves.

“Live in peace,” Kindin told him, though one could tell he sort of doubted it was possible, and we left him there to find a hygienist on his own. We went to the baker’s first and asked if perhaps he’d seen Elynea or the kids before leaving Garst’s knife with him. No luck. We bought a pastry from his first batch and some tea while we waited for the sun to rise and the people of Pelemyn with it. Then we continued to ask after Elynea everywhere up and down the street and for blocks and blocks around. Some people had seen her but not for the last couple of days. It made me worry that perhaps something truly awful had happened to her. If we didn’t find her soon, I’d be revisiting Garst du Wöllyr with the constable. But eventually we had to leave off because I had to go meet Fintan.

Kindin Ladd gave me a tired smile and hugged me. “May you find your friend and breathe peace from this day on,” he said.

“Thank you. For everything. Especially the part where you stopped him from putting a knife to my throat while I slept. I owe you a legendary gift basket. I’ll send it to the embassy.”

He smiled. “I’ll look forward to it.” He was familiar enough with Brynts to know that when they said you were going to get a gift basket, you were pretty much doomed to receive one and there was no use protesting that it wasn’t necessary. It was a cultural compulsion. My imagination was already composing and arranging items to give him. Maybe a nice handkerchief to offer his opponents when he had them immobilized, to wipe away their blood in style.

There were two mariners waiting at my home to escort me to Fintan. The Nentians, they assured me, had been arrested, along with some fish heads eager to do their bidding. The bard was safe. I ducked inside to get my writing materials, and we met him at a Kaurian restaurant owned by strict pacifists who served no meat of any kind, eschewing violence against animals as well as against people. We ordered marinated grilled mushroom sandwiches.

“Have an exciting night?” I asked him.

“Quite relaxing, actually,” he said, his tone upbeat. “I stayed at the home of a tidal mariner.”

“You mean Tallynd du Böll, or the pelenaut?”

“The former. She’s delightful. Great kids. And I learned how she got that limp, which I’ll share with everyone in a few days. How about you? Restful night?”

I lied and told him yes. I’d let the Lung brief him on security matters. It wasn’t my place. We worked and picked at our cruelty-free food until it was time for his performance.

Fintan’s voice floated over Survivor Field. “I learned a new Drowning Song last night—new to me, anyway. It’s one of your old ones to which my tutor knew only a couple of verses and the refrain. If you know more verses and manage to see me, I would enjoy learning more of them. If you know this one, please join in on the refrain.” He got them clapping or stomping in a slow beat, and then he began:

When the storm blew the ship out to sea

The mariners knew they were dead,

Oh, yes, they knew they were dead

And the ocean would be their bed.

(Refrain)

When the krakens rise from the deep

Then you will be sinking down,

You will be sinking down, down,

And you will never be found.

The currents and winds can be unkind

And you could lose sight of the shore,

You could lose sight of the shore, friends,

And then you will be done for.

(Refrain)

“My first tale tonight,” the bard said, “will be told by a slightly younger version of myself, since I had a unique perspective on the Nentian march on Gorin Mogen. The slightly younger me had never witnessed actual battle before, and so he had a fresher face than the slightly older and wiser me.”

When he took on a seeming, his clothing had changed to a nakedly martial appearance—the full hardened leather kit of Raelech armor—and his features had altered subtly to present a more youthful face—fine wrinkles gone, markers of stress as much as age.

It was a slow march to the south of Hashan Khek compared to the blistering pace we’d adopted in Numa’s company. The Nentian forces were sluggish at best because half of them were not professional soldiers at all but ragged people who wanted free meals and some pay in return for marching around. I am not sure they realized that they might actually have to fight. And I am not sure if the Nentian tactician, Ghuyedai, realized that if he asked them to fight, he would not get much value for his orders. They would break at the first charge or counterattack of the Hathrim.

His regular forces were much tougher; one could see the capacity for murder and cruelty etched into their features, hear it in their cynical laughter and in the targets of their jokes, which were always the weak or unfortunate. It made me reflect on the role religions play in shaping cultural attitudes to war. Those pledged to the Huntress Raena killed out of necessity only. When the words of the poet goddess failed, Raena was there to protect and rescue until words could be heard again. Hence the makeup of our party and our orders from the Triune Council: words first from the courier, and if that failed, Tarrech the juggernaut would speak in the warrior’s tongue.

But to Kalaad in the sky, everything was plants or meat, and he thought of them the same way. To Kalaad and thus to the Nentians, there was little difference between cutting down a tree or a human, except in spirit. Spirits returned to Kalaad, and he distributed them again or kept them in his company. Although I’m sure that the immortality of the spirit was a comforting thought, it was a worldview that to my own admittedly biased eyes placed little value on life.

The Godsteeth grew larger and larger as we marched along the coast, defending ourselves against occasional attacks from creatures of the plains. Despite our numbers and weapons, we lost a few people to grass pumas and a small flock of cheek raptors that typically preyed on herds of ruminants and thought an army looked a lot like a herd. They dive directly at one’s face, their talons designed to puncture and tear, scoop out gobbets of tender cheek meat, and fly away, leaving you to die and feed the scavengers of the plains. They killed three conscripted soldiers that way—ones who weren’t wearing helmets—and then more died because a panicked volley of arrows to bring down the raptors wound up falling on the army. Others died of flesh eels burrowing into their bodies in the night.

“I fully understand why the Nentians like to stay inside their walls now,” I commented, which earned me an appreciative grunt from Tarrech.

But eventually we saw walls rise from the horizon at the foothills of the mountains, and there were docks for the Hathrim fleet and glass boats deployed to intercept anyone approaching.

When Numa spied a patrol of houndsmen that obviously had spotted us, she snatched a flag of parley and ran to catch them. She had no fear of them; she could run faster than the hounds with her kenning. We saw her greet them and speak briefly.

“I told them,” she said upon her return, “that Rael’s delegation is traveling with but separate from the Nentian army and we wish to speak first. I requested a parley outside the walls and guaranteed their safety.”

Tactician Ghuyedai was not pleased with her initiative when he demanded to know what she’d done.

“You should have consulted me first,” he growled. “This is a Nentian matter on Nentian soil.”

“I remind the general that we are accompanying him in friendship but are not subject to his orders,” Numa said, refusing to apologize.

“You should not have made any guarantees in my name.”

“I made the guarantee in my name. And we will guarantee the safety of any who come to parley with us, Tactician.”

He ground his teeth and turned his back on her, calling for his junior officers. Presumably one of them would be going to parley for him.

The parley occurred an hour later, the three of us and one of Ghuyedai’s junior tacticians on one side and two Hathrim women on the other. The tactician sat astride an armored horse, and we stood on foot at parade rest. Numa was in the middle, I on her left and Tarrech on her right.

One of the Hathrim women was visibly shorter than the other but had shaved her head bald and set it on fire. She was introduced as La Mastik, High Priestess of Thurik’s Flame. The taller one radiated confidence and wore a smirk of condescension the entire time.

“I am Hearth Sefir of Baghra Khek, betrothed of Hearthfire Gorin Mogen. I speak for him.”

Ghuyedai’s tactician introduced himself as Nasreghur and said without art and with more than a little aggressiveness, “You have invaded Nentian lands, and we demand your immediate relocation to Hathrir.”

The hearth blinked, but her smirk remained. If anything, it widened. “I would not call it an invasion. We have no wish to conquer, and since you have marched all this way, you’re aware that we are quite some distance from any Nentian city. We are refugees who had no place else to go after the eruption of Mount Thayil and still have no place else to go. The ash cloud from Mount Thayil pollutes and sickens all of Hathrir right now. We sent spokesmen to Hashan Khek to explain and to ask for desperately needed food weeks ago, but we haven’t heard back.”

“We received that request and sent food immediately but have not heard back from our viceroy’s representative. Are you keeping Dhingra and his men prisoner?”

“I have no idea of whom you speak. We have received no word from Hashan Khek until this moment, much less food.”

It was most likely a lie but a smooth one. The tactician would need a moment to think of an adequate response, so I cleared my throat and introduced myself. Numa and Tarrech followed my lead. I noticed that Sefir’s eyes flicked to our Jereh bands, visually confirming what we said aloud by checking our stones.

Numa spoke for us after that. “I notice that you have erected walls quickly with the help of Raelech stonecutters. Our information indicates that they are still in your camp. Is this true?”

“It is. Their work is a credit to your nation and their kenning.”

“Kind of you to say,” Numa replied. “Rael formally requests the return of those stonecutters to our care this instant regardless of work in progress.”

“Of course,” Sefir agreed immediately, and I almost blurted out, “Really?” but turned it into a cough instead. The hearth continued, “We will deliver them to your care as soon as our parley is finished.”

That changed our objectives considerably. Our primary reason for sending the juggernaut, after all, was to rescue the stonecutters if the Hathrim refused. Now Tarrech had no reason to employ his kenning against the Hathrim, and I wondered if that was not her design all along. If she was well versed enough in our culture to read our Jereh bands, she might know much more and realistically conclude that if she gave us no reason to attack, we would refrain. Like the Kaurians, we use force only after a triggering event. It is no secret that in a way this allows us to be controlled: do nothing to trigger our military response and you will be safe. It dawned on me that her superior smirk might be deserved. At this time, anyway, she appeared to have all the answers.

Until Junior Tactician Nasreghur spoke again. “We have received reports from Forn that your houndsmen attacked their peaceful scouts without provocation.”

“Then the Fornish are lying to you,” Sefir said, and her expression finally hardened for a few moments. “The Fornish attacked us because we harvested a few trees to cook our food, even though this side of the Godsteeth is not part of their precious Canopy or their country. In fact, they are invaders much more than we are. We lost six houndsmen to them. We are clearly the party with a grievance here, and even though we are refugees, we reserve the right to defend ourselves.”

Nasreghur was having none of that and continued with his aggressive language. “You have no rights to harvest Nentian timber or occupy Nentian land without our prior approval. Refugee status does not confer to you the right to do whatever you wish within our borders. You are in violation of the Sovereignty Accords, and your navy is also illegally blockading our national waters. We insist that you end your blockade immediately and relocate to some other place in Hathrir.”

“The citizens of Baghra Khek, together with their lavaborn and military and naval forces, retain the right to defend their lives wheresoever they are regardless of official status or international treaties. And it is the height of callousness to demand that we relocate to a poisoned land on the instant. We offer you no harm and will gladly compensate you for timber harvested without permission in our hour of dire need. I formally request permission to continue timber harvesting with the understanding that we will pay in steel and glass for such resources; indeed, we would like to trade with Hashan Khek and other Nentian cities as we did in Harthrad.”

I noticed the entirely unsubtle use of “lavaborn,” just in case we had not yet noticed that there was a lavaborn giant standing there with her head on fire. I did not know at that time, however, if Sefir was lavaborn herself. Nasreghur shook his head and ceded nothing. “This is not a trade negotiation, though we would of course be delighted to trade once you are back in Hathrir.”

“Are we not to be allowed basic needs? You would have us die because we temporarily occupy a space you are not using?”

“The fact that we do not use a space within our borders does not create a right for you to occupy it any more than unused land in Hathrir is available for Nentian use. You continue to cast yourself as the victim when it is you who are victimizing Ghurana Nent. You are occupying land you have no permission or right to occupy regardless of whether a volcano erupts in your land or not. So answer me plainly: Will you agree to remove yourselves from this land at the formal request of Viceroy Lohmet?”

“Yes.” The Hathrim hearth’s smirk returned. Either she was lying or she was relying on a nebulous definition of when she would agree. Nasreghur was ready for that, however, and quickly moved to pin her down.

“When?”

“I’ll agree when a formal request is made.”

“I formally request that you leave Nentian soil immediately.”

“You misunderstand. I meant I would agree to leave when Viceroy Lohmet formally requests it. You are not he, nor is your puffed-up superior over there. When Viceroy Lohmet appears here in the flesh and formally requests that we leave, we will agree to leave. The Raelech delegation bears witness.”

“We do,” Numa said, and I saw how we had been outmaneuvered. Hearth Sefir could speak with Hearthfire Gorin Mogen’s authority, but we could not speak for the Triune nor could Nasreghur speak for the viceroy. She therefore had the advantage and could play on that.

Nasreghur ignored the exchange and tried to bluster his way through. “We are the viceory’s duly appointed representatives and speak for him.”

“I do not recognize this. I require his personal request.”

It was a transparent delaying tactic, and we all knew it. Nasreghur continued, always probing. He might be bereft of all subtlety, but I had to admire his determination to score whatever points he could.

“Recognize my request that you dissolve your naval blockade immediately and allow ships to pass freely up and down our own coast.”

“Or what?”

“Or we will be forced to make you comply.”

The Hathrim hearth snorted. “You must of course do as your conscience dictates, Junior Tactician. But know that the citizens of Baghra Khek will defend themselves if you attack.”

“You are the former citizens of Harthrad and have no right to be here whatsoever.”

“Do send your viceroy down to tell us that in person.”

“You can be sure I will.”

“Is there anything else?” She turned to us with a raised eyebrow, and Numa shook her head. “Very well. I will send the Raelech stonecutters out to you as soon as I return.” Her gaze swiveled back to Nasreghur, and she beamed at him. “Good day to you, friends. But I should warn you all that we have established a perimeter around our walls marked by a trench. Please do not cross that trench or we will be forced to consider it an attack on our people and defend ourselves accordingly.”

“That trench is on Nentian soil and means nothing,” Nasreghur asserted. “If we cross it and you attack us, then you will be at fault for beginning hostilities. This is our land, and by definition we are the defenders here, not you.”

The hearth shrugged. “A disagreement, then.”

Sefir and La Mastik bowed in concert and turned their backs on us, leaving us bemused and the junior tactician frustrated.

We reported the details to Tactician Ghuyedai, and he cursed once and spat before nodding to another one of his officers to proceed with some prearranged orders. Shouts and shuffling ensued, and it looked like they were forming ranks to march forward.

“Before you proceed, Tactician,” Numa said, “may we ask you to wait until our stonecutters are returned? They are supposed to be coming directly.”

“Perhaps,” Ghuyedai said. “Will you march with us against the invaders?”

“We cannot directly attack without permission of the Triune Council,” Numa replied, “but we can aid you in other small ways.”

“How?”

“They mentioned a trench. You’ll need passage over it. Tarrech can smooth the way for your troops, fill it in.”

“But you won’t fight with us?”

“As the junior tactician stated during the parley, it’s your land to defend. You have to defend it before the provisions of the Sovereignty Accords can be triggered.”

Ghuyedai was not pleased by the answer, but he couldn’t argue the point. And our offer wasn’t insignificant: bridging the trench quickly with Tarrech’s kenning would be far more convenient than breaking out spades.

“However,” I added, “if they do not return our stonecutters as they promised, that will be a different matter.”

Numa and Tarrech both nodded, and Ghuyedai grunted. “Very well,” he said. “Let me know when you have them back. I have preparations to make in the meantime.”

We three Raelechs strode ahead to find the trench the Hathrim had spoken of. It was only a hundred lengths away from where the parley had taken place. The Hathrim had merely stepped over it with their long legs, but it was a bit too wide for us to do the same thing. Its smooth sides and the shallow stone trough in the bottom marked it as the work of our stonecutters. The trough was filled with oil. Try to cross it and the lavaborn would spark it, turning the trench into a ring of fire. And once they had fire to work with, they would spread it quickly. Whoever crossed here first would almost certainly burn to death: that was always the promise of the lavaborn.

We waited at parade rest, and the sun had sunk only a smidgen toward its home in the western ocean before we saw a single houndsman emerge from the walls with three small figures walking before him. It was our stonecutters.

“They’re keeping us out of it for now,” Tarrech said, a note of regret in his voice.

“Yes. They’ve made a huge mistake coming here, but they’re playing it about as well as they can,” Numa said. “We’re going to get intelligence on their layout and defenses from our people, but it might not matter. It looks like they’ve made decent plans. Tarrech, can you tell from this distance whether they’ve salted everything?”

“A moment,” he said, closing his eyes and visibly sinking into the earth. He was rooted up to his calves in it. While he probed at the earthen defenses of the Hathrim through his kenning, Numa and I kept our eyes on the approaching houndsman. Both rider and hound were fully armored. Tarrech raised himself back up to the surface and opened his eyes while they were still out of earshot.

“They’ve been blasted through,” he said. “Even this trench is salted. Filling it in will require moving a lot of earth from outside the ruined area, and I’ll need the stonecutters’ help to do it to avoid strain. But here’s a surprise: they have crops on the far side.”

“Inside the trench circumference or out of it?” Numa asked.

“Inside.”

“So that’s obviously not salted earth. Can you do something to it from here?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Wait until tonight,” Numa said, “when they won’t see any sign of it in progress. Then ruin those crops from underneath.”

“You mean try to leave the rows intact?”

“Yes, so they’ll never even know it was done. I’d prefer them to be counting on that harvest coming in so they won’t make other plans for a few weeks.”

When our stonecutters reached the trench and we could see their faces, they were uniformly tragic. By this time they knew how badly they’d been fooled and that they had taken money to help the Hathrim establish a city in the borders of Ghurana Nent. And there was no way for them to refund the payment and undo their work; the salting of the city ensured that any blessed Raelech would have to tear down those walls in person, and for that to happen we’d have to expose ourselves to attack.

One of them saw my Jereh band and cried out, “Oh, triple damn, they’ve sent a bard here! Now everyone will know about this!”

“They’ll know about the incident,” I admitted, “but I swear to Kaelin I’ll never reveal your names.”

The houndsman, a younger giant who nevertheless sported an impressive black beard, dismounted and removed several interlocking sections of wooden planks that had been slung from either side of his hound in something akin to saddlebags. When he had affixed them all together and then bound them on the sides at intervals with metal spring clamps, he hauled the whole thing over and stretched it across the trench. It was a portable bridge, eight feet long and three feet wide, easy for a giant to assemble. He waved to it and stepped back, and I wondered if they had made that here out of Nentian timber or if it was something they had brought with them.

“Go in peace,” he said, though he nearly choked on the words. They floated down to us like dead leaves. “The people of Baghra Khek are grateful for your aid.” That was the third time I’d heard them use a Nentian name for their walled encampment. Perhaps the Hathrim thought if they repeated it enough, we’d think of it as legitimate. The stonecutters made no answer but wasted no time crossing the trench, and afterward the giant promptly lifted the bridge away and disassembled it. We said nothing until he had mounted his hound and ridden out of earshot.

“I will need to debrief the three of you and then report to the Triune Council,” Numa said, breaking the silence. “And after that you will be sent back to finish the work you were originally contracted for in Hashan Khek. You must do everything the viceroy asks to make up for this colossal blunder. If he asks you to complete work outside the scope of the original contract, you are hereby directly ordered by the Triune Council to complete it without charge.”

They fairly trembled and began to apologize. Numa cut them off.

“Everyone understands that you were duped into thinking you were building in Hathrir. Apologies won’t fix the problem. Only action will. When we rejoin the Nentians, you will not apologize; is that clear? That would put us further in the Nentians’ debt. The Hathrim are to blame for being duplicitous. You will say only that you will do your best to mend the situation.”

They all nodded and assured her it would be done.

“Any idea who that houndsman was?” Numa asked.

One of the stonecutters nodded his head. “That was Jerin Mogen.”

“That was Jerin Mogen? Is he lavaborn?”

“He is.”

“And Hearth Sefir, too?”

“Yes.”

“How many lavaborn do you think they have?”

The stonecutters looked at each other and shrugged. “Twenty?” one guessed. “Thirty or forty?”

“This is not going to end well,” I said. “They’ll have no problem setting us on fire.”

“We should let the tactician know,” Numa said. “Maybe we can convince him to hold off on the attack and think about it.”

“He needs siege weapons at the very least,” Tarrech agreed. “If he sends men in there now, they’ll be mown down.”

But there was no dissuading Ghuyedai. He wanted all nations to get involved in lancing the boil of Gorin Mogen, and to do that, Nentian blood had to be spilled defending against an invasion of Nentian soil. He was eager to be about the spilling, but the men he was going to send over that trench would not realize their role was to die; they were going to march, trusting that their general had a plan to win the day, and the horror of it grew in my mind. They would die because of a failure in diplomacy. The wording of the Sovereignty Accords required the blood of a defending army against an invading army to trigger the other countries’ participation, the thinking at the time being that no one wanted to be drawn into a war over minor skirmishes or the work of pirate raiding parties, but now I was beginning to see the practical application of it here, and my stomach churned with sourness. Ghuyedai would cast away these men’s lives like stones into the ocean because that would get him what the viceroy wanted.

“Give us that passage across the trench now, if you please,” he said after the stonecutters had briefed him on the defenses they’d built for the Hathrim. “We’re crossing before sunset.”

The way we saw it, we had little choice but to accommodate him. The Triune Council wanted to aid the Nentians without risking our people, and the tactician’s request qualified. The stonecutters worked in concert with Tarrech, each blessed by the earth goddess Dinae, and their combined efforts ensured that none of them had to strain. Outside of the salted zone bordering the trench, they shifted enough earth to fall into it and fill it for about twenty feet across, smothering the oil and thereby allowing an army to pass over it in narrow columns. It would have taken men with shovels an hour or more to accomplish this, but the stonecutters and juggernaut completed it in a couple of minutes, though it left dust hanging in the air for much longer. The result was a scalloped section of earth on our side of the trench that troops would dip into before rising up to cross the new land bridge. Ghuyedai gave two orders: the conscripts were to march on the city under the leadership of one of his officers, and Nasreghur was to take a company of men back to Hashan Khek with the stonecutters in tow and his preliminary report.

The setting sun warmed the right sides of our faces as we faced south and watched the Nentian conscripts cross the trench. They were armed with shields and spears. My personal belief—a nonmilitary opinion, admittedly—was that they should be armed with full pikes if they wanted a chance against the houndsmen, but perhaps they felt safer with shields.

Tactician Ghuyedai did have a company of pikemen, I noted, but he kept them in reserve along with his regulars. The ranks of spearmen marched across the trench and I kept waiting for it to ignite, all my muscles tense, but it remained cold and quiet. And so remained the city of Baghra Khek in the distance. No houndsmen formed up outside the walls unless they were mustering on the far side of the city where we could not see. No Hathrim infantry emerged to challenge the oncoming army, and we heard no alarms or saw any sign of activity from the walls. It was as if the Nentians marched on an abandoned fort.

That changed once they got into bowshot range. A flight of flaming arrows arced high over the walls, and the spearmen raised their shields above their heads to form an impromptu roof. Not a single soldier died from the arrows. They died instead from the flames.

Once the fire shafts landed among the men, thudding into shields or falling into the earth nearby, the true power of the Hathrim lavaborn was made manifest. From a distance, perhaps peeking over the tops of their walls, they spread those tiny fires to the nearest scraps of clothing. And once that ignited and they had more fire to play with, they spread it even farther, and in seconds there were ranks of men slapping at themselves or rolling on the ground, and they were so preoccupied with their pain and screaming that they never saw the second volley of regular arrows coming, never raised their shields, and those who were managing their personal fires got perforated instead.

Twice more the unseen Hathrim archers behind the walls repeated the pattern—a volley of fire arrows, spreading the flames to clothing, followed by a volley of regular arrows—and that was all it took for the army to break. The rearmost ranks wanted none of what was happening up front and pelted back to the trench, which never did ignite as we assumed it would. And as they ran from the screaming deaths of their cohorts, they did no little amount of screaming themselves. Meanwhile the lavaborn kept at their work on the front ranks, encouraging the flames to leap from soldier to soldier, alive or already dead, until all had fallen and the field was one large cook fire with greasy black smoke roiling and turning the sunset red as the fat of all those sacrificed men snapped and popped through dusk and into the night.

I hoped Ghuyedai heard it and it haunted him as it haunts me still. I hope he smelled the stench of those deaths and had it fill his lungs. I hoped he saw the terrified eyes of his men as they ran back over that trench, crying and with snot dribbling down over their lips, praying to Kalaad to spare them from being burned alive. I hoped he’d be declared unfit for duty. But I think those were all hollow hopes.

A better hope was that the Triune Council would have a good answer for what we witnessed that day, for they would need to respond to this slaughter for sure, and someone far better schooled in tactics than Ghuyedai would need to craft a plan of attack. We had seen no evidence that they had a true fury among them, but the city of Baghra Khek clearly had enough lesser lavaborn to burn whatever they wanted. With flights of arrows and fire they had slain close to two thousand men without ever exposing themselves to danger. A chill in my guts told me many more would have to die before the Hathrim were defeated.

“Meanwhile,” the bard said, returning to his current self and pulling out another seeming sphere, “the world’s first plaguebringer still had a Seeking to conduct in the aftermath of Madhep’s death.”

The figure of Abhinava Khose materialized in the smoke, and he, too, looked subtly different. Taller and older as a result of the aging penalty exacted by his kenning and with a look in his eyes that already hinted that the price of his power was grinding away his soul.

I gave Madhep to Kalaad in the sky, but when it came to the soldiers, I looked to Tamhan with pleading eyes. He did it, giving them more respect than they had given us, and then we moved our camp. The tired kids got on the horses, and we hiked a couple of miles in the darkness before stopping once more for the night. One of them noticed aloud that she hadn’t been bitten or even harassed by a single insect since she’d been in my company, and once she said that, the others realized that it was true for them as well. This small relief from a lifelong source of annoyance impressed them, I think, even more than summoning the swarms. Causing bugs to bite was not that big a deal to them. Preventing bugs from biting, though? That was miraculous.

It was wearying to pretend I was comfortable in a congregation of strangers. They all had been recruited by Tamhan, and to be honest with myself, even he was familiar only by the grace of a single day. I had known of him for a long time, but we hadn’t really spoken until the day before, and though we got along well, he also got along well with everyone, and I couldn’t assume that he felt closer to me than any of the Seekers. Because Tamhan looked to me, and I suppose because I was the one with the kenning, they all looked to me to lead them when what I wished for the most was to walk off alone and give my frustration and regret its proper voice and time. I saw in their eyes that they carried a set of expectations in their field bags that I couldn’t fulfill. I couldn’t make their lives better. All I could do was lead them to the nughobe grove and hope that at least one of them would be blessed.

The fear growing in my chest was that they might all die. In the eyes of the authorities of Khul Bashab, I would be responsible for killing all these kids. And I’d be responsible for the soldiers’ deaths and Madhep’s as well: authorities never take responsibility for their misconduct.

I already felt responsible for those men, and it was a heavy burden in my mind on top of all the others, one I would have to carry for a long time. I might have doomed all chance of being accepted or even allowed to exist by the government with a single uncontrolled flare of my temper. That one unguarded reaction might prevent me from doing so much good.

There are healers I know, for example, who believe that insects can spread disease. If that is a truth and I can stop insects from biting, then think how many lives I could save if only I was allowed. Would that not in time make up for the lives I took?

But already I see no path by which I can be forgiven for what happened. Madhep’s family wouldn’t forgive me, if any of them could be found, and Tamhan’s father would make sure the viceroy didn’t either. Not that the viceroy would need an incentive to turn against me after I killed a bunch of his men and took their horses.

We started small fires and tried to sleep, hoping perhaps that we would wake and find it had been a nightmare, easily banished. I took care to make sure everyone was within a sphere of my protection before picking my place to lie down, close to Tamhan but not close enough.

In the morning Madhep was still gone, my family was still gone, and I wept silently before anyone was up to see. But once it was daylight and I had to be the leader again, I spoke to the Seekers with Tamhan behind me, Murr by my side, and Eep perched on my shoulder.

“I wish to emphasize that you don’t need to seek this kenning and that you may change your mind at any time,” I said. “There is absolutely no obligation here. And there is also no shame. None of us is a judge, and none can decide for someone else what they should do with their life. After those who seek the kenning are finished, I will escort everyone else back to Khul Bashab so you will be safe.”

They stared at me in silence and a few of them nodded, but there were no questions. No challenges, either. They merely followed me, and some of them talked with one another through prior acquaintance, but none spoke with me and none made an effort to make new friends. No one knew if they’d still be alive to continue a friendship in a few days.

None of them volunteered their names after Madhep died, and I didn’t ask. Without Murr and Eep and Tamhan around to keep me company, it would have been a very lonely time. Tamhan spoke to me about what he had learned about business from his father: colluding with the viceroy and essentially bribing him through politely labeled methods ensured a tidy profit. The viceroy’s cronies became wealthy that way, the other merchants just got by, and all the rest subsisted if they were lucky. The unlucky ones—well, they met a bad end in the river or outside the walls, or they were walking with us to an uncertain future. He shared so much more, and I think some of it might have been important, economics and politics and so on, but I admit that much of it barely registered. I just liked to hear him talk and encouraged him to keep going.

That ended when we arrived at the nughobe grove in the afternoon of the third day. Murr went ahead to rejoin his nest. I told him that all the people with me had come to seek the Sixth Kenning and I would send them into the grove one at a time. Using my new abilities, I sensed that there were thirty bloodcats in the nest, and it was only a quarter-mile walk from where we stood on the northern edge of the grove.

He padded into the shade while Eep remained behind with me. I got out my journal and ink pot. The sun made me squint at them as I spoke.

“And now you must decide. You may go to seek a kenning, one at a time, or remain here with me. A nest of bloodcats will determine whether you are blessed, and they are waiting a quarter mile ahead, south of here. Give me your name before you go so that if you are not blessed, I can give your name properly to Kalaad in the sky. And if you are blessed, why, then, come back and tell us!”

There was a pause while they looked at one another, waiting for someone to go first. There were no well-kept statistics on the likelihood of success in the early days of a kenning’s discovery. But a man stepped forward after about ten beats and gave me his name. He gulped and looked uncertain despite being the first one to summon the will to go through with it. I smiled reassuringly at him and wished him well.

After five minutes I sent the next person willing to go after him, a girl who might have been my age but looked older. She had been worn down by life already, and her gaze was distant, seeing something from her past that spurred her forward into this desperate future in which she was willing to lay down her life for a chance at power. She half mumbled, half slurred her name and I asked her to repeat it, but she ignored me and stalked off into the grove. She had not been gone a minute before we heard distant cries of terror from the first man. Eyes flicked back and forth as the Seekers wondered if everyone else heard it.

“Making some noise is almost unavoidable,” I said. “One way or another, blessed or not, you’re going to get bitten. So we cannot assume an outcome from what we hear.”

I kept sending them in until only Tamhan remained—no one else refused, the desperation that thick in their minds—or rather, the despair. I remembered well the hopelessness I had felt and the welcome I had given to death. I hoped now the screams we heard were one last encounter with pain before a better life began rather than a moment of fear before death. The two of us waited until we heard the last cries from the final Seeker before walking together into the nughobe grove that had changed my life. Eep flew from my shoulder, unwilling to let the sky go, and screeched as she arrowed into the grass. He’d be fine until my return.

We came to the same clearing I had stumbled into the day my family died, and there we saw bloodcats at supper, tearing flesh from splayed forms in the undergrowth. Tamhan gasped behind me and began muttering prayers to Kalaad. I winced at the sight but had prepared myself for the reality of it. Every kenning took a steep toll, and I had seen plenty of dead in my time as a hunter. A few of the bloodcats looked up at us, but most of them didn’t bother.

“Murr?” I called. “Are you there?” I couldn’t pick him out from the rest.

“Murr,” a voice replied, and then I spotted him lazing on one of the tree branches ringing the clearing, his tail dangling below it. His muzzle was clean. Perhaps he hadn’t participated. Or perhaps he had gone first.

“Did any of the Seekers get blessed?” I didn’t know what answer I expected, but it wasn’t the hand suddenly raised out of the clearing or the two others that followed it.

Heedless of the danger—I supposed there was no danger for me—I rushed to help. The blessed had been bitten numerous times as I had, but unlike the others, it wasn’t fatal.

“Congratulations,” I told the first one I came to, speaking so that the others would hear. “You’ll heal quickly. You’ll feel better in the morning and be amazed at how well you feel the day after that.”

The man at my feet shifted his eyes to the left and right. He was about my age as they all had been, and I remembered his eyes and his unusual hair if not his name. He had shaved the sides of his head and left a broad stripe down the middle, which he had dyed with yellow poppy powder and fixed with beeswax. “Is it safe to move?” he asked.

“Yes, it is.” I extended a hand to help him up, and he groaned as he grasped and pulled. “Remind me of your name again?”

“Sudhi Khorala,” he said.

“All right, Sudhi,” I said after escorting him to the edge of the clearing, “stay here and I’ll get the others.”

The other two were women, though I supposed one was more of a girl. She had been the youngest of the Seekers and reminded me of my sister. She had blood on her face and streaks through it where tears had fallen.

“I’m still alive,” she whispered.

“You’re blessed,” I said. “Don’t worry. They won’t hurt you now,” and I helped her up.

She sniffed and wiped at her cheek, looking around at all the dead. “I thought I’d end up like the rest of them, nothing to care about anymore.”

“There’s still plenty for you to care about,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Adithi Ghumaal.”

“Can you walk?”

“I think so.” She took a couple of experimental steps. She had to limp, favoring her left leg, but she joined Sudhi and Tamhan while I visited the third person. She was already sitting up, staring at the bloodcats in outrage. It was the girl with the distant stare whose name I’d never heard correctly. She appeared quite lucid now.

“Damn it,” she said. “I was supposed to die!” She picked one bloodcat nearby and pointed at her. “Hey. Why didn’t you want to eat me? Do I smell bad or something? Gah, that stings!” She sucked at her teeth and looked down at her chest, which was covered in blood. Belatedly I realized she was missing a piece from her tunic. And she realized she was missing something else, and her angry voice rose to fill the grove. “One of you shits bit off my nipple! What am I supposed to do with only one tit?” She swung around to me. “Is this going to grow back? Did you fully heal?”

“Well, yes, I healed fully, but I didn’t lose anything either, besides blood.”

She surveyed the damage to the rest of her body, wincing. “You know, this is a messed-up way to get a kenning.”

“Well, next week it’s spiders, so I think this is pretty good, all things considered.”

“Spiders? How do you know that?”

“I just feel it. And can kind of see it in my head. You might be able to as well now. Think about it. These bloodcats won’t be the source of the kenning for much longer, will they?”

Her eyes drifted up to the sky as she thought about it. “Oh. Oh! Euuhh! Nasty!” She shut her eyes tightly as if that would rid her mind of the mental image. “I’ve never seen spiders that big before. You’re right; this is better.” She cocked her head at me. “What did you say your name was? I didn’t pay attention.”

“Abhinava Khose.”

“I’m Hanima Bhandury. You know what’s amazing—besides being alive? I’m talking and you can understand me. I didn’t expect that at all! I mean, damn, everything hurts, but my mouth is working again, and that feels good.”

“It wasn’t working before?”

“No. Got hit on the head a couple of years back, and it did some damage. Kept me from speaking properly. I’d know exactly what I wanted to say and how to say it, but it never came out right. Everyone thought I was stupid and it wore me down till I was ready to make my exit, you know? No one would help and no one seemed to care, so I thought I might as well join my family. They all got crushed by the same building that messed up my head. But now listen to me go. I’m never going to shut up!” She grinned at the same bloodcat she had scolded earlier. “You can have my nipple. It’s not like I was using it. I’ve got my voice back, and that’s all I ever wanted. This is the best!”

Strange words to say amid all this death. But she wasn’t thinking about what was going on around her. I extended a hand to her to help her up. She grasped it, groaned, and then threw her bloody arm across my shoulder. “Help me out of here, will you? My ankle’s messed up, too.”

Leaning heavily on me, she hopped over to the others at the edge of the clearing. They all introduced one another and shared smiles; Tamhan congratulated the blessed, and then they all looked at me expectantly. I got out my journal and turned to the page where I’d written down the Seekers’ names.

“Four blessed out of thirty-three seekers, including myself,” I said. “That’s a pretty low success rate if that holds true.” Their smiles disappeared. “Let’s give them all to Kalaad in the sky.”

We turned to the fallen, and I read their names one by one. Our bodies are no more than meat that falls on the plains one day and feeds some other meat, but I wished their spirits peace because I think they were all seeking that more than anything else when they followed me to the grove. Certainly Hanima had, and maybe Adithi, too. I suppose all Seekers are after peace of some kind, and make the calculation that one way or another—in death or blessing—they’ll get it.

But I wondered if peace was possible for us. Even though we called ourselves blessed, I didn’t see a future of bliss and contentment waiting ahead.

Plenty of chatter ensued once Fintan dispelled his seeming. Increased strength, speed, and healing as well as a connection to animals? The Sixth Kenning was truly a blessing even if it had a high mortality rate in those seeking it—the people nearest me were murmuring excitedly about Hanima’s recovery. If her brain injury could be healed with a blessing, then what other infirmities might be cured?

It certainly made me wonder if my old knee injury could be fixed after all this time. I imagined so. What trouble could mere tissue be compared to the complexity of the brain? I mean, except the very large drawback that you most likely would die trying to get yourself healed. No thanks. I was fine. I had lived with my bad knee for longer than I had enjoyed a stable one, and coping with it was neither good nor bad, just a fact of my existence.

I also found it interesting that seeking the Sixth Kenning, like the Fifth, involved potentially being consumed with the trade-off of some kind of symbiosis and new physical abilities. For perhaps two seconds I marveled that this was the first time we were hearing about this, and then I realized the Nentian government would have tried to keep it quiet if they didn’t control the source of the kenning. If there were still only four of the blessed and they were roaming the plains rather than spreading the word in the cities, then it was no wonder that we hadn’t heard more of them. And we’d had our own problems to occupy our attention.

The bard let people talk for a while then held up his hands, a seeming stone in one hand. “Let’s check in with Viceroy Melishev before we finish for the day.” He cast it down at his feet, and the sour leader of Hashan Khek materialized, this time in a muted, somber tunic of black and dark blue.

I miss Dhingra. This new man, Khaghesh, who bubbled up from the cesspool of the bureaucracy, seems competent, but I do not enjoy the same rapport. He smells like onions and sweat. And he has an unsightly boil or mole or something growing on his face below his right eye. Perhaps it is a reservoir for his evil thoughts. Or it’s a spider egg sac and one night soon the creatures will burst out and eat him in his sleep. One can only hope: I’m fairly certain he is a spy for Talala Fouz, so everything I do and say could all be reported later in writing to an unsympathetic pair of eyes. I don’t know when I will find someone to confide in again. I never should have sent Dhingra away.

That Raelech courier returned today with news of what was happening to the south: two thousand burned conscripts, Ghuyedai laying a toothless siege, and the juggernaut doing nothing about it.

“Tell me, Master Courier, has Gorin Mogen, in your view, violated the Sovereignty Accords?”

“It matters little what my views are, but I think he has.”

“Then by the terms of those accords, Rael is required to help us repel his invasion, is it not?”

“I am certain the Triune Council will act once I make my report. However, we were not sent here with the freedom to attack and may not act beyond the scope of our orders.”

Preposterous. “Why send a juggernaut if he’s not to attack?”

“A show of force is sometimes as effective as force itself and is often less bloody. And he was dispatched to safely retrieve the Raelech stonecutters who had been duped by Gorin Mogen.”

“Were they retrieved? Because they still owe me work.” And we’d need to have them do even more now that we had serious cause to believe we might have to defend against Hathrim.

“They were. They are en route under an honor guard of your forces handpicked by your junior tactician, Nasreghur. In the meantime, the juggernaut remains on site awaiting further orders from the Triune. And he did ruin the crops they’d sown.”

“They’d sown crops?”

“Yes, but they’ll have no harvest now.”

That isn’t the point at all. The fact that Mogen would be so brazen as to farm the land like it was his sends a much clearer message of his intentions than putting up walls. He intends to make his “refugee camp” a permanent settlement.

Nothing I can do except cry for help at this point, which does little for one’s sense of personal self-worth. Yet it is my only option. I send the courier on her way to beg the Triune Council to intervene, and I ask the Fornish to do the same and even send word to the Brynts and Kaurians that the Sovereignty Accords have been triggered. We will see who responds first. I think the Fornish will do something before my own king does. Certainly the lily-white tree lovers will act before the Senesh cousins will. Bhamet Senesh, who likes to sit in his tower and squat on a chair like he shat the whole city of Khul Bashab out of the dank bog of his ass, sent a man asking me for military aid because he had some unruly half-naked teenagers he couldn’t seem to tame. Incompetent tit.

Determined to get some satisfaction out of a frustrating day, I summon my worthless healer for another attempt at treating my condition. A greasy man with a fondness for mediocre boots, Malhama Poresh comes to me with his bag of stinking plant potions and remedies he claims are the latest medicines out of the healer community at Tel Ghanaz. He has given me unguents and oils and salves and numerous herbal teas to drink, smiling all the while and saying, “Try this!” but nothing cools the burning fire whenever I piss. And it has been getting worse. I have been getting fevers, chills, and sweats.

“Feeling better, I hope?” he says, flashing his teeth at me even though it should be obvious I’m not better.

“No.”

“Ah! Unfortunate. Well, I have something here that might do the job,” he says, already clawing in his bag.

“You have no idea what you’re doing, do you? Have you ever healed anyone with these concoctions of yours?”

“Oh, yes, many people, Viceroy! Your particular affliction is just proving stubborn.”

“It’s more than that, I’d say. I’d say it’s eating me alive. I was with a sexitrist last night and she refused to touch me, and I can’t blame her. It looks like it feels—painfully inflamed.”

“Apologies, Viceroy. I’m sure we can do something about it.”

While he rummages about, I call over some soldiers and order him bound and gagged. We go down to the stables and get two horses. I throw him over the saddle of one and lead him out, alone, to Kalaad’s Posts. It’s a bit of work to tie him to one myself, but once I’m finished, I fetch a whip from my pack and give him a lick across the chest just to get the scent of his blood in the air. Then I remove his gag and let him scream a bit until he asks, “Why?”

“If you can’t do your job, Malhama, then you’re tonight’s meal for something hungry out here.”

“No! You can’t just leave me to be eaten alive—”

“I most certainly can. I have been in pain for months, and it’s your fault. So I think you should feel all of that pain today.”

The healer’s face twisted in fury. “How is it my fault? Maybe if you didn’t fuck so many gut goats your cock would work just fine!”

“What?”

“You heard me, you deviant! Everyone knows where you stick that thing. Goats are just the beginning. You like gharel hens because of the way they squawk and wriggle. And then there’s the legendary sessions with wart yaks.”

He continues to list invented liaisons with various creatures while I scramble to my horse, draw my sword, and then hack at his neck to shut him up. His head tumbles into the grass, blood pumps from the stump a couple of times, and the horses whinny at the approach of predators. Cursing that he had been able to get to me and deny me what little pleasure I could take from his begging, I leap onto the horse and gallop back into the city.

My repeated requests for a Brynt hygienist to be sent to me from Talala Fouz have gone unheeded. The king wants me dead, I know it. Or so weak that I fail to dislodge the Hathrim and then he can remove me for that. The Fornish ambassador says there’s a Brynt hygienist in Pont whom they would be happy to send except that Gorin Mogen’s navy is making the passage too risky.

I have few options left. I can’t leave the city to seek aid while there’s an invading force on my doorstep, and there’s no chance of me receiving help for days at this point. If it is Kalaad’s judgment for me to die in the most humiliating way possible, I suppose I have earned it. But I will defy such an end as long as I can.

“Tomorrow our story will catch up with where we began, the night of the Bone Giants’ invasion. Until then!”

Toast, interrupted. Should anyone ever ask for a quick summary of my existence, I think that will do. The violent knock on my door as I was bringing breakfast to my mouth so startled me that I dropped my toast facedown. I could almost hear a mournful foghorn bellow through my shock as I stared at it, and I considered wailing an impromptu dirge, but the knocking continued, so I went to answer. The person responsible for destroying my breakfast was none other than Gerstad Nara du Fesset, looking grim.

“Oh, no. What’s the trouble now?” I asked her.

“No imminent danger,” she said. “But there’s someone who needs to see you.”

“Uh … the pelenaut?”

“Someone who works for the pelenaut. Are you ready to go?”

“More ready than I am to clean up my toast.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Never mind. Let’s go.” I followed the gerstad down to the warehouse district surrounding the docks. She wouldn’t tell me anything more about who we were going to see but instead spoke of what had happened at the chowder house.

“How’s your wound? I’m still terribly sorry about that.”

“It’ll be fine. The hygienist says I’m free of infection. And it’s not your fault. There’s no reason for you to feel guilty about it.”

“I see plenty of reasons. But I’m glad to hear you’ll heal. And at least I have something to do now that might make up for it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll be gone for a few days, working on something. If there are any more security worries, you’ll have someone else visiting you.”

“Oh. Well, I hope you’ll be safe.”

We turned down a narrow alley between buildings with only a sliver of sun illuminating it from above. It smelled of mold and other things that thrive in low-light, musty environments. The gerstad stopped at an unusual solid metal door with no handle on it and a slot at eye level. She knocked on it twice. The slot opened, and a pair of dark eyes peered out.

“I’m here with the professor as ordered,” she said. The slot slammed shut, and then a series of clacks and clicks signaled locks tumbling open. The door scraped open, and she ushered me through first. Two gigantic mariners waited inside, blocking our path down a hallway so narrow that they almost had to stand sideways. They searched me for weapons but not the gerstad.

“Clear,” one of them said.

“This is where I leave you, Dervan. Go with these men and be well.”

“What? I don’t understand.”

“They’ll take you to the man who’s speaking for the pelenaut in these matters.”

That didn’t give me any useful information and it annoyed me, but I understood that I must be meeting someone my wife might have known. Vague sentences and security paranoia could only mean I’d stepped into state-sponsored skulduggery. I nodded a farewell, and one guard closed and locked the door behind her.

The other beefy mariner grunted and indicated that I should follow him down the hall, which was singularly strange. The floors, walls, and ceiling were all metal. There were slots and sometimes holes all along the walls, and I glimpsed eyes watching us on the other side of them. They could, no doubt, thrust spears or shoot bolts at us through those apertures. Holes arranged in lines in the floors waited to receive the metal bars of portcullises that were currently drawn up into the ceiling, allowing us to pass. Anyone trying to get down this hall without permission would have tremendous difficulty pulling it off—even one of the blessed. Nothing to set on fire and too narrow for a Hathrim to navigate anyway. No earth for a juggernaut to manipulate. No plant life for a greensleeve to twist. And the entire foundation of the building would be salted, no doubt, to prevent any trickery from below. I wondered what defense they would have against a tempest trying to infiltrate as the wind and soon had my answer: a series of three rooms that functioned as air locks.

“This side of the building and the other are completely sealed off except through these doors,” the mariner explained when I asked. “No way for a tempest to open them. They’d have to become solid eventually, and then they’d be vulnerable.”

“Incredible. Even the pelenaut doesn’t have this kind of security.”

The mariner shrugged. “Pelenauts are easy to come by.” Implying that whoever I was meeting was more important than our rightfully elected ruler. Interesting.

“I’ll leave you here. Someone else will take you the rest of the way on the other side. Just wave at the people on the other side of the windows. They know you’re coming.”

“Okay. Thanks. Have a great … well, do you ever have a great day doing this?”

“Every day he doesn’t die is pretty great. I think he has to be pretty old by now.”

“You mean whoever it is I’m meeting?”

He grunted and waved me through the first door. It slammed behind me, there was a hiss of pressure, and through a window of thick glass on one side I saw a pair of mariners. I waved, they nodded, and then they turned a wheel set in the wall that unlocked the next door in front of me. Once I stepped through, the procedure was repeated twice more. Once I was past the third air lock, the hallway looked considerably more friendly. A young woman waited for me in a well-lit and much wider hallway decorated with art instead of murder holes. Her clothing was a riot of bold colors, a statement of defiance against the atmosphere of doom surrounding her. She smiled a practiced smile, and her voice matched its brightness.

“Good morning, Master du Alöbar! Welcome! If you will follow me, please.”

“Okay, hello. What’s your name?”

She spun on her heel and spoke over her shoulder as she walked briskly down the hall. “We don’t have names here. I think you’re the only one in the building who does at the moment, so congratulations. You’re about to meet someone known as the Wraith, if he’s known by any name at all. You may simply address him as ‘sir.’ ”

“The Wraith?” I snorted. “That’s a mite pretentious, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t suggest you share your judgments with him. Please do not attempt to look at his face. If you do see him, even by accident, we will have to kill you. Is that clear?”

Her voice was so joyful that it took a moment for the import of her words to sink in. “What? You’re being serious?”

“Very serious. If you see his face, you will die. Is that clear?”

“It’s terrifying.” She turned to look at me, the smile gone. “It’s also clear,” I added, and the smile came back. Approval for good behavior. “Does the pelenaut know about all this?”

“Yes. Your orders are coming from him. But the Wraith will be able to explain and discuss some things that the pelenaut cannot in court or anywhere else. This environment is much more secure.”

“I’ll say. It’s a shrine to paranoia.”

We arrived at a door that had a normal knob on it, and she paused with her hand on it, the smile erased from her face again. “Sit in the chair on the other side of this door. Do not try to explore the room. Remember, if you see him, you die. Just listen and answer and stare at the wall. When you’re finished, I’ll escort you out.”

Wondering if I could trigger an approval response, I said, “Thank you. I will do exactly as you say.” Victory! She grinned at me and opened the door.

The room was largely shrouded in darkness ahead except for an upholstered chair near the door and a small table next to it with a single candle and a glass of water. The chair faced a wall to the right of the door where two sconces with enchanted Hathrim fireglobes in them pointed to a canvas on the wall depicting a verdant, forested shoreline with a single ghostly figure standing there. A wraith among the trees. Death waiting among all the life. The message lacked subtlety, though I supposed he was at least hewing to a consistent theme.

I sat in the chair as promised, crossed one leg over the other, and stared at the painting, hands folded in my lap. I could see nothing else in the room even if I tried, but there was plenty of darkness to my left once the weak glow of the candle failed. I did hear some shallow, labored breathing and eventually a moist cough and a noisy clearing of the throat. A man’s phlegmy rumble spoke from the darkness.

“Master Dervan du Alöbar. Thank you for coming.”

He said it as if I’d been given a kind invitation rather than picked up by a military officer and escorted there. I’d much rather have been searching for Elynea and her children than dealing with this nonsense, so I took what petty revenge I could, perhaps driven mad by lack of breakfast. “My pleasure, Master Butternuts.”

The moist cough again. “You may call me sir, or, if you must, Master Wraith.”

“Oh, no, I’m not falling for that. They told me very clearly that I would die if I saw your face and I would die if I called you anything but Master Butternuts. I don’t want to die, so Master Butternuts it is. I’m kind of shocked you would try to trick me like that. I don’t know why I deserve any of this.”

The room was silent for a while except for the wet breathing. “Someone thinks they are being funny, like divers who take their dates to see the penis corals. They point and laugh for three or four seconds and thereby waken the longarms who live among them. When that first tentacle shoots out and wraps around their wrists, they stop laughing.”

He could feed his intimidation to the bladefins. “You’re right, Master Butternuts. This isn’t funny. Why am I here?”

He coughed, and something splattered in the darkness. Gross. “The pelenaut and the Lung grow more worried about these approaching allied armies. They may not be allies after all. The pelenaut may have mentioned this.”

“Yes, he has.”

“We’re like a litter of kittens in a burlap sack right now. We’re not sure what’s going to happen next, but we’re pretty sure the situation isn’t good. We don’t know how big the force is, nor do we know precisely where they are at the moment. We have not had time for any of our scouts to get out there and return, and we’ve had no additional Raelech couriers. But the bard’s story is pointing to some uncomfortable possibilities. Do you know why he was there, in the west, with a juggernaut?”

“The Triune Council sent him.”

“An afterthought. But sending a juggernaut was a misstep, and that was urged by a council member named Clodagh. You mentioned to the pelenaut that she was one the bard said nothing about.”

“That’s correct, Master Butternuts.”

“Bennelin would have fallen to the Bone Giants regardless, but sending a juggernaut away just prior to an attack has damaged her influence. She’s even more dangerous as a result.”

“How so?”

“She’ll be wanting to repair it now. She needs a big victory to overshadow that mistake. She has to gamble. She may be looking for a legacy beyond merely defending her country.”

“Maybe. But I don’t think the Raelech faith allows them to consider conquest.”

“I agree. So they won’t call it that. They’ll take over and call it ‘aid to an ally in need.’ We’ll be a ‘protectorate’ or a ‘benign dominion’ or some other euphemism that means we exist to please them, like one of their ceramic sex toys.”

“Wait, back up. How would they take over?”

“They arrange an accident for the pelenaut and let things fall apart like they absolutely would without his leadership. Then they offer to help. Their forces intermingle with ours. The population becomes used to following Raelech orders. And slowly, for our own good, we do things their way instead of ours.”

“That’s an imaginative scenario. Uncomfortable to contemplate.”

“As a fresh cob of corn shoved briskly up your anus.” His throat rumbled as he tried to clear it, but nothing came of it this time and he cursed before continuing. “I’m paid to imagine such things and prevent them from happening.” I suppressed a chill at his words. I’d heard Sarena speak them before, word for word. It didn’t matter if she’d heard them from him or the other way around: this man had most likely been her mysterious overseer who had supervised her operations and whom she had never named.

“So you admit that you have no factual basis for this Raelech conspiracy.”

“It is a fact that Clodagh has a militant mindset and is willing to send juggernauts abroad at the least provocation. It is a fact that we are still not sure how we’re crossing the ocean safely to strike back at the Bone Giants, so what use is sending an army here now? And it is a fact that Fintan knows things about the Nentian viceroy he shouldn’t know.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“He’s a damned skilled spy. And he’s here looking for weaknesses.” He got excited at the end of that and raised his voice on “weaknesses,” and this inspired a juicy coughing fit. I waited until he’d recovered to answer him.

“Unless he’s here to tell the story like he claims.”

“Of course he’s here for that. But that’s not the only reason he’s here. He wants to take a peek at whatever he can in the palace.”

“But he can’t get in there. When he’s not with me, he’s under surveillance, is he not? You seem to have it covered.”

“Maybe. What we’d all like to know is how he knows the inner monologue of Melishev Lohmet. I can’t believe that Lohmet would volunteer such sentiments as we’ve heard so far. Contempt for his merchants, his army, and his citizens, suspicions that his king is spying on him, openly coveting the throne, and his outright murders—he’d never want that to be public. On the one hand it’s as entertaining to us as a frenetic marmot orgy in the springtime. On the other it’s frightening because it means the bard gained access he shouldn’t have. Which means we need to guard against the same thing happening here. Imagine him talking to some other crowd of people that way about Pelenaut Röllend.”

“Rölly isn’t a degenerate like Melishev.”

“No, he’s not. But you don’t get to spend more than a day being pelenaut without making a decision that will cast you in a bad light if presented at the wrong place and time. On election day it’s all cake and tits and you think it’s good to be pelenaut. After that it’s tough.”

“You’ve seen a few elections, then?”

“More than you. I’m an old man with a sharp mind and a soft, shitty body. I like cake too damn much. The point is that we don’t want people hearing about us someday the way we’re hearing about the Nentians. I want you to ask the bard straight how he found out all that shit about Melishev because this is something you can be openly curious about. Everyone’s curious.”

“You think he’ll answer honestly?”

“No. But I think he’ll give you a more thoughtful answer. Others have asked him, of course, and he laughs off the question or gives a flippant reply. I want to know what he says to you.”

“All right. Is that all?”

“No. We need to keep your manuscript secure. You’ve written some things about our open suspicion of Rael that will be harmless later, but we don’t want it to get out right now. We’ll send some people over to make some modifications to your home.”

“Wait … you’ve read it?”

“Of course I have. I’d be a bloody incompetent master of spies if I hadn’t.”

I gritted my teeth, trying to think how they could have read my manuscript without me knowing. It had to be while I slept or while I was out. I was out often enough to make it feasible. “Fine. What else?”

“Stay away from the palace from now on. If the pelenaut wants to see you, he will meet you elsewhere. That way if you show up at the palace, we’ll know it’s not you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“We think it likely the bard will try to impersonate you to gain access to the palace. It’s all about security. Expect to be poked and prodded from now on to make sure you’re not the bard.”

“Understood, Master Butternuts.”

Silence for a few beats, then: “I’m starting to think you may be an asshole.”

“This from a man who threatens people with death if they look at you.”

A snort. “Very well. You may have your petty digs against my vanity. It is the least I can do after all your wife did for me and this country. In deepest sincerity, Master Dervan, she was our finest. An excellent spy and an excellent person. I wish she were still with us. I’m very sorry about what happened.”

I squeezed my eyes shut to prevent emotions from leaking out of them and spoke through clenched teeth. “And do you know what happened, Master Wraith? Sitting here in the dark, did you ever find out who was responsible for her murder? Or who came up with a poison our hygienists couldn’t counteract?”

“No. But I haven’t given up on seeking answers. I continue to devote resources to it despite our other priorities. Because the source of that poison does need to be found, and we need to muster an appropriate response.”

“You will inform me of any developments?”

“You have my word on it.”

I took a few deep breaths, thought of the ebb and flow of tides and the smooth sand that is left behind. I would be the beach after the tide has receded. I just needed to get out of that room and let the waves wash over me.

“You have my thanks. Am I dismissed?”

“In a moment. You’ll be relieved to hear you shouldn’t have to come here again. Communications will flow through the military or the Lung’s staff. You may pass along any information you have through the mariners on your detail, who in fact work for me. That is all.”

“Right.” I pushed myself up from the chair and exited through the door, where the woman with the approval smile was waiting. She flashed it at me and led me through a bewildering maze of halls, stairways, and doors to an exit that was different from the one I had used to enter. It wasn’t even the same building; we had traveled underground and come up somewhere much closer to the docks.

“I trust you can find your way home from here,” she said.

I gave her an approval smile and walked away. Home wasn’t where I wanted to go. Butternuts in there had opened wounds that weren’t fully healed, and I wanted to fight someone. I headed for the armory because maybe Mynstad du Möcher would spar with me.

The Mynstad smiled briefly at my arrival, but then her face became wary when she saw my expression.

“Are you available to spar, Mynstad?”

“Yes, Master Dervan. Are you well?”

I clenched and unclenched my fists. “No. I need a fight. I need to have my ass kicked. It’ll make me feel better.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It makes perfect sense. But if you could do it without causing any permanent damage, I’d be grateful.”

“Maybe some meditation would be better, or a good stiff drink.”

“I’m not some Kaurian who can just sit outside and breathe peace, and it’s too early to drink. I’m a Brynt and I need to let the violence flow out of me.”

She stared at me a moment, then nodded. “Very well. It so happens I wouldn’t mind kicking some ass this morning. Kind of convenient that you came along, really. Training swords?” She reached for a rack of dull wooden blades mounted on the wall.

“No. Fists.”

There was a moment of evident surprise, but she shrugged it off. “Okay. I hope you won’t mind if I tape my knuckles.”

“By all means.” I taped mine as well, and when we were ready, we stepped out to the courtyard.

She took in my stance and sniffed. “You sure about this, Dervan? I could just buy you a beer and we could talk about whatever’s troubling you.”

“No. I need to punch something.”

“Okay, then. Go ahead. Take a swing, at least.”

I shuffled forward as if I was going to fight right-handed, but of course my right knee was too weak to allow that. As soon as I tried to dance back or to the side, I’d fall over. I switched my feet and fists at the last moment before jabbing left and following up with a right cross, planting my weight on my good knee. She took the jab but wasn’t fooled by the switch; she stepped inside the cross and blocked it with her forearm, then hammered me in the gut and smashed her forehead into my nose. I never landed another blow. The Mynstad had speed and agility far beyond mine, as well as youth and strength, and she employed it all, robbing me of breath with body blows and then knocking me down with a couple of fists to the face that rearranged my features but thankfully left all my teeth in my mouth. My head spun, my ears rang, and I wheezed in the dust, coughing up blood.

“How’s that?” she asked, standing over me, her taped knuckles bloody while mine were pristine. “Your ass been satisfactorily kicked?”

“Perfect,” I said, blood and drool spraying from my lips with each syllable. “You’re a good friend.”

She shook her head in disgust and muttered, “Men don’t make a damn bit of sense.”

I started to laugh but then stopped because it hurt. “No, thank you. I feel so much better now.”

“Whatever. I’ll fetch a hygienist.” Her boots crunched away in the dust, and I didn’t even try to move. Other boots moved closer, but the Mynstad barked at whoever it was and told them to keep away from me. And so I was given some time before the hygienist arrived to lie still in the sun and feel it all, and the tears flowed out of me along with the blood and the spit as I missed my wife and mourned her yet again.

The mourning of a loved one never ends at the funeral. It comes back every so often like a stage performer eager for a curtain call and expects you to be loud about it. I gave it all the lung capacity I had.

I truly did feel better after I’d gotten that out of my system and the military hygienist patched me up. “What did you do?” he whispered to me after first making sure the Mynstad wasn’t in earshot. “Did you ask her out to dinner?”

“What? No. She was doing me a favor.”

He blinked. “That’s a new one.”

“I’ve heard some new ones today myself. It’s that kind of morning.”

I thanked him and returned home briefly to get my writing materials and then met Fintan at a Fornish greenery. Every bit of food there was imported from the Canopy, from salad leaves to root vegetables to beers. It even boasted a Fornish staff, short smiling pale people in woven clothes, all claiming to be from the Golden Tiger Clan.

“Oh, no. The Nentians got you last night?” Fintan asked upon seeing my face.

“No, I’ve been soundly beaten for unrelated reasons. I’ll be fine.” I waved a hand, dismissing it. “Looks like you were kept safe.”

He nodded. “Slept well, in fact.”

“Good. Wanted to ask you something that’s been bothering me in going over the story so far.”

“What’s that?”

“How’d you get all that sewage on Melishev Lohmet? I mean, I know you met him and you were in or around the Tower of Kalaad in Hashan Khek, but I can’t believe he’d share all of that voluntarily.”

“You’re right; he didn’t volunteer it.” He grinned at me. “Someone in the palace is getting nervous, aren’t they?”

“The palace?”

“Yeah. Where your buddy Rölly lives.”

“Unless the pelenaut has personally invited you to call him that, I’ll thank you not to use his nickname.”

“I beg your pardon, then. But seriously, Dervan. You’re asking because the pelenaut’s worried I’m a spy.”

“No, I’m asking because I’m curious. I can’t be the only one who’s asked you.”

“That’s true. But let me assure you—and whoever you may wish to share this with—that I didn’t infiltrate the viceroy’s sanctum in Hashan Khek and sift through his sensitive documents. My opportunity came later, and in a week or so it will be part of the story and therefore part of the record. Can you wait for your answer until then?”

I shrugged. “Sure.” There was no use pressing him. My personal curiosity should be satisfied with that. To pursue it would mean it wasn’t my curiosity after all but Master Butternuts’.

Despite not losing any teeth, my jaw still hurt from the Mynstad’s fists, so I ordered soup and pudding for lunch as we got to work.

The bard’s hair blew in a breeze coming from the ocean, and he smiled as he strummed his harp. “Today is a good day, I think, for a wind-chime from Kauria!” he announced. “If you’re unfamiliar with them, they are three verses of three with the end words of each line rotated. This is an easy one to remember. Do alter the gender to suit yourself.”

My emotions are tossed like the ocean wind

For my love is foremost in my thoughts

And she is a rare and dangerous treasure

But it is her very danger that I treasure

And hearing her laugh on the ocean wind

Inspires the most distracting thoughts

And now there’s naught but passion in my thoughts

For her favor is what I most treasure

And peace never blows from the ocean wind

“Today our tales will remain here in the east, all regarding the aftermath of the Bone Giant invasion. Here’s an account from the trader’s daughter, Kallindra du Paskre.”

When our wagon crested the hill above Möllerud, we expected to see the familiar domed roofs nestled against each other and softly gleaming, bronzed like baked goods frosted with sugar. We expected to see people on the road and cattle lowing in the fields outside the city. We anticipated health and prosperity and a vibrant market in which to sell our goods. What we saw instead was the aftermath of slaughter.

Some of the domes were crushed, and dark holes yawned at the sky. Rag doll bodies tossed about on stained turf fed the blackwings. Some of them were children, and I wept when I saw them, small innocents having their eyes plucked out by sharp beaks.

But the true horror for me, though I didn’t realize it until later, was that nothing burned. Not a single trail of smoke curled into the sky. Somehow this made the people seem more dead.

Perhaps it is the bias of my background speaking, where the night’s fire is a ritual and a comfort, but somewhere in the chaos of the city’s death, a cooking hearth should have blazed out of control. At the least, someone must have grabbed a brand, or a torch, or even a poker to defend themselves and thus set fire to their surroundings in a mad bid for survival. Death should not be so cold and black and silent. A fire is both appropriate and necessary. It is the ashes that announce that the past is dead and the future is in the soil, bounty to be brought forth by the water of Bryn.

There is no hope in a blight of blackwings croaking over their bellies full of the dead.

“You’re going to meet the leader of the importer clave in Fornyd, Culland du Raffert, next,” Fintan said when he had returned to himself. “Like many of you here today, he lost everything at the massacre of Festwyf. But that loss was not the end of his story.”

The strange smoke of his new seeming revealed a man in middle age, his skin loosened around the jaw and neck, a bit of a spread around his middle, and the beginning of a bald spot on the crown of his head. His clothing was neither rich nor poor; it was the garb of a respectable merchant, sober and prim.

My knees were fine this morning, but now they threaten to buckle with every step. My lip quivers, and my eyelids twitch. All my muscles are uncertain, reflecting the fear and trembling in my mind. I don’t know whether to weep or to charge down the Merchant Trail with a sword to meet the invading army all by myself. Quartermaster du Cannym told all the clave leaders that Festwyf was lost and the evacuation of Fornyd would begin immediately to prevent us from being lost, too. We are supposed to flee before this deadly flood of giants. We have that choice.

But my son and daughter and their spouses in Festwyf were not given a choice. And neither was my wife, who had sailed downriver last week to visit them. If Festwyf was lost, then they were lost, too. And with them gone, my business was gone as well; the invaders may well be peppering their camp stew pots with my spices. Not that the business was worth a damn when my family wasn’t around to make a living from it.

The furniture in my house is kindling and cloth now, nothing more, if only I remain to use it. The flowers in my wife’s garden will no longer hear her humming as she weeds and prunes. The water filtration system my son made for a school project continues to drip, but it’s all poison to me now. The quilt my daughter gifted to us for our twentieth anniversary: Who could possibly be comforted by it? Certainly not me. When I think that I was asleep while my family was being slaughtered, I nearly sprain my jaw from grinding my teeth together.

I will hold on to a cupful of hope until I see their bodies. And I might never see them, so that cup will always be there along with a bucket full of denial. But as time passes with no word and no spice shipments, I will have to confront that cup and bucket as the lies they are. And then what will I do, alone and shortly to be penniless?

Cry. Drink myself into oblivion. These are already attractive to me. Since I have to pack a bag and walk to Tömerhil, having no horse, I might as well fill it with liquor and money to buy more, all the money I have on hand. Strange how easily all other considerations slough away when it’s just yourself to care for and you don’t care much for the duty. So it’s the road south for me, and if I don’t receive some hopeful sign that my family may be alive after all, I’m off to Pelemyn. Long ago, when I was a young lad, before my business flourished and I met my wife, I was tempted to dive into Bryn’s Lung. My commercial success and marriage banished that inclination, but I see no reason why I can’t keep the date now. I have every reason to do so. And I think it’s calling to me, that sound like crashing surf in my ears that no one else seems to hear.

Except perhaps some do hear a song similar to mine. When I reach the road south, I join a stream, a river of people flowing that way, their faces stunned like mine, feet going one way and their minds going in myriad others. We are wrecked survivors adrift in the flotsam of memories, incapable of rescuing or being rescued, waiting for the inevitable return to the water.

“Culland’s journey has a spectacular end, and we’ll return to him later in the week, when he gets to where he’s going. Down in Kauria, Gondel Vedd has his own journey to undertake.”

My translation of Zanata Sedam is finished, or anyway, I’ve finished what I can. It’s still full of holes, and it’s time to return to the dungeon for Saviič’s aid. The couple of days off with Maron had done me much good, and I returned to my work and temporary lodgings at the palace feeling refreshed and excited. It will be satisfying to finally get a firm grasp of the text. I have found several words that look as if they might be names for the Eculan deity but cannot be sure from context if they refer to gods or mortal heroes, and I’m quite curious about their version of the Rift legends. What I can be sure of is that this Eculan religion seems preoccupied with suffering as a purifying force. Pain, discomfort, starvation; these are all visible signs of devotion to their faith. It explained why Saviič looked as he did and refused comfortable clothing. He was a pious man and as such could not look or feel anything but starved and miserable. And the promised reward for such piety—if I am correct—will be a remaking of the world in the Eculans’ favor. The triggering event for that upheaval had something to do with the Seven-Year Ship that Saviič was looking for. And just as I was thinking I needed to inform the mistral that these people prepared all their lives for war when we devoted all our lives to peace, I was summoned in the midst of my early-morning bladder evacuation and made a horrid mess because I was so startled by the pounding on the door. It was no ordinary lackey sent to fetch me; it was Teela Parr herself, exhaustion painting her skin a dark purple underneath her eyes.

“We need you right away,” she said, then frowned. “But take a moment to make yourself presentable.” I privately thought she asked for the impossible, but I tied my hair in a queue and found a stain-free tunic while she stood out of sight behind the doorway and briefed me, her voice carrying around the corner.

“We’re getting reports that Rael and Brynlön have been attacked and have lost several cities already. The description of the invaders sounds like our prisoner in the dungeon.”

Reinei bring us peace. “When was this?”

“Three days ago. The mistral was just informed through the Fornish ambassador.” My hurried dress accomplished, she walked me through the halls and laid it out: Bennelin, Möllerud, Gönerled, and Festwyf all lost, and more to follow because the armies had moved on to the interior. They had used a coordinated strike from across the Peles Ocean using massive fleets.

“How did they cross without losing ships?”

“We’d like you to ask Saviič that very question, among others. I have a list.”

She produced a sheet of paper with a numbered list of questions for Saviič, and we walked together down to the dungeon. Teela accompanied me to his cell this time, her nose wrinkling at the smell. The Bone Giant seemed pleased to see me but returned in short order to his customary entreaty.

“Give me my book, please,” he said in Eculan.

“I will soon,” I replied, and continued with my uncertain grasp of his language. “I am nearly finished with my copy and need your help. When I have finished a copy, I will return yours. But first, will you answer a few questions about Ecula for me?”

He flicked his eyes to Teela, registering that these questions were most likely going to be hers, but then chucked his chin at me. “Ask.”

I consulted the list. “When your soldiers go to fight, do they wear …” I didn’t know the word for “armor,” so I settled for “defense.” “Defense clothes?”

Saviič grimaced. “Defense clothes? You mean oklop?”

“Oklop?” I flashed my hands up and down my torso. “You wear to keep body safe?”

“Yes, yes,” Saviič said. “Oklop made of bone. Front and back.”

“And oklop on your head?”

“No. Paint faces like bone.”

I translated this to Kaurian for Teela, and she kept her face impassive and her voice controlled, giving nothing away in her expression that Saviič could read. “That confirms it, then. It was his people who attacked.”

I moved to the next question. “Does Ecula want to fight us? Attack us?”

Saviič shook his head. “No. I come to find ship. No fight. I have no oklop, no sword.”

He hadn’t answered the question. “Not you. Not Saviič. Ecula. Your home, your people. Do they want to fight us?”

The Bone giant shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe if you have Seven-Year Ship.”

“We don’t,” I assured him, and then translated for Teela.

“Huh. Go on,” she said.

“Ecula has boats,” I said to him. “Bigger than yours. Boats that can cross ocean without krakens taking them?”

“Yes.”

“How do you make these boats?”

“With wood.” He snorted as if I’d asked the stupidest question ever.

“But krakens take our boats made of wood. Why not yours?”

He didn’t answer for a while, his eyes traveling between me and Teela. “I don’t know,” he finally said, but once again he was a terrible liar. There was something about their boats he didn’t wish to share. After turning to Teela and translating for her, I asked her a question.

“Do we still have his boat?”

“No; it was wrecked on the coral of the islands when we found him. But I’m sure that there are boats off the coast of Brynlön now that we could investigate. Last question.”

I asked Saviič, “What are Eculan leaders called?” and berated myself for not asking him earlier. So many other words had seemed more important when his leaders clearly were not accessible.

“Our leader is the kraljic.” That was very close to the Uzstašanas word for “king.” Interesting.

“What is his name?” I asked, since the suffix of the word was a masculine ending.

“Kraljic Boškov.” A king, then.

“And the leader of your soldiers? What word is that?”

“The vojskovodja.”

That completed the short list of questions. “Thank you, Saviič. I hope to see you again soon. I will bring your book next time.”

We exited the dungeon and made directly for the Calm. We found Mistral Kira dressed in dark mourning grays, the gold pin of her house on her shoulder providing the only color. She welcomed me and asked what I had learned, but not until she had dismissed all other ears from the Calm. After I related my worries about the Eculan religion and added the answers to Teela’s questions, she stopped me regarding Saviič’s denial of Ecula’s intention to attack.

“He said maybe they would attack if we had the Seven-Year Ship?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we know we don’t, and we didn’t get attacked. What if they thought the Brynts or the Raelechs had it for some reason?”

“Worth investigating,” Teela said.

“I have an alternative theory that we can test,” I said.

“What is it?”

“According to Saviič, eighty-four of the faithful sailed west. How many returned? We know for sure that Saviič did not. What if the only survivors who returned to Ecula landed somewhere in the north? It’s plausible since any who landed on the Fornish coast most likely fell prey to their forest, and our coastal waters are less than hospitable. They might assume, therefore, that the northern countries were easier to conquer. The fact that no one returned from the south was proof that it was too dangerous.”

“An interesting theory but impossible to prove. Unless you talk to them,” the mistral said.

“Unless I—what? Me?”

“You’re practically the only one who can. I have some other old language scholars on the way here to continue speaking with Saviič. But he is obviously not aware of the Eculans’ current plans, nor is he one of their leaders. I want you to travel north, find these Eculans, and talk to them.”

“Oh. But if they are simply killing everyone they see, I may not be able to engage them in meaningful conversation.”

“No one has tried to speak to them yet. You have some knowledge of their modern tongue now, and you have a copy of that book, The Seven Kennings. They will listen. And I’m sending a couple of tempests with you to keep you safe.”

“Tempests?” I heard a door open behind me but kept my eyes on the mistral. It would not do to give the impression that there might be something in the room more interesting than she.

“Welcome, gentlemen,” she said. “This is Gondel Vedd, a scholar I’m placing in your care.”

The soft clop of boot heels on stone came to a halt to my left, and I could no longer ignore them. I turned as the tempests bowed to the mistral and saw an old man standing next to me and a younger man beyond.

The old man was my brother—an extremely aged version of him, anyway. He was ten years my junior and should have looked much better than I, but he appeared to be ancient, perhaps in his eighties or nineties, with a bent back and leaning heavily on a walking stick. He was no longer the proud tempest I had last seen many years ago. He now looked as if he would have trouble chewing his food. His voice was scratchy and tired like worn-out carpet.

“Gondel,” he said with a short nod. “It’s been a long time.”

“Hello, Jubal,” I replied, my mouth suddenly gone so dry that I had to cough. “It has indeed.”

The younger tempest looked to be in his twenties, dressed in brilliant orange tied scarves, though his true age might be much younger. He could conceivably still be a teenager. “I am Ponder Tann,” he said. “Peace to you.”

“Now that you’re all here,” Mistral Kira said, “I have a mission for the three of you. Fly to the Brynt coast, beginning at Möllerud. Find out what you can about what happened. Eventually I will need you to locate one of their armies and speak to their leader. I need to know why they’ve invaded and if they’re coming here next. If this is a matter of simple conquest, why were the Brynts and Raelechs targeted if we and Forn are closer to Ecula? And record everything, Gondel. The world is changing, and I want Kaurian eyes to be witness. Ponder will protect you on your travels. However,” she said to the young tempest directly, “if you or Gondel discovers evidence that Kauria is next, I want you to fly back here and inform me immediately, understood?”

All I could manage was a nod. She hadn’t mentioned what role my brother would play, but I already knew. He would fly us there, and after that his life most likely would be over.

The mistral continued, “Otherwise you may send regular reports the slow way through our ambassadors where you find them. I’m giving you a letter of introduction, Gondel, that will instruct our embassies to render you whatever aid they can. Help the Brynts and Raelechs understand what they’re up against but keep Kauria’s safety foremost in your mind.”

She had more to say, but I missed it, my mind preoccupied with the imminent death of my brother so that it ground to a halt like gears obstructed by a pebble. I didn’t hear how or when I was supposed to return, didn’t hear if I would have time to say farewell to my love before we departed, didn’t hear how we were supposed to survive while there. I didn’t even notice that the mistral had stopped speaking until Teela Parr nudged my arm with her elbow. Startled back into the present to find the mistral looking at me expectantly, I bowed my head and said, “As you wish, Mistral Kira,” and hoped that would serve. She gave a tight nod, and then I was shepherded through the palace labyrinth by Teela Parr, leaving Ponder and my brother behind with the mistral. I tried and failed to regain my focus. This wasn’t the calm day of scholarly pursuit I had been looking forward to.

Teela was talking and stuffing an official-looking bag made of sturdy leather with a light lunch and a change of clothes. I caught that there was a resealable oilskin pouch inside to protect against water damage, and she put official letters in there along with additional writing supplies and my copy of Zanata Sedam. When did she acquire that? I wondered, but said nothing. I wanted time to sit and think, to pause and pay attention to what was happening, but Teela kept me moving, grasping me by the elbow and guiding me to the royal falconry heath, a flowered meadow on palace grounds that graced what would otherwise be the stark slash of an oceanside cliff. Jubal and Ponder were there waiting for me.

“May the wind blow gently at your back,” Teela said, pushing me toward them, and I spun on her before she could leave me there, suddenly remembering.

“My husband, Maron! Tell him where I’ve gone and that I love him.”

“I will.”

She turned her back, and I had no choice but to face my future. The young tempest had a bag like mine, ready for days on the road, but Jubal had only his walking stick. We nodded greetings to each other, and then my brother said, “Give us a few moments to talk, Ponder, if you please.”

“Of course,” he said.

My brother and I removed ourselves twenty paces from him and stood on the precipice of the cliff, looking out at the shining ocean with the wind blowing gently on our faces, salt on our lips, and the smell of kelp in our noses. As it was our first private moment in sixteen years—our first moment of any kind, really—we spent a minute in silence, letting the wind speak first.

“Never thought you’d be working directly for the mistral, brother,” Jubal began after observing the appropriate time.

“Me neither. Choosing to be a scholar instead of seeking a kenning has proved to be useful after all. I have no regrets.”

“Nor I.”

His note of defiance sounded a mite desperate. Perhaps he was trying to convince himself. “Jubal,” I said, “you’re about to die of extreme old age at fifty-two. How can you have no regrets?”

“You can’t look at me and see all the good times I had getting here. But I do welcome the end.”

“Why?”

“You’re sixty-two now, right? I’m sure you’re feeling the first pains of advanced years.”

“Oh, yes. Well beyond the first pains.”

“Huh. Take it from me, it gets much worse.” As if to illustrate, a noise erupted from his backside, and he winced. “Sorry. Nothing pretty or peaceful about it, is there? No golden sunset, no dignified final chapter where you’re sitting on a porch swing sipping lemonade with your one true love. You know what it is? Damned diapers and that look in everyone’s eyes that says you’ve become irrelevant and a burden. This mission isn’t a punishment, brother. It’s a blessing—a boon!—for I’m finally going to have my peace. I asked for this assignment. Truly.”

“That’s good, Jubal, I suppose. But what I meant was that I don’t know why you sought a kenning to begin with. I mean, after we lost Rugel—”

“It wasn’t about him! Wasn’t about you, either, or anyone else! It was my decision, Gondel, my life!” He was going to say more, but his face purpled and he broke into a fit of racking coughs. When he had worked it out, he moaned and spat a glob of phlegm to the ground. Then he raised his eyes to glower at me and speak in more reserved tones, but with no less passion.

“I never had your wits, nor Rugel’s either. Knew that early on. Never had any passion for the sea except for the winds swirling above it. There wasn’t a damn thing I wanted to do in life except fly. So it was a kenning for me or nothing. No—shut up, now. Not a word. I know I could have done something else, Gondel. I could have found something steady and boring and peaceful and lived to be just as old as I look now. I just didn’t want to. If I had died in the Tempest of Reinei like Rugel did, I would have been fine with that. Instead I became the tempest, and they call me a hero. You don’t even know why, do you?”

“Not specifically. All I heard was that you defended the nation.”

“Yes, that’s what they say to the population. The mistral at the time didn’t want the true story getting back across the Rift; he preferred that they wonder what happened, and Mistral Kira never countermanded the order when she was elected. Not that it was ever brought to her attention. But I suppose it doesn’t have to be a secret now. Sixteen years ago one of the idiot Hearthfires put together a raiding party and sailed along the Fornish coast, thinking to swing down through the islands and sack Perkau. It might have worked, too, but they were spotted by a fisherman in the archipelago, and he reported their presence to Linlauen. The mistral sent me to find them. They made it to Perkau but had only set a few buildings and people on fire before I got there. I made sure they never got home. Never showed myself in the flesh, just remained the wind. Aged a lot that day.”

I remembered. It was the last time I’d seen him, after he’d aged and looked older than I did. He’d swollen with pride over some act of heroism he couldn’t name and made a point of ridiculing me for wasting my life. “You’re saying you killed all the Hathrim? That’s what you were so proud of, resorting to violence?”

“Of course I’m proud. I’m the reason Perkau still breathes peace this morning, Gondel. I was Reinei that day. I tossed them all up into the air and then left them there. They were alive and unharmed. Technically I didn’t kill them. It was gravity that did that. I let the wind die underneath their bodies, and they splattered on the beach. It was raining giants, and their heads split open like pale melons.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“I know it is. I was sick over it and had nightmares for years and pretended it was nothing. But I hear you’ve been spending time in a windless dungeon. That’s pretty disgusting, too, isn’t it?”

“It’s not the same—”

“It’s exactly the same. You’re doing something you loathe because you want to help.”

“That much is true, but sitting in a dungeon is not violent. It’s not murder.”

“I’m sure you’ll see plenty of violence on this mission before you’re through. Somebody always has to pay the price for Kauria’s peace. Sixteen years ago it was me. Right now it’s those people up north. And you don’t ever want it to be our people down here, so you’ll do what you have to do.”

“I won’t kill anyone, Jubal. Ever.”

“Perhaps not. But when you see someone else’s violent death, it’ll change you. When I saw those sparkers setting people on fire and laughing as they screamed, my nonviolent principles said they’d look the other way for a while. All I knew was that those giants had to be stopped and it was within my power to do it.”

“I grant that was truly an ethical conundrum for you. But not one I’ll have to face since I have no such power.”

“I think you’ll be surprised at your powers when you’re facing death.”

I made no reply. Arguing with him was wearying, yet we could seem to do little else.

He sighed, even more exhausted than I was by it. “Look, brother. It’s my last chance to say this. When we get to Brynlön, I’ll be beyond speech. So I want you to know now that I’ve always been proud of you.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“I appreciate the sentiment, Jubal, but you’ve always said the opposite. You said to my face that I’m a coward for not seeking a kenning. ‘A worthless academic who can say nothing useful in every language’—that’s one of my favorites and apparently one of yours. It’s been repeated to me by many of your acquaintances.”

“I know. I know. Gondel, I apologize for every foul wind I’ve ever breathed about you. It was unworthy of me and undeserved.”

“Then why …?”

“Because, Gondel, as you have no doubt surmised by now, I am in fact a walking, talking anus. It’s something I had to accept about myself after I noticed no one wanted to marry me—even after Perkau. Perhaps the violence tainted me forever and people could see it in my face. I had to accept that I am generally unacceptable. I got away with it because tempests are allowed some eccentricities and I bought a lot of drinks. Can’t get away with anything now, though. All I can hope for is your forgiveness. You’re my only family left and the only person who matters.”

“But we never talk—”

“Anus, as I said. Trying to be a human now, to remember what it was like. It’s not easy. Peace isn’t as easy as everyone wants you to think it is.”

That wrung a snort from me that turned into a spluttering, blubbering sniffle. “You’re forgiven, Jubal. Of course you are. For everything.”

My brother’s lips pressed tightly together, and then he sucked them in so that they disappeared, trying to hold back a sob. He successfully kept it down, but he did tear up and gulp. “Thank you, Gondel. You’ve granted me a peace I probably don’t deserve. And I know that you’ll do your best to bring peace to the north. The mistral trusts you for good reason.”

We embraced and pounded each other on the back, and I was surprised at how frail he felt when he used to be so strong. And I wanted to return to the city, find a comfortable fire in a public house, and simply sit in front of it with cider and talk and laugh with him, for we had never had that kind of moment together as adults. All we had between us was years of pointless distance. I wanted to have a brother again, but he had volunteered to die—again. And the mistral wouldn’t have ordered a sacrifice like this if she didn’t think speed was necessary for Kauria’s safety. We couldn’t delay. Jubal said as much before I could think of a plausible reason to linger.

“We’d best be about Reinei’s business,” he said. “You have everything you need?”

“Yes, but—”

“Show me. What am I carrying on the wind?” He waved at Ponder. “Let’s go, young man.”

I held up my pack of papers and writing materials, which also included a change of clothes, a small cache of food, and Saviič’s copy of Zanata Sedam. Jubal hefted it in his hand, feeling its weight. “That’s not bad. Fastened securely. Good. Anything breakable in there?”

“An ink pot, but it’s hardened Hathrim glass. And a jar of mustard.”

“That’ll probably smash when we land. You might want to leave it.” I took it out and left it on the precipice as an offering. Jubal nodded in satisfaction. “Now just hold the bag; don’t strap it to you. Can’t say precisely where it’ll drop, but I’ll try to get it as close as possible.” He turned his head. “Ready, Ponder?” The younger tempest nodded, and my brother tossed aside his walking stick. “Excellent.” He grinned at the younger man and then at me, genuine glee on his face as he clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “No more pain for me. Farewell, Ponder. Goodbye, brother.”

I didn’t want to say goodbye but couldn’t deny him his wish. “Goodbye, Jubal. May you find peace in the wind.”

“I will. I’m counting on it. Peace to you forever, Gondel.”

He drew a deep breath into his lungs and raised his hands dramatically, summoning or drawing the wind or whatever he called it, and a powerful gust blew us off the precipice and over the sea. I cried out in terror, expecting to fall, but we didn’t. We twisted and rose and continued to float over the ocean for a few more seconds, and then I slowly lost sensation in my extremities while simultaneously feeling as if I were being stretched like a string of honey being pulled out of a jar by a spoon. And soon I carried no weight, felt no gravity, felt no wind on my face, for I was becoming one with it through the provenance of Jubal’s kenning. The harsh whistle of the air became a soothing susurrus, and colors bled to gray and then nothing, and I lost all sense of time and thought only of our destination, the rolling hills north of Möllerud.

Apart from the initial terror, becoming the wind was much more pleasant than becoming a heavy sack of fluids again uncountable lengths to the north. It hurt to be flesh and bone, and in the process I collapsed to the spongy turf of Brynlön, my knees buckling at the very idea of having to bear my body’s weight again. I heard a thud and a gasp nearby, and my vision came back to reveal Ponder shuddering on the turf. He was nude, as was I, and our clothes floated down behind us. Just as I managed to raise my head, my bag hit me square in the face, so I was spared having to look for it. I brushed it aside, looking for Jubal. Where was he?

A whoosh behind me caused me to turn, and not five lengths away I saw a dull gray collection of dust take the shape of a man inside a whirlwind, one hand stretched toward me, but it never took on any more solidity than that, no bones or skin or collection of flesh. Jubal’s tunic and pants slammed into the middle of it, scattering the dust and dissipating the whirlwind. My brother the tempest was gone, leaving nothing behind to bury, forever adrift in Reinei’s wind.

It is strange to mourn someone you know is at peace, to cry when they are clearly better off than you are. But I did it anyway.

The bard’s last words hit most of us hard. We all thought immediately of who we had lost and last cried for, and many of us, myself included, welled up again. Sarena’s face still haunts my dreams, and I would so dearly love to hear her laugh again.

Gondel Vedd was only half right: it is somewhat strange to cry for those who are now at peace except for the stark fact that we, while living, are not.

Apparently I am destined never to enjoy a morning again. A dour collection of longshoremen woke me by banging on my door with a hammer. Upon opening it, I beheld them waiting in the dawn with a small wagon of construction materials and furniture.

I palmed the crusty sleep from my eyes and asked how I could be of service. The one in the front thrust a sealed note at me in reply. The sun had risen just enough above the horizon to allow reading.

Please meet the pelenaut at the home of Second Könstad

Tallynd du Böll upon receipt. These longshoremen will be

remodeling your home in your absence today as per our

conversation regarding the security of your manuscript

.

Yours in darkness,

Butternuts

Grunting in amusement at the signature, I asked the longshoremen if any of them knew where the Second Könstad lived. They all did, and one offered to lead me there.

“Excellent. I will get dressed and we’ll go. Come on in, gentlemen.”

There were six of them, all wearing woodworkers’ aprons with hammers and chisels and other such tools. One of them ducked his head into my bedroom for a quick look around and then regarded me with knit brows and a frown. “You’re not going to want to keep any of this, are you?”

“My clothes, I hope.”

“I mean your furniture. We have enough for your entire house and were told to replace it all.”

“Oh.” The pelenaut had given me only bare essentials and a better lock on the door, which had still been picked by Garst du Wöllyr. “That’s very generous, but why?”

“More places to hide things.”

That made sense, but I didn’t like the idea of being indebted in any way to the pelenaut’s master of spies. I didn’t see what choice I had in the matter, though.

“Do whatever you need; just leave me my personal effects.”

He nodded, and I departed with an escort after changing out of bedclothes into something more appropriate for meeting the country’s leader. I brought the manuscript with me since I’d be adding to it later.

The Second Könstad greeted me at the door to her home and invited me in for tea, making no comment on my battered face. She was getting her children ready for school and apologized for the fact that she wouldn’t have much time to chat. The pelenaut had yet to arrive. “Please help yourself to anything from that gift basket he gave me,” she said, pointing to it on the kitchen table. “I couldn’t possibly take care of it all before it spoils.”

“Thank you, but wait—the schools are open again?”

“A few of them are reopening today. The rest are coming. The university will reopen for the next semester, I hear.”

“Extraordinary. I hadn’t heard this at all.”

“I imagine the faculty will be notified very soon,” she replied, and smiled.

The gift basket contained foods I hadn’t seen in months. I grabbed a wheel of cheese and a cured venison sausage and sliced them up on a board while she bustled about. There was a loaf of bread in the basket, and I sawed off a few slices of that as well. The pelenaut arrived as she was leaving to take her children to school.

“Ah, Dervan, it’s good to see you alive after picking a fight with the Mynstad!” he said, grinning at me and then wincing once he got a better look. “Damn. She popped you good.”

“She did indeed. And yes, it hurts. But I feel better anyway.”

“Hmm.” Tallynd and her kids shut the door and cut off their accumulated noise, leaving us alone in the house. Rölly followed me into the kitchen and pulled out a chair. I placed the board of meat, cheese, and bread in front of him and poured him a cup of tea. “So tell me what brought that on, if you would.”

“Sarena. Frustrated that we still don’t know who killed her.”

“But you figured out why she was killed.”

“No, not specifically. Just something that the Wraith had her do, no doubt.”

“Any number of somethings, yes.”

“Why do we even need someone like him? Haven’t we been at peace with our neighbors for our entire lives?”

“Yes. But peace is something you enjoy in its season, knowing that someday it will shrivel and die. And now war is here. It will pass, too. History is full of one season or another; you know this. But how long war will last is often determined by people like the Wraith. I’m glad we had him and his network around, lurking in the dark. I inherited him, you know. From the last four elected pelenauts. He’s been festering all this time.”

“Ugh. You mean he’s literally festering?”

“Let us say he has significant physical handicaps. The mind is keen, though. He didn’t realize the bard’s story would be so provocative at first, but now he’s fully engaged in that and thinking ahead.”

“I’ve noticed. Are you worried about Fintan’s report of you when he returns home?”

Pelenaut Röllend shook his head. “More worried about us surviving the next few months. Fintan can tell all the nasty stories about me he wants so long as we’re still here.”

“You always did have your priorities straight. Well, I haven’t much to report. Fintan said he didn’t steal the Nentian viceroy’s private thoughts from the Tower of Kalaad or anyplace in Hashan Khek, though somebody else did steal them, and he assures us that the full story of how he came by them will be revealed in the days ahead.”

The pelenaut took a deep breath. “Delays upon delays. No solid information. Perhaps it is innocuous and innocent. And perhaps it is dust the Earth Shapers throw in our eyes to keep us from seeing the kick they deliver to our guts. I’m tired of trusting and hoping for the best, Dervan. Soon we will know for ourselves.”

“Know what?”

“How big the Raelech army is, for one thing. And hopefully much more than that. Something about the temblor leading them would be nice. I have opened the taps, and we’ll see what washes out.”

We ate in silence for a moment, and I began to feel guilty. Sausage and cheese like this were exceedingly rare at this point. Tallynd deserved it, no doubt, but so did everyone else struggling to survive right now.

“How are we doing, Rölly?”

He sipped his tea before answering. “Not so bad at the moment, considering. But we’re projecting serious shortages in the coming weeks. You don’t shrug off losing the harvests and trade routes from so many cities even if your population is greatly reduced. And the closing of the Granite Tunnel slowed down our trade with Rael, of course. But we’re reopening the schools to let the parents work a bit more during the day, giving everyone some structure and a sense of normality. I’m going to suggest tomorrow that Fornyd and the other river cities might be ready for repopulation.”

“How are they ready? They’re still mass graves.”

“Not as bad as you’d think. I’ve had the river traders working on it, floating barges of bodies downriver to the ocean, and of course all the hygienists I recalled have been working on the wells and sanitation systems.”

“What hygienists?”

“All of them from around the world. We needed them here, so I recalled them a few months ago to serve their country and sent most of them north, but also a few down to Göfyrd and Gönerled. We need to clean those cities up sometime, and that time is now. And we shouldn’t have everyone here in case the Raelechs have other goals in mind than their stated ones. We need to spread out again. And there might be enough to salvage from the surrounding areas to help a few hardy souls get through this next winter. They might be far better off, in fact, than staying on here.”

“I’m glad you’re up to thinking about all this.”

“It’s not so different from when we were young, planning how we’d survive the winter on the streets. Identify resources, figure out how to harness them, run the figures, study the flow. It’s just a difference of scale. There are a lot of people out there in worse shape than we used to be, and if I can figure out how to keep them fed and warm this winter, then we’ll avoid most internal security issues.”

“Meaning we’ll only have to worry about the Raelechs and Bone Giants and everyone else.”

“I’m letting the Wraith and the Lung do most of my worrying about that. The Könstad’s doing his fair share, too. He probably wants to worry aloud, in fact, so I’d better get back to the Wellspring. Thanks for trying to get something out of the bard—keep trying.”

“I will.”

Fintan wanted to talk about the opening of the schools when I met him. “This is fabulous news. I’m astounded that you’re ready to do this,” he said.

Shrugging, I said, “I have no idea how ready we are. I just heard about it this morning. I’m largely uninformed regarding formative schools since I don’t have any children and I used to teach at the university. The university hasn’t contacted me yet with any updates about reopening.”

“But where are all the kids on Survivor Field going? Are they coming into the city each day?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask for details. I imagine we can find out easily enough if that’s a vital concern …”

“No, no … we can get to our work.” I wondered why the opening of schools would be significant to him. Did it represent some kind of benchmark of organization to the Raelechs, an indication of recovery? I was used to thinking of education as a bedrock of society, but did that also indicate something to a military mind bent on conquest? Were the schools to be targets, perhaps? I’d mention his interest to the people who spent their time worrying about such things in darkness. It was too deep for me.

We were in a sandwich shop that I think perhaps Rölly had chosen for us specifically to highlight the shortages already here and those which were coming. Most of the menu had been crossed out. We could have any of the fish dishes or some tough, dried meat one would assume was of an advanced age. No fresh pork, beef, or lamb, of course; that was hardly surprising. But they didn’t even have any wetland marmot meat, which was normally plentiful near the end of summer, and I mourned that shortage especially. Marinated marmot meat was one of my favorites.

“So, it looks like fish or dried shit,” I said. “What’ll it be?”

“Hmm. I think I’ll go for the fish this time,” the bard said.

Later, upon the wall, Fintan’s greeting smile was distinctly mischievous as he strummed a basic chord on his harp. “One of our stories today has much to do with maps, so I thought I’d sing the old song about the Nentian heroine who discovered that the Northern Yawn was, in theory, passable by ships. We still haven’t managed to sail the Northern Yawn, though we’ve learned more about it since the time of Khalima Chanoor. Her accomplishment remains one of the most singular in the history of the world. Sing along if you know the words!”

Indomitable, unstoppable Khalima Chanoor,

Determined to map the wooded northern shore

And survive what no one had survived before,

Struck out from Talala Fouz and left a note on her door.

“I am off,” she said, “to fully explore

And map the cold and wooded northern shore,

Taking fifty people with me and more

To ensure completion of this vital chore.”

Indomitable, unstoppable Khalima Chanoor

Finally mapped the wooded northern shore

And survived what no one had survived before,

Arriving in Festwyf just as she swore:

But most of her company was no more

Because she cooked and ate them by the score.

We have our map of the wooded northern shore

Thanks to hungry, hungry Khalima Chanoor.

“We’ll begin today where we left off yesterday—with Gondel Vedd!”

Once Ponder Tann and I collected our clothing and dressed, we both checked our belongings to make sure they had survived the journey well. My hardened ink pot hadn’t shattered while wrapped up carefully in my tunic, so that was a relief. Zanata Sedam was intact. They had been in good care.

But I didn’t feel as well as I had before. My muscles trembled at rest and my bones felt traumatized, and for good reason. Ponder must have seen the pain on my face.

“The shock will wear off after a few minutes,” he said. “Give it some time.”

“Did we just age, too, or was the burden borne entirely by Jubal?”

“We aged a little, yes,” Ponder said. “Riding the wind is always expensive. But Jubal paid for most of it.”

“I think I’ll sit, then, and wait to feel better before moving on.” I half fell down and took my first good look at Möllerud below. The Peles Ocean was to our left, the green swells of Brynlön were to our right, and a gray, empty city watched over by blackwings squatted like a memorial instead of a home to many thousands. Even the bright blues and whites the Brynts favored had faded in the absence of life, and the hammered bronze domes on some of the buildings were dull and lusterless.

Dark smears fouled the grass outside the walls. Parliaments of blackwings feeding on corpses or else the rags and leftover blood of those already eaten.

“Look at that, Ponder.”

“It’s horrific.”

“I can’t imagine why anyone would do that to other people.”

“That’s what we’ve been sent to find out, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it is. How much were you told about this mission?”

“Very little. We’re supposed to locate the invaders, report what we see, discover if they intend to attack us, and find out why they attacked the Brynts and Raelechs.”

“Correct. And you’re to stay with me unless we find an imminent threat to Kauria; is that right?”

“Yes. Messages sent by ship otherwise.”

The closest port was Setyrön, and the road to it, well worn by traders’ wagons and horses, beckoned to us along the coast. But we had no messages to send yet beyond what the mistral already knew: Möllerud was no more.

A fleet of anchored ships with their sails furled bobbed in the ocean outside the city. That looked like a good place to start looking for clues about the Eculans’ intentions. Perhaps there would be written orders that I could read.

Catching Ponder’s eye, I pointed to the port, determined to get the mistral’s work done and make my brother’s end mean something. And maybe being driven like him was not so bad. Maybe my obsession with language would help me save lives as he had with his kenning, except through peaceful means. “Shall we begin there?”

We walked slowly, still recovering from the journey, and the smell from the city only grew in our noses as we approached. I saw bodies rent by violence and gnawed on by animals and connected it to Saviič’s lunges at my person from his cell. I had felt sympathy for his imprisonment before, but seeing what his countrymen did to these innocent people without provocation, or anyway without any efforts at diplomacy, left me satisfied that he was where he should be.

A narrow, bumpy trail forked to the left to travel directly to the port, skipping the city gates. We took it and shortly discovered that the city was not empty after all. A party of six Eculans sprinted toward us from the gates, their bone armor clapping against their bodies as they moved. Their faces were painted, and they held large bent swords. We had no weapons because we never used them.

“Ponder?” I said.

“I see them.”

“They do not look peaceful.”

“They will be whether they wish to or not,” he replied. “Stand firm here. Call out to them in their language. I will leave one with breath to speak.”

“What do you mean? You won’t kill them?”

“No. But neither will they kill us. Be patient and trust me.”

I fumbled at the clasps on my bag and then plowed my hand into the oilskin pouch to find Zanata Sedam. Seizing it and holding it aloft, I cried out, “I am a follower of the Seven Kennings!”

They slowed, shot glances at one of them who must be their leader, and he barked at them, “It’s a trick! Kill them!” and they resumed their charge at full speed.

“He said they should kill us,” I mentioned to Ponder, feeling that might be relevant to our interests.

“Very well. Let’s calm them down.”

The tempest stretched out his hands to the Bone Giants, fingers splayed, and then he turned them palms up and crunched them. I don’t think the gesture was necessary, but such movements helped the blessed sometimes visualize what they wished to accomplish. In this case, he pulled all the air out of the Bone Giants’ lungs. They gasped to refill them and found it did them no good because Ponder was making sure the air did not cooperate. They stopped running first, then dropped their swords to clutch at their throats as if that were the source of the problem. Their throats functioned perfectly, however. Their faces turned red, then purple, and they all collapsed to their knees and then their sides as their bodies were starved of air. Ponder allowed one of them—not the leader—to resume breathing, and he took in great heaving lungfuls while his companions slipped into unconsciousness.

“There,” Ponder said to me. “I’ve released them all. The unconscious ones will wake with headaches later and an aversion to men in orange clothing. You can talk to the conscious one now. I’ll make sure he comes no closer.”

“Let us speak in peace,” I called. “But please remain where you are. Your friends will be fine.”

He called me several names that I did not recognize—epithets that Saviič had never bothered to teach me—and suggested that my parents had been siblings and that he would resume killing me shortly.

“That’s not very helpful,” I said. “We wish to be friends with Ecula.”

“Friends?” he spat, his chest still rising and falling visibly with the effort to regain his breath. “You steal our breath and say you wish to be friends? I don’t think we can be friends now.”

“You had already said you were going to kill us. We had to do something to defend ourselves. May I ask why you wish to kill us?”

He squinted at me, taking a good look. “You are different from the people who lived here.”

“Yes. We are from a different land. But we know of Ecula. We know of Zanata Sedam. We wish to have peace.”

“Ha!” he barked. “If you know Zanata Sedam, then you know we cannot have peace.” He quoted the first line of the text after that: “ ‘In the beginning there were seven, and in the end there will be only one.’ And that one will be Ecula.”

He was framing the phrase in terms of countries rather than kennings, which I thought strange. Their plan was to destroy the six nations? The math didn’t add up if they counted the additional nations beyond Ecula that Saviič drew on the map. Perhaps they didn’t know we had six nations. “So that is why you are here? Why you killed the people who lived here?”

“Yes. It has begun just as it was set down.”

I did not recall any passage detailing an invasion, but I had no doubt that they were interpreting some vague passage as explicit instructions to attack everyone who wasn’t Eculan. I wanted to ask him where it was set down but feared getting mired in his religious delusions.

“But they did nothing to you, correct? These people gave you no insult.”

“They have the Seven-Year Ship.”

“Where?”

The Eculan shrugged. “We have not found it yet, but we are sure they have it.”

“Who told you they had it?” I asked.

“Our vojskovodja.”

“Where is your vojskovodja?” I asked. “I need to speak to him or her.”

“He is with the army.”

“Which one? There are several armies, yes?”

“This army. The one that freed this town.”

“Freed?” If killing everyone was freeing them, then that word must not mean what I thought it meant.

“Yes. This is an Eculan city now.”

I gestured to the cold stones, the cold bodies. “Nobody is living in the city.”

The Bone Giant waved the fact away. “They will someday.”

So it was to be conquest. Kill everyone but keep the infrastructure. Simply replace the Brynt population with theirs. And all for some mythical lost ship that I was fairly certain the Brynts knew nothing about. I would have liked to find it myself at this point, but not for the same reasons as the Eculans. If the owners of that ship could make the Eculans stop fighting, it was worth searching for.

“When will your armies arrive in the south?”

The Bone Giant’s face pinched in confusion. “This is the southern region. There is one other army south of us. That is all.”

The only other cities to the south of us that the mistral had listed as lost were the Raelech port of Bennelin and the Brynt port of Hillegöm. If this Eculan believed them to be the southernmost reaches of the continent, then they were operating with incomplete information. They must have acquired a map of Brynlön and Rael and nothing else; I had seen such regional maps before. Or else I was leaping to a conclusion. Or this man was lying to me. I could lie as well.

“I must make sure I understand,” I said. “I am still learning your language.”

The Eculan sneered, showing a mouthful of teeth in as poor condition as Saviič’s. Did they not adhere to basic rules of hygiene? “I can tell,” he said. “How did you learn?”

“One of the faithful. He was sick, and we found him. He taught me. He told me of Zanata Sedam.”

“Who?” the Eculan asked, intensely interested. I doubted I could lie about the name. As fanatical as they were, they probably had all the names of the faithful memorized. And this might be the opening I needed.

“Saviič,” I replied.

“Saviič lives?” He was thoroughly amazed and obviously recognized the name.

“Yes, yes, he does. He was injured on his journey. He is to the south and healing. Perhaps your army has already found him.”

“Where is Saviič?”

I held up a hand to urge him to be patient. “Have you seen a map of this country?”

“Yes. All have seen it.”

“May I see?”

“I do not have a map with me.”

“Stay there. I will show you.” Since we would not kill this man, we had to ensure that he reported nothing useful to his superiors later. He would not learn of Kauria from me if he did not already know of it. Searching the ground, I found a stick on the side of the road and stepped forward a few paces, sketching a rough facsimile of the Brynt and Raelech coast in the turf. I poked at places to indicate the locations of cities. I circled the one that represented Möllerud and then stepped back, motioning to Ponder that he should follow with me to keep a healthy distance between us.

“Look,” I said, pointing to the ground. “Without your weapon, please. I show you where Saviič is.”

The Bone Giant rose to his feet and left his sword on the ground. He seemed to be composed primarily of sinew yet rattled as he walked. Still, his easy movement and height made him intimidating. He peered down at my improvised map and said, “What is this?”

“The coast. The city in a circle is this one,” I said, pointing at the ground beneath our feet. “You see three cities to the south: Hillegöm, Bennelin, and Fandlin. Saviič is in Hillegöm.” By the time he discovered I was lying, I would be far away.

“My army is there now! I must tell my vojskovodja!”

Pasting on my best fake smile, the one I always wore to administration meetings at the college, I said, “I am happy I could help. I hope all the other faithful returned to Ecula.”

It was a statement that begged to be corrected, a favorite stratagem of mine to keep people talking. Say something a person knows to be wrong and very few will be able to contain the inner pedant who simply must teach you how very wrong you are. The Bone Giant was no different. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Most did not. Seventy-seven and seven sailed west, but only seven returned to Ecula.” He raised his fist to the sky, suddenly overcome with zealotry. “It was a sign!”

He did not say what the sign might signify or who was responsible for the sign. But instead of asking him to explain, I simply nodded, the safest reply one could make to nonsense. It was not difficult to deduce that one or more of the faithful who returned must have supplied them with the regional map of Brynlön and Rael they used for their invasion.

“Perhaps more of the faithful remain here like Saviič,” I said. “Your other army to the south may discover them. Your armies to the north may discover more!”

“Why would the faithful remain here all this time?”

An excellent question. Why would these fanatics remain here? “The Seven-Year Ship,” I blurted.

“Yes?”

“They may have searched up rivers for them. They go deep into the interior, very wide. Ships can sail on them.”

“I had not thought of that. It is possible.” Well, it was plausible, anyway, to someone like him who didn’t know these lands. There was no mysterious ship crewed by white-skinned men hiding somewhere up the rivers of Brynlön.

“Can you tell me what the Seven-Year Ship looks like?” I asked him. “I have never seen it.”

He pointed to the bay, where the Eculan fleet was anchored. “Different from our boats. Hull curved to slice waves, very tall. Kraken on the main sail.”

“How does the Seven-Year Ship cross the ocean without being taken by krakens?”

The Bone Giant’s eyes widened. “Yes, I would like to know this, too!”

“But you crossed the ocean.”

“I don’t know how, though. The leaders never told us. Very big secret.”

I waved it away as if it were unimportant. “And when you find the Seven-Year Ship—well, then what?”

The Eculan shrugged. “Depends on what we find. But hopefully it will lead us to the Seventh Kenning. Or even be anchored next to it.”

“Since I am new to Zanata Sedam, could you explain the Seventh Kenning to me? Saviič could not.”

“It’s powerful. More powerful than the other kennings.”

“Yes, it must be, of course. But what is it?”

“Power.”

“Fine, but how does it work? What can one blessed by the Seventh Kenning do?”

“Do you think I don’t know?”

“I’m starting to wonder, since you do not answer.” The translated (yet incomplete) text of Zanata Sedam had not provided me any clarity on the subject, so it was little wonder this soldier had no answers. It only said the Seventh Kenning was greater than the others, or beyond them, or a blessing past the power of speech. But on such a vague promise they had crossed the ocean.

“I do not think I should tell you. You say you follow Zanata Sedam, but you are not one of us.” He pointedly summoned some phlegm from his lungs and spat in our direction.

“Fine. And what if you don’t find the Seven-Year Ship?”

He shrugged. “Then next year we look in the other countries.”

I cocked my head, alarm swelling in my head like a balloon. “What other countries?”

The Bone Giant waved dismissively in the direction of Kauria. “Farther south. The ones on the other map.” He must have meant the southeastern regional map. So Kauria was next, along with the east coast of Forn. “But I am not worried,” the Bone Giant continued. “We will find the Seven-Year Ship here somewhere. It has to be in the north.”

“Why must it be?”

“The vojskovodja is sure, and so is the kraljic, so we are all sure.”

Their king! “Has the kraljic joined you here?”

A derisive snort. “No, of course not!”

“Of course not,” I said, grinning at him. “Thank you for your time. I’m glad that you and I could speak peaceably.”

He jerked his head around as if suddenly remembering that his companions were still unconscious. I found it reassuring. He was not the quickest gust in the storm, and that meant he was less likely to try fooling me with misdirection. Ponder had done well to keep him conscious instead of the leader, but it was time to make an exit before his suspicions triggered a renewal of violence.

“I wish you and your companions well,” I said. “They will awaken soon, so there is no need to worry. Please tell them I am sorry I had to put them to sleep. I wish we all could have spoken in friendship as you and I did.”

“Where are you going?”

“Up the road to the next city. We have news to spread, after all, that some of the faithful still survive! Is there any message you wish to send along?”

“No,” the Eculan said, his tone making it clear that he was unsure if that was the correct answer. “Why are you going that way? I thought you said you needed to speak to my vojskovodja.”

Oh. I supposed I had said that. Shrugging, I said, “Any will do. There’s another one leading the army to the north, isn’t there?”

“Yes, but—”

“I will tell him of Saviič also.” I waved at him and began to back-pedal. “Farewell.” Ponder waved and walked backward, too, and we took perhaps ten steps that way before turning our backs. A stolen glance over my shoulder showed the Eculan bending to his leader, trying to wake him up.

“We will have to take turns sleeping and hide somewhere off the road tonight,” Ponder said.

“That is well. We are all still alive and breathe Reinei’s peace.”

“Should we not be walking to Hillegöm, where the army is? I thought we were supposed to speak to some military officer of theirs.”

“There’s no need. I have found out what we needed to know. Kauria is a possible target, but not until next year. We can find our ambassador in Setyrön and send word via ship to Mistral Kira. And if we can find this Seven-Year Ship they want so badly or, better yet, the source of the Seventh Kenning, Kauria will never be invaded at all. That must be our new goal.”

“That was quick work, Scholar.”

“Only made possible by your keeping the peace. Thank you for that. We still have much to discover and time is our enemy as much as the Eculans are, but perhaps we may find a way to baffle them yet.”

“Soon after that,” Fintan said as he imprinted a new stone, “Kallindra du Paskre met someone fascinating.”

We have come into a strange morbid time of prosperity, and I am unsure that I like it. My parents are uncomfortable with it, too. There is no joy in this success. But we have sold everything that we could possibly sell at Setyrön after the Bone Giants destroyed cities to the north and south. Our inventory is empty. People were practically frenzied when we came to town—it was like we were the last family of traveling merchants that might ever appear in their lives, and I suppose I can see how that might be true for them, how that fear could wrap itself around their minds like longarms and then squeeze. But they are not cut off; there is still the sea.

And as Father pointed out, there was salvage to be had in Möllerud; that was our only available option right now.

“I don’t want to go back there,” Mother said. “All those dead people. It’s not like they moved on. They’re still rotting there in the open like they were Nentians given to the sky. And I don’t loot corpses.”

“I never suggested that we would be looting corpses.”

“Looting their homes is the same thing!” I’d never heard such anger in Mother’s voice before. “Call it salvage if you want, Lönsyr, but it’s grave robbing, and we’re not going to do that!”

“I think you’ve misunderstood what I wish to salvage. We’re not looting or robbing or profiting off a single Brynt. I’d like to go down there and salvage one of those giant ships.”

“What?”

“Our land trade routes are essentially gone now. How will we make our living once we’ve spent the money we just made? We need to become sea traders, and you saw that fleet of abandoned boats off the coast of Möllerud.”

“Not to dunk your plan’s head in the river, Father, but we don’t know anything about sailing,” I said.

“It’s time we learned! Free boats don’t come along all that often.”

“I’m no expert, but they didn’t look like any cargo boat I’ve ever seen.”

“That’s why we’re going to go down there with shipwrights and sailors.”

“I … what?” Mother said.

“We have the money to hire them right now. The plan is that we go down there and snag a boat or three. Break down one or two, modify the other into a cargo boat with cabins for us. We fly merchant colors. Sail back to Setyrön with the help of our hired crew and learn how to be merchant mariners. Sail from there to Pelemyn with our first load of cargo.”

Mother shook her head. “It’s too risky.”

“Continuing our land route is every bit as risky, if not more. The army that took out Möllerud is still wandering around down there to the south. What if they come back?”

“Well, yes, Lön, that’s an excellent question. What if they come back while we’re down there?”

“We’re not going down alone and certainly not beyond the city. There’re a lot of people going. There will be scouts, and we’ll have plenty of warning if they come back.”

“No, I’m not buying what you’re selling. What does ‘a lot of people’ and ‘scouts’ mean? Is the quartermaster sending an army of mariners along with us or what?”

“Mariners are definitely going, yes, and they’ll be scouting for the enemy and cleaning up the city. Lots of families who had relatives in Möllerud will be going, too. I am sure that there will also be some who are, in fact, intent on looting.”

“If any of them are part of the merchant clave, I won’t speak to them again.”

“As you will. But there are some who think as I do that the giants’ fleet should either be put to use or scuttled. The quartermaster’s one of them.”

“So you have official permission?”

“I and others. We are to take what we want from the invading fleet and destroy the rest.”

It took hours of Father submitting to further questioning and Mother probing to discover holes in his plans, and she did find a few, but Father knew how to handle them: “How should we address that problem, do you think?” he would ask. And in that way Mother became the architect of the future as much as he. They were an excellent team.

Though I was fairly excited by the prospect of learning new skills, the idea held little relish for Jorry. His face was long and mournful as he listened to our parents making plans.

“What’s wrong?” I asked him.

“Little chance of ever seeing Mella du Bandre again if we’re switching claves.”

“So? There’s a greater chance of seeing plenty of other girls whenever we’re in port. Huge cities every time, Jorry, instead of villages and homesteads in the country. Math. Odds.” I snapped my fingers in his face. “Think about them.”

He squinted at me and sneered, ready to scoff by reflex, and then froze as math happened in his head. “Oh.”

I rolled my eyes. His attachment to Mella du Bandre had all the depth of a lily pad. “Your happiness is chained to your groin, little brother. Set it free.”

“My happiness or my groin?”

“Never mind. Shut up and stay miserable.”

I viewed the return to Möllerud as a proper thing. It would not be a helpless, hopeless grind across the tracks, tears coursing down our cheeks as blackwings fatted themselves on a silent city. There would be mourning, true, but there would also be a cleansing and a slow, patient redirection to order in the wake of chaos. A steady building after quick destruction.

Mother told me that this is the pattern of life, and I have seen nothing to contradict it yet: it slowly gets better but suddenly gets worse. And so we must always work, always build, shoring up our walls against the storms that will inevitably descend.

I have been thinking about that night when Motah stole a map of the continent from us. Was that the first gust of this later storm? We haven’t seen these “Bone Giants” in person, but that’s what hearsay is calling them. People we spoke with in Setyrön said they got to the tops of the walls and even got into the city before they were all killed. The tidal mariner dumped most of them into the ocean before they could land, and the same thing happened in Pelemyn. But they were tall and pale and thin like that woman, and their violence was abrupt like hers. And like the man who killed most of the du Hallards. At least Tarrön was safe with an aunt and uncle in the city.

When I tried to talk about it with Father, he shushed me. “Speak no more of that with anyone.”

I know his fear was that we’d be blamed somehow. The air was thick with it: Why hadn’t the mariners seen this coming, or the quartermasters, or the pelenaut? But there had been nothing for us to see except for a single, starving, nearly naked lost woman. And then, of course, there had been the stories of Tarrön and Mella, which the constable had improbably dismissed as some kind of mutant Fornish pirates. She may have never even told anyone about it.

On the way down to Setyrön in an impressive if motley caravan of soldiers, merchants, and other citizens, we came across an older Kaurian man and one of Reinei’s most blessed, a real tempest. I confess to staring impolitely: I do believe I was, for the first time, smitten.

The tempest—introduced as Ponder Tann—had shorn his hair practically down to his skull, and his face was likewise clean-shaven and so very pleasant to look at. He looked like a man who truly believed in the peace of Reinei. Over light brown pants and boots he wore a multitude of thin, gauzy swaths of bright orange and yellow fabric looped and tied around him. They were squares or rectangles knotted at the corners, nothing like a tunic or a shirt about him, just layers of sheer fabric. He must get cold, I thought, and then remembered that he would never be too cold or too hot unless he wished it. He had nothing to fear from the air.

His companion looked slovenly by comparison; if you didn’t see the Kaurian mistral’s osprey on his shoulder, you would assume that he was some kind of servant to the noble-looking tempest. The truth was the opposite: the tempest was there to protect and serve this old man.

He was largely bald but had let the gray curly hair around the temples and the back of his head grow out. He’d pulled it back into a queue behind him. His eyebrows had gone gray, too, and he had the beginnings of a curly, woolly beard sprouting on the dark crag of his jaw. His clothing was much more common and was confined to muted colors. I saw no house embroidered on his tunic apart from the osprey. He worked his way up the road, asking everyone he passed if they might have seen a Bone Giant before the invasion.

“No,” Father said, and I said, “Yes, we did,” at the same time. That earned me a dour glance from Father, and he asserted once more that we hadn’t.

The old man’s eyes shifted between me and Father. “May I introduce myself? I’m Gondel Vedd, a language scholar from the university at Linlauen.” That explained why he spoke Brynt so well. He had a bit of a charming accent but had no difficulty with the words. “The reason I ask is that one of these Bone Giants landed near Linlauen and we still have him there now. I’m able to speak some of their language, so I’ve been sent up here to see if I can piece together what happened and perhaps help our countries avoid further violence.”

Father said, “I’m sorry, but we haven’t—” and then Mother chucked him on the shoulder and scowled. Father sighed and jerked his head back at me. “Talk to my daughter.”

I sketched out for him what had happened that night with the giant woman who was possibly named Motah, and he asked me particulars about the map.

“Which map did you give her? A regional map of Brynlön and Rael?”

“No, it was of all six nations. A very good map—Kaurian made, in fact.”

“You’re positive?”

“Yes. It’s the only map of the world we had, and there was a drawing of Mistral Kira and her osprey on it, I remember that.”

“She probably didn’t make it back, then. Or else the leaders weren’t sharing the big picture with the soldiers.”

“I’m sorry, what do you mean?”

“I spoke with one of them recently. There are a few in Möllerud, and I’ve already warned the mariners at the front of the column to beware. He has seen regional maps but not a map of all six nations.”

“Oh! So our map couldn’t have made it back to wherever they came from?”

“They call it Ecula. And it appears unlikely. Unless the Bone Giants are lying to their own people.” He plunged his hand into a flat leather bag slung across his body and produced a strangely bound book with the foreign words Zanata Sedam on the cover. “Did she by any chance have a copy of this book with her?”

“No, she had a dagger with her, and that’s it. I mean, she might have had a book in her boat, but we never got a close look at that.” Then I remembered that I had recorded the whole thing in my diary and asked him to follow me to the back of the wagon. I crawled in, fetched my diary, then invited him to sit on the tailgate with me. I turned to the entry and showed it to him.

“Fascinating,” he said as he read it, and then turned to me. “Would you mind terribly if I made a copy of this account? It’s quite helpful and precisely what I was hoping to hear about.”

“Sure, go ahead,” I said. “And I know of at least three other families who have seen one,” I added.

“Are they nearby? Might I speak with them?”

“Tarrön du Hallard is in Setyrön. But he might not want to talk about it anymore. The Bone Giant killed his family.”

Gondel pursed his lips together. “I see. They can turn violent of a sudden, I’ve noticed,” he said.

“Is the one you have in Kauria like that, too?”

Gondel nodded. “He’s calm until he sees his religious text. Then he tries to get to it no matter what. A fanatic.”

“Well, I did write down what the du Bandres said. It’s in my entry about the clave.” I leafed through the pages until I found it and showed him.

“Ah! My thanks. You are so kind to share this with me.”

He produced his own paper and ink and scribbled down my entries in Kaurian, translating as he went. I let him work in silence and tried my very best not to stare at the tempest as he walked behind and to one side of the cart, keeping Gondel Vedd in sight. In my imagination he was doing the same thing I was and trying not to look at me, stealing glances out of the corners of his eyes. It was fortunate that Jorry was walking up front with the horses and saw none of this; he would tease me mercilessly about it just as I had teased him about Mella du Bandre.

When the scholar finished, he closed my diary and returned it to me with both hands like it was something sacred. “I hope you realize what you have here, Kallindra,” he said.

“Just a diary,” I said, taking it from his knobby, ink-stained fingers.

“It’s much more than that. It’s a record of a way of life that no longer exists. The end of an era. It’s history. Whatever Brynlön may be in the future, it will never again be the country you wrote about there.”

“Oh. I hadn’t thought of it like that.” The diary seemed heavier all of a sudden, and I frowned. “I suppose you’re right.”

There would be no clave in a cornfield for us again. No happy visits to farms and villages or the special treat of that honey-apple bacon. All our usual customers were gone. Their lives were over, and ours were forever changed.

Gondel Vedd had understood that before I did. How? What had happened to him? He looked at me with such empathy in his eyes that mine welled up and I gulped, trying to swallow a sob.

“Does your family follow Bryn or some other god?” he asked.

“Mostly Bryn, but we revere them all like many traveling people do. I’m sure you follow Reinei.”

“Yes. I subscribe to peace. But it’s difficult to see Reinei’s work in Brynlön right now. I hope the wind will blow gently and bring you peace again soon. I will pray for you and your family if you don’t mind.”

“That would be very kind. Thank you.”

He bowed his head to me. “It was my very great pleasure to meet you, and I hope we will meet again in this life. Please be well and happy until then, and be wary. There were a few Bone Giants still in the city when we left it.”

The old scholar slid carefully off the tailgate and winced at some pain—knees would be my guess. But then he raised his hand in farewell, and so did the tempest. I waved back, carried along by the wagon, and watched them diminish as they turned to continue on their way to Setyrön. I hoped I’d see them again, but every revolution of the wagon’s wheels told me that the future was too uncertain to harbor such thoughts. My only certainties at this point are that my parents love me and my brother is unspeakably horny.

The bard waved to the crowd after returning to his own form. “That’s all for today! Tomorrow we hear more from your very own tidal mariner, Tallynd du Böll, as well as others!”

Immediately after the bard’s performance on the wall, one of the Wraith’s men approached me and handed me a set of keys. “Those will get you into your house. We’ve installed several security measures, and someone will tell you about them tomorrow. For now, enjoy your new home.”

“My new home? What do you mean?”

The longshoreman didn’t reply; he simply trickled away into the crowd like spring runoff. I made my way home as quickly as possible, curious beyond measure, as the sun edged toward one horizon and the moon peeked over the other. People in the streets were smiling, amused by Kallindra du Paskre and her assessment of her brother.

My house didn’t look any different from the outside except for the front door. There were three different locks on it now instead of one, though still just the single knob. I considered the ring of keys in my hand, wondering which one belonged to each lock. I was going to look silly while I tried them out.

“Dervan?” a woman’s voice called behind my back, uncertain and tremulous. I turned and beheld a familiar figure in orange.

“Elynea!” I threw my hand up in surprise and dropped the keys. “You’re alive!”

She began to smile and then frowned. “You thought I was dead?”

“No, I simply didn’t know; I’ve been looking for you.”

“You have?”

“Well, yes. Excuse me.” I bent down to pick up my keys. “Garst came looking for you a couple of nights ago, and that made me worry.”

She put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, I was afraid of that. That’s why I didn’t come back.”

“Are you all right? How is Tamöd?”

“He has a black eye, but we’re okay otherwise. I mean—” She bit her lip, and her eyes welled a bit. “I’m feeling angry and stupid and don’t know how I’ll ever forgive myself for putting Tamöd in that situation, but physically, nothing permanent. We’re fine.”

“I’m so relieved. But please don’t blame yourself. All the blame rests with Garst. And if it makes you feel any better, he received his comeuppance from a Priest of the Gale.”

Elynea palmed the tears away from her eyes and said, “A Priest of the Gale? One of those Kaurian warrior monks?”

I grinned at her. “You should have seen it. He was so peaceful there at the end, so polite and cooperative with his face mashed into the floor.”

“Ah!” She clapped her hands twice and returned my smile. “So justice still exists. That does make me feel better.”

“Good. Are you safe now? Is there anything I can do for you?”

She looked over her shoulder. “Well, when we left you said that we’d always be welcome back …”

“That was true. And it’s still true.”

“I was hoping we could stay with you again while I look for another job.”

“Oh, of course! Of course! Please do! Where are the kids now?”

She hooked a thumb behind her. “We’ve been hiding at Dame du Marröd’s for the past few days. Do you still need furniture and … things?”

“Well, perhaps not. Some men were working on the house today, and I’m not sure what to expect when I open the door.”

“I saw them. They were moving a lot of stuff in there.”

“Oh. Shall we take a look, then?”

I asked her to hold my manuscript while I fumbled with the keys. “These are all new,” I explained. “I need to figure them out.” I began with the top lock and didn’t get it to turn until the last key. The main lock with the knob underneath it likewise didn’t turn until the second try, maximizing my embarrassment. At least I knew by process of elimination which key would turn the bottom lock. “Great. I’ll take that back,” I said, reaching for the manuscript. “Go on in.”

She turned the knob and pushed open the door, stepping inside. Her gasp of surprise was only a beat ahead of mine.

“They did a lot more in here than I thought,” I said.

The living area was fully furnished with a new sofa, chairs, and conversation table, as well as bookcases full of books that I did not own. I needed only a brief glance to confirm that it was all far above a university professor’s pay. That meant I was in deep debt to the Wraith or the pelenaut or somebody before I even got into the bedrooms.

“Oh, gods, I am in so much trouble,” I muttered. When the men with tool belts had bidden me farewell that morning, I had expected a few spare extras but nothing like this. I wasn’t looking at simple security and convenience; I was looking at luxury. And one way or another, the Wraith would make me pay for it.

“What are you talking about?” Elynea said. “This is fantastic! Look at this fabric!” She was petting the sofa like it was a precious baby rabbit, and I had to resist the temptation to join her. It did look fantastic, but I knew that I hadn’t earned it yet, and I feared what it would cost me.

I couldn’t worry about it in front of her, though, so I nodded and pasted a smile onto my face. “It’s very nice,” I managed.

The kitchen hid new dishes and silver in the cabinets. The bedrooms had entirely new beds and frames in them, along with hardwood wardrobes that looked like they might be imported from Forn. The one in my room almost certainly was, hand-carved with intricate flourishes and probably worth more than my annual salary at the university. The second room—which would belong to Elynea and her kids—had two spacious beds in it. It had to be an upgrade from Garst’s quarters or cramped shared space in Dame du Marröd’s house.

“This is wonderful!” she said, and turned to me; her expression lit up. “Your new job working at the palace must be treating you very well!”

“Yes, very well,” I said, ashamed that I couldn’t explain that I hadn’t paid for any of this. The perplexing thing was that I couldn’t see any of the security supposedly installed beyond the locks. That, I supposed, meant it must be excellent security.

“May I go get the kids?”

“Absolutely! They live here with you now.”

Elynea’s face twisted for a moment, and then she lunged at me, clutching me tightly in a hug made awkward by the fact that I was still cradling the manuscript at my side. She had her head turned sideways against my chest, and I couldn’t see her expression.

“Uh,” I said, so dull that I wondered how anyone could believe I was a professor. “I’m glad you’re back.”

She didn’t respond for a few moments, and I searched for something else to say. She saved me by murmuring, “I never should have left. You’ve been so kind.”

“Nonsense. You’ve been excellent guests. It’s easy to be kind.”

She squeezed a bit tighter and then let me go. “Thank you. I’ll be back soon.”

“I’ll be here.”

She dashed out, and I returned to my bedroom and opened the wardrobe. My tunics were already hanging inside, and some of the shelves were occupied with folded clothes. I planted my manuscript on top of some pants and closed the doors, shaking my head. Something about the windows drew my attention: they were thicker around the edges. Drawing closer, I saw that they were new. The glass was quite thick indeed, and the frames locked on all four sides. To break in, someone would have to wield a tremendous amount of force to shatter the glass and undo the locks. Between the windows and the bolts on the front door I didn’t think anyone would be stealing my furniture again.

Unless Elynea left the door open while I was gone. Or even conspired with thieves to have me robbed while I was away. I still didn’t know what happened that first time.

But how odd, I thought, that the second bedroom contained two beds instead of one, just in time for her return. Almost as if the Wraith planned on me having more than a single guest. Was I, a nominal spy in the Wraith’s organization and therefore the pelenaut’s, being spied on in turn?

I recognized the onset of pervasive paranoia. Sarena used to have it bad, questioning whether every single person in her life might be an adversary. It hadn’t served her well, so I focused on what mattered to me: Tamöd and Pyrella would be safe here, and Elynea, too. They had lost so much, and their future was so uncertain. Let them at least have a secure place to sleep at night, since that was in my power to grant them.

Stung by the thought that I had almost nothing to fix for the evening meal, I repaired to the kitchen to take stock of my stores. The pantry, I discovered, was now stuffed full. In the icebox I found a thin package of wetland marmot meat, among other things. The hearth was already lit, and a new cord of wood waited to be burned.

“How much did all this cost?” I wondered. The empty house gave me no answer. But then the front door burst open, and Tamöd rushed through the door, his arms spread wide and a joyous smile on his bruised face.

“Dervaaaaaan!” he cried. Pyrella followed close behind him, and the hugs they gave me were not awkward at all.

There may be no greater indicator of societal stress than a dearth of proper cheese. When I met the bard the next day at a south side cheese shop, the proprietor nearly wept as he recognized Fintan and apologized for having only two rather stinky varieties for us to choose from and few prospects of restocking anytime soon. Dairy was disappearing fast, and he figured he would disappear with it, since few people would pay for expensive imports.

“I might need to go into the supply side myself if I want to make it,” he said. “Become the dairy farmer I need to make cheese.”

His situation, as with Elynea’s and so many others, made me wonder what our country would look like in the months and years ahead.

We were both at pains to assure the proprietor that we were there as much for the bread and tea as the cheese. Fintan in particular swilled the tea as he fought off a couple of yawns.

“Didn’t sleep well?”

He shook his head. “I rarely do. 1 mean, I do have restful nights, but they’re almost always interrupted. Nightmares, you know. I keep waking up with the stench of burning men in my nostrils. But I’ve been telling myself that Kaelin just needs it all fresh in my mind to do my duty and tell the tale, and once I do, those memories will stop haunting me at night. That’s what I’ve been hoping and praying for. I’ll go up on that wall today and purge it all, and then Gorin Mogen can let me sleep.”

“I hope it happens as you say, for your sake,” I said, but didn’t feel optimistic about his chances. Once horrors take hold in the mind, they tend to clutch and linger, and it takes waves and waves of laughter to wash them away. The problem was that we still had so little to laugh about.

The view from the wall looked different when we got there. The bleachers below were still full, but something was off. It took me a moment to figure out what it was. “Oh! There’re no kids.”

They were back in school. Or rather they were getting out of school now but hadn’t arrived in time to fill in some of the bleacher seats in advance of the bard’s appearance. Looking out beyond the bleachers, I saw some smaller figures mixed in along Survivor Field. Elynea and the kids were most likely at Dame du Marröd’s now, and I wondered how the kids’ first day back at school had gone.

Fintan pulled out his harp, greeted everyone, and announced he’d be performing a traditional Hathrim song still quite popular today.

“I will, in typical Raelech fashion, only perform three verses, but there are many more variations. When it was taught to me by my master during my apprenticeship, he pointed out that this particular song is important as the source of the Hathrim tendency to look upon destruction as a new beginning rather than an end. They often shrug off disaster and say that ‘something better will rise from the ashes,’ as we’ve seen with Gorin Mogen and the population of Harthrad. It makes the giants of the west a resilient people, which is admirable. But it also makes them a people willing to burn anything at a moment’s notice.”

Fire burns! And it cleanses,

And something better

Rises from the ashes,

Like sunspot blooms

On the Hearthfire Ranges.

Fire burns! And it cleanses,

And something better

Rises from the ashes,

Like hardwood saplings

That will fuel our forges.

Fire burns! And it cleanses,

And something better

Rises from the ashes,

Like hot colored glass

In storytelling sculptures.

“Today’s first tale is a bloody one. Let’s head west to Ghurana Nent, where I was given a very rude awakening.” The bard took on a seeming of himself, the slightly younger and less worn version, dressed in the Raelech red leather armor.

I woke up alone at dawn to the sounds of men dying. Trust me when I say few things bring you to full alertness like the final anguished cry of a life ending in violence. Snakes in the pants or a bucket of ice water will work as well but not linger in the mind. That chorus of terror, though, still echoes in my head.

Numa was long gone, and another courier had come at sunset the day before to fetch Tarrech back to Rael, so I was the only Raelech left in the stone bunker that Tarrech had made to protect us against flesh eels and other plains creatures. The roof served as a good vantage point, so when the screams began, I peeked out the breathing vents and then emerged from the bunker to climb to the roof, where I could feel properly horrified and helpless.

To the south, the Hathrim oil trench was all lit up with flames and foul clouds of black smoke billowed into the air. Behind it, in the distance, a formation of giant infantry was shouting and pounding their chests, lifting axes and spears high.

And to the west, directly across from me, men were sprouting into flame as if their heads were the wicks of candles, and many whose heads weren’t on fire had them struck off by the axes of Hathrim houndsmen, a large formation of them charging through the Nentian camp four deep, trampling, hacking, biting, and setting tents on fire.

The Nentians were caught badly off guard, many of them asleep as I had been. The houndsmen traversed the length of the camp from north to south, came to the edge where a line of sharpened stakes was ironically pointed to keep them out or slow them down, and turned around to form up for another pass, ready to mow the camp again like a field of hay. Tactician Ghuyedai had bothered to protect only the southern side of his camp, a halfhearted effort and a strategically stupid decision. Perhaps he thought that he was safe with the juggernaut nearby, but of course he no longer was. Mogen knew how to take advantage: his houndsmen had simply ridden around to the north in the darkness.

Someone rallied a group of pikemen together to stand in front of the next charge, but it was a line only two deep and not wide enough to matter. The houndsmen in the front rank were lavaborn, and they pulled up short and attacked with their kenning while the other ranks of hounds split out to the flanks, got behind the pikemen, and tore them to bloody shreds, grasping their whole bodies in their mouths and biting down, shaking their heads a few times, and then tossing their carcasses aside to land among their comrades. They were utterly destroyed, but they did get the houndsmen to stay still and broke the charge. That allowed the Nentians to charge in on their own from the flanks with pikes, not in any organized fashion but with mad abandon and desperation. And some of them were successful: they sank their pikes into the vulnerable sides of the hounds or even into their hindquarters; there were yipes and whirling hounds to attest to it.

Realizing that they were in an exposed position, one of the giants sounded a retreat to the north; they had to get out of the middle of the mob. Though one hound went down, the rest broke free to the north of the encampment where the charge had begun.

The rider of the hound that went down leapt free before it fell. It was a giantess, judging by the lack of beard, and I soon recognized her as Sefir, their hearth. She kept her hound’s body to her back and then swung her axe in long, wide swaths, keeping the Nentians at bay until she could set them on fire one by one.

Once clear of the camp, the houndsmen with wounded animals dismounted and left them there while those with untouched mounts formed up anew and charged back in. The giants on foot followed in their wake, laying about with their axes, with the lavaborn continuing to spread flames. Nobody fights well while on fire except for the lavaborn themselves.

The infantry from the city approached, taking long strides across the field toward the trench, stepping over their own siege breaker walls, and soon they joined in the massacre. The whole of the Nentian army, surprised out of bed, was slaughtered before the sun was entirely above the horizon, and all I could do was watch. Another two thousand or more added to the toll of two thousand from a few days ago.

Bards are not renowned warriors, and I had no weapons apart from a belt knife and a fighting stave. In my youth I had done my martial arts training like every other kid in the Colaiste, but none of it was designed to take on mounted Hathrim houndsmen. That’s what juggernauts and temblors were for. And if the Nentians, who were armed with weapons designed to take out houndsmen, could not do it without surrounding them and taking huge losses, then there was nothing I could do. I was waiting for one of the lavaborn to see me and casually set my head afire. There would be no hiding in the bunker because there was no way to secure the door. Tarrech had made it invulnerable to fire from a distance but hadn’t counted on Hathrim arriving in person to say hello.

For that was what they did. The screams from the camp lessened and then were cut off altogether as the last of the Nentians died, including Ghuyedai. After that there was only the sound of cooking meat and giants laughing and blackwings calling out to one another as they circled above, eyeing the feast below. I didn’t try to hide, and I fully expected to die. It was the least I could do to help things along; though I would miss Numa and regretted that I would never get to tell this story, I thought my death would at least spur the Triune Council to order something more forceful against Gorin Mogen than the rescue of the stonecutters he’d duped. I said my prayers to the Triple Goddess and consigned myself to death when one of the Hathrim pointed to me through the smoke and shouted to Hearth Sefir. He strode through the carnage in my direction, and Sefir joined him. I expected to be set aflame any moment, but instead they stopped in front of me and squatted down, removing their helmets. Thanks to this and my position on the slightly elevated roof of the bunker, we were eye to eye. Sefir nodded once to me, and smirked, her armor splattered in the blood of Nentians.

“We meet again, Fintan, Bard of the Poet Goddess Kaelin,” she said. I nodded in return as the other giant removed his helmet. “I present to you my husband, Hearthfire Gorin Mogen.”

The Hearthfire was likewise covered in gore, but mostly lower down. His beard was trimmed on the sides but fell from his chin in a black wave to midway down his chest plate. His eyes were ice blue under a heavy brow.

“First,” he said, his voice a deep rumble, “be assured we mean you no harm, Raelech. Thank you, in fact, for staying out of the way during this messy business.”

“That’s what you call it? Messy business? You slaughtered those men in a sneak attack!”

“Do you believe for one instant that they would not have done the same to us if they could?”

“Any attack on Nentians here is a violation of the Sovereignty Accords. You are in the wrong no matter how you try to twist it to claim self-defense.”

The giant shrugged a shoulder. “Fine. We have played long enough. We’re staying here, and I want you to let the viceroy in Hashan Khek know. This city is named Baghra Khek. All peoples—especially Nentians—are welcome to trade in Baghra Khek and to live among us, as many do in Hathrim cities to the south. But make no mistake: this will either be a Hathrim city-state under my rule, the modest boundaries circumscribed by the trench, or a Nentian city of which I am the viceroy. We want logging rights to the northern side of the Godsteeth, for which we will gladly pay, and we will plant a new tree for every one we cut down. If the viceroy or the king wishes to discuss reparations for the men they lost here, I am open to discussing that. I am ready, in fact, to discuss any way forward that will allow my people to remain here permanently and peacefully. We will not entertain any demands that we leave, and any military force sent to drive us out will be destroyed without mercy just as you witnessed here this morning.”

“I’m to be your messenger?”

“Yes. We’re fresh out of Nentians at the moment, heh heh.”

His casual disregard for their lives—making a joke out of all that death—left me slack-jawed. His hearth elbowed him and he flicked his eyes to her, and when she gave a tiny shake of her head by way of scolding him, he turned back to me and cleared his throat. “Apologies. I am often ill suited to diplomacy.”

“Noted. You must know the Nentians will never agree to this.”

“Not at first, no. But that’s where we’ll end up after they’ve sent some more men to die. We can hope it won’t come to that, but we know that it will.”

“It won’t simply be the Nentians. You’ll never have it this easy again.”

“Oh, yes, I’m well aware we will never again have such favorable odds. Too bad your juggernaut ran off on you like that or we might have had a real fight. What was so important that he had to leave?”

“The Triune Council required his presence for something, but I don’t know what.”

“I hope they will have the good sense not to test my resolve. We have dealt with you fairly and harmed no Raelechs and hope that Rael will be a prosperous trading partner with Baghra Khek in the near future.”

“I’ll pass the sentiment along, should I get the opportunity,” I said. “Though I’m not sure how I’ll return to Rael at this point.”

The hearth replied, “We will escort you to Hashan Khek by boat to deliver our message. We’ll even pay for your services, which will hopefully allow you to arrange transport home.”

I had very little choice. There was no reason to stay and every reason to leave, and they offered the only transport that wouldn’t get me eaten by something on the way. But it turned out that when Sefir said “we,” she had no intention of escorting me herself. She and Gorin did escort me to the city, but not inside of it, rather to their docks. They boarded me onto one of their glass boats and set a guard so that I had to stay there and not snoop around. I waited for my actual escort for more than an hour.

It turned out to be Jerin Mogen, whom I’d met before when he returned the stonecutters to us, and another giantess whom I had yet to meet. Both were armored, axes in one hand and helmets carried in the other. I noted differences in the armor: Jerin’s had the same stylized bronze and copper sigil of Thurik’s Flame on his breastplate that his parents wore, whereas the giantess had what looked like the head of an open-mouthed lava dragon on hers, worked in silver and gold rather than copper and bronze. The plating and shape of her armor also were different from the Mogens’, the steel itself of a different color, perhaps of a different quality, though I am not qualified to judge such things. And both of them were different from what the infantry and houndsmen typically wore; that suggested to me that this giantess, whoever she was, must be high status somehow, on the level of the Mogens.

She had long red wavy hair touched with sun-bleached strands of yellow and brown eyes under elegantly arched brows. Her mouth appeared to be wide in a narrow face, and she probably had a winning smile when she had cause to give one. Meeting me, however, was not such an occasion. Her gaze took in my Jereh band and armor with interest; I was probably the first Raelech bard she’d ever seen.

Jerin, who was only slightly taller than she, introduced us. “Hello, bard. I’m Jerin Mogen,” he said, “and this is Olet Kanek.”

“Related to Hearthfire Winthir Kanek?”

She nodded but didn’t bother to clarify the nature of her relationship. I was going to ask, but they just stepped onto the boat, put their axes down, and untied us from the dock, asking me to sit near the aft to work the tiller. They used huge oars resting in the bottom of the boat to pole us into deeper water, and then they sat and rowed us out a bit farther, pointing us north before unfurling the sails. That task done, they returned to their rowing benches, facing me in the stern but not each other, and resumed rowing as if they could not get away from Baghra Khek fast enough. They did all this in complete silence, and I witnessed it with a growing sense of awkwardness.

“Would either of you like a song or perhaps a story to fill the time?” I ventured, and Olet finally opened her mouth to speak.

“No,” she said.

Jerin chuckled briefly at my disappointment, and then the void was filled only by the slosh of waves lapping against the hull and the repeated dip and splash of the oars. I noticed that they both studiously kept their eyes square with their shoulders, as if a glance near the middle of the boat would unforgivably invade the other’s privacy or perhaps nightmarishly invite conversation. It was a bizarre mix of avoidance and respect.

“I’m not well versed in matters of Hathrim etiquette,” I said after this stretched for a few minutes, “so please correct me if I’m wrong, but it appears that the two of you might be in the silent phase of an extended quarrel.”

“Not at all,” Jerin said, his tone affable, even amused. “We have yet to quarrel.”

“Because you barely speak?”

“Ah, you’ve a keen mind. Well done.”