Breath and Bone

Chapter 1

“I don’t understand why I must remain locked in this god-cursed chamber all morning, dressed like a ducessa’s lapdog,” I said, scraping the frost off the window mullion. The distorted view through the thick little pane revealed naught but the snow-crusted ruins of the abbey brew-house, a sight to make a stout heart weep. “You seem to forget that I’m yet a vowed novice of Saint Ophir’s Rule. I should be helping the brothers rebuild their infirmary or salvage their stores if there’s aught to be found under the rubble.”

Storm, pestilence, civil war…the world was falling apart all around us. Abbot Luviar’s hope to protect the knowledge of humankind against this growing darkness dangled by the thinnest of threads. A monk I had believed holy…and my friend…had abducted a child I’d vowed to protect. And I was stuck here in Gillarine Abbey with a guard who never slept, awaiting who knew what. I needed to be doing something useful.

I wrenched the iron casement open and let the snow-­riddled wind howl through for long enough to remind me of the dangers abroad. Setting off alone on a mad chase through the worst winter in Navronne’s history was a ludicrous idea for anyone, much less a man who was like to lose his mind at any hour. My unlikely nursemaid, a warrior whose presence turned men’s bowels to water even before they glimpsed his mutilated face, blocked the doorway of the abbey guesthouse bedchamber. A pile of velvet and satin garments draped over his arm, and a pair of low-cut doeskin court boots—large enough they might possibly fit my outsized feet—dangled from his thick fingers. He waited until I slammed the casement shut before vouchsafing a comment.

“His Grace wishes you to dress as befits his pureblood adviser. You must be ready whenever he summons you, so you should do it now.” Voushanti twisted the unscarred half of his mouth in his unsettling expression of amusement. “And you’re as suited to be a Karish monk as I am to be a pureblood’s valet.”

Though my dealings with Voushanti were anything but amusing, I could not but laugh at the bald truth stated so clearly. My novice vows had bought me a haven here two months previous, when I’d been a wounded deserter with no prospects of a roof, a meal, or a kind word anywhere. That my attachment to Gillarine Abbey had grown into something more was a virtue of the people here and no reversal of my own contrary nature. Circumstances—the law, my loathsome family, and the contract with which they had bound my life’s service to the Bastard Prince of Evanore—had halted my brief clerical career…and every other path of my own choosing.

I peered into the wooden mug on the hearth table, discovered yet again that it was empty, and threw it across the chilly room. “Let me dig graves, if naught else, Voushanti. The brothers have not had time to bury their dead since the Harrower assault. Prince Osriel has not yet arrived at Gillarine, so he couldn’t possibly need me before afternoon. I’ll not run away. I gave him my word. Besides, I’m still half frostbit and wholly knob-swattled from the past seven days, so I’m hardly likely to wander off into this damnable weather again.”

Were I the same man who had claimed sanctuary at Gillarine two months past, I’d have broken my submission to Osriel the Bastard, bashed Voushanti in the head with a brick, and gone chasing after the villain monk and his captive, be damned my word, the weather, and the consequences. But for once in my seven-and-twenty years, I had tried to think things through. Brother Gildas wanted Jullian for a hostage, a tool to manipulate me, thus he would keep the boy alive. I had already sent word to the lighthouse cabal, people who were far more likely to be able to aid my young friend. And in my own peculiar interpretation of divine workings, I believed that breaking my oath of submission, given to save Jullian’s life on another day, would somehow permit the gods to forsake the boy. Two months past, Jullian had saved my life. Perhaps the best service I could do for him was to behave myself for once. Dear Goddess Mother, please let me be right.

Voushanti tossed the fine clothes on the bed. “Dress yourself, pureblood. Remain here until you are summoned. You don’t want to know how sorely Prince Osriel mislikes disobedient servants.”

I pulled off the coarse shirt the monks had lent me and threw it to the floor. Propping my backside on a stool, I began to untie the laces that held up the thick common hose so I could replace them with the fine-woven chausses Prince Osriel expected to see on his bought sorcerer. Deunor’s fire, how I detested playing courtier to a royal ghoul who wouldn’t even show me his face. Though, in truth, if Osriel’s visage was more dreadful than Voushanti’s purple scars and puckered flesh, it would likely paralyze any who saw it. His Grace of Evanore had the nasty habit of mutilating the dead, and was reputed to consort regularly with the lord of the underworld.

Argumentative murmurings on the winding stair slowed my fingers and stiffened Voushanti’s spine as if someone had shoved a poker up his backside. The prior of Gillarine, a black-robed monk with a neck the same width as his shaven head, swept into the room, laden with drinking vessels and a copper pitcher. A ginger-bearded warrior burst through the doorway on Prior Nemesio’s heels.

“I’m sorry, sir,” said the frowning warrior, a robust Evanori by the name of Philo. “The monk insists on seeing the pureblood. I know you said to keep everyone away, but to lay hands on a clergyman—”

A second warrior, also wearing my master’s silver wolf on his hauberk, joined his fellow. Their drawn swords appeared a bit foolish with none present but one stocky, hairless monk, one gangle-limbed sorcerer wearing naught but an ill-fitting undertunic and one leg of his hose, and their own commander.

“For mercy’s sake, Philo, Melkire, sheath your weapons,” I said, stuffing arms and head back into the shirt I had just shed. “Father Prior! Iero’s grace.” Hose drawn back up and laces retied, I jumped to my feet and touched my fingertips to my forehead. “I was shocked to find such devastation here, holy father. If I can do aught to help…”

Though protocol ranked any pureblood, even an illiterate, incompetent one like me, above nobles, clerics, or any other ordinary, I prayed my respectful address might prevent Voushanti and his men from hustling Nemesio away. The prior was my only link to my friends of the lighthouse cabal. I hoped for news of Jullian.

Nemesio’s nostrils flared as if an ill odor permeated the room. Difficult to imagine this unimaginative and slightly pompous man conspiring with the passionate, aristocratic Abbot Luviar to create the magical cache of books and tools they called the lighthouse.

The prior set his copper pitcher on the table and arranged the five cups beside it in a neat row. “Indeed, I have come to request your aid, Brother Valen.”

Voushanti rumbled disapproval.

I acted quickly, lest protocol violations end the visit. “You must not address me directly, Father Prior, but only Mardane Voushanti, as he represents my contracted master, Prince Osriel. But I’m sure the prince would hear your petition favorably in appreciation for your hospitality.”

I held no such assurance, of course. Though I had served him less than a fortnight and met him only twice, Prince Osriel seemed even less likely than most of his ilk to express gratitude of any sort. But perhaps he liked to pretend he was reasonable.

Prior Nemesio’s thick shoulders shifted beneath his habit. He clutched the silver solicale that hung about his neck as if the sunburst symbol of his god could protect him from these minions of the Adversary. The dark blots in his wide, pale face spoke of a sleepless night. “Mardane, a few weeks ago, one of our young aspirants disappeared. We have searched, questioned, and expended every resource to find him without success. We fear greatly for his life. Perhaps you remember Gerard, Brother Valen? A good, devout boy, just fourteen.”

I nodded, a chill more bitter than Navronne’s foul winter shadowing my spirit. Of course, I remembered. This recital was for Voushanti’s benefit. Only the previous night had I shared with the prior my new-formed belief that Brother Gildas, scholar and traitor, had not only stolen young Jullian away, but murdered his friend Gerard.

Nemesio straightened his back and spoke boldly. “We of Saint Ophir’s brotherhood are Gerard’s family. If he lives, then we must locate him and ensure his safety. If he is dead, he must be returned here where we can afford him proper rites. We understand that Brother Valen’s pureblood bent involves tracking and route finding, thus request his aid in our search for the boy.”

Fool of a monk! I wanted to strangle Nemesio. Gerard’s body must be retrieved, and I was more than willing to lend my paltry skills to the task, but Voushanti was Prince Osriel’s man and could not be permitted to know of the place I believed the boy lay—or its significance. The Well was secret. Holy. And Voushanti and our master were not. “Father Prior, I couldn’t possibly—”

“Cartamandua is not brought here to serve you, monk,” Voushanti snapped. “Prince Osriel has chosen this monkhouse as a neutral meeting ground suitable for his royal business. The pureblood is required to attend his master. Nothing else.”

Nemesio’s hairless skull and wide neck glowed crimson. “Well, then. It was but a thought. We would never wish to distract a man from his duty. Here, I’ve brought refreshment for you all.” He filled the five plain vessels from his pitcher, handing them around first to Voushanti and the two warriors, then to me. “In all the excitement of your arrival yestereve…the various comings and goings of so many…we lapsed in our sacred rituals of hospitality.”

Nemesio raised his cup to each of us. His hands were shaking. “May the waters of Saint Gillare’s holy font bring good health and serenity to our guests.”

Voushanti shrugged at Philo and Melkire and the three of them raised their cups and drank. I raised my cup in my two hands, but only touched my lips to its rim. Since the day I turned seven, the day my mother the diviner first pronounced that I would meet my doom in water, blood, and ice, only desperation could drive me to water drinking. And were I naught but a withered husk, I could not have touched this water. The holy spring that fed the abbey font had its source in the hills east of Gillarine—in the very pool where I believed Gerard’s body lay.

A glance across my cup revealed Nemesio glaring at me as if I were defiling a virgin. I had no idea what I’d done, but his shoulders sagged a bit as I lowered my cup. He snatched away the vessel and gathered the emptied cups from the others.

“I’d best leave you gentlemen to your preparations,” he said. “The guesthouse is yours for as long as you need, of course. Though we can provide but meager fare since the Harrower burning, we shall send what refreshment we can for His Grace when he arrives. Our coal garth is intact…” Nemesio’s nervous babbling slowed as Melkire sagged against the doorframe, rubbing his eyes.

I glanced from the prior to the soldiers. Something untoward was going on.

“Mardane Voushant…s’wrong…” Philo’s voice slurred as he dropped to his knees and slumped to the floor. Melkire tumbled on top of him with a soft thud.

“Gracious Iero!” said the prior softly. But he made no move to succor the men.

“What treachery is this?” Voushanti’s hand flew to his sword hilt, and the core of his eyes gleamed scarlet. But before he could draw, he blinked, sat heavily on the low bed, and toppled backward.

“Father Prior, what have you done?” I said, my stomach lodged so far in my throat, my voice croaked as if I were a boy of twelve.

Nemesio dropped his vessels on the table. “They’ll sleep for a few hours and wake confused, so Brother Anselm told me. We’d best go right away.”

I could almost not speak my astonishment. “Nemesio, are you absolutely mad? These men serve Osriel the Bastard, the same prince who conjured horses and warriors the size of your church from a cloud of midnight, the same who, not two months ago, cut out the eyes of a hundred dead soldiers who lay in your fields. We know neither his capabilities nor his intentions in this war. Great Iero’s heart, for all we know he may have dispatched the Harrowers to burn you out!”

“I’m well aware. If the Bastard Prince wishes our destruction, then he’ll do it. I cannot control that. But you have made a grievous charge against Brother Gildas—the lighthouse Scholar—and we cannot know how to proceed until you prove it. As we’ve only these few hours until Prince Osriel takes you away, and as only you can find this place in the hills, I see no alternative.”

“Did you send my message to Stearc and Gram?” Thane Stearc was likely the leader of the cabal now that Abbot Luviar lay dead and Brother Victor lay comatose somewhere in Prince Osriel’s captivity. Stearc despised me and would no more believe my charges than Nemesio did, but Gram—Stearc’s quiet, pragmatic secretary—was a man of reason. He’d see that a search was mounted for Jullian and Brother Traitor.

“Indeed I sent news of your safe return. I also informed them of your foul accusation and my determination to seek the truth. You claim that you are one of us—sworn to Abbot Luviar’s memory to aid us in our mission—and this is the service we require of you.” Without waiting for my hundred arguments against this lackwit plan, he stepped over the two warriors and vanished down the stair.

Gods preserve me from holy men. It was Abbot Luviar’s persuasive passion that had got me caught up in his mad scheme to preserve the entirety of human knowledge in his magical library. Now his splayed and gutted corpse hung from a gallows back in Palinur. Crossing Prince Osriel…laying out his men with potions…the prior would have us end up the same or worse.

Yet as I pulled on a heavy cloak, I could not deny the virtue of retrieving poor Gerard. Unlike Jullian, a wily, experienced conspirator at age twelve, simple, good-hearted Gerard had been but an unlucky bystander. He should not lie forgotten.

For the fiftieth time since we’d left the abbey, I glanced over my shoulder and saw no one. A frost wind gusted off the mountains to the south, whipping the snow into coils and broomtails that merged with the gray-white clouds, hiding Gillarine’s broken towers. Ahead of me the prior, his black cowl billowing, strode eastward across the wind-scoured fields toward the valley’s bounding ridge, leading Dob, the abbey’s donkey.

Though the calendar marked the season scarce a month past Reaper’s Moon, the once-fertile valley of the Kay lay blanketed in snow. The Karish said Navronne’s past ten years of increasingly cold summers and bitter winters were caused by the One God Iero’s wrath at mankind’s sinfulness. The Sinduri Council claimed the elder gods’ bickering among themselves had shifted the bowl of the sky. Those of the lighthouse cabal feared the cause lay with the earth’s guardians—the mysterious, elusive Danae, who had withdrawn from all contact with humankind. Though I had no sensible arguments to make, my instincts told me that matters were worse than they imagined. Whatever the cause, famine and pestilence had taken on bony reality and crawled into our beds with us.

“We should be hunting the living, not the dead,” I said, puffing out great gouts of steam in the cold air. “Don’t you understand, Nemesio? Not only does Gildas have Jullian, he has my grandfather’s book of maps. And the god’s own fool that I am, I unlocked the book to him. Given rumor of a Danae holy place…given even a guess as to where one might lie…he can follow the maps and take the Harrowers there to destroy it. Once Prince Osriel takes me away from here, I’ll not be able to help you anymore. And without me or the book, you’ve no hope to find the Danae and ask for help.”

“Brother Gildas has been a member of Saint Ophir’s order for nine years.” Nemesio’s voice quivered with suppressed fury. “With unmatched scholarship, holiness, and devotion, he has devoted himself to work and study that he may carry the world’s hope into the future. You, sir, are a liar, a charlatan who has mocked our faith and suborned the weak-minded with your unending prattle, a hedonist and libertine, an illiterate wastrel who has spurned Iero’s greatest gift—the magic in your blood—and accomplished nothing of value in your life. Why would anyone accept your word as truth?”

Knowing that his every charge had merit did nothing for my bitter temper. “Have you no fear of walking out alone with such a rogue?”

“Two of our brothers hold missives to be forwarded to Thane Stearc should I fail to return.”

“Spirits of night…”

Nemesio halted where the land kicked up sharply into the ridge, motioning for me to take the lead. “Abbot Luviar, the most admirable and perceptive of men, insisted that you were more than we could see. Yet he also named Brother Gildas as the Scholar. In which man was he deceived?”

And so was I silenced. I could not argue Gildas’s guilt without confessing my own—that my slug-witted reaction to an excess of nivat seeds had prevented me rescuing Luviar from his hideous death. The fact that Gildas himself had abetted my perverse craving could never exonerate me.

Our path twisted upward through gullies and rockfalls, every crevice and shadowed nook treacherous with ice and crusted snow.

“Not far now,” I said, as I led Nemesio and the flagging donkey up the last steep climb and onto a shelf of rock that abutted a shallow cliff.

Shivering, uneasy, I gazed back out over the valley of the Kay and the slopes we had traversed, shrouded in snow fog that teased the eye. Drifting clouds mantled the cliff tops above us. I could not shake the certainty that we were being watched. How could I have been so stupid as to come here? Only one day ago I had narrowly escaped a trap set by the trickster Danae down in the bogs of the River Kay. And now we were to intrude on their holy place, an unassuming little hollow that touched on the most profound mysteries of the world.

Chapter 2

Sila Diaglou, priestess of the ragtag Harrowers, wished to send Navronne back to the days before cities and roads and tilled soil, to a time when women hid in caves and men cowered in terror of night and storm. She named all gods false: Iero, the benevolent deity of the Karish, as well as Mother Samele and Kemen Sky Lord and the rest of the elder gods, worshiped in Navronne since time remembered. Harrowers ridiculed belief in Iero’s angels, called the impish aingerou naught but fools’ wishing dreams, and denied the existence of the Danae, whose dancing defined the Canon—the pattern of the world.

I could not name which gods were real and which but story. Nor could I argue the truth of angels or aingerou, though I spat on my finger and patted the naked rumps of those cherubic messengers carved into drainpipes and archways in hopes my prayers might be carried on to greater deities. But Danae…As boy and man I had scoffed at my grandfather’s claims to have traveled their realms. But Danae existed. Since I’d come to Gillarine, I had glimpsed at least two of them for myself.

The prior and I trod slowly along the snowy shelf path. Repeated melting and freezing had left small glaciers along the way.

“Are you having second thoughts, pureblood?” asked Nemesio, blowing on his rag-wrapped fingers to warm them. “Why would Brother Gildas choose this particular spot to hide a body when any of these gullies would do? Perhaps you’ll tell me this is the wrong location after all.”

There was no mistake. “He chose this place because killing Gerard was not his object. He wanted to kill the Danae guardian.”

Despite their claims, at least some of the Harrowers believed in the Danae. It could be no accident that their savage rites murdered Danae guardians one by one.

Legend said Danae lived both on the earth and in it. Everywhere and nowhere, my mad grandfather said. Most times they took human form to walk their lands—our lands, for the human and Danae realms were both the same and not the same. But for one season of every year a Dané became one with a sianou—the grove, lake, stream, or meadow he or she had chosen to guard. The protection of a Dané infused the sianou and the surrounding land with life and health.

Our destination was such a sianou, a pool I had located at the bidding of Abbot Luviar, before I even understood what kind of place it was. I had brought my friend Brother Gildas there, and in the weeks since that night, Gerard had gone missing, blight had infected Gillarine’s orchards and fields, and disease had come to its sheepfolds. When I touched my hands to the earth in the abbey’s cloisters, I could no longer feel its living pulse. Harrower raiders had left the abbey buildings in ruins, but I believed the cause of its underlying sickness lay here and that Gildas was responsible.

Snow and ice packed a jutting slab beneath its slight overhang. Dob balked and brayed in protest at the tight corner. As the prior slapped the donkey’s rump and hauled on the lead, a horse whinnied anxiously just ahead of us.

Startled, beset with imaginings of lurking Harrowers, I hissed at Nemesio to keep silent.

Footsteps and jostling spoke of one man and one beast. “Easy, girl, it’s friendly company on the way. We’ll be about our business and be off again to hay and blanket.”

The quietly persuasive voice brought a smile to my lips. Gram could convince a cat to play in the ocean.

“How in great Iero’s mercy do you happen to be here?” I said, abandoning the prior to the donkey while I hurried around the rock and along the shelf toward the slender, dark-haired man stroking a gray mare. “Did you get Nemesio’s message about Jullian and Gildas? Well, of course, you must have done. That’s why you’ve come. Gram, you must believe me. Gildas has taken Jullian and the book. He’s murdered Gerard…”

I wanted to pass on everything I knew: what I had sensed in the abbey’s cloisters, the truth about my damnable perversion and how Gildas had thought to use it to bend me to his will. My determination to rescue Jullian—perhaps the only true innocent left in this blasted world—had become a fever in me. Ever-sensible Gram would understand the importance of prompt action. The man spent his days as the calm center of the lighthouse cabal, juggling his testy employer, Thane Stearc, and Stearc’s ebullient daughter, Elene. But I’d scarcely begun my tale when Gram raised his gloved hand.

“Hold, friend Valen,” he said. “We are already moving. Thane Stearc and his men have spent the night scouring the countryside between here and Elanus for the two of them. Mistress Elene leads another search party between here and Fortress Groult. We told Thanea Zurina that a wayward monk had kidnapped a young friend of yours and asked her to keep an eye out along the roads west as she makes her way home.”

The flushed Nemesio joined us, hauling Dob behind him. “What are you doing here, Gram?”

Gram bowed politely. “Good Father Prior, your god’s grace be with you this morning. As I was just telling Valen, Thane Stearc has dispatched several parties to search for Jullian and Brother Gildas. As he wished to move swiftly, my lord left me behind at Fortress Groult. So I rode up here, hoping to make myself useful.”

The secretary’s pale skin took on a hint of scarlet. Though no older than I, Gram was sorely afflicted with ill health.

Prior Nemesio shook his head. “Brother Valen’s story is nonsensical. How could a scholarly man such as Gildas give hearing to Harrowers? Even if he be apostate to divine Karus and the One God, which I cannot credit, who but mindless lunatics could imagine that a world without tools or books is what any god intends?”

Sila Diaglou claimed her dark age would be a time of appeasement, a time of cleansing, required because we had forgotten our proper fear of the Gehoum, the elemental Powers who controlled the land and seasons. The bitter wind whined through the crags, as if to answer my skepticism with a reminder of our wildly skewed seasons, and the disease and starvation that howled at Navronne’s door like starved wolves.

Gram stroked the mare’s neck and fondled her ears. “Men are driven in such varied ways, Father Prior. Brother Gildas relished his task as Last Scholar, destined to be the holder of humankind’s accumulated wisdom. Perhaps—and who can say what is in a man’s heart?—he does not relish the task of First Teacher.”

Nemesio tightened his full lips. “We have only Brother Valen’s surmise. I’ll not believe ill of Brother Gildas without some proof. So where is this pool, Brother? We must get you back before the demon prince’s heathenish servants awaken.”

I’d been to the Well only once, in conditions of light and weather so different I didn’t trust my memory to recognize the cleft in the wall. So I crouched down, recalled the passage, the grotto, and the pool, and allowed magic to flow through my fingers into the stone beneath my feet. Cold, harsh, its cracks filled with frost crystals, the stone gave up its secrets far more reluctantly than earth. But I stretched my mind forward, swept the path and the cliff, and after a moment, a guiding thread claimed my senses—a surety something like that birds must feel when the days grow short and they streak southward beyond the mountains toward warmer climes. Such was the gift of the Cartamandua bent, the legacy of my father and grandfather’s bloodline—a gift I had spurned because of its cost to my freedom. “This way,” I said, moving northward along the shelf path.

“You said Prince Osriel himself comes to Gillarine tonight?” said Gram to the prior, as they trudged behind me, leading the beasts and sharing a flask Gram had brought.

“Aye,” said the prior. “’Twas only out of respect for good King Eodward’s memory that I could stomach hosting such a visitation. How could a noble king breed such a son?”

Gram downed a long pull from his flask. “Abbot Luviar himself could not explain the ways of the gods sufficient to that question.”

Dikes of dense black stone seamed the pale layers of the limestone cliff with vertical bands. Some twenty paces along the cliff, a wide crack split one of these dark bands. “Here,” I said. “We’ll find him here.”

The gray morning dimmed to twilight in the narrow passage. We stepped carefully. A dark glaze of ice sheathed the straight walls and slicked the stone beneath our feet. Ahead of us, beyond a rectangle of gray light, lay the little corrie, centered by a pool worn into the stone.

Clyste’s Well, the pool was called, named for the Dané who had last claimed guardianship there. On one of his journeys into the Danae realms, my grandfather had involved Clyste in a mysterious theft that had driven humans and Danae apart. For his part in the crime, the Danae had tormented his mind to madness. For hers, they had locked her away in her sianou, forbidding her to take human form again. She had lived on all the years since, enriching the lands watered by her spring, including Gillarine Abbey. But no more. My every sense insisted she was dead. Murdered.

Heart drumming against my ribs, I bade Nemesio leave the ass where he stood. A few steps more and we reached the entry, the point where the passage walls expanded to encircle the grotto like cupped hands. Ah, Holy Mother… I clamped my arms about my aching middle. I would have given my two legs to be wrong.

Translucent, blue-white cascades of ice ridged the vertical walls and sheeted the smooth ground. The pool itself lay unfrozen, dark and still, no matter the wind that whipped the heights, showering us with spicules of ice. Gerard floated on the glassy water, naked, bloodless. Rain must have washed his shredded flesh clean of blood and what scraps of his abbey garments the knives had spared. The thorough savagery could have left no blood inside him. Iron spikes had been driven through his outstretched hands, tethering him to the rocky bank like a boat to its mooring. But one hand had torn through as he struggled to escape his fate, and now dangled loose in the water. Harrowers left their ritual victims to suffer and bleed, for it was both their blood and their torment that poisoned the sleeping Danae and the lands they guarded. So my grandfather had told me.

Nemesio choked, and I shoved him ruthlessly back into the passage to empty himself, though it was likely foolish to worry about further desecrating a place so vilely profaned. Gram pressed his back to the cliff wall at the entry, his pale cheeks as stark and drawn as the frozen cascades. “I cannot go here,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you with this.”

“No matter. Rest as you need.” I retrieved a worn blanket from the donkey’s back and entered the grotto. Kneeling at the brink of the pool, I touched Gerard’s tethered hand. Cold. Great, holy gods…so cold. Darkness enfolded me, threaded my veins and sinews, tightened about my heart and lungs until I felt as if I shared the terrifying, lonely end of this child’s short life, and with it, the cold suffocation of the dead guardian. I needed desperately to empty my stomach, too, to cry out my sickness, to run, to be anywhere but this dreadful place. But I could not leave the boy. Forgive. Please gods and holy earth, forgive us all.

Stretching out from the brink, I drew him close, then worked awkwardly to wrap the blanket around him. By the time I had pulled his weakened flesh from the remaining spike, an iron-faced Nemesio had rejoined me. Together we used the blanket to lift the boy from the pool, then wrapped him in an outer blanket and carried him into the passage.

As the three of us tied the gray bundle to Dob’s back, a movement caught the corner of my eye back in the corrie. A glint of sapphire brilliance quickly vanished in the gray light.

“Go on out,” I whispered, still fighting to contain my own sickness. Gram looked ill, and the prior’s teeth clattered like a bone rattle. Nemesio and I were both soaked. “I’ll be along before you start down the steeps.”

Nemesio clucked softly to the donkey. I slipped back down the passage toward the rectangle of light, flattened myself to the icy wall, and peered into the grotto.

A tall, naked man, every quat of his lean flesh ridged with muscle, knelt on one knee beside the pool. Back bent, head bowed, he extended his long arms over the water in a graceful curve as if to embrace the very essence of the pond. Red hair twined with yellow flowers curled over one shoulder. Patterns of blue light scribed his skin—a sapphire heron on his back, vines and flowers the color of mountain sky on his powerful limbs, a spray of reeds drawn in azure and lapis along one thigh and hip.

The Dané lifted his head, and a single anguished cry tore through him—echoing from the ice-clad walls, resonating in my bones. And then, stretching his arms to the heavens, he rose on his bare toes and whipped one leg around so that he spun in place. A quick step and then he spun again…and then again, moving around the pool in a blur of flesh and color and woven light, one arm curved before his chest, one above his head. The very rocks wept with his sorrow. I thought my heart might stop with the beauty of it.

When he reached his starting point, I stepped farther into the grotto. He halted in midspin and dropped his hands to his sides. He was not at all surprised to see me. And I recognized him. Three times I had glimpsed this same one of them…but never so close. Never in the fullness of his glory.

His eyes glowed the fiery gold of aspen leaves in autumn. On his left cheek the fine-drawn pattern of light scribed a dragon, whose wings spread across brow, shoulder, and chest, and whose long tail wrapped about his left arm. Below the graceful reeds that curved from his hip across his belly, a hatchling dragon coiled about his groin and privy parts. He appeared no more than thirty, but Danae lived for centuries and did not age as humans do.

“I didn’t know this would happen,” I said. “The man I brought here pretended to be what he was not. The child he slaughtered was an innocent…chosen because he was my friend. Never…never…did I mean to bring this on the one who slept here—this Clyste. My grandfather—” I caught myself before saying more. The Dané wouldn’t care to hear that a human wept for her.

“As wolfsbane art thou, Cartamandua-son,” he said, speaking fury and grief in the timbre of tuned bronze. “Beauty and poison. Taking life. Giving it back. Speaking the language of land and water, but with words graceless and ignorant. Intruding where thou shouldst not, violating—” He broke off, trembling, and swept his hand to encompass the grotto. “Thou dost lead me here, cleanse the Well so I do not sicken, return it to my memory so I cannot escape knowing what is lost—though I must lose it all over again as I walk away. Is this thy pleasure to taunt those thou dost not know? Dost thou think my love for Clyste can shield thee from the judgment of the long-lived?”

As flint to steel, his indignation sparked my anger, erasing all caution. “I know naught of you, Dané, save that you once offered me a haven in my need, then stood back and observed my captivity as if I were a performing bear chained for your amusement. I know that Danae vengeance has left my grandsire a madman. And I know that you or one of your fellows tricked me and my companions and our enemies into the bogs as if all humans were naught but beasts worthy of a slaughterhouse.” Naught would ever erase the memory of luring my enemies into the freezing mud to save my companions’ lives, of hearing…feeling…them drown. “I once believed your kind to be the blessed finger of the Creator in this world. But you are no better than we are.”

“Pah!” With a snarl of disgust he turned away. Kneeling once again by the pool, he scooped water in his hands and poured it over his head. “Askon geraitz, Clyste,” he said, his voice breaking. “Live on in my heart, asengai. Let me not forget thee.”

“Kol, don’t leave. You must—Please hear us!” I had forgotten Gram. The wan secretary stood framed in the dark band of the passage entry, astonished…stammering. “Many of us…most…despise these murderers. The Everlasting is in upheaval, to the ruin of our land, our beasts, and all humankind. Whatever the cause, we desperately need the help of the long-lived to understand it…to make it right again. The gard of the dragon names thee Kol, friend and foster brother of Eodward King, brother to shining Clyste, who danced as none before her. In Eodward’s name we beg hearing. Please, take us to Stian Archon or to any who might heed our message…our need…”

The Dané shifted his gold eyes to Gram. Cocking his head, he flared his nostrils and inhaled deeply. His lip curled. “Human speech is briar and nightshade. Human loyalty is that of wild dogs and weasels. Stripped is Stian of his archon’s wreath.” His finger pointed to the dark pool. “These evils are the gifting of Eodward to those who sheltered him. Begone! Thou dost bear the stink of betrayal and shalt not pass one step into our lands until his debt is paid.” He strode toward the ice-clad wall, but before he reached it, he vanished in a ripple of air and light.

Never had I stood in a place so unforgiving, so empty. Gram might have been frozen into the wall. I gave him a nudge, and we abandoned the grotto.

Halfway down the dark passage, a spasm of coughing caused Gram to stumble and skid on the ice. I grabbed his arm and steadied him. “You should come back to the abbey with us, Gram. You look like walking death.”

“I might as well be dead. I should have listened better at Caedmon’s Bridge, but I didn’t want to hear their judgment. I should have believed what you told us about the Harrower rites poisoning sianous.”

“My grandfather said it is the Danae’s greatest secret. But when I walked into Gillarine yesterday and found it ruined…when I touched the earth in the cloisters…Gram, I felt the world broken. I know it sounds presumptuous. I’ve meager skills and a history of lies, but you must believe that every breath, every bone, every drop of my blood tells me that this breaking is cause of the world’s upheaval…the weather…the sickness…I’ll swear it on whatever you like.”

Someday, perhaps, someone might believe what I said without the backing of god-sworn oaths. My myriad swearings had my life tangled upside over and backside front.

“We did not doubt your sincerity, Valen. We just believed that no human action could compromise the Canon itself. We assumed your grandfather’s tale was but guilt speaking through madness. And now I’ve wasted this opportunity. I should have been better prepared. Ah, cursed be this weakness…inept…” The racking cough forced him to stop and lean on the wall. He slapped his hands against the stone in frustration, his reserve shattered for the first time since I’d known him.

“If all this is true,” he said, when he caught his breath at last, “if the Danae forget a place when it is corrupted and lost to the Canon, then how could Kol be here?”

“He follows me,” I said, able to answer that one question, at least. “I saw him the first time on the night I tried to escape from Gillarine. He waited in an aspen grove and offered his hand—tried to rescue me. Then he watched me every day of my punishment exhibition in the streets of Palinur. I even glimpsed him in a courtyard of my family’s house. I saw a Dané in Mellune Forest, too, but I’m not sure it was he. I didn’t know the one with the dragon on his face was Kol. Spirits of night, Clyste’s brother…he likely was the one who tried to drown us in the bog. My grandfather warned me that I was in danger from the Danae.”

Gram stared at me for a moment in the dim light, then rested his back against the passage wall and averted his eyes. I’d never met a more private man. “That makes no sense,” he said, collecting his scattered emotions. “Your grandfather is being punished for his crime and will continue to be until whatever he stole is returned. Thus his debt is being paid. The Danae would never take vengeance on others, even his family, unless they believed those others complicit in Janus’s crime. Their law—the Law of the Everlasting—forbids it.”

He ran his long fingers through his hair as if to drag ideas from his skull. “Danae justice is quite clear and quite specific. Everything is balance. Bargains. Exchanges. Think of what Kol said and how he said it. Death and life. Violation and restored memory. He clearly did not blame you for Clyste’s death. He would blame the one who did the murder. Perhaps he was already following you about when it happened. Yet he implied that you’ve raised the ire of other Danae…the judgment of the long-lived…and with your grandfather’s warning…” He looked up at me again. “Valen, do you have what Janus stole?”

“No!” I said. “I didn’t even know of my grandfather’s crime until a fortnight ago. And he refused to tell me what he took. If their ‘justice’ is so balanced, then why does Eodward’s betrayal bar us all from their realms?”

“I don’t think he meant all humans.” Shivering, Gram bundled his cloak tighter. “I’ve got to consider all this…inform Thane Stearc and see what he makes of it. Our plans may have to change. Come, we’d best get back.”

“Brother Valen!” As if in echo of Gram’s conclusion, Nemesio’s call bounced urgently through the passage. “Get out here now!”

“So you go back to Osriel?” said Gram as we hurried toward the light.

“I would rather do anything else. But I must honor my word or else—Well, I don’t know what would happen, but my word is the only thing I’ve ever held to. I promise you, I’ll be no good to him.”

He stopped me as we approached the mouth of the passage. “You said something similar back at Mellune. What do you mean?”

No need for him to know what my nivat-starved perversion was like to make of me. I pulled my arm from his hand. “Be well, Gram. Give the thane and his daughter my regards.”

“Teneamus, Valen,” he said.

We preserve—the Aurellian code word of the lighthouse cabal. Gram’s invocation of it expressed the sincerity of his concern for me. I had no answer for his kindness. “We’d best go before Nemesio bursts.”

It was as well I chose not to further compromise my vow of submission. When Gram and I stepped from the cleft into the open air, Nemesio and the donkey waited with Gram’s gray mare. Beside them stood Voushanti.

Chapter 3

No argument of mine could persuade Voushanti that I’d no intent to run. “His Grace will decide your punishment,” he said as he bound my hands to the donkey’s harness. “And you will be there to heed it.”

Though pale and quivering, Nemesio bore Voushanti’s impossible arrival with a straight spine and unbowed head. I should have warned the prior about Prince Osriel’s favored commander. I had seen Voushanti recover from terrible wounds in a matter of hours. I had witnessed his resiliency as we tramped day and night through the winter nightmare of Mellune Forest. More than once I had looked into the red core of his eyes and suspected he did not sleep. What common sleeping draft would affect such a man, if man he was?

At least the mardane showed no interest in exploring the cleft. Whether or not Prince Osriel was Sila Diaglou’s rival in the pursuit of chaos, the last thing I wanted to do was teach him a way to interfere with the Danae.

When we reached the flats, Voushanti dismissed Gram with a promise to report his interference both to Thane Stearc and Stearc’s liege lord Prince Osriel. The last I saw of the secretary, he was vanishing at a gallop into the frozen haze that had settled in the valley. Voushanti, the prior, the ass, and I slogged toward the abbey afoot.

With no silken cords binding my hands to stay the flow of magic, I could have unlocked the chain that linked my wrists to the donkey even with my limited skills. But in truth I could not summon the wits to work a spell. A storm of blue light filled my head—the image of the Dané as he danced out his grief. I had never imagined such expressive power in mere movement, as if his body formed words and music I could not hear. My own feet dragged like brutish anvils through the snow. My arms felt stiff as posts. Compared to his, my body was no more living than a wall of brick.

Remnants of our exchange swirled in my thoughts like water through a sluice. He’d said that I had cleansed the Well, as if it were some marvel. Yet I’d done naught but remove the dead boy, hardly difficult for a man of his strength.

Kol, the son of the Danae archon who had sheltered King Caedmon’s infant son more than a century ago…My mind balked at the imagining. My grandfather, a cartographer with a sorcerer’s bent, had discovered Caedmon’s heir living in the realm of the Danae—the realm of angels, legend called it. Life spent differently in Danae lands, for a century and a half after his royal father’s death, Eodward had just been passing from youth to manhood. A Karish hierarch and a high priest of the elder gods had persuaded the young man to return to Navronne and revive the wreckage of his father’s kingdom. Though Eodward had promised the Danae to return to them after only a few years, he never had. Navronne had needed her strong and honorable warrior king, who had freed her from the disintegrating Aurellian empire and a succession of invasions from the barbarian Hansker.

Three years ago, good King Eodward had died, abandoning Navronne to his three sons—a blustering brute, an effete coward, and my master, rival to the lord of the netherworld. Between my grandfather’s unexplained theft, Eodward’s betrayal of his word, and the depredations of the Harrowers, it was no wonder the Danae brooked no dealings with humankind.

Nemesio unlatched the wooden gate in the low eastern wall of the abbey. The prior had been silent on our return journey. Praying, I thought. Mourning. Deunor’s fire, Gerard… an unscholarly boy with a quick smile and an innocent heart. What punishment would be dreadful enough to requite this crime? Gildas…the Harrowers…Sila Diaglou…I would see them brought to account for it.

As soon as we left the field path for the abbey walks, the monks began to gather, like blackbirds to a rooftop. Despite their anonymous robes and hoods, I recognized them by their shapes—short, tight Brother Sebastian; willowy Brother Bolene; squat, stooped Brother Adolfus—and by their hands, roughened by cold and hard work or stained indelibly by buckets of ink. These men, who had so kindly welcomed me as a vagabond into their brotherhood, offered no signs of blessing, greeting, or welcome. Why would I expect it? Most of them had last seen me a month past, when my sister had led me from the abbey with shackled feet and silkbound hands—a disgraced recondeur, named traitor to god and king, a liar and thief who had mocked their vows by pretending he could be worthy of their company, even for a season. And now…chained to the ass that carried Gerard’s body…as if I were responsible…My skin heated with shame.

“Set me loose,” I said to Voushanti through my teeth. “I’ll not run. Please. They’ll think I did this.”

But he wouldn’t until we reached the bedraggled garden maze in front of the church. As the brothers lifted the boy gently and carried him toward the lavatorium where they would clean and wrap him properly, Voushanti detached my chain from the ass and led me toward the guesthouse like a troublesome dog.

Philo and Melkire awaited us in the guesthouse bedchamber, dark rings about their eyes and glaring resentment pouring off them like steam from a lathered horse. Voushanti unlocked my manacles and jerked his ugly head to the fine clothes, still strewn on the bed, and a copper washbasin sitting beside the hearth. “Clean and dress yourself.”

Days of fear and frustration boiled over despite my best intents. “What, no whips? No dungeon? The abbey has a prison cell, you know. If I’m to be treated as a brainless dog, why not kennel me?”

Voushanti grabbed the laps of my cloak and dragged my head down to his, where I could not ignore the scarlet pits of his eyes. “I would gladly whip sense and respect into you, pureblood. Be sure of it. Your flesh is weak and your mind undisciplined. But our master has charged me to preserve your skin and your mind for his pleasure, and his will is our law. Now prepare yourself for his arrival.” He shoved me away.

I clamped my hands under my folded arms, fighting to control my anger. Deep in my gut an ember flared in warning. Before very long—a day or two at most—its fire would grow to encompass my whole body, triggering the hunger for blood-spelled nivat seed. Ravaged with guilt on the day Luviar had died, I’d sworn off the doulon—the enchantment that transformed fragrant nivat into an odorless black paste that warped the body’s experience of pain and pleasure. I’d thrown away my implements and the last of my nivat supply, so when the hunger came on me next, I had naught to feed it. That’s when I would go mad.

“Have we word of His Grace?” Voushanti blocked the narrow doorway.

“Santiso rode in not an hour since,” said Melkire. “He says the prince should arrive at any time. The other parties to the parley are expected tonight as well.”

As the three of them discussed horses, guard posts, and the best places to billet Osriel’s retinue, I stripped off my sodden garments. The water in the copper basin was tepid. A clean linen towel, many times mended, lay beside it. They’d left me no comb, but my hair had not grown much since it was trimmed to match my regrowing tonsure. I dunked my head in the basin and thought fleetingly of not pulling it out again.

I had to put the morning’s events aside for now. I needed to use the next hours to the cabal’s advantage. Perhaps I could acquire some notion of Osriel’s plans in this damnable war or learn the nature of his power. His mother had been pureblood and clearly he had developed his magic far beyond the weak capabilities of other mixed-blood Navrons. But I didn’t even know what parley was to happen here.

For three years, Osriel had sat on his gold mines in his mountainous principality of Evanore, weaving devilish enchantments while his half-brothers’ war ravaged their own provinces of Ardra and Morian. Theories abounded on why he raided his brothers’ battlefields and mutilated the dead—none of them pleasant. I had believed the stories of Osriel’s depravities exaggerated until the night when Prince Bayard of Morian had flushed his brother Perryn to Gillarine’s gates, slaughtering a hundred of Perryn’s Ardran soldiers along the way. Hellish, dreadful visions had descended on the abbey that night, and by morning every corpse lay under Osriel’s ensign and stared toward heaven eyeless. The monks had called it Black Night.

As I laced my chausses, Philo raced up the stair, snapped a salute, and reported Prince Osriel’s arrival. “The prior has given him his own quarters and offered any building save the church for his use. His Grace sent me to fetch you, Mardane.”

Voushanti eyed my half-dressed state. “Inform His Grace that I am unable to yield my charge until he summons his pureblood. I will deliver the sorcerer and my report at the same time.”

Philo pressed a clenched fist to his breast and bowed briskly.

I refused to rush my dressing. The clothes were of the sort expected of purebloods: a high-necked shirt of black and green patterned silk, ruched at neck and wrists, a spruce-green satin pourpoint, delicately embroidered in black and seeded with black pearls, and a gold link belt. The doeskin boots felt like gloves. Ludicrous apparel for wartime in a burnt-out abbey. But if my master wished me decked out like a merchants’ fair, so be it.

Voushanti’s impatience came near scorching my back, but eventually my hundred buttons were fastened and fifty laces tied. I lifted the claret cape and mask and raised my brows. He jerked his head in assent. So other ordinaries were to be present, not just my master and his household.

The lightweight cape of embroidered silk fastened at my right shoulder with a gold-and-ivory brooch, shaped like a wolf’s head. The mask, a bit of silk light as ash, slipped onto the left side of my face like another layer of skin and held its place without ties or bands of any kind. Someone had given my exact description to the one who had created and ensorcelled it. Of all pureblood disciplines, I most hated that of the mask.

Then we waited.

Though the great bronze bells had fallen from the church tower, the monks rang handbells to keep to their schedule of devotions and work. I would have preferred to get on with whatever vileness Osriel planned for me. It would save me fretting over the worthwhile tasks I ought to be attempting while I yet had a mind: rescuing Jullian, retrieving the book of maps, discovering where Sila Diaglou hid her supplies and trained her Harrower legions. I wasn’t even sure whether or not the lighthouse yet existed after the ruinous assault on Gillarine.

I had believed the magical domed chambers and their astonishing cache existed underground below the abbey library and scriptorium, but I’d seen no evidence of the downward stair in the rubble. Why hadn’t I asked Gram what had become of it? If Osriel chose to lock me away in one of his mountain fortresses, I might never learn. My contract with the prince, negotiated by my father and approved by the Registry, lacked the customary protections afforded more tractable pureblood progeny, thus allowing my master to do whatever he wished with me.

I slammed my fists against the window frame, rattling the glass in the iron casement. Voushanti snorted, but said naught.

By the time Philo brought the prince’s summons, Vespers had rung through the early dusk. The ginger-bearded soldier led Voushanti and me past the charred hollows of the west-reach undercrofts, where the fires had been so fierce that the entire upper structure of the lay brothers’ dorter had collapsed, and around behind the squat stone kitchen building to the refectory stair.

“His Grace will speak to the mardane first,” said Philo. “The pureblood is to wait inside the door, where he can be seen.” The ginger-haired warrior pulled on his helm, took up a lance propped against the wall, and joined Melkire in a proper alert stance flanking the wide oak door.

We entered the refectory halfway along one side of the long chamber. The barreled vault of the roof stood intact, but the tall windowpanes were broken and the pale yellow walls stained with smoke. The long tables and backless stools had been shoved together at the lower end of the cavernous hall.

The refectory had been my favorite place in the abbey. But no robust ale or steaming bowls of mutton broth sat ready to warm the belly on this eve. No beams of light streamed from the soaring lancet windows to warm the spirit. No grinning boys or teasing monks awaited to warm the heart. I splayed my five fingers and pressed my palm to my breast, praying Iero to welcome Gerard and to comfort Jullian, boys who had honored their god with such cheerful service.

Two braziers provided the only light or heat. They flanked a single plain wood chair set before the delicate stone window tracery that gaped empty at one end. There, robed and hooded as severely as any monk, our master awaited us.

“Stay here until you’re called,” muttered Voushanti.

An enigma, Voushanti. His touch left me queasy, and his glance induced me to spread my fingers in ward against evil. Yet for all his single-minded ferocity and spine-curling presence, the mardane had never harmed me. Together we had survived the ordeal in Mellune Forest.

He hurried across the worn wood floor and prostrated himself at Osriel’s feet—an elaboration more suited to an Aurellian emperor than a Navron prince. The prince motioned Voushanti up, but only as far as his knees. I could not hear what was said, but felt the Bastard’s anger stirring the shadows like the first breath of a storm wind.

If Voushanti’s presence disturbed my stomach, Prince Osriel’s disturbed my soul. My imagination conjured a thousand horrors beneath his hooded robe. Some said the prince was crippled; some said his body had been corrupted by his dealings with the Adversary.

The wind whistled and moaned through the broken windows, swirling the detritus of dust and glass that littered the floor. I twitched and fidgeted, fussed with my cloak, with my belt, with the iron latches of the lower windows. I strained to hear the monks’ Vesper singing down in the ruined church, and tried to recall the words of the psalm and the comfort they promised. Deunor’s fire…what was taking so long? Voushanti must be reciting every detail of the eight days since we had left Prince Osriel in Palinur. I tried not to imagine what punishments Osriel could devise for my morning’s misbehavior. My every sense, every nerve, felt stretched to breaking.

The light wavered. For a moment I thought the flames in the braziers had gone out. But rather the shadows were creeping in from the corners and vaults to envelop the prince and his kneeling servant, roiling and thickening until I could scarcely see the two men. Sweat beaded the base of my spine beneath my fine layers, even while the night air pouring through the empty window frames froze my cheeks.

A quick strike of red light fractured the gathered darkness. Voushanti’s shoulders jerked, and he could not fully muffle a groan. Twice more, each eliciting a similar cry, and then the mardane bent down as if to kiss Osriel’s feet.

The prince, shapeless in his enveloping robes, leaned back in his chair. Voushanti climbed slowly to his feet. Stepping back a few paces, the mardane motioned me to approach.

Wishing myself five thousand quellae from this place, I took a deep breath and crossed the expanse of floor through the swirling dust and snow. Heat radiated from Voushanti’s body as if he had swallowed the sun. As he bowed and withdrew, blood trickled from the unscarred corner of his mouth. Mighty gods…

Remembering Osriel’s instruction from our last meeting, I whisked off my mask and looped it over my belt. My knees felt like porridge, my skin like cold fish.

“My lord prince,” I said, touching my fingers to my forehead and bending one knee—the proper pureblood obeisance to his contracted master.

The flames in the two braziers shot into the air in spouts of blue and white flame, pushing back the rippling shadows. Not enough to reveal the prince’s face. Only his hands were exposed. Long, slender, pale fingers, one adorned with a heavy gold ring. Their smooth firmness reminded me that Osriel was no older than I. He twitched the ringed finger, and I rose to my feet.

“Magnus Valentia.” The harsh whisper came from behind and beside and before me, raising the hair on my arms. “The reports of your behavior puzzle me.”

In our previous interview, the prince had expressed a preference for honesty over feigned deference, for boldness over cowering. Swallowing hard, I shoved fear aside, clasped my hands at my back, and hoped he’d meant it.

“How puzzled, my lord? Since leaving your side in Palinur, I have followed Mardane Voushanti’s direction, and I’ve not strayed from his sight save when his sight was clouded with sleep. We traveled companionably. Indeed, we worked together to preserve the lives of your Evanori subjects on our journey from Palinur. Never once, even when Mardane Voushanti and his men were…debilitated…by the severities of that journey and we were separated by necessity, did I break my submission to you. Nor did I have any intention of doing so this morning when I aided the good prior to retrieve one of his abbey’s lost children. Mardane Voushanti had no basis to assume I would run away.” The weight of Osriel’s attention slowed my words.

“Yet this morning’s excursion occurred over his objections, and only after a monkish potion laid him low—he has reaped his proper harvest for that slip of attention. I instructed you to obey him as if his word were my own. So tell me, shall I punish you for disobedience, or shall I punish this Karish prior for poisoning my servants and abducting my pureblood for his own purposes?”

The questions and accusations nipped at my skin like the claws of demon gatzi. I kneaded my hands at my back, expecting to feel bloody pricks and scratches. Hold on to your mind, Valen, I thought. No supernatural power exists in this room. You have felt the stirrings of true mystery in the Gillarine cloisters, and you have witnessed a living Dané dance his grief. Whatever Osriel of Evanore might be—and I had no doubts he possessed power unknown to any of my acquaintance—he was neither god nor demon.

“Prior Nemesio believes that my novice vows, made but a few weeks ago, give him a claim on my loyalty. Though my oath to you is more recent, I saw no compromise of your interests in helping him retrieve a dead child.”

I stepped closer to the chair and did not squirm. “As for potions and poisons, the unfortunate effect of the abbey’s blessed water on Mardane Voushanti and his men is perhaps a reproof from their gods at some failure in their devotions. For surely, my cup was filled from the same pitcher, yet I did not fall asleep. Then, too, Mardane Voushanti arrived at the sad scene of this boy’s death not half an hour after I did, thus he could not have been much affected. Were the prior’s water poisoned, would not the mardane have suffered its effects longer? Or is there some reason his constitution does not succumb to the effects of potions or poisons?” I braced, expecting red lightning to strike.

But instead, the prince leaned his elbow on the arm of the chair and propped his chin on his hand. “Ah, Magnus, your tongue is as soft and quick as a spring zephyr in the Month of Storms…and just as deceitful. Unfortunately I’ve not the time to test your stamina at this game tonight. But I believe I shall reap great pleasure from our sparring in the deeps of this coming winter. Snug in my house, I shall strip you of your pureblood finery and raise the stakes for untruth.”

I bowed, hiding my satisfaction, as well as my face, which his throaty humor had surely left void of color.

“And now we must discuss a few things before my guests arrive.”

“Of course, my lord.” I straightened my back and forced myself to breathe.

The prince angled his head upward, then waggled his hand toward the floor. “Sit,” he said impatiently. “I’ve no wish to break my neck gaping upward. Is your father or brother so tall as you? Your grandfather, perhaps? Purebloods are of wholly modest stature.”

“I am an aberration of pureblood lineage in countless ways, my lord. My own father would gleefully deny my birth had he not scribed it in the Register himself and seen the entry countersigned by two unimpeachable witnesses.”

Off balance from his abrupt shift from chilling threat to peckish complaint, I settled on the wood floor and wrapped my arms about my knees. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. The shadows that reeled and twirled on the refectory walls had no correspondence to the flames in the braziers. Nor did their shapes—heads, limbs, writhing torsos—correspond to those of the prince or my own body.

“An aberration? Yes, I suppose you could be,” the prince mumbled.

I did not flinch or turn my head when his next comment seemed to come from behind my left ear. “So tell me who would be considered unimpeachable witnesses to a child’s birth? Truth and lies are of infinite interest to me. I might like to interview such a person.”

At least this answer was easy, though I could not fathom the intent of the question. “For good or ill, lord, the witnesses to my birth are beyond your inquiries. Indeed, they are more a part of your own history than mine. Two of my grandfather’s oldest friends happened to be visiting our house on the day I was born—Sinduré Tobrecan of Evanore and Angnecy, the seventh Hierarch of Ardra, the very two clergymen who brought your father to Navronne from the realm of…angels.”

“A most interesting coincidence.”

Though forced to parrot the facts and validation of my lineage since I could speak, I’d never considered them at all interesting.

The prince settled back in his chair and did not move. Thinking, surely. Watching, too. The velvet hood might mask his own face, but I did not believe it obscured anything he wished to look on. Rather than squirm under his scrutiny, I stared back at him. From this angle I could glimpse his jaw—fine boned, square, clean shaven—and mouth—generously wide, lips pale but even. Unsettling. Well, of course, I thought, after a moment, he is Eodward’s son. Though I had met the king only once, every coin in the realm bore the imprint of those fine bones. What was so dreadful about Osriel’s face that he kept it hidden, when his man Voushanti walked freely with his own ruined flesh bared for all to see?

“Tell me, Magnus, what magics can you work? You’ve said that you paid no mind to your tutors and that your inability to read prevented your study of pureblood arcana, but Voushanti’s report indicates you are not incapable of spellworking. What have I received for my hundredweight of gold?”

No wisdom lay in underreporting my paltry skills in some hope that Osriel would set me free of my contract. He might decide my best use was that he made of corpses. Overreporting might yield me a better position in his house. My grandfather constantly babbled that I had talent beyond the usual for purebloods. Of course, even before he went mad, my grandfather had an overblown opinion of our family’s talents, and I’d never seen evidence of anything extraordinary in myself.

“Honestly, my lord—you see, I remember you are very strict about honesty, even if the honest statement fails to please you—my catalogue of spells is thin. Beyond my family bent of route finding, tracking, identifying footsteps, and the like, I’ve meager skills in spellworking. Opening locks is perhaps my strongest, and I can accomplish voiding spells—making holes in things.” I closed my eyes and wished I had more to report so that I might hold back some small secret advantage for the future. “I can work inflation spells—that is, I can create an illusion by exaggerating an existing object. For example, I once conjured a tree stump from a weed with spreading roots. Creating an illusion from nothing is beyond me…” Truly it was a pitiful collection when one considered the vast possibilities of magic.

I was straining to come up with something more to boost my worth, when the refectory door burst open and Voushanti hurried toward us. “My lord prince, your guest has arrived. As you commanded, I informed him that only the two principals and his pureblood would be allowed in your presence. He was not pleased, but neither did he leave.”

“Well done, Mardane. You’ve taken the measure of his desperation, it would seem. Let him cool his heels for a moment, while I instruct my sorcerer.”

The visitor had a pureblood in attendance. He was nobility, then, or clergy, or a civic official wealthy enough to purchase a pureblood contract, someone who thought to profit from traveling to this remote site to wait on the Bastard Prince, even as Osriel’s eldest brother was ready to declare victory in Navronne. All parties to this war were realigning themselves since Prince Bayard’s alliance with Sila Diaglou and the Harrowers had broken three years of stalemate.

Voushanti left as he had come. Once the door had closed behind him, Prince Osriel returned his attention to me. “I require your complete obedience tonight, sorcerer. Without reservation or any of your clever deceptions. You will stand to my right and slightly in front of me, angled where you can see my hands and I can see your face without moving my head. I wish you to listen carefully to all that’s spoken and observe all that remains unspoken. You will say nothing without my permission. Do you understand? Nothing, even if you are addressed directly. But if I require you to respond or offer an opinion, you will speak in perfect honesty, without subterfuge or withholding. Is this clear or must we argue it? I promise you, I will prevail.”

Though such threats could not but raise my hackles, innate perversity no longer drove me to pointless rebellion. For the sake of my friends in the cabal, I needed to learn what I could of Evanore’s prince and those who came seeking his favor. So I rose and bowed, touching my forehead. “As you command, Your Grace.”

If my master thought my presence would lend him some kind of prestige in a lordly negotiation, he had an unhappy lesson coming. By now every pureblood in the kingdom would know of Osriel’s contract with the infamous Cartamandua renegade.

Moments after I slipped on my mask, straightened my cloak, and took my position at Prince Osriel’s right hand, the great door burst open, and I gaped as if I’d seen a fish walk out of the ocean. Prince Bayard of Morian walked in, followed by his half-brother, Perryn of Ardra, and Bayard’s attendant pureblood sorcerer—my own brother, Max.

Chapter 4

Bayard and Max, layered in mail, leather, and fur-lined traveling cloaks, each made a quick survey of the room. The two of them were similar in build, though Max’s tight bulk came in a smaller package than the Duc of Morian, called the Smith for his brutal manners. The last I’d seen of Max, he had been chortling at the news of my father contracting his rebellious younger brother to the most feared man in Navronne.

Perryn, Duc of Ardra, remained near the door, shivering in grimed silk and torn lace, his once golden hair greasy and unkempt, his head bent, and his arms wrapped about his middle. His furtive glance took in Osriel and the dancing shadows. Then, as if he had seen enough, he hugged himself tighter and closed his eyes.

Max bowed respectfully to Osriel, touching his forehead with his fingertips. His eyes reflected humorous irony as he pivoted to face me, touching one middle finger to the center of his brow—the proper greeting of one pureblood to another while in the presence of ordinaries.

I made sure to close my mouth, which still hung open in astonishment. Unsure whether my master would consider a returned greeting as speech, I remained motionless, my hands at my back, grateful for the mask that might hide the extent of my surprise. What possible circumstance could bring Bayard supplicant to his despised youngest brother in the very hour of his triumph? Every notion of politics claimed the Smith should be seated on Caedmon’s throne at this moment, planting his brutish foot on the necks of groveling Ardran nobles.

“So is this the kind of foolery the terrifying Osriel spends his time on? Playing with shades and gargoyles in a Karish ruin?” Bayard’s posture, feet apart, hands resting lightly at his waist, spoke everything of self-assurance. But deep creases in his brow and stretched smudges about his eyes hinted that victory did not rest firmly within his grasp…as if his presence at this assignation so far from Palinur was not indication enough.

“Is one fool’s occupation to be preferred to another’s? My shades leave no one bleeding.” Prince Osriel’s cool jibe heated his elder brother’s cheeks. “You requested this parley, brother. And you said I should choose a neutral venue.”

Osriel snapped his fingers. The flames in the twin braziers surged to the height of a man, causing the shadows to lengthen and dance wildly. Two armless wooden chairs took shape out of nothing, positioned to face him. Bayard paled and shifted uneasily.

My master gestured toward the chairs. “Come, brothers, sit. I would not have you stand like servants or courtiers. I’ve missed our long dinners with Father, talking of history and geography, building and art. Should I send for food and wine? Perhaps we could begin again in his memory.” The words pelted the faces of his brothers like hailstones, evoking a cascade of expressions, even as they whetted my own curiosity.

“No need for games, Bastard. You know why I’m here.” Bayard snatched one of the chairs, realizing only after he’d sat how awkwardly it suited. It was much too small for his blacksmith’s frame. Max moved to Perryn’s side, touched his arm, and gestured to the second chair. The blond prince shook his head and huddled deeper into his own embrace. One might have thought him cowed, save for the occasional glance of purest hate that speared Bayard’s back.

“I am guessing you’ve at last seen Father’s writ of succession,” said Osriel. “And that you are preparing to proclaim to the people of Navronne that it names you heir, just as you’ve insisted all these years that it would. But we know the truth of that, don’t we? As does our frighted brother. Have you found a better forger than his?”

The truth laid out so quietly exploded in my head. My gaze snapped from one to the other. Osriel—Eodward’s named successor? I recalled the grand depiction of the ordo mundi painted on the walls of the Gillarine guesthouse and imagined it flipped end over end, the denizens of heaven and hell dislodged and poured out to mingle with the tangled creatures of earth’s sphere. Horror, wonder, denial, and awe mastered me in rapid succession.

One would think Bayard chewed iron. “You will never wear my father’s crown, Bastard. I’ll gift it to a Hansker chieftain first.”

“So what do you propose to do about this little disappointment?” Osriel’s throaty whisper exuded subtle menace. “Do you think to snatch those few who know the truth and feed them to Sila Diaglou? I hear her executions are most efficient, if a bit gruesome. I quite resent your allowing the bloodthirsty priestess to destroy my city and slaughter my subjects—even holy monks, I’ve heard.”

All confused bulk and outrage, Bayard spluttered. “Navrons will never accept a crippled, half-mad sorcerer as king. You’ve no warrior legion and no strength to lead one. That’s why you’ve never pressed a claim. Fires of Magrog, you sneak onto our battlefields and mutilate the dead. You squat on your treasure, waiting for the two of us to kill each other off—”

“You and Perryn chose your own course of fraternal mayhem,” snapped Osriel. “I warned you at the beginning I would not play. As for the rest, I have my own purposes. Now, what do you want of me? I will never kneel to you. Put that right out of your thoughts.”

Osriel…king. Every belief must shift and skew at the imagining.

Bayard burst from his chair, swung around behind it, and gripped the squared oak back, as if wrestling a hurricane into submission. Both face and posture declared he would prefer to open his belly with a dagger than speak what he had come to say. “The woman Sila Diaglou is a demon gatzé. But using her legion of madmen was the only way I could get this sniveling imbecile to heel before he burnt my ships and yards—our only hope to hold off the spring raids from Hansk. I agreed to cede her territory—some wild lands, a few villages, a town or two. She said that with sovereign territory ‘properly cleansed,’ she could prove to the rest of us the power of her Gehoum. But this lunacy she’s wrought in Palinur…” He spat his words through the bitter edge of humiliation. “I gave her no mandate for executions. I ordered her to stand down and withdraw her filthy lunatics from the city, but her partisans goad everyone to their own madness. Now the witch has presented me with a list of demands, threatening to raze Palinur and set her madmen on Avenus and other cities if I don’t comply. I’ve squeezed Morian’s treasury dry to get this far, believing I’d have Navronne’s wealth—mine by right—to control her at the end. But what have I found?”

He strode to Perryn, huddled against the wall, dragged him to Osriel’s feet by the neck of his silk tunic, and shoved him sprawling. Perryn threw his arms over his head and lay quivering, and I cursed myself once again for ever believing he was man enough to lead Navronne.

“This parasite,” snarled Bayard, “this weak-livered vermin, did not merely exhaust Ardra’s patrimony, but Navronne’s, as well. Our father’s treasure house sits empty, its gold squandered on oranges from Estigure, on brocades and perfumed oils from Syanar, on follies, jugglers, and lace, on miniature ponies for his whores, on puling spies and legions of mercenaries from Aurellia and Pyrrha who have never set foot in Navronne, if they exist at all. If I am to crush this devil woman, I must have Evanore’s gold.”

Osriel perched on the edge of his chair, coiled tight as a chokesnake. Bayard bulled ahead without a breath. “You will not have to kneel. You will have autonomy in your own land until the day of your death, and I will recognize you publicly as my sovereign equal in Evanore. Together, we can prevail. Together…” Bayard’s speech trailed away in the face of his brother’s frigid stillness.

“What does she want?” said Osriel, quiet and harsh.

Bayard’s beard quivered with pent rage. “It doesn’t matter what she wants. She’s a madwoman. We yield on these demands and she’ll come back for more. I see that now.”

Osriel leaned forward slightly, and I knew Bayard felt the pressure of his brother’s will as I had earlier. “Tell me what she asked for.”

Heaving a sigh of suffering patience, Bayard whipped his hand toward Max. “Tell him.”

My brother stepped forward and bowed slightly to his master. “First, she demands the province of Evanore, whole and entire. Second, she desires that one of my lord’s brothers, either one, be turned over to her as mortal forfeit for the offenses the line of Caedmon has wrought against the Gehoum.” My brother cataloged the unthinkable as if the items sat on a shelf like tin pots.

Osriel tented his pale hands, his fingertips just touching his chin. He did not speak.

Max bowed again and flicked a glance at me. “Third, she desires a piece of information—the location of a secret library that she claims is anathema to the Gehoum. It does not appear to exist where she was told. And lastly, she wishes to own the contract of a particular pureblood sorcerer.”

“A pureblood?” Prince Osriel dropped his hands abruptly into his lap. “Who? For what reason?”

The public half of Max’s face remained perfectly neutral as his position required. But an eye accustomed to looking past a pureblood’s mask could not miss the wicked humor behind the sheath of dull blue silk. “She insists on controlling one Magnus Valentia de Cartamandua-Celestine, lately returned to the discipline of the Pureblood Registry. She did not explain why.”

Magrog’s teeth! My suddenly sweating hands came near slipping out of each other behind my back.

Bayard shoved his chair away so viciously it tipped over and clattered to the floor. “The cheek!” he fumed, striding to the windowed wall only to reverse course and return to kick the toppled chair. “As if I would go scrambling about the city like her pet hound, hunting libraries and purebloods. My own sorcerer’s brother, as if that would make her my equal.” He paused and glared at me as if Sila Diaglou stood behind me with her hand on my shoulder. “What does she want with you, pureblood, eh? I hear you are a renegade, a liar, and a thief.”

Mind reeling, I pinned my gaze on Osriel’s hands. They were still, so I kept silent and asked myself the same question. Why would the Harrower priestess want me? Not merely for the Cartamandua blood. Max…Phoebia…my father had no contract, for the gods’ sake. They all displayed the bent of my grandfather’s line. Unlike me, they were trained and skilled and intelligent enough to read books and make sense of the world.

“You’d best keep an eye on him, little brother,” said Bayard with a sneer. “By the Mother’s tits, I’d give her Perryn and offer to gut him myself, save for the damnable impertinence of her insisting on a kill of my own blood. But Evanore…”

Perryn had crept to the foot of Osriel’s chair and hunched there in a shriveled knot. “You wouldn’t let him give me over, brother,” he said. “I was ever kind to you. It was Bayard played the bully. He swears he’ll do this bargain, and throw you in as well if he can persuade the witch to forgo Evanore’s gold.”

“Does anyone outside this room know that you two have come to me?” Osriel spoke over Perryn’s head as if the fair prince were some whining hound.

Bayard spluttered. “My aides know, of course. My field commanders. I’m not a fool—”

“Tell me the truth, Bayard, or I’ll send you back with an ox head instead of your own. Does anyone but these two know you’ve come to Gillarine to meet me?”

“No one else knows,” said Perryn, emboldened like a lapdog that finds its courage only at its master’s feet. “He says we must be secret, else she’ll find out he’s plotting against her. He near pisses his trews at the thought. She sees everything.”

“Good.” Osriel pointed to a spot in front of his chair. “Now stand here, the both of you, and listen. Yes, you, too, Perryn. Your ‘kindness’ fell short back when your pleasure was to lock me into emptied meat casks. Stand like a man and listen to me.”

Perryn slouched to his feet, while Bayard stood his ground ten paces back, bristling like an offended boar. My master waited silently. Only when Bayard expelled an exasperated oath and moved to Perryn’s side did Osriel speak again.

“You came here seeking my help, brothers. Did you think I would shovel gold into your pockets and allow you to continue sending my people to the slaughter as you’ve done these three years? You’ve countenanced crimes that make my activities look tame, and I should rightly take your heads for it.”

Reason. Assurance. Command. Of a sudden this mad parley felt grounded in something more than terror.

“I am the rightful High King of Navronne, whether anyone beyond this room ever understands that or not, and you will stand or fall by my will.”

“You are a crippled whelp who knows nothing of warfare.” Bayard spat the brave words, but held his position in the place his half-brother had indicated. He must be at the end of all recourse.

Osriel raised a hand in warning. “I am allowing myself to believe that the two of you have been stupid and blind these three years, rather than vile and malicious, and that your excesses have been as misreported as my own deeds. Either we work together to salvage this mess you’ve made, or you can walk out of here this moment. As for the fool who attempts to touch my gold without my consent, I will take his eyes living from his head and hold his soul captive in everlasting torment. Choose, brothers. For Navronne. For our father, who foolishly believed in all of us.”

A seething Bayard, his complexion the hue of bloomed poppies, whirled and strode away. I was certain he would broach the door, but instead he circled the refectory. Perryn lifted his chin, sneering as if ready to defy both brothers, but glanced at the ceiling, peopled by writhing shades, shuddered, and dropped his head again. Osriel waited. I held my breath.

Halfway between his brothers and the door, Bayard slowed, growling with resentful fury. “What do you propose? I concede nothing until I’ve heard your plan.”

Osriel flicked his ringed hand toward me. “Magnus, tell me: Is your brother trustworthy? I will send him out if you say.”

Max stiffened as if one of Silos’s firebolts had fused his spine. Not the least hint of a smirk appeared on either half of his face. For a pureblood adviser to be dismissed in a negotiation accounted him as useless to his master. If report spread of such a thing, it could ruin Max.

Past grievance, childish pride, and my every base instinct gloated in such opportunity. Yet, for some reason surpassing all speculation, my brother and I stood at a nexus of Navronne’s history. My master, who astonished and mystified me more by the moment, required me to offer a fair measure of a man I scarcely knew. And I’d begun to think I’d best heed the Bastard’s wishes. Petty vengeance had no place here.

“My brother is not and has never been my friend, Lord Prince,” I said. “Neither has he been my enemy save in the petty strife of family and as a danger to my freedom in my years away from my family. I have encountered him only briefly as a man, thus I can say nothing of his honor or his moral strength. But he has ever supported and embraced the strictures of pureblood life. Thus I believe he would do nothing to the detriment of his bound master. In any matter of contractual obligation, I would trust him completely.”

“Good enough. He stays.” Osriel’s brisk assent near sucked the words from my mouth before I could speak them. He nodded to Bayard. “Here is what I propose, brother: Send your pureblood back to Sila Diaglou. Tell her you accept her terms.”

“What?” Bayard bellowed.

The green shoots of hope that had sprung up so unexpectedly in the past hour were sheared off in an instant. The Harrower priestess had plunged a stake through Boreas’s gut, reciting her blasphemous incantations: sanguiera, orongia, vazte, kevrana—bleed, suffer, die, purify. And then she had licked my old comrade’s blood from her fingers. I struggled to hold my position without trembling.

“Great Kemen preserve!” said Perryn, looking as if he would be sick. The blond prince backed toward the door. “You can’t do that, you twisted, depraved—”

“Have your man say that your brother Perryn is already forfeit because of his treasonous looting of Navronne’s treasury and his forgery of our father’s will.” Osriel pressed forward, his words harsh, decisive, shivering the air. “Have him report that your bastard brother is mad and can be persuaded to yield his land, his pureblood, and the secret of the library. Set a meeting with the woman and use it to haggle with her over the gold and apportioning of Evanore—she will never believe you would concede it all. Let her think she is going to win, while you control the damage as you can. At the last, settle for the best deal you can make, with the stipulation that her legions enter Evanore at Caedmon’s Bridge and attack my hold at Renna on the winter solstice. Tell her that I submit myself to Magrog at Dashon Ra each year at midnight on the winter solstice; thus my magic will be at an ebb.”

“And then?” Bayard growled in contempt and snatched Perryn’s sleeve, before the cowering prince could run away.

“Either the joined might of Eodward’s sons defeats her, or the world we know will end.”

The simplicity of this declaration left Bayard speechless. My head spun; my stomach lurched at the speed of events. Even Max’s mouth hung open.

“Osriel, you are mad,” said Bayard, recovering his wits sooner than my brother or I. “And I must be mad to listen to you. Yet Father’s writ claims—Tell me this, Bastard. What do you do with dead men’s eyes?”

The challenge echoed from the vaults as if the hideous beings dancing there had joined in the question. I wanted to cry out in chorus, “Yes, yes, tell us.”

“Ask first of Sila Diaglou how long she plans to let you rule,” said Osriel with such quiet menace as to raise the hair on my arms. “Bring me her truthful answer, and I’ll give mine.”

Osriel uncurled one slender hand to reveal a white ball of light, pursed his lips, and blew on it. A shivering lance of power split the air between Max and Bayard, causing Perryn to yelp and crouch into a ball at Bayard’s feet. “This will keep our brother quiet for the nonce. Lock him up safely, where no one can harm him. I’ll send a messenger to your headquarters in Palinur on the anniversary of Father’s coronation. At that time, you can inform me of the outcome of your negotiations, and I’ll notify you of any change in plan.”

Perryn pawed at his mouth and tongue in a wordless, animal frenzy I recognized. Poor, stupid wretch. How many words did his tongue-block forbid?

Bayard folded his arms and stared boldly at the man in the green hood, reclaiming something of the pride he had brought into the hall, but little of the arrogance. “You wear Father’s ring. I assumed this sniveling twit had stolen it from his dead finger, then feared to wear it publicly.”

Osriel’s slim fingers caressed the gold band. “Father gave it to me the night he died. Believe that or not as you choose. Perhaps I stole it. Perhaps my devilish magic twisted his mind.”

Testing. All of this was testing. Would Bayard believe? Would he accept what was offered or balk in arrogance, in self-deception, in fear? Would I? For I could not shake the notion that all of this was my test as well. Osriel had no need of me in this confrontation. I brought no power, no prestige, no insight that such a perceptive mind could not have come up with on its own. Yet a man of such well-considered purposes would not have me here without specific intent. Perhaps it was only to witness a kind of power I had known but twice in my life: in an abbey garden when an abbot had peered into my soul and found it worthy of his trust, and long ago beside a battlefield cook fire, when these princes’ father had shared his love of Navronne with a youthful pikeman.

After a moment, Bayard shook his head. “Father’s writ purports to explain why he chose you over me. Reading it, I heard his voice as clear as if he spoke to me aloud. ’Twas the Ardran hierarch showed me the thing, and I destroyed his chamber after. Had the Karish peacock shitting his robes, I did, naming him a cheat and a forger, as mad as you to believe our father wrote such lies about a crippled weakling.”

“Father valued you, Bayard. If you read the entire writ, then you know he named you Defender of Navronne and your sons after you, believing that your strong arm and stubborn temper should hold the righteous sword that mine cannot.” It was the nearest thing to an apology I ever thought to hear from royalty. A gift offered without coercion, without demand for reciprocation, with humbling generosity.

I thought Bayard would pounce on Osriel and grind him in his jaws. “Why didn’t he tell us? He knew what I believed. What everyone in this kingdom believed. Every day of my life I trained to be king, and he never told me elsewise.” Pain, not anger, drove his fury—a familiar anguish, rooted in family, in a child’s expectation and betrayal.

“You trained to be a warrior, Bayard, not a king. Father made his decision only after I turned one-and-twenty and showed some prospect of living for more than a moon’s turning. He told me first. Then Perryn. But you were off pursuing Hansker again, and he would not have you hear such news from any lips but his. Nor would he shame you by telling another soul before you. But you spent more time on your ships than in Navronne those last few years. How many times did he summon you home? He risked everything to save your pride and lost the gamble.” A gentle reproof, taking its power from unbending strength.

“I could not abandon my men halfway between Hansk and Morian just so I could play courtier. Let up the pressure, and barbarians lose all respect. I saved Navronne. I—”

Bayard cut off his own protest. Even he could hear how foolish it sounded now after three years of war and thirty thousand Navrons dead. He spat on the floor. “You’ll never rule; you know that. A bastard. The evil stories told of you. Clerics of either stripe won’t accept it. The people won’t. Not when there’s a strong, legitimate elder son. The hierarch’s paper is ensorcelled so it cannot be destroyed, sad to say, but without a valid second copy no one will believe it.”

Osriel did not accept the gauntlet Bayard threw, but rather slipped it back on his brother’s hand. Only time would tell whether he had left a spider in its folds. “We will preserve this kingdom first, brother, and then turn our minds to its ruling. I’d recommend you not go setting any crowns on your head before the solstice.”

Bayard jerked his head in assent. “I’ll see you on the solstice, then. Between times…I’d recommend you look to your back, little Bastard. I think you’re the only thing in this world the mad priestess fears.”

Bayard grabbed Perryn’s collar and shoved the moaning princeling toward the door. Max hurried ahead and held open the door, casting me a long, curious gaze before following his master from the room.

As soon as the door had closed behind Max, the flames in the braziers faded. The shadows flowed together, pooling in corners, settling over the monks’ tables and stools. The man in green slumped backward in his chair and leaned his head tiredly on his fist.

My mind, numbed with wonder and shock at what had just unfolded, slowly began to function again. Should I kneel to my king or should I topple his chair through the gaping windows and protect Navronne from a madman, a honey-tongued servant of Magrog who had convinced me that even the evils he acknowledged would admit to rational explanation?

Before I could choose any course, he swiveled his head my way, still resting his temple on his pale fingers. His eyes remained shielded behind his green velvet hood, but I felt their scrutiny. “So advise me on my plan, Magnus Valentia. Perhaps I should allow this bargain with the priestess to stand. The land is mine. The pureblood is mine. I know the whereabouts of the lighthouse. My brother Perryn has fallen to ruin in defeat and is useless to anyone. Bayard has too many dead Navrons on his conscience to be trustworthy. I could throw him into the bargain and allow Sila Diaglou to take care of all my problems.”

Slowly, deliberately, I removed my mask and tucked it into my belt. A hundred responses darted through my head. I could not be easy, not with my fate bandied about as a bargaining chip of less worth than a slip of gold from Evanore’s mines. Yet neither fear nor resentment shaped my answer. “You wish me to be honest, my lord. So I must confess, I am very confused.”

Confused was too simple a word. I could not shake a growing admiration for this man—the same villain who had bound Jullian in terror to manipulate me, who claimed pleasure in bending minds to his will and refused to deny he stole the eyes of the dead. In the space of an hour I had both learned the unthinkable truth that the Bastard of Evanore was the rightful king of Navronne, and heard enough to suspect that choice not so unthinkable. Even as he quipped of betrayal and surrender, the echo of his charge to Bayard fed a mad and greening hope. Beyond shadows and sparring, nothing this man did was a lie—which frightened me to the marrow. Yet…

He laughed, deep and convincing. And familiar. Was I again recalling his father who had smiled as he watched me dance away the horrors of battle so long ago?

“I, too, sit confused,” he said, “for I know why Sila Diaglou wants the lighthouse. She wishes to destroy it so there will be no healing or recovery from the ravaging she plans. And I know—”

“Iero’s everlasting grace!” The shattering explosion of truth set my mind reeling. Healing…recovery…spoken like good Eodward’s chosen heir…a prince who hid wisdom and reason behind a gargoyle’s mask…who had sent his newly acquired pureblood out to rescue two holy men that a villain had no reason to aid. No discretion, no forethought, no tactic could keep my discovery from my lips. “You’re Luviar’s man!”

Chapter 5

“My princely pride prefers to think Luviar was my man. You understand, pureblood, that your tongue will blacken and rot before I allow you to speak those words outside this room.” A red glow suffused two fingers of Prince Osriel’s left hand as he made a slight circular gesture.

I clamped the back of my hand to my mouth, battling a sudden nausea as my tongue grew hot and swelled to half again its normal size. The taste of decay…of rotten meat…flooded my mouth. Spirits of night!

At the very moment I believed I must choke on my own vomit, the sensations vanished. I took a shuddering breath. “Not a word to anyone, lord. Not a word.”

“Only five living persons—and now you as a sixth—know that Luviar de Savilia was my first tutor. He remained so until I was ten, when my father built Gillarine and installed him as its abbot. He would have schooled me here, but…circumstances prevented it.”

My mind raced. Who else would be privy to such a secret? Brother Victor, of course; if Luviar had been one face of a coin, Victor was its obverse. And Stearc, who was himself a student of Gillarine, and the first to bear the title of lighthouse Scholar, would surely know. But Elene had been horrified…disgusted…when I asked her about Osriel, so perhaps Gram, not Stearc’s daughter, was a third. Yet Gram was wary of this prince.

I must be wary, too. Perhaps this was but a ploy to pry names from me. “Lord, these other five…they must be Luviar’s people as well.”

“Some are. Some are not. If you are attempting to discover whether I know that Thane Stearc and his daughter and his secretary have plotted with Brother Victor, Prior Nemesio, your sister the Sinduria, and even young Jullian to salvage what they can of learning before Sila Diaglou remakes the world, the answer is yes. If you are asking me to tell you which of those conspirators might know of my involvement with the lighthouse cabal, I will not, for you are not to speak of it with anyone.”

I licked my dry lips. No need to remind me of that. “But Brother Gildas did not know?”

“Ah. Indeed that is perhaps the one favorable circumstance of this betrayal.”

“So you know that Brother Gildas…”

“…has taken the boy and the book of maps. Yes. And we must assume he is taking them to Sila Diaglou. Which means we must wonder if her demands of my brother will change once she knows what she has.” He held up four fingers and ticked off one and then a second. “It is obvious why the priestess wants the lighthouse. Its treasures thwart her aims of an ignorant, helpless populace. As for why she desires one of Caedmon’s line to go under her knife: My family is consecrated to Navronne—I will be displeased if you laugh too openly at that consideration after such close viewing of us three together—and she has long held that our blood will be all the more potent for these purification rites she works, releasing a great deal of power at the same time.”

He wagged his third finger, offering me no opening to respond. “As for Evanore…she hungers for it. Not solely for its gold, for which she has little use, but because my land is the true heart of Navronne, which is the Heart of the World. You have not seen such magic as can be worked in Evanore.”

The prince wriggled his remaining finger. “But you, Magnus Valentia de Cartamandua-Celestine…why did she ask for you instead of your grandfather’s book? You have already unlocked the maps to her man Gildas. To seek out Danae holy places so that she can work her abominations, all she needs is the book and time enough to use it. You’ve no more insight than the monk as to which places in the book are significant—perhaps less—and a book is far easier to manage than an obstreperous pureblood. Certainly purebloods have skills in magic—most of them superior to yours, it seems—but Sila considers your kind a disease akin to royalty and practors, an affront to the Gehoum, and she vows to dispossess purebloods of their favored place in the world. Did you not know that? So lay your mind to the question. Why does she want you?”

The wind moaned through the jagged glass. A quick review of everything I had learned and experienced over the past weeks, most especially my grandfather’s fractured testimony, brought me only one conclusion. “I suppose because I can take her past the boundaries of the maps. Gildas can lead her to any location on the maps, but to travel deeper into the realms of the Danae, they’d need my grandfather or me. My grandfather told me that my bent could take me anywhere…even to places he had not mapped…even to the boundaries of heaven or hell. Silly to think…No one would believe such a thing.”

The prince settled back in his chair. “The boundaries of hell…I doubt you’d care for that.”

My skin crept. He spoke as if he’d visited there.

Dread encircled and choked me like smoke from the braziers. “I’ve told the others, and so, I suppose you know that these murderous rites the Harrowers perform destroy the Danae guardians and corrupt the Canon. If Sila Diaglou were to lead her Harrower legions into their land…My lord, what better way to accomplish her ambitions than to destroy them all?”

He fell into a deadly stillness. Then he rose from his chair and grasped the back of it for a moment, as if to steady himself. “Well then, we certainly can’t allow you to fall into her hands.”

He turned away and moved in measured steps, not toward the outer door, but toward the kitchen stair. His shapeless green robes hinted at a slender man slightly more than average height.

This could not be the end of the subject. Luviar’s passion…the certainty of the darkness to come…only in these past few days had the urgency penetrated my understanding: the end of the Danae…the death of Navronne…the long night, the end of the world we knew become a reality as palpable as the wood beneath my feet.

“My lord, protecting me is not enough,” I said to his back. “What if they’ve other ways to make the attempt? What if they abduct my grandfather? The danger—”

“Your sister has secured your grandfather and hidden him somewhere not even I can find.” He paused at the edge of the pool of light cast by the braziers. “You’ve tested well, Magnus. Better than the first reports led me to expect. That morning in Palinur…Voushanti doubted your mind’s clarity.”

“My lord, what use do you think to make of me?” Even as the essential question took shape in my head, I was not sure I could bear the answer. Such a deep-buried longing gripped my heart, far deeper and more profound than the doulon hunger, I thought my chest must burst.

“I think you have just answered that question,” said Osriel, as if plucking thoughts from my head. “The Danae dance on the solstice; did you know that? Whatever magic exists in the world is renewed on that night. The music of the universe reaches its crescendo, so they say, and without magic we will not prevail. That’s why I chose that day for our confrontation with Sila Diaglou. The assistance we need from the Danae must be arranged before they dance. And someone must warn them of the priestess and her plot.”

The treacherous, trickster Danae. Blue fire spun in my head…dragons and herons and long muscled limbs. Glimmers of light and shadow shifted and leaped on the burnished wood floor. I stared unblinking, as if these things might form some pattern I could comprehend.

“Good night, friend Valen.”

Startled, I glanced up to see his pale lips graced with quiet amusement. And for the first time that evening, he spoke without whisper or throaty harshness. So familiar.

Words rushed out of me. “Your Grace, this night has left my curiosity pricked beyond all reason. Excuse my impertinence, but you are not at all the person I expected. And I have a fancy…foolish, I know…that we are not strangers. I would look upon your face, lord, that I might know my rightful king.”

“You’re not afraid? Even my eldest brother, who regularly dropped me down the sewage sluice at our father’s house in Avenus, fears me. And rightly so.” His gold ring gleamed in the dying light, defining his hand against his shapeless robes.

“I do fear you, lord. Reason demands it. Instinct insists upon it. Yet I do not find myself afraid.”

“I’ve planned to force your service blind,” he said. “How can I trust you—a proven, skillful liar? I’ve been given reason to believe you involved in the matter of this murdered boy. And you could easily have betrayed Luviar and Victor, hoping to buy yourself a more comfortable future.”

“No, my lord! I never—” Guilt aborted my protest. For certain he must feel the heat of my shame about Luviar’s death. Yet some circumstance had gained me his favor. “The mission to rescue Abbot Luviar and Brother Victor…that was my test.”

“Luviar, may his Creator cherish his great soul, trusted you. That—and desperation—bought you that morning’s chance. I do regret I had to use Jullian in such vile fashion, but I had no time to argue or explain or devise a better trial.” He raised a hand and the flames in the braziers flared, bathing us both in yellow light. “I suspect Luviar was right. He said you were but lost and searching for your place. Perhaps that place is at my side…for as long as I can survive.” His smile widened, and he lifted his hood.

I gawked like a crofter’s child brought to a palace. Then a pleasured warmth suffused both flesh and spirit. Reclaiming sense, I sank to one knee and touched fingers to forehead, making proper obeisance to my bound master and sovereign lord…to the Thane of Erasku’s intelligent and persuasive secretary, Gram.

“My Lord Voushanti!” The urgent voice and pelting footsteps from the bottom of the guesthouse stair halted my ascent and spun Voushanti halfway round.

The mardane was escorting me to my bedchamber. No matter that for me the sun had shifted in its course, Voushanti’s zeal to ensure my security and compliance with our master’s wishes had not.

“We’ve trouble!” Philo, chest heaving, cheeks ruddy, beard and leathers dusted with snow, appeared at the bottom of the stair carrying a lantern. “Harrowers accosted Ervid and Skay on the road to Elanus. When the orange-heads found the prince’s safe passage letter on Skay, they tore into him. Left him for dead. Ervid fought free, but instead of pushing on with his dispatches, the fool bided and brought Skay back here.”

“Has he lost his mind?”

“They’re lovers, lord. He could not—”

“Were they followed?” Voushanti’s question punctured Philo’s excuses like a bodkin.

“He believes not, sir. Skay lies in the monks’ kitchen. His life ebbs quickly, lord. If the prince—” The warrior’s voice quavered and halted. Fear for a friend’s life? Fear of Osriel’s wrath?

Of course, Philo would not be privy to Gram’s secret. This facade of horror…the gruesome stories…had been spread to shield a frail man with too few warriors to hold his own in war. And he had devised this masquerade to allow him to move freely through the kingdom, for his brothers’ supporters would have no qualms at removing the inconvenient bastard from the reckoning of power.

“Post Havor’s men about the abbey’s inner walls,” snapped Voushanti. “I’ll inform His Grace.”

I’d wager my life that Voushanti—the loyal bodyguard, messenger, nursemaid—was one of those few who knew Osriel’s secret. Yet the mardane was not a true member of the cabal. He served Osriel only.

Philo pressed a fist to his breast and vanished into the gloom below. Voushanti motioned me up the stair. “Get to your bed and sleep, pureblood. We’ll likely be traveling tomorrow. And I’ll advise you: Do not wander. It’s a dangerous night to be abroad.”

In the depths of his black eyes the warning gleamed like molten iron. This was a dangerous season to be abroad.

“Will your duties permit you sleep tonight, Mardane?”

Amusement lifted the unscarred corner of his mouth. “Matters do not seem promising.”

As he galloped down the steps, I slogged upward again. Sleep…after such a day. My body felt as if the clouds had opened and rained stones on me. Yet how could my mind ever still itself enough to sleep? The prince had not lingered in his hall after his revelation, but assured me that we would talk more in the morning when Stearc and his daughter would join us. If they did not have Jullian and Gildas in safekeeping, we would set out in search of them by midday. The prince…Osriel…Gram.

No mystery now how the cabal had come by the journal of Eodward’s tutor. Or why Stearc offered his secretary such deference and care. Perhaps Elene had been near panic when I inquired about Osriel, not from distressed sensibility at her lord’s depravity, but fear that somehow I had guessed a perilous secret. Eodward’s chosen heir…I had witnessed Gram’s intelligence, reason, judgment, his calm strength that had naught to do with arms. Aye, but therein lay the peril. How could a man with no legions hold a fortress, much less win a kingdom?

I rounded the last spiral of the stair carefully, wishing I carried a torch. Only a faint wash of a rushlight in the upper passage touched the steps, leaving most of them dark as spilt ink. I grabbed the rushlight from its bracket and carried it with me. The coals in my bedchamber hearth were carefully banked, but I let them lie for morning. Instead I threw off my cloak and attacked my legions of buttons, hoping Gram would not require such grandiose attire too often.

Great gods…Gram… Every time I thought I had accepted what had just happened, a wave of excitement washed over me. I’d never felt like this before…a part of something so important, something that felt so right. Of course, not even the most foolhardy gambler would risk his coin on our chance to put Gram on Caedmon’s throne, much less to hold off the plagues and famine that augured the coming years of trial. Even if Bayard kept to this truce of necessity, the prince must confront Sila Diaglou on the winter solstice, some two months hence. A night of magic, perhaps, but even devout Karish folk believed the longest night of the year to be the apex of the Adversary’s strength, when he set in place his schemes to ensnare the innocent, while the angel legions sang in holy chorus and formed up ranks to face him.

The choice of that particular night for Gram’s first step was perhaps the finest irony of this whole tangled story. For I had been born at midnight on the winter solstice, so the family tale had always run—the ill-famed winter’s child of bardic rhymes, the get of gatzi, conceived when Magrog’s demonic servants infiltrated the bawdy rites of spring. And on this birthday would I turn my grandfather’s mysterious eight-and-twenty. My ears itched with his whispering: Thou shalt be the greatest of the Cartamandua line. Thou art of my blood, incomparably strong in magic. I, the least gifted of men. Grinning like a fool, I shed the satin pourpoint, wondering if it was too late to learn a bit of spellworking.

And then, from out of nowhere, an invisible ax shattered my skull. Knives…lacerating…my flesh bathed in fire. Paralyzed with dread…awash in pain…drowning in blood…

Choking, gasping, I dropped to my knees. The weak glimmer of the rushlight seared my eyes with the glare of a thousand suns. Gray, transparent faces, twisted with hate, hovered above me, striking…cutting…I felt my bones shatter. Blade-rent, beaten, my body reported every color of pain, and my mind every nuance of grief, of rage, of regret, of unfounded horror and hatred.

Even as I experienced the agony of such wounding and felt a frigid numbness creep upward from my toes, I knew my limbs whole and unmarked, my palms resting on cold, solid stone. No one stood beside me.

The physical pain ceased as abruptly as it had begun. The emotional tumult dwindled more slowly into a directionless anger. Then that, too, faded until I was empty of all but my own terror. I lay curled on the floor, trembling, my arms wrapped about my knees, afraid to move lest I trigger another assault.

My disease, surely. Yet this was not the familiar ground of doulon perversion. The pain…the searing dread and anger…never in all my years had I experienced such a ravaging, as if my sickness had itself become some live thing inhabiting my body, wreaking purposeful vengeance now I’d sworn I’d no longer service it with nivat seed.

After a time I sat up. Slowly. My blood started flowing again, and reason crept out from hiding, dragging with it a dismal conviction. I had to tell the prince. Tonight, while this pain remained fresh, reminding me of the madness to come. The hopes raised in the past few hours could not overshadow that inevitable result. Nor could they shake my certainty that one more use of nivat would destroy both soul and body. Life’s last great joke. I had found a master I was willing to serve, but my irredeemable folly had ensured my service would be cut short. I could not allow Osriel to imagine he could rely on my help.

I pulled on the heavy cloak I’d worn in the morning and hurried down the stair. One might have thought the world had already ended. The abbey ruins lay burnt and frozen, dark and silent. One faint gleam shone from the kitchen building in the south cloister, where the prince had been summoned to succor his fallen messenger.

The night air frosted my lungs, and I clutched my cloak around me. The world felt askew, as if my body were besotted with mead.

The grimed windows of the kitchen flickered with odd light of purple-streaked scarlet. I shoved open the plank door and stepped into a dark vestibule. Wet heat slapped my face, and with it the sweet, ripe alchemy of human dying—sweat, piss, emptied bowels, and the overwhelming iron taint of blood. A young man in padded leathers stood off to one side, his one arm held tight across his breast, clenched fist at his heart, the planes of his face eroded with grief. Voushanti’s wide hands gripped the young man’s shoulder and pressed him against the bricks of poor Brother Jerome’s beloved hearth. But it was the tableau in the center of the room that turned my blood to sand.

The kitchen worktables had been shoved aside to clear the stone floor. Fire blazed—a broad ring of tall flames, scarlet and purple and the deepest blue of midnight, of storms, of bruises and pain. No fuel fed the flames; no hearth contained them. Within the fiery ring a stocky warrior lay dead, his body hacked and battered, the top of his skull caved in. Far worse than those mortal wounds were the fresh bloody holes that gaped where his eyes had once looked upon the world.

Prince Osriel—the gaunt, dark-haired man I knew as quiet, persuasive Gram—knelt beside the body, his velvet robes stained dark. Gore adorned the prince’s face, not random splatter, but precisely marked patterns of circles and lines on brow, temples, cheeks, and chin. The blood signs burned with a power of their own that thrummed in my head as music—songs of pain and bondage, of striking whips and cries of despair. The prince’s cupped hands, bloody to the wrist, held a calyx of carved stone—a shallow offering vessel as Iero’s worshipers used to carry fragrant oils to his altar. Wisps of gray smoke trailed from the vessel.

“…come weal, come woe, bound to my will and word until world’s end. Perficiimus.” Osriel’s chant rang clean and hard and sure.

As he lowered the bowl, I backed away, cracked open the door, and slipped unseen into the bitter night. A haze of smoke and freezing fog obscured the stars. Somewhere soldiers softly called the watch.

Pressing my back to the stone wall, I tried to erase what I had seen, to silence the truth articulated by that sonorous incantation. Holy gods, how many times had he done this? What use did he have for souls withheld from whatever peace lay beyond this life? The wall of midnight that had smothered the fields of Gillarine remained etched in my memory—behind the fire-breathing horses and monstrous cloud warriors, I had seen gray, transparent faces in the blackness, hungry…lost…angry. And now I understood what I had experienced this hour past.

Life or death. In alleyways, on battlefields, in taverns and hovels and fine houses, I had always been able to determine whether a wounded man was like to live or die, no matter if the last breath had left him. But never before without my hand touching his body. And never before had I lived the actual rending of the victim’s flesh and spirit. Somehow Osriel’s dread enchantment had opened a door, and my talent had taken me through it to a place I had no wish to go. Navronne’s rightful king, the world’s hope, my bound master…Holy Iero, preserve us all.

For better or worse, my stomach was long empty, thus I left little trace of my retching in the snow. Had matters been different, I might have spent the night in the open air trying to purge the odor of unclean magic that clung to my spirit. But cold and exhaustion drove me back to the guesthouse, along with a vague sense that the prince must not know I’d glimpsed what he was about. I was certainly not as ready as I’d thought to bare my own weaknesses to my master.

Every bone and sinew demanded that I bolt like Deunor’s fiery chariot from what I had just seen. It was one thing to accept Osriel’s admission of unsavory practices, and wholly another to feel their blight upon my own soul. Could I, who prated of free choices, serve a man who enslaved the dead?

Abbot Luviar had taught me that I could not sit out this war. And if I were to take a battle stance at Caedmon’s Bridge on this night, I would yet choose Osriel and his lighthouse over Sila Diaglou and the world’s ruin. But obedience…the loyalty I had been so ready to hand over not an hour since…that would be another matter.

Once back in the guesthouse bedchamber, I stripped and rolled up in the coarse wool blankets. But I did not sleep. Instead I traveled the boundaries of hell in the company of savaged corpses with bloodied eye sockets, of a master whose face was marked with blood signs, of a whirling Dané who spat gall. The agonies of a dying soldier wrote themselves over and over again in my soul, and a diseased knot burned in my gut, fiercer with each passing hour.

Chapter 6

The day birthed as gray and forbidding as my spirits. Voushanti did naught to improve matters. When I inquired what had become of the wounded messenger, he said only that Skay had succumbed to his injuries, and that Ervid had lapsed into a forgetfulness, so that he could not even remember how his lover had died. I wanted to be sick.

The scent of spiced cider, mingled with woodsmoke and the abbey’s ever-present residue of charred wool, wafted up the stair as I followed Voushanti down to the second floor of the guesthouse to meet the new arrivals. The mardane motioned me toward an open doorway to the left of the landing, then slipped down the stair before he could be seen.

Voushanti had reminded me forcefully that the prince’s disguise must be strictly maintained unless Osriel himself signaled otherwise, even with members of the cabal. Never had a man’s character confused me so. I had taken to Gram’s kind, morbidly cheerful ways in our first dealings, admired his intelligence, humility, and equable humor in the face of his employer’s irascible nature. I had believed him my friend and the only honest member of the lighthouse cabal. The absurdity near choked me as I pulled on the silken half mask and stepped into the room.

The sound of friendly argument welcomed me to the modest retiring chamber. Prior Nemesio was conversing energetically with a big man with a narrow beard, a beaklike nose, and the scuffed leathers and jewel-hilted sword of a noble warrior—Stearc, Thane of Erasku.

The talk ceased abruptly at my appearance. Rapidly melting snow dripped from the cloaks flung over chairs drawn close to a blazing fire.

“Cartamandua,” said Stearc, sounding wholly unsurprised. He finished removing his gloves and tossed them onto the drying cloaks. “So Prior Nemesio was right that Mardane Voushanti has left you here alone this morning?”

At Stearc’s right hand stood his daughter, Elene. Her close-woven braids gleamed the same bronze hue as her father’s hair, and her rugged garb and weaponry reflected the same martial seriousness. I hated that I could not give full attention to her blooming loveliness. But Osriel…Gram…sat bundled in blankets beside the fire.

“Prince Osriel and his main force departed in the night,” said the prior before I could answer. “Voushanti rode out to Elanus before dawn in search of fresh horses. I was something surprised the vile fellow would leave Brother Valen unguarded after yesterday’s unpleasantness, but he told me he did not wish the pureblood to be seen in town.”

I was grateful that Nemesio’s eager report prevented me having to affirm this nonsense.

“Fortunate for us,” said Gram. “Valen, we could use your talents to aid us in the search for Jullian and Gildas. Neither Lord Stearc nor Mistress Elene has found any trace of them.”

“You may have whatever you need of me,” I said, trying not to imagine his sober, pleasant face marked with unholy blood. “I just want to find the boy.”

“It is nonsensical to go chasing off into the wild until we receive the reports from the Sinduria’s spies,” said Elene sharply, clenching her fists as if to extract some sense from the air. “We’ve no idea where Sila Diaglou might be, and we’re all more tired than we’ll admit. Each of us would give his heart’s blood to see Jullian safe, but we need everyone fit, so perhaps, for once, insufferable pride and infernal stubbornness won’t trump reason and planning. Our purposes are ill served if one of us falls off his horse and must be scraped up and put back on again.”

Gram threw his blanket aside and rose from his chair, his lean frame straight and confident beneath his sober garb. The heat of the fire had painted his gaunt cheeks scarlet. “Mistress, you know how many days must pass until we can gather reliable reports. If Valen’s talents can give us direction, we should use them. If it is my infirmities that concern you, let me ease your mind. I’ve not been floundering in weakness all morning, but rather trying to give some thought to strategy. May I speak freely, Lord Stearc?”

Stearc nodded. Elene folded her arms across her breast and shot Gram a murderous glance. The little chamber shimmered with heat. I retreated to the window niche in search of the colder air that leaked through the iron seams of the casement. Urgency pulsed in my blood like battle fever. The doulon fire was rising in my gut.

Gram shoved a renegade lock of hair from his eyes. “Firstly, our overarching goal remains the preservation of the lighthouse, and as the lady suggests, we cannot lose sight of that in our fears for Jullian. As Gildas has the book of maps as well as our young friend, we must pursue him and hope we can retrieve both at once. Meanwhile, Prior Nemesio must find us a new Scholar. Whether he is selected from the survivors here at Gillarine or from elsewhere in Navronne, that one must be brought here as quickly as possible to study and prepare.”

The prior sagged onto a couch, his round face stunned, his gaze flicking uncertainly at the man he believed little more than a lord’s scribe. “But I am no Luviar, Gram. I’ve no wisdom to bring to such a task. How can I—?”

“None of us can replace Luviar,” said Gram, clasping his hands behind his back. “We must do with our own talents. He chose you to run his abbey, Father Prior, to care for his brothers whom he loved. Thus he had clear faith in your judgment. If Valen’s accusations are correct, then Gildas deceived even the abbot. Perhaps a more practical man will make a better choice.”

Though his manner was entirely calm and logical Gram, Prince Osriel’s eyes had taken on the character of iron when fire, hammer, and coal have had their way. No wonder he kept his gaze shuttered as he played this role. No meek secretary had such eyes.

A cramp tightened my left calf. I propped the toe of my boot on a stone facing and stretched out the muscle. It’s nothing. Nothing.

Prior Nemesio kneaded his chin, staring at the patterned rug. “Luviar had a great respect for Jon Hinelle, a merchant’s son in Pontia who once studied here,” he murmured, “and for Vilno, a self-taught practor who once traveled as far as Pyrrha. Hinelle, I think—he’s younger, more practical, if not quite so powerful a mind. With the abbey library in ashes, the new Scholar will need access to the lighthouse. And he’ll need protection.”

Over Nemesio’s head, the prince lifted his eyebrows at Stearc and flicked his gaze from the bemused prior to the door. Stearc nodded brusquely.

“We shall open the lighthouse the moment the new Scholar is in place, Father Prior,” said Stearc. With a firm hand, the thane dislodged Nemesio from the couch and drew him to the door. “And I’ll leave a small garrison here at your disposal for the new man’s retrieval and protection. Fedrol is a capable commander and will ask no awkward questions. I’d advise you heed his recommendations…”

As their voices faded down the stair, the prince poured himself a cup of cider from the pot on the polished table, lost in his own thoughts as he sipped. I kneaded my aching left forearm and breathed away a sharp spasm that pierced my rib cage.

Elene graced me with a rueful smile. “It is the gods’ own gift to see you safe, Brother Valen.” Her voice sounded as rich and potent as fine mead, warming even my cold spirit.

I mustered a smile and bowed, pulling off my mask and looping it on my belt. “Just Valen, mistress. I make no further pretense to holy orders.”

“Two days ago, when we saw what the Harrowers had done to the abbey, and then Voushanti straggled in, saying you had stayed behind to face our pursuers alone, we feared your brave heart lost. So when your message came to Fortress Groult—” Her red-gold skin took on a deeper shade. “While we could not rejoice at your conclusions, we did rejoice that you were alive to make them. And now”—she jerked her head at the prince—“we’ve no need to hide certain facts from you. For better or worse.”

“For better or worse,” I said softly. So she knew Osriel’s secret. “Mistress, do you know—? Last night, I—” The prince looked up from his cup, expressionless, and I dared not speak what I had seen, lest he overhear. “Lady, I am unsure of whom I serve.” Perhaps I had found the source of her bitter enmity for Gram. I could not imagine a woman so devoted to justice and right, herself so rich with exuberant life, countenancing practices so abhorrent.

“We are an inharmonious collection of comrades, to be sure.”

The clamor of boots on the stair signaled Stearc’s return, accompanied by a blast of cold air—and Voushanti. Elene promptly moved away from me, poured a cup of cider, and plopped herself onto the dusty couch.

Welcoming the fresh air, I pressed even closer to the window. The stifling heat was near choking me. Another cramp wrenched my back. I blamed the overbuilt hearth fire and the previous day’s climbing. Please, gods…

“We should inform the prior of your identity, Your Grace,” said Stearc, squatting by the fire and rubbing his hands together briskly. “If he is to be an effective ally, he should know all.”

The prince shook his head. “Too many secrets have escaped our grasp of late. Nemesio is stalwart and intelligent, but unimaginative in deceit and poor at conspiracy. That Gildas cannot expose me is one slim consolation amid Valen’s ill tidings.”

“I don’t understand why you believe all this about Gildas. The boy’s body is proof that he was murdered, not that Gildas did it. We’ve a far more likely candidate right here.” Stearc glared at me with undisguised contempt. “Did your own guilt catch up with you, pureblood? Did you realize you’d be found out, and so turn on the very one who compromised himself to aid you? Perhaps you didn’t know that Gildas confessed how he’d induced you to strike him and run. How he sent Gerard after you with supplies for your escape. The monk’s testimony shook even Luviar. Now you say some magical insight has shown you the boy’s resting place? I don’t accept it. You were half crazed that night. I say you struck down the boy so he couldn’t give you up to the purebloods.”

Voushanti shifted his position slightly, intruding between Stearc and me. “You should listen to the pureblood, Thane. Whatever else, he’s no coward. Eight days ago I was ordered to kill him did he step wrong, but I found reason enough to leave him walking. Save for his diverting the Harrowers, you, your daughter, Prince Osriel, and the rest of us would lie dead on the Palinur road.”

This casual confirmation of how close I had come to dying by Voushanti’s hand did naught to cool my burgeoning anger. I’d given Elene the benefit of the doubt, but this…Damn the woman; she had been there. She had allowed these lies to fester.

“I am certainly no innocent,” I snapped. “But bring me the man or woman who says I have ever used a child ill, and I will show you a liar. As it happens, I’ve a witness that Gildas himself brought me supplies the night of my escape, that I forbade him send the boys, and that I had no contact with either boy before I was slammed senseless near the aspen grove. As that witness has not come forward to speak for me, perhaps the coward prefers I stand guilty of the crime.”

Osriel looked surprised. “A witness?”

Stearc snorted. “I don’t believe—”

“You planned to kill Valen?” Elene rose from the couch, her face crimson. Had Osriel spouted blood from her glare, it could not have surprised anyone. “You told me you would question him and seek the truth about that night. I never thought—Are we no better than the murderous madmen we fight?”

The prince’s face hardened like mortared stone. “We did as we thought best.”

“Your secrets blight your life far worse than any illness, Gram of Evanore. Twisted pride and a corrupt soul will be the death of you, not Sila Diaglou or your wretched royal brothers.”

“Daughter!” snapped Stearc. “Mind your vixen’s tongue!”

Wrenching her glare from Osriel, Elene crossed her arms, touching opposite shoulders, and bowed to me. “I beg your forgiveness, Master Valen. I had reasons for my silence that seemed compelling at the time but were clearly selfish, foolish, and inexcusable. Please believe, if I had imagined such murderous folly, I would never have left the matter in doubt.”

She turned back to the others. Though her arms remained in the penitent’s gesture across her breast, her fists tightened as if to contain a fury that matched my own. “Papa, Mardane Voushanti, my lord prince, I indeed followed Brother Valen out to the dolmen that night. He did not leave my sight until the purebloods gave chase through the fields. All is as he has said. Only Gildas came. Not Gerard. I heard Brother Valen adamantly refuse to involve the boys in any way. He could not possibly have seen anyone that evening without my knowledge.”

“You returned at dawn, girl!” bellowed Stearc, his cheeks burning. “You said you’d been with some ailing pilgrim woman in the Alms Court all night. What were you doing with Cartamandua? And where were you after he was taken?”

“That has no bearing on Valen or Gildas, so I’ll not waste our time just now, Papa,” said Elene, acid on her tongue. “But I will tell you. What misdirected loyalties induced my silence are now moot.”

I had no wits to sort out what she might be talking about, save that it surely had to do with Osriel.

“I am satisfied that Valen is innocent of these crimes, Stearc,” said the prince, putting a sharp end to the matter. “After yesterday’s encounter with Kol, I fear our hopes of aid are even flimsier than before. Yet before we can consider how to approach the Danae, we must attempt to retrieve the boy and the book…and Gildas. We ride within the hour.”

Voushanti had passed around cups of cider, and now stood across the room, observing me curiously. Every time I blinked, the world seemed to waver. I gulped the cider and set the cup aside before the mardane could notice how my hand shook.

Stearc jerked his head at Elene and snatched up his cloak. “Let’s be off, then.”

“Not you, Thane. You are to remain here.” The prince pivoted on his heel. “You and Fedrol will detail your men as you see fit for the prior’s needs and for the security of the lighthouse and the brothers.”

Stearc flushed and glared at me. “My lord, if this is punishment for my accusations—”

“This is not punishment,” said the prince sharply. “We’ve no time for petty guilts and reprisals. Believe me when I say I would prefer to have your strong arm at my side. But Luviar has fallen. As the only living lighthouse ward-holder, your personal safety is paramount, and we’ve no time to transfer your charge to another. Thus, if you perceive the least threat to your person in these next weeks, you will entertain no foolish ideas of brave antics, but will run and hide, no matter the brothers’ safety or your daughter’s or mine. Do you understand me?”

“Aye, Your Grace. Of course.” Stearc gritted his teeth and bowed.

The prince shifted his attention to Elene, who looked as near jumping out of her skin as I felt. “Mistress, though it grieves me to say it, you cannot go with us either.”

“I thought we had no time for petty reprisals!” she snapped. “I have not faltered in my duty to this cabal, no matter our personal disagreements. I have not hesitated.”

“I would not think of underestimating your determination,” said the prince, as frosty as the windowpanes. “My only hesitation is for the dangers I must ask you to venture instead. Thanks to a few brave souls, Brother Victor lies safely at Renna. To move him was a risk, but not so much as leaving him in Palinur. Saverian will keep him alive if any physician in the world can manage it. Mistress Elene, I would ask you to meet Victor at Renna and take on the burden he and Luviar kept safe from Sila Diaglou. Saverian can work the necessary rite. We cannot leave your father the only ward-holder. Are you willing?”

“You wish me to be a lighthouse warder?” Astonishment wiped Elene’s fine-drawn features clean of anger and outrage. “Of course…of course I will.”

“Good.” The prince turned briskly to Voushanti while Elene was yet stammering. “Dispatch Philo and Melkire to safeguard Mistress Elene on her travels, Mardane. They’re our best, and if they remained with us…Well, I’d not wish them to confuse Thane Stearc’s secretary with their prince just yet.”

Voushanti nodded, as did Elene, only a rosy flush remaining of her surprise.

“I believe we have some time, if we take care,” said Osriel to all of us. “Sila Diaglou has some use for Valen beyond his grandfather’s book. As long as her attention is distracted with her own plans and she is left guessing as to mine, a small, fast party should be able to move unnoticed to intercept Gildas.”

“Gildas knows I’ll come after Jullian,” I said. I wished I shared Elene’s determined composure. My knees squished like mud and my bowels churned like a millrace.

“But you are Osriel the Bastard’s bound servant, and Osriel’s cruel games would never permit you such freedom,” said the prince. “Secrets and deceptions grant us opportunities that fate denies.”

No one could have missed this reproof of Elene. But I could read the prince’s expression no better than any other time. His cool sobriety revealed no hostility.

“Now that Gildas holds the book,” he continued, “Valen is our only hope to warn the Danae and enlist their help. As his safety is critical, and I’ve still some notion of ruling my father’s kingdom, Voushanti must keep the both of us alive through this venture.”

Voushanti bowed. “How many men?”

“Only us three.”

“My lord, no!” Voushanti and Stearc erupted in unison. “Impossible…”

Stearc argued himself hoarse about Osriel’s foolishness in taking a single bodyguard “no matter his exceptional talents.” Osriel allowed him to rant, but altered the plan not a whit. As Stearc moved from sputtering at Osriel to showering Elene with warnings and advice, the prince took up pen and paper to set his plan into motion.

Osriel took Gildas’s threat too lightly in my opinion. The monk might believe me the Bastard’s bound servant, but he also knew how I felt about villains who abused children. Worse yet, he knew my weakness; he’d left a box of nivat seeds to taunt me. I’d destroyed the box and yet clung to the belief that I could manage a few more hours of sanity—long enough to set Osriel on the right path. I could not abandon the boy. I had sworn to protect him.

Voushanti charged off to see to horses and supplies, and conversation shifted to a brisk discussion of message drops and rendezvous and other details that needed no input from me. As the moments slipped by, the knot in my belly launched a thousand threads of fire to snarl my flesh and bones. My companions and their concerns and, indeed, the entire world outside my skin began to recede, until they seemed no more than players and a flimsy stage. My time had run out.

“My lord,” I whispered from my place by the window. It was all the voice I could muster from a throat that felt scorched. “I need to tell you…”

No one heard me. Elene held Osriel’s sealed orders for his garrison at Renna and for this Saverian, his physician and house mage. Voushanti returned and hoisted the leather pack that contained the prince’s medicines. Osriel donned his heavy cloak and tossed his extra blanket to Voushanti, telling him to pack it. “A dainty flower such as I cannot afford to leave extra petals behind.”

My body burned. I tried to unfasten my cloak and padded tunic, but my hands would not stop shaking.

Soon Osriel and Stearc were laughing. They embraced fiercely. Elene clasped her father’s hands, biting her lip as she mouthed sentiments I could not hear.

I fumbled with the iron window latch and shoved the casement open far enough I could gulp a breath of frigid air to cool my fever.

“Magnus, it’s time to go.”

“Magnus Valentia!”

The calls came as from ten quellae distant. I lifted my anvil of a head, sweat dribbling down my temples. The four of them stared at me.

“What’s wrong, Valen?” said the prince.

“I can’t,” I said, pressing one arm to my belly as a vicious cramp tied my gut in a knot. “It’s too late. Gildas knew—” But I could not blame Gildas for this betrayal. He had merely taken advantage of my own sin; the excess nivat he’d given me in Palinur had but sped up what was going to happen anyway. “I’m afraid I’m no good to you after all.”

“Are you ill, pureblood?” Voushanti dropped the satchel. “You should have spoken earlier.”

I shook my head, as waves of insects with barbed feet swarmed my skin. “You’d best go now. Retrieve the book, or you’ll have to discover another way to the Danae.”

The prince appeared in front of me. Though his years numbered only six-and-twenty, fine lines crisscrossed his brow and the skin about his eyes. Concern settled in the creases as in a familiar place. “You seemed well enough yesterday. Have you some hidden injury? We can fetch Brother Anselm.”

When he touched my chin, I jerked away. But trapped in the window niche, I could not evade him. I closed my eyes, though behind my eyelids lay naught but flame. “No, my lord. A disease.”

“But not a new one.” I felt his gaze penetrate my fever like a spear of ice.

My molten gut churned. “It comes on me from time to time.”

“Have you medicines for it? How long will it hinder you? A day? A week?” Spoken with the understanding of a man who had dealt with illness every day of his life. Did his remedies skew his mind until he could think of naught else, until they became indistinguishable from the disease? Did his salves and potions leave him muddleheaded so that he killed the people he was trying to help? I doubted they tempted him to slash his flesh or scald his feet just to make the healing more pleasurable.

“You’re our best hope to reach the Danae, Valen. We’ll get you what you need. Just tell me.”

There it was. The temptation I feared most.

The doulon hunger sat inside my head like the Adversary himself, whispering its seductions. One spell and you can hold together for a few days…help them rescue Jullian…retrieve the book. Then they won’t need you anymore, and you’ll have kept your vow as best you could. Too bad you threw the enchanted mirror away—so easy to do when your gut is not on fire—but this devil prince can surely enspell another. And he’ll have a supply of nivat as a gift for the Danae. Surely…

The fiery agony was my disease. For all these years, no matter its torment, no matter how I rued my folly, cursed the stars, or told myself otherwise, deep inside the darkest core that held a man’s unspoken sins, I had welcomed its pain in aid of its remedy. My chest clenched with hunger. My loins ached with need no woman could satisfy. Saliva flooded my mouth. No amount of washing had removed the scent of nivat that clung to my skin, to my fingers that had opened the little box Gildas had left me. So enticing…

“Valen?”

Luviar had died an unspeakable death because the doulon had left me slow-witted and confused. Brother Victor lay half dead and Jullian was captive because servicing my need demanded my first and clearest stratagems, and every other matter must yield to whatever the doulon made of me. Nivat gave me an illusion of control, but I knew better. A cramp wrenched my back like an iron hook.

“You cannot help me. You must not.” Saints and angels, make him believe it, for you’ll never be able to repeat these words. My darkest core prayed he would not listen.

“Look at me, Valen.” His icy fingers shook my chin. “Open your eyes. I am your lord and your bound master. I command you tell me what’s wrong.”

Best let him see the raging hunger. Best see his reaction in turn, to crush hope and understand my fate. I allowed his clear gray gaze to capture mine, then spoke so that only he could hear. “The doulon.”

“Ah.”

He dropped his hand but not his eyes, his expression such a strange compounding of comprehension, curiosity, and calculation, I could not read it. But at least I saw no judgment. Perhaps a man who enslaved souls saw no perversion in teaching the body to crave pain in order to release one moment’s ecstasy and gain a few weeks’ comfort.

“You are full of surprises, friend Valen.” His voice was soft. Puzzled. Kind. Almost as if he were Gram alone and not the other. “But this one—”

He turned away abruptly, leaving me slumped against the window, where I tried to inhale enough cold air I would not erupt in flames. I was relieved to hear him dispatching the others about their duties, telling them he would set out after Gildas as planned. Good. Maudlin sympathy was no better an asset for a worthy king than self-righteous judgment. Somehow it made my shame easier to bear that he was proceeding with the kingdom’s business.

Eyes closed again, stomach heaving, I slid slowly down the wall, trying to decide what to do with myself once these four were dispersed on their missions. I could not remain in the guesthouse. Stearc would not be so matter-of-fact about this betrayal as his prince was. Horrid to think of the thane filling my last hours of reason with bullheaded insults. But I also hated the thought of burdening the brothers…

“Come, come, you’re not going to get off so easy.” A firm hand caught me under the arm and halted my downward slide. “Stand up, Valen. Gather what’s left of your wits and come with me. We must find our young friend and your book and this villain who thinks to use them.”

“Your Grace, if I could—please believe me—I would. Do you have any idea—?” I lowered my voice so the others would not hear. “Doulon hunger destroys mind and body. I’ll be of no use to you.”

“I have a very good idea. I was born with saccheria.”

Saccheria! No wonder reports named him a cripple. Joint fever, a rare and brutal rogue of a disease, could crack a man’s limbs or bend them into knots. Even if the first bone-twisting onslaught of fever didn’t kill you, you were never free of it. It would attack again and again, vanishing abruptly for weeks or months at a time before the next assault, manifesting itself in a hundred cruel variants—one time as grotesque skin lesions, the next as mind-destroying fever, a lung-stripping cough, or a palsy that transformed a robust warrior into a bed-ridden infant who fouled his sheets. Always lurking…always unexpected…always, always painful.

He released me as soon as I was standing again. “One cannot live as I have without learning every remedy the world provides for pain. And the first and most difficult thing you learn is that there exists no remedy without cost. I was fortunate that my father forbade me try nivat or poppy until I was old enough to understand their price. I won’t give you either one.” His calm assurance eased even so blunt a condemnation. “Unfortunately for you, I also know you’re not going to die in the next few days.”

“I’ll want to,” I said. And even if I shed the doulon hunger, I would have to face the disease itself.

He pulled my cloak around my shoulders and tugged it straight. “So you will. But I won’t allow it, and perhaps you will have accomplished something useful before you expire.”

Chapter 7

“I can’t eat this,” I yelled, knocking away the spoon, spilling hot soup over my clothes, my blanket, and my unfortunate companion. “Tastes like drunkard’s piss.” I rolled to one side and drew my knees to my chest, the sound of my own croaking voice threatening to burst my eyeballs. I was shivering so violently I could not catch hold of the blanket to draw it over me, and so lay exposed to the frigid evening.

One of my tormentors threw the blanket over me—over my head, so that every breath was tainted with the stench of horse, smoke, vomit, and my unclean body. Moaning, I clawed at the damp wool to get it off my face before I could not breathe at all.

“Just stick a knife in me,” I said between gulps of the frosty air that froze the slime leaking from my nose. “It’s quicker than poisoning or suffocation.” Quicker than devouring oneself from the inside out.

“I give you no leave to die. You vowed without reservation that you would not run away from me. Remember?”

My chief tormentor was no more than a shadowed outline between me and the fire. I closed my eyes and clung to his voice. Calm. Cruel. Kind. The fragile thread of reason that held my body and mind together. Days…blessed angels, how many days since I could think, since I could move without screaming, since I could sleep? And now it was almost night again, and we lay on a bleak hillside in a forest of charred trunks, all that remained of a spruce and aspen forest. I had tracked Gildas and Jullian into this desolation somewhere west of Gillarine, but I could not have said where.

“Tell me, Valen, what is it you do when you put your hands on the earth? Do you work a spell to find the way? Or do you ask…someone…something…to show you…as with a prayer? Or is it something else altogether?” Gram…Osriel. Of course I knew the one who held me on his leash. It was just difficult to remember the two were the same man. “Answer me, Valen.”

“Don’t know. I feel. I see. It hurts.” I swiped at my face with my trembling hand, only to sneeze again—a great wet gobbet of a sneeze. Samele’s tits, I was disgusting. I hunched tighter as the sneezing set off another barrage of cramps. Chokesnakes writhed in my belly, clamping their wirelike bodies about my stomach, liver, and gut. The two swallows of piss soup I’d got down came ravaging back up my gullet, as did everything my companions tried to shove down me.

When I was done with the latest bout of retching, a warm wet rag wiped my face. “I’ve seen that the seeking pains you, as does everything just now. But Voushanti says it didn’t seem to distress you in Palinur or Mellune Forest. So perhaps when you are yourself again, it will be painless again.”

The prince’s patient baritone never changed. If I could find a blade, I might slip it between his ribs just to see if the next time he said, “Tell me, Valen,” it might sound something different. But my eyes watered so profusely, the world and its contents were never in the places I expected them, and my two companions hid their weapons from me.

“Please let me sleep,” I whispered, rolling tighter, clutching my blanket to my chest, trying to hold still so the cramps would ease. “Have mercy.”

“I’ll not give you what you want. I told you that. Sleep will come when it will. Perhaps later tonight. Now it’s time to search for Jullian again. You told us this afternoon that we were close. You made me promise to force you to this again when we reached higher ground.”

No…no…no! Impossible when rats fed on my brain, when my parched soul shriveled, when marvelous, glorious life had shrunk to this frozen, wretched, burning hell.

“Come, Valen, will you try?” Ever and always patient.

“Aye, lord. Just help me move.”

The two of them unfolded me, supported me as I knelt beside a patch of cleared earth, and then gently unclenched my fists and laid my shaking palms on the cold ground.

“Find the boy, Valen. You are gifted beyond any man I know. You’ve kept us close these four days, though we’ve traveled in entirely unlikely directions. This child, your young brother, stolen by a traitor who would use him to destroy you…”

Somewhere in the ragged, hollow shell of my being, where the shreds of reason, talent, and sense had collapsed like the walls of Gillarine, anger smoldered. When my tormentor’s voice touched that ember, I could grasp my anger, use it to steady my shattered nerves, which in turn gave life to my magic.

Where are you, Archangel? I promised to protect you. Where?

My will drew my mind into the earth, and I sought through soil and roots, frozen now, the cold penetrating deeper than these lands had known since before men walked the earth. The roots tore at my mind’s fingers like metal thorns, the dirt and rocks scraped like ground glass, leaving my soul raw and my gut bleeding. But anger held me together, and I swept my inner vision across and through the landscape, seeking the footsteps of the traitor and the boy…and discovered they had diverged. Where are you, boy? Saints and angels, if I but had a drop of his blood to link a path…

I poured my soul into the seeking, existed as worm, as beetle, as root, listening and smelling and feeling the cold grit as I groped for some hint of human footsteps. Gildas had led us on a lunatic’s path. This high, rocky wasteland had welcomed few humans, but hosted every kind of wild goat, squirrel, and rock pig for generation upon generation. Most of them dead now. A sickness festered in this desolation.

Cold…frigid, searing, mind-numbing cold…a thread of ice…suffocating…drowning…

I snatched my hands from the ground and clamped them under my arms, rocking my body to soothe the urge to vomit. “Water!” I gasped. “Gildas has left him in the water. A spring or a seep. Holy gods, in this cold. Hurry…hurry…no time.” I flapped and floundered, struggling to rise. What if Gildas had left him bleeding as he had the hapless Brother Horach, as he had poor Gerard, attempting to poison another Danae guardian? Jullian’s brilliant mind and noble heart, his determined courage that had stood up to mad sorcerers and powerful priestesses, laid waste by knives and despair…the imagining drove me wild.

“Wait!” Osriel crouched in front of me and clamped his hands on the sides of my head, demanding I look him in the eye. His features swam in the light of the crescent moon that shone bright and heavy in the west. “Be clear, Valen. Jullian is abandoned? Where is Gildas himself?”

I blinked and squinted in the moonlight, trying to connect the wavering landscape with the images in my head. We crouched just below the summit of a rocky bluff, a vantage where the prince and Voushanti could survey the steep-sided, narrow gorge.

“Northwest,” I mumbled, shaking my head to clear it. “Over that ridge at the end of the gorge and into the earth. Moving fast as if he knows this country.”

“That makes no kind of sense,” said Voushanti from behind me. “This is bandit country, riddled with hiding places, true enough, but what purpose for a scholarly monk? Into the earth…a cave, then? Does he think to be a hermit like the wild holies in Estigure?”

The two of them had speculated endlessly on why Gildas traveled so far from the impoverished Moriangi villages and failing Ardran freeholds where Sila Diaglou enlisted most of her support, and so far from the estates of Grav Hurd and Edane Falderrene, the two nobles who trained her legions.

The prince’s attention did not waver though he had to squeeze his questions between bouts of coughing. His saccheria had flared up a day out of Gillarine. “How far, Valen? Can we reach Gildas before you lose your sense of him?”

“If we stay high…traverse the ridge. But Jullian is down. Straight west and down. This side of the ridge.” To get down these icy slopes to fetch Jullian and then back up again and over the ridge to catch Gildas would be impossible. And I would lose the monk’s track long before we could travel the long way around out of the gorge and up the easier slopes to the ridge. Tears and mucus ran down my face unchecked. “The boy will die down there in the water. Die alone. We can’t leave him…not fair…not right…an innocent…”

“We should go after the book,” said Voushanti. “The monk believes us weak. He’s planned to make us choose. The boy is likely dead already.”

“Not yet,” I said, holding tight to my anger so I could think. “I’d know.”

“I’ll not build our future on one more dead child,” said the prince hoarsely. The saccheria had left thorns in his breathing. He moved carefully, as if his joints grated upon one another. “If we cannot protect our own, then how can we protect the rest of the kingdom? Valen and I will fetch the boy. You can go after—”

“No,” said Voushanti flatly. “I am here to protect you and your pureblood. You have bound me with that duty, and no whim—even yours, lord—will sway me from it.”

“You—are—my—servant.” A flash of red lanced from the prince’s fist to the bottomless black of Voushanti’s eyes…and held.

Muffling a groan, the mardane dropped to his knees. Even in his submission, he struggled and writhed, his body seeming to bulge and swell until he twisted his thick neck sharply, wrenching his eyes from Osriel’s lock. In that same moment the red lance broke and vanished. The mardane yanked his sword from its scabbard, laid it crosswise on his upturned palms, and thrust it at our master. “Do with this as you choose, lord, as is your right and privilege,” he said, curling his half-ruined mouth into a demonic leer, “but I will not leave you.”

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and confirmed that the sword’s crimson glow was not some artifact of blurred vision.

“By the mighty Everlasting!” Osriel’s upraised fists shook and spat white sparks that showered down on Voushanti’s dreadful face.

Surely Magrog’s own presence would not taint the night with such a stench—death and brimstone and scarcely bridled violence. The earth shivered at Osriel’s wrath, or so it seemed to me, who would gladly have exchanged my body for that of one of the cold worms I had touched. I laid my head on the ground and shrank as small as I could manage.

“You will pay for this, Voushanti. When your day of trial comes next, you will pay.”

The dispute was quenched as quickly as it had flared. The night became only night once more, rather than the vestibule of hell. Before I could sort reality from nivat-starved illusion, the two of them had tied me to the back of a horse and we were descending the slope into the darkening gorge. I could not fathom why Voushanti yet lived. In what kind of bondage did he serve?

The nervous animal’s hooves slipped more than once. Voushanti cajoled the beast to stay afoot and me to balance my weight back to help keep it so. But every jogging movement set off my cramps, and before we’d descended halfway to the bottom of the vale, I had stopped worrying about Osriel’s scarce-contained furies and was begging Voushanti to throw me from a cliff.

“Tell me which way to the boy, Valen,” said the prince, laying his hand on my knee as he walked beside me. Fifty times he had said it, between his hacking coughs. Even through my layered chausses I felt the heat of his fever.

“Water,” I said, my chin bouncing on my chest, lips numb, drool freezing to my chin. “Find the water. Down.”

The beast beneath me jolted forward. I muzzled my screams in the crook of my arm. Gildas must not hear us.

The night’s black seemed washed with silver. Details of the land crept out of the dark—scrubby trees, snow, crooked slabs of ice-slicked rock. Could it be morning already? Please, holy Iero, no. After a night in freezing water, the boy would be dead.

No, this light was something else. Not moon. Moon and stars were lost in cloud. Yet I could see…there, the guide thread itself laid out on the landscape, a gray pattern that sparked and shimmered of its own light, scribed atop the landscape, like the sigils of the Danae that shone from within and yet apart from their bare flesh. I dared not ask if my companions could see it, too.

“Bear left,” I croaked. Red sand hardened into stone and twisted by wind and water had formed a narrow rift. Thistles and scrub sprouted between its thin layers. “It’s narrow. Choked with boulders.” Beyond the boulder field a wall rose like the facade of a temple, an oddly flat face in this rugged wilderness.

We halted, and before I comprehended he had gone, Voushanti returned from a scout. “It’s as he says, my lord. Great slabs fallen everywhere. Dead trees. No sign of anyone, boy or man. But the place has an odd feel. We’d best leave the horses and the pureblood out here. Neither will manage the boulders.”

They untied my hands and feet and helped me to the ground. Propped my back against a rock. Bundled blankets around me and gave me a sip of ale.

“Are we in Evanore, lord?” I mumbled, my speech vibrating through my skull.

“No, Valen. Why would you think that?” Gram’s endless patience at my shoulder. Profound weariness. Perhaps the netherworld I had witnessed in his eyes had been but my own madness.

“Brains boiling.”

Soft laughter fell about my head and shoulders like autumn leaves. “Should we ever travel to my wondrous land, I’ll shield your poor brains, Valen. Now tell me: Is the boy close? We can’t take the horses any farther.”

I clutched my belly and rolled to the side, onto my knees, pressing forehead and hands to the churned snow and dirt. All I could sense was the blistering heat of my skin. “I can’t feel, lord.”

“Do we need to warm your hands? We daren’t make a fire.”

“Can’t raise my magic.” I could not even remember why I searched.

“Heed me, pureblood.” The presence swelled and darkened just behind me, close to my ear, sending thrills of terror up my spine. “Your father and grandfather used you to fuel their war with each other. Do you think I do not understand why a child’s pain touches your soul so deeply? Stop playing at this and find the boy, or I will break you.”

The boy… The ember yet burned. I grasped it and dived into earth. And from the deep crevices between the rocks came the faint trickle of water and a rhythmic tapping.

“Holy Mother, he’s trapped in the boulders,” I mumbled, hands clawed into the frozen mud, pebbles digging into my forehead. “In the crevices between. Look down. Seek the water.”

“Hold on just a little longer, Valen. Not a sound as we fetch him.”

“Careful on the ice.” Voushanti’s parting whisper carried through the night air as clearly as Gillarine’s bell.

My every sense stretched to fevered refinement. The crunch of their boots sounded like the tread of a retreating army. The horses snorted and tore at the dead grasses that poked through the snow, their mundane noises the cacophony of the world’s end. The hot stink of their droppings choked me.

I shivered and a spasm raked me from belly to lungs like a lightning bolt, near rending the bones from my flesh. “Archangel,” I mumbled into my knees. “Jullian! Where are you, boy?”

My agitated mind would not stay still, and I reached farther into the boulder-filled rift…into the earthen banks beyond the boulders, past the stone wall…where something breathed…men, unmoving, waiting, ready in a great hollow. Gildas was there, gone through the rocks, not over them. And a woman beside him…pale-haired, cold, deadly…roused with unholy lust to serve her fearsome Gehoum. Great gods…a whole citadel buried behind these steep banks. Sentries…watchers…ahead and to either side of us. Trap.

I clawed at the boulder behind me, willing my useless body upward. Stumbling into the rift, I dodged fallen slabs until the piled ice, stone, and rubble wholly filled the narrow gorge. I scrabbled up the boulder pile, at every touch reaching for their footsteps…Voushanti the devil, Gram my friend…Navronne’s king…Must be silent. Though I could hear my skin ripping on the sharp rocks. Though I could feel the blood leaking out of me.

There…ahead of me…Voushanti’s dark bulk, and ahead of him a muffled cough that sounded like a wild dog’s bark. “Who’s there?”

They heard me. Saw me. Caught me as my foot slipped on an icy slab.

“Trap,” I sobbed, pain lancing every sinew like hot pokers. “Ambush. At least twenty of them ahead. Sentries on the cliff tops to either side. And beyond them—gods have mercy—a fortress. Hundreds of them. We can’t—”

“Do they know we’ve come? Answer me, Valen. Do they know someone’s here?”

They held me tight, and I reached out with my tormented senses and felt the night…the watchers…listening…a shifting alertness…stiffening…ready. “Aye. They know.”

Gram held my jaw in his hot hands. His face was distorted…swollen to ugliness with the scaly red signature of saccheria…a gatzi’s face with dark, burning pits for eyes. “We’re going to control this. Voushanti is going to get you out of these rocks and then you’re going to scream a warning to Gram and his companion Hoyl that this is a trap. You must be silent until Voushanti tells you. When you shout, you will think of me only as Gram, and Voushanti only as Hoyl. Do you understand? You must do this, no matter how it pains you.”

“Aye,” I said, though whips of fire curled about my limbs. Though I had no idea why he wished me to do it.

Big hands grabbed me and hefted me across a broad shoulder. Jostling, bumping, slipping, every jolt an agony. I bit my arm to muffle my cries, until at last he threw me across a saddle and bound me tight. I took shallow breaths. Somewhere in the braided silence a hunting bird screeched, and the man with red eyes whispered a count from one to two hundred. Then he snapped, “Now, pureblood. Warn Gram and Hoyl of the trap.”

Somehow I understood how important it was to do this right. The listeners mustn’t know I’d learned about the fortress. They mustn’t know I’d brought Osriel and Voushanti here. So I lifted my head and bellowed like a bull elk until I was sure my skull must shatter. “Gram! Hoyl! It’s a trap! Come back! Four…five of them waiting! Run!”

My shouts set off a riot of noise—shouts from right and left, clanking weapons, drawn bows. But before one arrow could loose, a thunder of moving earth raised screams beyond my own. Voushanti cursed and mumbled until pelting footsteps joined us. “Ride!”

We rode as if Magrog’s hellhounds licked our beasts’ flesh with their acid-laced tongues. I wept and babbled of Sila Diaglou and the fortress I’d discovered hidden behind the stone, and I swore I had not caused the earth to move and kill the sentries, though I feared I had done so. I cried out the anguish of my flesh until we stopped and Gram tied rags across my mouth. “We’ll find the boy again, Valen. On my father’s soul and honor, I promise you, we’ll save him.”

That was the last thing I heard before my brains leaked out my ears.

“Magrog devour me before ever I touch nivat seeds!” Words took shape as if they sat in the bottom of a well. “Are you sure he should travel, my lord? The brothers would gladly keep him here at the abbey. It’s astonishing; they still consider him one of themselves—even Nemesio.”

The cold air that brushed my face stank of manure and mold and mud. Mind and body were raw, gaping wounds.

“Ah, Stearc, I don’t think traveling could make things worse. He’ll be safer at Renna while he endures this siege. If he has a mind left by the end, Saverian will find it. Right, Valen?” The muffled voice of my tormentor moved closer to my ear. “My physician’s skills are exceptional, complemented and honed with a mage’s talents. You will marvel.”

I could not answer. My mind was long dissolved, my tongue thick and slow. They had tied rags over my eyes and plugged my ears with wool as I screamed. Light, sound, touch tortured my senses like lashes of hot wire.

“As you’re the only one can draw sense out of him, Lord Prince, it’s good he’ll be with you. And if it makes you ride in the cart and keeps you out of the wind until this cough is eased, that’s a double blessing.”

“I’ll survive. Brother Anselm has refilled all my bottles and salve jars. It’s still more than a month until the solstice. Valen is the concern for now. I need him well. It was I that Kol forbade from entering Danae territory, not Valen. Unless I can think of some gift to placate them, it will be left to Valen to warn the Danae of Sila Diaglou’s plot to exterminate them.”

“But if the pureblood’s vision was true, and we’ve actually found Sila Diaglou’s hiding place…that’s more promising than any of this Danae foolishness. Fedrol has already set up a discreet watchpost on the hill.”

“Carefully, Stearc. I’m still debating whether I was mad to set off the landslide, minute though it was. The priestess must not suspect that Valen recognized the place as more than a convenient site for an ambush. Was Gildas a fool to lead us there or are we the fools to believe we’ve gained a slight advantage?”

“We are certainly fools. Godspeed, Your Grace. Tell my daughter I will see her at the warmoot.”

“I doubt she’ll hear any greetings out of my mouth, but I’ll do my best.”

When the world jolted into movement, I screamed. They had bundled me in blankets and cushions and moldy wool, but to little avail. My bones felt like to shatter.

For hour upon hour, aeon upon aeon, I existed in darkness, in company with Boreas as he sobbed out his torment, with Luviar as he cried out mortal agony, and with Gerard, alone and freezing, as he fought so desperately to live that he tore his hand from an iron spike. I felt my own hand rip and my own belly tear, spilling my bowels into the cold to be set afire. I screamed until I could scream no more. Tears leaked from beneath my aching eyelids. Life shrank until I felt trapped like a chick in an egg.

Only the one voice could penetrate my mad dreams, and I clung to it as a barnacle to a ship’s sturdy keel. I tried to croak in answer, just to prove to myself I yet lived.

“We must travel to the Danae, Valen,” he said one mad hour. “Luviar believed that the world’s sickness derives from their weakness. Everything I know confirms that. Our estrangement from them surely exacerbates it. But, tell me, should we walk or ride as we approach them? My father said the Danae ride wild horses when they please, but most prefer to walk, to feel the earth beneath their feet. Perhaps it would show our goodwill to walk into their lands.”

“I hate horses,” I croaked, “and they hate me.”

He laughed at that and I hated him. Gram was Osriel; Osriel was a gatzé, Magrog’s rival.

We traveled onward…and the voice touched me again and again. I cherished it like sanity itself and loathed it like the cruelest Registry overseer.

“Tell me about your grandfather, Valen,” he said. “What did he steal from the Danae? They wear clothes only when they wish to hide among us or when the whim takes them. They carry nothing from place to place save perhaps a harp or pipe and would as soon leave it and make another as carry it. What do you steal from such folk? Tell me, Valen.”

Everything hurt—my hair, my eyebrows, my fingernails. He could stop it, but he wouldn’t, and anger enabled me to muster moisture enough to spit in the direction of his voice. “Their eyes, perhaps. Their souls.”

In the ensuing silence, pain came ravaging, and I wept and pleaded. “I’m sorry. So sorry. Please speak to me, my lord. The silence hurts.”

His breath scraped my face like hot knives. “Do not speak of matters you do not understand, Magnus Valentia. I am your master and your lord. My purposes are not yours to judge.”

As the flood of misery swept me along, my tormentor spoke less and less, and I sank deeper into chaotic dreams. I drowned in fear and pain, suffocated in madness, too weak to claw my way out. Though I feared him above all men, only my master could grant me breath.

“Here, taste this. It’s very sweet—makes Voushanti heave. But your sister told me you had a special love for mead.”

“Bless you, lord,” I whispered as the wagon jolted onward. “Bless you.” I licked what he dabbed on my lips and mourned because it tasted like pitch instead of mead. But I did not tell him so, because I was afraid he would abandon me to the dark and the visions. “Please speak to me, lord.”

“I’m sorry for my reticence, Valen. I’ve naught of cheer to report. So if you’d have me speak, then you must excuse my mentioning serious matters when you are so sick. Every hour brings us closer to the solstice, and I am in desperate need of a plan. How do I find the Danae? How do I persuade them to trust me? If you don’t get well—of course, you will—but if you don’t, I’ll be in a pretty mess.”

“Likely I’ll be sicker on the solstice,” I mumbled into the moldy wool. “Even if I survive this.”

“And why would you be sick on the solstice? I expect you to have your head clear of this cursed craving long before then. From what your sister told me, you’re never really sick.”

“Solstice is my birthday.” The effort of conversation made my head spin. “Always sick.”

“Indeed? You must have been a horrid child. Did you make yourself sick on your birthday? Too many sweets? Too much wine?”

This birthday…what was it? I had thought of something…before sickness and mania took me. Something nagged, like dirt left in a wound. Mustering every scrap of control I had left, I dug through the detritus of memory. Seven. The mystery of seven. My grandfather had confirmed it.

“On some birthdays, my disease got worse. On my seventh birthday, I set fire to my bed and ran away. On my fourteenth: I hurt so wicked, I took nivat the first time. Twenty-first: thought my prick would fall off. Almost killed a whore…” The wagon lurched and bumped. I clutched the blankets, shivering, and fought to keep talking. The dark waters of madness lapped at my mind. If I sank below the waves, I would never rise. “Gods, I am a lunatic. Always have been. But Janus says I’ll be free on this birthday—twenty-eighth. Dead, more like. Every seven years, I go mad.”

He was so quiet for so long, I panicked, flailing my arms in the darkness. “Please, don’t leave me, lord. Please!”

“I’m here, Valen.” He caught my arms and laid them gently at my side. I welcomed the searing torment as he laid a firm hand on my head. “That’s an extraordinary tale…seven, fourteen, twenty-one…and now twenty-eight. It reminds me of something in Picus’s journal. Picus was my father’s tutor, himself a monk as well as a sturdy warrior, sent to protect Father as he grew up in Danae fostering, and to ensure he learned of his own people. Picus wrote endlessly of numbers and their significance, especially seven and four. He it was who calculated the sevenfold difference in the spending of life in Aeginea. The Danae themselves pay no heed to numbers past four—the completion of the seasons that they call the gyre and their four remasti, or bodily changes: separation, exploration, regeneration, maturity…”

Moments seeped past in the dark. The horses whinnied. The cart jostled. The hand on my head quivered. My master’s voice shook when he took up again, though he had dropped it near a whisper. “You have always been rebellious…out of place…never sick, save for this peculiar disease festering in your bones. Your grandfather favored you above all his progeny…the same man who stole a treasure from the Danae…to which he claimed a right. Janus de Cartamandua, by coincidence the very same man who provided unimpeachable witnesses to your pureblood birth—his own two boyhood friends.”

Of a sudden, hands gripped my shoulder like jaws of iron.

“How blind I have been,” he said, “I, who have read Picus’s journals since I was a child. Think, Valen. Of course you can’t read. Of course confinement and suffocation madden you…make you feel as if you’re dying. Confinement within the works of man kills them. But you don’t die from it. Remember on the day your sister was to take you from Gillarine, Gildas gave you water—I’d swear on my father’s heart it was from the Well, already tainted with Gerard’s murder—and it poisoned you. But, again, you did not die, only got wretchedly sick, because you are both and neither. By all that lives in heaven or hell, Valen…”

And the truth lay before my crumbling mind, as gleaming and perfect as the golden key of paradise, as solid and irrefutable as the standing stones of my long questioning now shifted into a pattern that explained my father’s loathing and my mother’s drunken aversion and every mystery of my broken childhood. My father’s damning curse hung above it all like a new-birthed star in the firmament: You are no child of mine.

Indeed, my blood was no purer than Osriel the Bastard’s, at most only half Aurellian—and that half given me by Janus de Cartamandua, not Claudio. But unlike that of my rightful king, the taint that sullied my pure Aurellian heritage was not the royal blood of Navronne, but that of a pale-skinned race whose members were exceptionally tall, had curling hair, and could not read. Thou, who art without words, yet complete.

“…you are Danae.”

The cart bucked once more, and I lost my feeble hold on reason. The tides of pain, fire, and madness engulfed me, and I heard myself wailing as from a vast and lonely distance.