Breath and Bone

Chapter 8

The angel sponged my chest with warm water and chamomile. I scarcely dared breathe lest she realize I was awake—or as much awake as I ever seemed to get amid my cascading visits to hell and heaven. The sponge moved lower. A pleasurable languor settled in my belly and spread to knees and elbows. This moment was surely wrought in heaven. But who would ever have expected heaven to smell like chamomile?

She lifted the sponge, sloshed it in a metal basin, and squeezed it, the sound of dribbling water setting my mouth watering as well. Her washing was always quite thorough, the water deliciously warm, her fingers…ah, Holy Mother…her fingers strong and sure. Her hands were not the tender silk of a courtesan’s, nor were they rough and callused like those of a dairy-maid or seamstress, but firm and capable. Tough, but unscarred. Her voice named her female, but when she leaned across me to reach my sprawled arm, her body smelled of clean linen hung out in the sun to dry. An angel, then, not a woman. But her hands…

“I think you are beginning to enjoy this too much, Magnus Valentia.” The angel’s breath scalded my ear. “Either you are feigning sleep or your dreams have broached the bounds of propriety. Know this, sirrah: I would as soon tongue a goat as indulge a man’s pleasure—no matter the marvels of his birth.”

The warm sponge touched my groin…I groaned as gatzi drove me back into hell.

Magnus Valentia. The name attached itself to me in some vague fashion throughout my ensuing visit to the netherworld. As familiar spiders crept through my bowels with barbed feet, breeding their myriad children, who then flooded out of my nose and mouth and other bodily orifices, and as gatzi strung me up on a cliff of ice and lashed me with whips of fire, I examined the appellation carefully. Shoving aside pain and madness—what use to heed the twin keystones of my universe?—I turned it over and over in my ragged mind: Magnus Valentia. It wasn’t quite right. Not a lie, but not truth either. The few bits of truth I experienced—the angel’s sure hands, clean smell, and astringent tongue, the clean cold air that blasted my overheated face from time to time, an occasional taste of pungent wine, the plucked notes of a harp—had a certain rarefied quality about them, a hard-edged luminescence that distinguished them from mania.

The uncertainty of name and birth dogged me until I next came to my senses—or at least what portion of them I could claim. A flurry of hands rolled me over in the soft bed and restrained my wrists and ankles with ties of silk. I could not fathom why my caretakers bothered with such. The only movement I seemed able to command was licking my parched lips.

A hand on my forehead brought the world beyond my eyelids into sharper focus. I smelled…everything…dust and stone, the faint residue of burning pennyroyal, rosemary, oil of wintergreen, medicines and possets, old boots and dried manure, cinnamon and ale, evergreen branches, chamomile, and soap. But unlike the usual case of late, the varied scents did not corrode my flesh. Hell’s minions had been using my senses as instruments of torture.

“The spell seems to be taking hold,” said the woman—the angel. Her voice crackled like glass crushed under a boot. “His last seizure spanned only an hour, and each seems milder than the one before. He no longer tries to injure himself. His body now responds to pleasure as well as pain. As Your Grace has rejoined us, perhaps he’ll open his eyes. He reacts to your presence as to none other. And not entirely with terror. Does that annoy you, lord?”

Someone drew up a sheet of soft linen to cover my naked shoulders and the touch of its fine-woven threads did not make me scream. I almost forgot to listen as I contemplated this odd experience.

“Will he have a mind left after all this? I need him capable. This very hour would be none too soon.” The man’s voice slid into my thoughts like a sharpened stake into soft earth, rousing a frantic need for sense and strength. Despite his intriguing language of sanity and reason, instinct screamed that to lie here bound and muddleheaded in his presence was dangerous.

Filled with eager dread, I fought to open my eyes, but succeeded only in stirring up remnants of madness. Just punishment. I had broken vows…indulged perversion…done murder…soiled my bed…and now I had to pay. Dancing shadows swirled in the landscape of my head, parting to reveal scarlet light glaring from the empty eye sockets of sprawled corpses, a brawny man pinned to the earth with wooden stakes, skeletal fingers drawing me into the snow-blanketed bog, pulling me down and down into the icy mud. Drowning…suffocating…freezing…yet never, ever dead. Seven times seven times seven years was I condemned to live and die, buried in the ice. A wail rose from my hollow chest.

The angel’s hand on my back silenced my cry before it reached my throat. Her sere voice swept away the nightmares as if they were no more than ash, drifting like black snow about my bed. “I cannot even venture a guess as to his state.”

She moved away. A clank of iron, various rustlings and thumps, and a mumbled “flagro” produced a rush of sound and a moment’s blistering heat behind me, surging to attack the legions of winter.

“Yet indeed the fellow’s constitution is extraordinary,” she continued. “A fortunate man—that is, one who did not die gnawing his own appendages—would experience the most acute nivat sickness for six weeks after quitting the doulon. Certain effects—nausea, high-strung nerves, tremors, and sweats—would then linger for nigh on a year, and susceptibility to the craving for the rest of his life. This man, or whatever you think he is, is emerging from the acute illness after only a fortnight. Perhaps your theory as to his birth explains why. Whatever the source of his resistance to nivat’s worst effects, each succeeding hour convinces me that this sensory disorder that remains is, indeed, fundamental to his body’s humors. Yet I see no more evidence of immortality or inhuman strength in him than I see of wings or halos or blue sigils glowing from his skin. Look at the scars on his thigh and shoulder. He’s been wounded a number of times, and he’s been enslaved to the most virulent of all enchantments for near half his life. No physician could tell you more of his nature than that. Consult priests or talespinners, if you insist on more.”

“I’ve not yet confirmed the details of his birth,” said the man. “And we’ve no idea the implications of dual bloodlines—such bloodlines. Of course, he would be neither immortal nor invulnerable. You’ve not mentioned this to anyone else?”

“Certainly not. I’d sooner spread plague than dose idiots with more superstitions. It’s wretched enough to see their response when I confess that my employer is Magrog the Tormentor’s rival, while I am forbidden to reveal that he’s naught but a disease-ridden celibate with a diabolical bent for magic and an overgrown opinion of himself.”

“Someday, mistress, you truly will overstep.” Frost edged the man’s words, so bitter that my tattered soul curled into a ball and hid, certain I was fallen to hell again.

But my astringent angel laughed, her fearless merriment a silver sword banishing the demon gatzi that tried to take shape behind my eyelids. Pillows lay soft beneath my cheek; tendrils of warmth wafted from her hearth. Even the silken ties that bound my wrists and wrapped each finger made me feel safe and protected in her presence.

Receding footsteps crossed my muted chamber, then clicked on tile as they passed into a place of echoes. Behind my eyelids I envisioned a long, wide passage of clean white stone, bordered by arches hung with brightly woven curtains. The lamps that hung from the high ceiling shone, not with burning oil or lit fingers of wax and braided wick, but with the pure blue fire of daylight, held captive within their glass panes. The image held the same hard-edged truth as the angel’s hands and stray moonbeams.

Whence came such certainty? I could not have seen. I’d been a raving lunatic since well before they brought me here, my eyes covered, my ears and nose stopped to tame the agony of my senses.

“Someone’s coming to sit with him? I don’t begrudge you rest after this long siege, but I’d not have him left alone.” The man’s voice echoed faintly down the passage.

“The fellow must have some charm about him,” she said, sere as the uplands of Ardra. “Everyone seems eager to take a turn to help—even your little heart’s bane. I’ve made a schedule…”

Gatzi surged out of the corners of my mind, pricked at my skin, and drew me downward into the frozen bog. Mud and water filled my lungs, so I could only choke and gurgle, not scream.

“There, can you feel it, Brother? A marvel as we’ve not seen since we left Palinur. Awkward as this might be for us were you sensible, Saverian said that to expose your skin might do more good than harm, so…”

Hands drew stale linens away, tugging gently where they snarled my tucked limbs, carefully settling the scant weight about my hips. The touch of air on skin set off a defensive tremor deep within me where some primitive function kept my heart beating and lungs pumping. Yet it was merely sharp-edged heat that bathed my flesh.

Every nerve burst awake in that moment, not in the overstretched agonies of madness, but in a fevered baptism of delight. My lungs filled with light. My ears rang with its brazen song. I tasted its tart and searing flavor. And as heat filled my veins, I groaned and uncurled, stretching to gather more of it before hell’s minions snatched it away.

“Dear Brother, I’m sorry if this hurts you!”

My eyes flew open to dazzling brilliance, and a sweetly curved form shimmering red against the haloed light—my angel. The memory of her strong hands tending my naked flesh sent the liquid sunlight in my veins surging toward my groin and possessed me of such aching desire, I dared reach for her wrist, even as I breathed fire. “O blessed one…”

“Brother Valen, the Mother be praised! What are you—?”

I drew her close and kissed her—gently, for angels are but cloud and music and divine light, thus bruise easily. Her lips were as sweet and rich as heaven’s cream. Her silken gown flowed as water on my skin. And underneath that fabric…As my left hand fingered her bronze corona of soft hair, my right released her wrist and smoothed the gauzy robe from her shoulder. Great gods of earth and sky, what gift of mortal substance have you granted your holy messenger? My mouth followed my hand’s guidance, as it unmasked the tender hollow below her shoulder and the firm swell of her breast…skin so like silk…

“Brother, what magic do you wield? Ah, Holy Mother…your hands are unbound. I’ve never felt such. We ought not…”

I kissed her lips to quiet her. Suffused in exquisite radiance, she yielded to my embrace, only a sighing breath as my hands slipped away her layered raiment, until she lay entwined with me, her skin cool against my fever, no sexless divinity, but full and ripe and enduringly female.

Hands cupping her firm backside, I drew her sweet center against my swollen need and buried a groan in her neck. Gods, I had been ready for an eternity. I tumbled her over, released her to the pillows, and straddled her. She lay beneath me in the brilliance of winter sunlight, arms flung over her head. Her eyes were closed, long lashes delicate on her cheek, lips full and slightly parted, golden skin flushed. Ready, too. I inhaled deeply.

As if a finger had snatched a blindfold from my eyes, her scent snapped me awake. Fennel soap. Thyme and leeks. Woman. Elene.

I hesitated, quivering with the difficulty of restraint, trying not to let thought or fear intrude where they had no place. Naught had changed but my perceptions. I touched two fingers to her lips and drew them down the fine line of her jaw and her neck, across her breast, and down to her belly. She shivered deliciously.

I smoothed my palm across her belly…and a certainty intruded on my overcharged senses, one of those spine-rippling moments of prescience I’d experienced throughout my life. I must not lie with her. Some heated core within her insisted I had no right.

Shaking with pent desire, I snatched my hand away.

“Lady…” I drew a wavering breath and shifted to the side, making sure not to touch her again. Then I spread the fallen red silk over her, gathered the tangled bedclothes into my lap, and turned my face away as if I had not looked on her abandon. Assuredly this was not her first time to lie with a man. Was it my own past sin that burned my conscience and stayed my hand? Fire-god Deunor, what had I done?

“Forgive me, lady.” My voice sounded coarse and strange, scarcely audible. “My madness has drawn you in. Or some magic of the sunlight. Unable to control—By the Goddess Mother, I would not take you unconsenting. By magic. Even mad, I can’t believe I would.”

She stiffened and drew away, the catch in her throat no longer healthy lust, but shock. My body’s demands were not so speedily dismissed. Great gods… I clawed the bright-woven blanket and clamped it in my lap. Perhaps I’d best keep babbling.

“Your kindness seems to have brought me back to life,” I said, as hurried fumbling took her clear of the bed. “My head so muddled…a lunatic…I thought you an—”

Tell her I’d believed her an angel, and she’d be sure I was mad and have me bound again. I could scarce argue with such a judgment. I had no idea of year or season, of where we were or what had brought us here. Only now were life and memory settling into some explanation of this eternity of pain and nightmare. Nivat. The doulon. Disease.

“You’ve cared for me all these wretched days…Iero’s hand of mercy…and I so disgusting in my perversions. I’d no idea that I had…I don’t know what to say.”

She didn’t run away. Scarce controlling my urge to wrestle her back into my arms, I could not but shove the wadded bedclothes tighter into my treacherous parts and shut my foolish mouth. A warrior woman of Evanore. She likely had a knife to hand—though where hidden in that gown I dared not imagine. What business had she in red silk instead of her habergeon? Yet truly, mail as sturdy as her father’s might not have resisted my urgency this day. Her father…Now there was a remembrance made my shaft begin to shrink.

The silence stretched long enough, I ventured a glimpse to make certain she was no stray illusion after all. She stood at the wide window, where the unexpected brilliance of sunlight split by mullioned panes had set off my befuddled misbehavior. Red gown in disarray, bronze hair tousled, she folded her arms and pressed one hand against her lips as her shoulders shook.

Just as I, shamed and regretful, returned my attention to the rumpled sheets, muzzled laughter burst that fine barrier and brightened the room even as the sunlight. “Dear Brother Valen,” she said, when her first spasms had eased, “when you wake, you wake. Though I must appreciate, and approve, your gracious conscience, I don’t know if I will ever, ever, forgive you for stepping back. I’ve imagined this occasion since I first took you walking out of Gillarine. Were I living in my grandmother’s day, I might have carted you off to my fastness that very night! Somehow you cause a woman to lose her mind and forgo all other…yearnings. Indeed your fingers carry magic.”

Unable to keep my gaze from her, I gaped, uncomprehending.

She shook her head in mimed rue. “What’s more, honesty requires me to confess that this is the first time I have visited you this tenday of your stay at Renna. Other tasks have occupied my time. It is Renna’s physician, Saverian, you must thank for your care. Though I’ll warn you: Play your finger tricks on her, and she’ll have you a eunuch before you can sneeze.”

The astringent angel. How could I ever have believed that sexless messenger of the heavenly sphere to be Elene, who was abundant earth itself? I felt ridiculous…and marvelous…and then, of a sudden, weak as a plucked chicken, as the sunlight faded into flat gray.

Elene produced a comb from her pocket and began to tame her hair. Chilled and chastened under my rumpled sheets and blankets, I curled up around my regrets and considered the mysterious certainty that had halted so fine a pursuit. I was no diviner. The only thing I’d ever predicted with accuracy was whether a sick or wounded man was like to live or die.

Life or death… I closed my eyes and recalled that core of heat beneath Elene’s silken skin…that core of life…My eyes popped open again. “Oh, good lady!”

My face as hot as the color of her garments, I motioned her near. What I had discerned might be more dangerous than any magical indiscretion. She approached my bedside, brows raised in amused speculation, her face at a level with mine. Not even the spider on the windowsill could have heard my whisper. “Mistress Elene, do you know you are with child?”

Clearly not. For a second time the sun vanished behind burgeoning clouds, and I existed once more entirely within the bounds of disastrous winter.

“You’re wrong! No god would be so cruel…so foul…the Mother would not permit it!” She spun in place, her arms flailing in helpless frenzy, until her bloodless fists gripped a warming iron and she smashed it onto the bed not a tenquat from my head. “Damnable, accursed madman! How could you know?”

I didn’t take the warming iron so much for a personal assault, as for a measure of shocked desperation. Her earlier confessions affirmed the child was not mine, begotten in some lunatic frenzy I could not remember. I kept a wary eye out for a second strike. “I’ve always had this instinct—”

I began to say it was a scrap of talent inherited from my mother, the diviner. But returning memory swept through me as a spring wind through an open door, swirling away dead beliefs like dried leaves. My hands trembled, no longer from frustrated lust, but from evidence revisited and truth laid bare. Josefina de Cartamandua-Celestine, drunken diviner, wife of Claudio, was not my mother.

“Valen, are you ill? Did I strike you? Holy Mother, I’m sorry. You’ve been so—I didn’t mean—Let me find Saverian.”

The warming iron clanked onto the floor, the noise making me wince. Elene streaked out of the room in a blaze of scarlet, while I flung off the bedclothes and examined my naked flesh. What did I expect to see? Blue dragons tearing through my skin? Surely the doulon sickness had unstrung my reason.

But my mad grandfather’s words popped into my head as clearly as I’d heard them that last night at my family’s home. Everything is secrets and contracts…I stole from them. A treasure they did not value. I had the right, but they could not forgive the loss of it…Only, Janus de Cartamandua-Magistoria was not my grandfather. He was my father.

I stumbled to my feet and strode the length of the chamber, an expansive room of whitewashed stone walls, of clean curves and arches and broad paned windows. Swelling anger gave strength to limbs too long cramped and idle. My skin buzzed as if I’d been buried in a barrel of flies.

Thou canst not know! He’ll think I told thee…Claudio exacted such a price…keeping me from thee. His babbling made sense now. I could reconstruct the history: Janus de Cartamandua, whose pureblood wife was long dead, had brought home an infant, a child of his own body, and struck a bargain with his son, Claudio. Raise this child as your own, Janus would have said, and I’ll not announce to the world that the Cartamandua bloodline is corrupted. I will even supply unimpeachable birth witnesses for the Registry.

Claudio, furious, filled with hate for the man who put him in such a position, would have agreed in a heart’s pulse…on condition that Janus stay away…never tell the child the truth…never interfere. For seven-and-twenty years Claudio had pretended to the world that the loathsome child, whose very existence promised ruin to the family, was his own pureblood offspring. And all the anger he dared not show for his own father, he had expended on the child he despised—the son of Janus de Cartamandua and a Dané named Clyste.

“Spirits of night…” Truth pierced my heart like a sword of fire, as painful as any remnant of my madness: I had heard my true mother’s voice. Beyond a barrier of mystery in Gillarine’s cloister garth, I had felt the pulse of her lingering life…experienced her grief and wordless tenderness, heard her music that had touched places within me that I didn’t know existed. But I’d not known it was she, imprisoned for Janus’s crime…trapped, condemned to slow fading. So he had described her fate. Now she was dead, and I could never know her. And I…

I propped my hands on a long bare table of scraped pine, my whole body shaking.

“Return to your bed, and I can keep the others away from you for a while longer.”

In an arched doorway stood a tall whip of a woman, dressed in riding leathers. Though her height spoke contrariwise, her nose, as long and straight as my own, her skin, the hue of hazelnuts, and her hair, straight, black, and heavy, tightly bound in a thick braid, testified unmistakably to Aurellian descent. Pureblood or very near. Tangled as I was in the unraveling of long deception and a loneliness that threatened to unman me, I had no capacity to guess who she might be.

“On the other hand, if you roam the halls of Renna, I’ll take no responsibility for the consequences, especially if you insist on wearing naught but your skin. The housemaids rarely see such sights. Evanori are a modest people.”

The prospect of visitors and questioning nauseated me. “I thank you for the offer, lady, but I doubt Kemen Sky Lord himself could keep Prince Osriel away once he hears a report of my state.” Once he knew his captive half Dané could speak.

“What state would that be?” Decisive footsteps brought her up behind me, and her leather gloves skittered onto the table. “As a physician, I propose dead as your most likely condition and that what I see before me must perforce be an apparition. Surely no human body could withstand what you have gone through this tenday and stand here speaking as if he’d a modicum of sense.”

“Physician?” I whipped my head around. She stood three or four paces away, her brows raised. “You’re Saverian…” The astringent angel.

“Please don’t bother me with ‘What an odd name for a woman,’ or ‘How could such a young woman possibly know enough to be a physician?’ or ‘You must mean hedge-witch, do you not?’ or ‘How could a modest woman bear to mess about with such nastiness as physicians must?’ So, Magnus Valentia, are you human or apparition or…something else?”

I averted my face, propped my backside on the table, and rubbed my aching head. Someone had trimmed my hair short again, disguising its telltale curl—so unnatural for a pureblood. “I don’t know what I am.”

To my discomfiture, the woman briskly installed herself in front of me and held out one open palm as if to demonstrate it held no weapon. Then she touched me with it—raised my chin, felt my forehead, and lifted my eyelids, peering inside me as if I were a vat of odd-smelling stew.

“For one, you are a doulon slave,” she said, as she retrieved my hand from my groin where it was attempting to maintain a bit of dignity before a stranger. She attended the beat in my wrist veins as dispassionately as ever Brother Robierre the infirmarian had done at Gillarine. “No matter how remarkably fast you have sloughed them off this time, nivat’s chains will ever bind you. I would be remiss if I did not say that here at the beginning. A fool should know what his stupidity has cost him.”

I examined her face, all unrelieved planes and angles. A small mouth and ungenerous lips. The pureblood nose narrow and sharp. Small creases between her dark brows, and crinkled lines clustered at the outer corners of her eyes, as if she spent a goodly time at her books, though the smoothness of her dusky skin testified that she could not yet have seen thirty summers. Naught of warmth or passion in that face. Naught of disgust either, which spoke decently of her philosophy as a physician.

Using both hands now and spitting a few unintelligible epithets under her breath, she explored my neck, strong fingers poking and prodding in search of who knew what. Yet the annoying agitation of my skin dulled, even as she produced a silver lancet and glass vial from out of nowhere and nicked and milked the vein in my left arm.

“What does that mean?” I said, watching her stopper the vial containing my blood and slip it into her pocket. “About the doulon. I’d not dared hope—”

“It means you’d best put nivat seeds right out of your head. To touch or even to smell them risks waking your craving again. And it means that you must find some other way to deal with this.” She blew on her fingers and touched my ears.

The world exploded in sound. Bleating, crunching, crackling, drumming…the noise trapped inside my skull felt as if it were bulging my eyes from the inside out.

Birds scrabbled on the roof. Pots rattled in a distant kitchen. Two women argued. A sick man moaned and mumbled in drugged sleep. A rhythmic crashing could only be someone raking hay. Horses chomped…mice scuttered…this very structure—a house of wood, not stone—creaked as the wind pushed on it. My heart rumbled like an avalanche beside the woman’s steady drumbeat.

I cringed and clapped my hands over my ears. “Blessed Deunor!”

Saverian’s warm hands covered mine and, at her muttered word, mercifully damped the clamor. Strong, capable hands. I would never mistake them.

“Thank you,” I whispered as the din in my head subsided. To my relief, my voice remained a whisper and not the onslaught of a whirlwind. “For all your kindness these days.”

“Kindness had nothing to do with it,” she said, dry as the desert winds of Estigure. “Prince Osriel insists that he needs your functioning mind as soon as may be. Yet each one of your senses seems to suffer this same incontinence. This muting enchantment is a somewhat brutish remedy, but the only way I see to solve a problem I’ve been given no leisure to investigate. It is far from a permanent solution to your excess sensitivity, as it fades quite rapidly. Perhaps if you could tell me more about the progress of the disease. Do these symptoms vary?”

“When I was seven, attacks came every month or two, and lasted a few days at a time. Over time, they became more frequent, more severe, and lasted longer, but still coming and going. By fourteen…well, I started the doulon at fourteen, and after that…”

“…everything was a muddle. Yes. I would imagine.” She gestured insistently toward the rumpled bed and offered me her arm. “Elene indicated that the sunlight roused your member. Is that true? Is there some connection?”

Since I’d first discovered the merry art, I’d never understood why so many shrouded it with shame. But her brazen questioning made it sound as if one could set down a recipe for desire as Brother Jerome had seasoned stewing parsnips. Disconcerted, I refused her assistance and set out for the bed on my own. “I don’t—Perhaps. The light fed whatever—I’ve never noticed a connection.”

By the time I’d gone half the length of the chamber, I decided I should have kept her beside me instead of leaving her behind to observe my naked rump. Of a sudden I could not get myself back under the bedclothes soon enough. I certainly had no mind to tell her that it was the memory of her hands had done the rousing.

I sank to the low bed—a boxlike wooden platform, built right into the floor—dragged a blanket from the tangle, and bundled it around my shoulders. I was shaking again, this time from the cold. The sun had lost itself in the gray and white world beyond the window glass.

Saverian knelt by the hearth, threw three logs onto a heap of glowing ash, and snapped her fingers. The ash glowed brighter, but the logs remained inert. “Flagro, you misbegotten twigs!” she shouted with a certain cheerful virulence. Bright blue flames as high as my knee burst from the logs with a throaty roar before settling into a tidy, robust blaze.

“You’ll find clothes in the chest and cider by your bed. I’ll have food brought. Though you may yet experience nausea or poor appetite, you should eat and drink. Someone will sit with you until we’re sure my conjuring can sustain you, but by heaven and earth, keep your appendages to yourself! If someone had found you with Thane Stearc’s only child…You’d not like thinking on what meager bits of you would be left for me to study.” The woman retrieved her gloves from the table and moved briskly to the doorway. She paused, thoughtful. “You don’t fancy men, do you? Should I warn them as well?”

An abortive laugh burst through my heavy spirit. “Not in that way. At least, not recently.” Then again, one heard so many different tales of Danae. Who knew what was true? Some tales said Danae mated with the wind or the sea or with animals or kin. My stomach lurched unpleasantly.

“Osriel has told me your history, and of his theory as to your birth. I must tell you that I’m skeptical. Even if there exist beings who live for centuries and can conjoin themselves with trees or mud, I doubt you’re one of them. These past days…if you could have escaped the consequences of this unforgivable injury you’ve worked on an otherwise healthy body, you’d have done it.”

“Perhaps I just don’t know how.”

“Pssh.” She leaked skepticism.

As her departing footsteps echoed in the passage, I tried to imagine what it might be like to yield my soul and body to a tree and be confined by its immovable bark and leaf or to find myself locked into the barren stone and blue-white ice of Clyste’s Well. I lurched from the bed to the night jar, threw off the copper lid, and heaved up bile from my empty belly.

Chapter 9

I held the spell fragments—the essence of the turned wood cup, the image of the large wooden bowl I desired, the linkages of power, the rearrangement of perception, the connecting threads of what was to what would be—and then, carefully, slowly, I unleashed the flow of magic. Nothing happened. I closed my eyes, focused on my fingers and on the warm center somewhere amid lungs and heart and spine whence I drew magic, and tried again, this time with less caution. Failed again.

A stupid test. But my question had been answered. Either the doulon sickness had drained me of magic or Osriel had somehow precluded my use of it. And without working magic, I could not begin to understand what the nonhuman part of me might bring to it.

I tossed the cup on the bed and ran my fingers about the window frame, searching in vain for the faint prickles that would indicate a barrier to sorcery. My fears that the power of Evanore might explode my small illusion or bloat my cup into a house now seemed absurd. Evanore…the haunted realm.

The view beyond my window was stunning—a sprawl of blue-white mountain peaks and plunging chasms, shrouded in wind-whipped cloud. Nearer, dominating a tortuous slope, a small, solid fortress backed up to a low bluff, the two appearing to have sprouted together from the stone core of the mountains. Scattered about the lower slopes, colorful tents billowed like the sails of a Moriangi fleet. Riders streamed from the encampment and the lower valley toward the fortress gates, banners fluttering, squires, servants, and soldiers trudging alongside.

More than the barren, windswept slope separated this house—where I was kept—from the fortress. These clean open arches, the finely carved ceilings, polished woods, and expansive windows were altogether unlikely for an Evanori war lair.

Of course, Osriel himself made no more sense than this house. It would have been easy to dismiss him as a cynical and unprincipled sorcerer, the most skilled manipulator of men I had ever encountered, able to convince abbots and nobles that he held the interests of Navronne preeminent, while using cruelty and torment to ingratiate himself with the lord of hell. Yet I knew the answer to his mystery was not so simple. He had risked his own life on our last venture, not just to retake Gildas and the book, but for Jullian, whom wise men would name the least of our cabal. And some quality in the prince had reached me through pain and madness and kept me from losing my mind. No matter how much I wished to distance myself from his red lightning and blood-marked rituals, I owed him a debt.

I snatched up the green sash and knotted it about my waist. I’d found it along with a knee-length tunic and wool leggings in the carved clothes chest at the foot of the bed. True to her promise, Saverian had sent a serving man with a wooden dish heaped with bread, cheese, and dried apples. I had made it through one rubbery slice of apple before my rebellious stomach halted further attempts. She had come herself an hour later. Inspected my tongue and eyes, taken more blood, sat at the table to write extensive notes in a worn book. She had refused to say when I could travel or whether anyone was out searching for a captive child.

Gods…Jullian. The thought of him held by Harrowers tore at my heart. Unfortunately this past hour had left me no nearer choosing a course of action. I had sworn not to run. Yet, did a man’s oath bind when the one who’d sworn it discovered he was something altogether different than he believed? Not entirely human. I kept staring out the window half hoping, half terrified to see a Dané with a dragon on his face. My uncle. Holy Mother…

“Hsst! Valen! Over here.” The whisper came from the corner beyond the empty table and a yellow painted washing stand stacked with towels.

My heart’s stuttering calmed when Elene poked her head through a heavy curtain woven in colorful stripes. Against the rich greens and blues, her complexion took on the color of whitewash. She beckoned me to join her. Not at all a difficult summons to obey. Truly the woman was more addictive than nivat, especially as I now had a true memory of her unclothed, instead of mere imaginings. The truth outshone the image as an angel outshines a frog.

“Great gods be thanked,” she said softly, inspecting me from head to toe, her very presence lifting my spirits. “Saverian told me I’d not harmed you, but I kept imagining a great charred dent in your skull.”

I spread my arms and twirled about, then ducked my head so she might view its integrity. “Your weapon never touched me. Rather, it’s I who must apol—”

“Valen, you must not tell anyone what you told me. Please, promise me. I beg you.”

I could not help but smile at this ferocious reversal of her earlier indignation. Glancing about to ensure no weapon was at hand, I spoke softly. “So it’s true, then?”

“By the Mother, promise me! On your word—the same oath you gave Osriel!”

Though I could foresee no circumstance that would make me betray such a confidence, the prospect of one more binding oath filled me with misgiving. I was already hamstrung by my submission to Osriel. Yet I did need a friend in this house, and I could well understand her desperation. An unexpected pregnancy was no happy news for an unwed girl of any parentage. So I raised my hand.

“I could never be such a madman as to betray the confidence of a daughter of Evanore. But if it eases one worry, mistress, then by the Mother I swear you my silence without reservation. And perhaps in return you’ll be kind enough not to mention my…indiscretion…of this morning to any who might take offense.” I didn’t need irate warlords drawing practice targets on my hide.

She rolled her eyes. “I’m hardly likely to speak of it. Remember you are the lunatic, not I. Well…clearly I am, as well…but you can be sure my tongue is mute. I told Saverian you’d made an advance. In the confusion of your illness, of course. I had to report your…condition. For your sake. You can be sure the frost witch will bait us with it, but she’ll not tell anyone else. Though she’s wholly Osriel’s creature, it suits her to keep her patients’ counsel. She’d not have them withhold information she needs to succeed in her work.”

This barren bluntness belied any assumption of a womanly confederacy.

“So, what of you, lady? Will the man be upright about all this? What will you do?” Though I was ferociously curious, I chose not to risk Elene’s wrath by asking who had begotten the child. She lived in a world of men. One glance from her and she could have her pick. Her fury had not implied an unconsenting liaison, which precluded any temptation for noble reprisal on my part. But jealousy could easily lock my fingers around the damnable oaf’s neck. Better not to know.

“I should have some time before anyone will guess—except perhaps Saverian. And I’ll just stay out of her way. Whatever must be done, be sure no man will decide for me.”

She beckoned me to duck my head again and startled me with a ferocious kiss planted square atop my head. “You’ve a good heart, Valen. The Mother shield you from your master’s vile works.”

Brisk footsteps echoed from the main passage. Elene paled. Stung by her warning, I caught her shoulder before she could duck beyond the striped drapery. “The prince…Voushanti…all these warnings…I feel as if I’m running blind down the road to hell. Someone needs to explain what I should fear, and you’re the only person I trust to be honest with me.”

Her brown eyes flamed amber. Resolution stamped her face. “You’re right. But later tonight…during the warmoot. This last night is mostly ceremony. The main gates of the fortress face westerly. When the lords start singing, get you to the rock gate behind the east end of the hall, and I’ll show you what to fear. Now, please…”

I released her, and she vanished. Snatching up a towel from the painted stand, as if I’d been washing, I spun in place and greeted my master as he hurried into the chamber. Garbed in an ash-gray tunic and black leggings no finer than my own, his hair tied back by a purple ribbon, he appeared more servant than prince. His pleasure as his first glance assessed me reflected that part of him I would ever name Gram.

I sank to one knee and touched fingers to forehead. “My lord.”

“Will you never cease to astonish me, friend Valen?” he said, cocking his head to one side as he gazed down at me. A smile played over his fine countenance—noble Eodward’s handsome features writ on a darker, frailer, sterner canvas. “I expected to find you weak and woolly on your waking day.”

I dared not meet his eyes. Had our king known what his favored son played at? “I am both of those things, lord.”

He touched my shoulder. “Come, get up. I won’t keep you long. I’ve a hundred warlords in my hall, drinking my ale and spoiling for battle. Do you feel up to a walk?”

I held out my incapable fingers. “As long as you don’t expect me to seek out our route.”

He laughed quite genuinely and motioned me toward the passage. “That’s Saverian’s doing. She found silkbinding your hands tiresome and dodging your nightmares dangerous. You’ll learn, as have we all, to avoid annoying Saverian. Thus you must tell me promptly if we need to get you back to bed. I doubt I could carry you, even underfed as you are.”

Despite his claim of warlords waiting, we strolled down the passage—the very one I had envisioned so clearly in my madness, even to the patterns and colors of the woven hangings. Above every arch hung a shield of beaten gold, each shaped as an animal—a fox, a lion, a boar, even fanciful beasts such as a dragon, phoenix, or centaur. One was a gryphon, its feathered wings spread from its lion’s body, as on the Cartamandua family crest.

Bearing left around a corner, we arrived at a long gallery where weavings no longer blocked the arches. On one side of the gallery, the openings held paned windows that overlooked the descending slope, the grim fortress, and the grand mountain landscape; on the other, the openings stood unblocked, accessing a courtyard garden almost as large as Gillarine’s cloister garth. Trees, shrubbery, and flowers grew in healthy profusion in air that held the warmth of late spring rather than winter’s bite.

The notion struck me that I’d mistaken Elene’s reference to my stay at Renna as a mere tenday. But when I looked to the sky to verify the season, I gasped in wonder. A dome of faceted glass separated us from the gray sky. Snowflakes flurried and danced, melting when they touched the intricately patterned glass.

“It’s very like the domes in the lighthouse,” I said, recalling the twin mosaic vaults of colored brilliance that had imbued the storehouse of books and tools with magic and majesty.

“This was an early experiment,” said the prince. “It told me that what I wanted to do was possible. Luviar and Victor had created the underground chambers early on—did you know that Victor is a pureblood stonemason?—but his design was very…monkish. We had no time to cache works of art, but I felt our lighthouse ought to include something of no worth beyond its beauty. We’d not want humankind to forget something of such importance.”

Once I would have marked this unsentimental declaration as the wisdom of ever-sensible Gram, and reveled at the new knowledge he’d let slip. Now I worried at his purpose, sure his every utterance hid meanings within meanings. And, too, a knife of guilt twisted in my heart at the reminder of my forgetfulness.

“Brother Victor…how fares he?” I’d heard a sick man struggling to breathe and wondered if it was the little monk. “I’d like to visit him. And Jullian…have we word of his fate? Plans for his rescue?”

His expression grave, Osriel clasped his hands behind his back. “We’ve had no further word of Jullian, and no word on the negotiations between my brother and Sila Diaglou. Be assured I remain committed to getting the boy back safely. As for Brother Victor…he improves daily, but his injuries were dreadful. Saverian has kept him asleep as she works to repair them. We hope he’ll wake again when they’ve healed enough to cause him less pain. Best leave him in peace for now.”

I was hardly surprised at his putting off my visit to the chancellor. “Later, then. As soon as he’s able. I would never have guessed Victor pureblood.”

“A humble man is a rarity among purebloods.”

“True,” I said, glancing at the magnificence above us. “For certain, I am no judge of men.”

I longed to pour out my myriad questions to my friend Gram, but I dared not expose my ignorance to Osriel. Which was a wholly foolish sentiment. After weeks of raving mania, what part of me could be left private?

We ambled down one of the paved walkways that interlaced the garden, pausing when we came upon a fountain tucked into a grove of elders. Water bubbled from the feet of a statue depicting a tall, nude woman with an eagle taking flight from her upraised hand. Beside her, a sculpted man bent one knee and stretched the other leg behind him in a straight line with his muscled back. His fingers touched the center of his forehead in a gesture of respect, as his stony eyes gazed on a small tree bursting from the earth just beyond his bent knee. My skin slithered over my bones when I noted the fine whorls and images carved into the figures’ marble flesh.

The prince stood at my shoulder. “My obstinate physician declines to reveal what the two of you discussed this morning. So I must ask if you remember our last conversation?”

I stared at the statues and forced my voice steady, as if on every day I spoke the unthinkable. “Janus de Cartamandua-Magistoria sired me. The Dané named Clyste was my mother.”

“It explains a great deal, don’t you think?” he said. “So you believe it’s true?”

“Yes.” Though questions piled upon questions, like a flock of sheep at a narrow gate, each pushing to get through. “I wonder…did they lock her away in the earth for lying with a human or for allowing a human to steal me away?”

I stole a treasure they did not value, but could not forgive the loss of, so Janus had said. I could not yet think of the old man as my father.

“Almost certainly the latter,” said the prince. “My father and the monk Picus left Aeginea well before you were born. But I have Picus’s journals, where he recorded all he learned of the Danae. He wrote that once past the third change—the passage of regeneration—a Dané is capable of mating and can choose his or her partners at will. As long as a joining is consensual, none may gainsay it. Certainly for Clyste to conceive a child could have been no accident. Danae females are fertile on the four days of season’s change and no other. No matter that her family, the archon, and every other Dané would disapprove her choice, we must assume she chose Janus, and she chose to make a child with him.”

They’ll never have thee. I saw to it. The mad old man’s words hung in my memory like stars in the firmament, sharpening the familiar aching void in my chest. Of a sudden, no caution could restrain my questions. Half my life had been denied me, the other half twisted out of all recognition, and this prince held some answers at least. “Then why would she let him take me? Everything he said leads me to believe she consented.”

“Danae dislike halfbreeds”—he squatted beside the fountain and ran his fingers over the marble branches of the new-birthed tree—“but they believe no one else has any business raising one of their blood. Unlike Aurellian purebloods.” He flashed a grin up at me. “Once our blood is proved tainted, the Registry cares naught what becomes of us. Perhaps you’d like to send the Registry a notice of your changed status?”

I had already considered that. “They’d only believe it another of my lies.”

“Mmm…likely so.” He removed a stone cup from a niche beside the fountain, scooped water from the font, and drank it down. I declined his offer of the cup, and he replaced it in its niche.

“So Clyste’s child vanished,” he continued. “The Danae believed the child belonged with them and punished her. But as to Clyste’s purpose…A Danae mother is responsible for her child’s education, including preparation for the remasti. She selects the child’s vayar—the dance master. This preparation is the most serious and sacred duty among the long-lived. Perhaps she meant for Janus to bring you back at some time.”

I hadn’t even known the right questions to ask that night in Palinur, and my grandfather’s ragged mind had skipped from one thing to another. But there had been something…“He said she bade him destroy his maps to keep other humans away from the Danae lands, because he could ‘keep his promises’ without them. And he said he’d failed her. But that could mean a thousand things.” It was all very well to explore past intents, but the future concerned me more. “Why did he say I would be free when I turned eight-and-twenty? What happens then?”

“Four times in their lives—at the ages we would name seven, fourteen, one-and-twenty, eight-and-twenty—Danae undergo these bodily changes they call remasti or holy passages. We know little about the passages, save that each results in new gards—their skin markings. They consider the whole thing very private. Most of what Picus learned of them came from the confidences of one disaffected Dané female—a halfbreed girl named Ronila who left Aeginea before making her fourth change. He knew only the results of the fourth: The newly matured Danae are bound to a sianou and allowed to dance in the Canon itself for the first time, and from that day they are free to walk the world as they choose, subject to no person, law, or duty save the Law of the Everlasting as interpreted by their archon.”

“But Janus had no intention of me living as a Dané. He wanted me to stay clear of them until I passed my birthday.” ’Tis no life for thee, he had told me. “Perhaps that was it. He had promised Clyste that he would send me back and then changed his mind.”

Osriel nodded as he picked dead blooms from the violets massed about the fountain. “Therein, too, lies freedom of a sort. Picus wrote that those Danae who choose not to undergo the fourth remasti, or are forbidden to do so, or are incapable of it, lose the power to become one with a sianou. They revert to an ordinary life span—longer than humans live, but far short of the centuries a mature Dané would expect. It sounds as if you will become wholly human on your birthday. That must be what Janus wished.”

“There must be something more,” I said. “He told me I would be the greatest of the Cartamandua line. He said our family would be powerful beyond dreaming.” Dawning understanding knotted my hands and heated my cheeks. For a lifetime I had hated Janus de Cartamandua with every scrap of my strength. But he had given up his mind to the Danae, and in the throes of despair and weak-minded sentiment, I had come to believe he’d done it to protect me from harm. But now matters became clear. It was never for me—child or man. All was for the Cartamandua bloodline. “He must have thought staying free would strengthen my bent or change it in some way. He thought I would make our family ‘magnificent.’”

“Would that we could question Picus. But not long after he and my father returned to Navronne, the monk vanished without a word to anyone. Come along.” The prince motioned for me to walk with him. “What happens or does not happen on your birthday is not the only mystery to unravel. Would you like to hear what I know of your mother?”

“Very much.” I needed to move, to walk if I could not run.

“Clyste was my father’s foster sister, making you and me cousins of a sort. I hope that does not disturb you too awfully.” We walked out of the garden, through the airy passages, and into a series of shuttered rooms. “She was daughter of the Danae archon Stian and beloved of every Danae for her joyful spirit and for the skill and glory of her dancing. When Clyste came into her season for her fourth change, the powerful Dané who had guarded the Well for time unremembered announced that he was tired and ready to yield his sianou to a younger guardian. All believed that the Well, a place revered among the Danae, had chosen Clyste. Kol told Picus that she brought an intelligence and a perfection to the Canon that the long-lived had rarely seen.”

“Until Janus corrupted her,” I said, near spitting gall. Anger burrowed under my skin and throbbed like a septic wound, poisoning the hard peace I had made with the old man on that last night in Palinur.

Osriel shrugged and strolled through a chamber littered with old paint splashes and stacks of canvas into a room hung with every size and shape of willow bird cages—all of them vacant. Someone of wide-ranging interests had lived in this house. But no longer.

“My father’s failure to return to the Danae caused much anger and grief, and as years passed, visits with Clyste and Kol and my father’s other friends among the Danae grew rare. But on one night not long after I was born, Kol barged into my father’s bedchamber. Bitter and furious, Kol told him that Clyste had been bound to her sianou with myrtle and hyssop, forbidden to take bodily form again. He left with no further explanation, and my father neither saw nor spoke to another Dané before he died.”

I held back a curtain, and we passed into what must once have been a gracious library, its dusty shelves now holding only a few scattered volumes. I guessed that the rest now sat in the magical lighthouse.

“Clearly there is even more to the story than we know,” the prince continued, “for one must ask: If the Danae knew Janus de Cartamandua had stolen you and punished him for it, why did they never claim you? It would have been no great leap of intelligence to see that the infant who appeared in the Cartamandua house at the very time of the theft must be the half-Danae child.”

I caught his meaning. “Yet if they had known I was half Danae, they would never have tried to drown me in the bog along with everyone else.”

“Exactly so. I believe that, of all the Danae, only Kol knows who and what you are. Clyste never told them that Janus had fathered her child.”

Which meant that Kol alone had driven my grandfather mad and that it was unlikely that Kol had launched the owl to drown us in the bog. If he had wanted me dead, he’d already had ample opportunities.

“Had I known all this before Mellune Forest, I might have run into the wild and begged the Danae to make me one of them,” I said, “assuming such a thing is even possible. But whatever their reasons might have been, to trick fifty people into drowning—without judgment, without mercy, guilty and innocent alike—is as despicable as the Harrowers clogging wells with tar in Palinur. To protect my friends, I had to become complicit in their evil. I won’t do that again.”

Perhaps it was my imagination that Osriel’s complexion darkened. A perceptive man as he was would surely understand it was not only of Danae evils that I spoke.

I moved swiftly to make my intent clear. “I will uphold my oath of submission to you, lord—I’ll not run—but I intend to stay out of their way until my birthday.” I had no desire to live as a stone or a tree.

Our meandering path had led us back to the passage of shields and curtained doors. “Your position makes sense,” he said as we neared its end. “But you have also sworn to serve the lighthouse cabal. As there seems to be no immediate danger to you from Kol, I must call upon your oath and bid you guide me to a place where I can try once more to speak to him. We must discover if the Danae know the cause of the world’s sickness, and we must warn them of Sila Diaglou.”

Bonds of oath and obligation, now made all the more repugnant by this deeper loathing, settled about my limbs. “But, my lord—”

“You’ll not have to face him yourself. In the hour I stand in Danae lands—beside the Sentinel Oak at Caedmon’s Bridge—I shall deem your present obligation to me and to the cabal complete, and you may choose your own course to face your past and future. Saverian will maintain her remedy for your sickness as long as you require it. You will be welcome to reside here or come and go as your health allows.” His face—Gram’s face—expressed his particular earnest sincerity that could persuade a hen to lay its neck beneath the ax blade. “After the solstice, the world and our place in it will be changed for good or ill. At that time we will renegotiate the terms of your service. So, are you willing?”

Free to choose my own course…how sweet those words, offering the one thing I’d ever begged of the gods. He was right. If Kol meant to hand me over to the Danae or drive me mad, he could have taken me at Clyste’s Well or fifty different times back in Palinur. And the deed should be possible; I had seen the great oak where only a crude illusion should have existed, where nothing grew in the human plane. I could take Osriel there, then be on my way…search for Jullian. Once the boy walked free and Gildas had paid a price for Gerard’s murder, all my oaths would be fulfilled. Free to choose…“My lord, yes. Of course I’ll take you.”

“Good. I’ll have done with my thirsty warlords tonight. If you feel in anywise fit enough, we’ll leave for Aeginea tomorrow. Time presses us sorely.”

“I’ll be ready.”

I pulled aside the blue and yellow curtain and waited for the prince to enter my bedchamber, but he motioned me to go ahead alone, bidding me to rest well.

A wolf of hammered gold adorned the wall above the archway. Its garnet eyes gleamed fierce in the lamplight. Kindness, understanding, generosity…how easily Osriel induced me to forget my doubts. No matter my chosen course, this time I must not avert my eyes.

I took a knee and touched my forehead in proper obeisance, and rose at his nod. “Tell me, my lord,” I said, as he turned to go, “if Brother Victor dies, will you take his eyes?”

The gaze he cast over his shoulder could have frosted a volcano’s heart. “Yes.”

I wanted Osriel to be worthy of his inheritance and worthy of my trust, but as the Duc of Evanore vanished down the passage, it felt as if he dragged my entrails with him. I needed to learn what Elene would tell me.

Chapter 10

Restlessness drew me out of my bedchamber before Osriel’s footsteps had faded, and I paced the sprawling house as if paid to measure its myriad dimensions. In hopes of finding Brother Victor, I bypassed the domed garden, the painter’s room, the scavenged library, and the other places I’d walked with the prince. Wisdom advised me to seek a confidant who did not transform my loins to fire and my mind to jam as Elene did. Loyalty bade me warn the monk of his peril. I could not believe he knew of Osriel’s unsavory practices. I was already chastising myself for agreeing to my master’s plan. Why did I trust him? He didn’t even bother to mask his infamy.

Though dusty and deserted, the house was finely proportioned and lavishly ornamented with windows and murals, painted ceilings and rich hangings. Yet the farther I walked, the worse the stench: latrines, rotting meat, male sweat, candles, incense, and wood ash, mouse piss, boiling herbs. I’d always thought Moriangi houses the nastiest in the kingdom.

By the time I rounded a new corner only to find a corridor I had traversed three times already, I suspected some magical boundary kept me separate from the ailing monk. I touched the smooth tiles of the passage floor, seeking some trace of him, but as before my bent failed to answer my summons. Confessing defeat, I chose to retreat.

I could not find my bedchamber. My footsteps thudded on the tiles. The mice scuttling in the walls were surely the size of houses. Anxiety grew like dark mold in my lungs and heart.

Increasingly confused, I burst through a door I’d not yet broached. Tables jammed with neglected plants crowded the long room, and the glare of the westering sun through its three walls and roof of glass near blinded me. Eyes blurred, nauseated by the stink, I stumbled sideways.

An explosion of pain in my skull sent me crashing to the floor. I crawled into a corner and huddled quivering, arms wrapped about my head.

Running footsteps hammered the passage floor like the thousand drums of Iero’s Judgment Night. With a hiss of disapproval, the newcomer wrenched my arms aside, pried my chin upward, and slapped something cold and round onto the center of my forehead. As worms burrowing into my flesh, magic flowed outward from the disk, gnawing skin, muscle, and bone, quieting whatever it touched before squiggling onward…deeper…farther…

When the disgusting sensation faded, the world felt dull and distant, as if my entire body had been sheathed in silken hand bindings. “Could you not make this enchantment feel more like your fingers and less like maggots?” I said.

“My apologies, O Magical Being!” Saverian grabbed my hands and hauled me to a sitting position. The world spun only slightly. “What a fool I was to design this spell for your relief and not your pleasure.”

“Mistress, I didn’t mean—”

“Of course, had you remained where you were told, I could have renewed your shield at the proper time, and you would not have experienced the spell’s less pleasant aspects so acutely. But then, the parts between your legs do resemble those of mortal males, so I shouldn’t expect too much in the way of common wisdom.” Her complaints were issued with the same ironical humor she had used to address the uncooperative logs in my bedchamber hearth. “And I dislike being labeled as anyone’s mistress. My name is Saverian.”

I rubbed at the crusted mess on my eyelids, hoping to regain my faculties now she had withdrawn her hand. Water sloshed and dribbled. She whispered, “Igneo,” and not long afterward, a hot damp cloth scalded my eyelids.

“Ouch!”

“Must you forever complain?”

Her blotting was indeed more satisfactory than rubbing away the grit of sweat and tears…and blood, I noticed when she paused to rinse the cloth. My collision with the brick wall had split my head in more than my perception. But the sharp sting served as pleasing evidence that my senses now functioned in a somewhat normal fashion.

The physician had changed from her riding leathers into a skirt and shapeless tunic of dull green. A slim leather belt settled about her hips, more for the purpose of attaching a knife sheath and two leather pockets than any decorative enhancement of her spare figure.

“I was hoping to visit Brother Victor,” I said. “He is a friend…mentor…”

“…and the prince told you, ‘Not yet.’ It might soothe your conscience to see the monk, but it would do him no good at all. His health improves. His injuries have challenged me, but will yield in the end.”

She dropped a jingling something into one of her pockets and tightened the drawstring with a snap. Her insistent grip on my hand hauled me to my feet with astonishing ease. As I concentrated on remaining upright, she surveyed me head to toe and sighed heavily.

“Come along. Our doughty prince insists that you remain out of sight while he plays Evanori chieftain in his hall. He fears your presence would be a distraction. Nothing sets Evanori warlords slavering more than a tall, scrawny pureblood.”

Untwisting my trews, I padded after her through another garden room and into the chilly corridor. My head throbbed, but only with bruising, not madness. “I’m no more pureblood than he is—or you are.”

Saverian raised one instructive finger. “Ah, but Caedmon’s holy blood flows in Osriel’s veins, which means they will forgive him anything, and despite being a woman who prefers books to battleaxes, I can at least claim half an Evanori birthright. Were I in your place, I would certainly not attempt to explain to a hundred warlords come to the last night of a warmoot that, despite my Registry listing, I was not an Aurellian pureblood because my mother was an angel…or a water sprite…or whatever it is you claim. Of course, I say you can be damned and do as you wish, save that our lord has commanded me to see you obey him. And I will see to it. You must have peeved him something dreadful to put him in such a vile temper.”

Her heavy black braid had been knotted at the back of her long neck and fixed in place with an ivory skewer. Easy to imagine that skewer stretching all the way down her spine. Half Evanori, half Aurellian—that likely explained her odd nature. Evanori hated Aurellians—and thus purebloods—with a passion wrought of gold, starvation, and survival.

After Ardra and Morian had fallen to the Aurellian Empire, and Caedmon had sent his infant son to the Danae for protection, the king and the remnants of his legions had retreated into the wilds of Evanore. Raiding, running, hiding in caves and corries, freezing and starving alongside his men, Caedmon taught the warlords to fight as one and helped them build impregnable strongholds to hold off the invaders and their cruel emperor, who lusted for Evanore’s gold. When Caedmon fell at last, having earned their eternal loyalty, the Evanori held out a century more. Had they yielded their region’s treasure, Aurellia would likely yet stand, and Navronne would yet be subject to an empire that built its strength on magic, slavery, and brutality.

Though feeling mostly myself again in body, my spirit remained tight wound. If Osriel meant what he said about my choosing my own course, I’d no mind to put off our coming journey into the Danae realm, no matter the state of my recovery. Thus, to learn what secrets Elene could teach, I had to see her that night. Which meant I had to find a way into the fortress. As a prison guard Saverian did not elicit the same unnerving fears as Voushanti, but she had shown power enough to make me wary, nonetheless.

“You seem excessively compliant for one who speaks of our master so slightingly,” I said as she marched into the familiar passage. The hammered gold wolf with garnet eyes glared from the far end, guarding my bedchamber door. “Is it to benefit the lighthouse you do all this?”

She snorted. “I am Renna’s physician and house mage, not a member of Osriel’s band of merry monks.”

“Your privileged position must shield you from his wrath. You don’t seem to fear him as the rest of us do.”

She waved me through the blue and yellow door hanging. “If you assume my familiarity with the prince buys me leniency from his strictures, I’d recommend you actually use these senses I’m protecting for you. Bear in mind, I’ve known him from infancy and have learned in what matters I dare cross him and in what matters I dare not.”

I made as if to enter the bedchamber, but instead blocked the doorway. “Prince Osriel wishes me out of sight—fair enough. But might there be some hidden vantage from which I could observe tonight’s events? I’ve no experience of Evanori customs, so I’m greatly curious. And, by every god in heaven, if I am left alone to parse my birth, my body, or my future for one more moment, not even your magics will keep me sane.” This last came out sounding a bit more desperate than I liked.

She tipped her head to one side and pursed her thin lips into an unflattering knot. Her brow ridges were angled slightly downward from midfore-head, giving her a forever-quizzical expression. After a breathless moment, she shrugged. “Why not? Let it never be said I granted Osriel of Evanore exactly what he desired on any occasion whatsoever.”

I didn’t think I’d ever met a person so unattached to human feelings. All the world seemed subject to her disdain. Recalcitrant logs or foolish sorcerers could cause her transitory annoyance, but I couldn’t imagine what it might take to truly frighten her, or to please her, for that matter. At least she had no red sparks centering her pupils.

Saverian sat in my room for several hours that afternoon, writing in her journal, reading from several books, annoyed when I tried to talk or ask questions.

“Sleep, if you can’t think of anything better to do,” she said, after one ill-timed query. “I’m not here to entertain you. You’ve taken enough of my time over the past few weeks.”

But my skin itched and my insides felt like a nest of ants. I could no more sleep than I could read her books. “What do you do with your time when not nursing twist-minds or demon princes? I’ve never seen anyone save monks or schoolmasters sit so long with a book.”

“Books don’t prattle. Books don’t make demands. Yet they give you everything they possess. It’s a very satisfying partnership.”

I considered that for a while, as I watched her read. Annoyance vanished as the words absorbed her attention, replaced by a fluid mix of interest, curiosity, and serious consideration. Her brow would furrow; then she would write something in her journal. Once the thought was recorded, the furrow smoothed, and she went back to reading. Books supplied companionship, perhaps, but I doubted any words on a page could do what her hands had done for me as I lay in the doulon madness. “Satisfying doesn’t sound like much to aim for.”

“Enough!” With a spit of exasperation, she scooped all her belongings into an untidy armload and headed for the door. “I’ll fetch you in time for the warmoot.”

I spent the next few hours berating myself as an idiot. I hadn’t meant to voice my musings aloud. At least she had given me something to look at beyond four walls and a bed.

One of her books had fallen to the floor beneath the table. I thumbed through it, picking out one or two letters that I knew, then watching them melt and flow into the ones next to them. Gods, useless. I threw the book across the room and went to sleep.

True to her word, Saverian returned just after a bristle-bearded serving man had lit the lamps. As I snatched a long black cloak from the clothes chest, I felt warmly satisfied that, for the first time in forever, I was both reasonably clearheaded and taking some action on my own behalf.

“You need to eat more than one bite of meat and a dried plum,” said the physician after inspecting the food tray that had arrived an hour earlier. She stuffed a slice of oily cheese into my hand. “Eat this as we walk, and I won’t find a reason to abort this venture.”

I could make no plans until we reached the fortress, but if I were to shake free of Saverian and find Elene, I would likely need magic more than nourishment. I obediently took a bite of cheese, then held out my fingers. “Can you unlock these, good physician? I feel a cripple without my bent even to know north from south.”

Her dark heavy cloak made her look taller and more than ever like a stick. She shrugged. “You assign me more skill than my due. It’s not your fingers, but only this house I’ve sealed against your magic—and that only possible because it is a peculiar house with a number of in-built protections already. I assumed you would be more in control of yourself by the time we took you out walking. Please tell me that’s true.”

“I promise I’m in possession of all the reason I was born with.” I grinned and took another bite of cheese to please her. “Honestly, I do appreciate your care.”

She blew a derisive breath and hefted a stout leather bag over one shoulder, the bag of the sort that Voushanti used to carry Prince Osriel’s medicines. The outer doors waited in a pleasant vaulted alcove I’d not glimpsed in all my wanderings. The four broad panels of the twin doors had been painted to depict the seasons, the rich hues and intricate drawing giving the depth of truth to the design. Though stunningly beautiful, the paintings left a hollow in my breast. Each panel showed a pair of dancers, their pale flesh twined with designs of azure and lapis. We pulled open the doors and stepped into the winter night.

The cold snatched my breath away. Fine, sharp grains of snow stung the skin, the particles more a part of the air itself than anything that would pile or drift on the barren ground. Across the windswept slope, bonfires and torches lit the fortress gates and walls, orange flames writhing alongside a hundred or more whipping banners that flew from the battlements.

As we trudged down the path, thick darkness crowded the light-pooled fortress and the soft-lit windows of the house we had just abandoned, as if the mountains had drawn closer under cover of the starless, moonless night. I drew my cloak tight, grateful for Saverian’s enchantment that tamed my senses. It must be that Evanore’s violent history remained raw enough to taint the night with the anguish of its dying warriors and the wails of its starving children, for the wind bore grief and despair and anger on its back as surely as it carried shouts of greeting or the smells of horses and smoke. A harsh, dry land was Evanore. I would no more touch my fingers to this earth than spit on a grave.

From the battlements sounded the low, heavy tones of a sonnivar, the hooked horn that stretched taller than me when stood on end and that rang so deep and so true its call could be heard for vast distances through the mountains and vales, guiding Evanore’s warriors home. Evanori claimed the timbre of each warlord’s sonnivar unique, so that a fog-blind warrior could identify which fortress he approached from the sonnivar greeting alone.

A party of horsemen rode over the steep crest of the valley road and cantered up the gentler slope to the gates. Gruff voices carried across the dark hillside, shouting challenges and orders until the portcullis clanked and rumbled open and the party rode through.

“Pull up your hood,” said Saverian softly, as if fearing that we, too, might be heard from afar. “And carry this.” She shoved her leather bag into my hands. I hefted the heavy little bag onto my back, as our path joined the trampled roadway to the gates.

“The password, Saverian,” said a slab-sided warrior standing to one side of the sizable detachment manning the gate tower and portcullis. “Even for you this night. And identify your friend.”

“Pustules,” said the physician. She stepped up close to him, as the sonnivar boomed again from above our heads. “Is your wife pleased with your renewed affections, Dreogan? Perhaps I need to reexamine your little—”

“Pass!” bellowed the guard. A snickering youth waited behind an iron wicket set into the tower wall. At the guard’s signal, the youth unlocked the little gate, let us through, and locked it again behind us.

“You’re on report, Dreogan!” Saverian called over her shoulder. “This is no night to be slack.”

“Deunor’s fire,” I said, “has every man in the universe got crossways with you?”

“You’ve not seen me crossways, sirrah. Dreogan would kiss my feet did I but ask. More fool he.”

More fool the man who imagined my companion a feeling woman.

The burly warrior’s curses followed us as we hurried through a passage so low I had to duck and so narrow we could not walk abreast. The close quarters set my teeth on edge. Once through, we passed without challenge across the barren outer bailey and through the inner gates into the bustling main courtyard. Thick smoke rose from torches and warming fires, as squires and men-at-arms groomed horses, honed weapons, greeted friends, and shared out provisions. A burst of cheers and oaths pinpointed a dice game on our left, and whoops rose from the milling crowd when servants rolled three carts loaded with ale casks into the yard. We kept to the quiet perimeter, dodging several sighing fellows who’d come to the shadowed wall to piss or satisfy a lonely soldier’s fleshly urges.

Naught fazed Saverian. She headed briskly for the northwest corner of the yard, where a tight stair spiraled up one of the fortress’s barrel-like towers. The thick tower walls damped the noise of the courtyard until we emerged on a parapet walk. On one side we overlooked the noisy throng of waiting warriors, on the other a close, dark well yard. Two heavily armed guards, their heads wreathed in steaming breath, halted Saverian at a thick door of banded oak that led into the blocklike heart of the fortress. She complained of a sore elbow from riding and named me her servant, brought along to carry her medicine bag.

“I’m sure I needn’t remind you to stay quiet and out of sight,” said the woman under her breath once the guards passed us through the low doorway. “A warmoot is a sacred meeting between the warlords, their heirs, and their sovereign. It is closed to other Evanori no matter how favored, even wives or husbands, and most certainly closed to outsiders.”

“But a half-Evanori physician is admitted?”

“Only if I remain out of sight and hearing. It is an ongoing argument between His Grace and me. He wishes no public reminders of his difficult health, yet he knows saccheria can flare without warning, so he tolerates my presence. Few know the truth of his condition: you, your fellow madmen in this monkish conspiracy, and those few who have served in Renna Syne—the ‘window palace’ where you’re housed—since he was small. Even his royal brothers have it wrong. The cretins think he shapeshifts to disguise a crippled back.”

“Does he?”

Her glance could have withered heaven’s lilies.

Of a sudden the fine, graceful house set apart from the fortress made sense. Osriel had grown up here. Eodward had housed his pureblood mistress in Evanore, away from the Registry’s interference, and he had named their child the province’s duc, so that Lirene would own the bound loyalty of the Evanori, if not their love. The house protections used to damp my magic would be those of any pureblood home where the children had not yet learned to control their sorcerers’ bent.

More anxious than ever to make sense of Osriel, I leaned in close and touched the physician’s hand, hoping to soften her in the way I’d had most success throughout the years. “I’ll confess, mistress, Prince Osriel leaves me not knowing which ear to listen with. If you could but tell—”

“I am not your mistress, Cartamandua,” she said, with long-suffering patience. “I am a servant, as are you, and Renna’s servants do not gossip about Prince Osriel. Best learn that.” She removed my hand from her arm with a grip worthy of her warlord ancestors. Foolish to imagine my…natural skills…could lure her into anything she had no mind to.

Beyond a short vestibule, we came onto a gallery that overlooked a smoky feasting hall. Below us an elderly woman decried the depredations of a Harrower raid. Prince Osriel and a hundred or more warriors sat listening.

Saverian frowned speculatively when a grin broke over my face. The hall’s arrangement reminded me of nothing so much as the refectory at Gillarine, with the monks seated according to seniority at long tables along the side walls, the abbot and prior at their head, listening to the day’s reading of the holy writs.

Of course, rather than a splendid window overlooking the cloisters and the abbey church, a solid wall of war banners rose behind Osriel’s great wood chair. And rather than the tall glass windows of the refectory, only arrow slits penetrated the thick side and entry walls. Every other quat of wall space from floor to wood-beamed roof was given to a vast collection of war trophies: shields, weapons, bits of armor, several long oars and a carved wooden figurehead with snaky hair and peeling paint—evidence of Hansker longboats. A few dried, hairy lumps looked disconcertingly like long-dead squirrels…or scalps.

“No question where Evanori hearts find pleasure,” I murmured.

Saverian folded her arms and gazed down on the panoply. “Indeed, the most welcomed entertainment at this gathering would be a Harrower raiding party storming the doors. What a collection of idiots. And the women are as bad as the men.”

At least we agreed on one matter.

Despite the smoky heat, both men and women wore heavy fur cloaks over thick leathers, mail, and weapons. The only concession to ornament were the fine-wrought clasps, earrings, chains, rings, and bracelets—all gold—that adorned every head, neck, and limb. A gold band set with garnets circled Osriel’s brow atop a soft hood that obscured his face.

Evidently Osriel had allowed Stearc to venture from Gillarine for this gathering. Elene sat just behind him on a bench against the wall, along with the other warlords-in-waiting, some young and blooming as she was, some older and as battle-worn as their sires and dams.

I examined our immediate surroundings for some way to slip the bonds of Saverian’s custody. The featureless gallery where we stood stretched the entire length of the hall. I could imagine bowmen poised at the iron rail. Or musicians with harps and vielles—if Evanori subscribed to any display of the gentler arts. About halfway along the outer wall, I noted a narrow gap.

Leaving Saverian in the vestibule, I ambled down the gallery. A sidewise glimpse confirmed the gap was a downward stair. I squatted just across from it and peered through the iron railing, as if trying to watch the events below without being noticed. Clutching the medicine bag, I considered what excuse I might devise for a venture down the stair.

One after the other, the warlords took the place in the center of the room, gripped a staff topped with a wolf’s head of wrought gold, and recited the incursions of Ardran or Moriangi raiders who scoured the countryside for food stores, or the vile deeds of Harrower burning parties who ravaged isolated villages and farmsteads on both sides of the border. I gathered this was the third night in a row they had recounted these same grievances, determined to implant them in one another’s memory as if the offenses had been dealt against them all. When Thane Stearc took the staff, he told of the dog-faced man who led the Harrower pursuit on our journey from Palinur and how the pursuit had been thwarted only when his pureblood guide had tricked the Harrowers into a bog and drowned them all.

As always, reminders of events in the bog left me nauseated and uneasy. Reflexively, I glanced over my shoulder. Saverian was staring at me, her nose flared in disgust. Perhaps she had never heard the story, or had only now connected it with me.

During each report, the rowdy onlookers shouted confirmations or approvals, curses or reprimands for the speaker’s tale. When a young thanea, sized like a brick hearth and clad in scarred mail, reported that she had dreamed of shadow legions overrunning Evanore, I expected derisive hoots and laughter, but the lords thumped fists on the tables and shouted that the time had come for Evanore’s legions to take the field.

Prince Osriel listened to all without comment. Once the staff had passed through every lord’s hand, the company fell silent. The elderly woman returned to the center of the room and began reciting. As her voice rose and fell in the fashion of talespinners, the torchlight dimmed.

The old woman spoke of Aurellian ships come to the river country in the north and Aurellian legions crossing the broad Yaronal from the east after discovering that the small magics they worked in their distant homeland took fire with power in the lands of Navronne. But they found this favored land ruled by a stubborn king…

It was Caedmon’s story she told, tracing his lineage into the deeps of history and telling of his rise and fall. Her tale recalled the great window in the Gillarine Abbey chapter house. In jeweled glass it had depicted the sad and honorable king who had first united the gravs of Morian and the warlords of Evanore with his own kingdom of Ardra. He had made the disparate realms into something greater than the sum of its parts, only to see his beloved Navronne brought to heel by the predatory Aurellians. The storyteller painted her portrait with words, not glass, depicting the king leading the tattered remnants of his legions to the great bridge he’d built to link Ardra and Evanore.

Deep shadows enveloped the gallery. Saverian could not have seen my hand rummaging in her medicine bag. I snatched out a few items and stuffed them in my pockets.

When the old woman’s tale was done, the lords began to sing. I stood up, fumbling the bag until I dropped it, spilling the loose contents on the gallery floor. That Saverian noticed. And came running.

“What have you done, fool?” she whispered, snatching up vials, packets, and tight-wrapped bundles of linen and wool. I held the bag open as she put the things away, sensing her itemizing each article, as I’d guessed she would. She patted the floor around us and hissed, “Three packets and two small jars are missing. Holy Mother…”

One of the lords took up another song—the Lay of Groshug, an interminable recounting of a bloody boar hunt that I enjoyed only when I was roaring drunk. They’d be bawling it for an hour at the least. Saverian would not dare risk a scene. And I gambled that she’d not dare leave her post. Her first duty was to Osriel’s health.

“I fear things dropped through the railing,” I whispered. “I’m sorry…I’ll fetch them.” And before she could protest, I shoved the bag into her hands and darted down the stair.

The stair dumped me into a dark vestibule, crowded with two big tables, piled with empty tankards and dirty serving platters. A wide door led back into the hall. A narrower door led outside, where an arcade fronted the long side of the building. Accompanied by the lords’ robust rendering of the chorus to the Lay of Groshug, I sped eastward through the arcade in search of the rock gate Elene had mentioned.

The geometries of such a fortress were fairly simple. A cross wall joined a long barracks building to the Great Hall. The arcade tunneled through the wall and ended abruptly in an alley at the far end of the hall. Follow the alley to the left, and you would end up in a paved yard surrounded by kitchens and bakehouses and storage buildings. Go right ten paces along the east end of the Great Hall, and you ran straight into the mountainside.

No gate was visible where the blocklike hall merged with the rocky buttress, but I guessed that the perilously steep set of steps cut into the mottled gray and red rock would lead me there. As I half climbed, half crawled up the interminable stair, I blessed Saverian for clearing my head. With only the diffuse light from the hall’s arrow slits to illuminate the rock, I needed all the acuity I could muster. My feet were bigger than the altogether too-slanted steps.

Elene awaited me atop the stair, like a warrior angel on a church spire. “I didn’t think you’d come, not a day out of your bed and bound by Saverian’s spellcraft.”

“To meet with you, lady, I would even climb this god-cursed stair again,” I said, gasping. “But by the Mother, do Evanori not approve of air?”

I bent over and propped my hands on my knees, coughing as the cold dry air rasped my heaving chest. I prayed I was not so sorely out of health as to be flattened by a hundred steps. But a squirrel could have toppled me.

“Renna is higher than Erasku. It’s even higher than Angor Nav—the duc’s official seat. Even I notice the sparse air here.” Her face was only a pale blur in the night, but her pinched voice hinted at high emotion reined tight. “Osriel told my father you were taking him to the Danae tomorrow. Is that true?”

“That’s what he wants,” I said. “We’ve less than a month until the solstice.”

“Come.”

By the time I accumulated enough breath to ask where, she had pivoted sharply and marched into the night. I followed carefully. The stair had brought us onto a steeply ascending apron of rock that skirted a bulge in the massive ridge. I hugged the rock wall on my left, for on my right, tiny, winking blots of torchlight and bonfires in a gaping darkness marked the heart-stopping drop to the fortress. The irregular path canted outward, and my boots hinted that ice lurked in its cracks and crevices.

“I had decided to send you back to your bed,” said Elene, little more than a formless darkness ahead of me. “To show you this betrays an oath I swore on my mother’s memory, a villainous oath that should condemn me to the netherworld for the making, not just for the breaking. He chose it. Not I—stupid, mooning cow that I am to be so led into godless folly.”

“What oath?” I caught up with her just as the path ended abruptly at an iron gate. The tall gate, anchored in the rock, blocked entry to a shallow breach in the ramparts of the ridge. “What folly?”

The gate rattled with Elene’s violent application of her boot. “Papa refuses to come here with me or listen to what I say, because my showing him would break my oath and because the secret’s owner is holy Caedmon’s heir. I’d hoped one of the monks might listen, but I was never allowed to be alone with them. And I could never tell anyone outside the cabal. All I want is to stop this wickedness. And so this morning, seeing how you sensed his evil already—rightly so—and I was so angry, I said I’d bring you. Yet I would send you away ignorant even now if he’d not told you he was going to the Danae right away. He means to do this…to use their magic…”

She grasped the iron hasp, touched it with a gold ring that shot sparks like fireflies into the dark, and spoke a word I could not decipher for the half growl, half sob that accompanied it.

“Mistress, you must excuse my confusion. Who is going to do what? Osriel?”

Indeed, I thought my acuity must be impaired again, so little sense could I make of all this. The most daunting news I’d gleaned from her avalanche of words was that her fear outstripped her anger.

The breach in the rocks proved to be but a crumbling wash the width of my armspan. It rose at a shallow pitch, which my lungs approved, and wound between huge boulders that were easy to spot—a good thing, as the sky was as dark as tar. I wasn’t sure how Elene could show me anything. Yet when we emerged from the gully atop the ridge, a livid haze lit the night before us, illuminating a scene of desolation.

For as far as I could see, the ridge top had been hacked away, gouged and broken into a shallow bowl a quellé wide, at least, seamed with trenches and pocked with dark holes. Broken troughs and sluices, iron wheels, and snarls of ancient rope rotted or rusted amid heaps of crushed rock. Chiseled slabs lay tilted and broken beside a monstrous quern and a cracked mortar broader than my armspan.

But it was not the ugly spoil heaps or grinding stones that colored my soul the same bruised gray as the unnatural haze and made me want to run far from this place. All the grief of Evanore lay here. All the anger. The pent emotions I had felt on the wind, and those I had sensed when first I looked upon Osriel’s land, were but goosedown to the leaden weight of sorrow and fury that settled on my spirit. I could scarce breathe.

“What gold could be dug from Dashon Ra has been long carted away,” said Elene, standing at my shoulder. “But he says the veins yet thread the earth like a web and extend throughout Evanore. He says they are like ring mail that strengthens our land, holding a power that fires magic. Come on.”

She marched down the sloping side of the abandoned mine, hopped across a deep, narrow trench, and skirted the corner of a rubble wall—all that remained of a shed. The haze thickened, coiling violet tendrils about Elene’s boots. I followed, wishing I had never asked her to show me this. Making Deunor’s sign upon my brow and drawing Iero’s holy seal upon my breast, I prayed that Saverian’s spell would not fail me. This land held terrible secrets.

Down and down. Our boots slipped and slid on the loose tailings and patches of ice. Nearing the bottom of the slope, we ducked under an ancient leat, solid and unbroken, though only grit and gravel remained where water had once flowed. Beyond us lay the lowermost levels of the mine, a rectangular pit of iron-laced rock the size of Renna’s Great Hall, cracked and scarred by weather and men’s work. Piles of rubble littered its floor. And across every handsbreadth of the rock walls, every protrusion, knob, or broken shelf held a vessel of carved stone, votive vessels as you would find in Deunor’s temple or Iero’s cathedral—hundreds of them, some the size of bread loaves or tabors, some smaller, palm-sized like oil lamps, like the calyx I had seen in Osriel’s bloody hands in the abbey kitchen.

The bruised haze hung above the vessels as does the stench above a midden. Dread rose in my soul like fever. “This is where he brings them…the eyes of the dead.”

“He seals each vessel with his own blood. When he brings it here, he unseals it and empties it into the earth. That dark blotch at the center is a bottomless shaft. Though the vessels are no longer needed, he names them sacred because of what they carried, so he leaves them here.”

“Not sacred,” I said, revulsion clogging my throat. “This is no holy place. No temple. It is a prison.” As my gaze roamed the desolation, I clamped my hands under my arms as if some accident might make them touch this violated earth. I didn’t want to hear those trapped here. I didn’t want to feel their fury and confusion and hatred more clearly than I did already. Madness had owned me for too many days.

Elene scooped up a handful of crushed stone and dirt, then allowed it to rain through her fingers onto the dry earth. “He plans to work some terrible magic here. When he brought me here three years ago to show me—to end what we had begun in happier times—he said he hoped with all his being that he would never have to set his plan in motion, for it would be such a sin as would end his last hope of heaven. Truly, Brother Valen, it is not for his own glory, but for Navronne he strives, yet he does not listen that hope cannot be bought with sin.”

The bilious light sapped all color from her warm skin. The tears rolled down her cheeks like gray pearls, and her palms pressed flat across her belly as if to shield the child that grew inside her. “I put my hope in Luviar and his noble lighthouse to show him the way of right. For one blessed hour on that same night you escaped from Gillarine, I thought his loneliness had led him back to love. And though that hope proved false, I believed my dearest prayers answered when he told us of the Harrower hiding place you’d found, and that his brothers had agreed to join him to oppose Sila Diaglou. But a tenday ago, while you lay ill, reports came that Sila Diaglou had abandoned her hidden fortress and, at the same time, raised her own banner in Palinur alongside his brother’s. A light went out of him that day. Within hours he left Renna with only Voushanti accompanying him. And since he’s come back, he has not spoken to me, not looked at me, not told anyone where he went. I’ve begged him, yelled at him, pleaded with him to explain to the cabal what he plans next, but he refuses.”

She waved her hand at the bleak scene before us. “Three years ago, he told me that his own power might not be enough to accomplish what he wants, and that the more certain way would be to ask the Danae’s help to join their magic to his. And now you are to take him to the Danae. Whatever this is…he’s decided to go through with it. By the Holy Mother, Valen, you’re a sorcerer and his friend—the only one not blinded by fealty or awe or fear. Only you can stop him…save him.”

I wanted to laugh at the idea of me stopping Osriel the Bastard, the rightful King of Navronne, the sorcerer who called up red lightning and performed rites that reeked of brimstone, from doing anything he chose. But Elene’s grief and fear for the prince tempered my answer with sobriety, at least. “Lady, I cannot even begin to imagine what spells might be worked with…whatever lies in this place. And indeed the prince has good reasons to go to the Danae, the same he has stated all along. We must know what they can tell us of the world’s sickness and its remedy. If he gives them warning of Sila Diaglou and Gildas, perhaps they will shelter our Scholar and give light to his lighthouse. It is his right and his duty to speak to them for us. But I promise you I’ll do what I can to discover his plans and persuade him to some alternative.”

I had no faith in my promise. Nor did she, though she thanked me and pretended it so. I took her in my arms as she wept, wishing naught but to offer comfort. For indeed the least significant, yet most painful discovery on this night of dread revelation was that I would willingly suffer any danger to serve Elene, though her heart was not—and had never been—mine to win. No wonder at her agonies if that ebullient heart—and the child she had conceived—belonged to the Duc of Evanore. And no matter the course of past or future, a love already tested by the trials of grim necessity, of denial and sacrifice, of illness, war, and unholy sorcery, was unlikely to be swayed by the fingers of a feckless vagabond, whatever the marvels of his birth.

Chapter 11

Down, down, interminably down. The steep descent from Renna to the borderlands of Evanore in the driving blizzard was unrelenting misery. Hold your seat. Keep your back straight. Legs forward. Trust the beast. The distance was not so far, so I was told. Two days, three in such weather. But my backside was already hot and raw, and every other part of me was frozen, save two fiery strips on my fingers where the leather cinch straps, made into knife edges by the cold, had sliced my flesh. My back and shoulders ached…as did my spirit, weighed to breaking with the memory of those thousand empty vessels.

I had spent the dreary hours speculating on how I could possibly accomplish what I had promised Elene. To set myself as intermediary between Osriel and Stearc’s daughter was only slightly less witless than setting myself between my friend Gram and his dangerous royal self. What in the name of heaven did he think to do with Danae magic and thousands of imprisoned souls? And how could I possibly stop it? Elene had sorely misjudged my capabilities.

Stearc rode point, the dark expanse of his shoulders our guide staff through the world of white. Five of his own warriors rode alongside him. They were to escort him back to Gillarine and relieve the troop he’d left there, while Osriel and I hunted the Danae.

The prince and I followed close behind the thane. In the presence of Stearc’s men, Osriel rode as Gram. He had insisted I wear my pureblood garb and return to pureblood disciplines, playing Prince Osriel’s contracted servant sent upon a private mission. The mask and cloak felt odd, as if they belonged to someone else.

Voushanti guarded our rear, along with his trusted warriors Philo and Melkire. Just ahead of them rode Saverian, brought along to tend Osriel’s health. She had been furious at the prince’s insistence that she accompany us and had taken her vengeance by calling hourly halts and forcing him to drink her potions. Saverian reminded me of thyme or savory—useful in small amounts, but like to gag you in too great a quantity.

I’d no more questions about how to rattle her temper. On the previous night, when I had come round the end of Renna’s Great Hall from the rock gate stair after bidding farewell to Elene, Saverian had pounced like a starved wolverine.

“Are you entirely without intelligence?” Clearly the question was not meant to be answered. She grabbed my cloak and dragged me past the doorway that returned to the hall, where Osriel’s warlords were cheering. “Do you think me blind or just some thick-witted troll? What a striking coincidence that you dropped my things—which I had damned well better get back, by the bye—at exactly the same time the heiress of Erasku slipped out of the hall. I’m truly surprised not to find you naked again! Ah, yes, I forget: a Dané dances naked and reportedly can seduce a brick wall does he but sigh. So it is but your inborn nature to put the moon-mad little warrior at risk of a flaying from her father, and surely the annoying physician can fend for herself when the guards alert Prince Osriel because the woman’s servant has gone missing at a warmoot!” Astonishing how she could raise such a lather in a voice that none could have heard five steps away from us.

We had returned straight on to Renna Syne. The walk seemed to cool her temper slightly, but upon our arrival, she made clear that I had exhausted what meager stock of forbearance she had vouched me as her patient. “I don’t wish to be friends with you. I don’t care to join monkish conspiracies to change the world. All I ask is civilized behavior—which means, among other things, that you do not put me at risk of losing my employment or my life.”

When she had me sit on the bed and proceeded to drop a thin chain about my neck, I’d feared she’d decided to strangle me. But the fat little coin that dangled from the chain and weighed so heavily on my chest was, in fact, the gold medallion she used to tame my disease.

“When you feel your senses compromised, hold the medallion in the center of your forehead, infuse it with power until the world quiets, and do not beg me for any favors when it’s no longer sufficient to the task.”

With the remedy for my disease in my possession, I’d felt well rid of Saverian’s attentions and gleefully anticipated setting out on my own business once my obligations to Osriel and Elene were concluded. But a night awash in sweat, plagued with doulon dreams and fits of the shakes, had stolen all the pleasure from my prospective independence. Eventually, I had squeezed enough use from the woman’s medallion to soothe my night’s ills, but I had sorely missed her hands.

Fingering the gold disk, I glanced over my shoulder. The prince was unrecognizable in thick layers of wool. Somehow I’d thought it might be easier to draw him into conversation with him traveling as Gram, but my every attempt had fallen to naught. In truth he had not spoken to anyone since we’d ridden out of Renna’s gates at dawn, leaving Elene behind to tend Brother Victor in Saverian’s absence. His visage reflected more of the hammered gold wolf with garnet eyes above my bedchamber door than my friend Gram.

Stearc’s back vanished around a steep bank. The billowing curtains of snow had thinned, so that as we followed the thane around the prominence, the rugged borderlands opened to every side. Rival claims, blood feuds, and banditry had ever festered in this harsh land. A few Ardran manses, where villeins worked their lords’ wheat fields, lay nose to jowl with Evanori fortresses and freeholds, where crofters kept flocks of rangy goats or coaxed rye and oats from the thin soil under the protection of their warlords.

A little past midday, the air grew thick with black smoke. Voushanti dispatched Philo to scout the road ahead and drew the little troop close around us. Swords were loosed in their scabbards. A flurry of powdery snow announced the warrior’s return.

“Raiders burnt out Edane Godsear’s villeins at sunrise this morning,” said the ginger-bearded warrior. “Harrowers, not bandits. The village is ash. The women say their men were called to the manse, as it’s burning as well, and they’ve seen smoke rising from both north and west.”

“Is the manse still under attack?” asked Voushanti, who had come up to the front beside Stearc.

“No, lord,” said Philo.

Voushanti and Saverian were of a mind to turn back. Had I not been accustomed to the monks’ signing speech, I might have missed Osriel’s gesture; as he adjusted his grip on his reins, one gloved finger broke out from his curled hand to point decisively forward.

“We’ve business west,” said Stearc. “No rabble with torches and bill-hooks will hinder us.”

We rode on. The Ardran village had comprised no more than eight or ten dwellings, huddled near the crossing of road and a stream. Naught but a clay baker’s oven was left standing. Women stood paralyzed beside the smoldering ruins, children clutching their skirts. Plumes of smoke and billowing snow could not hide their smudged cheeks or the dull eyes that stared hopelessly as we rode past.

“Lord Stearc,” said the prince softly, urging his mount up beside the thane. “We cannot just pass them by.”

“We can do nothing for them, Gram. Godsear will see to their welfare. It’s too dangerous to linger where raiders can hide so easily.”

“They’re stronger than we are and accustomed to hardship,” said Saverian. “If they’ve no help for themselves, an hour’s attention from us is not going to change their fate.”

The prince bowed his head in deference. “You heard Philo’s report, mistress. The manse itself is burned. We must stop.”

And so, of course, we did. Osriel was the first off his horse. He engaged himself with one person, then the next, prodding each to move and think. “Goodwife, have you a place to shelter? Family? You must get out of this weather. Gammy, have you a root cellar here? Or root crops under the snow? Boy, use that fence pole to shove the embers together to make a fire. Then get your sister and bring the unburned beams to build a windbreak. Help your mam stay warm through the night. Have you menfolk?”

Most of the women were lone—their husbands already dead or gone with their lord to fight for the feckless Perryn, which they believed the same as dead. And rightly so. The men called to the manse to help fight the fire had been graybeards or cripples or boys under fifteen.

Saverian dressed burns and tended injuries, moving briskly from one to the next. Our warriors offered packets of bread or cheese, sympathetic ears, and strong arms to build shelters. The people gawked at me, wondering, as if I might perform some magic to rebuild their lives. But of course, they didn’t know I was the most useless of sorcerers. I managed only to uncover their well with a minor voiding spell, but I had no confidence they could survive the frigid night.

“The new year will bring a new king,” Gram told one trembling goodwife. “Survive until then. Greet him with your needs and sorrows. Those who have done this deed are not messengers of great powers, but vile ravagers, and your king will call them to account for this crime. Gods do not begrudge you a roof.”

After an hour, we rode on. Though our escort remained alert, we encountered no Harrowers, only the path of destruction they had crafted. Every manse, croft, village, and sheep shed we passed by lay in ruins, some already cold ashes, some still blazing. We stopped wherever we found people, whether Evanori or Ardran, whether villeins, noblewomen bundled in charred furs, frightened boys, or grizzled crofters with burnt hands. Some mumbled fearfully of the blind immortal Gehoum, afraid even to help themselves. But more picked themselves up and set about their own survival once they heard that a new king would bring them aid with the new year.

As we rode past a ragged Evanori procession on their way from their charred hillside to a warlord’s hold, I moved to Osriel’s side. “Why, lord?” I said softly so that the soldiers could not hear. “Why do you not reveal yourself to these people? Not that you are Eodward’s heir…I understand that. But how much more would their spirits lift if they knew the one sharing his bread and blankets to be their own duc? And how eagerly would they rally to his cause when he did step forward to claim his father’s throne?”

“Fear has ever been the Bastard’s staunchest ally,” he said, hunching his shoulders against the bitter wind. “Hope must stand aside and do its work softly until the day is won.” He kicked his mount ahead of mine and said no more.

Seeing the steadied shoulders, the firmer grasps, the clearer eyes that Gram’s care effected, I could not but remember Luviar’s talk of the mystical bond between Navronne and its sovereign. The lack of a righteous king speeds the ruin of the land. And so, perhaps, was the reverse true; the ascension of a righteous sovereign might have consequences deeper than law or politics. I wanted Osriel to be that king. I believed he could be. But the poisoned fury of the dead that infused this land and hung like battlefield smoke inside my skull made me fear that he was not.

For three days we pushed hard, fearing that a new storm might leave the roads impassable. Late on the third day we descended a steep pass between two spiny ridges only to see a grand prospect opened before us, washed in the indigo light of snowy evening. From west to east the dark, jagged gorge of the River Kay sliced the frosted landscape of treeless terraces. Just below us the river plunged down a great falls and veered northward through broken foothills, where, freed from the confining rock, its character altered into the lazy sweeping flow that fed the fertile valley where Gillarine lay.

Bridging the gorge a quellé west of the falls was Caedmon’s arch, its broken entry pillars on the Ardran side resembling thick ice spears. And just north of the pillars lay the crossroads where I had first glimpsed a Dané and a tree that did not grow in the human plane. My stomach tightened.

“Lord Stearc,” I said, coaxing my balky horse up beside the thane as the road wound downward onto the flatter approaches to the bridge. “Call a halt as soon as we’re across. I’ll lead from there.”

He jerked his head in assent. Before very long, Stearc passed over the bridge and between the broken pillars. He raised his hand.

“Saints and spirits,” I mumbled, as I reined in beside him, gulping great lungfuls of Ardran winter. Blessed Ardra. The clouds seemed thinner this side of the bridge, the air clearer…cleaner. Only my own anxieties thrummed my veins, not the muted violence and suffering that had tainted my every breath in Evanore. I felt as if a mountain had rolled off my back.

“Are you ill, Magnus? It’s been only a few hours since you renewed the damping spell.” Saverian slipped from her saddle, squinting at me as if I were a two-headed cow. She’d not spoken three words to me all day. Only diseases piqued her interest.

“On the contrary,” I said, wishing she weren’t watching as I lifted my mangled bum from the saddle and dropped to the ground. I winced, but managed not to groan aloud. “Both health and spirits seem much improved now we’re this side of the river.”

“Except for the posterior.” Her slanted brows mocked a frown and her small mouth quirked, as she cupped her hand beside her mouth and whispered, “However will you ride naked?”

Gods… A number of entirely crude retorts came to mind, but they would likely only encourage the creature. I vowed to ignore her and her odd humor.

Leaving the horses with Voushanti and the soldiers, we joined Osriel and Stearc beside Caedmon’s pillars. Thane and prince were arguing quietly. “…But you have too few men to protect you, lord.”

“Have the past three days taught you nothing?” snapped the prince. “You need to be out of sight. You carry the lighthouse ward. Remain at Gillarine until I give you leave to do elsewise.”

The thane stalked away, threw himself into the saddle, and barked a command. He and his five men mounted up and soon vanished into the valley of the Kay.

“Are you ready to proceed, my lord, or do you wish to wait for morning?” I said, removing my mask now Stearc’s men were gone. Voushanti, Philo, and Melkire had dismounted and were sharing a skin of ale with Saverian. The prince sat on a stained block of marble fallen from the shattered columns.

“We go now. I’d rather not push our luck with the weather.”

“All I know to do is try to find the Sentinel Oak and seek a way to take us past it. I gather we’ve brought no nivat?” Though my voice remained determinedly neutral, conscience and resolution battled the guilty hope that he would contradict me. Would he dare tell me if they had it?

“No nivat.” The prince rubbed his neck as if to ease the stiffness. “What need to lure the Danae into our lands, when your talents can take us into theirs? I trust we’ll have no inflated illusions today.”

Relieved, yes, truly relieved, I told myself, I sought some trace of good humor in this reference to my artful past. But none of Gram’s wry humor or controlled excitement leaked from under Osriel’s thick cloak and hood. He manifested only this passionless determination I’d seen throughout this journey.

Voushanti commanded Philo, Melkire, and Saverian to remain with the horses, while he, Gram, and I ventured onward. A few hundred querae from the bridge, I halted. Time to keep my promise to Elene.

“My lord, perhaps we should discuss how we’re to approach the Danae. If I could but understand the terms of your discussion, what exactly we are seeking from them, what’s to happen on the solstice…”

“That is not your concern. The time for discussion has passed.” And that was that.

I could have refused to take him farther, but I had no means to weigh the world’s need against Elene’s fears. If I postponed my leaving, stayed close if and when this meeting took place, then perhaps I could glean Osriel’s purpose.

“It is my concern, lord, as your contracted adviser and as a fellow member of the lighthouse cabal. Eventually we must and will discuss it. For now, for the Danae’s safety and our need for understanding, I’ll fulfill our bargain.”

I knelt and touched my hands to earth. At first I sensed nothing beyond the scrape of snow crystals on my wrists and cold grit under my palms. A momentary panic struck me that Saverian’s medallion had left my bent useless. But she had insisted that it should not, and as distasteful as her arrogance might be, she had convinced me of her competence.

I closed my eyes and filled my lungs with the cold air, imagining its pungent clarity sweeping aside all worries of Elene and Osriel, of lost souls and abducted children, of familial lies, gravid warnings, and looming birthdays. My fingers prickled and warmed, and I swept my mind across the frozen ground.

Beneath the wind-crusted snow lay a mat of yellowed grass and dormant roots, clotted with damp soil and stones. Sheep had grazed here along with deer, elk, and horned goats come down from the mountains. The beasts left a threadwork of trails down to the willow brakes and fens of the Kay. Human hunters, trappers, and other travelers had beaten two paths across the meadow—one leading down the valley toward villages, abbeys, and cities, the other up the bald rocky prominence to the thick-walled castle men named Fortress Groult. At the conjunction of these paths lingered the faint warm residue of sorcery.

Not much magical structure remained of my illusion—a knotty stump magically inflated from an astelas vine, meant to convince Gram and Stearc that I could read my grandfather’s book of maps. Yet two months ago that cheat’s ploy had spanned the barrier between true life and myth, between the realm of men and Aeginea. On a meadow with naught growing taller than my knee, I had glimpsed an oak tree with a trunk the breadth of my armspan and a canopy that could shelter a small village, and my companions and I had encountered a Dané female with moth wings on her breasts. I had yet to understand how I’d managed such a feat, but I hoped to repeat it.

My magic enveloped the spot of warmth. Recalling the great tree’s particular shape and the wonder I had felt upon seeing it, I sought some trace of a Danae presence upon the land, some evidence of the juncture of two planes that existed here.

The frozen world, the whickering horses, my companions, and my fears receded, and my mind filled with an abundance of the familiar and mundane—the paths of ancient sledges drawn up the hill to build the fortress, the remnants of siege engines and destroying raids, the blood and pain humans left everywhere they walked. Sounds, smells, tastes echoed the richness of the land and its history. Trees had once populated these terraced meadows: maples and oaks, spruce and fir, white-trunked birch. I concentrated, stretched, delved deeper…

…and came near drowning in music. A legion of musicians must have walked here, leaving behind songs in varied voices…a pipe, a harp, a vielle, some instruments unknown to me…everywhere random snips of melody that on another day would fascinate and delight. But on this day the pervasive music distracted me, and I pushed past it…deeper yet…until I felt the weight of the land, the slow-moving rivers of the deeps, the impenetrable roots of the mountains.

Puzzled and anxious, I reminded myself to breathe amid such ponderous life. Yet I sensed more in the deeps: heat…circling movement…stone dissolved in eternal fire…

I backed away quickly. No beings left traces so deep as this. No presence I’d a mind to encounter. I retreated to the veils of music, each melody as rich and holy as plainsong, of marvelous variety, yet not intruding one upon the other, as if designed—

Understanding blossomed like an unfolding lily. Brother Sebastian had taught me that plainsong was a medium of prayer—bearing the petitions we would submit to the gods—and also a mode of prayer—a state of mind that exalted the soul and opened our thoughts to heaven. I focused my inner eyes and ears upon the music as if squinting to see differently or angling my head to pick up fainter sounds, and I began to see and hear and feel what I had previously gleaned in random glimpses and snippets. As blue sigils upon smooth flesh, traces more numerous than the paths of deer had been drawn on the land’s music, circling, dividing, rejoining. The earth’s music served as the favored medium of the earth’s guardians—their paint and canvas, their clay—opening the mind and senses to the deepest truths of the world. Danae shaped paths of music, imposing harmony…patterns…where they walked. No single thread laid across the landscape, but many silver threads that joined and divided and crossed one another. And now the path lay before me, I, Janus de Cartamandua’s son, could surely walk it.

I jumped to my feet. “Follow me.”

Mesmerized, I strode across the snow-clad meadow toward a spreading oak that had not yet shed its russet leaves. When at last I touched its bark, I marveled that the great bole’s rugged solidity did not waver or vanish. Laughing as would a man freed from the gallows, I pressed my back to the trunk and peered at the hazy blue sky beyond the spreading canopy—no longer winter evening, but autumn afternoon. The chill that nipped my skin tasted of fruit and wine. Then was my attention captured by the prospect beyond the shaded circle.

Earth’s Holy Mistress… Bathed in the steep-angled sunlight, the land fell away in the familiar giant’s steps to the river valley far below. But here, the grass was not crushed with early snow. Rather it rippled in golden, ankle-high luxuriance. The great forests of the Kay, thicker, taller, stretched well beyond the boundaries I knew, so that swaths of red-leaved maples, of deep green spruce and fir and russet oak lapped even these upland slopes and spilled onto these grassy meads. A kite screeched and dived from the deepening sky, only to soar upward in an arc of such exultant grace as to bring a lump to my chest.

No evidence of the human travelers’ road scarred the autumn landscape. No warriors’ refuge had been hacked from the rocky pinnacle where Fortress Groult had loomed only moments before. I spun in my tracks. No human work existed anywhere within my sight, nor did any prince, warrior, physician, or beast.

“Lord Prince!” I called, hurriedly retracing my path toward the gorge, out from under the tree…back from golden afternoon to indigo evening and snow. When Osriel and Voushanti came back into view, standing not twenty paces from the barren crossroads, I grinned and beckoned, shouting as the wind billowed my cloak. “You’d best stay close!”

Osriel’s eyes gleamed as hard as garnet. The deep twilight left Saverian, the soldiers, and the horses as anonymous smudges by the broken pillars of the bridge approach. “You’ve found your way, then? We lost sight of you.”

“Ah, lord, it is a wonder…” Osriel’s somber visage stilled my desire to babble of music and sunlight. As did Elene, I feared his soul already lay beyond the rock gate without hope of heaven.

Reversing course toward the oak, I walked more slowly this time, relishing the passage, feeling the land and light shift all around me. I sensed a strip of woodland to my left before I could see it, smelled the intoxicating air of Aeginea while human paths yet lay beneath my feet. Voushanti’s mumbling told me he saw the tree well after it had come into my view.

When we reached the tree, Osriel touched the craggy bark, and his gaze explored the spreading canopy. It grieved me that I could read no wonder in him.

“I would venture the opinion that we stand in Danae lands, Lord Prince,” I said softly, as the dry leaves rustled in the breeze, a few drifting from the branches above us, “and that the meeting you have sought is at hand.” For indeed another marvel awaited us.

Striding upslope from the valley were five Danae, their elongated shadows gliding across the rippling grass as if they flew. A big, well-muscled male led the party, his ageless face reflecting unbounded hauteur. A wreath of autumn leaves rested on a cascade of rust-colored hair that fell below his slender waist. A female walked alongside him. Though taller than most human women, she appeared but a wisp beside his imposing height and sculpted sinews. The skin beneath her blue sigils glowed the softest hue of sunrise, and a cap of scarlet curls framed her delicately pointed face. Her lean body spoke of naught but strength.

Slightly behind these two, almost as tall as the male, walked the disdainful female we had met here two months ago—she whose angular face was scribed with a coiled lizard, her flat breasts with intricately drawn moth wings. The Sentinel, Gram had named her. Woodrush and willow, mold and damp—did I truly catch her scent at such a distance or was it but memory?

These creatures value human life less than that of grass or sticks, I reminded myself, summoning disdain and repugnance, lest the empty yearning of that magical night overwhelm me again.

Two other males trailed behind. They seemed younger, less…developed…than their leader. Or perhaps that was only my assumption as they had no sigils marked on their unsmiling faces. They carried bundles in their arms.

“Let us walk out, Valen. Best let them see us.” The prince’s command startled me, and my feet obeyed without consulting my head for a reason not. Osriel and I stepped beyond the oak canopy together, Voushanti so close behind I could feel his breath on my neck.

The five Danae halted ten paces away, wholly unsurprised, as if they had come here purposefully to meet us. The hair on my arms prickled, as my true father’s warning crept into my memory: Go not into their lands ’til thou art free…not until eight-and-twenty. My belief that Danae other than Kol did not know me dulled with the fast-failing sunlight, for it could not be mere imagining that five pairs of aspen-gold eyes had fixed on me.

“Envisia seru, ongai…engai.” Prince Osriel inclined his head to the two in front.

“My lord,” I said softly. “What is—?”

“So a human knows of manners…and how to keep a bargain,” interrupted the small female as if I did not exist. The breeze wafted the sweetness of white pond lilies. “Awe embraces me. But I cannot return thy offered greeting. The sight of thee doth not delight my eye, Betrayer-son.”

“As ever, the long-lived honor their word,” said the prince, nodding coldly to the Sentinel. “Thus I presume it is Tuari Archon”—he acknowledged the male—“and his consort, Nysse”—and the female—“who honor me with their hearing. I regret that my presence offends. My sire reverenced the long-lived and their ways, and rued the division that grew between him and thee. As do I. As thine eyes attest, and the call of thy blood will surely affirm, I have brought thee that which was stolen.” His slender hand pointed at me.

No heat, no fire, no explosion of astonishment ignited my soul. Rather a deadly cold crept upward from my toes as floodwaters swamp a drowning man. This quiet betrayal should no more surprise me than should the sharp bite of Voushanti’s dagger now threatening to pierce my spine. Would I never learn? Ignorant, gullible, damnable simpleton. My family…my true parents…Luviar…Elene…Gildas…Osriel…they were all the same. Only a sentimental fool could have imagined that Osriel the Bastard, master of secrets, might possess some trace of honor and friendship and set me free as he had promised. A prince who had used an innocent boy to gain my oath of submission would not flinch at using me to gain—what?

“What is my blood-price, Lord Osriel?” I snapped before they could complete their inspection of me. “Now you’ve had your use of me, you might as well explain. At the least may it be some magic to avert the world’s end, for of a sudden I’ve lost all confidence that you are capable of illuminating your lighthouse for any Scholar. And I’d surely not wish my life to feed the evil that lies beyond Renna’s rock gate.”

He did not flinch. Neither did he offer me further assurances that my life was not at risk. “You will not be alone in your sacrifice,” he said.

The two younger Danae had glided to either side of us, cutting off what escape paths did not lie through the Danae or Voushanti’s knife. They laid aside what they carried—loops of braided rope tangled with some thick articles of wood—and stood alert. Watching me. Yet for that moment, as I met my master’s hard gaze, bitterness outflanked fear. “Perhaps those who have no sorry history as liars and renegades will be given a choice as to their sacrifice—along with the grace of their lord’s trust. Despite your dark mysteries…I would have served you willing, Prince, had you but asked.”

At that, a tinge of color did touch his cheeks. But he did not waver. “Life is pain,” he said. “Only movement—purpose—can make it bearable. As your life’s path has now brought you here, I’d recommend you summon what resources you possess to meet your fate. You are not helpless.”

He turned his back on me, opening his palms to the Danae in invitation. “Shall we proceed with our exchange? The day wanes. The world wanes. Our people suffer—both yours and mine. Our alliance promises hope for all of them.”

Tuari opened his palm in acceptance. “Let us walk, Betrayer-son. You bargained news of the Scourge.”

“There is a woman named Sila Diaglou,” said Osriel, moving to Tuari’s side. “She and her followers wish to return humankind to a primitive chaos…”

Heads together, the archon, his consort, and Osriel strolled into the evening meadow. Voushanti and the Sentinel trailed after them at a respectful distance. An owl soared through the air and settled on Moth’s shoulder—an owl just like the one that had tricked me and my companions into the bogs.

The two young Danae stepped toward me. At once Janus’s warnings took on a firm and terrifying reality. I’d come to Aeginea before turning eight-and-twenty, Osriel had mentioned sacrifice, and these two had muscles that looked like braided iron. No one was going to help me.

I bolted. I’d covered more than half the distance to the Sentinel Oak before one of them brought me down. Spitting grass and dirt, I slammed my elbow into the naked, wiry body on my back. He grunted, but did not let go. Writhing, twisting, I reached back in hopes of capturing the arm that was locked around my neck like an iron collar. I lifted my hip and bent my leg in unfortunate directions in an attempt to trap his feet. But my foot got tangled in my cloak, the Dané clung like a leech, and he caught my flailing arm with his free hand and pinned it to my side. His legs felt like steel ropes about my hips.

I wrestled my knees underneath my belly and prepared to lurch up and back, relishing the prospect of slamming him to the ground and crushing his balls. But as I rose, his friend pounced, and the two together flattened me again. Air escaped my chest in a painful whoosh.

While I fought to get a breath, the two Danae trussed my wrists and knees. Manhandling me as if I weighed no more than dandelion fluff, they dragged me toward the great oak on my back.

“Is this how the long-lived treat their kin?” I gasped as I bumped across the rocky meadow. The glowing pattern of oak leaves on one fellow’s legs pulsed an angry purple in several spots. I hoped that meant they hurt.

“You’re but a halfbreed,” said the youth on my left as if I might have the intelligence of a stick. “Scarcely kin.”

Entirely inappropriate laughter welled up from my depths. “Twice cursed!” Surely no man had ever been so afflicted with purulent family. Both branches of my ancestry grasped to hold on to a wretch that neither of them wanted.

When the dragging stopped, I assumed I’d be left until they were ready to take me wherever they thought to keep me. Did Danae have prisons? But the two uncoiled their loops of braided rope—vines, I thought—shoved me upright, and bound me to the massive trunk. I smothered a smile. No unspelled rope had held me for long since I learned how to make a voiding spell when I was eight. I just needed a little time and something to distract these two.

Yet as twilight dropped its mantle over this landscape, I could not focus on my spellmaking. Once they had secured my upper body to the tree, they spread my ankles apart and fixed them in place with loops of rope, a wooden block snugged firmly behind each knee.

“I would do this in thy stead, Kennet,” said the taller of the youths, whose wheat-colored hair was braided with firethorn berries. “I’d not have thy gentle heart troubled by the deed.”

The other youth, he of the bruised oak leaves, knotted the rope that fixed my thighs in place and looped it behind the trunk again. “I’d gladly give over the task,” he said when he reappeared, “but I’d best not refuse Tuari. Give me leave to settle my spirit and strengthen my arm. I would make it fast and clean.”

A third chunk of wood, long and narrow like a club—a very heavy-looking club—lay on the ground behind them.

A fluttering panic rose in my belly. “Great gods of mercy, what are you doing? I can be persuaded not to run again. Once sworn, I keep my word.”

They wrenched the bindings tighter yet. I strained at the braided rope, but could shift neither legs nor torso so much as a quat. “What offense have I given? I’ve ever honored the Danae. I’ve left offerings even when I had naught for myself. Told your stories with reverence.”

Their blue sigils glowed like traces of sapphire in the lowering dusk. A last tweak of my positioning and the Dané with the firethorn braid picked up the club and moved to one side.

“I did not make my father lie with one of you,” I said, panic stretching my voice thin. “I’ve done naught but be born!”

The other youth, Kennet, extended his hand upward as if to grasp a fistful of leaves above his head, then coiled his body into a knot close to the ground. As I watched, breathless with fear, he unwound himself, spun once, and leaped into the air higher than my head, legs stretched fore and behind, as light and quick as a frighted doe leaps a fence.

My heart leaped with him. For a moment the sheer power of his body’s feat overshadowed my foreboding. But as he sank to one knee, took a deep breath, and stood up again, terror came rushing back. No time for pride. “Please, I beg you—”

“No deed of thine has brought this trial on thee,” said the one holding the club. “Only the Law. Halfbreeds cannot be allowed to corrupt the Canon again. Thou must never dance in Aeginea. Thou shalt not.”

“Dance?” My eyes latched on to the brutish stick of wood as he passed it to the dancer Kennet. “I don’t even want to stay with you! I’ve no intent to dance anywhere…don’t know how…save in a tavern brawl…crude stomping to pipe and tabor…nothing like what you do. I’ll swear it…swear obedience…kiss your archon’s feet…whatever you want. If you cripple me…gods, what gives you the right? If you do this, I’m a dead man.”

I’d seen what happened to cripples in famine times. For a man who could not read, the only labors that might keep him eating required legs that worked.

“We cannot take the chance. No argument will change that. But be assured, once thou’rt recovered, we’ll help thee make a useful life.” When I opened my mouth to beg and curse him, he shoved a strip of leather between my teeth. “Bite down hard.”

Kennet stepped toward me, the club poised on a line with my left knee. I slammed the back of my head against the ridged oak bark, squeezed my eyes shut, and all at once the sky fell and lightning struck…

Chapter 12

Stripes of lightning blazed on my breast. On the ground before me writhed a snarl of blue light…thumps, groans…quickly silenced. Beside me a dark shape yanked away ropes and my arms fell free. Dazed…confused…I spat out the strip of leather, but a hand clamped over my mouth, demanding silence before moving back to its other tasks. A whisk of cold steel sliced through the extra loops holding my thighs and knees, and I was free. My knees…intact. Of a sudden my every joint felt like mud.

My senses began to pick the truth out of the darkness. Blade strokes, not lightning strokes, had sliced through the braided rope across my breast. The spreading warmth dampening my shirt was my blood. And I had two rescuers…

Bright blue sigils faded to a dull glow, outlining my captors’ sprawled bodies, then winked out. The third Dané, the one who had fallen…or jumped…out of the tree, fumbled at my arms. “How hast thou—?” Hissing enmity spewed through the night as if it were the glowing dragon on his face that spoke. “Who else walks here?”

“Stay away from him!” Saverian’s brisk command whipped through the night as my ankles came free, the binding ropes hacked apart by her blade. “Run, Valen!”

Though I could not see the physician herself, her weapon—a dagger the length of my forearm—appeared to my right, reflecting the Dané’s blue fire. I stumbled, weak-kneed, to join her.

“No!” Kol stretched out his leg and spun. The dagger went flying. He grappled with the shadowy figure, cutting off her growl of fury, and threw her to the turf. Then his iron hands clamped on to my arm and propelled me away from the oak. “Come with me, Cartamandua-son, or count thyself captive of the archon once more and be broken. The remedy I’ve given thy captors will not quiet them long.”

“Wait! What have you done? The woman…” Recovering some semblance of strength, I wrestled free of him and returned to Saverian, relieved to feel the beat of life in her neck. “I’ll not leave her.” She had thwarted the prince’s will and jeopardized his bargain with the Danae, and I trusted neither Osriel’s mercy nor his friendship.

“The human is no concern of mine.” Kol’s voice shivered my bones. “She interfered where she had no business.”

So did you, I think, uncle. Though not for love of me. The memory of his grieving at Clyste’s Well remained as vivid as on the day I’d witnessed it. Duty, not care, had brought him to my rescue.

The Dané moved away, the words trailing behind him. “Stay if thou willst. Gratefully will I be finished with thee.”

I had only a moment to decide. Kol seemed honest at least, both in his dislike and in his grief. He held out some hope of evading Osriel, whose perfidy had sapped all faith. No vow, no pledged service for whatever cause, should require a man be crippled. I scooped the limp physician into my arms, heaved her over my shoulder, and hurried after the Dané, praying the gods to forgive my presumption of divine benevolence in the face of my oath breaking.

We moved west on undulating ground, the river a constant rush on our left, and the bulge of land and rock that formed the pinnacle of Fortress Groult a swelling blackness against the starry sky on our right. I fixed my eyes on the blue-limned shape ahead of me, while concentrating every other sense and instinct on my footing. The Dané acknowledged my presence with neither glance nor speech, but the distance between us did not vary, no matter that I flagged under Saverian’s weight on every uphill pitch. He could have vanished in an instant. I had no choice but to trust him.

The night deepened. My shoulders ached. The wind grew into a constant buffeting, whipping my face with the hem of Saverian’s cloak and the flaps of her leather skirt. The physical effort and the concentration required to avoid a fall made thinking impossible. So it was only when a sudden gust from my left staggered me that I noted the change in the air. The wind smelled vaguely of fish and felt odd—cold, yes, but heavy and sticky. A quick look around staggered me as well. Not three steps to my left, the earth plunged precipitously into the night. The far side of the river gorge had vanished. And beyond those black depths…the river’s voice had changed into a rhythmic pounding crash. “Kol,” I called. “Where are we?”

He did not respond. I repeated the call several times, especially once the path began a twisting descent that ofttimes seemed more vertical than not. Sand and gravel on the path set my boots skidding and my heart galloping. Immediately after one jolting slide, when only a nubbin of crumbling rock had saved me from skidding off the path and plummeting the rest of the distance to the bottom of the cliff, Saverian began to squirm, mumbling something about hands and castration. Her heavy cloak, leather overskirt, woolen riding breeches, and leggings were all in a bunch about her thighs, half obscuring my vision.

“For the love of the Mother, hold still,” I shouted, planting my heel in a crack well suited to a cliff swallow’s roost. “I’ve no place to set you down. And you don’t want to see where we’ll land if you throw me off balance.”

If she spoke I didn’t hear her, but she did settle. The roar of the sea grew louder, the scent of salt wrack affirming the evidence of my ears. At a slight leveling of the track, I risked another glance. A star-filled sky illumined the white curls of breaking waves.

Ardra touched the western sea just north of the tin mines and cliffside sea fortresses of Cymra. But to reach the shore one must cross the wilds of the Aponavi, painted clansmen who herded goats and crafted rugs and collected heads for sport. To consider how far we might have traveled stretched my tired mind beyond reason.

Below me, Kol’s fiery sigils vanished, and I hurried onto the next downward pitch. My left boot slid sidewise toward the void…Concentrate, fool! But my right boot had no purchase on the skittering rocks, and I dared not trust it with our combined weight. Three quick steps at once brought me to another course reversal and an even steeper pitch. I dared not pause the entire last quarter of the descent, so that when I hurtled onto a shore of rippled sand I had difficulty persuading my feet to stop before they quickstepped right into the sea.

“Great Deunor’s grandmother!” I said, dropping to my aching knees…my blessed, aching, unsplintered knees. A rush of gratitude led me to deposit Saverian onto the sand with far more care than my screaming shoulders would prefer. Then I sat back on my heels, gulping air. She sat up, pulled her half-unraveled braid out of her face, and gaped.

“You’ve infected me with your madness.” Narrowing her eyes to slits, she rubbed her temples vigorously. “Else I’ve bumped my head, and all this”—she waved at the sea and sky and sand without looking at them—“is but my own mind’s imagining. If you tell me it’s neither, and that I’ve not just dreamed performing the single most appallingly stupid act of my life, I beg you snap my neck quickly.”

“You saved my life, lady—you and he.” I nodded a hundred quercae down the shore where Kol sat on a cluster of boulders, long arms wrapped around his bent knees, allowing the sea spray to shower him. “I could not leave you to reap Osriel’s whirlwind for your kindness. But truth be told, I don’t know as I’ve done you any favor. I’ve no idea where he’s brought us…”…assuming Kol had brought us here at all. Just because I had managed to follow him didn’t mean he wished us to be here.

She bent her head to her knees and beat her fists on her skull. Mumbled invective flowed from her like lava from a volcano. Her inventive mixture of human anatomy and unlikely violence altogether lifted my spirits.

The chill, damp wind flapped my cloak. Driftwood lay about the shore, tempting me to direct the prickly mage’s attention to fire. But the luminous breakers, the wind-borne scent of unknown shores, and a heaven filled with brilliant stars of such profusion and arrangement as I had never witnessed reminded me that we were not in our own land, but lost in Aeginea.

I pushed up to my feet. “I must speak to him before anything. Find out where he’s brought us and what he wants of me. You’ll be all right for a bit?”

“On the day I require the protection of a lunatic, I’ll snap my own neck. Yes, please go find out where we are, so I’ll know whether I’ve a better choice to travel east to Estigure or west to Cymra to find a new employer.” Her gaze, sparked with starlight, traveled up and down my height. “You’re going to tell me we’re in the realm of angels, aren’t you? And that the naked man with the exceedingly odd skin that I’ve imagined seeing is some kin of yours?”

I grinned down at her. “My uncle. Though he’s as loath as my every other kinsman to claim me. I’ll be back as soon as I may, and I’d advise not burning anything right away.”

I tramped the short distance down the broad tidal flats, finding it easier going than slogging through the dunes. Kol took no notice of my coming. Mustering every shred of graceful manners my tutors had beaten into me, I bowed and spoke the greeting Osriel had used. The Dané might not delight my eye, but my gratitude could not be measured. “Envisia seru, Kol. How may I serve thee in recompense for sound legs?”

“Be unborn.” He continued to stare into the churning sea.

The rebellious ember that yet denied the story of my birth winked out of existence. Seeking shelter from the wind and spray, I squeezed between his waist-high perch and another slab, pressed my weary back to the damp stone, and sat.

“If wishing could accomplish such a thing, gods know it would have happened long before now,” I said, twisting my aching shoulders. “My father’s family wished it. Many’s the time I’ve wished it—but that was before I learned that I had a kinswoman who could be spoken of as ‘beloved of every Dané for her joyful spirit.’”

“Do not think to ingratiate thyself by speaking of her.”

“I’ve no wish to ingratiate myself with any of your kind,” I snapped, his arrogance a cold wash on my conciliatory sensibilities. “You have extended me favors I never asked of you and that are clearly at odds with your own inclinations. Thus I must assume it is your sister’s desires you serve and that she wished us to treat each other with honor, if naught else. I offer no less than she would ask—and no more.”

After a long moment, he jerked his head in agreement. “I retract my unworthy accusation.”

Resisting the temptation to gasp in mock astonishment, I gestured at the desolate shore. “So, why would my mother want me here?”

“She chose me as thy vayar—thy teacher. The shores of Evaldamon provide a suitable place for teaching and are little traveled. Days pass slowly here. Yet were the days each the lingering of a season, the task is already impossible. I smell the remasti close upon thee. Once a body has passed the last remasti unchanged, naught can be done to alter it.”

“The last remasti…my birthday.”

He squeezed his eyes shut and ground his jaw. “Clyste trusted the Cartamandua to bring thee to me in the proper season—long ago. Despite what human lies tell, the long-lived do not steal human children away to Aeginea. Clyste’s innocence burned as the stars; the Cartamandua’s false promises stank as human dwellings do.”

“So it was for one broken promise that you stole Janus’s mind—stole his life.” Kol’s arrogance revolted me. “You mourn for my mother who broke your laws and sent me off with him. Yet for a failed human man, you alone issue a judgment that breaks all bounds of compassion. I’ve no desire for your lessons.”

“Which is precisely why the teaching would be useless.”

The Dané unfolded his legs, pressed the bottoms of his feet together, and drew his heels close to his groin. I squirmed as I watched, imagining the uncomfortable stretch. Clasping his hands together, he straightened his arms over his head, then slowly bent his body forward until his chest came near touching the surface of the flat rock. I hugged my knees tightly, as if someone might prod me to replicate his move.

The silence lagged. Already I rued my hasty retort. My life demanded answers. I needed to understand what I was and what I would be, come the winter solstice.

“You brought me here despite your belief that I could not learn what you would teach,” I said. “She had some plan, didn’t she…my mother? She mated with Janus because she—”

“I will not speak of that joining.” He sprang to his feet, his sigils pulsing, posture and voice articulating bald humiliation. “It is enough that my sister’s blood flows in thy veins. She believed the Everlasting had accounted a place for thee in the Canon. This I cannot and will not accept. And if ever such a disordered event were possible, the season of its accomplishment has long passed. Yet even so late in this waning season I know what she would ask of me.”

“The Canon. A vayar is—” I pounced upon the absurdity, astonishment ruining my intent to curb my tongue. “You don’t think to teach me to dance?”

His face, long, narrow, and perfectly formed, might have been cold marble beneath his sigils. “No. But if I gift thee the separation gard, as if thou wert a nestling new released from thy parents’ side, the Law forbids Tuari to damage thee without informing thy argai—thy eldest kin, who is Stian, my sire. The custom provides only a delay, shouldst thou be taken captive again, for the archon’s judgment of a halfbreed will never be other than breaking. But it might give trustworthy companions a chance to protect thee.” He jumped down from the rock, landing on his bare feet with the weight of thistledown. “If I can convince Stian to agree and gift thee the walking gard as well, thou canst move through the world with certain skills of the long-lived, which will aid thee in eluding capture. Clyste would wish these protections for thee, though all other wishes fail.”

“The gards…these markings…the sigils of Danae magic…” My hands crept inside my sleeves and rubbed my arms. Denial rose like bile in my throat. But a glance at the sea, churning a few paces from my boots where it had no business being, slowed my retort. The Danae could travel impossible distances…vanish as if they had wings…hide.

Twelve years I had hidden from the detestable life my pureblood birth prescribed for me. Lacking purpose beyond staying free, lacking skills beyond health and wits, I’d survived by embracing the chances Serena Fortuna had placed in my way. I had never turned my back on the divine damsel. And now matters were far more complicated.

I might be able to find a route out of Aeginea, but I could not imagine where I might be safe from Osriel’s wrath and from these Danae who would maim me and from the Pureblood Registry, who yet believed me pureblood and would run me to ground without mercy did Osriel but hint that I had violated my contract. More important, a stolen child awaited rescue—so I prayed—and a murdered child awaited justice. I no longer had confidence that Prince Osriel would weigh their needs important beside this mysterious course he had chosen.

“So you could just…mark…me and I could travel as you do?”

“Not so simply as that. I would provide thee the necessary teaching.”

“And the price? I understand that your…gifting…is to Clyste, not to me. But to gain these skills, surely I must be required to yield something. Janus warned me to stay away until I was eight-and-twenty…past this last change…”

“The Cartamandua never understood the remasti or the gards.” Kol’s tone made it clear that folk held higher opinion of crawling snakes than he did of the man who’d fathered me. “Janus believed a vayar imposed some alteration upon the body at the remasti, thus making it something other than ordained by birth. Even while promising to do as Clyste asked, he confessed his fear that I would make thee more our kind than his. To him birth was blood, and blood was all. But the change is already trapped within thee. Necessary, even for one with a human parent. Thy own skills and talents and practices determine the partitioning of thy nature—entirely of humankind, entirely of the long-lived, or somewhere part of each.”

“So my father was wrong, and you, who despise me and my kind, will generously share your Danae magic with me.” Kol’s assurances sounded promising, but I could not bar Janus’s wild eyes and drooling mouth from my memory.

Exasperation broke through his chilly reserve. “I shall not harm thee. Many easier ways could I damage thee, if vengeance were my intent. I could have left thee for Tuari to be broken. Do thou pass the time of the last remasti entirely unchanged, thy skin will harden into a prison and thy spirit shall die captive within it. To change, thou must yield only the desire to remain ignorant and incapable and incomplete.”

Ignorant and incapable and incomplete…my skin a prison. A pureblood diviner reading my cards could not have so captured the entirety of my existence. My gaze traveled the length of Kol’s marked limbs. What did it feel like? Would my own human magic behave differently…be lost? Great gods, did Danae eat? Make love? Well, of course…I was evidence of that. But all I knew was fireside tales of beings forced to live as stone or trees, who died when trapped within walls. Different. Not human. I rubbed cheek and jaw, as if I might discover lines and sworls waiting beneath my skin.

Events were moving so rapidly. Gildas had taken Jullian to Sila Diaglou as a tool to manipulate me. Weeks it had been already. If she came to believe the boy of no use to her…I could not allow that, which meant my time was short. Yet Danae magic might make all the difference, enable me to get him away, to learn and do the things I needed to do. The lighthouse must endure, no matter what wickedness Osriel the Bastard thought to work with solstice magic.

I blinked and gazed up at Kol. “How long would this take?”

He threw up his hands. “How long, how many, how far, how much. Hast thou no questions of substance?” He pointed to the rock where he’d sat. “If thou art here when the sun wakes from the cliff, I will begin thy teaching, as my sister would desire.”

He turned his back and waded into the sea. Once the slack water lapped his thighs he dived into the rolling waves. Lightning the color of lapis and indigo infused the churning surf and then faded.

Snugged between the two chunks of granite, wavelets creeping ever closer to my toes, I tried desperately to think of some reason not to be here in the morning. But I could command neither mind nor body to any useful purpose…what with the exertions of the day…with this unknowable path beneath my feet…

“You didn’t ask him about a fire.” Saverian’s head popped up from the far side of Kol’s rock, causing me to slam an elbow into the rock. My heart crashed into my ribs with the impact of the surf.

“Mother Samele’s tits, do you forever sneak around and show up where you’re not invited?”

“I’ve noted several nice-sized chunks of wood lying around. I can either set them afire so that you’re not quaking like an Aurellian torturer on Judgment Night, or I can use them to turn your knees to powder as your other relatives proposed. And then I’ll politely ask the naked gentleman to tell me where in the Sky Lord’s creation you’ve brought me. You forgot to discover that, as well.”

I was trembling. Fear had its part, no question. But the damp had penetrated my sweat-soaked garments, as well, and though in no wise as frigid as in Evanore, the wind cut through the layered wool like Ardran lances. “I’d say burn what you like. He’s not going to be happy no matter what I do. Can you see where he’s gone?”

Her gaze roved the enclosing night. “We should leave this place. Use your skills and get us away. Trusting a creature like that…” She shuddered. “His spirit is surely a glacier. He may have had feelings for his sister, but he has no feelings for you. He doesn’t even hate. He exists.”

“So speaks the woman who serves the Duc of Evanore.”

She came round the rock and offered me her hand. “Osriel of Evanore is a human man of extraordinary discipline. His passions run very deep and sometimes lead him to ill choices. But I understand him.”

“Explain the ill choice of crippling his friends.” Weary to the bone, I accepted her hand—unusually cold on this night—and hauled myself up. We strolled down the shore, collecting the odd bits of wood thrown up on the sand. “Will he forgive what you did tonight?”

“Forgiveness is not Osriel’s strength. He tolerates no weakness in himself, and while he does not expect the same of those who serve him, he does expect their trust. No matter how I argue with him, I’ve always given him that in the end.”

“Even with whatever mystery lies beyond the rock gate at Dashon Ra?”

She halted in midstep. “If you ever whisper of that again, even in private, I’ll unravel my spell and leave you gibbering until your mind is muck. Elene is a fool to have shown you.” She snatched an arm-length branch from the sand. “Never misapprehend. I am Osriel of Evanore’s loyal servant whether or not I dare stand in his presence again. As for tonight…in no way was I prepared to tend horses while you and Osriel strolled into heaven or hell or wherever we are. And when their intentions became clear…No worthy physician could stand by and see a healthy body damaged. But be assured I will always wonder what might have happened if I had let events play out as he planned. You would have survived without my intrusion.”

So she knew at least somewhat of Osriel’s plan for Dashon Ra. Unfortunately, as we wandered about the shore filling our arms, naught in her demeanor invited further discourse. At last we threw our bits and pieces into a pile, and I spread my arms so my cloak might block the wind as she arranged them and worked her magic. With her third snapped “flagro,” the center of the little pile began to smolder. She broke off splinters of the half-rotted wood to coax and nourish the little flame.

“I should have you teach me how to do that,” I said, stretching my hands toward the growing flames. “Probably more use than what Kol will teach me.”

“You’re going to allow him to work his wiles on you? Have you heard no tale of the Danae? Great Mother, preserve my reason, you are a fool.”

“So, my wise physician, come up with a better suggestion before tomorrow—something that does not include mutilation, chains, or removal of my eyes. An innocent child languishes in captivity, his days short unless I show up to claim him, and another lies dead, and I’m the only one who seems to care anymore. Indeed I’ve done nothing of worth in my life, and see little prospect of it. But everything in this world has a purpose: clouds, thorns, fleas. Perhaps I’ll do better as a…whatever I am…than I’ve done thus far, pretending to be human.”

We sat in uncomfortable silence. Saverian’s stomach growled. My own had near gnawed itself through, and we’d not a scrap of food or drink between us. Though her flames grew and bathed my front side in warmth, I could not stop shaking.

A soft slapping sound from the darkness to my left sent me to my feet like a whipcrack. A dripping Kol stepped into the ring of firelight, tossed two fish the size of my boot soles onto the sand in front of us, then walked into the night without a word.

“So are you mad or sane this morning?”

Saverian’s bent must signal her when a person’s awareness returned, for I’d not so much as lifted an eyelid or stirred a muscle in my nest of sand. I managed only a grunt in reply. Such early questioning left a body no time to enjoy those few moments of uncomplicated, irresponsible satiation that occur between sleep and waking. It didn’t seem at all fair.

Of course, I had waked her with my screaming in the middle of the night, convinced the sea’s crashing signaled the world’s end and that hurricane-driven knives were flaying me. I vaguely recalled her yanking the gold disk from my neck and wrestling my thrashing limbs quiet as it sent forth its maggoty magic to quell the onslaught. Humiliating. I’d been so sure I could control her spell.

“You’ve likely an hour until the sun’s above the cliff,” she said. “There’s fresh water in the rocks down that way where the cliff’s collapsed.”

I rolled to all fours, spitting sand, blinking away sand, shaking my head to speed the shower of sand from my hair. The stuff had crept into my boots and my ears and every pore and crevice in between. As I stumbled through the cold gray dawn to relieve the pressure of food and drink, the grit abraded my feet, my eyes, my waist, and my groin.

I returned to our little camp clearer in the head at least. No matter what happened with Kol, if I thought to go anywhere and accomplish anything afterward, I needed Saverian’s medallion back, along with better teaching as to how to use the thing.

The physician was cooking some eggs on the same flat stone I had used to cook Kol’s fish. The lively fire and the replenished stock of wood testified she’d been awake much earlier than I.

“I hope you’re not bruised,” I said, squatting opposite her as she poked her eating knife at the eggs. “Thank you. Sorry for the fight.”

“Having to deal with your illness was a good thing, I think. It made me forget what a puling coward I felt last night with all this…strangeness…and seeing Danae in the flesh and getting whacked in the head. I began thinking as a physician again.”

Her admission startled me, but I detected no humility in her demeanor. She wrinkled her nose at the eggs as they quickly took on the color of dirt and the consistency of drying plaster.

“I considered what the Dané said about this ‘change’ being trapped inside you. Perhaps he holds the true remedy to your disease.”

“I’d like to believe that. But clearly you’ve not met my mad patronn. Kol’s work is not necessarily benevolent.” I grimaced, as always, at the recollection.

“Osriel told me your history,” she said. “I can’t blame you whichever way you choose. But you can’t go back to nivat, and I don’t know how long the disk is going to help you.”

“Your rock is a bit too hot.” I offered her a flat piece of wood to use for a plate. If she didn’t eat her eggs soon, she could use them to bandage wounds. My stomach growled and rumbled. “Were there more of those wherever you found them? Or did Kol bring them?”

“I’ve not seen him as yet this morning. And these were all I could find without climbing, so you might as well take half.”

“I couldn’t—”

“Would you stop being so polite? I’ve wiped up too much of your bodily fluids to like you, but I’m not prepared to let you starve or go mad, either one.” She scraped the leathery mess onto the wood and ran her knife down the middle, dividing them precisely in half. “But I detest dirt and cold and sleeping on the ground, and as you see I’m worse than useless at cooking, so please just get this business over with and show me the way back to my own bed. I must get back to Osriel. His illness does not wait. I can resolve my difficulties with him.”

She pulled a spoon from her belt kit and began eating. A bruise on my hip, caused when the two Danae had thrown me to the ground, was the only remnant of my own kit. Her dagger lay wherever Kol had kicked it, and I had carried no weapon since Boreas stole my knife all those months ago. I scooped the ugly little mess with my fingers and stuffed my mouth full. A fine time for my uncle to walk out of the sea with his hands full of green stuff.

With only a cool observation, he dropped the soggy weeds onto the sand beside us and strolled down the shore to the clustered rocks where we were to meet. His gards gleamed silver, scarcely visible in the sunlight. Instead of climbing onto the rocks to wait, as he had the previous day, he propped one foot on the rock and bent forward, leg straight, stretching his arms to touch his toes, his chest flat along his thigh. He remained there, perfect in his stillness.

“Do you think he’s praying?” I said, wiping my sticky hands on my chausses and imagining the ache of such posture. It made the abbey practices of kneeling and prostration seem benign.

“Did you not observe the way the other fellow moved…danced…before he set to crush your knees?” said Saverian. “Evidently even a Danae body must work to develop that kind of power and forestall damage. The sea is cold, which tightens the muscles. He’s loosening them again. I suppose he means for us to eat this green mess.”

“You’re welcome to all of it,” I said, not so hungry as I’d thought.

Kol shifted his stance to the other leg.

I pulled off my boots and dumped the sand from them. Examining the brightening sky above the cliff top, I judged I had time enough to wash the gritty egg taste from my mouth. Naught was like to wash away the taste of fear or loosen the tightness in my back.

Leaving my boots by the fire to warm, I headed up the shore barefoot. As I strode away from Saverian and her fire, and Kol and his rock, doubts crept forward, whispering that I was a fool to consider Kol’s offer. Saverian’s leathery eggs had reminded me of days when I’d had naught so fat and filling. I’d never been greedy of pleasure, wealth, or happiness. I’d enjoyed my life—eating what I scrounged, drinking, singing, dancing, albeit in my own crude fashion. I’d shared delights with women and left them laughing and satisfied; I’d worked hard and walked the length of Navronne beneath the skies of summer and winter. I’d seen marvels and talked of philosophy and nonsense with a variety of folk. What more did I want?

Education was truly a wicked thing. Ignorance had served me well for seven-and-twenty years, and now these monks, princes, and serious women and children had forced me to take note of the world’s trouble, and got it all tangled up with honor and righteousness and good works. But I was no grand thinker. No mighty warrior. No martyr or hero or scholar. I had no plan for saving either Jullian or Navronne from Sila Diaglou, and no twisting of my brain since my recovery had devised one.

By the time I’d located the trickle of fresh water that burbled underneath a collapsed segment of the sea cliff, washed salt and sand from face and teeth, and swallowed a few mouthfuls, I’d half convinced myself to run away. I would persuade Saverian to return the gold medallion and teach me how to control my disease. Kol had offered no remedy to prevent me going mad from stinks and noises.

The Dané put himself through several more contortions, sitting, squatting, bending, and stretching. The fellow could not be built on bone. Not human. Gods…

I started back.

Kol positioned himself at the very brink of sea and shore. Facing the sea cliff, he raised his arms straight over his head, then allowed them to settle slightly lower, at an upward angle with his shoulders. He paused there, face lifted to the cliff top.

Without reason, my steps slowed. My breathing paused. At the moment the sun nudged its rim above the sea cliff, Kol ran five mighty steps forward and leaped into the air, knees bent—one forward, one behind—lifting my heart right out of my body. Music, some marvelous discourse of pipe and dulcian, burst forth when his feet touched earth and he began a series of impossible leaps and spins, linked with sweeps of arm and hand, with slow turns and long extensions of leg…skyward, seaward…

Great gods have mercy! As the rays of morning light touched my cheek, the earth shifted beneath my bare feet…breathing…rejoicing…grieving…alive. I felt the exuberant burst of its renewal, as I had felt my own upon waking in sunlight through Osriel’s window. And this…the Dané’s dance…had caused it to happen.

Down on one knee, chest heaving, Kol extended his muscled leg and back and touched his forehead. He held the position impossibly long until his breathing stilled, so that one might believe him transformed into the very stone statue I had seen in Osriel’s garden. Perfect.

“Magnus Valentia!” Saverian called as I passed by her. “We need—”

“Can’t,” I yelled over my shoulder, for of a sudden I was running. Kol had risen, glanced at the barren rock, and was walking away.

“Kol, wait! I want…” Breathless, I came to the rocks and called after him, heedless of duty, fear, or pride. As if a sword had opened my breast to expose a wildcat in place of my heart, a lifetime’s worth of dissatisfaction, of restless searching and unfocused longing made some kind of sense. I had never imagined such possibility as my uncle had just revealed. If I wanted to help my friends, I had to live. If I wanted to live, I had to take this chance. I could not let fear and caution make me run away—not this time. “Please. Teach me.”

Chapter 13

“Season upon season does it require to learn the dance. The fullness of a gyre at the least to grasp the very beginning positions.” Kol’s hands flew up in empty offering, demonstrating the futility of what I begged. His every word and gesture spoke the extent of his scorn. “For a body half human, unpracticed, grown fixed in its working, for a mind distracted by human concerns and unprepared even by the remasti, the breadth and extent of the Everlasting would not be sufficient.”

Not even such denial could discourage me. Could I but find the proper words to describe this revelation…this certainty that lived in my very breath and bone…I could convince him.

“I am not wholly unpracticed,” I said, following as he strode along the shore, incoming wavelets lapping at his feet. His gards shimmered palest silver in the cold sunlight. “I’ve run since I could walk, danced since I first heard a flute in the marketplace. And I’ve vigor and endurance beyond other humans—I see that now.” My pleas sounded weak and pitiful beside a hunger that left the doulon but a passing whimsy. All my life’s desires and longings had come together in those moments of Kol’s dancing. Could I but grasp this purpose, surely all other matters—duties and vows and promises—would fall into a pattern I could comprehend. I was meant for this.

“To master the correct line of a jeque—the simplest leap—and how to balance, how to approach, how to land, how to shift weight and control the strength required while bringing grace and smoothness, takes practice—every day, every night, season upon season, constant work to develop the flexibility of the hip and the power of the leg and the understanding of how these work together. A sequence of three eppires—spins on one foot—happens not in all the seasons before a wanderkin becomes a stripling. And these are only the movements. The wanderkin and stripling study the land and seasons, the growing things, the beasts. Even more difficult…the maturing student must learn to work with the music of the Everlasting, so he may devise sequences of steps to conjoin all these elements, else the dance is but exercise with no effect. And once these are mastered, even yet must one learn the lore of the Canon and how to work a sianou. Thou art far beyond teaching, even were I willing to take on such a task.” He had drawn his brow so tight his dragon’s upper wing curled into a knot.

“A lifetime of practice…yes, I can see that. Like a swordsman’s training. I could not do what you do in any matter of months or years. Even the moves that appear simple are built on layers of strength and precision. But the other learning…Music lives in me; I hear it everywhere…even across the years, when I use my bent. And I’ve not spent my life without eyes or ears. Likely I picked up much of the worldly lore in all these years. It’s just the movements…” My limbs and spine longed to stretch and spin and soar. My heart and lungs ached to fuel such power as I had seen.

We rounded the curving end of the shallow cove and came to a point where sand yielded to a cobbled shore, carved with tide pools. White-winged gulls flapped and rode the wind, while bearded ducks and thin-necked grebes pecked at sea wrack abandoned by the tides.

Kol took out across the cobble, and I followed, abruptly aware of my bare feet on the cold hard knobs. The Dané halted and pointed at a crescent-shaped pool near the water’s edge. One could not mistake the challenge. “Share your knowledge, halfbreed. Tell me what lives here.”

Having worked for a time in the ports of Morian, I knew something of shore birds and fish and shelled creatures. But to recite them as for a schoolmaster…Kol’s expression echoed my every childhood tutor’s disbelief. Ignorant plebeiu. Stubborn, ill-mannered whelp who refuses even to try. Have you some disease, Magnus, that you cannot pick out one simple word from a page, or is this but the incurable hardness of your spirit?

I forced past failures aside. This was the dance, life that linked sunlight and sea and earth. Even the Cartamandua bent could never again bring me to this crossroads of possibility.

Kneeling on the hard cobbles, I peered into the clear water, the sunlight dazzling my eyes. I saw little but rocks and a few sea plants with long stalks and filmy red leaves. One tiny fish darted into the rocky shadows. The carnage the hunting birds had scattered on the cobble told me more. “There’ll be crabs and mussels here,” I said. “Those bunched green fronds are a snake plant stuck to the rock, I think. When the tide goes out, it withers.”

“But does it live or die? Guesses and simplicities hardly suffice.” Kol stood straight as a post. What did he want? Such creatures as lived in pools hid among the rocks and weeds. Who could know them all?

Irked by his contempt, I plunged my hands into the pool. Perhaps my bent might reveal what passed here in the same way it allowed me to distinguish footsteps. Elbow deep, the cold water wet my sleeves and crept upward toward my shoulders as I loosed magic to flow through my fingertips. I listened, smelled, tasted, stretched my mind into the crevices and crannies. Slowly, I began to comprehend what my senses uncovered: threads of color, of stillness and movement, of life and death.

“Fish live here,” I said. “Shannies and bearded rocklings—and tiny shrimp, almost transparent, and the warty yellow lump that is a slug, not a pebble. And this”—I touched a dark, twisted knot of a shell—“is a dog whelk that Hansker milk for purple dye. The strawberry growing on that bulging rock is no plant, but a tentacled beast that stings its prey—the smaller creatures who hide in these forests of leaves, like the glass shrimp brought in by the tide and the mitelings of the dog whelk…”

I told him of death and birth, of how the whelk’s tongue scoops the flesh of the mussel between its closed shells, and how an entirely new creature can grow from the broken arm of the scarlet sea star that hid beneath a wave-smoothed rock. The pool was a world to itself, fed and ravaged by the god of the tide, as Navronne was fed and ravaged by our fickle gods.

When my hands grew numb from the cold, I had to stop. Bundling my fingers beneath my arms, I sat up, shivering and blinking in the watery light.

Kol sat on his haunches beside me, staring into the water. “As I have watched thee walk the land and sound the streams of the earth in company with humans, I assumed thy works a preening deception—the arrogance of the Cartamandua passed on in his seed. Again, I have erred.” He shifted his gaze to my face as if he looked on me for the first time. “For a gyre—a full turn of the seasons—I studied this very pool, and only then did I understand so much. Thou hast a grace for seeing, rejongai. Did the gyres wheel backward, I would press thy sire earlier…convince him to bring thee to me for teaching, not wait, as I did, for him to fail.”

He rose to his full height. “But no wishing can recapture lost chance. Clyste was wrong. Were all accomplished as she hoped, even then thou couldst not dance the Canon. Human blood flows in thy veins, and the archon forbids tainted blood nigh the dancing ground. Naught can change the lessons of the past. We will speak no more of the Canon. I can gift thee the gards of separation and exploration and the teaching of their use, as I said, and that only.”

But the vehemence of his denial was no longer directed at me, but at himself. Pride had caused him to fail Clyste, a sister whom he loved. For the first time since I had seen him greet the morning, a spark of hope burned inside me. I would not push too hard. He would bend. Whatever the “lessons of the past,” I believed as I believed naught else in this world that my mother had meant for me to dance.

“What must I do?” I shoved up my sleeves and stretched out my arms as if they were sword blanks to be heated, hammered, and shaped.

He motioned me to follow him back around the headland to the sandier shore. “As I said, each change lies buried within thy flesh already—the three suppressed and the great one yet to come.”

“Then why didn’t I change when the time was right? I suppose it’s more difficult for ones like me. Halfbreeds. Which means this will likely be uncomfortable—” Memories of battle wounds came to mind, and those horrid birthdays when I’d gone half mad with pain and lashed out at anyone within reach, driven by an agonized restlessness that naught but violence or spelled perversion could still.

No matter my desires, dread shivered my marrow.

“It is neither fault in thee nor a factor of thy mixed birth that thou art unchanged. A remasti is impossible to accomplish alone. The vayar must guide the immature body to express its power, and the gards are the visible signs of its accomplishment. Other halfbreeds have taken the remasti without difficulty.”

Kol motioned me to stand before him at the edge of the water, but I held my ground in the dry dunes. My nerves would not permit my mouth to be still. “What will I feel? What will change besides the…marks?”

As if even that alteration was a small thing! How would I walk the streets of Palinur again, with blue light glowing on my skin? “Surely it will be different for one who is part human.”

“Certainly the result will differ.” He visibly forced himself patient, closing his eyes, whose color had shifted from a deep sea green to aspen gold. “What hand or eye is entirely the same as any other? What walking step or standing posture is the same? The long-lived tread the path of perfection, but we each find our resting posture somewhere along the way, our own talents and our bodies’ limits determining our place. Even tainted blood does not preclude one attempting the path. Now we must begin or even the slow days of Evaldamon will carry us to the Everlasting with thou yet unprotected.”

I opened my mouth and then closed it again. Answers would come. With no more hesitation, I moved to the edge of the water. “Tell me what to do.”

“We will begin by acknowledging our bond as vayar and tendé. Then, when I give thee a sign, thou must wash. Especially thy arms and legs. Sand is an excellent aid.”

“Wash…here? In the sea?” Water and cold, my two least favorite aspects of nature, and not entirely because a diviner had once named them my doom.

“Yes.”

The wind had risen, frosting the waves with foam. A haze paled the sky and sunlight, and a layer of deep gray banded the horizon. No chance Kol intended for me to stay clothed. Gods, I was damp to the skin, and now he wanted that skin bare. However Danae managed to stay warm as they ran about naked in winter weather, I had not inherited that gift. I glanced along the shore and over my shoulder. A trail of smoke rose from our fire, but I could not see where Saverian had got off to. “All right, then.”

Kol bowed with all the formality of a pureblood head of family, then clasped his hands behind his back. He dipped his head in approval when I returned the bow without prompting. “The season has long passed for thee to leave thy parents’ side, nes—”

His dragon gard drew up as he cut off this pronouncement. “What name dost thou prefer? Thou art very big for such address as nestling or wanderkin.”

This slight break in his formality nudged me toward an unlikely grin. Indeed, though he could likely break me over his knee, we were quite evenly matched in size. “I answer most to Valen. Is there some proper title I should use for you? I’ve no wish to be rude.”

“Name me relagai—mother’s brother—or vayar. To address an elder by name requires a harmony we shall never share.”

I ignored his coldness and bowed to acknowledge his point. “Relagai.”

He took up where he’d left off. How much “elder” was he? Likely centuries. Gods…“Freed from thy parents’ side, Valen, thou shalt have license to wander the world and learn of its wonders and its evils, to learn the names and natures of all its parts. I have accepted the duties of vayar given me by she who gave thee first breath and who nurtured thee for the long seasons of thy borning. I pledge with all honor and intent to provide thee truth and healthy guidance and to protect thee from harm to the limits of my being and the Law of the Everlasting. Come to me with thy questioning, with thy fears and troubles, with thy joys and discoveries, and I will hear thee…without judgment…and answer thee as far as I am able. Thy own part of this joining is but thy pledge to explore and learn and come to me if thou art troubled. If thou wilt accept my teaching, Valen, give me thy hands.” He extended his own hands, palms upward.

I had not expected so solemn a swearing. The cost to his pride could not be small.

“Thy pledge honors me, relagai,” I said, inclining my back in deference. “All the more for our disharmony.”

At least my own part seemed uncomplicated—unlike the other oaths that bound me. I laid my palms over his, and the world—sunlight, colors, shapes, and outlines—dimmed and faded, as if reshaping themselves. Moments later, when he released my hands, the cast of the world returned to its normal state, as if I had but waked. He gestured toward the foaming sea. Time to wash.

I hesitated. It was not that I was shamed. Nakedness in the proper time and place was comfort and pleasure, not wicked. But somehow, when I glanced at Kol, I imagined myself as one of the transparent shrimp standing beside the scarlet sea star. And somewhere Saverian would be watching…ready, no doubt, to catalog my lacks.

My vayar raised his eyebrows and inclined his head toward the water. Waiting.

Reluctantly I shed my layers and tossed them onto the sand above the tide line. My bare feet had become something inured to the chilly sand, but the cold wind stung, my manhood retreated, and my first step into the water was a badger’s bite. By the time I’d submerged to the knees, my teeth clattered like hailstones on a tin roof. If I were to be done with this before my blood congealed, I’d best move faster. I lunged a few steps farther into the oncoming waves and sat.

“G-g-great Iero’s m-m-mercy!” Unfortunate if some ritual silence was required.

Once sure my heart had not stopped, I scooped sand from underneath me and hurriedly scrubbed at my flesh. The waves slammed into my back and lifted me from the sea bottom, threatening to tumble me over, but I splayed my legs and dug in my heels. For the most part I managed to stay upright and keep the salt water out of nose and mouth.

After the briefest service to every spot I could reach, I floundered and lurched toward the shore, only to discover what I should have expected. Emerging wet into the wind felt far, far colder than sitting in the water. “C-c-could we be quick about this?” I mumbled.

A scowling Kol moved to my side and cupped his hands about my right shoulder. Warmth flowed from his touch and again the world shifted. The sunlight dimmed, and the shore receded as if a great fog had settled over it. I no longer felt the buffeting wind or the gritty sand, but only Kol’s warm hands and the sea that crashed and gurgled about my ankles, tugging at me…breaking the bounds of my skin…pouring into me…filling me. Drowning me…

Do not be afraid, Valen. Kol’s sharp command interrupted my growing panic. To make this passage, we must step outside the bounds of bodily form. This sea is myself and will not drown thee.

I lost myself—limbs and torso, head and privy parts dissolved. His hands yet anchored me—one solid point of heat, a tether to the world, all that stood between me and blind terror. All else was embracing water, as if I were the immortal sea star tucked securely in the tide pool, knowing that any broken part of me would form another self, and that the tide would bring me all I needed to live. I trusted Kol, and so I drifted…tasting salt and fish and sand. I smelled green sea plants, felt the tickle of wind on the surface and the great heavy urging of the god of tides—everything a curiosity. I wondered at the endless play of daylight in the shallows and shied from the shadows of the boundless deeps. Fish in silver armor darted past me…through me…

For a nestling, such life as this is the greater part of what he knows—the safety and comfort of a parent’s sianou, its myriad parts, its voice and texture, and the elements that make it live. Kol’s voice existed everywhere around me and inside me, though I could not say I heard him. The remasti of separation shifts a nestling from an existence sheltered and constrained by sire and dam into one shaped by his own body—a much greater change for most than for thee, one who has lived across a multitude of seasons constrained by flesh—however ill-fitting. Now, thou must choose to step beyond this place and allow thy true nature to reshape thy flesh. Let my hand guide thee.

From the anchor point, warm strong fingers began to re-create my invisible arm, moving down its length as a sculptor’s fingers might smooth his clay. Only this sculptor’s fingers left traces of fire and blade in their wake. Cutting, burning, tearing…

Pain and panic bade me fight, but I could not locate the rest of my body. Nor could I find voice in the sea to scream or beg that he should stop before what flesh I yet owned was left in tatters.

Be easy, Valen, he said, as he released the fingers of one disembodied arm and shifted his touch to the place where another ought to be. I but release what is bound in thee. It is so difficult, I believe, because thy true senses lie buried deeper than those of a nestling. Be easy and dream of the wide world. I shall not harm thee.

Both arms now pulsed with agony. While the greater part of me yet floated insubstantial in the gray-blue water, I existed amid the frothing surf and freezing wind as well. Great gray masses of cloud boiled on the horizon, reaching for the sun.

Kol’s hands left my fingers and began to sculpt a thigh. Great gods among us…

By the time his hands released my second foot, I existed wholly in the familiar world, sprawled on my face with my mouth full of sand. Though fire raged in my legs, my arms had fallen numb. I was afraid to move. I was afraid to look.

He relinquished my burning toes. “Stand now, Valen, that we may end this passage properly. Thou art free to wander Aeginea, and none may hold or hinder thee without our argai’s consent.”

Entirely wrung out, I moved slowly to all fours. Every quat of my length felt something different from every other. Frozen or scorched or nothing. Worst…I could not feel my hands at all. “What’s wrong with me?” I croaked.

He offered me his hand, but I was loath to touch him again. I stumbled to my feet and stared at my skin. My chest and abdomen and groin remained as they ever had been, cold pale flesh and dark hair caked with sand, but the now-hairless skin of fore and upper arms, of hands and fingers, of thigh and leg and foot, appeared an ugly mottled gray. Dead. No pattern was discernible, and certainly no beauty or power. And as the fire of Kol’s touch died, every particle of that flesh lost all sensation. I shook my lumpish hands, kneaded them, slapped my arms and dying legs with no effect. “By Kemen Sky Lord, Dané, what have you done to me? I can’t feel anything!”

Knitting his brow, he reached out to take my arm. I jerked away and stepped back, wincing from the fire in one foot, stumbling over the deadness in the other. “Stay back.”

“Does not the world speak to thee?” he said, puzzled. “Thy gards will clear as thy senses waken, and take on their design as you walk the days. Touch the wind, rejongai.”

“I can’t feel the wind, not with dead limbs! Is this your clever vengeance? What of Danae justice that punishes only the guilty?” I could not strangle his long straight neck, for my blighted arms could be used as naught but bludgeons.

“No, no. All was done as prescribed. Thou shouldst discern more than before. More intently. More delicately.”

His conviction did naught but unravel me the more. My chest and stomach seemed stuffed with sodden wool that thickened and compacted with every breath. I dropped to my unfeeling knees and plowed my hands into the sand that might have been silken pillows or hot coals for all I could tell. Wrenching my focus tight, I sought magic, but no warmth flowed through my dead fingers. I sat back on my heels and roared in rage and frustration. “You’ve killed me, you cursed gatzé.”

Kol crouched beside me, for once unwrit with scorn or anger. “This is not of my doing, rejongai. Why would I pledge thee care and teaching, and then set out to make my own words false? The remasti is a work of reverence for the vayar, a work that becomes a part of his kirani—the patterns he dances—as much as any jeque or eppire. No joy or use can be derived from such betrayal. It is why the long-lived fail in understanding of human ways.”

“Then what’s wrong?” I gasped, my chest laboring, my throat swelling shut as if a door had closed behind my words. I was suffocating.

He reached out again, and this time I had no strength to resist. I watched his fingers touch my arm and trace my sinews, but I could feel naught of it. “I experienced resistance as I released thy change,” he said, puzzled, “but I assumed it to be thy years of restraint and thy intractable nature. It felt as if some other skin sheathed thee.”

His surmise stung me as a slap on my cheek. “Get the woman,” I whispered. “Hurry. Please.”

The daylight blurred and wavered. I did not see Kol move, for I curled into a knot on the sand and concentrated all my strength on drawing air into my lungs.

“All right, all right, you can let go of me. Am I to be punished for watching?” Her dry voice rattled like a stick in a pail fifty quellae distant. “Egad, Magnus, you look even worse close by. Is this part—? Gracious Mother, what’s happening to you?”

“Undo your spell,” I croaked. “It’s stopping the change. Can’t breathe.”

Praise be to all gods, she did not hesitate. She ripped the delicate chain from her leather pocket and pressed the gold medallion to my forehead. The maggots crept outward, only this time they left life, not deadness, in their wake.

With a great whoop, I inhaled half the sky, clearing throat and lungs and head. When she took the disk away, I stretched out on my back and flung my limbs wide, reveling in the delights of properly working heart and lungs. “Mother tend you in your need, good physician…”

No more had I begun to speak than the wind caressed my arms and legs. Of a sudden I drowned in sensation: the overwhelming scents of the salt and sea wrack, and the lingering aroma of our cook fire, last night’s fish, and the morning’s ill-favored eggs. I smelled a distant winter—rank furs and damp wool, the smokes of burning coal and pine logs, the damp earth and scat and piss of animal dens, the dust of empty grain barrels, the ripe sweat of lust beneath old blankets. And from other senses…Not only did I hear the crash of waves and the gurgle of the slops between the rocks, but I perceived the rustling of the red-leaved sea forest in the tide pools and the rippleless darting of the shannies. Not only did I feel the salt in the wind, but I knew that in its wanderings the air had once kissed a church, drawing away the scent of beeswax and marble dust, the sweet smokes of incense and oil of ephrain, the pungent perfume of ysomar, used to anoint the sick and dying…And still there was more.

“Holy Mother,” I whispered, wrapping my arms about my head to prevent its bursting, “how can I ever sort it all out?”

“Are you well, Valen?” said Saverian, sitting on her heels at my side, the gold disk clutched in her hand. “What’s happening to you? I can moderate the spell if need be and reimpose it.”

Unlike the experiences I had named a disease, this barrage of scents and sounds neither seared my nostrils nor made my ears bleed. Nor did my eyes revolt at the daylight’s complex textures of gray, blue, and silver or the impossible shapes of distant rocks that would have been a blur an hour before. I could make no sense of much that I perceived, but none of it drove me mad.

“For now, yes, I’m all right. Thank you. I think—” I swallowed hard, took a shaking breath, and stretched my arms skyward so I could see them. The gray mottling had brightened to the same pale silver as Kol’s gards, though that could be but a trick of the shifting light. I could yet discern no pattern to the marks. My stomach hitched, and I folded my arms across it and stopped staring at myself. “There’s just so much.”

“So your disease is indeed of your own nature,” said Saverian, kneeling in the sand, as matter-of-fact as if on every day she witnessed madmen transformed into Danae children. “As I predicted.”

“Thy perception is quite limited as yet,” said Kol, looking down at me. His handsome face expressed naught but tolerance—no more of concern or bewilderment. “’Tis the task of wanderkins to learn the source and nature of what they perceive and to extend the boundaries of their skills. As they learn to walk in quiet, layers unexpected reveal themselves. Having lived in the world so long, thou shouldst have an easier task than most.”

“You mean, there could be more?” How ever could a child manage all this?

“Always more. Subtleties. Grand things that might once have seemed whole display their sundry parts. The reach of thy experiencing shall widen from this small shore to distances and deeps. Wert thou a true wanderkin, destined to dance and live as one of us, such discrimination would be necessary to thy duties.”

“And I’ll perceive whatever exists in the human realm as well as Aeginea,” I said, sitting up. Indeed, I was already experiencing many things far beyond this shore. No ale-sodden hunter lay snoring beneath fouled blankets anywhere near here, I’d guess. No wheezing practor in a freezing church anointed a woman dead in childbirth, unless…Perhaps those places existed as did Fortress Groult or the Sentinel Oak—visible in only one plane, though I could touch their very rooting place in the other.

His nostrils flared in distaste. “No. To experience the sensations of human works we must depart from the true lands and immerse ourselves entirely in the human world.”

I glanced up sharply. “But I—” His certainty made me doubt. Perhaps my long-distorted senses were but remembering things I already knew. My finger crept up my ugly arms. The lack of hair was disconcerting, but I could not feel the marks themselves. I brushed at my skin, half expecting the pale mottling to fall away like dry flakes from a charred branch. Perhaps nothing at all had happened to me, save a blessed remission in my disease.

“A true wanderkin’s primary tasks are exploration and the perfection of sensory knowledge.” Kol took on his schoolmaster’s aspect, as if I were indeed a new-changed Danae child. “I can teach thee closure…to silence one sense or the other…to quiet levels thou dost not wish to perceive. Control and discipline will ease thy confusion.”

“Yes, I’d like that very much…”

Learning to manage this oversensitivity that had plagued me my whole life would be a grace indeed. But more awaited me. I was sure of it. My mother had believed that Kol could protect me from the Danae’s crippling blows and instill in me what I needed to make sense of the world. If she knew Janus de Cartamandua at all, then she knew how unreliable his character. She would never have based her whole plan for me on his promises. I inhaled deeply, buried apprehension, and averted my eyes from my body.

“…and then I’d like—How soon can we move on to the second remasti?”

“When we move on.” Kol strolled away toward the water.

Saverian rolled her eyes as if I were a lunatic. The burgeoning clouds released their burden, binding sea and sky into a gray eternity of rain.

Chapter 14

Saverian pressed herself to the cliff to shelter from the rising storm. I grabbed my clothing from the sand and joined her. But the rain drove straight in from the sea, a cold sheeting deluge that soaked us to the skin—not all that far in my case—chilled us to the bone, and made it impossible to think too much about what I had just done. Certainly the ugly change to my arms and legs did naught to keep me warm or dry. Naught that I could see along the strand promised better cover, and a fire was out of the question. We could not stay here.

“We need shelter,” I shouted at Kol over the hammering rain, the continuous rumble of thunder and surf, and the maelstrom of sounds and smells that filled my head with more images than I could possibly sort out. “Humans die of cold and wet.”

I saw no benefit in pressing the point. The Dané would choose to help or not. I believed he would. He had squatted ankle deep in the surf and spread his fingers in the incoming wavelets, as if ensuring that their texture met his expectations. Rain sheened his long back like a cloak of transparent silk.

“Thou shouldst not have brought the woman,” he called back without looking up. “I could have taken thee into the sea again.”

“Did he do that?” I asked Saverian as we waited and shivered. “Take me under water? I mean, I experienced something. Naught I’d want to do again.” My antipathy for water was too deep-rooted. The gray waves churned and frothed in nauseating rhythm. “I felt as if I were dreaming of the sea…of drowning…of his voice. I didn’t think it was real.”

“Nor did I. When you came out from your w-washing, he grabbed your shoulder and led you right back into the water.” The shivering physician grimaced and wiped water from her eyes. “The waves boiled bright b-blue around you. You both vanished. I’ve seen nothing like it…nothing ever. How did you b-breathe, Valen? It was hours before he led you out again. Why aren’t you d-dead?”

“Hours? That’s not possible.”

“I’m a good judge of time. I was beginning to think I would need to find m-my own way home.”

I jabbed my fingers into my ribs. It hurt. “Well, I’m not dead. But I’m not going to try diving in on my own.”

A reluctant smile teased at her mouth. “I’d planned to examine your new skin to see if you had scales or gills. But I’ve no paper or pens to record my findings. A poor practitioner to get caught without.”

I could not but return her smile, grateful for her astringent practicality. Had she screamed or shrunk from me in disgust, the anxious knot lodged in my own breast might have unraveled into panicked frenzy.

Kol unfolded his limbs and struck out northward along the shore. His hand twitched in a gesture I interpreted as an invitation to follow. Saverian must have gotten the same notion. She sped after him like a constable after a thief. The physician might miss her bed or her books, but I couldn’t imagine she would regret the absence of any person.

I used the moment’s privacy to relieve myself and wrestle my ugly arms into my soaked wool shirt, hoping it might cut the wind and soften the impact of the driving rain. Then I set out after the others.

Saverian’s time estimates could not be accurate. I could feel the sun hiding behind the storm. I could almost see it, in the way you see the rider in an approaching cloud of dust or envision a Syran woman’s body within her cloud of drifting veils. And it had scarce moved from the cliff top since Kol’s dance of greeting. As I marveled at this certainty, all out of nothing, a moment’s flush left me warm and cold together. I tried to hold on to the sensation, but sounds and scents and images piled one up on the other like unruly children demanding my attention, and soon I was naught but cold and wet again. Strange.

Kol moved swiftly. Just past the slumped cliff where we’d found fresh water, the shoreline curved and took the two of them out of sight. I trotted a little faster and caught up with them just as the Dané started up a steep bank scored with rivulets of mud. The footing was tricky, and I was just as happy to be bootless, able to feel where rocks and rooted shrubs gave surer purchase.

Saverian climbed like a goat, but with far less grace. She was confident and fast, but grabbed on to every protruding rock and twig, and her boots slipped every other step. Her black braid had escaped its bonds and water cascaded from her straggling hair down her neck and the back of her cloak. When I came up behind her—by sheer virtue of my longer legs—she was mumbling through chattering teeth. “Wretched royal b-bastard. ‘Leave your b-books and ride out with me,’ you said. ‘I need you.’ Yes…to be trapped in a city full of torch-wielding madmen, chased by Harrowers, saddled with a d-doulon-raving lunatic, frostbit, saddle-sore, bashed in the head, d-drowned, and now abandoned in a monsoon in company with said madman and a cold-blooded dancing g-gatzé. Never again, Riel. Enough is enough.” She stomped through the mud as if it might be Osriel’s face.

I scrabbled upward, wondering if she’d find it amusing if I accused her of whining. Likely not. “You’ve not traveled with the prince all that much, then? On his visits to Gillarine? Or to…battlefields?”

Locked in her grumbling misery, she perhaps forgot what she considered my business and what not. “Stearc keeps him to his regimen when traveling. I give the thane spells and medicines enough to get Osriel home if he gets very bad. Of course, now Stearc’s commanded to stay at the abbey, it’s left to the dead man to see to Riel. The god-cursed fool oughtn’t travel at all…”

The dead man…Voushanti? An extra chill raised my neck hairs. Her commentary flowed like the mud around our feet, and I didn’t want to interrupt it, but someday I’d get her to explain.

“…and certainly not in winter. The cold torments his joints, and swells his lungs and air passages. One day he’ll fall off his horse and die, and then what of his grand plans? What of his father’s wishes? What of his warriors and his subjects and his—The rest of them? Blasted, mite-brained, cold-blooded, soul-blind idiot.”

The rest of whom, physician? Another question to save for a better time. “He told me that life is pain and only movement makes it bearable.”

“Pssh.” Saverian dispensed disdain as innkeepers dispense gossip. “His father spewed that drivel when Osriel was a boy and he was trying to coax the child out of bed on a day when every move Riel made was agony. He’d put Osriel on a horse or force him to run races with him. It wasn’t fair. The child would do anything to please his father, though it caused his saccheria to flare and he suffered for days after, and King Eodward knew it. The king called this torment love.”

“But Osriel got out of bed.”

“He did. He does it every day. Honestly, I’ve no idea how. His father’s love left his joints like broken glass and his soul a grinding stone.” Saverian slipped again and only her grip on a pine sapling saved her from falling face down in the mud. “The Mother spare me any such love.”

I didn’t think she had to worry. Loving the physician would be as rewarding as romancing the dunes we’d just left behind.

Mud squished between my toes as I climbed. I could well imagine robust, ruddy Eodward prodding his sickly child to be strong enough to survive in a brutal world. Yet I had received a privileged glimpse of the king’s nature once when I was a young soldier under his command, and I surmised that the pain Osriel experienced on those hard days did not outstrip that his father felt at forcing him to it. Eodward had been rewarded by seeing his sickly child grow to manhood, an uncommon fate for a victim of saccheria. Saverian was right, too, though. Pain could change a man. Make him hard.

“Did you love the prince…when you were children?”

“No. We were friends. Playmates. My mother was his physician.” As if she realized, of a sudden, the personal turn the conversation had taken, Saverian tightened her jaw and hauled herself upward even more forcefully. “Where is this creature taking us?”

That, too, was a most interesting question, for a glance back over my shoulder showed naught but rain and a valley of trees. No sea, no shore. Even more unsettling…the sun, yet buried deeply in the clouds, now lay behind us, what my instincts deemed west, though our path had not turned and scarce an hour had passed from my recovery. What daylight the storm had left us was rapidly failing.

I pressed my hand to Saverian’s back, hoping to speed her steps. The Dané would likely welcome an excuse to abandon us. When we crested the steep slope, Kol’s sapphire gards were just visible through a scattering of saplings that bordered a darkening wood.

“Come on.” I took Saverian’s hand, and we pelted after him through the trees. The gloom of the deeper woodland enveloped us.

Saverian slowed. “Valen, look.”

“Best keep up. He’s using no track I can travel on my own.” I tightened my grip on her wrist. What with the rain, tired legs, a head packed with fears and nonsense, and Kol’s disconcerting route finding, the shifting of north and south, of before and after and here and there, was twisting my instincts underside up and forepart behind. Our every step moved across time and distance in ways not even a Cartamandua could fathom.

But the willful physician snatched her hand away. “Stop! Look at yourself, Valen.”

“We daren’t lose—” Iero’s grace! I stopped. Threads of pale lapis-hued light snaked about my fingers and bare legs. I shoved one sodden sleeve higher. The light—some threads fine, some thick—shifted and blurred beneath the raindrops. The knot in my breast burst. A cold shaft of terror pierced me head to feet. I had become…other.

“What’s happening? Is it uncomfortable? Pleasurable?” She made her odd little open-palm gesture asking permission, but touched my arm before I could refuse it. The traces sparked silver and blue under her fingertips.

“I’m—No. It just itches. Stings.” As if a swarm of ants had taken up residence on…or inside…my flesh and took it in mind to bite me every once in a while.

“Do you feel it atop the skin or deeper? Perhaps it’s like a lizard’s coloring that changes with its surroundings.” She bent my arm at wrist and elbow, which caused the marks to squirm and blur. “Look at that! If I just had my lenses…better light…”

Queasy and embarrassed, I jerked my arm away. The shifting marks seem to be connected straight to my gut. “We’d best go. He’s waiting for us.”

I stumbled forward, clutching my bundle of clothes and boots, unable to keep my eyes from the unstable patterns on my bare legs and feet. Saverian grabbed my sleeve and guided me around trees and stumps.

A flare of white welcomed us into a rain-swept circle of trampled grass amid the trees. A starlike cluster of twigs, the source of the pale, magical light, dangled from an overhanging branch, unaffected by the rain. The light revealed several ramshackle sheds and lean-tos nestled beside a thatch-roofed hut. Kol stood at the open doorway of the hut, engaged in conversation with a man in a dirty white gown and a brown—I wiped the rain from my eyes. Not a brown cloak, but a cowl, and a well-delineated tonsure that bared half his scalp. I was speechless.

“…Well, of course, I’ve been gi’en to welcome the stranger, and to hear a voice of home would put me out of mind in heavenly thanks, though I’ve renounced all such. But a woman born…Brave Kol, could ye not ask me please to slash my throat or draw down the poison of the hemlock, but ye must put me in the way of my sin? Half a century’s turn must I have fasted and prayed by now—not to say, great God of all, that I’ve complaints or believe by any chance that I’ve full expiated my guilt, for certain not”—he raised a bony hand to address this side comment to the heavens—“but to come to this moment to find myself in the full occasion of repeating my defilement—more likely, e’en, being half mad as I am—’tis a sore deterrent to hospitality!”

The white light bathed his face as he stuck his head around Kol’s rangy form and squinted into the rainy night. “Did ye not say ye’d brought two human folk? Or is it—?” As his examination took in my odd and soggy self, half dressed, legs flaring blue like miniature lightning, his own ruddy complexion lost all color, and he circled his breast with Iero’s seal, completing the gesture by clutching his chest as if his heart might fly out of it. “Mighty saints protect me, Brother Kol, ye’ve brought me a halfbreed.”

Assuredly his claim of fasting was no lie; the monk had scarce a citré’s weight of spare flesh on him. But he had once been a robust man, perhaps a half head less than Kol or I, and his meatless bones were broad and thick. Gray-stubbled chin and tonsure appeared as ragged as his garb, and assuredly no cleaner. But despite his self-deprecation, his voice boomed clear and the pale eyes gleamed as sharp as a well-honed dagger.

“Is the woman also mixed blood?”

“Only the male,” said Kol. “He is newly a wanderkin and cannot warm himself as yet. His companion has fallen afoul of Tuari, and the wanderkin would not leave her to the archon’s retribution. She needs shelter.”

“Ye’ve saved him from the breaking, have ye not, Kol? Put yourself in the way of burying, and if this girl aided ye in such an enterprise, then right and mercy it be to protect her. But how came ye to involve yourself with any human offspring, who’ve sworn never—?” The wide-eyed monk inhaled sharply. He stepped around Kol, and unheeding of the rain soaking his cowl and gown, grasped my arm and dragged me underneath the twiggy lamp. His fingers a manacle about my wrist, he swept my face as he might study his holy writs. “Merciful Iero, Liege of Heaven!”

“He is born of my sister,” said Kol.

“The cartographer relinquished him at last?” The monk’s fingers pinched my chin with the bite of a hungry dog on bloody meat and twisted my head side to side. “All count of human years has escaped me, but this one cannot have much time left before his maturing. Ne’er did I imagine your cruel penalty would budge the Cartamandua mule.”

Kol stiffened. “Humans are not fit to judge cruelty.”

“Strip off yer righteous skin, Brother Kol, and we’ll argue it again,” said the monk cheerfully, spinning about to face the Dané so quickly that his garb snapped my bare legs, causing a shower of blue and silver sparks. He tapped his own broad chest. “Would ye wrestle me to answer which of us has the One God’s ear? I’m not what I was, but if blessed Iero doth keep this heart thuttering, a human sinner will yet crack your long-lived spine. Fasting and hard labor strengthens—”

“Janus did not send me,” I interrupted, too curious to endure their jousting. “What, in Iero’s glory, brings a Karish monk to Aeginea? You’re not from Gillarine.” The threadbare brown cowl and white gown were not the black garb of Saint Ophir’s brotherhood. A century’s turn, he’d said. Names and faces, plots and schemes flew through my overcrowded head—the abbey, the lighthouse, the succession, Luviar, Osriel, Janus, Kol, Eodward…“By heaven, are you Picus?”

Then I, too, drew Iero’s sunburst upon my breast, for to see a man two centuries old and not dead drew truths of dread mystery and mortality all too near. Caedmon had sent a monk to the Danae with his infant son, a man charged to educate young Eodward as befit a human prince. But the fellow had vanished mysteriously some few years after Eodward’s return to Navronne, and only rumors had ever said where he’d gone.

“Picus?” Saverian tilted her head to one side, looking him over. “Osriel has a set of journals written by a man of that name. He was King Eodward’s—Mother save us!” Even the cool physician could not contain her astonishment.

The monk’s pinched face blossomed into such a joyful alignment as coaxed my own spirit to a smile. “I’m not forgot, then?” He quickly raised his hands as if to stay a legion. “Nay, nay, don’t tell me. Be it honorable memory or ill repute, I must not care. Penance is a narrow road. But here we bide in the deluge, and this lady’s lips blue as a wanderkin herself! And the lad doth appear as he were a goat who’s been witched into fasting. Prithee, come inside my cell and take what meager comforts I’ve to offer. Yes, the both of you. Should my weak character keep a drenched and freezing woman in the rain, ’twould be another sin to my account.” Picus pulled back the hide curtain that served him as a door and waved us in.

“My gratitude, Brother,” said Saverian as she hurried inside.

When I moved to follow the monk, Kol stayed me with a gesture. “Warm thyself, Cartamandua-son. I’ll await thee, that we might advance thy teaching as the night settles in. If I can convince my sire of the need, I can gift thee the walking gard at next dawning, and so shall we be quit of each other the sooner.”

“Tonight? Certainly…but…” I hadn’t expected to go out again. Yet it was really just morning down by the sea. The rain pounded Picus’s thatched roof, the tumbledown sheds to either side of it, and the thick mat of leaves beneath the bedraggled maples and copper beeches. “Won’t you come indoors with us, vayar? I’ve so many questions. We could talk where it’s dry.”

Kol reached for a sturdy branch above his head, and in one smooth motion lifted his shoulders above the branch until he supported his whole weight on his stretched arms and hands. A graceful swing of his legs, a twisting motion, and he sat on the branch, knees drawn up in his encircling arms, perched as easily as a cat. “Thou’lt not be long inside.”

Whether this was a statement or a command, I wasn’t sure. Kol’s manner was a bit wearing. If my mother was beloved of all, then surely her brother must have something to recommend him. I just hadn’t seen it…save, of course, the grace to protect my physical well-being against Danae spite. From the sheltering doorway I watched him turn his face up, allowing the cold rain to bathe his face and stream his long red hair down his back.

“He is beautiful, is he not?” Picus stood at my shoulder, the ripe aroma of unwashed flesh and a diet heavy with wild onions souring the autumn pungency of old leaves and wet pine bark. “No Ardran rose was ever so lovely, no Morian stag ever so regal, no Evanori boar ever so stubborn as Kol Stian-son. Had he a soul, the Creator would not know whether to name him Archangel or condemn him to eternal fire for daring rival Him.”

“Kol is certainly hard, but even I would not call him soulless.” Not one who danced as he did, who grieved as he did.

Picus held open the flap of leather behind me. “Nay, nay. It is not a matter of naming. Have you ne’er been taught the holy writs, lad? The Creator gave the spark of life only to human creatures. Danae have souls no more than red deer or ash trees or the wind.”

“Then what of those like me? Am I half souled, part tree, part man, destined for half heaven or half hell?” I tossed this out in jest, thinking he but carried on his sparring with Kol. But his prattle stilled long enough to disturb me. I turned and found his pale eyes picking at my face as if to search the darkest nooks and crannies behind my heart and ribs.

“I know not,” he said softly. “There was a time when I believed the One God could not be so cruel as to beget a soulless creature upon a human parent. But then I saw evidence…” He switched his gaze back to the Dané in the tree. “Perhaps it is one by one He chooses.”

I swallowed hard and hid my mottled hands in my soggy bundle of clothes. No soul…that was not possible. I shifted my shoulders as if to prove I had will and sense of my own, and I remembered Gillarine Abbey church and how I had felt uplifted there, and reverent—surely the sign of gods speaking to a person, one capable of repentance and service, one possessing life beyond the body’s limits. But then, I had also felt uplifted when I saw Kol dance, when I had looked on Elene silhouetted in sunlight, and when I’d sat in Gillarine’s refectory eating stewed parsnips. How would one ever know if one lacked a soul? Even Danae had thoughts and will, emotions and, at least in Kol’s case, some sense of honor—not the marks of soulless beasts.

“Was Kol so fierce before his sister—my mother—was imprisoned?” Cowardly, I asked no more of souls.

“Kol hath ever a sober cast of mind,” said the monk, palpably relieved at my shift of subject. “More than most Danae, and of a certain, more than Clyste—not that she lacked intelligence to accompany her cheery nature. He ever seeks perfection in his being—a hard road for any of God’s creatures. But Clyste made him laugh and softened his eye, and my dear lad challenged him to find delight in brotherly friendship as well as duty. Twixt them both, held so dear by their love, Kol reflected Iero’s light upon us all. But I fear his joy has died with them.”

My dear lad…It took me a moment to realize the monk spoke of Eodward.

“Come inside, lad, and relieve thy chill.” The monk’s hand gripped my shoulder kindly, even if his offer was wholly nonsensical. Naught could relieve the chill he had just laid on me. For a being without a soul, death became the end of all.

Moist heat slapped my face as I ducked and stepped into Picus’s round hut—scarce eight paces across. Saverian knelt by a small fire pit in the center of the dark room, stretching her cloak to help the thick layers to dry. I needed no polite encouragement to sit on the hard-packed dirt beside her. Not only could I not stand upright without cracking my head on the low slanting ribs of the roof or poking my eye on wayward thatch, but I could scarce see or breathe at that height. If the monk had a hole in the roof to draw out his smoke, it was wholly inadequate to the task.

Picus let the door flap fall behind us. Quicker than blinking he had coaxed his fire brighter, set a clay pot of water over it, and snapped sprigs from a dry bundle dangling from his roof alongside a skinned rabbit, several woven nets bulging with pale, dusty vegetables, a variety of tools with leather-wrapped handles, and a pair of snowshoes. He settled cross-legged across the fire from me and Saverian and crushed the leaves into a clay mug and bowl. “We’ll have a bracing tea anon. ’Tis such pleasure to have company, I scarce know up from down—not seen a human person in much longer than you’d want to account. I’m flummoxed that I can recall how to speak, so you must command me stopper my mouth when thy ears protest. Kol comes to check on me now and again. Tends my garden or brings me a fish or a bag of apples, and in return I deluge him with human words, poor fellow, the last thing he cares to hear. Which recalls…”

He sprang to his feet and poked his head through the door flap. “Kol, as thou’rt waiting…my turnips suffer black mold, and the onions pull up soft and slimed, scarce a layer fit to eat. I fret this rain will finish them. The spelt in the far mead has no ripe heads, and frost nips the dawn. I know it’s been scarce a month since you’ve tended it, but if thou wouldst have mercy upon my poor plot, I’d be most grateful.”

I tried to hear Kol’s response, but I could not distinguish it from the sounds of snapping fire and rain rustling on the thatch, and the thousand other noises of storm-racked forest and distant sea vying for attention in my head. Overwhelmed with mystery, I could not even imagine what Picus required. I doubted Kol would set to work with rake and hoe. Another question to add to my growing tally.

I held my hands near the fire, but instantly withdrew them before my skin blackened like scorched paper. The shifting blue marks had faded to silver. I wrapped my arms around my unsettled middle and hoped the steam rising from my sodden shirt would suffice to calm my shivering.

Picus closed the flap again and lowered himself to the dirt floor, scratching his grizzled chin. “’Tis a wonder Kol comes here. The land grows ill. Will not stay healthy no matter that he puts it right. And my company is no pleasure to him. Though, indeed, he’s exiled himself from their company, save when he is summoned to the dance. Even his sire is near a stranger to him since Clyste’s fall.”

I believed I knew why. “None but you and he know that Janus fathered Clyste’s child.”

Picus nodded. “After Clyste’s prisoning, I saw that Kol bore some weighty burden and seemed like to shatter with it. So I baited him into a fight—not so difficult to do, as you see—and goaded forth his secret. Took me a good trimonth to walk without those bruises squalling, and I’ve ne’er regrown the teeth.”

He kneaded his unshaven left jaw for a moment, his attention suddenly far away. But then he scooted around and rummaged in the dark behind him, pulling out two irregularly woven blankets that might once have had some color. He gave one to each of us. “Come, thou’rt a soggy pair. Bundle up and get warm, mistress. I’ll leave thee lone here in the house and take me to the shed when sleep time comes so ye can do what women must. And I’ll not even think on it, I promise, or if I do, I’ll perform my most rigorous spiritual exercises or even hike me down to the sea and douse my head, though I could wish for better weather or at the least Kol to take me down a shorter path. The determination to penance can take a man only so far until it falls into the sin called ‘pride of mortification,’ if thou’rt familiar with Karish vice and virtue.”

“Good monk, you’ve no need to give up your bed,” said Saverian. “I’m a daughter of Evanore and our customs see no wrong in stalwart women sheltering with honorable men.” She was being exceptionally polite. She didn’t correct his use of mistress.

Shaking his head sadly, Picus poured the simmering water over his herbs and handed the mug to Saverian and the bowl to me. “Ah, mistress, hope of heaven and true repentance bids me warn ye that I am no honorable man, but abjectly fallen. Though vowed chaste at fifteen, and gi’en naught to suffer in this life but a surfeit of adventure and the joy to serve the fairest prince the One God ever sent to humankind, I succumbed to the Adversary’s assault and broke my vows and the most solemn responsibilities of a teacher to lie with a woman. None should trust me.”

A long pull on the steaming tea seemed to restore the physician’s ironical humor. She tilted her head and examined the monk, as he opened a flat wood chest he’d dragged from the same dark corner where he’d found the blanket. “So you what…consummated an attraction…kept a female companion…in two-hundred-some years…a healthy man who lives among beings who go about unclothed? I’ve little understanding of Karish ways, despite my association with Brother Valen here, but I hardly see the difficulty. If you are indeed this Picus…a man of such advanced years…I would think the continuation of a young man’s animal urgencies would be more reassuring than problematical—mayhap a sign of your god’s favor.” She sounded little short of laughter, which I feared must surely wound a monk so determined to penance, no matter how foolish we judged his rigor.

“The structure of virtue was the last lesson of my novitiate, Saverian,” I said, “though I scarce got beyond naming the seven great virtues and the twelve great vices. But pride of mortification made sense to me—the vice of those who aggrandize themselves by the extremity of their penance rites or humility. Clearly Brother Picus heeds the first duty of the sinner—to sincerely balance his reparations with his clearest assessment of the severity of his sin. We must honor his judgment, while welcoming his willingness to allow us to intrude upon his solitude.”

Picus looked as though the portal to heaven had opened in front of him. His rounded mouth opened and closed like that of a fish. His hands, one holding a rank-smelling onion and the alter holding a leaf-wrapped bundle that smelled fishy, dropped into his lap. “Novitiate?” he stammered. “Thou art Karish, then, a monk vowed, as well as the Cartamandua’s halfbreed son who has begun to take the Danae passages. How comes that—?” Pain etched his fleshless face. “Ah, great Iero’s heart, I must not even ask. I have renounced the world.”

“I did take novice vows, but my abbot sent me back into the world. The story is very long, Brother Picus, and not half so interesting as your own, which we would relish hearing.”

This man had known King Eodward…and Caedmon himself. He could tell us of the Danae…of Kol and his disaffection from his own kind…of my mother and her plan…perhaps even something of the world’s grief. A guilty fear gnawed at me that the archon would be so angered by my escape, he would refuse to tell Osriel what they knew of the failing world. If I could learn from Picus, perhaps I could make up for it. Once Kol set me free to go back to the human world in safety, I could send what I’d learned to the cabal, thus keeping my vow to Luviar. As for Osriel himself, I felt no pity. Likely they would not cripple him for their own failure to hold on to me.

“Thou must tell me thy names, at the least,” said Picus, as he busied himself with his pot and his bundles, “and some small summary of thy purpose in Aeginea, lest I go mad and forget even my devotions. If the Cartamandua did not send thee to Kol, then how come ye here? Kol’s pride would never allow him to fetch thee. Didst thou not know what breaking awaited a half-breed, boy? I fought to convert the long-lived from all their heathenish ways, especially from such cruel abuse of their own children”—he clutched his hands to his chest for a moment, closing his eyes and looking as if he might choke—“but their terror of Llio’s curse ever drives them. And you, lady, so wise and gentlewomanly…an Evanori warrior? Stalwart, I’ll vow, but not half so ferocious as the warlords I remember, who painted their faces with blood and brought Hansker scalps to lay before King Caedmon. How come ye here with Janus’s son?”

As his stream of words bounded and flowed like an exuberant watercourse, the monk dropped the leaf-wrapped bundle into the blackened clay pot and whipped a knife from the folds of his robe. Though the blade was worn near the slimness of a stiletto, he proceeded to slice the onion into the pot, as well, tossing the moldy outer skin out through the dripping door flap.

“My name is Valen,” I said. “I’ve come here to learn of the world. Tell me, what is this Llio’s cu—?”

Of a sudden, I was not sure I could sit still to hear the secrets of heaven, much less whatever tidbits the monk could reveal. Picus’s pot belched steam, smelling strongly of fish and onion. The smoke filled my lungs, and the rank smell curdled my belly. My skin itched. My foot tapped the dirt floor uncontrollably. So little air.

I waved at the physician to take up the conversation, while I downed the lukewarm tea—mint and elderberry—and appreciated its spreading comfort. An unlikely sweat broke out beneath my wet, scratchy shirt.

“I am Saverian, physician and student of natural philosophy, house mage to Osriel, Duc of Evanore, Prince of Navronne. A daughter of warriors, not one myself.”

Picus’s expression blossomed with wonder. “You serve my king’s son? What a fine man he must be. I had warned Eodward that the One God disapproved using holy marriage for wartime alliance, but the Moriangi grav and his men knew of ships, and when we drove the Aurellians to the sea, ’twas the grav who crushed them. And the grav’s daughter produced such a robust babe. I knew him only as a motherless boy, of course, rough mannered and interested in naught but fighting. I tutored him in combat as I had his father. I tried to introduce book studies as well, but the fighting was heavy in those days, and we were constantly on the move, so we’d no time for it.”

Saverian nodded. “You speak of Bayard, the eldest of Eodward’s three sons. When times were more settled, another son, Perryn, was born to Eodward’s second wife, an Ardran ducessa. My master is the third and youngest, born to his pureblood mistress. You do know of Eodward’s fate, Brother?”

“Do I know he is dead? Aye. Even I, whose eyes remain steadfastly human, saw the sun dim on that day. Kol came to break the news and invite me to share his kiran, but I could not, though I knew it would be such a glory as I had not seen since he danced for Clyste. I sent him away, that a heathen creature would not witness a monk’s blaspheming, for I had always believed merciful Iero must surely bring my lad home before the end. Whate’er his sins, as any king must commit in carrying his office, they could not be so dread as to forbid him one last glimpse of the Canon after so long away. Once thou hast seen it…” The monk dashed a hairy knuckle at his eyes, as he stirred his pot with a wooden spoon. “Three sons left. A mercy in that at the least.”

A mercy only if we did not tell him of the princes and their war. Though Picus’s talk touched on old mysteries, like the Canon, and new ones like this Llio’s curse that caused the Danae to cripple halfbreeds, and kirani that seemed something more than mere dancing, it was an effort to concentrate on the conversation. I hunched deeper into myself, cold and hot together, ravenous, yet unsure if I could choke down this mess he stirred. Something was definitely wrong with me. When had I ever found aught I would not eat? The light had gone completely from my gards, leaving my skin purplish gray and leprous in appearance.

“Why did you abandon King Eodward, Brother?” said Saverian, a physician setting out to diagnose the world’s ills. “You vanished without a word to the king or anyone else. You were seen leaving Palinur, but no evidence of mishap or treason was ever found. Even the journals you left behind told Eodward nothing of your fate. The prince says his father died yet grieving for your loss, chastising himself for some unknown failure that drove you away. Surely your god would agree that service to Navronne’s king supercedes any personal penance, especially for minor transgressions of the flesh.”

Picus squeezed his broad brow tight as if to force aside the sentiments that had bubbled so near his surface. “One night’s fall from grace drove me from my lord’s side. I had long renounced the woman and thought I’d made amends. But when I was confronted with the lasting evidence of my wickedness and shown how it contravened everything I loved, everything he loved, I knew no man had ever so abjectly failed his god or his lord. Ronila said that to cleanse my sin I must bleed, suffer, and die by my own hand or hers. But the One God forbids self-murder, and I would not add to my soul’s debt by allowing her to take my blood on her own hand. So I swore to her on Iero’s name that I would die to the world—leave my prince and all my friends and holy brothers without apology or explanation, and live henceforth in solitude, penury, and repentance for as long as the streams of time might carry me forward. She knew me and believed I would keep any pledge so sworn. And so I have, save for these few untimely lapses, when I am out of measure surprised.”

“Ronila?” said Saverian. “The woman you lay with…who must have been a student, if you betrayed a teacher’s trust. But I thought your only student was Eodward himself.”

I glanced up from my knees where I had focused my eyes to get control of my stomach. The dim smoky room swirled unpleasantly. “You mentioned Ronila in your journal—a disaffected halfbreed girl who left Aeginea after making her third change.”

Picus wagged his head. “We witnessed her knee-breaking, my prince and I. A golden child of an age ye would judge fourteen summers. ’Tis after the child passes the second remasti they do it. She screamed and begged us to save her from crippling, but we could not. My prince was naught but a tender seven-year-old, and I God-sworn to protect him above all things, which meant honoring Danae customs. So much pain…After, I thought to give her something back to redeem her suffering, something the others would not have and could never take from her. The long-lived claim to bear no grudge against a broken halfbreed, but of course they do. They seek perfection in their arts—which are firstly their bodies and their use of them—and thus treated her with cruel disdain. She was clever at numbers and had such a vivid imagining that she devoured all I could teach her of Navronne, of natural philosophy, of human history and warfare, of moral philosophy and the teachings of Karus. Every afternoon when she had completed her tasks of the day—making baskets or weaving spidersilk or gathering apples or mushrooms—she would hobble to my canopy for teaching…Ah, I babble on too long. I sinned. I renounced that sin. But I will pay the price of it until my bones are dust.”

He tightened his mouth and would not speak more for a while. He broke pinches of herbs from his dangling bundles and threw them in his pot, each breaking an explosion of fragrance. The scent of dried mushrooms, damp earth, and moldering leaves left the memory of nivat on my tongue. Sweat dribbled down my sides. My left thigh muscle cramped, and an ember burned in my gut…

No! Nivat no longer had power over me. I forced my thoughts away from my body. So the celibate monk, exiled far from home and holy brotherhood, had seduced a half-Danae girl. Or had she, a lonely outcast, enamored of a kind, virile young man, used her Danae wiles to tempt him? Yet more troubled me than such common failings as lust and seduction. Something in the telling of his story…something in the words…had touched off a bone-deep revulsion, but I could not capture it. Wit seemed to have drained out of me, along with the myriad telltales of my senses that had been with me since the remasti. This windowless room. So small. So close.

“Here, give me thy cup, good Valen, and we’ll see thy belly filled.”

I looked up and Picus’s grimed face leered huge and grotesque in the garish firelight. The encircling walls of his hut bulged inward, threatening to squeeze the breath out of me. Heat seared and scoured my limbs. Of a sudden I was back in my bedchamber in Palinur, my skin on fire from my father’s leather strap, panicked, cursing, screaming, beating on the door barricaded with sorcery as the walls closed in. The firelight wavered…darkened.

“Excuse…must go.” Gasping for air, I scrambled to my feet, knocking my forehead on the roof beams, and escaped into the night.

Saverian burst through the door flaps while my hands were yet propped on the outer wall of a lean-to filled with wood, and I was gulping great lungfuls of cold air. “Do you need the medallion, Valen?”

“Just air. So hot.” I fumbled at the laces on the scratchy shirt and ripped it over my head, allowing the cold rain to hammer and scour and revive every part of my skin. My senses quickly regained some balance. “Sorry. Rude of me.”

From her shelter in the hut’s doorway, she held out her cupped hand, overflowing with tangled gold chain. “Perhaps you should wear this.”

Shaking my head, fighting to shed the oppression of panic and suffocation, I turned around and leaned my back against the woodshed. The sodden shirt wadded in my hands preserved a bit of propriety. “I’ll be all right. You may write this in your notes: Danae halfbreeds sicken within walls.”

Kol had known what would happen. The Dané no longer sat in the tree, but music had joined the clamor in my head, and I glimpsed blue flashes among the trees. “It must be time for my lessons. You’d best stay here, unless…”

I beckoned Saverian urgently. Without hesitation, she darted across a muddy strip and sheltered under the lip of the shed.

My finger on her lips silenced her question, and I dropped my own voice to a whisper. “…Unless you’re afraid of the monk.”

She yanked my hand away and took on such a look of scorn as would chill a salamander. “Afraid of the chance to converse with a man two hundred years old? I’d barter my maidenhead for the chance, and here it is laid in my—” Of a sudden the fireglow of her damp cheeks outshone the white light from the twiggy lantern. “What are you smirking at? That I happen to find many amusements more enticing than rutting like an overheated dog? Study the human body and its lamentable urges, and you’ll see it is an altogether ridiculous object.”

“Bless me, gods, that I remain an unstudious man!” Not even her sour expression could restrain my laughter.

But now that the rain had reawakened the chaotic information of my senses, I could give thought to the serious matters that had gathered with the deepening night. So I stifled amusement and quieted my voice. Despite her peculiarities, Saverian was a woman of sense and intelligence. I could not stay here to learn what I needed, but perhaps she could.

“Saverian, if you would, I beg you discover what you can of this Llio’s curse—this Danae fear of halfbreeds. My mother conceived a halfbreed apurpose, knowing what her people would do to me if I was caught. Why would she do that? Kol says that she believed I belonged in the Canon, which makes no sense at all. The mere consideration appalls and disgusts him, and I’ve no faith that I can budge him to tell me more. And there’s something else…something in the monk’s story…that sets off warning trumps in my head. Truly I’m half knob-swattled with this day and cannot capture it, yet every bone in my body screams that all this is connected: Eodward’s history, Danae intransigence, my birth, the wretched weather, and the sickness of the world, the Harrowers and their poisoning of the Danae.”

A thought darted past like a firefly, before being swallowed in an assault of scents reminiscent of a town marketplace: baking pies, roasting meat, leather goods and perfumes, herbs, vegetables, and scented oils, horse manure, pigs. I prayed that Kol could teach me what to do with all of it.

“Even if you care naught for Navronne, you’re Osriel’s friend and servant,” I said. “What we learn here could be the keys to his future.”

“Osriel betrayed you. Why would you care about his future?”

“You’ve witnessed the havoc the Harrowers wreak in Navronne. And I promise the damage is much deeper than that you saw. Surely you saw, too, the hope he brought them, almost without trying. People wiser than me have entrusted Navronne’s salvation to Prince Osriel’s hand—but I fear that trust has been misplaced unless we can find out the truth of all this before he takes a path of desperation. This thing you will not speak of. This thing he hopes to fuel with Danae magic. I have this notion I can help him, but only if I learn enough.”

What wastrel fool had ever made so pompous a statement? But I did feel it, however foolish. If I could only see the way.

Saverian nodded slowly, her clear eyes as lustrous as jade in the white light. I had never noticed their color. “I’ll learn what I can.” Then she lowered her lids halfway and snatched the wadded shirt from my hand. “Meanwhile, I’ll dry this out. I doubt you’ll need it for a while.”

I grinned as she threw it over her shoulder and ducked into Picus’s hut. Then I set off into the trees to find Kol. Amid the cascading telltales of hunting foxes, nervous deer, and mice and moles that burrowed through leaves and earth, I heard Picus greet Saverian with concerned questioning. She reassured him as to my health. “Ah, for certain,” he said. “I’d forgot how the walls torment the odd creatures…”

Creatures…beings that had no souls. My smile faded.

Chapter 15

Kol crouched impossibly high in the limbs of a leaf-bare ash that bordered a swath of open meadow. The wind rustled knee-high grass and faded leaves, and the rain outlined odd dark shapes, barriers of timber and tied brush set at angles across the meadow. I blinked, astonished that I could see so much as that on a starless, moonless night. The air smelled of must and soured grain, of soggy earth and the small stream that bisected the gentle slope, and of a thousand other scents that had naught to do with this meadow. A wolf’s howl sent chilly fingers up my bare spine, hinting that even the magics of Aeginea could not hold back this foul winter. Naked in the night wood…I’d never felt such an idiot.

As I opened my mouth to call him, the Dané rose from his crouch and brushed bits of bark and leaf from his skin. Angling his feet, as if for proper balance on the branch, he stretched his arms skyward. His gards brightened to the cold blue of a mountain winter sky. Somewhere—in my head, in my heart, in my imagining?—music swelled. The sweet clarity of a rebec’s bowed strings twined my overcrowded thoughts in a single long note that stretched my nerves taut…and then Kol launched himself from the top of the ash.

My heart near stopped until his feet touched solidly to the grass, and he began to whirl and spin and leap through the meadow, a glory of power and strength, raising one and then another thread of melody to join in a driving gigue. Danae danced to the land’s music—or made it.

Determined to understand what he did, I pushed aside the wet leaves and pine needles at the edge of the wood, pressed my fingers into the mud, and released magic. As if lightning illuminated the symbols on a fiché, I glimpsed rowed turnips, carrots, and onions slimed and rotting underground, a plot of stunted wheat across the stream, and hungry moles panting as they excavated tunnels underneath it all, their fur patched with disease. My spirit choked at the suffocating sickness. Kol’s exuberant feet scribed silvered traces across the unhealthy landscape, his every bend, dip, and spin bringing new complexity to his insistent melodies.

I could have watched him dance until the end of days. Every note perfect…every step exquisite…exhilarating. Even when I knelt up, allowing the rain to rinse the mud from my hands, the magic he raised in Picus’s garden meadow enfolded me in such beauty as would draw a stone’s tears.

The music reached its whirling climax, and Kol stretched legs and arms to leap in one great arc across the stream, streaks of blue trailing behind him as if his gards were threads of silk, whipped to frenzy by the wind of his passing. Above and below and around me an explosion of color washed the landscape like watered ink. The healthier humors of a nearby forest glade flooded the diseased plots. Owl and hawk rose up from the wood, dark shapes diving and soaring to purge the pests, while other creeping creatures deep buried in the soil, too tiny for a human eye to see, woke to cleanse and nourish roots and stems. The waterlogged soil released its burden, riddling the undersoil with new channels to the stream. When the spinning Dané took a knee, aligning his back and outstretched leg in the position I’d come to know as completion, it seemed as if the earth gave a great sigh of contentment, while I was left roused and aching with unspent desire.

Kol held his position for a long while, and when at last he stood, his posture bespoke a man completely drained. His head came up, expression vague and lost, his sculpted features sharpening only slowly when he caught sight of me. He heaved a sigh, kneaded his neck, and started up the gentle slope, following the path of the stream. A slight sweep of his right hand commanded me to follow.

I joined him, padding through wet grass while he strode on a game trail that bordered the stream. “How do you do it?” I said, when it became clear he had no plan to initiate conversation. “Draw the music from plants and beasts and dirt clods? Use your body…your movements…to join all the parts together? Is the Canon something like this?”

“I am not here to teach thee of the dance. I’ll not speak of the Canon. Nor will I guide thee through the remasti of regeneration. No use in developing skills…and hungers…thou canst neither use nor satisfy.” He swept his dripping hair back from his face, squeezed water from it, and tied it into a heavy knot at the back of his neck.

“Regeneration,” I repeated. Osriel had said the third remasti was the passage of regeneration, when Danae first experienced the hungers of fleshly love…when they became both capable and desirous of mating. “That’s what you did to this field. Your dance healed its sickness as a human physician heals a body, diagnosing its ills and applying the proper remedy. You called forth creatures to cleanse and nourish it, changed its makeup in subtle ways to leave it healthier. But the way you accomplished it was more like mating than healing. The dance this morning touched my spirit, but this…I was honored…humbled…to witness it, relagai.”

Kol cast me a sidewise glance. Suspicious. “Thy gards tell thee these things?”

I looked down at my mottled arms and legs, so pale and ill-defined beside the brilliant clarity of his dragons, reeds, and heron. My marks no longer flashed or swirled. I doubted a human eye would even notice them were I ten paces distant. Yet though the wind had picked up, and I felt its bitter edge, the cold no longer penetrated beyond my skin.

“No. Not the gards…” I stumbled a bit, as the truth of my change settled even deeper in my gut. “I saw, or well…rather, it’s something like seeing. When I touch the earth and use my magic…my Cartamandua bent…an image of the surrounding land forms in my mind, in my senses, so I see and hear and smell what’s there or has been there in the past—plants, beasts, humans, the paths they’ve left. And I can explore the image—look deeper, learn how it fits together, as I did with the tide pool. It’s difficult to describe.”

“Thy senses comprehend the particular changes I brought to this land?” Surprise and skepticism boiled out of him like seepage from a wound. “Without study or examination or practice?”

“The changes—the hunting birds you called forth, the water channels, the rest—yes. The paths of your movements that link them all together appear to me as threads of silver across the landscape. I can see the threads even as you draw them, and those of other Danae from earlier times.”

He halted in midstep and glared at me, his aspen-gold eyes like flame in the darkness. “Thou canst see the paths of the kiran—the patterns left behind from the dance?” His tone dared me to affirm it.

“I could walk them as you do this track under your feet.”

He clamped his mouth shut and stomped faster up the path. When a dead limb blocked his way, likely fallen from Picus’s fence making, he snatched it up and threw it farther than even my improved eyesight could make out in the middle of the night. Had it struck a fortification, even at such a distance, I would wager on the stick to penetrate the stone, so vicious was its launch. I’d thought he would approve my increased understanding. Perhaps I had trespassed some protocol by observing Danae mysteries or speaking of them. I trailed along behind him, my bare feet tormented with sticks and rocks, narrowly avoiding wrenching my ankle in some burrower’s entry hole, and near giving up on comprehending my uncle.

As the vale sloped upward, the land grew rockier, so my battered feet could attest. The path soon vanished, as did the stream, replaced, almost before I could imagine it, by rills and rivulets that trickled across the hillside from thick forest on either side of us. The soil beneath my feet thinned. At least the rain had slackened, holding somewhere between a drizzle and a mist. Kol’s gards flared brighter.

Of a sudden, I realized that we had traveled farther from Picus’s meadow than our steps could justify. Alert now, I began to feel a shifting when Kol invoked his magic—when the path took a sudden turning or broke dramatically uphill. When the scent of pine and spruce entirely supplanted the scent of oak and ash and hawthorn in the space of twenty paces. When the air grew sharply colder and very dry.

“Your gards carry power that enables you to move from one place to another,” I said, pushing my steps to keep up with the fast-moving Dané.

“Aye. After the second remasti, the stripling’s growing familiarity with the world becomes a part of the walking gards and can be called on as desired.” The brisk walk seemed to have restored his calm. “The particular slope of a grass-covered hillside recalls that of a mountain meadow. The sound of one stream echoes another that happens to feed a mighty river. Just here”—he pointed to a stand of evergreens—“the odd shape of that tallest tree’s crown recalls to me the outline of another tree against a different sky, thus forms a path from this place to the next. I can walk there if I will. It is all a matter of similarity and recollection, for all places are bound one to the other in ways a human—most humans—cannot perceive.”

“Sometimes we do,” I said. “We come to a new place, yet feel as if we’ve been there before. Or we meet a stranger and feel as if we know her already.”

“Perhaps.” A grudging admission.

By the time I wrenched my eyes from the fork-tipped fir, disappointed it had not belched fire or displayed some other obvious magic, we walked a slightly steeper path amid widely scattered trees. My breathing labored. Around another corner and we were traversing the shoulder of a conical peak outlined against a star-filled sky. Mist floated like a gray sea below us.

A half hour’s hard climb and we had left the last stunted trees behind. We came to a rocky prominence—a thick slab of pale stone, some twenty quercae in height, that poked up in gloomy isolation from the mountainside. Kol propped one foot on a broad flat shard, long split off from the standing rock and toppled to the grass.

“We begin thy teaching here,” he said. “Thy gards draw in the sights and sounds, tastes and smells from forest, vale, and shore, as well as the dust of Picus’s foolish babbling and the stink of his dwelling place. No doubt rememberings of thy usual days intrude upon thy perceptions, as well. Likely it is some confusion of these impressions with the observation of my kiran that caused this seeing thou hast reported.”

So he had not entirely dismissed his disturbance at my claim. “Yes, my eyes, nose, and ears are overwhelmed, but what I saw back there, the silver traces—”

“Thy task is not to think or speak,” he snapped. “I’ll give thee ample opportunity to question. ’Tis the deeps of the night here on Aesol Mount, the time when the world is quietest. Best for listening to voices that cannot be heard in the day. Best for learning control.”

I shut my mouth, suppressed my resentful urge to kick him, and bowed. I needed to learn.

As before, the politeness seemed to take him a bit off guard. “I should not have taken the time to shape a kiran for Picus’s plantings. Thou didst not linger within his walls as long as I thought a halfbreed might, thus my hurry opened the way for this misunderstanding. So, no matter.” He waved as if his willing could dismiss my beliefs. “A wanderkin’s task is learning of the world, thus the separation gards are the most sensitive and most subject to confusion. Thou must seek perfection in their use, as in all things. For now, I promised to teach thee closure and control. Sit before the rock”—he pointed to the featureless slab—“and listen. Stone speaks softly but with utmost authority. Seek its voice. Listen for it alone, and it will root thee firmly. Once thou canst hear the speech of stones, thou shalt begin to understand closure.”

Were he anyone else, I might discount such instruction as lunacy. But the man who had made love to Picus’s garden, tending it, infusing it with life, must be granted trust despite our other disagreements. The effects of his work yet fired my blood. Feeling exceedingly awkward, I sat cross-legged on the damp ground facing the rock and reached out.

“Do not touch the rock!”

I snatched my hand away.

“Our purpose is to develop and exercise thy control of the gards. Human tricks have no place here. Heed the stone. Work at it.”

Balls of Karus, the man is difficult! The task seemed impossible with him standing not two paces behind me, with the riot of smells, sounds, and tastes from my senses swelling my skull to bursting. The traveling had, at least, reduced the uncomfortable involvement of my privy parts, but had presented its own myriad questions. And somehow in this clean and pungent air, my charge to Saverian kept repeating itself in my mind…

I needed to understand Llio’s curse, which condemned halfbreeds to crippling. My sudden conviction that my own existence was intimately entwined with the fate of Navronne had surprised even myself. But surely my life had taken no random course—not from the day I was conceived, not from the day I happened upon the book of maps, not from the day three months past when I lay bleeding in a ditch, only to stagger, blind and ignorant, straight to my mother’s sianou, where a Karish abbot had built his lighthouse. Clyste, a dancer so powerful that the earth itself had chosen her for a guardian, had laid the preservation of the lighthouse…of Navronne…at her son’s feet. My feet. Of a sudden that seemed so obvious. And terrifying.

Listen for the stone. A hand clamped my bare shoulder as a dog’s jaws grip a bone, infusing my body with my vayar’s will. I had to learn before I could act. And so I shoved aside fear and looming destiny for the moment and set to work.

How would one recognize the voice of stone? First concentrate on hearing in preference to the other senses. Dismiss colors, images, tastes, and tactile sensations. Soft, Kol had described it, and so I dismissed the noisy, loud, and brightest sounds, the florid trumps and horns, the bawling of donkeys, the screams of prisoners, and cackles of madmen. With utmost authority, he’d said, and so I dismissed the quiet nattering of birds and insects, the trivial speech of gossips, and the soft mouthings of lovers, the pale colorings of everyday living. As if the entirety of my perceptions were bedcoverings, I peeled away layers, hunting a voice of solidity, of weight, of dense, slow changes…

Saints and angels, this is impossible! As if slogging through desert dunes hunting for one particular grain of sand, I would push one thought aside only to feel five thousand more cascade into its place. But in the end, when all else was stripped away, a soft word rumbled through my spirit like distant thunder, like the shudder of an avalanche halfway across the world. A burden settled on my shoulders…ponderous…immense. Hold. And some interminable time later came another. Forever.

This was no dialect a mouth could imitate. Truly I heard no speech at all—no sentient mind produced such words. Rather I experienced an expression of unyielding heaviness and stalwart density, stiffening my back and chest, forcing thigh and shoulder taut. Unmoving. Unshakable. Just as I was about to release my concentration and declare victory, for of a certain no entity but a mountain itself could speak with such weight, another word boomed from a wholly different direction. Crush. I held breathless, as if the massive boulder and its fellows were grinding me to powder. Pound. Squeeze. This voice drummed cold and harsh. Then came another voice—smaller, lost. Deep. Tumbling. Diminished. Dizzy, I imagined smooth rounded stones washed endlessly in a mountain river, their substance ground inevitably away.

Fascinated, I sorted through the slow-moving litany, seeking the voice of the particular rock before me, for the words came one and then the other with great gaps in between. Was this a conversation? I decided not. A foolish notion, and yet what would I have said a few days previous to anyone who told me I would hear words in the voices of stone?

Shattered. Waves of blazing heat rolled over me, and more of wet and brittle cold, an uneasy pressure culminating in explosive power and breaking—this rock, whose fractured shoulder lay prostrate beside it, whose enduring memory spoke destruction and ending.

I’m sorry, I answered. Not that I believed the slab could think or understand, only that its overwhelming desolation required some response.

Satisfied and weary, I released the sensory textures of the world to intrude once again. How small and weak they seemed. Not trivial. Not unimportant. But eminently controllable. This must be what Kol wished me to understand. Closure.

Excited, I nudged and poked at the clutter, recalling the depths to which I’d gone to hear the stone. The act cleared a small space where I could have a thought without intrusive clamor. Of course, my newfound order quickly collapsed into confusion again. This would take practice. I gave up and opened my eyes.

Mist had crept up the mountain and enfolded me, soft and damp. The bulging moon hung in the sky, thinly veiled like a pureblood bride. A rush of air overhead marked a hunting eagle’s quiet passage.

“This rock misliked its breaking, vayar,” I said, grinning as I straightened my back and twisted my neck, stretching out muscles too long still. Had someone told me I’d sat before the confounded rock three nights in tandem, I could have believed it. I needed a piss so badly, I felt like to burst.

No one answered. And I felt no presence behind me. I peered first over my shoulder and then around the rock.

Kol stood slightly higher on the slope, conversing with another male of his kind, this one shorter and wider in the shoulder, though yet lean and tautly muscled. The moonlight illumined moon-white hair, bound into a long tail tied every knuckle’s length with scarlet. The gard on his broad back—a twisted pine as you might see on a mountain crag—gleamed a sharp and vibrant cerulean. The two of them were arguing and did not glance my way.

I shifted my position slightly, so that I could observe the two less obviously. Clearing away the clutter inside my head, I picked out Kol’s voice.

“…told the tale of my kiran as if he had himself designed it. He touches the earth to know these things. He saw my changes, Stian. He claims to see the kiran patterns themselves.” Kol’s voice rang tight. Anxious.

Stian…my Danae grandfather. The eldest of my family. Wonder held me speechless.

“And this is the same sorcerer who brought death to Aniiele’s meadow? Who violated Clyste’s sianou so that now thy sister, too, lies poisoned by the Scourge? How canst thou look upon a human without loathing? How canst thou ask me to approve a halfbreed as my charge?” The elder crouched beside a cracked slab of rock and picked at a tangle of vegetation, tossing aside dead leaves and stems. “The Cartamandua…healthy for them both thou didst hide this history from me. Humans are a breed of vipers.”

I held my place behind the rock, excitement quenched. Fortunate that experience had given me no expectations of warm family welcomes.

Kol stood his ground above the older man. “Indeed, this Valen broached Clyste’s sianou, but only his companion sullied the water that day. And I’ve told thee repeatedly that he saved Aniiele, though I did not understand how so at the time. The hands of the Scourge had struck down the victim and left him to bleed. But this sorcerer gave back the victim’s choice as to the manner of his passing, and so, at the last, the victim’s blood was freely given. Aniiele lives, Stian sagai, by virtue of this man’s deeds.”

Great Iero’s heart…Kol had watched me murder Boreas! That terrible night had etched a vivid horror on my soul: the black, blood-smeared lips of Sila Diaglou and her henchmen; my old friend captive of agony and despair; the sweet meadow that had felt as a part of heaven stained in so vile a fashion by his blood and torment. Blood freely given…Aniiele lives… Though naught could cleanse the blood from my hands, Kol’s words brought a measure of comfort I had never expected.

“I have tried to dismiss him,” said Kol. “But he sticks to me like thorn. I have named him as insolent as his sire, yet he sounds the streams of earth with reverence and respect, using skills unknown to our kind. He hungers for learning and does not hold back. He led me to the poisoned Well, and I danced beside it. Had my kiran not been flawed with anger and grieving, I might even have reclaimed the Well. And Clyste…Thy daughter was no birdwit child, Stian, tricked into mating with a pithless fool. The Well chose her as its guardian, and she chose the Cartamandua as her child’s sire. She never explained her choice even to me, but just this day I’ve wondered—Feel the waning season, sagai. The true lands are dying. Just this morning I’ve had to reclaim yon garden vale yet again. The Well and the Plain are lost, and my heart speaks what my mind cannot grasp—that the Canon is diminished by far more than we can remember. If this halfbreed’s claim is true, if he can see the patterns, might he be—?”

The elder burst to his feet and shook his finger at his son. “Thou art our answer, Kol, not a halfbreed Cartamandua. Each season brings thee closer to perfection. All recognize it. Thou shouldst dance the Center this season. But thy petulant exile sours the archon and the circles, and as a storm wind among roses hath thine errant rescue of the halfbreed pricked Tuari’s wrath. He would see thee bound and buried for the shame thou hast brought on our kind before Eodward’s son. Only thy irreplaceable ability keeps thee free. Break the halfbreed. Give him over.”

“Have I shamed thee, Stian sagai?” Kol’s words cracked and snapped as does a frozen lake.

The white-haired Dané clasped his hands behind his neck and pressed his arms inward, as if to squeeze out the thoughts Kol had implanted in his head. Only after long silence did he release his grip. Tenderly he drew his fingers along Kol’s hard cheek and tucked stray red curls behind the younger man’s ear. “Nay, jongai, never shame,” he said softly. “It is only…for good or ill, the archon’s word speaks our Law. My human son has met his mortal fate. My daughter ne’er will dance with me again. I would not lose thee, too.”

“Then do not allow Tuari’s blind hatred to speak for thee. This halfbreed is born of Clyste. Her choice. Grant him the walking gard to keep him safe.”

Stian dropped his hand heavily, leaving three small flowers twined in Kol’s hair. “Bring him.”

The true lands are dying. So simple a phrase to leave my heart hollow. Did no one know the reasons? Were even the Danae, who could reshape the earth and command its creatures, confounded by it? What did that do to Osriel’s hope? Navronne’s hope?

Kol tramped and skidded down the slope toward me. Wary of this elder who spoke so casually of breaking halfbreeds, I chose not to let them know I’d overheard. I sprang to my feet and shouted louder than before, “I’ve heard the stones’ voices, vayar. This one is most unhappy.”

“Thou hast heard—” Kol stopped halfway down the slope and shook his head as if to clear it. “Come up, rejongai. We will talk of stones’ voices later. Stian summons thee.”

When I reached Kol’s side, and we climbed slowly toward the waiting elder Dané, he spoke softly. “Thou hast shown reasonable manners thus far, Valen, and I would caution thee to continue. My sire hath only tonight learned of thy parentage…”

“…and he is no happier than I was.”

For the first time I glimpsed amusement twitch Kol’s fine mouth. “Thou hast no measure of his unhappiness, wanderkin. And Stian’s skills make my own appear but a nestling’s tricks.”

I doubted that, having heard how Stian spoke of his son’s talents, having witnessed those talents summon the earth itself to his service.

“And mention not thy female companion or the monk.”

No, Stian would likely have no kind feelings for Eodward’s tutor or a human stranger, however unlikely that Saverian and Kol would repeat my parents’ folly. Indeed, the consideration of a mating between Stian’s son and the physician conjured a delightful image—something like the conjoining of a swan and a woodpecker. A virginal woodpecker.

I smothered a grin. “Aye, relagai. No mention of distracting humans.”

The elder Dané awaited us where the rolling meadow formed a shallow bowl, choked with dead willows and matted vegetation. His fingers stroked the blades of brittle grass that had once stood as tall as my hip.

“Stian sagai”—Kol bowed gracefully before his father—“I present a wanderkin of our blood-clan. I have accepted the charge of his dam to stand as his vayar. He hath pledged himself to explore and learn, and I judge that his talents and experience have given him knowledge sufficient to accept his walking gard. He answers to the name Valen.”

Stian rose. A snarling cat graced the brow and cheek of the broad-shouldered Dané, its long tail twined about his neck. The gards that marked his flat belly, broad chest, and muscled limbs spoke of jungles and hot, languid pools. Despite his white hair, he appeared no older than Prior Nemesio. A man in his prime, with spring-green eyes that scoured me.

“Scrawny. Thick-boned. Weak.” I might have been a cow. An ugly cow.

Kol answered coolly. “Valen followed me from the Sentinel Oak to Evaldamon without rest, sagai. Even so, his strength or endurance is no matter. I seek thy consent only for the walking gard, that Clyste’s child may have skills to elude those who would break him…to our shame. His use of those skills shall be his own burden, not thine or mine. He is not to dance.”

Stian’s lean face resembled Kol’s. The father’s chin sat squarer. The son’s eyes sat deeper. Stian reminded me of the first stone whose voice I’d heard. Unyielding heaviness. Stalwart density.

The elder’s arched nose flared in contempt, and the creases about his eyes deepened. “The Cartamandua bragged that he sowed his seed across the lands and seasons and taunted his kin with his scattered offspring. That such a preening rooster laid hand to Clyste…that she chose prisoning to protect him…Pah!”

“When I was a boy, Janus named the Danae glorious, generous, and hospitable,” I snapped, anger banishing caution. “I refused to believe him, madman that he was, preferring the common wisdom that the long-lived are spiteful, petty, and cruel. A child’s insights can be astonishing, can they not? For even then, I did not know that a Dané had stolen Janus’s wits over a broken promise. Nor had I been ensnared by Danae trickery designed to murder other humans. Nor had I yet experienced the Danae welcome for their imperfect kinsmen. Is your hammer ready?”

“Rejongai!” Kol barked.

I pivoted to face my uncle squarely and bowed. “Teach me, if I have erred, vayar. I assumed that frank speech must be expected between elders and wanderkins. Or perhaps it is believed that halfbreeds do not hear when their lacks and parentage are so unkindly discussed, which, of course, must make it proper to cripple such a flawed being.”

Stian’s complexion darkened. He stepped forward, his fingers splayed in some fashion that caused sweat to bead on my brow and back.

I did not retreat.

“Stian sagai!” Taut as a maid on her virgin night, Kol stepped between us. “I am his vayar. Thou canst not touch him without first touching me.”

“Give him passage, Kol,” said Stian, snarling and pointing to the fractured rock. “I consent. But do it here. Without sparing. Then keep him forever from my sight.”

Chapter 16

While Stian reclined on the fallen slab, glowering at us, Kol led me up the jagged southern face of the rock. Once we had left the ground behind, Kol’s muttering never ceased. “Thou hast the thoughtfulness of a badger, Valen. Did I not warn thee of his temper? Did I fail to mention that this is the same Stian who must be consulted as the archon prepares to break thy knees? For a passing satisfaction, thou hast forfeited every benefit of his tolerance.”

“What hope has any halfbreed of his tolerance?” I called up to my uncle, whose feet dislodged sharp slips of rock that peppered my face. My blood yet ran hot, as well, though it was cooling rapidly as the distance between my feet and the hard ground increased. Why did words bother me so?

The uneven steps, created by long-ago fracturing and smoothed by centuries of wind and rain, grew narrower and impossibly farther apart as we neared the top. I squeezed my fingers into a crevice, even as a fierce wind threatened to rip them out again. Praising Kemen Sky Lord for his moonlight, I gripped with toes curled as if they might hold me to the rock.

“Stian bears no inborn hatred for humankind,” snapped Kol. “He nurtured Caedmon’s son against all custom. Never did he fail in love for Eodward, even when my mortal brother broke his promise to return—a betrayal that cost my sire the archon’s wreath and brought to power those who despise all humans and their works. Never did he fail in love for Clyste, though she tore his heart by refusing to explain who had fathered her child and who had taken the babe away, though it meant he watched her unmade and bound to earth.”

With a last smooth effort Kol stood atop the rock looking down. Wind gusts snatched his hair from out its knot and threatened to tear me from the wall. Every scrap of my will was required to loose my fingerhold and follow him.

“Nor did Stian fail in love for me when he saw I knew Clyste’s secret and would not yield it. When my sire takes his season in this mountain, he feels the dying of the earth and believes some failing of his has left us helpless to change what comes. Thou knowest not of tolerance.”

Of a sudden, my personal grievance seemed petty. Kol’s passionate avowal touched the very heart of my purpose. Out of breath, heart galloping from the climb, I crawled over the rim of the rock. “Kol…relagai…why is the earth dying? In the human realms, matters are far worse than here. Our weather, our crops and herds—”

“Such matters weigh too grievously to be spoken of in passing, and we must begin the rite. I had planned more teaching, but Stian could withdraw his consent as sudden as he granted it. Get thee to the center spire.”

The flattish summit of the rock encompassed only a few quercae around, and most of it comprised the jagged edges of great fractures, impossible to balance on. Even the more solid center was laced with cracks. Deep inside the rock, the rain froze and melted and froze, threatening to splinter it yet again—to its grief, as I had learned not an hour since. But as a spear thrust into a body’s heart, a slender spike of harder stone protruded above the surface to the height of my shoulder.

Kol, of course, reached the spike in two easy leaps. Filled with misgivings about rites that took place atop such perilous perches, I stepped after him, only to wish fervently that I had remained on hands and knees. Every step across the gaping blackness of a crevice sent my stomach plummeting, no matter that most were narrower than my foot. Time and distance reshaped themselves in Aeginea, why not length and breadth as well? Had a crack yawned and swallowed me whole, I would not have been surprised.

Once I joined him, Kol whipped out the length of braided thong that tied up his hair and bound one of my wrists to the narrow column. “Hold up,” I said. “What are you—?”

“The binding is to keep thee safe, rejongai, lest thou shouldst move untimely and fall. Stian insists we work thy remasti here, and not solely that the exposure might discomfort thee. This rock is called Stathero and plunges deep into the heart of this mountain, which is his sianou. Stathero hath a mighty presence, and wind is necessary for this passage as water was needed for the first. But thou needst not worry. I made my own remasti here and emerged unbroken.”

Stian’s sianou. I was not soothed. Stian valued Kol.

My uncle motioned me to stand straighter. “We must imagine that the rain hath sufficed to cleanse thee. I understand this passage comes hard upon thy first. Thy separation gards have not yet settled into their pattern, and thou hast much to learn as a wanderkin. Yet thou art full grown already and resilient, I believe, thus new changes should not daunt thee. Art thou willing to continue?”

I nodded, but kept my mouth closed lest my stuttering resolve declare this lunacy gone far enough.

He inhaled deeply and bowed. I returned the formality as best I could, tethered like a wayward goat. But then a blast of wind staggered me. My fingers closed around the black spire, and my free hand as well, and I wished heartily for a thicker leash.

Kol briefly touched his hands to my shoulders. Then, impossibly, he began to dance. His unbound hair billowing wildly in the wind, he spun on his toes about the perimeter of the rock. One misstep, one miscalculation, and he must crash to earth. No winged angel, he had leaped from the high branches of the ash tree, not flown, and Stathero reached more than three times the ash tree’s height. In fascinated horror I watched the stars grow hazy and the moonlight dim, and I heard no music but the howl of the wind. “Kol, do have a care.”

By the time a breathless Do not be afraid appeared in my head, I could not heed it. The bluster atop Stathero had grown to a shrieking gale, tearing at my hair and rippling my skin, lashing me with particles of ice and whips of cloud. Had I the benefit of clothes, they would have been torn away. My own gards pulsed a dull gray-blue, yet all perception fled as if the south wind blew straight through my head to empty it of thought, of prayer, of memory, of identity, and the north wind reached deep to snatch the very breath from my lungs. The world shrank to a roaring knot of black and gray, threaded with the blue lightning that was Kol. And then the lightning struck and set my back afire.

Somewhere Kol’s voice called to me, but I could not heed it for the burning. The wind tore my free hand from the column and raised me in its giant’s grip. Bound only by Kol’s tether, I fought the wind, drew in my limbs, and crouched lower to find purchase on the rock. I touched my hand to the cold surface and released magic, but I could summon no thoughts save Let me be somewhere else than this and Please don’t let it blow me off the edge and some fool’s apology for causing such chaos atop the broken rock. Roaring, devouring, the lightning reached over my shoulder to fire my breast, and I closed my eyes and screamed…

“It is done, rejongai. Thou art—” The hands that had untied my wrist and now rested so gently on my scorched shoulders withdrew abruptly. “Stian! Sagai! Come up, quickly.”

I was far too weary to heed unexplained urgency. My head rested on my arms. When had I last slept? The bitterly cold world whispered hints of rosecolored light around my eyelids. The wind had settled to a modest bluster, but something blocked it, so that it touched my face only now and then. My legs felt odd. Kneeling. Cold. Heavy. I didn’t bother to look. Moving, thinking, choosing what to do next…those tasks waited far beyond me. I craved sleep.

Approaching voices. “…never seen such…not precisely a hole, but a niche…to fit…”

“…some error in thy kiran…”

“My kiran intruded not upon this rock, sagai.” Kol stood over me as he pronounced this chilly conclusion.

I wished they would take their bickering elsewhere. A sunbeam touched my cheek, a lancet that pricked my veins, infusing warmth and light, as if I had drained the Bucket Knot’s prize butt of mead. The fond memory of my favorite sop-house roused such a prodigious thirst as no man had ever suffered. The wind and lightning had surely burned out every dram of moisture in my body, and I would lick old Stian’s toes did I imagine he had brought a wineskin with his grim company. As I had no wish to be subject to further insults, I kept my heavy head where it was.

“Didst thou sense a breach, Stian? What does it mean that he could do this?”

“No. And I cannot—” The elder Dané bit off his words. Did I not think it ludicrous, I would have called him frighted. “Get him beyond my boundaries, Kol. But let him not stray from thy sight until I come to thee.”

The knots in my burning back did not relax as Stian’s angry presence receded and vanished.

“Come, get up, Valen,” said Kol, tugging on my arm. “Thou’lt have to extricate thyself.”

I lifted my boulder of a head, stared at the Dané’s toes, and realized my eyes were below the level of his feet. So the rest of me…I blinked, squinted, and peered downward.

I sat in a hole—actually more like a small, dark cave hollowed from the surface of the rock. My legs were tucked around a small protrusion, preventing Kol from pulling me straight out.

I looked up at my uncle, whose face was shadowed against a brightening sky. “This isn’t usual, is it?”

“No. This is not usual,” he said, dry as sunburned leaves. “Somehow your remasti has caused an unnatural change in Stian’s sianou, one of the most stable locales in all the Canon.”

“The wind,” I said. “Never felt such a wind. And lightning.”

He gave me his hand, and I untangled myself from the rock that appeared to have melted and hardened again in just such a tidy nest as to hold me. “The wind did not do this, rejongai. Thou hast done it—and if by accident rather than intent, that is perhaps worse. Assuredly were this known among the long-lived, knee breaking would be the kindliest remedy proffered thee.”

I did not want to imagine consequences worse than crippling. Nor did I want to remember my prayers for shelter or think of what power might shape rock. Such wonders could have naught to do with Valen the Incompetent. I stepped out of the little bowl. Movement and the resulting sting front and back reminded me of the occasion for my presence atop this hellacious boulder. Apprehensively I glanced down. Gods among us…

A tangle of fading sapphire traces marked my breast and belly. Kol stepped back and cocked his head to one side, then walked around behind me.

“Stathero hath taken no offense at thy intrusion. Its likeness forms the gard on thy back, and here”—his finger traced an outline on my breast—“I have a thought we may find a sea star, a dog whelk, perhaps other beings from my own sianou.” He sighed, and rueful resignation scribed his face as clearly as his dragon. “To carry so clearly the markings of the places thou hast touched…and so early…those things, too, are not usual.”

Twisting my head in an attempt to see my back near broke my neck. That the marks faded into silver as the sun rose higher did not help. I closed my eyes and pretended I did not feel like some marketplace oddity come from savage lands to swallow fire and juggle hoops.

“Come, Valen. Thy tasks and lessons have scarce begun. And we must leave my sire’s sianou that he may examine this night’s work in peace. Thou’lt come to envision thine own gards, as their use becomes a part of thy nature. If thou art fortunate, their line and color will please thee.”

We began the long climb down Stathero’s jagged south face, a matter that consumed all my attention. Down, even in daylight, was at least as terrifying as up in the dark. Yet from the number of questions that tumbled out of me when my feet at last touched the ground, at least a bit of my mind had been working.

As we hiked down the mountain, away from Stathero and Stian, Kol responded to my barrage of queries with studied patience.

“The gards fade naturally in sunlight, save when we dance or otherwise focus our needs upon them. Once fixed in design, they do not change. Some believe they express a truth about the spirit who wears them…

“Wearing coverings, such as human garb, that hide the gards inhibits our use of them and the power they carry. Excessive covering and lack of use will weaken them. To travel the paths of linked remembrances requires full use of the gards…

“Males with maturing bodies oft bind their loins for dance training to ease soreness, but they cannot persist in it too long else they’ll not progress as they should…

“Yes, we sleep and eat and drink, though not so frequently as humans. Of course we enjoy it. We do not understand why Picus’s ‘one god’ prizes dirt and hunger. The sea doth not starve itself of rain to satisfy the requirements of the Everlasting…

“We do not understand human gods at all, though every human tries vigorously to explain them. The long-lived, as all things—sea and sky, humans and beasts—are both subject to the Everlasting and a part of it. The Law of the Everlasting has charged our kind to tend the land and sea. Thus in our work we seek beauty, balance, vigor and harmony to match that we see in the Everlasting. But even among the long-lived lie disagreements as to the exact nature of the perfection toward which we strive…

“No! As vayar I pledged to answer thy questions as far as I am able. But I cannot and will not discuss the Canon with a halfbreed stripling, though you were to stand twice my size or manifest talents to make your present ones seem small. Thy tasks are other and will never be concerned with the dance.”

And this last answer drove me to distraction. “You’ve told me the world is dying,” I said, as we trotted down the mountainside, “and I believe you. I’ve seen it. My prince, Eodward’s son, a man who studies and reveres the Danae, has brought your archon news of those you call the Scourge—the Harrowers. We fear the Harrowers have some larger plan that threatens your kind. Ignorant as we are, we cannot guess what that might be or what must be done about it. That is what he hoped to learn from the archon…the reason he gave me up to them.” I told myself that knowledge was Osriel’s aim, not solely the power to aid in his unholy mystery, as Elene feared.

Kol listened carefully, gravely, his body poised in interest. But his response, when it came, remained unchanged. “Humans can do nothing. Nor can halfbreeds. I will not discuss this matter with thee.” Which declaration, along with his troubled expression, told me that all of this most certainly had to do with the Canon, and that no matter my wheedling or pleading, he would not budge. All I could do was stay close and hope to change his mind. Perhaps Saverian would have more luck with the monk.

“Attend, stripling!” As we descended into the forest that wrapped the lower slopes of Aesol Mount, Kol broke his broody silence. “If thy walking gards are to be of use, thou must learn. Unless…Perhaps thy human half flags?”

His scorn grated, especially as it reminded me how long it had been since my restless night on the sand and Saverian’s lusciously fat and gritty eggs. “I’m here to learn,” I said.

He acknowledged my declaration with a jerk of his head. “Recall the crowned fir I showed thee. Dost thou see something like here in the daylight? Yes…there. Now consider the one that stood on the ascent from the meadow—the same in its shape against the sky, in its smell and taste, in its presence in the wood, though its location differed greatly…”

As dreams of food and sleep crept into my bones with the allure of nivat, Kol forced me to dredge up every recollection of the path we had been walking when I had asked about his mode of traveling—the slope of the land to either side as well as what had lain under our feet, the configuration of the stars, which I could not remember, and the taste of the air, which, to his surprise, I could. And then he bade me close my eyes and consider the new marks I wore, explaining that it was easier to begin this teaching while I yet could feel the burning of their newness.

“I’ve no expectation that thou’lt accomplish a shift so soon. Subtle moves give always the most difficulty to a stripling. The touch needed is not a grand jequé, but only a small leap from one manner of thinking to another. Haste leads to error. Thou must remember to—”

“Just so. I understand.” Impatient with his tedious schooling, I glared at the treetop. I was accustomed to wielding magic, and the memory and instinct he described as bound into my new markings were but another form of it. My mind held to the recollections and reached into the faint blue aura that I envisioned near my heart, grasping the power I found there…

…and I was tumbling head over heels down a steep gully, snagging limbs and hair on rocks, wild raspberry thorns, and rotting timber. My sublimely graceful vayar, gards gleaming silver in the morning sunlight, stood on the path at the verge of the gully, one arm wrapped about a stately fir, laughing at me. It was worth the uncomfortable exercise to see him laugh. If his grieving made the mountains weep, Kol’s merriment made the sunlight shimmer.

“Another lesson, my cocky stripling,” he said, once on the near side of sober again. “One must remember to decide a position for one’s feet, else one may topple from a mountaintop, step into a lake or tar pit, or slide…most wretchedly…into a ravine.”

I struggled helplessly in my nest of raspberry thicket and rotted hawthorn, laughing, too, despite my humiliating display, the painful scrapes and bruises atop my already tender skin, and the long, steep climb awaiting me. Even beings of legend could not always get things right.

When at last I climbed onto the path, I stretched out my blood-scoured arms. “Tell me, vayar…”

“The gards survive all but the most violent wounding,” he said, all seriousness again. “On our way, we shall practice closure. Clearly thou didst not find true closure at Stathero, if thine ears yet reported sound. Stone hath no voice.”

“Nay, vayar, I heard them, even Stathero…”

Kol refused to believe my claim to have heard the speech of stones. Evidently the exercise was supposed to result in the silence I ultimately found. He set me other problems as we walked: to describe the scent of thistledown from one particular withered plant along the path, to isolate the feel of salt spray on the wind, carried from the northern sea. Some I managed, some I did not. But I felt more in control of my senses, and came to believe I could learn to pick and choose what I saw and heard.

“Control and discrimination must become as natural as breathing,” said Kol. “With practice, it will.”

He jumped from a steep hillside, where he’d had me examining the movement of the soil sifting ever so slowly downward, and landed softly on the path far below.

I flattened myself to the scrubby ground and crept downward, my tired feet skidding—speeding the hillside’s centuries-long collapse.

When I joined my uncle on the path, pleased I had not slipped and broken my neck, he huffed scornfully. “Thou hast the capacity to jump as I do, if thou’lt but try. Drive thy spirit upward with the leap and hold it firm and soaring until thy feet touch solidly. It is will that counters the forces that draw us to earth.” Without waiting for me to so much as catch my breath, he marched down the path. “Next task: Tell me which elements key our shifts on the way down. Be attentive.”

After some half quellé of rocks and roots enough to make a goat stumble, Kol halted and asked me how many changes we had made since he had jumped from the hillside. The shifting exercise and the downward climb had sapped nearly the last of my endurance, and the wintry air had begun to penetrate the shield of warmth I had enjoyed since leaving Picus’s house. Unable to summon words enough to describe or even count what I’d seen, I sat on my haunches, cleared away the leaves and debris from a square of earth, and sketched out a map in the soft dirt.

The exercise helped refresh my mind. I pointed to an angled square that signified a rock. “You shifted here, where that squarish boulder hung out over the path. Again here…I think…where the pond was choked with dead leaves. And here”—I pointed to a split in the path—“or just beyond…I’m not sure. Here, perhaps?”

Kol looked from my face to the sketch and back again. “Dost thou mock me?” he said stiffly. “Thinkest thou my object is to shame thee, that thou must attempt the same?”

I blinked, entirely confused. “No…I’m sorry…what is it? You asked how many shifts. My head is too tired to think. I drew the map so I could show you.”

“Thou canst untangle such markings?” he said. “Like Janus’s papers? Picus’s books?”

“Read? Not words, no. I’ve never—” As the underlying sense of his question struck me, I understood his surprise…and his offense. I was both and neither, Osriel had said. “I cannot read words…books…the writing on pages as humans can. They appear naught but blotches and a jumble. However, the lines and patterns of a map, the pictures and symbols, those make sense to me. But you…and the others of your kind…can’t sort out those, either?”

“We see what lives. What moves. We understand bulk and shape and eating and purpose. Scratchings on beast skins or wood chips or dirt have no meaning to us.”

“And yet, your eyes can interpret these.” I held out my arm where pale fronds of sea grass twined my fingers.

His eyebrows rose. “Thy gards live—a part of thee, as mine are a part of me.”

I bowed to him in sincere apology. “Forgive me, vayar. I did not understand. Another lesson learned.”

He jerked his head and walked ahead. “Attend, rejongai…”

Feeling as lively and attentive as a post, I stayed close enough to follow Kol’s shifting paths the rest of the way, but was incapable of analyzing his moves or the terrain. When the woodland and Picus’s little garden vale came into view at last, I had fallen considerably behind.

Kol halted a little upstream from the monk’s tidy plots, and by the time I joined him, he had plunged his hand into a reed-shadowed backwater and pulled out a plump silver fish. As he stilled its flopping distress with a rock, I knelt beside the pool and plunged my head into the water. Though chilled already, I hoped the icy bath might set my sluggish thoughts moving again. I had so many questions I needed to ask, so many lessons to learn. I could not allow him to think me weak or foolish.

But when I sat up again, all I could think was how fine the sun felt on my back, and how soft the earth under my knees, and I could not help but sag into a formless heap on the stream bank, mumbling something to Kol about taking just one moment to consider all I’d learned.

Rosemary and basil. Fish. My stomach near caved in upon itself at the fragrant wood smoke. I blinked and stirred, grimacing at the twigs and pebbles embedded in my ribs. One numb hand prickled painfully as I raised my head. An odd coating of ash dirtied that hand, and I tried for a goodly while to brush it away before remembering that the livid marks were a part of me. I sat up quickly.

Thin blue smoke rose from a patch of sandy stream bank a few paces from my feet and dispersed slowly above a sea of yellow grass and the green islands of Picus’s garden plots. A bundle wrapped in blackened leaves sizzled in the little fire—the source of the savory smells. Though steep-angled sunlight sculpted the nearby slopes, deepening the colors of the meadow to ocher and emerald and highlighting the splash of dark trees to either side, iron-gray clouds obscured Aesol Mount and all else to the east and south of us. I stretched and shivered, then stepped closer to the little fire and sat on my haunches.

Kol danced in the yellow grass, or rather practiced, I guessed, as he repeated a particular spinning leap for the fifth time. I felt no stirring in the earth or magic in the still, cold autumn afternoon. He stopped, stretched out first one leg behind him and then the other, bent himself in an impossible arc to one side and then another while clasping his hands at his back. Then he began again. Arms set in a graceful upward curve, now step, leap into the air higher than my head, spin with legs straight together, land like a settling leaf. Shake out the tight legs. Step back. Pause. Arms up, step, leap, spin. Step back…Whatever difference might exist between one exemplar and the next was far too subtle for my judgment. How could a man force his body into such feats?

I rose onto my toes, then bent my knees and jumped as high as I could, doing my best to turn but halfway round as I did so. My leap might have cleared the height of a small dog, and my feet struck earth so hard I rattled my teeth and came near falling in the fire. How could one even begin without music?

I squatted and touched the earth, not seeking, so much as wondering…and laughing a little…at what strange byways my thoughts traveled nowadays. Not so long ago my mentor was tidy Brother Sebastian, and my worst trouble the good brother’s scolding me for a dirty cowl or discovering my inability to read. Danae did not read. Danae danced, healed, and moved, soundless and graceful, through the world like the bird that glided in circles high above the meadow.

“Hast thou failed in attentiveness and burnt my fish, rejongai?” Somehow Kol had come up behind me without my knowing.

I jumped up, my face blooming hotter than the coals. “I didn’t know you intended me to—”

But the arch of his eyebrow and a particular compression of his lips gave me to believe, of a sudden, that I had no need to defend myself against his charge. And in the moment I comprehended that, I understood a number of other things.

“You have bested me, uncle, I’ll confess it. All my claims of strength and endurance and learning crumbled at your assault. I suppose I’m fortunate that I didn’t step off a cliff. I could neither have walked one more step nor imbibed one more lesson, which, I’m coming to think, is one of those very lessons you wish me to learn. And if you truly relied on me to heed your cooking, you’re neither so wise a vayar as I’m coming to suspect nor so vigilant a guardian.”

“To recognize a body’s limits is surer protection than gards or human magic. I have pledged to ensure thy safety. The lesson had to be taught.” He retrieved a stick and arranged the coals piled about his wrapped fish. “In truth thou didst surpass every boundary I foresaw. And I am not sure what to do about that.”

My hopes, despite the tempering of truth, surged anew. His manner invited me to broach the most important topics again. “Relagai…”

The sunlight vanished. I shivered and searched for words sufficient to express my need. Snowflakes drifted from the overripe clouds. A red-tailed hawk circled lazily above the meadow. Kol turned his fish with a stick, frowned, and glanced upward. He sat up sharply.

“Valen,” he said, eyes fixed on the bird. “Canst thou find Picus’s house, by gard or eye or thy human magic?”

Of a sudden, the air thrummed with danger. My gaze swept the forest edge and the ash tree where he’d sat when I joined him in the night, then shot up to the bird, which had completed a loop and now arrowed toward Kol. I had walked here from the hut without any magic. “I believe so. What’s wrong?”

“Kneel and bow thy head so the bird cannot note thy unmarked skin. Do it now.” His command brooked no question. “When I leave the meadow, be off to Picus and await my return. Or Stian’s. Do not walk the world unguarded.”

I did as he said, extending my legs and bending over them in one of his stretching postures. The only reason to hide my unmarked face and groin would be to pass me off as a mature Dané. Which meant that someone—the bird’s master?—must be watching. “Who’s coming?”

“Hush.” He tossed his stick into the fire and rose. Wings ruffled. “In the Canon, bird, and honor to thy master and mistress.” I felt no presence save Kol and the bird. “Fortunately I’ve completed both work and practice this day, thus can answer their summons promptly.”

No one responded. My uncle’s chilly declarations seemed directed solely to the bird.

“I prefer to travel uncompanioned, as you know, but of course, I cannot prevent thee. Wait…”

Kol’s hand rested lightly on my back for a moment. “It seems Tuari and Nysse require my presence, Jinte. Keep thy spine stretched and loose until the finger numbness subsides. ’Tis the surest method for relief.”

I waved a hand and shifted my position slightly as if heeding his advice…as if the bird might remember my false name or how I had responded to the prompting. The evening’s chill settled deeper.

The wings ruffled again and flapped, and after a moment, a sidewise glance showed Kol striding down the meadow and the hawk gliding in lazy circles above him. Once they had vanished into the evening, I jumped up and raced into the wood in search of Picus and Saverian. Kol’s abandoned fish had charred to ash.

Chapter 17

“The messenger bird is like to be a friend of the archon, one who failed to make the fourth passage.” By the light of the twig lantern, Picus picked bits of leaf and thorn from a sheep’s skin. “ ’Tis the common fate of those who cannot dance their Danae magic well enough or learn the skills required of them.”

“They’re forced to become birds if they fail to make the fourth passage?” Saverian paused in her frenetic pacing to gape at Picus as if he’d said Magrog himself would sit down with us to dine.

Saverian’s relentless urgency had me gobbling much too fast. The woman had come near taking off my head with an oak limb when I refused to leave straightaway to take her home to Renna. The woman and the monk were bundled in cloaks and blankets, while I sat comfortably on the snow-dusted ground in shirt and braies, sopping up Picus’s boiled turnips with a wad of doughy bread. Though I mourned Kol’s fish, I would have relished far worse than the monk’s meager fare by this time. Evidently two full days had passed since I’d gone off with Kol.

“None are forced into bird form,” said Picus, scratching his arms thoughtfully before returning to his wool picking, “unless they’ve sore trespassed their Law, in which case their new form would more like be stone or snake. The alter choice for failure is to live on as a hunter, artisan, weaver, or some such like, and such is not a happy life for a Dané. While their fellows dance, their own bare faces wrinkle and their bodies fail near quick as us human folk. Without a sianou they will ever feel rootless and lost. Most prefer inhabiting bird or beast to such shame, though I’ve always been of a mind ’tis a perversion of the ordo mundi as if ’twere I had walked into Navronne as king instead of my good prince. But at the least, they choose it for themselves.”

My hand paused twixt bowl and mouth, soup dripping from the bread onto my knees. “The hawk was a person, then, thinking and listening…” Which explained Kol’s little deception. A person…trapped in that feathered body. And in Moth’s owl, too. I had already decided that Moth, not Kol, had led me into murder in the bogs. I shuddered.

“Nay. No person. ’Tis said they lose most faculties, retaining only what wit their companions especially nurture.” Which made sense if the person had no soul to begin with.

I stuffed the bread into my mouth, making sure to savor every morsel. I’d sworn not to think of souls. I’d plenty more worries closer to hand. “Why would Kol be summoned so abruptly? He seemed wary, but not afraid.”

Picus shook his head. “Tuari hath neither favor nor use for Stian or his kin. If the archon has staunch witnesses to thy rescuing, he’ll happily bury Kol.”

“Bury…” Of course, that’s why Kol had said Stian might come for me, if he could not. The gummy bread clogged my gullet. “Iero’s grace, I must go after him…save him.”

“Fie on that, lad. Ye’d make his good deed a waste and end up broken and prisoned alongside him. None’s so clever as Kol, and he’ll not be easily locked away. They need him.”

I recalled Stian’s words. “Because of his dancing.”

“Because his line is fertile!” Saverian’s declaration burst out like floodwaters through a breached dike. “Picus says the Danae have always been slow to reproduce—likely a matter of their long lives—but the problem has grown worse in the years since Llio’s curse. Children have grown so rare among them that these Harrower poisonings are devastating. They can’t replace those lost. For a Danae coupling to produce two offspring, as Kol and Clyste’s parents did, is unheard of. That’s why they were enraged when Clyste’s child disappeared. To learn that she wasted her fertility on a human mate has surely infuriated them all the more.”

“Aye,” said Picus. “They’re sore diminished from their greatest glory. Tuari blames humankind for all their ills.” The monk’s big hands fell still, and he closed his eyes as if praying. “Sin begets sin.”

“Fear for survival will drive a species beyond custom and boundaries, Valen.” The physician crouched at my side, her jade-colored eyes drilling holes in my skull. “Picus says that this Tuari’s despite is so great that any bargain worked with a human—especially one of Eodward’s kin—is surely devised to turn upon the human party…”

…and Elene believed that Osriel had come to Aeginea to bargain for power—a magical alliance to fuel the dread enchantment waiting at Dashon Ra. I could not imagine the magnitude of the working Osriel planned. But surely a backlash from its failure would be his ruin…and Navronne’s. No wonder Saverian was agitated.

The monk filled my emptied bowl from the ale crock at his elbow, glancing from one of us to the other, his eyes sharply curious. “What troubles thee, friends?”

I took a swallow of thin ale. “Good Picus, I must get this lady home. She guards Prince Osriel’s health and has been from his side too long. As Kol can care for himself, I’ll see her safely back to her duty. We’ll need a few provisions for the road, lest my poor skills delay us.”

“But ye said Kol told ye to bide.” His sheepskin dropped into the mud, and his broad brow knotted in concern.

Who knew how many human days had passed since Osriel had given me up to the Danae? Instinct told me that the winter solstice raced toward us with the speed Nemelez drove her chariot of ice through her demonic lover’s fiery kingdom.

I drained the bowl and returned it to the monk. “We dare not wait. Tell Kol I’ll return here as soon as may be.”

We took our leave within the hour. Now I’d had a little rest and food, the cold did not bother me so much, but we bundled my thick hose, winter tunic, belt, boots, and pureblood cloak with Picus’s dried fish, a skin of his ale, a clay bowl, and the remainder of his bread. Picus insisted Saverian keep the blanket he had lent her. “Best I not inhale the scent of a woman lest my dreams illustrate the sins I’ve banished from head and heart.”

I bowed deeply, crossing my clenched fists over my heart—Gillarine Abbey’s signing speech for farewell and a reminder to remain staunch in one’s vows and devotions. Picus, eyes bright, returned the gesture solemnly. “I shall sincerely try to hold fast to my tottering virtue, Brother Halfbreed. But if a word as to the meaning of this haste should fall upon mine ear at thy return, I do not think Iero would grudge it.”

“When I can, Brother. When I can.” I grinned and waved as we headed into the chill autumn night.

At every step of those first hours, Saverian and I worked at cross purposes, my long gait unaccommodating to her quick, careful steps, my inclination to go over obstacles while she preferred under or around. And though I could not see well in the thick dark of the woodland, I could rely on my bent. She could see nothing at all. After she stumbled for a third time, near breaking her skull, I took her arm to steer her between the bare limbs and woody underbrush that snagged her cloak and skirts. That only made our disparities more awkward.

Before long, she sputtered and shook off my hand. Waving me to go on ahead, she snatched up a dry limb and set it gleaming with yellow light that had naught to do with fire. “I’ll see to my own feet, thank you. By the Mother, how ever does a blind person manage without going mad?” She dogged my steps, tight-lipped save when urging me to go faster.

Happily, we soon emerged into the open, gently rolling country to the south. I knelt and sought a route to the Sentinel Oak, the only way I knew to get us back to the human plane. As in the garden meadow, the landscape took shape upon my mind’s canvas in a single grand leap of understanding, rather than the slow building of the past. A confusion of tracks sprawled before us—migrations of great herds of elk and wild horses, footpaths of deer and Danae folk, and a great blight of blood in some past epoch—but no settled roads. And, unfortunately, the oak lay hundreds of quellae to the southwest, beyond expansive forests, a sizable rise in elevation, and at least two major river crossings. To travel the distance afoot would take us more than a month.

“But you’ve learned to journey as Kol does,” said Saverian, when I announced this unhappy news. Like a fine hunting hound, she seemed poised to charge off in whatever direction I pointed.

“Only once,” I said, sitting back on my heels and scratching my head. “And yes, I ended up in approximately the correct location. But I’ve too little familiarity with Aeginea to know many landmarks to use for shifting. Danae wanderkins are supposed to explore for years to learn the landforms and plants and trees and such.”

Snowflakes flurried from overburdened clouds, melting quickly on our cloaks. A frost wind from the south had whipped the woman’s deep-hued cheeks to a rosy brown. I’d been so sure I could get us home. Cocky wanderkin, Kol would say. Recognize thy limits.

Saverian was not so easily discouraged. “Osriel says that human lands and Aeginea are actually the same; we just experience different aspects of them in the two planes. You’ve traveled all over. You know Navronne.”

“But no Navron cities exist in Aeginea, no roads, no houses. The trees and forests are all grown up differently…”

Yet she was right. The terrain should be the same. Since I had walked into Aeginea, I had seen the chasm of the River Kay, the familiar climb from the valley of the Kay toward the mountains, and the rock of Fortress Groult, even though the fortress itself did not exist in this plane.

“Come on.” I made for the top of a rocky little knob half a quellae ahead, stopping only when I reached its crest. Squinting and puzzling at the landforms, I reached up to clear the melted droplets from my lashes, only to see a sickly thread of pale blue snaking about my fingers and up my arm into my sleeve. Laughter welled up from deep inside.

“The humor in this situation entirely escapes me,” said Saverian, heaving and gasping as she finished the sharp little climb and halted beside me. Her magelight had paled to the color of cream, and breath plumes wreathed her head. Her vehemence triggered a bout of coughing, aborted by a great sneeze.

“Are you all right?” I said. Her flushed cheeks flared brighter than her magical light.

“Well enough, considering I’m hiking into nowhere with a man whose walking pace is a modest gallop. Is that the joke?”

“I knew you’d wish no coddling,” I said, shoving my bundle of clothes and provisions into her hands. “You should have yelled at me to slow down.”

I unlaced my braies and shirt. She stared as if I were a lunatic. Which I believed I was. “Indeed, physician, I am the great joke. Here I’ve been so preoccupied with Danae secrets, princely deviltry, Kol, Elene, and what in Iero’s name will happen to the lighthouse, not to mention this confounded route finding and the nature of Aeginea, that I’ve completely forgotten my lessons. If you’ll pardon my boldness, I am going to remove my clothes just now and attempt to do as you suggest—see if I can make some use of this motley collection of strangeness that is my body. Yell at me if you see anyone coming.”

She held out her hand to take my shirt, a smile tweaking the thin lips into something altogether more pleasant than their usual sardonic set. She waved her hand at my disrobing. “Please. Do whatever you must to get me home.”

I grinned and left the rest of my garb in her custody. For certain she was no wilting ninny.

Sitting cross-legged atop the little knob, I listened for the voices of stone. It seemed to take quite a while—or rather I managed it only after setting aside all fretful sense of time. Once I had rediscovered that quiet place where only a few faint declarations of Forever and Grind intruded, I allowed my Danae senses free rein and used the cascade of sensation to expand and deepen my Cartamandua seeing.

The cool dry air of summers past, along with the sharp blasts of past winters, teased my skin. The rich scents of soil and the buried roots filled my nostrils. I experienced not only the sounds and smells of wild Aeginea, but those of human habitation as well: sod houses, flocks of grazing sheep, the sharp bite of axes and tools. The blight of human blood and death near choked me. I explored deeper. Farther.

Were we walking the lands of Navronne, I would declare our location to be the upland moors of far northeastern Ardra, a long-settled expanse of sheeplands, grouse, and heather, whose streams and springs fed the riverlands of Morian. Indeed I had marched through those very moors with King Eodward’s legions, camped and foraged on that land—this very land—fought a great bloody battle here with the Dasseur, the barbarians who had stripped the Aurellian Empire of its northwest territories. Eodward had triumphed in that battle, making his stand on a dimpled fell that was the highest point of the region. Even then the barren mound, shaped so like a young girl’s breast, had reminded me of Mon Viel in the hills of southern Ardra, a region as familiar as my hand.

Carefully I shuffled through the cascade of impressions like a gem merchant through a bag of rocks, choosing only those that came through my eyes, while silencing all the rest. Then I stood up and peered again into the night.

As had happened on that strange night of my nivat madness, when Osriel and Voushanti and I had tracked Gildas’s flight from Gillarine, the landscape gleamed of its own pale light. The route my Cartamandua bent had prescribed stretched south and west across this luminous terrain as if a giant had unrolled a spool of gray floss and left it behind to guide us. But it was the landforms I examined.

“There,” I said, pointing to the gentle mound that sat in the center of the blood-tainted ground between us and the southern horizon…and, at the same time, far past it to that other swelling prominence some two hundred quellae to the south, known in the realm of humankind as Mon Viel. Reveling in the success of my combined Danae–human magic, I was already recalling the feel of the springy turf beneath my feet, the scents of wild lavender and lemon thyme, the calls of meadowlark and blackthrush that spoke freedom to a child run off from home in stinking, noisy Palinur. “We’re going there.”

Ignorance and inexperience put a quick damper on my satisfaction. Each leg of our journey took longer than it should. We had walked halfway to the horizon before I could join the knowledge of my senses with the power of my walking gards to make the shift southward to the slopes of Mon Viel. We were yet in Aeginea, of course, for the nearby heights where Caedmon’s royal city ought to rise in all its glorious might sat dark and bare.

Next it required three false starts before I gave up trying to use a rocky little grotto to walk into a similar nook I remembered from my journey in Mellune Forest. Perhaps I recalled too little of the snow-drowned nook’s scents or actual conformation to make the Danae enchantment work.

And then I discovered the risks of impatience when I tried to use a boggy spring surrounded by dry vineyards to plant us in the vastly different boglands of the River Kay. Saverian and I both spent two hours spewing our last month’s meals from fore and aft into the muck and praying we would expire before we drained ourselves to raw husks. Human bodies—even those half Danae—were evidently not meant to move through the world so abruptly.

Subtle moves, Kol had told me. I now understood that he’d not meant subtle in distance, but in distinction. To shift from one steep, shaded mountain path to another so much like it was easy, even were they a hundred quellae apart. To shift from a puddle among barren hills to a forest-bounded bogland was possible, but would wring a body inside out. At least I had remembered to “place” my feet, so that we writhed and retched on mostly solid ground and not neck deep in mud.

“If you can find anything to burn, I can spark a fire,” said Saverian in a croaking whisper. “Tea will get us on our feet again.”

She sat halfway up the steep little bank, her head resting on our provision bundle nestled in her lap. A seep around the woody roots of a larch had induced her to crawl up the bank to clean her face and hands. That she could consider doing more stoked my admiration. I yet wallowed in my own stink half in the mud, half out, thoroughly humiliated, exhausted, and shivering. I wasn’t sure anything could help.

“I’ll find something,” I said, dragging myself to my feet. This bog was the last place in the world I intended to die. Did I touch this muck with magic, I was certain I would hear the wails of drowned Harrowers, even across the barriers of the human plane and Aeginea.

I dragged handfuls of dry sedge and leatherweed and a few dead alder saplings from high on the bank to Saverian’s feet, and tore open cattail pods to provide tinder. Half an hour more and we sipped lukewarm tea made from Picus’s blessed herbs.

“I’m sorry,” I said, clutching the bundle of clothes in my lap, my throbbing head propped on one hand. “I need a bit more schooling.”

“You should put on those clothes,” said Saverian, ever the physician, as she passed me the blackened clay bowl. “Your lips are blue, and not with Danae sigils, and I can walk not one quat farther tonight. Assuming this is night.”

I gazed dully at the sky. Though it had gleamed azure in the wintry daylight at Mon Viel, it now glowered with the blue-black sheen of a magpie’s wing. I could not sense the sun anywhere. Snow dusted the landscape, and wind moaned over the bog, rattling the leafless willows.

“We can’t stay here,” I said. “This is Moth’s sianou. She hates humans—and has proved it. Would as soon drown us all as look at us. We can walk all the way to the oak if need be. Rest, get your legs back, and then we go.”

I downed a swallow of the rapidly cooling tea and passed it back. The pulse and twitter of a curlew echoed through the morbid stillness, reminding me of the deserted mine above Renna. “When are you going to tell me what Osriel plans?”

“I will not. I cannot.” She threw a rotting limb on the fire, and a veil of sparks spurted upward.

“Have you seen the place where he imprisons the souls? Have you felt them? It’s wrong, Saverian. Evil. They are so angry, so terrified, filled with hate. I’ve never felt the like.”

“Impossible. Those people are dead. Emotions are created by the living body and mind in response to changing circumstances. They are no more than the body’s humors infusing the blood, like the tincture in an alchemist’s vial. There is no such thing as a soul.” Her utter conviction was tinged with a bleak and weary sadness that surprised and grieved me. What had happened to her to cause so sere a vision of life?

“Then what does Osriel capture when he seals a dead man’s eyes in a calyx?”

“Waste. Dust. Echoes of life.”

“So why not tell me what he thinks to do with his nasty treasury? Certainly it’s not too dread to speak of, if he but plays tricks with dust and waste.”

“He is my lord and my friend. I will not violate his trust.”

I wished I had the wit to argue with her. So sharp and scholarly a mind as hers should not be burdened with so barren a philosophy. She was no ale-house philosopher, taking a position for the sake of argument. Yet having so recently examined my own state and come up with no conclusive evidence of a soul, I had no weapons to bring to a joust about the rest of humankind. And while I remained firm in my belief that the essence of a human person lived beyond the last breath, I certainly didn’t want Saverian providing sensible evidence to crush my own hope for the same.

As the last of our pitiful lot of fuel fell to ash, I stood up, slung the bundle over my shoulder, and pointed south along the bank, where in the other realm so like to this, Thalassa had escorted me toward Gillarine. “Let’s go.”

Saverian wasted no breath on conversation along the way, so I amused myself imagining what various monks would say did I come striding through their gates clad only in blue fire. And then I thought of Thalassa, and, for the first time in my life, found myself wishing I could talk with my sister…half-sister…no, half-niece…now. A priestess of the Mother, she could tell me of souls. It might be easier to hear the truth from her than from Picus or Saverian.

We left the treacherous bogland and soon trudged across the river-looped valley floor where Gillarine ought to lie. Clumps of slender beeches dotted the grassland, their trunks split and peeling. The limbs of scattered oak scrub curled like the legs of a dead spider. And everywhere patches of blackened, slimy grass testified to the land’s death—to my mother’s death and Gerard’s death—to poisoning by people who stole innocents like Jullian and slaughtered bold and noble spirits like Abbot Luviar.

I knelt and touched the damp earth, snowflakes melting on the back of my blue-scribed hand. The land’s sickness coursed through me like a river of sewage, bearing the stink of betrayal, mindless ravaging, and death. I welcomed it, allowing it to fuel anger and temper the steel of my resolve. Whatever I had to do to stop this, I would do.

“We need to move,” said Saverian, tapping a cold hand on my shoulder. “This place is too open. Someone…something…unfriendly lurks here.”

“Did you not say such feelings are but a body’s humors mingling?” I said, bitterness overflowing. “You are part alchemist, Mistress Mage, so repair them yourself.” But I rose and led her southward.

Recovered equanimity told me when we passed beyond the boundaries of my mother’s poisoned resting place. The gloom lightened a bit. I could sense the sun nearing the zenith behind the layered cloud. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was feeling a bit useless earlier and should not have taken it out on you.”

“We could both use a real bed.” Save for a fleeting smile, her expression was etched with determination. What drove her? Never had I known a woman so complicated. Strong, though. And honest. I could understand why Osriel trusted her with his life—and why he valued her prickly company.

“You never told me what you learned of Llio’s curse.”

She hitched her cloak about her shoulders. “It’s difficult to know what to believe. Picus swallows every tale and grinds it in the mill of his faith. Simply stated, Llio broke the world. Somehow. Picus says that Danae speak of four sacred places, the first sianous where the first four of their kind were born of the Everlasting, brought to life and given bodily form. These four are the Mountain, the Plain, the Sea, and the Well.”

As always, the mention of sianou joining made my skin creep. “My mother’s Well.”

“Exactly so. The guardians of the Four are always exceptional dancers. Llio, the halfbreed son of a Dané named Vento and a human woman, became the chosen of the Plain. Among his many couplings—it seems most Danae are not singular in such matters—Llio mated with a human woman named Calyna, and got her with child.”

Saverian warmed to her storytelling, as we ascended the terraced foothills that would lead us to the Sentinel Oak. The snow swirled thicker, and the wind blustered as we came out of the valley.

“On the spring equinox, Llio attacked another Dané during the dancing of the Canon, and in the ensuing struggle, Llio died. From that hour the Plain was lost to the Canon. Picus does not know why or how—he babbled about human legends and the lost city of Askeron. But the Danae blame Llio’s half-human temper for this great breaking and their decline in fertility that followed. They vowed that no halfbreed would ever dance the Canon.”

“Thus they break our knees.”

“That’s only the beginning of the deviltry.” Saverian double stepped to catch up with me again, and I tried to slow my pace to accommodate her. “Llio’s father, Vento, held Calyna captive until the child was born, then drove the mother from Aeginea, while keeping the infant. But Calyna knew of the Danae’s weakness—this bleeding rite they call the Scourge—and she bled some poor human to poison Vento’s sianou when he took his sleeping season. As it happened, Vento also had a full-blooded Danae elder son, none other than Tuari, the present archon. Tuari used the child to trick Calyna to fall off a cliff! He claimed he did it to prevent Calyna telling other humans about the Scourge. But Stian, who was archon, believed Tuari did the murder from shame and vengeance, and he condemned Tuari to take beast form every summer until Llio’s child reached maturity.”

“So Llio and Tuari were half-brothers,” I said, astonishment stopping me in my muddy tracks. “Saints and angels, no wonder Tuari has no use for human folk. Or for Stian’s family either.”

Saverian bobbed her head in a most satisfied manner. “Humans are not the only fools who cripple themselves with lust. Sin begets sin. And did you guess? The child of Llio the halfbreed and poor murdered Calyna was the same crippled halfbreed girl Ronila who stained Picus’s virtue!”

“Gods!”

As all these threads raveled and unraveled, our urgency redoubled. We hurried through the chilly gloom, wondering what it meant that the Danae had now lost two of their four holiest places. And we speculated about Ronila’s evidence that had driven Picus to such extremity as deserting Eodward and living out his life in penance. Saverian said the monk had refused to discuss the woman.

At last, weary beyond bearing, we dragged ourselves up the last steep rise. Across the rock-laced meadow stood the Sentinel Oak. Saverian leaned heavily on my arm, no longer reluctant to accept help. “Too much to hope that Osriel is camped at Caedmon’s Bridge,” I said.

“He told me he intended to return to Renna straightaway from Aeginea. But then again, he didn’t mention he planned to leave you tied to a tree with broken knees. Damnable prick.”

Smiling at her vehemence, I knelt and touched earth. I needed only my Cartamandua bent to find my way back to the human realm from here.

The patterns of the Danae were scribed everywhere upon this land—the fine sprays of silver, whorls and roundels, ovals, spirals, and multiple sets of straight lines that crossed to form gridlike shapes. What marvelous patterns must radiate from the four great sianous, the oldest, the first.

Though, for the first time, I felt close to answers, I’d no time to consider the earth’s mysteries. We needed to find our prince and prevent him using whatever grant he had bargained from the Danae, lest the backlash of Tuari Archon’s hatred make our problems worse. Magic flowed through my fingertips as I held in mind Caedmon’s Bridge…the grim verges of Evanore…the snow-buried barrens we had left behind…every edge and sweep etched on my memory. And instinct led my eye to one bright track leading into a thicker night and deeper winter—into human lands.

“Valen!” Saverian’s tense whisper brought my head up. She crouched beside me, pointing to the Sentinel Oak. From beneath its bare canopy three Danae moved deliberately toward us. Likely it was my imagination that told me two of them carried wooden clubs.

I grabbed Saverian’s hand and bolted. The guide thread led us straight toward the spot where Caedmon’s Bridge should span the Kay, and I dared not deviate from it in hopes I could take us to the human realm some other way.

The Danae changed course to intercept us. We had no hope of outracing them, and naught would prevent them following us into the human plane. I needed to shift us far from this place.

As we sped across the hillside, I focused on the great rocky pinnacle that overlooked this mead and recalled another rocky peak that overlooked a barren hillside. Both of them should house a fortress. “Physician,” I said, breathless. “Pin your eyes straight ahead. Yell at me the instant you glimpse Caedmon’s Bridge.”

She jerked her head. The blood pounding in my ears near deafened me, as I concentrated on the fortress rock and the thick straight walls I knew existed atop it in the human realm. At the same time, I built the image of the second fortress: its rarefied air, its looming mountain neighbors, its thick, safe stone, the smell of warriors’ piss along the inner walls, the welcoming fire of torches and the boom of the sonnivar, pitched to match no other in any world. Not at all a subtle leap.

The Danae cut a swath of sapphire through the snowy night. Moth wings gleamed upon a female’s breast and brow. I gritted my teeth and dragged Saverian faster, gripping the dual images of the fortress. This would be enough. It had to be.

“The bridge!” gasped Saverian at the same time a killing frost enveloped us.

Trusting her word that we had entered the human plane, I shifted course abruptly, angling back across the hill toward the rocky summit of Fortress Groult, putting us directly on a course for the closing Danae. Then I reached into the blue fire that raged from my own breast and drew forth magic…

Harsh breath crackled and froze the hairs in my nose. My bare feet skidded on a patch of ice, and as Saverian and I crashed to earth, I whooped in exultation. We lay tangled in a heap at Renna’s gates, and the Danae were nowhere to be seen.

Even the blinding pain in my head and the wrenching spasms in my empty gut could not damp my good humor. I had seen across the boundaries of Aeginea clearly enough to build the shift—a work of the senses that Kol had said was impossible for his kind. My every instinct insisted gleefully that I could have worked the shift directly, before we had even crossed the physical boundary between Aeginea and Navronne.

Arms and elbows dug in my gut. Boots scraped my legs. My throbbing head slammed abruptly into the frozen ground. “Gods, woman”—I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth to hold back the surging bile—“give me a moment’s peace.”

“Put on this cloak, fool.” Even sick and frozen, Saverian could pierce a man’s craw with her disdain. She threw something scratchy and wet over me. “You don’t want anyone to see you…like this.”

I thought at first she meant heaving, but when I drew my hand away and glimpsed the delicate outline of a dog whelk nestled in fronds of sea grass that twined my fingers, I understood—and blessed her practical wisdom. The brightness of my gards near cracked my skull. I closed my eyes and pulled the cloak around me. “Need to find my braies and hose.”

By the time Saverian screamed out her name to the sentries, most of my gards were covered, and I had even donned the pureblood mask I’d found in the pocket of my cloak. Saverian and I stood in a delicate balance, supporting each other, but if someone didn’t open the gates soon, they would have to drag us in by the heels.

The gates ground open with a soul-scraping cacophony. A torch flared the dark tunnel, searing my eyes, but I could not mistake Voushanti’s bulk in company with the soldiers.

“We need to see Prince Osriel as soon as possible,” said Saverian.

“Unfortunately His Grace is not in residence,” said Voushanti. “Dreogan, prepare to close the gates. Muserre, Querz, wake Mistress Elene and tell the steward to prepare hot food and wine for the physician and the pureblood. I’ll escort them in.”

“Where in the name of all holy gods is he?” I said, unreasonably irritated, as my bowels churned.

Voushanti waited until the three warriors had left us. Then he turned his gaze our way, the red centers of his eyes flaring savagely. “Our master has been taken captive, sorcerer. He lies in the dungeons of Sila Diaglou.”