Breath and Bone

Chapter 28

I crouched in the lee of a limestone scarp—the only shelter in the storm-blasted wilderness—and vomited up nothing for the fiftieth time in an hour.

Had my throat not already taken on the character of raw meat, I would have screamed into the earth as my limbs seized with cramps, my gut twisted into knots, and my skin felt like the vellum of Sila’s map as it charred into ash. Instead, I writhed and moaned and cursed, ready to devour the frozen mud or my own flesh did I have the least imagining it would taste of nivat.

The hunger had come upon me as I had traveled the first shift from Osriel’s gates, as if my body knew that my responsibility for others’ safety had ended for the present and it could now indulge itself. Determined to seek my uncle’s counsel, I had ignored its warning and traveled the meadows beyond Caedmon’s Bridge to the Sentinel Oak. Once in Aeginea, I shifted straightaway into the terraced land where, in the human plane, Ardra’s prized vineyards lay dying. I had no notion of how to find Kol, even assuming the archon had not turned him into a beast or locked him out of his body. But if I could just find my way back to Picus, surely he could tell me how to locate my uncle or Stian.

Over the hours my craving had deepened, and the blizzard that had struck with the sunless dawn grew so violent I could not see. The onset of familiar cramps and tremors banished all my suppositions that relinquishing this renewed craving would somehow be easier than what I had undergone before. I could have torn through steel with my teeth to find the makings for a doulon. And this time I had no Osriel or Saverian to hold me together.

Miserably lost and dreadfully sick, I had wandered in circles for more than a day. And when my strength failed, I had crawled to this meager shelter to escape the storm. So much for great vows and resolutions.

A bout of coughing and sneezing felt like to push my eyes from my head. Somewhere in my mindless wandering, I had lost my bundle of clothes and provisions, which left me naught for wiping my streaming nose or eyes and naught to keep me warm now my gards could not. My shivering could have rattled even Renna’s stout walls.

I tried to muster the sense for a seeking. Grateful that the sky did not shatter with my first movement, I rested my forehead on the snowy ground, pressed my palms to the earth on either side of my head, and forced magic through my fingertips. Instead of a nicely measured flow, power gushed through my wretched body in one enormous surge.

What felt like a hard-launched stone struck the center of my already tender forehead…which made no sense at all as my forehead yet rested on the snowy earth. But the image of the landscape struck me clearly: rolling meadows…not barrens, as they seemed in this grim weather. Dormant, yes, with the waning season, but in summer, thick with hazel and dogwood, grouse and falcons, roe deer, and myriad other creatures. The undersoil smelled rich with life and health. Well tended.

As I lifted my head a little and pressed the heel of my hand onto the unbroken flesh centering my forehead, a rush of warmth flowed up and around and over my back, flooding me with scents of clover and meadowsweet. Azure lightning threaded the snow all around.

“What thinkest thou to do here, ongai?” A woman’s words peppered my skin like wind-driven needles. “To break my sleep without greeting…to broach so deeply. Such blatant rudeness requires explanation before I report thee for sanction.” And then a bare foot struck me in the chin.

I fell back on my heels, clutching my rebellious stomach as a trickle of blood tickled my raw throat. Sanction…captivity…breaking… Panic near shredded my wits. I scrambled backward…and then I saw her.

Long arms wrapped about her knees, she sat in the snow—no, perched atop the snow like a bird, so weightless did she appear. Tousled curls the silvered rose of winter sunrise framed her round face. A butterfly, its lace wings tinted every hue of sunlit sky, hovered on her ivory cheek and trailed threads of dewy cobwebs down her shoulders and arms. What scraps of wit I had left escaped me.

“Thou’rt but initiate!” Her face blossomed in surprise as she looked on mine. She tilted her head, and her eyes traveled downward. “I could have thee sanctioned for—” Her examination halted in the region of my groin, wrinkling her glowing face into a knot. “No initiate, but a stripling male of full growth. You’re failed, then. Hast thou no shame to come poking around my sianou like a mole in the heath? Unless thou’rt but some odd dream come to warm me this winter…” Her pique trailed off in whimsy. “I’ve a fondness for dream lovers.”

“You are…so…lovely.” As I stammered this inanity, the surge of blood that spoke the goddess Arrosa’s will seemed to flush the sickness from my veins. Though my state was no more sensible, at least I might not vomit on the small, pale feet that glimmered not a quercé from my knees. I inhaled deeply, dabbed the back of my hand against my bleeding lip, and tried to remember the polite address for an unrelated Dané female. “Shamed…yes, engai. Forgive my rudeness. I’ve been wandering. Ate something I should not. I seek my vayar to discuss my future and, in my confused state, mistook the place.”

“Ah, I once mistook mustard seeds for nivé, and they roused such a storm inside me, I could not dance the moonrise.” Her smile set my gards afire. She touched my knee, releasing sparks of silver and blue. Did all Danae have moods that switched from storm to sun faster than flickers’ pecks?

I leaned forward. Inhaled again. The afternoon smelled ripe as an autumn orchard. “Surely the moon wept on that sad night.”

Pleasure rippled the brightness of her gards. “Sweetly spoken, stripling! Perhaps I should feed thee belly-soothing tansy before I sleep again. Thou’rt lovely, as well, and bring a powerful presence and a lusty vigor to my meadow.” As she brushed her finger over my bruised lip, a veil of disturbance dimmed her starry brightness. “How is it possible thou art failed? More important, how is it possible a failed stripling can broach my sianou?”

“His blundering feet but sounded a dream, Thokki.” Kol’s voice cleaved the thickening air as the bells of Matins shatter a monk’s wistful dreams. “Envisia seru, sweet guardian.”

The female jumped gracefully to her feet, a move that did nothing to calm my urgent admiration. Woven spidersilk draped from one shoulder front and back. A girdle of strung pearls, wound thrice about her, caught it loosely at her hips, whence it fell to her knees. The veil hid naught of importance.

“Too long since the sight of thee hath delighted my eye, Kol Stian-son! Why are—?” A catch in her throat signaled alarm and wonder as her gaze switched back to me. She stepped away, arms crossed on her breast. “This is the Cartamandua halfbreed. The violator.”

Kol spoke up before I could protest. “He is no violator, Thokki. Tuari’s long-soured spirit speaks blight upon my rejongai. Blight upon my sister for her choice to bear him. Blight upon me for choosing to spare him the pain of breaking. Yet I have released his true being and found him reverent and gifted, though indeed clumsy as a bear in spring.”

“Willing, then, I yield to thy judgment.” Brow darkening, she touched Kol’s arm. “Is it true they have passed over thee, Kol? That Nysse is the Chosen for the Winter Canon?”

He nodded stiffly. “But I am neither locked away nor beast-captive. I need not be at the Center to dance my part fully. And come spring”—he shrugged—“perhaps eyes will be clearer.”

“Winter already bites deep, thus I have bedded early.” She hunched her shoulders and wrapped her arms about herself, allowing her gaze to travel the gray dome of the sky and the wilderness of snow. “But I shall wake for the Canon and make my voice heard to argue this decision. I’ll not be alone in it. Thou shouldst challenge Nysse, Kol. The world is injured, and any who keep thee from dancing the Center tear at its wounds. Thou’lt have a care with this halfbreed?”

Kol stepped close, took Thokki’s head gently between his hands, and kissed her hair. “I shall chastise my tendé for blundering so crudely into thy dreams, and then commend him for his choice of beauty to admire. Wilt thou partner me for a round this Canon, Thokki?”

She flushed cheek to toe—a fetching glory, to be sure. I near swallowed my tongue.

“I—” She tilted her head and looked askance at my uncle. “Thou needst not offer such a gift to keep me silent about this encounter.”

Kol bristled. “I do not use a Canon partnering for bribe or payment.”

“Of course,” she said quickly. “I never meant insult. That thou wouldst mark my dancing in anywise near thy level humbles me. Honored and joyful would I be to partner thee.”

“We shall be on our way. Come, rejongai.” My uncle’s curt command brought me to my feet and into a respectful bow, determined not to shame him further in front of Thokki. I sincerely hoped that he had not compromised his honor to prevent her telling tales of me. I wasn’t sure he could forgive such a necessity.

I bowed to Thokki, as well, but deemed it best to keep my mouth shut. The language my body spoke was boorish enough.

“In the Canon, Thokki,” said Kol.

“In the Canon, Kol,” she called after us.

My uncle struck out across the fields without any word to me. Outside of Thokki’s warm presence, his tension was as palpable as the bitter wind. He set a blistering pace. I struggled to keep up, doing my best to ignore the returning symptoms of my craving. We made two magical shifts, and though I felt the moves clearly, I could not have repeated them.

After the second shift, the snow yielded to a cold, pounding rain. The land stretched flat and gray as far as I could see. The air weighed heavy on my shoulders and smelled of river wrack. Sweat poured from my brow, and my knees quivered.

“Vayar,” I called hoarsely as Kol began to move even faster. “We must talk. Matters of grave import. Please…”

My legs slowed on their own, threatening to give way completely as cramps and shakes racked my back and limbs. At first I thought he might abandon me in the rainy desolation, but as I willed myself a few more steps along his path, he spun and waited for me.

“What ails thee, Valen?” His speech pierced like shards of bronze. “I expected thee stronger, faster, and more attentive on thy return. I expected thee careful. Had I not kept my ears open in readiness, only cracked bones wouldst thou have to walk on this night. Thy coming rattled the Everlasting as crashing boulders, so that any who heed the movements of the air could feel it.”

He rested his hands on his hips. “That thou dost dawdle and moon along the way is my responsibility; I should have taught thee better how to curb the rising heat of a stripling till thou shouldst encounter a proper companion. But it is naught but madness to risk thy safety by broaching the sianou of a sleeping guardian—a deed no stripling of any maturing shouldst be able to accomplish. Only by fair chance didst thou choose Thokki, a merry spirit who trusts her friends. Has sense left thee entire?”

I summoned control and stood straight, determined my ragged condition would not interfere with the world’s fate. “Vayar, I bring news of the doom of the long-lived. These wild folk that poison the guardians are led by one who once lived in Aeginea. She means to destroy the Canon…destroy you all.”

“We spoke of this before, and I told thee—”

“Her name is Ronila.”

“Ronila!” His shocked echo split the air.

At the same time, pain lanced my middle, causing me to double over. He caught my arms just before my knees buckled. “Art thou injured? Broken? Come…” In a blur of pain and dark rain, he sat me on a muddy hummock, filled his hands, and poured rainwater down my throat. To my shame, it stayed down no better than any other contents of my stomach.

“I’m just sick,” I said, wiping my mouth on my arm. Not even the fires of shame could quiet my shivering. “It’s nivat—”

“Fool of a stripling! Thou art completely witless! Complain not to me of nivé, if thou wouldst ever have my ear.” He grabbed my arm and, without another word, dragged me through a series of nauseating shifts. The world dissolved in churning gray and I completely lost track of body and mind…

“So, are you more sensible now?”

Sand in my mouth. In my eyes. Everywhere underneath me. Rain drummed on my back and cascaded over my head. I squinted into the murk. The pounding in my head was not just blood but waves, out there beyond the veils of rain that merged sea, air, cliffs, and sky into one mass of gray. Evaldamon. The salty residue in my mouth evidenced Kol had dunked me in the sea at the very least.

“Yes, rejongai. Better.” I sat up, feeling scoured inside and reasonably clearheaded. Recollection of his warning postponed my questions about nivat and what he’d done to aid me.

“Tell me of Ronila,” he said.

“The priestess who destroys your sianous is Ronila’s granddaughter, raised to be Ronila’s vengeance on humans and Danae alike. But it is Ronila and her toady that I fear most. They have some scheme…”

I told him all I knew of the old woman and Sila and Gildas. Though I did not describe Osriel’s particular plan, I revealed how Tuari had pledged to spend the power of the Winter Canon into the golden veins of Dashon Ra and fuel the prince’s dangerous enchantment.

“…but once Picus told me of Tuari’s hatred for humankind, I could not believe the archon would keep the bargain. I had to warn Osriel of the potential treachery. That’s why I left Aeginea so abruptly.”

Kol sat on his haunches, his mouth buried in his hands as he listened to my story. Through a sheen of raindrops, his dragon suffused his lean face with a sapphire glow. “Though my sire and I disagree with the archon on many matters, Tuari has always attended his responsibilities faithfully. He does not make bargains he has no intent to keep; nor would he ever compromise the Canon. When he failed to name me Chosen—the one of us who dances at the Center—none could understand it. My dancing is unmatched in this season.” Honesty, not pride, birthed his claim.

“As Picus told thee, Tuari is least likely of all of us to join a human—especially Eodward’s son—in any endeavor. Yet Dashon Ra is the Center of the Winter Canon, and he has named his consort Chosen. She could do this thing—divert the wholeness of the dance into the veins and not the land itself…” The words faded. His thoughts drifted deeper.

This was not what I wanted to hear. “Janus said the Chosen dances at the Center to ‘bring all life to joining.’ All life—human, Danae, birds, beasts…everything?”

“The dance of the Chosen joins all that is brought to the Canon by the long-lived—trees and rivers, mountains, stones, sea and shore, earth and all that grows, as well as all thou hast named.”

“But only the lands you remember. You can’t include the parts of the earth that are corrupt.”

Kol straightened abruptly. “I have told thee, I will not—”

“I know that you and your kind forget places that have been poisoned, Kol. Janus once created a great map, hoping to show you the places you had lost. But he didn’t understand that Danae could not make sense of such patterning. Somehow Sila Diaglou got hold of that map and was using it to judge her success in forcing your kind out of Aeginea.” I could not let him avoid the subject any longer. “Vayar, you vowed to provide me truth and healthy guidance. As you see I need both of those now more than I have ever done, else we have no hope of untangling this mess. My mother intended me to help. You know that. I’ve just no idea how. Permit me to do so. Please, uncle, teach me.”

Kol scooped a handful of sand, allowing the rain to wash it through his fingers. Only when his palm was clean did he respond. “Janus said he would help us reclaim the Plain. It is only a name in our tales of the Beginnings, yet we believe its importance equal to the Sea, the Mountain, and the Well. Thou hast judged rightly; we cannot bring it back into the Canon if we cannot find it. We cannot find it if we cannot remember. In the same way each of the sianous lost to the Scourge falls out of our memory and thus out of the Canon. Only the names linger to remind us of our loss.”

Sorrow, grief, and shame clothed him as new gards. “Clyste traveled with Janus as he marked his papers,” he continued, “returning joyful, for her eyes had seen these dead places. For one or two she was able to work a kiran to bring to the Spring Canon. With Janus’s magics we would be able to find these places again and reclaim them all. But when at last the Cartamandua returned and unrolled his great skin, we could see naught but scrawling that twisted our eyes and turned our heads wrong way out.”

“Ronila could read it,” I said. “But in her spite, she told no one. She must have taken the map from Janus then, or perhaps Picus gave it to her when he came back to Navronne. The hag burnt your only hope to find the dead lands. Sila wants you to forget Aeginea and interbreed with humans. Ronila wants to ensure you never remember. Ronila wants you dead.”

Kol scratched his head. “Neither of those could have taken it. Ronila was long away from Aeginea when Janus brought the great map. Picus too. I know that because the Cartamandua brought the skin map on his last visit, the same visit that Clyste lay with—”

He whirled about sharply, his golden eyes as bright as small moons in the gloom. Before I could ask what insight had struck him so forcefully, he yanked me to my feet. “Come, rejongai, we must resume your lessons. Take me to the Well.”

“We’ve no time. And I cannot—”

“The long-lived do not grasp humans’ constant invocation of time. Before and after, soon and how long seem to us but walls built to imprison you. But indeed, the change of season bites the air, and I see such danger and such possibility as tell me I have lived blind until inhaling this very breath that leaves my body.” His hands near burnt their image into my shoulders. “If thou wouldst justify Clyste’s fate, Valen Cartamandua-son, then do as I say, without thought, without distraction, without artifice, living only in the embrace of the Everlasting.”

His urgency made my heart race. And as dearly as I desired to determine my own course, the past months had taught me faith and trust. I trusted Kol in the same way I had trusted Luviar, when every mote of common wisdom said to distance myself from plots and conspiracies. In the same way as I trusted Osriel when the accumulated witness of my eyes and ears clamored for me to slay, not save him. But I hungered for answers as I hungered for spelled nivat. “I will obey, vayar, but I beg you answer one question: What have you guessed?”

“Many things, but only one sure. Tuari has given Ronila the map.”

No matter how I pestered, Kol was adamant. He would explain no more until I led him to Clyste’s Well. I had no capacity to judge what it might mean for the Canon if Tuari had been duped by his half-brother’s daughter. Duped, to be sure, for if the archon was a person who attended his responsibilities faithfully, and who would never compromise the Canon, then he could not possibly have read Ronila’s true intent. Yet no warning from Kol or from me could stop whatever scheme Tuari had devised. The archon had no use for either of us.

I had come to Kol for guidance. Thus, over the next hours, I indeed left everything behind and gave myself into the embrace of the Everlasting. We traveled the length of Navronne. Again and again I sank to my knees, placed head and palms on the mud, snow, or rocky ground, and released careful dollops of magic to seek a route to the Well. Though Kol’s dunking had eased my immediate sickness, the yearning for nivat dogged my heels like an unwanted hound, as I sought out landmarks…rivers, seas, mountains…anything that might tell me where we stood and where we must go next. Subtle steps on this journey; I needed naught else to make me heave.

When storm and night and weariness left me too confused to continue, I attempted what I had never done before, seeking through the wind-whipped clouds above me to find the guide star. Fixed and firm, Escalor took its place in the landscape of my mind with the brilliance of my uncle’s gards. Using its anchor, I knew which way to go next. Thou shalt map the very bounds of heaven, Janus had told me, and wonder and gratitude swelled within me.

Happily, the harder I worked to juggle the fruits of senses and memory with the direction of magic and instinct, the less my nivat cravings troubled me. Not just in the way focused attention masks a nagging distraction, but in truth. My gards grew brighter as night closed in.

When my steps flagged, Kol taught me how to sniff out a Danae cache—a small stone vault filled with provisions and marked with an aromatic cluster of horsemint seed heads. I devoured every morsel of the dried apples and walnuts we found in the store. Kol watched me eat and eased my concern when my full stomach at last waked my conscience. “Replenish the cache next time thou dost walk these hills, and it will serve another who lacks time to hunt,” he said. Beyond that he refused to speak, save for an occasional, “Attention, stripling. Thy mind doth wander.”

My first shift after the cache took us from one ledge of rock to another and into calmer weather. The strip of blackness west of the ledge was the valley of the Kay. Only a few steps more and I led Kol down the slotlike passage through the cliff and into the high-walled corrie of my mother’s sianou.

Saints and angels…it felt as if we plumbed the very heart of winter. Ice as thick as my thigh sheathed the walls of the Well, glinting eerily with the reflected lightning of our gards. The pool had shrunk. Crumpled, broken ice hid its sunken surface. The wind moaned softly through the heights, swirling dry snow from the crevices.

“Inerrant thou hast come here, just as on the morn we met,” said Kol, who remained in the dark mouth of the passage. “The Well has not faded from thy memory.”

“No,” I said, hoping he would now explain. “Its location is as clear to me as on the night I first walked here.”

“Canst thou see…?” His voice trailed away as he walked toward the pool. After only a few steps, he sank to one knee and touched the ice-slicked rock. “Follow one of her paths. Prove it.”

I knelt and yielded magic, and it was as if the hidden stars came streaking into the corrie, embroidering trails of silver light upon the dark stone. Everywhere, circles and twining loops, layer upon layer of threads, as deep as I dared plunge, all quivering with light, each one that I touched with my inner eye thrumming with stretched music.

The uppermost image was bolder than those that lay immediately below, the steps larger. This was Kol’s own path, when he had danced his grief on the day we had retrieved Gerard’s body from the pool. Carefully I studied the interlaced threads of his steps, comparing it to the images that his movements had etched on my memory. And then I peeled away that layer—as one could with the thin transparent layers of the stones that men called angels’ glass—and examined the next.

My mother’s feet had laid down a more intricate pattern than Kol’s. I began to walk the silver thread. “She began here,” I said, touching the place at the far side of the pool. “Here a small leap.” A faint thread between a hard push and the landing. “Then a spin. A step and then another spin. The pattern repeated three more times…” As I walked I could almost feel her movements. “Here she paused, bending I think because the thread is uneven…another sequence of five steps and spins, and then here she made that twisting move as you do, on one foot, lowering her heel to mark each turn, again, and again…ten…twelve times…”

“Eppires,” he said, suffused with awe. “Thou canst truly see her steps. I recognize this kiran.”

“There are hundreds of paths here, layer upon layer. I could walk each one if you wished.”

“Do this one again,” he commanded, resolute. “And this time, shadow her moves.”

“I cannot—”

“Do not say I cannot. I do not expect thee to dance, only to move in the manner of the kiran, to feel that I may also feel.”

And so I began again. I pivoted and jumped in my own limited fashion. Wobbling. Awkward. I spun a quarter turn and tripped over my own foot, where Clyste had made three full rounds and landed on her toes. Filled with the remembrance of Kol’s grace, I knew I must appear a lumbering pig with feet of lead.

I balanced on one foot for a moment at the first spot where Clyste had paused…and felt a feather’s touch along my spine. At the next step I touched more softly on the ball of my bare foot and when I leaped to her next landing place, I recalled my leap from Torvo’s wall and drove my spirit upward with the imagining of my mother’s gift. I landed gently on my left foot, my knee and ankle bent. No wobble.

My skin flushed. Alive. Awake. As if the air spoke to me. As if a lover’s hand touched my lips. The color of my gards deepened. Eyes fixed to the silver thread, I brushed my right foot forward and shifted weight, as the pattern told me…

I finished the kiran on one knee, the alter leg stretched out behind me in line with my straight back, my fingertips touching my forehead. Only when I became aware of Kol’s gaze did I break into a sweat of embarrassment. “I got caught up in it,” I said, drawing into a huddle, wrapping my arms about my knee. I could not look at him. My crude miming must surely have appalled him.

“The ending position is called an allavé,” he said dryly. “Wert thou to stretch the spine longer, round the arms as if embracing a tree, and lower the hips, while aligning the back foot and hip properly with the correctly curved shoulder, I might call thy position…minimal. Now, touch the stone beneath thy feet.”

The ice had melted along the silvered path. The stone, warm beneath my fingertips, swelled as if with living breath. “This is not usual,” I said, half in terror, half in question, “for one of my poor skills.”

“No. Not usual.” Kol knelt beside me as my fingers traced the silver thread in awe and wonder. “In these few steps…a youngling’s raw beginning…thou hast summoned life where none dwelt when we stepped through into this place. Think, Valen, is it possible thou couldst find other kiran shadows like these, without knowing their location beforehand or their makers? Without maps or books? Couldst thou walk the world, seeking with thy hands and thy Cartamandua magic these patterns scribed in seasons past?”

“Yes, I believe—” And then did my thick head begin to comprehend what he was asking me. Janus’s map had failed to tell the Danae what they had forgotten, because they could not read the language of lines and symbols. But Clyste had seen my father’s truer magic. He had taken her into places she could not find on her own…and she had been able to coax dead lands back to life with her dancing. Danae could see only living things, and so Clyste had chosen to create a living map—a child who could find what was forgotten and dance it back into the pattern of the world.

“Thou art the answer, Valen,” said Kol softly. “Thou are the healing for the breaking of the world.”

Chapter 29

As a red tide departs a once-healthy shore, leaving behind a plague of tainted fish, so did my moment’s exhilaration rush out to leave me aghast, aching, and empty. “How can this fall to me? I’ve so few skills…scarcely begun…God’s bones, years…lifetimes…it would take me to seek out such places without the guidance of the map.”

Not soon enough to tilt the world’s balance on the solstice. Not soon enough to shield Osriel or Elene from dreadful choices, or save anyone, Danae or human, from coming treachery and chaos. And I was not fool enough to believe that this glimmer of life evoked by my awkward capering meant I could ever reclaim a sianou for the Canon.

“Best begin, then. Attend, stripling.” Kol laid his hand on the crumpled surface of the pool. Around his spread fingers the blue-cast ice began to melt, until an oval hole penetrated the thick layer all the way to the dark water. He stood up, towering over me, his dragon etched sharp against the night. “Wash thy skin. Snow and ice would be excellent aids.”

I glanced up sharply, fear and excitement prickling every hair I had left. “I’m to go on? The third passage?”

“No matter what else comes at the Winter Canon, thou must be a part of it. Only then wilt thou be long-lived and free to undertake this task of healing. Even a halfbreed is made new by the Canon, so that none can hinder thee without new cause. Once thou art past this change, we will speak of Tuari’s blundering and thy prince’s need, and how we might make answer to them. Those will be simple enough beside the matter of intruding thee into the Canon without dooming us both.” He blinked and softened his stern aspect for a moment. “Thou art willing, rejongai? To take on the fullness of thy being? The responsibility it entails? To accept my teaching?”

My hands took a notion to rub my knees, even while my innermost heart told me that this was what I had come to Kol for. My answer had been given when I woke at Gillarine and saw a child had preserved my life, and in Gillarine’s garden, when Luviar had deemed me worthy of trust, and again on Kol’s own shore, when I understood that it was not disease or perversion or mindless rebellion that drove me. “I trust thee with my life, vayar. Yes.”

A skim of ice had already formed inside the hole. I broke through the brittle layer, scooped out a handful of water, and splashed it on my face. The cold took my breath. Another handful on my head. Gods in all reaches of heaven! I scraped up shards of ice from the pond surface, and the coarse-grained snow caught in the crevices, and scoured the mud and sickness and dried sweat from my skin, rinsing with more of the damnably frigid water. Sea bathing. Wind scouring. What shape would this passage take?

I was soon ready to declare myself clean enough for any enchantments, but the direction of Kol’s unsatisfied inspection reminded me of the exact nature of the third remasti—the passage of regeneration. Sweet Arrosa, preserve and protect!

Steeling myself, I doused my shrunken nether parts. I thought my skull might split from the shock of it. Surely I must be sprawled in some dark alley, my body gone doulon-mad, my mind locked into these perverse dreams.

“We shall attempt this passage here,” he said, when satisfied with my ablutions. “In the usual course for a stripling, thou wouldst encounter groves or streams, fields or hillocks whose guardian is fading or ready to move on to a new place. Across the seasons thou wouldst learn and study these places, speaking with their guardians, weaving their patterns of life into your own. And on the day of thy third remasti, thou wouldst choose one of these places to partner in thy change. But at the tide pool on mine own shore didst thou show me another way of learning.” He gestured toward the frozen pool. “So, learn of the Well.”

Sitting on my heels, I laid one hand upon the stone bared by my crude echo of Clyste’s dancing. The other hand I dangled in the dark water through the hole Kol had made. I closed my eyes and released magic, and the story of the Well unfolded.

Unlike the tide pool, or Picus’s garden, or the meadows near Caedmon’s Bridge, each of which teemed with layered life and growth, the grotto of the Well was a barren place. A few astelas roots lay shriveled in the cracked walls. Tucked into the rock near the top of the crags sat an abandoned aerie. But flowers and eagles had been intruders here. The Well was visited by rain, wind, and snow, but few creatures of any sort. A cold, lonely place, even in summer. The patterned music of the Danae, buried so deep in other places, lay very near the surface, as in a temple where gods and angels hover close to us. I breathed deep, exhaled slowly, and learned.

Stars lived here, even hidden above the clouds as they were. Cold and sharp as the rock and ice, their exposed light would arrow into the pool. I scooped water in my cupped hand, and it teased my tongue and palate with bubbles like sharp cider. But a sour second taste bloomed when my tongue touched a ragged black string that lay in my palm.

I shook the slimy thing off my hand, bent closer to the pool, and again plunged my arm into the cold water to the elbow. No fish, no creatures, no plants had ever lived here. But the stringy black growths slimed the smooth pale curves of the Well and even the disturbance of my touch broke off more feathery tendrils to taint the water. I reached deeper yet, toward the spring’s source, through layer upon layer of porous stone. The deeper I probed, the warmer the water, as if the Well’s source were the fires of the netherworld. I widened my exploration into the channeled rock, which spread the Well’s bounty through a vast area of the surrounding lands.

Black slime clogged every watercourse. The channels lay barren and dry, and beyond them I found the withered roots of the forest across the vale, the starved confluence with the River Kay, sluggish and teeming with pestilence, Gillarine’s soured barley fields, disease-ridden orchards, and cloister font—it, too, slimed with black.

Sick at heart I withdrew, sat up, and told Kol all I had found. Poison, death, blood-fed corruption throughout the lands where my mother’s gift had once spread health and life.

“Thy learning surpasses my understanding, rejongai. Now I, too, know the Well.” Though his finger touched my cheek gently, Kol’s stern visage did not soften. “Breathe in the essence of all thou hast learned—good and ill, sweet and bitter—and weave it into thy spirit. Open thyself, as to a lover, yielding thy boundaries. Give and receive, reserving nothing.”

Yielding thy boundaries… My heart near stopped its rattling, and every terror of confinement and suffocation rose into my throat to strangle me. I knew what he meant for me to do. Now the moment had come, my instincts screamed of danger, of entrapment, of choking death and failure. But memories of Stearc’s monumental sacrifice, of Jullian’s courage, and of Elene holding life and love so dear, put me to shame. If I could not face my own small terrors, how could I take on Osriel and those he planned?

Near paralyzed with cold and fear, I crept gingerly onto the frozen pool. Facedown, limbs spread, I tried to imagine how to accomplish what Kol described. The bit of warmth I had engendered in the stone lay well out of reach, and the expanse of broken ice beneath me was hardly a lover’s body. Saverian’s bony substance might come close, but she was at least warm. The thought of the acerbic physician made me smile through my fear. Naked again, she would say to this. Feeling grandiose, Magnus?

Behind me the air shifted, and I heard a quick breath and the soft impact of a landing. Kol was dancing. Like Saverian’s gifted fingers waking my skin, so did the wind of his spins brush my back and flanks, riffle my hair, and tickle my bare feet. His leaps and turns drew forth a stately drone of invisible pipes, and the countering rhythms of sawing strings filtered through ears, through skin, through the cold air I drew in with every tremulous breath. Music thrummed in my bones, and its harmonies played out in the air above me…in the ice beneath…in the tainted water below, and the earth that cupped this pool in its arms. My blood heated…and I became aware of every quat of skin where it touched ice…melting…dissolving one into the other…

To yield. To become nothing, trapped in stone. I wriggled a little, flexing fingers and toes to make sure I still had them. In the movement, a shard of ice gashed my belly. Merciful gods…blood…water…ice. A cold sweat drenched my body…

…and then I laughed. I rocked to and fro and rapped my head on the ice, chortling to think what Josefina and Claudio de Cartamandua-Celestine would say to this unlikely version of my doom. Never in Josefina’s wildest divinations could she have seen me like this. Facedown in a cesspool. Great gods, I would not go back to that life. I would trade not one moment of this fear and doom and terrifying beauty for anything those two had offered me or any fate I had imagined for myself. Let it come!

Kol’s music pulsed and drove, and a hunger deeper and more profound than nivat welled from my depths. Groaning…laughing…I let go of thought and reached out with my spread limbs to embrace the world of the Well…water and stone, forest and barley fields, streams and orchards, river and valley…reserving nothing…

…and I plunged through the ice and into the cold, wet blackness. Spears of ice pierced my skin. I dared not scream, because I could not breathe in the water. Yet the scream leaked out of my dissolving flesh, and the cold and the water passed through me as I fell…blind, for not even my gards lit this darkness.

Softly, rejongai, settle. Do not fight. Do not fear. Feel. Touch this place and allow it to touch thee in return. Thy laughter is surely the heart of thy magic…

Kol’s breathless voice faded as hearing followed sight into the void. But I clung to his assurance that this was as it was meant to be. Thus I did not go mad when I fell through cold stone and gritty soil, and my thoughts disintegrated like a snowball striking a brick wall. All that remained was raging desire, as I plummeted deep into the molten fires of the earth and was reborn as the guardian of the Well.

I could not breathe. Could not move. Could not see. Sated, conjoined with flame and left hollow as a burnt-out stump, I could but exist for a while. Thus I did not panic when waking mind insisted I no longer had a body.

First, I knew the water. I flowed in stately rounds, cooling as I rose from steaming depths to surface ice, brushing against rocks and clumps like a purring cat’s tail, and then sinking again to dissolve and dance in the fire. Starlight bubbled in my shallows—not so much as I would prefer—but tart and sweet, as intoxicating as the laughter of angels.

The black tendrils, on the other hand, tasted of decay, sapping my pleasure. My solid faces, cracks, and crevices—the curving walls that existed in and of myself—burned with the painful gnawing of the invasive slime. I grieved for the tormented dead whose blood had fed this poison, even as I swirled around it, prying it from my bones and dragging it down to the fire.

My veins were dry, clogged with the foulness, so that my fair limbs—my fields and groves and waterways that lived in the light—withered and languished. With rising anger I slammed against the barriers of corruption, shifting them enough that I could slip through—a few droplets, then a trickle to begin the healing. I had always been a quick healer.

Valen! Draw in thy sense and spirit. Reach for my hand. Already, I do feel thy life in the land…a glory, rejongai, but we must go forward…

The summoning waked tales and memories that had been scorched away in my passage: the tale of the world’s end, the waiting legion of the dead, the friends depending on me. I could not rest here to scour and clean and repair my wounds. I could not sleep. Other duties called. Regretfully, I retreated from earth and bone. With what my mind insisted was a hand, I reached upward…

My uncle dragged me, coughing and gagging, from the frigid water. I collapsed on a skid of ice, kicking, writhing, and scraping at my skin. My groin was tangled in strings that stung like the tentacles of a bladderfish. “Get them off,” I cried hoarsely. “Holy gods, get them off!”

“Easy, easy, rejongai.” Kol held my arms as I writhed and flailed, coughing up water and trying to breathe. “’Tis only thy new gards. Breathe. Be patient. The soreness will ease.”

“Soreness?” I croaked, as I clutched my knees and curled into a quivering ball around my wounded parts. “It feels as if I’ve been whipped. And drowned before that. And before that…”

I could not fathom what had happened to me. Remembrances of overpowering need, of raging fire, of immeasurable release lurked somewhere below my present thoughts, too immense to bring into the light. And then I recalled my bizarre impersonation of water and stone, more vivid than doulon dreams.

“The Well has chosen thee, rejongai. Marked thee. I have danced here, and it lives in my memory as it has not since Clyste faded.”

My uncle sat beside me, waves of heat radiating from his sweating body, as if he had danced the night through…perhaps several nights, judging by the starved hollow of my belly. For certain we had come here in the night. Now weak and cloud-riven sunlight glinted on the ice walls.

“If thou but knew all those of the long-lived who have attempted the Well only to emerge bruised and bleeding, weeping for their failure. Not only brash initiates, but mature dancers, worthy to take on great sianous. Valen”—I looked up at the severe pronouncement of my name to see my uncle’s eyes bright as summer and his brows raised high—“this is not at all usual.”

Weariness set me laughing this time. I tucked my head into my arms and longed for food and sleep and one of Saverian’s balms to ease the vibrant sting in my flesh.

“And now we must speak of more lessons,” I said, “and of the Canon and Tuari and those who wish to murder the long-lived, and I must learn what to do to save my king’s soul and his”—no, even to Kol I could not mention the child—“and his subjects and my friends.”

Kol sighed and offered me an insistent hand. “Lessons, yes, but I’ve brought thee sustenance, lest thy strength or attention should waver.”

Ever a slave of my flesh, the prospect of food cheered me greatly. As I accepted Kol’s hand and proceeded gingerly to the almost sunny, almost dry spot where he had laid out his provisions, I kept glancing downward, afraid to look too closely.

“Feathers, I think,” said Kol, inspecting me as I lowered myself carefully to the ground. “And braided…something.”

Unable to imagine what such decorations might mean, I shook off the oddity and devoured his small feast: two knotted carrots, four chewy figs, and three round, sticky cakes made of hazelnuts, dried blueberries, and honey. Every delicious bite warmed and strengthened me. I could have eaten ten times the amount.

As I ate, Kol taught. “When I danced in Picus’s garden, my steps were not random. I designed a kiran, a pattern of movements to encompass a living landscape—the beasts, plants, trees, earth, stone, and water that comprise it, the air, the light, and the storms that shape it. I, and the others of our kind, dance many kirani throughout a season, not just at our own sianous, for many small places in Aeginea have no guardian of their own.”

“So the silver threads I see are the evidence of a kiran—not just any dancing,” I said, licking the honey from my fingers.

He acknowledged the point. “We bring these kirani to the Canon, dancing them in the various rounds throughout the day or night. The Chosen, the one named to dance at the Center, takes in all that is brought to the Canon in each dancer’s kirani and joins them together as I told thee, building the power that thy prince desires to feed on. At the moment of season’s change, the Chosen yields this power to the land through the Center, whence it spreads throughout Aeginea and into human realms through the connections that bind our two realms into one whole—”

“—the Well, the Mountain, the Sea, and the Plain, the sianous where the first of your kind were born of the Everlasting and took bodily form.” My hands fell still.

He nodded. “It is also the duty of the Chosen to strip away those kirani that are incomplete or poorly effected, any that might violate the harmony of the dance and reduce its power. This stripping removes the kiran-hai—the affected land—from the Canon for the season. Though an embarrassment to the dancer who shaped the defective kiran, one season’s removal does not poison the land or wreak irreversible harm. In the usual way, the kiran is repaired or improved and brought to the following season’s Canon.”

Kol braided his hair as he spoke, his wrenching twists and yanks speaking eloquently of his agitation. He tied off the thick braid with a solid knot, then pushed aside the strands of hair that had escaped his control.

“When I was but a nestling, the halfbreed Llio, Ronila’s sire and guardian of the Plain, brought an unusual kiran into the Spring Canon. Tuari was Chosen—his first naming—and he removed Llio’s kiran as flawed, tainted with too much of human influence. Llio argued that his steps were not flawed, but only new. When Tuari refused to reconsider, Llio—impetuous, foolish, driven to rage unnatural to the long-lived—tried to take Tuari’s place at the Center by force, a forbidden act that threatened the entirety of the Canon. In the ensuing struggle, Llio fell and broke his skull. Before the dancing ended, he had returned to the Everlasting. It was as if Llio had been poisoned of our ancient Scourge while joined with his sianou, for we could not find the Plain again, and it quickly faded from our memories in all but name. So was the Canon sorely broken.”

“The long-lived blamed it on the fact that he was a halfbreed,” I said. Llio’s curse.

“Aye. My sire and others have come to admit that the nature of the Plain as a channel to the human realm, and the nature of the Canon when we are wholly at one with our sianous, must have caused the breaking in some part, and not entirely Llio’s human violence. Tuari does not agree. But those events and those that followed—the unstable storms, our own failure to regenerate, the weakening of the bond between our kirani and the land, the increasing incidents of the Scourge—have ever preyed on Tuari, plaguing him with doubts and leading him on a wavering course.”

Kol’s silence was the quiet between rainstorms as a line of squalls moves in from the sea. And so I waited.

Eventually he sighed and began again. “When Tuari summoned me from Picus’s garden, he said he had been searching every channel of wisdom to learn how to restore the Plain and the Well, but all had failed. He had come to the conclusion that the human realm weighs too heavily upon the Canon, causing this imbalance in the world that we all see. He asked that my father and I consider abandoning our sianous for the Winter Canon to see if such removal might correct the imbalance. We refused, both Stian and I, for our kind emerged from the Everlasting in the beginnings apurpose to hold the four great sianous that join Aeginea and the human realm. Stian believes that to yield the remaining two would surely rend the world. Tuari appeared to yield to our misgivings. Now, hearing your tale, I surmise that he has reconciled with his kin-brother’s child, Ronila, and given her Janus’s map, hoping that Picus’s teaching and her life in the human world would reveal to her its meaning, thinking she might show us a way to recover the Plain and the Well and these other lost sianous. If, instead, Ronila has spoken smooth lies and convinced Tuari that such recovery is forever impossible…”

“…the archon might instruct his consort to repair this imbalance,” I said. “And the Chosen can forcibly remove the kirani of the Mountain and the Sea from the Canon.”

“I believe this is why he names Nysse Chosen. He hopes to repair the Canon by sheering it in twain.” After speaking this grim verdict, Kol stretched his legs straight in front of him, linked his hands behind his back, and bent his forehead to his knees, raising his linked hands skyward.

I leaped to my feet, appalled, certain that Kol’s theory was correct. Ronila had purposely destroyed the map in front of me, knowing that my news of it would be a torment to Kol and Stian. “Tuari may have yielded to your argument, uncle, but Ronila will find a way to kill you…you and Stian…and me, too, if she learns what’s happened here. She wants to ensure the Mountain and the Sea are lost forever along with the Plain and the Well.”

“I shall warn my sire,” said my uncle, his voice muffled by his knees and the effort of his stretching. “We shall need his help to get thee into the Canon.”

This made no sense at all. “I cannot pass for one of you, no matter my gards. I cannot dance. I’ve no idea what to do.”

He released his arms, drew in his legs, and bounced to his feet. “Return here at high sun on the solstice, and Stian will instruct thee. There will be sufficient distraction in the Canon for him to slip thee into his round.”

“Distraction?”

Kol raised his arms and bent wholly to one side and then the other, holding each for longer than my sympathizing muscles could bear. Then he stood upright and bent forward from the waist. Supporting his weight on his arms, he slid his feet in opposite directions until it seemed he must rip himself in two. He settled his groin to the ice, then stretched his arms forward, flattening his chest to the ground as well. After a very long time, breathing slow and deep, he rose again.

“I shall issue challenge to the archon, asserting my right to dance the Center,” he said. “If I prepare sufficiently, my kiran of challenge shall be of such a nature that none shall question my right, and for certain none shall pay any mind to a new-marked dancer in a minor circle of Stian’s Round. I shall dance thy sianou, rejongai. Unusual—but then, all that touches thee is unusual. That the Well is reclaimed will ripple through the senses of the long-lived as a spring zephyr. And on solstice night when the season shifts, I shall infuse the gold veins of Dashon Ra with the power of the Canon and trust thee to put the world right again.”

His confidence…his courage…left me breathless. “And if you fail, uncle? Or if Stian is caught bringing a halfbreed into the Canon? Or if Ronila—?”

“Be off, Valen rejongai. I’ve work to do.”

Chapter 30

The few-quellae walk took me from the Well into the ruin of Gillarine, and only twenty or thirty steps more transported me from the cloisters into Renna’s well yard. The high walls left the yard in gray-blue shadows. A leaden afternoon—a proper reflection of my spirits. Flicks of sensation—a taste of moisture in the air, the feel of damp earth beneath my feet, the spongy moss between the stones—afflicted me with a yearning like that of a traveler on an evening road, hoping to see a warm and well-lit house over the next rise. And my gut felt uneasy.

I sighed and strolled toward the stair. I dared not hope that this third passage had somehow cured my doulon craving. I must speak with Saverian. I needed clothes. I needed sleep. I needed to know what day it was.

“Who’s down there?” The gruff challenge came from high atop the wall that separated the well yard from the inner bailey. Someone had spotted me. “Gatzi’s thumb! What’s that?”

“There you are!” This shout, emitted in the squawking timbre of a young male, came from much closer. “Did you fall out of your head just because you spilt a bit of dye on you? You’ll freeze out here, and His Grace won’t like you tainting the well with dye!”

Confused, I glanced over my shoulder just in time to see a great bat flying across the yard, only I realized, as the dark mantle of wool fell over my head, that it was but a boy carrying a very large cloak. No sooner had I twisted the heavy folds so that my face poked out of the hood rather than into it, than Jullian shoved me into the deeper shadows of the colonnade.

“I’ve been waiting for you, Brother Valen,” he whispered, as the guards on the wall speculated quietly on the likely parentage of a fool who’d walk naked in the freezing well yard after spilling dye on himself, and wasn’t it an odd kind of dye to shine so brightly. “I didn’t think you’d want to be seen…this way.” He sounded disapproving, but then, he persisted in calling me Brother.

“I’m grateful,” I said, fastening the clip at my neck. “It feels right to wear only the gards when I’m in the wild, just as wearing a cowl feels right in an abbey. But when I’m back amongst the rest of you, it’s damned awkward. Tell me…how long was I gone?”

“A sevenday, it’s been.”

“Seven days!” Dismay erased what smattering of confidence I’d held on to. The solstice was but two days hence. Sila Diaglou would likely be crossing Caedmon’s Bridge this very night.

“Everyone’s worried, but no one will speak what’s on his mind, especially to me. There’s going to be a battle here, isn’t there? A magical battle that will mean the dark age is come?”

“Yes.” Jullian was no longer a child to be sheltered with sweet lies.

He straightened his back. “I knew it. They keep saying I need to be hidden in some fortress along with Mistress Elene and Brother Victor, but Mistress Elene vows she will ride out to war tomorrow. Mistress Saverian insists Brother Victor is too weak to travel anywhere, but he winks at me when she says it. We believe—Brother Victor and I—that there’s only one place we ought to be when this battle comes. Prince Osriel told us how you took him there so quickly, and if you were to take us that same way, then Brother Victor wouldn’t have to ride out in the cold. We’ve no other Scholar.”

His boldness stilled my churning thoughts. “You want to go to the lighthouse.”

He bobbed his head.

Simple logic and the boy’s stalwart stance testified to the rightness of such a course. Brave Jullian, the brightest student the abbey had ever nurtured, with the wise and capable Victor to mentor him, could become a Scholar well worthy of those who had died to give the world hope. To deny these two the chance to honor their vows to their god and their brotherhood would be to forswear my own.

I bowed to him with sincere solemnity. “In the name of the lighthouse cabal, I would be honored to transport the Scholar and his mentor to their duties. Teneamus.”

Jullian released a deep-held breath, no doubt erasing the pent arguments he’d held ready to hand, and squared his shoulders for the next challenge. “I suppose we’d best tell the others.”

I grinned and started up the stair. “I’ll tell them. But I’d give a good deal for a shirt and a mug of ale first.”

“I’ve tunic, braies, hose, and all over here. The physician gave them to me to hold for you.”

“Just tunic and leggings, I think. No braies today.” The walk from the Well had kept my new gards stinging.

Osriel, Elene, Saverian, and Brother Victor were taking supper in a small dining chamber. The sight of my friends tucked away in the homely warmth of the firelit room struck me with a terrible sadness, poised as we were at the verge of the abyss.

Word of my arrival had preceded us. The prince had abandoned his meal and stood stiffly by the hearth. “Welcome, Valen,” he said, gesturing to the table where two fresh bowls, spoons, and cups had been set. “Refresh yourself. You, too, young watchman. We’ve sent for more.”

“Thank you, lord.” I took a knee, hoping to reassure the prince that I wasn’t planning to abduct him again. “It is fine to see you recovered from your ordeal.” Though he was gray-skinned and gaunt as always, naught of weakness marred his posture, nor any outward sign of his saccheria.

As soon as he gestured me up, I turned to Elene. Her skin bloomed a much healthier hue than his. Even from across the room, I felt the robust life in her. Only her great eyes betrayed knowledge and grief beyond bearing. “Dearest mistress, forgive my not coming to you on our return from Palinur. Anything…anything…you need of me, please ask.”

She lifted her chin. “Later this evening, after you have paid your service to His Grace, I would appreciate a private word. I wish to hear of my father’s death.”

“Of course, Thanea.” I bowed deeply. Osriel would have a deal of trouble preventing his newest warlord from riding out to face her father’s murderers.

Beside Elene sat Brother Victor, resting his diminutive chin on folded hands. I smiled and cupped my palms together. “Iero’s grace, Brother.”

He smiled and returned the gesture. “Good Valen. Well met.”

I had saved Saverian for last. As I’d pulled on the clothes she’d left me, I had imagined her ironical smirk as she attempted to pry out what I’d been up to by inspection alone, and I had prepared a properly humorous and mystifying retort.

But her dark eyes smoldered, and she seemed on the verge of explosion. “Gratifying to see you’ve rejoined us, Magnus.”

“Saverian,” I said, swallowing my jests unspoken. How had I offended this time?

I took the vacant stool between her and Jullian. The boy was already laying a fine-smelling portion of meat over a thick slab of bread in his bowl. Timely and agreeable as Kol’s provender had been, my stomach yearned for the hot and savory. I dug in and rejoiced when a serving woman brought in another tureen. Perhaps the uneasiness in my gut was just this and no warning of perversion.

The small room vibrated with unspoken questions. Yet, though they had already finished their meal, the company gave me time to eat by sharing news. Elene reported that Prior Nemesio and his monks were safely bedded at Osriel’s remote hold at Magora Syne, that Thane Boedec and Thanea Zurina had arrived with their house warriors three nights previous, and that scouts had reported Harrower troops on the approaches to Caedmon’s Bridge.

“I’m glad to hear the brothers are safe,” I said as I refilled my bowl. “I presume Prince Bayard’s legion accompanies the Harrowers.”

“They follow,” said Osriel, “but they appear to answer only to my brother, not the priestess.”

“Thanea Zurina and her men rode out yesterday to meet the Harrowers at the Bridge,” said Elene, a simmering anger scarce contained. “But Boedec’s force is ordered to remain here along with Renna’s garrison. His Grace seems to believe such a strategy does not condemn Zurina’s house to annihilation. Though my liege forbids me, I’ve sworn to ride after her come the dawn and lend her my household’s support.”

I glanced up at Osriel, whose dark eyes had not left me, and at Saverian, who brooded and bristled, mouth tight as a pinchfist’s heart. Then I blotted my mouth and decided I’d best forgo a third portion of the well-seasoned mutton, lest the tensions in the room crack Renna’s thick walls.

“I’ve had a strange journey,” I said. “I’d like to think I bring some small hope for this confrontation, but I’d best let His Grace judge. However”—I stood, raising my cup that brimmed with its third filling of Renna’s best ale—“as this might be the last feasting night of the lighthouse cabal for a goodly while, I would like to wish godspeed and all good hopes to our new lighthouse Scholar and his mentor. Luviar himself could not have chosen better or braver.”

No honorable Evanori may refuse to join a toast to a fellow warrior. Nor may he interject his own contravening opinions before the drinking’s done. Monk, prince, physician, and thanea raised their cups and drank. As I was likely thirstier than any of them, I drained my cup first and got the upper hand in the ensuing remarks.

“Abbot Luviar would not have us forget our vows on this night,” I said. “I understand the urgency of getting these two securely housed before the solstice. Thus I’ve offered my newfound talents to escort them to Gillarine. Yet, were I to attempt more Danae shifting before I’ve slept, I would likely deposit them in Aurellia or in the middle of the sea. Which means, Mistress Elene, that I must prevail upon you to delay riding out to war on the morrow, as you and Brother Victor will both be required to open the lighthouse. Am I correct in that?” I did my best to appear guileless.

It was Brother Victor started laughing first. Jullian appeared to have acquired a healthy sunburn, but soon ducked his head and snorted into his sleeve. The prince blurted a modest chuckle that soon erupted into Gram’s best humor, and even the two women, one beset by indignant grief and the other by gods knew what, soon joined in. Elene knew very well that her intent to ride off to the bridge was rash and futile.

Naught was fundamentally changed by our laughter. Grievance and worry held their grip on each of us. But no one argued with my pronouncement. Osriel returned to his chair, and we talked for a while of how the lighthouse had come to be. Brother Victor recounted the story of my novice punishment when he first showed me the astonishing library, and we spoke of what might be needed to keep the two scholars safe in a future that was naught but hope.

As Brother Victor and Jullian withdrew to their night prayers, Osriel saluted the monk with a hand on his heart, then turned to Jullian and bowed. “Brave Scholar, wisdom, courage, and honor must ever be our beacon through this storm. I can think of no one better suited to light our lighthouse.”

Elene touched my hand as she made to follow them from the room. “I want to be angry with you, Valen, but you make it difficult.”

“I must keep practicing, then. No one has ever noted such a difficulty.”

“When you’ve done with Osriel…”

“I’ll come.”

Saverian had slipped out without a word to anyone. Her anger afflicted me like a saddle sore. Every passing moment seemed to aggravate it. Only duty kept me from running after her to settle matters. Osriel was waiting.

“As always, you tread the verge of treason, friend Valen.” Cup refilled and in hand, he stretched his feet toward the fire. “But I do thank you for reminding us of our common purpose. And most especially—Elene will not hear logic from me.”

Without waiting for an invitation I dragged my stool closer and perched. “And it is entirely logic that forces you to hold her back from danger?”

His color rose. “Logic is all I can afford. Believe it or not, Elene is her father’s worthy heir, a dauntless and skilled warrior, and a leader warriors will respect. Anger makes her even more formidable. But for this mission, courage must take on a different face. Zurina knows exactly what I’m asking of her.”

“To run. To let the Harrowers believe that her sex makes her weak and afraid, so they will think nothing of chasing her all the way to Renna and the world’s end.”

He drank and then swirled his cup idly. “So must I die on the solstice or not?”

“If Kol succeeds at what he plans, no…”

I told him all. And as I feared, neither Kol’s intentions nor the chance that I could heal the world’s wounds changed his determination.

“If you bring me word that Kol has won his challenge, I will joyfully accept the personal reprieve,” he said, after reviewing every nuance of my story. “And that you could be destined to heal these plagues and storms leaves me in awe and inspires hope for our future. My faith in you is immeasurable. But I must and will raise the revenant legion. Tales of hope and faith will not persuade Sila’s fighters to lay down their arms, even if you were to stand before the hosts in all your glory to deliver them. Do I not fight the battle two days hence at Dashon Ra, then it must be fought another day in Ardra or Morian. Here I can set the terms. If you’ve brought me an alternative, Valen, then tell me.”

And I could not. Though I believed Osriel’s enslavement of dead souls would carry him down a path of wickedness no honorable intent could redeem, I had no argument to stay his hand. Sila Diaglou and her grandmother would leave Navronne in ashes and Aeginea desolate.

My conversation with Elene was little easier. We sat stiffly in her chilly retiring room. The hearth fire had already been banked. I spoke of her father’s courage, but gave no details of his horrific end. And I confessed that I had not been able to redeem my promise to turn Osriel from his path. “I’ve brought him hope, though,” I said, but did not reveal how slim. “How goes it with”—I waved vaguely at her belly—“you? You seem well.”

“I could not hide it longer from Saverian. She says all seems to be as it should be. A hundred times I’ve thought to tell Osriel, but then I say: If he did not change his plans for me, why would he change them for a child he does not even know?” She did not weep or plead this time. Nor did she invite an embrace or comfort.

“Hold your secret close, mistress. Even so important a matter, from one who is dearer to him than all others…I doubt it could sway him just now. He is too locked into this course, and at the least, we need him clearheaded. But there will come a time when it’s right.” I hoped.

We agreed to leave for Gillarine at midmorning.

I returned to the tower room assigned to me, threw open the window, and sat on the bed to unlace my boots, imagining each of my friends doing the same. Each of us alone, anticipating the trial to come. Of a sudden I could not bear solitude. I relaced my boots and hurried down.

I gulped great breaths of air before descending the stair to Saverian’s den. You’re being wholly irrational, I told myself. What difference does it make what she thinks of you? No answer made itself known, and would have made no difference anyway. I needed to see her.

“Saverian?” I tapped on the open door.

“I’m here.” The rattling and banging going on inside the low-ceilinged chamber where we had revived Voushanti served as evidence enough of that.

It was impossible to tell what she was doing, beyond removing every bottle, box, and packet from her well-ordered shelves and putting them back again. I stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, waiting for her to turn around to see who had come.

I cleared my throat. “I thought you might be interested…as my physician…as a matter of your studies…” Weak. Insipid. “As you weren’t with me this time, and I found myself thinking about you right when something most astonishing happened. I fell out of my body—”

She spun about, a nasty-looking pair of sprung forceps in her hand. “You damnable, god-cursed, splotch-skinned toad. How can you let him do this? I’m to bleed him? Watch him suffer? Watch him die? And then perform this despicable enchantment to bring him back to lead an army of dead men?”

I felt unreasonably stung. “I tried to talk him out of it. I thought you knew what he planned.”

“About the dead men’s eyes, and giving the Harrowers to the dead, yes. That’s vile enough. But not the other. Not murdering him. And of course Riel chooses to explain my part in his villainous little scheme after you vanished without saying anything to anyone. No one knew where you were going or when or if you might come back, and then the boy told us what Gildas did to you, and I can’t conceive of how your mind or body can deal with the doulon again so soon. And every moment I thought we’d have to take Voushanti through another death ritual. He must either taste your blood soon or die again—it’s surely some marvel of your damnable blood that he has survived this long. So comes tonight, and after worrying myself half sick, you stroll through the door all politeness and deference to Riel, and offering such kindness to poor, half-crazed Elene, and such honor to that brave child—able to work this magic of yours, twisting them all inside out for love of you. But I won’t do any of it. Not for you, not for him, not for anyone. By this unmerciful, coldhearted, god-forsaken universe, I won’t.”

But, of course, she would, because she loved Osriel and believed in him, though it ripped her asunder. And somehow hearing that concern for me had some small part in her fury scratched the itch that had driven me down into her pit of a workplace to stand in the way of this outpouring.

“Please believe me, Kol is doing all he can to see that Danae magic will carry Osriel through what he needs to do. If all goes well, you’ll not need to retrieve him from death. And I yet hope that somewhere in the great mystery that’s to happen on that night, we’ll find him an alternative to his legion of revenants. As for Voushanti…I’ve already told the prince that the mardane will not die again. I’ll let the man suck my marrow if that prevents it.” I stepped close enough I could feel the heated air quivering about her, and I could smell the salt in the tears she would never shed. “You know why Osriel’s chosen you for these hard things—because he knows of no one more clever or sensible, no one more skilled. Because he knows you will do it only if you are convinced it’s right, and we have no choices left. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you where I was going. I was already half out of my head when I left. But I’d like to tell you what’s happened, because you were with me through the other, and I need—I think you might understand the parts I’ve not told anyone…”

I told her all of it—about my doulon sickness, about my guilt over Luviar and my shameful liaison with Malena, and my horror that she might carry a child of my loins. I told of exploring the Well, and how awkward and ungainly I had felt tripping over my feet in my mother’s footsteps, and how quiet and lonely it had been to be the Well, and how terrified I was of losing myself, and how it was the memory of her touch and her good humor that had soothed my fear, so that I had been able to yield my boundaries when I had to…

When I began to sweat and hold up her ceiling for fear of it crushing me, we moved outdoors—and still I babbled as I had never done in all my life. She asked sensible questions, and gifted me with thoroughly unsentimental encouragement when I confessed my doubts that Valen de Cartamandua could possibly be destined to heal plagues and pestilences, and she laughed when I told her of stinging tentacles and blue-scribed feathers in unlikely places.

When the stars had spun out their rounds, and she sat pinched and shivering in the well yard, no matter that I had given her the heavy cloak and wrapped her in my arms, I bent down and laid my forehead on her hair, inhaling its clean scent. “I thank you for this,” I said. “I don’t know what came over me. Next time, you must do the talking.”

She pushed me away, quirked her mouth, and stuffed the cloak in my lap. “Perhaps I’ll conjure myself into a tree, and you can dance around me—or I’ll come to you when you are living as the Well and can’t talk back.”

I slept long and deep that night, and I dreamed of dancing around her and of hearing her speak in the rustling of leaves and bubbles of starlight and the silence of stones.

“I presume the lighthouse is still at the abbey,” I said when Brother Victor joined Jullian, Elene, and me in Renna’s well yard on the morning before the solstice. “Never thought to ask.”

“It is,” he said through the windings of scarves and cowl and the extra cloak Saverian had insisted he wear for our short journey. Jullian carried a leather case filled with medicines, each labeled with uses and doses. Saverian must have been awake preparing them all night after I’d left her in the well yard.

I glanced up and all three of them were staring at me expectantly. I tried to take on a properly sober expression. “Well, we should be off, then. I—You must excuse me, mistress…Brother.”

Embarrassment quickly heated the still and bitter morning, as I wore naught but my gards beneath my cloak. I removed the cloak and draped it over Jullian’s shoulders. Trying to concentrate, I motioned for them to follow me down the colonnade.

Once we walked Gillarine’s cloisters, I held the others still for a moment, while I ensured no Harrowers lurked nearby. Jullian grinned as if he had invented me. I snatched my cloak from the boy, while Elene and Brother Victor gaped at the abbey ruins.

The little monk clenched his fist at his breast, his odd features lit from within. “Great Iero’s wonders! Who could imagine that it might take us longer to reach the lighthouse from the west cloister, than to reach the west cloister from Renna?”

Victor led us around the north end of the cloister, past the church and the carrels where the monks had pursued their studies in the open air and around the corner by the half-ruined chapter house. He stopped short of the worst of the blackened rubble and turned down the alley that had once marked the ground-level separation of chapter house and scriptorium.

Just beyond a mountain of fallen masonry and charred timbers, a perfectly intact arch supported what remained of the upper-level passage that had connected the two buildings. Set into the wall beneath the arch was a niche where a soot-stained mosaic depicted a saint reading a book.

“Now, mistress,” said Brother Victor, “I need you to lay your hands in the niche as we discussed.” The monk placed his own small hands atop Elene’s and closed his eyes.

A rainbow of light reived the day with magic, scalding my gards and near blinding me. The air crackled like burning sap and tasted of lightning. Neither Elene nor Jullian seemed to notice anything beyond the door that now stood open in the wall and the lamp that hung just inside, ready to show us the way downward.

“Brother, I am happier than ever that I never crossed you in my novice days,” I said, shaking my head clear of sparks and glare.

He smiled and motioned us into the doorway. “You had naught to fear. Only in the service of the lighthouse am I exempted from Saint Ophir’s proscription of sorcery.”

While Jullian and the chancellor inventoried pallets and lamps, blankets and pots, to see what extra supplies they might need brought from Renna, Elene and I explored the two great domed rooms. Though her father had been one of the lighthouse founders, she had never been inside.

The walls of one room were devoted to thousands of books, while the storage cases that lined the narrow walkways held the collected tools of physicians, masons, tailors, and every other craftsman. The second room held the collections of seeds, as well as plows, looms, lathes, and every other kind of implement the human mind could invent.

“Ah, Mother of Light,” whispered Elene as she gazed at the searing glory of Osriel’s domed ceilings—the overlaid wedges of jeweled glass that shone as if the sun itself hid behind them. “These are the very image of his soul…”

She expressed a wish to be alone; thus I wandered back to the other room. The books were useless to me, but I found the tools fascinating. Beside a case that held a collection of pens and inks, measuring sticks, compasses, and the like, stood a tall shelf holding a collection of scrolls and flat maps. Many bore the Cartamandua gryphon. On the lowest shelf sat a number of books.

I squatted beside the shelf and ran my fingers idly over the spines. I pulled out one book, but it was all text, not maps. The age and the decoration of its thin leather cover named it Aurellian…which reminded me of a small puzzle.

“Jullian, back at Fortress Torvo you told me that Gildas used an Aurellian book to interpret my grandfather’s maps. Why did he need such a thing? What did it tell him that the maps could not?”

The boy unrolled a palliasse, releasing a cloud of dust. “He didn’t use the Aurellian book so much to interpret the maps, as to tell him what to look for. It was a book of legends of the Danae. He said the stories told him where the holy places…the guardians…might be. And then he would know which maps to use to locate them.”

The world held its breath. “Did he ever mention something called the Plain? Or the legend of Askeron?”

Jullian’s brow wrinkled. “Not that I heard. But he’d not even worked a tenth of the way through the book. The Aurellian script was an ancient kind, written by some adventurer long before the invasion.”

My brief hope sagged. Surely bringing some news of the Plain to the Canon might bolster Kol’s challenge.

“Narvidius,” said Brother Victor, poking his head from the storage room. “Narvidius, Viator. I know that book.” He craned his neck to scan the vast shelves. “We have a copy here somewhere. That’s how Gildas knew of it.”

“Find it,” I said, my excitement rising. “By Iero’s hand, Brothers, find it before tomorrow.”

Chapter 31

Vermilion streaks scored the ragged black scud whipped from the peaks of Evanore. The mountains themselves stood black, still, and immense, untouched as yet by the fire to come. Despite the livid ground fog that seeped through the iron gate of Dashon Ra to twine my feet, the air between the wakening mountains and this rocky perch snapped clear and brisk on this solstice morning.

My fists drummed softly on the rocks at my back. My stomach had surely shrunk to the size of a nivat seed. Every untimely bird squawk came near sending me crawling up the cliff. I tried to concentrate. I sensed the plodding hoofbeats and harsh breathing of thousands of men and horses advancing relentlessly from the north. Only light, dry snow had fallen in the past weeks—crystalline fluff that you could blow off surfaces as if it were dust. Sila’s troops would experience no delays on the road to Renna.

I deemed myself fortunate to be in command of my senses and in control of this fiendish restlessness. Today was my birthday. The day I was to become one of the long-lived. The day the world could plummet into the abyss.

Firm, heavy footsteps approached from the direction of the stair behind Renna’s Great Hall, and moments later, Voushanti strode past the outcrop where I stood waiting for him. Not an hour since, Osriel had passed through the gate and vanished into the fog-choked gully behind it. Before Voushanti could do the same, I stepped out of my hiding place and called after him. “Mardane, do you endure well?”

The warrior whirled around, sword in hand. “You’re not supposed to be here, sorcerer.”

“I searched for you half the night, Mardane. More than ten days have gone since our blood-bond was created.” Saverian suspected Voushanti did not want to be found. “The prince told me that you are to lead his personal defense tonight, while he works his great magic.”

“But this morning I am to bleed him. That is what you command me, is it not—to aid him in this madness and then save him from it?” If words could slash skin, so his would have done. “I need naught else from you.”

“I would not have you weaken, no matter what the day demands. I may not be available to succor you later.”

He turned as if to continue on his way, but his feet did not move. Though his broad shoulders held rigid beneath his mail shirt, his neck bent forward. “Indeed, I flag,” he said at last. “Do you know what to do?”

“Saverian gave me the words.”

Voushanti pivoted smartly and waited for me, the unscarred half of his face gray and sagging in the half-light. His knife’s fiery kiss on my thumb burnt like the solstice sunrise.

“Live, mortal man,” I whispered, frost pluming from my mouth, “all desire and worth bound to my will until heart stops, bone crumbles, and breath fails.” A sour odor crept through the air as I fed magic to Saverian’s spell and pressed my bleeding thumb to Voushanti’s cold lips.

His eyes locked with mine, resentment and shame flaring scarlet in his depths. Though every instinct prompted me, I did not turn away.

The moment passed. The enchantment resolved. I removed my hand.

Voushanti wiped the last traces of blood from his mouth with his sleeve, averting his gaze. “May I go now? His Grace awaits his torturer.”

“Heed this command, Mardane: Obey Prince Osriel exactly in this dread matter. In all else protect him unto the limits of your life…no matter his orders.”

The warrior bowed curtly, stepped past, and vanished into the gully.

I did not follow. Osriel did not wish any to witness what he was to endure at Voushanti’s hands. No matter Kol’s intent to yield the power Osriel needed, the prince could not be certain of it. Only a long, slow bleeding into the earth would generate magic enough to raise his revenants, and so he must initiate his grotesque alternative early on this still, cold morning, hoping that I would bring him news of Kol’s aid before he was too weak to pull back.

Did Kol’s challenge fail, Osriel would use the word trigger bloodwitch to summon Saverian to carry out her grim assignment. He had refused her plea to set up a second trigger in case he changed his mind. Furious, she had disobeyed his command to stay away, hiding herself and a supply of medicines, surgical instruments, and blankets in one of the stone sheds left by those who had mined Dashon Ra. From there she could observe Osriel throughout the day and ensure he did not fail too quickly.

Osriel’s first scream rent the brightening morning. I shuddered. What faith he must have in the mardane. Voushanti had to take the prince to the precise juncture of torment without death, to induce him to forget hope, that Osriel’s despair might create power for redemption. Faith and honor, love and duty…I could not deny the virtues that drove the prince and his servants. But with every breath, in every bone, I knew this horror was wrong.

So I did not go to Saverian, though I hated the thought of her lonely vigil. And I did not drag Osriel away from his torment or Voushanti from his cruel task. The only way I could prevent the dread conclusion of this harsh beginning was to take up my own part in the day’s events. By midday I must be back to the Well, where Stian would be waiting to take me into the Canon. The situation of Dashon Ra, the silhouette of its rocky parapet against the sky, the thinness of its air, and the gouged and damaged bowl carved from its heart already lived in my memory, ready to bring me back here again.

“Who’s there?” Two warriors stood watch at the bottom of the rock-gate stair. They whirled and presented arms as I descended, clearly surprised to see anyone approaching from the direction of the heights. It was ginger-bearded Philo who challenged me, along with Voushanti’s other faithful lieutenant, the dark-haired Melkire.

I lowered my hood. “At ease, friends. It’s just Valen.”

The two men lowered their swords. “Should have known you would be a part of all this strangeness, pureblood,” said Philo. “Perhaps you can tell us why we’re posted here behind the hall and kitchens, instead of in the field.”

“We’ve heard reports that the Ardran prince and Sila Diaglou herself are but half a day out in hard pursuit of Thanea Zurina,” intruded Melkire.

“The Ardran prince…Perryn rides with the priestess? Does Bayard, too?” It could be disastrous if Bayard brought a Moriangi legion here.

“The messenger said no Moriangi regulars rode with Sila yestereve,” said Philo. “Only Prince Perryn and a handful of Ardrans. It was their route worried him the most. Zurina is leading them straight for the eastern approaches, showing them the secret ways not even the Aurellians could find. If they come upon Renna from the backside, they’ll drop these rocks right on our heads.”

This bursting unease from two well-disciplined warriors but reinforced my beliefs about this day’s battle. Naught would be held back today—no secret, no life, no soul. Ronila and Gildas would unravel their plots, too, and like these two, I didn’t know whence the attack would come.

“Zurina is no fool,” I said. “She’s surely got her reasons—and her orders. And certainly Thane Boedec and his warhost will be ready to meet whatever comes. Does Voushanti know that Perryn rides with Sila?”

“Aye,” said Melkire. “He received the report.”

“Good. Stand fast and have faith in your prince and your commander,” I said. “Guard them well, warriors. And may your gods do the same for you.”

“Godspeed, pureblood,” said Philo. “It gives us heart to know you are with us.”

I wished I had more reason to be optimistic. And this matter of Bayard…

A few steps took me to a patch of bare ground behind the bakehouse. Though lacking a sample of Max’s own blood, I squeezed a few drops from the fresh cut on my thumb and used it to touch earth with magic. Whether it was the half-Cartamandua blood or merely the heightened alertness of this day that fed my skill, I located him quickly.

Spirits and demons… Max had crossed Caedmon’s Bridge into Evanore. Bayard’s legions could not be allowed to join Sila’s. So great a host could overwhelm Osriel’s fragile trap, or break too quickly through the defense Voushanti would mount for Osriel. Osriel must not be forced to take action before Kol’s release of power at the change of season.

I pelted through the halls and passages of Renna. In a great show of noise and sparks I burst a bar on the wicket gate, then promised the quaking gate guards dogs’ faces if they failed to let me out. Bayard wouldn’t listen to me. I needed to see Max.

Out on the open hillside, I stripped and bundled my clothes, tying them over one shoulder, and touched earth again. Carefully I recalled the landscape of the southern bridge approaches—a steep descent from the mountains over treeless slopes, leveling out only within the last quellé. As certain as I could be of Max’s position along that road, I headed northward along Renna’s rutted road to the point where it began its steep descent. Holding the two landscapes in my head for similarity, I worked the shift…

Two riders pulled up sharply when I stumbled through a washed-out rut ten paces in front of them. Unfortunately, they were but the first of a sizable vanguard and neither of them was Max.

One sidewise glance and I dived off the road, tumbling farther than I liked down a precipitous slope of rocks and scrub into what appeared to be a snow-choked gully. I landed facedown and skidded farther yet, digging in my toes as my head and shoulders crashed through brittle branches and crusted snow. When I came to a stop, my head hung out over a precipice of at least a thousand quercae. My stomach plummeted the entire depth; thankfully, my body did not.

I held still, stifling my gasping breaths, while fifty other horsemen passed by and the two riders argued with each other about exactly what they had seen, and whether the slope was too dangerous to explore. As my legs began to cramp from my desperate hold, another man joined them.

“A naked demon glowing with light, you say?” said the newcomer, snorting in sarcasm after their lengthy description. “More likely a boulder tumbled off the cliff. Speak such foolishness again, and I’ll conjure tails on your backsides.”

“Aye, master.” The clank of harness and whuffling of horses was followed by departing hoofbeats. But only two beasts had gone.

“Are you falling out of the sky now, Valen? Pardon if I don’t come down to join you.”

I crept backward crabwise. Once I found a firmly rooted branch to rest my foot on, I turned around and scrambled upward. “I need to talk to you, Max.”

He dismounted and sat on the verge of the shelf road, waiting, examining me carefully as I crouched just below him so as to remain out of sight of the road.

“First you must tell me what you are,” he said in as soft a voice as ever I’d heard from him. “And who you are.”

I extended my arm so he could see. “I’m still kin—of Cartamandua blood. It just happens my father was not Claudio, and my mother was not human.”

“Not human…” He stared at the sapphire seagrass and the snarling cat, but did not touch them.

“You’re not half so surprised as I was. But much as I would love to share the tale—one could say I’m the younger brother of a map—we’ve far more important business. Bayard was supposed to wait at the bridge.”

Max tore his gaze from my hand. All wariness now, he scanned the cliffs and the upward road, as if hordes of my kind might be lying in wait. “Bayard released Perryn to ride with him, believing him chastened by his tongue-tied captivity. Then the little fair-haired weasel rode ahead with the priestess. It makes Prince Bayard exceeding nervous—the idea of Sila, Perryn, and Osriel working some compromise without him.”

“Listen to me, Max, and believe. There will be no compromises at Renna. The only way Bayard comes out of this with even a portion of what he wants is to honor his agreement with Osriel. You must persuade him. My master will not be denied this day.”

Max leaned forward—all business—worried and angry. “You lied to me about Fortress Torvo. Used me. And yes, it seems you left me clean of blame. But it left my master chary of Osriel’s schemes and me chary of persuading him to trust the Bastard. Why should I believe you now?”

“Have you touched earth since you crossed the bridge, Max? Have you allowed yourself to feel what haunts Evanore?” Even lacking Danae blood, Cartamandua talents should detect the sickness lurking in the veins of Dashon Ra.

“Osriel’s wards.” His voice dismissed the fears he named, but his pureblood mask could not hide those written on his face and in his eyes. He had felt the anger of the dead.

“Exactly so. Whatever you perceive, it is only the beginning for those who challenge Renna. Do your master and his men march on Osriel, they will curse the day they were born, and they will curse the day they died here. Do you understand me?”

“I’ll think on it.” He averted his eyes, shuttering fear behind perfect pureblood indifference.

Such feeble assurance did nothing for my confidence. Too many pieces of the day’s puzzle remained tenuous. “I’ll tell you a secret—you, Max, not your master. Perhaps if you understand why I could trust no one in Palinur, you’ll give credence to my word today.”

“Perhaps.”

I prayed that I revealed only what no longer held importance. “Sila held three prisoners on the day I came to you. My master was one of them. Does that justify my deception?”

Dismissive laughter burbled from inside him and made it so far as his throat. But then his eyes met mine, and laughter died. “By the night lords…the sickly secretary.”

His gaze traveled my length as I climbed back onto the road. “Believe, Max. You must find some way to persuade your master to hold back. If not, then in the name of heaven, look to your own soul and ride away.”

I prayed my vanishing trick would leave him convinced.

The sun had traveled much too far from its fiery birth by the time I returned to Renna’s well yard and shifted back to Gillarine. That such a journey should by rights have taken me three days did naught for my growing fever. I needed to be at the Well. I would spare only a few moments to learn if Victor and Jullian had discovered word of the Plain.

Once sure the abbey hosted no unexpected visitors, I hurried to the lighthouse door and invoked the trigger word archangel. The lighthouse door burst open. Jullian must have been sitting on the other side.

“We’ve found it!” The boy bounded down the stair ahead of me.

Brother Victor sat at a worktable half buried in books and scrolls. “Iero’s grace, Valen!” he said. “Read him the passage, lad. I’m determined to find him a map.”

Jullian proudly showed me the pristine copy of the book Victor had named Narvidius, Traveler. My restless feet had me circling the room as the boy read the Aurellian text.

To discover the lost country, the seeker must divide the riverlands in twain, and the eastern half in twain again. In the innermost of these two last divisions, known as the Barrowlands or the Haunted Plain by the local peoples, travel the winding thread of the River Massivius, called in ancient times Qazar or the “Twin,” as it crosses a series of rocky berms and parts itself into two waterways. On a fertile isle between, enriched by the water’s flow, once stood the garden city of Askeron. Here did great sorcerers raise the river water to their uppermost towers and channel it through the lanes and terraces, so that water flowed through every man’s hold, the streets were ever clean of dung and waste, and the air was ever sweet with the roses and honeysuckle that grew in wild cascades from the walls.

The lost city of Askeron figured in numerous legends. Narvidius speculated that the sorcerers had grown cocky and cultivated all of Askeron’s terraces, forgetting to leave a wild place for the guardian Dané to enter and leave. Thus had the crops and gardens failed one dreadful summer. In that autumn, the river grew to a mighty flood and washed away every trace of Askeron and left the ground dead so that the eye of humankind could not see its remains.

“There’s no other reference to a plain in the book?” The link seemed tenuous.

“None. But we found no mention of the other particular names you said either—the Mountain, the Well, or the Sea,” said the boy. “Though he writes of many mountains and seas. Surely holy Picus would not have told you of the story did he believe it false.”

I wasn’t at all sure of that. Holy Picus enjoyed his storytelling.

“We’ve few good maps of eastern Morian,” said Brother Victor, beckoning me to his table. “No Cartamandua map. But I’ve found one that shows a divided river.”

The monk showed me the sketchy rendering of a river that split into two only to rejoin itself on its way to the northern sea. A different, later map purported to show the River Massivius and its relation to several other rivers and the Trimori Road, the Aurellian trade route that led to the great port city, only this map showed no division in the river.

“Tell me the names of these towns and cities, and these other places,” I said, tapping my finger on the words around the divided river. I had marched with Eodward to the defense of Trimori, along that very road, and it seemed as if we’d crossed a thousand rivers. “If I could but find some place I can remember well enough, I could transport myself there.” I had no time for long expeditions.

Jullian began reading the names: Armentor, Vencicar, Pavillium…None was familiar. For each map, Victor and Jullian read me the marked distances and interpreted the key, but the Barrowlands were marshy and had a reputation for ill luck, thus Eodward’s legions had avoided it.

Out in the cloister garth, I touched earth, bringing to mind all I had learned of the divided river, but a path failed to resolve. It would take me weeks of traveling to approach the Barrowlands and the River Massivius from anywhere I knew.

A crestfallen Jullian trotted alongside me. “Is there naught else we can do to help? Another map? Some question that needs answering? I want to fight in this battle beside you and Gram, but I know my best use is here and not behind a sword.”

His earnest innocence, as always, made me regret the flaws and failures that left me unworthy of such admiration. “Here’s a question: Find out what use Danae have for nivat. My uncle gets testy when I mention it. And I suppose I’m ashamed to press him. Perhaps if I knew what they do with it, I’d know how to prevent the vile things it does to me.”

His face brightened. “I’ll do it. I swear—”

“Be careful with oaths, lad,” I said, smiling. “They’ll take you where you never thought to go.”

When I delivered Jullian back to him, I clasped hands with Brother Victor and thanked him for his help. “Lock your door, Brother. Stay safe. I’ll come when I can to tell you what transpires.”

“No one will find us.” Brother Victor touched my bare shoulder. Somewhere in all the taking off and putting on, I had lost my bundle of clothes. I hadn’t even noticed. “You shall be Iero’s finger of grace this day, Valen. Do not doubt.”

The silver-white disk of the sun had slipped past the zenith, and I was yet climbing the last steep hill toward the Well and my waiting grandsire. The day had grown oppressive—the air so cold and thick it was an effort to breathe. Not a whisper of wind stirred the dead grass that poked from the rocks in stiff clumps. The light was flat, a gray-white haze dulling the faint blue of the sky. I felt screams on the air. The taste of blood filled my mouth, no matter how often I spat or grabbed a handful of dry snow to wash it out. Was it that this land’s king lay bleeding, or had Sila and her allies already reached Renna and bent their minds to slaughter and corruption?

I jogged lightly across the ledge and down the narrow passage through the cliff that led to the Well. A white-haired Dané squatted beside the dark, still surface of the pool.

“With all respect, grandsi—argai.” He looked up sharply and I bowed. “Duties prevented—”

“Thy duty lies here and only here.”

Stian’s greeting halted my apology in the way of an avalanche—rock and ice and inarguable finality. Which, on this day when my turbulent insides already seemed to be digesting briars and knives, drove me to bursting. “My duty lies wherever I choose to pledge my service. Here at the Well. With my king. With my human friends. And with my Danae kin.”

“This is impossible,” he roared, shaking the ice-clad granite. “Kol is mistaken in thee.” He jumped to his feet and strode across the corrie. In moments he would vanish.

“Wait, please, argai. Permit me…” Damnable touchy bastard. I dropped to my knees and laid hands on the stone, and felt a welcoming warmth flow up my arms. But it was a pattern I sought, the newest one—of course he would have danced here.

It began and ended at the spot where he had been kneeling. First a powerful spin. More turns than Kol’s, but a heavier landing. I brushed one foot to the side. Shifted weight. Brushed the other. And then a leap—drive your spirit upward, Valen—scarcely landing before another, and then another, circling the pool. Do not think of your loutish, graceless bumbling. Only of the steps…feel them…show him…

Such twisted grief I felt as I moved through his steps, such wrenching guilt for blindness and stubborn pride, for anger and righteous belief. Stian’s grief and guilt. Clyste, the brightest spirit ever gifted to the long-lived, had died here unforgiven. She had not dared tell her own sire of her hopes, and this shadow of his kiran told me she had been right to keep her secret. That was the worst. He would have woven her bonds of myrtle and hyssop himself. Pain drove Stian’s dancing, relentless, unending self-condemnation for beliefs he could not recant.

I stumbled to the end of the silver thread. Trying to stretch my spine longer, lower my hips, and round my arms as to embrace a tree, I made my imitation of the allavé. I closed my eyes, determined to hold the position as long as possible, more afraid to hear Stian’s scorn than to exhibit my incapacity. But, at the least, I understood him better.

To my astonishment, a hand grasped my back foot, shifted it slightly toward the center of my body, stretched it out farther, and left only my great toe touching the ground.

My forward thigh heated. My supporting ankle wobbled. But I squeezed my eyes shut and willed myself still.

The hands grasped my waist and pressed me down and forward, and then pushed my shoulders down to realign them with back, hip, and leg. I thought my burning thigh would rip. But I held.

“Remember,” he said as he pulled my elbows wider and lower, twisted and kneaded my wrists until they felt like softened clay, and riffled my fingers until they rested light as ash on my forehead. Cradling my head in his palms, he drew his thumbs across my eyelids and forehead, smoothing away my frown of concentration. “Thou’rt a stick. Pounding will break thee…or leave thee pliable. Now stand up.”

I drew in my back leg and pushed up, resisting the urge to groan or knead the muscles of my aching thigh.

“I could not believe what Kol spoke of thee,” he said, his granite cheeks unsoftened. “Come. We must prepare. Nightfall opens the Canon.”

Chapter 32

I held my tongue and followed Stian through the cliff passage. My actions seemed to please him better than my words.

We emerged from the passage into a wholly different landscape—a valley of tall pines decked with frost. Then Stian transported me through a series of breathtakingly fast shifts that demonstrated how rudimentary Kol had been with his teaching. No shift left me nauseated until the last, when we strolled onto a grassy hilltop, the high point of a ridge that protruded from the mountains. The oppression of the day, the anguish on the air, the blood and pain and unyielding winter came together here, leaving every movement an effort.

With only a gesture, Stian bade me stay where I was, while he wandered about the hillside. Every once in a while he would execute a breathtaking leap or a jump and spin that denied the god’s firm hand that holds our bodies to the earth. At last he seemed to find what he wanted. He knelt and began to clear a spot of rocks and grass.

The view from the hilltop was magnificent. A little to the north, a small lake reflected the flat light, its outflow several small streams that shone like steel and gouged the hillsides. East of the ridge, the land dropped into a tangle of rock spires and knobbed hills that stretched to the horizon and the deepening blue of winter afternoon. The shortest day of the year. I was eight-and-twenty, and I was not mad. Not yet.

I turned to the west and caught my breath. A parapet of red-and-orange-streaked stone edged the ridge, dropping precipitously to a broad slope—the apron of the greater mountains to the south. The jagged rim reflected the very shape I had etched into my memory that morning.

“This is the Center,” I murmured. “Dashon Ra.” Only we stood in Aeginea, where no human had gouged and scraped and hollowed out this hilltop in search for gold. I knelt, and though I dared not touch the earth of such a place with magic, I believed I heard Osriel’s harsh breathing and felt the seeping of his blood. “Be strong, my king,” I whispered as if he might hear me across the distance. “Do not yield your soul too quickly. I will find you a way.”

“Come here.” Stian sat back on his heels and motioned me to do the same on the opposite side of the barren patch he had created. “Do not move. Do not interfere.”

With the same powerful fingers he had used to correct my allavé, he scooped up the damp soil and spread it over every finger’s breadth of my face and neck. “Do not touch it,” he said as he closed my eyes and packed the soft soil over them as well. “Do not remove it until I tell thee.”

My skin heated. Itched. Burned. Panic welled up from my depths. “Iero’s grace! Please—”

He gripped my wrists firmly until my breathing settled. “When I lay a hand on thy breast, follow me. Move as I do, as best thou art able, and attend carefully the earth beneath thy feet. Remember.”

I could not imagine what he meant until he packed my ears with dirt, causing another bout of terror. He gripped my wrists until I understood he was not going to fill my nose or mouth.

A touch under my arms brought me to my feet. Thin cold air cleansed my lungs and whispered over my skin. Over my gards. I wriggled my feet and noted the surface of sere grass and thin soil, shards of rock and pricks of ice.

His hand touched my breast for one brief moment. Then the air moved. I panicked. This was impossible. But somewhere inside, the part of me that was coming to understand the language of the gards knew that he had spun in place and taken one step to the right. I did the same and managed not to fall. This time a shard of rock pricked my left great toe and a sprig of tansy tickled my heel.

The air moved again. Another spin. Another step right. Five more. A small leap from one foot to the other. Left, then right, then left again. Repeat. At the end of the sequence, I would have wagered my left arm that I stood exactly on the same spot where I had begun. Without sight or hearing, I had to focus on the gards, the shifting of the air, and the feel of the earth.

Hands touched my arms, extending them straight from my shoulders, kneaded my wrists, and riffled my fingers to ease their stiffness. Then he touched my chest, and we began again.

By the fifth time through, I heard the music, a stately rondeau. By the tenth, I knew every pebble and sprig of the ground, and I was able to concentrate on the spinning, sensing every twitch of Stian’s muscles and striving to emulate him until I could sustain an entire revolution without wobbling.

When we completed yet another repetition—the fourteenth or fifteenth—Stian changed the pattern. He clapped his hands and stomped his foot at the same time, then clapped three more times rapidly. A step to his right. So odd not to hear the sound, but only to feel it. I mimed his moves. He repeated the pattern. Again and again, until my heart stuttered in the same rhythm. This one was much easier. Simple. Boring. One more and then he walked away. I waited for him to jump or spin, but he didn’t. Fear nibbled at my mind, but I focused on his movements and did not rush. I executed the last repetition and walked after him. He would not lead me off a cliff.

The surface changed from grass and stony earth to sheer rock. Then to ice. He was shifting as he walked. When the rushing movement of a stream confused me, I hesitated briefly, then stepped forward. My foot found no purchase and I toppled…

Hands grabbed my arms and dragged me backward, holding me tight until I regained balance and firm footing, and longer yet until my senses calmed and I could feel subtleties again. I inhaled deeply. Just beyond my feet the rush of water drew its own wind and shed a fine spray. The hands released me and touched my chest lightly.

More careful this time, I swiveled right and followed him down a short, steep path and into fast-flowing water. Treacherous rocks underfoot, round and slick. Water so cold it stole my breath. But I did not fall or step into a waterfall.

When I stood ankle deep in the stream, Stian halted. A startling application of freezing water cleared my ears. “Holy Mother!”

“Discipline and obedience serve thee well. Wash now. Then we will speak.”

I rinsed the dirt from my eyes. The stream that froze my feet was the outflow from the small waterfall and the deep pool at its foot. I dived into the pool and washed away the residue of the afternoon. When I climbed out again, shaking off the freezing water like a pup, my waiting grandsire inspected me, giving particular attention to my face.

“Did I get it all off?” I said, a bit impatient. My skin yet burned from the grit.

“The soil…yes.” His middle finger traced an outline about my left eye, around my cheek and ear, and down my neck. “Fitting, I suppose, that it should be the Cartamandua beast.”

“The Cartamandua—?” I slapped my hand to my cheek. “A gryphon? That means you—But I thought the remasti didn’t happen until the Canon. I assumed you were testing me.”

“The remasti must be sealed in the Canon. Wander away from Aeginea just now and this gard will fade, and thou shalt be no more than before. And indeed I used preparation for this night’s deception to distract thee from thy fears. I would not have thee damage the dancing ground as thou didst gouge Stathero. Kol spoke to me of thy peculiar nature, and I did not dismiss all of it as foolery.”

I could not help but grin. A gryphon. Great Mother…that would explain the feathers and braids down below—eagle’s feathers and lion’s hair. I stretched out my left arm and found that my gards had shifted. Talons wrapped my shoulder, draped by an eagle’s wing. The breast and legs of the lion scribed the left side of my chest.

I bowed to Stian. “My thanks for your care, argai. I will strive to learn all you teach.”

He seemed satisfied, if not pleased, as he beckoned me to follow. “As thou art prepared, we retrace our steps. Here is my plan for the Canon…”

The daylight was failing.

“So if all goes well, if Kol takes the Center and holds the magic of the season’s change, how long will I have to inform my prince?”

Even in its fifth variation, Stian could not seem to grasp my question. “The power of the joined kirani shall flow through his hands and feet. He does not hold it. How long has no meaning.”

Stian and I crouched in the gully that penetrated the rocky rim of Dashon Ra. No iron gate barred the gully’s western end. No fortress pressed its back to these vermillion cliffs. Not in this realm. Did the same steep-angled sunlight that bathed these cliffs shine on my dying king?

“How will Kol know the moment of the season’s change? Will he do something so I’ll know he’s ready? Or just before?” I knew the dancing would not stop. He’d said they danced till dawn.

I felt confident that I could get to Osriel’s side in the space of a few steps. After the afternoon’s exercise, this hillside felt a part of me, and I would never shed the image of the ravaged mine…and the souls that dwelt there. I just wasn’t sure when I would need to go. At what point could I tell Osriel that Danae power was his for the taking?

“Thou shalt know the season’s change as well as Kol. Dost thou not know when the wind shifts or the sun rises?”

“Yes, yes, of course I do.” Faith came very hard on this evening, when every moment threatened disaster, when so much was new to me.

I peered out from our seclusion, and my breath caught as it had repeatedly over the last hour. How could I respond to the sights before me but with aching wonder? Danae, hundreds of them—male and female—roamed the hillside, greeting one another. Some practiced dance steps; some stretched out their limbs. Many wore veils of spidersilk that floated in the breeze, echoing or elaborating their movements. Others wore flowers in their hair—hair long and red like Kol’s or white like Stian’s, or palest gold, silver as moonbeams, or green as the sea. None black as mine. Stian had threaded my hair with vines to disguise it.

More Danae arrived, appearing in a wink of light here and there across the landscape. Age did not mar their ravishing beauty. Stian pointed out those who were eldest—recognizable by a luminous aura that left them almost transparent. And I noted Tuari, his rust-colored hair wreathed with autumn leaves, his haughty face marked with a roe deer, and his consort, Nysse the Chosen, with her cap of scarlet curls and a swan scribed on cheek and breast.

These two walked an arced path through the crowd, greeting the others, drawing them into ordered ranks behind them like a ship’s wake. By the time Tuari and Nysse reached the apex of the hill, the other Danae encircled the hill in spiraled bands of light. Three initiates stood at the lower end of the spiral, their full complement of gards pulsing a dull gray like my own. A few immature initiates—young males and females lacking facial gards as yet—scrambled onto the rocks south of my position, where they could watch.

Here and there a latecomer winked into view and hurried up the hill. As Stian moved to join them, he glanced over his shoulder. “Our fate lies with thee, Clyste-son. Have care with it.”

I bowed. “With all my heart and skill, Stian-argai.”

He nodded and ran up the slope to join one of the ranks, greeting those on either side of him.

Great gods, please grant that I do not fail them. Breathing deep to calm my jittery gut, I hugged the rock and waited.

The last rays of the sun were swallowed by the horizon. From the hilltop, one of the eldest Danae began to sing a simple wordless melody, eerie, haunting, marvelous, wrenching, for it touched all the yearnings and confusions that had marked my life from my earliest days: the pain that had dragged me into perversion, the fury that had lashed out at confinement and tawdry concerns, the truth that had teased at me in temples and taverns, in drink and in lovemaking. The song called me to the dance.

Tuari spun on one foot, straight and powerful, then came to rest and touched Nysse’s hand. She stretched one foot skyward, impossibly vertical. Tuari held her hand and walked a circle around her, turning her as she balanced on her toes. When he released her, she touched the next in line, a luminous elder who jumped and scissored his straight legs so fast they became invisible. He landed and touched the next…

And so the connection of movement and grace passed down the spiral around the hill until it reached the three initiates at the end. Their gards pulsed a faint azure. But not mine. My breath came short and painful, as I withheld my answer to the call. I had to wait. This was but the first round, the Round of Greeting, so Stian had schooled me.

A livelier song began the Round of Celebration. The ranks of dancers broke into smaller circles or duets or solo dancers, each following the music as they would. Soon other songs drowned out the voices—the songs of trees and wandering waterways, a pavane as stately as an oak, a gigue, light and joyous like the water. Or perhaps only I heard those particular harmonies, and others heard songs drawn from their own senses.

I climbed the gully wall and found a perch whence I could see farther down the hill to the lake, where the reflections of the dancers grew brighter as the afterglow faded from the west. Danae everywhere. An hour, they must have danced that second round.

The third round began with the Archon’s Dance, a courtesy to his position. All others sat wherever they had finished the last round and watched attentively. Tuari was a powerful dancer. His jumps were almost as high as Kol’s, his eppires charged with life, his positions held to the point of breaking. Though glorious in themselves, his movements spoke more of vigor than of grace. Yet at his allavé, the watchers all over the hillside offered their approval, slapping one hand against a thigh—the sound of hailstones rapping on a slate roof.

The next to dance was Nysse, for this third was the Round of the Chosen, where the archon charged the one judged finest among all Danae to demonstrate her skills and invited any who wished to challenge her naming to do so.

Indeed Nysse was lovely. She could weigh no more than cloud, for though her jumps were not so high as those of the males, she seemed to hang suspended in the air for an eternity and land without disturbing the grass beneath. Her willowy grace evoked the image of a pond where swans glided in the moonlight and once a year white lilies bloomed. Yet the dance affected me with a wrenching sadness, as it told how early snow had blighted the lilies and sent the swans southward over the mountains.

To feel Nysse’s movements was to understand that every passing season weakened the bonds between the kirani and the land. When even so beloved a sianou as the Pond of the White Lilies suffered, the world must change or be lost. Her allavé drew a sigh of wonder and grief from the Danae host. Without a word, she had made a strong argument for the unlinking Kol feared.

As the slapping noise and cries of approval grew, Tuari spread his arms, inviting any to challenge his consort for the Center. I could not imagine who would attempt it. Even Kol must doubt. I crushed that thought before it could blossom. Three dancers tried, each one better than the last, though none were a match for Nysse. Few from the crowd voiced support for any of them.

An expectant murmur traversed the crowd as a fourth challenger strode up the hill and nodded to the archon—Kol, unmatched in his pride.

He began slowly, a simple series of steps and blindingly sharp triple spins, one and then another, scribing a circle on the hilltop, so that those on every side could see—every movement precise, composed, and very large. His body spoke that this was to be a monumental kiran, for he did not stop or slow or hesitate or miss the next…or the next…or the next…And when he had drawn us tight enough, when I could not believe that he could possibly execute one more movement without flaw, he coiled and leaped into the air like the explosion of a geyser, soaring twice the height of a man, his legs split wide and straight. No sooner landed than he bent gracefully to earth as if to work a summoning, then rose and with his powerful leg drew himself into one eppire and then another, driving his body until my heart felt like to burst. The music he drew from earth and sky began with the grieving strings of vielles and the cool flowing sorrows of a dulcian—my lost mother—with hints of mysteries and secrets, and moved with driving purpose to trumps and songs of triumph.

I could not have said that those who watched held breath as I did. They could not know how much depended on this kiran. But when Kol had built the image of the Well, so true that I could feel my own deep-buried fires, my veins of stone, my bed of earth and wounded walls, wonder and memory surged through the host. One and then another of the Danae stood as if they could not believe what they perceived. Some spread their arms as if to bask in their awe.

By the time Kol stretched leg and back and bowed his head in his allavé, every Dané in Dashon Ra was standing. And when he rose to his feet, a great cry of joy and triumph shattered the night.

“He said to prepare for a surprise, but who could have guessed this marvel?”

I almost fell off my perch. Kol’s friend Thokki stood just below me, looking up with eyes the same color as her gards—the hue of morning sky in spring.

“In the Canon, Thokki.” I jumped down and kept my distance, wary, ready to pounce if she cried out warning.

“Thou hast naught to fear from me, initiate,” she said, raising her hands as if to ward a blow. “Kol asked my help—a matter of such astonishment that all else he babbled was but chaff tickling my ear, save for his promise that his challenge kiran would vouch for his actions—as indeed it has. He asked me in his sire’s name to partner thee in Stian’s Round and disguise thy…limitations.”

“I promise you that—”

“Thy promises carry no vigor with me, initiate. Kol’s and Stian’s serve well enough.” Her ready smile dismissed whatever offense I might have taken. “Ah, see? Tuari has no choice now.”

I looked back to the hilltop where Nysse herself took Kol’s hand and presented him to the exultant Danae. Another cheer broke out as Tuari followed her lead. Then the two of them backed away, leaving Kol alone at the Center.

Kol stomped one foot on the ground, then clapped his hands together over his head. He set up a steady rhythm that subsumed the random slaps and cheers and drew them into unison. Soon every Dané kept his pace, so that the earth thundered with it. They continued all together until Kol nodded, and a group broke off and set up a counterpoint of three quick claps in between Kol’s steady marks. My blood pulsed in time with them. Simple. Powerful.

“Dost thou feel the call?” asked Thokki, tight with excitement. “This is Stian’s Round.”

My foot hammered the beat—the same rhythm Stian had driven into my head that afternoon. How had I ever judged it boring? All across Dashon Ra, the Danae formed circles large and small, wheels within wheels. Circles of light. “Aye,” I said. “I feel it.”

Thokki clasped my hand and grinned. “Then let us join in.”

She paused, watching, as one great wheel expanded to catch up more dancers, burgeoning in our direction, and then shrank again, spinning off minor circles like sparks from a fire. “Now!”

We ran across the small dark gap and joined three others—two males, one female—in a minor circle. I stumbled at first, my heart in my throat.

“Welcome the initiate!” called Thokki as she stomped and clapped.

The others shouted, “In the Canon, initiate!”

“In the Canon,” I croaked. Then I stomped and clapped, kept the rhythm and moved in the circle, and within three beats felt like crowing with the joy of it. I could have continued a lifetime with naught but this.

But the dance was not static, and Thokki leaned close. “Thy feet, initiate. Do not lose the pace. Remember.”

She stepped back, and I felt sere grass and thin soil, shards of rock and pricks of ice underneath my feet. I spun in place and stepped to the right. Gods cherish all…a rock pricked my left great toe and a sprig of tansy tickled my heel. And so we moved into the patterns Stian had drilled into me. Simple steps and spins and short leaps about our small wheel. The music of pipes and tabors swelled from the earth and stars. My gards took fire with the deepest blues of lapis, sapphire, and summer midnight in the frostlands, and I thought I must be raised into heaven. And when Stian’s Round came to its end in a great crescendo, I thought the hands that reached under my arms as if to embrace me must surely be my grandsire come to welcome me. Kol had won, and I was Danae.

The arms squeezed upward, crushing my shoulders. “Take the halfbreed to the pond. And remove that one.” Thokki stumbled forward and fell, her head slamming into the turf. “I’ll have Tuari break her for this trespass.”

No mistaking the crone’s voice that gave the orders, or the stick that fell so brutally on Thokki’s shoulder, or the shapeless form that moved into our circle from the night. Underneath her hood, golden eyes smoldered with hate, and her thin lips broke into a smile that none but I could see. Ronila.

Chapter 33

“No!” I yelled as a Dané with an unmarked face hefted a dazed Thokki to his shoulder and disappeared into the night beyond the circles. “Don’t harm her. Please, you don’t understand!”

The glare of sigils and starlight became a blur as I tried to wrestle free. But the owner of the well-muscled arms that gripped my shoulders locked his hands behind my neck. No matter my kicking and writhing, another Dané bound my ankles. If I could not walk, I could not escape.

The youth glanced up at me and wrenched his knots tighter. My heart sank as I recognized him as Kennet, the initiate whose legs were twined with oak leaves, Tuari’s attendant who had bound me to a tree intending to break my knees. His tall, strong companion with the wheat-colored hair was likely the person crushing my neck.

The other three dancers of our circle gawked in disbelief as the two young Danae bound my wrists behind my back. “My kin-father, the archon, has charged me to root out the causes of our failing life,” Ronila said to them. “What more cause could we discover than a halfbreed flaunting illicit gards in the Canon?”

“Don’t let her do this,” I said. “She wants to destroy us all!”

Ronila touched each of the three dancers on the shoulder. “Human interference has corrupted the long-lived, even he who is Chosen. I have paid the just price to preserve the Canon, and so must every violator. Go. Dance Freja’s Round and restore innocence to the change of season.”

The three glanced back uncertainly as they moved off to join Freja’s Round or the Round of Learning, where one dancer would move about the inside of a wheel of light, striving to match every other dancer’s most difficult steps.

“This is no violation!” I shouted after them. “Kol brought back the Well. It lives in your memory again.”

Kennet’s comrade hefted me onto his shoulders and carried me down the hill, past circles and spirals that twisted and turned like jewels of heaven strung on silken threads. Ronila hobbled alongside.

“I am made new by the Canon,” I said, recalling Kol’s teaching. “You cannot hinder me.”

“The archon will render that judgment,” said Kennet. “We but ensure thy attendance.”

With only a few hundred steps we traveled far from the dancing ground and the Center. This pond lay in a nest of meadowlands in the lee of a gentle hilltop, very like the lake at Dashon Ra. But here spike-thin pines and dark spruce mantled the surrounding hillsides. Snow lay deep upon these meadows, frosting every twig and needle of the trees. And the new-risen moon set the crystals sparkling and laid a path of silver light across the rippling lake. The splendor of the scene pierced my heart.

Two Danae walked out of a rainbow flare and joined us at the lakeshore. “What urgency demands our absence from the Canon, Llio-daughter?” said Tuari. “The change approaches. The dance beckons.”

My captors threw me to the ground at Tuari’s and Nysse’s feet. I rolled to the side, spitting out snow and dirt that filled my mouth. My cheekbone stung, sliced by a protruding rock.

“Behold, Tuari Archon,” said Ronila, “all has come about as I warned thee. You asked me, as your kin, as one who has paid the just price of imperfection, to uncover evidence of the corruption that cracks the world. Here is the halfbreed Cartamandua found preening and prancing in Stian’s Round. Canst thou mistake whose work this is?” Ronila’s stick poked my back, where the second remasti had etched Stian’s rock, and my arm, where the cat lurked amid Kol’s sea grass.

“Thou dost accuse the Chosen and his sire of willful violation?” Sounding truly shocked, Tuari stooped to examine me closer. “How can this be the Cartamandua halfbreed? He wore no gards when I saw him.”

“Clearly they have forced his body through some corrupt remasti,” said Ronila. “Canst thou not feel the storm wind rising in the human realm? Look out upon the beauty of Aeginea, Tuari Archon, and tell me that human violence and filth do not threaten its annihilation.”

“Good archon, gracious Nysse, I bring you hope of healing,” I said, struggling to my knees. “Your kind were given guardianship of both Aeginea and the human realms. Surely no mere chance caused the first four Danae guardians to arise at the points of our joining. I beg you heed what you have felt this night. Kol has given you back the Well, where my mother was poisoned by this harpy and her minions.”

“Who can say what deceptions Stian and his brood have wrought in our minds?” said Ronila, sneering. “The daughter who gave a child of our blood to a human. The son who steals the Center, as he stole this halfbreed from your just breaking. The father who once condemned you—Tuari Archon—to live as a crawling beast. They have brought a halfbreed to the dance, as your own proclamation of the Law forbids.”

Tuari looked from Ronila to me, his rust-colored eyes flaring with anger and mistrust. “Did Kol and Stian bring thee to the Canon, halfbreed?” he asked.

“Ask him about Thokki, as well, resagai,” said Ronila eagerly. “She who has lusted after Kol since he was nestling. Corrupted, as are all those touched by Stian’s get.”

“More pain and vengeance will not repair what’s done,” I said. “But I can help you heal the Canon without breaking it further. All I ask is your hear—”

“Thou art halfbreed, Cartamandua-son,” said Tuari sternly, interrupting. “Thou hast reached maturing this night, thus the Law forbids me to break thee. However, those who brought thee illicitly to the Canon are forfeit. Answer truth, if thou wouldst have me hear another word from thy lips. I will judge silence as agreement. Did Kol and Stian bring thee to the Canon, using Thokki to shield thee?”

How could I weigh the consequences of my answer? I, who was a master of lies, could likely devise a reasonable story. But Ronila had built her life on lies, corrupted Sila with lies. We stood at the brink of the abyss, and I needed this man to believe what I told him. Surely it was the time for truth. Kol and Stian…and Thokki, too…had known the risks they took.

“Yes,” I said, “because they believed—”

“There, you see?” crowed Ronila.

“Silence, Llio-daughter.” Tuari held up a warning finger to the old woman. “I have sought thy forgiveness for the wrongs I’ve done thee and thy dam, and thou hast offered me generous service in return. But I am archon and would hear what healing this Cartamandua-son believes he can bring to the Canon. Despite our hard experience of him, Stian is no mindless actor.”

Ronila pressed her hands together and bowed. “It is but sincerest concern for the Canon that drives my crone’s tongue, resagai. Thou art most generous to allow thy flawed kin to be of use.”

“Speak, Cartamandua-son.”

“I am born of a line of cartographers—human sorcerers who can find their way through the world with magic…” With cautious hope and urgency, I told the archon of my bent. Of finding the Well before I knew of my parentage. Of my ability to follow the paths of kirani laid down on this day or those long past. Though I dared not mention that the Well had chosen me as guardian—not with Ronila present, not when I was captive—I told him how I had walked my mother’s kiran to build Kol’s memory and understanding of the Well, and what Kol believed about my talents.

“I know not what to believe,” said Tuari, throwing up his hands. “How can I accept that a human-tainted abomination, one ignorant of the Canon, can accomplish what our finest dancers cannot? We feel the chaos of humankind; we suffer these poisonings and betrayals, and blind though we are, we know our lands diminished. To hear thy claim that we are responsible for this great imbalance drives me to fury.”

“Allow me to show you, good Tuari,” I said. “I can help you restore what is lost.”

“This halfbreed is poison, Archon,” snapped Ronila, growling with hate. “Stian has set him to bring you down in—”

Tuari silenced her with a gesture, then turned to Nysse, who had been quietly attentive throughout all. “Kol’s and Stian’s violation—deliberate and well considered—risks the very survival of Aeginea…of our kind,” he said in anguished indecision. “How can I allow it? And yet this halfbreed’s sincerity rings true, and Kol’s kiran hath bespoke a marvel this night. I must consider: What if his claims be true, and I refuse to heed?”

Before Ronila could burst or Tuari shatter with his vacillation, Nysse laid her hand on Tuari’s shoulder. “The season’s change is upon us, my love, yet clearly these matters cannot be settled in haste.” Her clear voice rippled with light, just as the pond did. “Stian and Kol have certainly trespassed the Law. Thokki to a lesser guilt. Yet unless we can prove, without doubt, that their violations have done damage, Kol must dance the Center. To force him out on uncertain grounds could be judged an equal risk to the Canon. Nor will I have it said that private jealousy spurred me to take his place. His kiran was flawless, and none other can approach our level. Only in the dance and its consequences can we judge truth.”

As a snarling Ronila clutched her walking stick and muttered indecipherable venom, Tuari kissed Nysse’s forehead and gazed adoringly on his consort. “Nysse’s wisdom frees my own thoughts, good Ronila,” he said, his relief blinding him to the old woman’s burgeoning malice.

But the archon immediately quenched my own surging hope. “By the halfbreed’s own word are Kol and Stian guilty,” he said. “We shall hold the Cartamandua-son as surety for their guilt until the dance is finished. If they value him sincerely, they will step forward to accept the consequences of their violations—myrtle and hyssop and forever unbinding. Then shall we give the halfbreed an opportunity to prove his promise of restoration. If they do not step forward, we shall judge their violations frivolous and force them to their punishment, proceeding with whatever is necessary to rend our unwholesome bond to the human realms.”

“Whatever is necessary?” I cried. “You mean you would lock the guardians of the Mountain and the Sea in their sianous, and allow them to be slaughtered as was my mother. But, of course, Ronila will see them dead in any case. Tuari Archon, Ronila despises human and long-lived alike. In the human world, she names herself the Scourge. She has corrupted her granddaughter and taught her to poison sianous. She wants to destroy all possibility of recovery for the Canon, condemning the world to chaos.”

But the weak-livered fool would hear none of it. “None shall be slaughtered,” he said, insufferably condescending. “If you are what you say, we shall discover it. Ronila has long suffered the consequences of her mixed blood and aspires to naught beyond her place. I sought her aid to recognize human-tainted corruption, and by your own word, she has done so.” He took Nysse’s arm. “Kennet, Ulfin, secure the halfbreed until we are ready for him, and see that Thokki is returned to the Canon undamaged.” The two regal Danae strolled toward the lake…fading…

“Archon,” I called in desperation, “I can restore the Plain!”

Tuari paused and looked back, shaking his head in disbelief. “Bring us to the Plain in the hour of Kol’s trial, halfbreed, and I shall deem all transgression worthy.” He and his consort vanished in a streak of light.

Despite my futile struggles and impotent pleas, the two young Danae seated me on a jumble of rock so that I had a place to rest my back for the long night to come. Ulfin left to find out where their third companion had taken Thokki, while Kennet gathered a handful of reeds from the lakeshore and spread them on the rocks as if to sort them. Ronila crouched in the lee of a pine tree, watching us and jabbing her stick repeatedly into the crusted snow.

Urgency near drove me wild. Kol danced the Center and would do as he promised, but all would go for naught did I fail to let Osriel know. And even then, I must persuade the prince that allowing dead souls to devour the Harrowers must surely violate the Canon we were trying to heal. Then must I bend my thoughts to finding the Plain before Kol could be imprisoned. I twisted my hands in their bindings of braided vines until warm blood welled from the raw scraping.

As I tore my wrists, Ronila drew a bundle from her voluminous robes. “Those of us half human can suffer from the cold,” she said. “The gards are never quite enough. I would lend the Cartamandua-son my spare cloak. No ill in that, eh, lad?”

“Come ahead,” said Kennet, who perched cross-legged beside me, head bent, braiding his reeds into a mat.

“I need naught from you, Scourge,” I said, cursing the bindings that would not stretch.

“Oh, you need this.” As the old woman approached our rocky perch, she juggled her bundle of brown wool and stumbled awkwardly over her walking stick.

Kennet reached out to catch her, and she fell forward into his lap, a shapeless heap. Startled, he looked down at her and grunted wordlessly. Ronila wrenched and twisted as if to free herself of his grasp, but his hands had fallen limp. She stepped back, and the young Dané shuddered and slumped sideways, his lifeblood gushing from the ragged hole just below his breastbone, his gards fading. His head rested on my thigh.

“Murdering witch!” I cried, horrified. Twisting my shoulders half out of their sockets, I slid my bound hands under me and around my legs to the front. Too late for Kennet. I pressed my shaking hands to his face and felt the surety of death.

Ronila backed away, laughing at my contortions. Dark stains covered her brown robes. “The long-lived take exception to those who slay their young. As you do. My faithful monk sends word that he plans to shred thy archangel before he bleeds him. He has only to choose which sianou to poison.”

She turned her back and hobbled away.

I bellowed in wordless rage. The knife lay on the rock in a pool of Kennet’s blood, and I fumbled it into my grasp. I sawed at the ropes on my ankles until they fell slack. Heedless of the blade’s lethal edge, I cut my hands free. Some of the blood that slathered them was certainly my own. Weapon in hand, I sped after the retreating demoness…

…only to have the old witch shift and lead me past a different lake…

…and again, so that I pursued her alongside a broad, sluggish loop of a river…

…and again, to find my feet on a rutted cart road, skirting a river bend. Inside the river’s loop, a jagged ruin loomed darkly through a driving snow, and in the moment I spun, blinking, to confirm that we had come to Gillarine, Ronila vanished in a burst of red light. Hand of Magrog!

Hate and fear driving me, I pelted toward the ruin, leaping the jagged foundation walls that were all that remained of the infirmary. I cut across the buried herb garden, and sped past the great chimney of the bakehouse and around the corner between the refectory building and the dorter. Then caution slowed my feet, and I crept through the ruined east cloister. I could not hide myself in the dark, but at the least I didn’t have to announce my coming like a maddened bull. What better way for these demon gatzé to gain entry to the lighthouse than to prick Valen Blunderer into a mindless rage and send me charging forth to rescue Jullian?

Breathing deep, I called on my finest senses. The air tasted of fear and torment, and reeked of blood and nivat, so strong it came near choking me. No surprise that Gildas would wield my weakness as a weapon. Reawakened hunger ground my gut. But I would not run away.

I crept around the ruined scriptorium and down the alley toward the sounds of tight breathing and rapid heartbeats, grabbing up an iron torch bracket to supplement the bloody knife. The lighthouse door stood open, a soft light emanating from inside, illuminating a vision of horror in this once-holy precinct. Brother Victor’s body dangled from the arch that bridged the alleyway. The pool of blood underneath him had long clotted and frozen.

Ah, merciful Iero, cherish your faithful servant. Yielding time only for this one prayer, I pressed my back to the broken stone, and crushed both deep-welling grief and an explosive lust for vengeance. Gildas and Ronila must have planned this damnable sight to send me further into frenzy. But my best honor to a man of reason would be to hold on to my own. My rage froze as cold as the night. I acknowledged no fear, as I considered spells…

“Right on time, friend Valen!” Black cloak, hood, and boots made it difficult to identify the man who stood behind the shadowed arch. But Gildas’s condescending humor was unmistakable. “We’ve not even gotten too cold awaiting you.” He jerked one shoulder, and Jullian stumbled up the stair and into the light spilling from the lighthouse doorway. The boy’s hands were bound behind his back, and a rope encircled his neck. “Did I not tell you that an archangel would be my shield when the last darkness fell?”

“The Tormentor readies a special pit for you, murderer,” I said, tightening my limbs to pounce.

“Oh, I would not risk a move just yet,” said Gildas. The monk waved a small knife, smeared with black, at Jullian’s face. The boy tried to pull away, but the taut leash held him close. “Throw away your weapons, Valen, then proceed down the stairs and seat yourself on the stool beside the worktable. I expect to see your palms flat on the table when I bring our young friend down. One move of disobedience and I prick him with this blade. Doulon paste prepared from your blood would be a nasty balm for a wound, would it not?”

“Don’t do it! He plans to—” A jerk of the rope silenced Jullian’s anguished warning.

No curse seemed sufficient to the occasion. I tossed Ronila’s knife and the iron bar into the rubble and did as he had instructed. The lower doors were thrown open, so that a table sat in plain view of the stair. In the center of it sat a bowl of nivat seeds. The scent near caved in my skull. Beside the bowl sat a leather pouch, a rushlight in a small iron holder, and a lidded calyx of silver, the size of my fist. No doubt the pouch contained linen threads and silver needles and enchanted mirror glass.

As I sat on the backless stool and laid my palms on the table, I summoned images of Victor and Kennet to divert my cravings into anger and purpose. I recalled the collections of tools and mapped out where knives, axes, or any other sharp implements could be found and estimated how long it would take me to reach them. Always too far and too long.

Though reason told me that one exposure to the doulon would not enslave the boy, even an hour of such craving for pain must scar a tender soul, no matter that soul’s courage or resilience. I had been fourteen and far from innocent, and I would never be free of it.

Jullian descended the stair, Gildas behind him, clutching the short neck rope. Great gods, what I would have given for the ability to touch minds. If I could but induce the boy to dive or duck, yanking Gildas off balance, I could leap the table and take the villain before he could strike. But Jullian’s face shone pale as quicklime, and Gildas maintained distance enough that I could not possibly reach him soon enough. The monk settled on a bench and forced Jullian to his knees in front of him, the knife poised at the boy’s cheek.

“And so we have come to this day, Valen. The day the world ends.” He tilted his head. “The gryphon gives you a rakish air.”

I would not trade quips with him.

As ever, he grinned, reading me like one of his books. “So well disciplined. You’ve learned much since you first came here. You seethe and plot, seeing naught but obstacles as of yet, and so also you must know what I intend for you to do now.”

One more doulon would not end me. I would control it. Wait for him to let his guard down. Kill him. I reached for the leather pouch.

“Not the pouch. Not just yet. Open the calyx.”

I did and almost choked. The silver vessel held doulon paste—more than I had ever seen at once. It must have been made with two hundred seeds. “Just stick a knife in me,” I said. “I’ll do you better service as a corpse than what this will leave of me.” I would be one twisted scab, a gibbering cripple.

“Made with your own blood. You’ve no need to use it all. Scoop out double your usual amount. Remember, I’ll know.”

I did as he said. Taking tight grip of my senses, I licked the tasteless mess from my fingers. “Iero have mercy,” I whispered as the vile paste ignited the fire in my belly.

Every muscle spasmed at once, every quat of my skin screamed as if I had fallen into the everlasting fire. Yet even such pain as constricted my lungs and shredded my spine was not half enough to resolve the doulon spell.

In mounting frenzy, I slipped from the stool, ground my head into the floor, and clawed my skin, tearing at the cut in my cheek. All foolish notions of control, of retaining sense and purpose vanished. All I could think of was my need for pain.

“Go on now, boy, draw us a pitcher of mead, while I tend him. With a regular diet of nivat, Valen will become quite docile. Rely upon it, a slave who can shelter us in Aeginea shall make all the difference over the next few years as we await the deepening dark. Perhaps we’ll teach him magic.”

Gildas bent to whisper in my ear, his scorn mingling with the shrieking of my blood. “I’m going to let this build for a while, Valen. But don’t lose hope. Just implant the lesson in your head. Relief comes only when I say.”

The fire grew, and my mind broke. I writhed and moaned. I begged him to strike me. But only when my body seized into one unending cramp, and my heart balked and swelled into an agonized knot, did Gildas lay my left hand on the seat of the stool and slam a knife through it.

I screamed at the moment’s blinding rapture, blessing Gildas for the divine release, though I had danced in heaven on this night and knew this was not at all the same. He yanked out the dagger, and I curled into a knot around my throbbing hand and my shame.

Time slumped into a formless mass, even as I struggled to retain some grip on it. Stupid, vile, perverse fool, your king awaits you. How many hours had passed since I had been carried from the Canon? My heart cracked to think that Danae were yet dancing without me.

From Stian’s naming of the dance rounds, I had estimated the change of season would come some two hours past midnight. I would know, he’d said. But then, he had not thought I would be wallowing in a stupor, clutching a pierced hand and working not to empty my guts onto the lighthouse floor.

Gildas had returned to his bench. He cleaned his knife and coiled the rope he had used to hold Jullian. “Come, sit up, Valen,” he said when he’d finished these tasks. “We’ll share a pitcher of mead. Very good mead, I would imagine, as it was laid down in the early days of the lighthouse.”

Behind him, Jullian was twisting his face like a mischievous aingerou, and one of his hands kept making sharp jerking movements. Something about the pitcher in his hand. About Gildas. Distract him…

Gildas narrowed his eyes and glanced over his shoulder. Jullian stepped around us, and I heard him set pitcher and cups on the table behind me. I uncurled, pushed up with my arms, and vomited into Gildas’s lap. That he then kicked me in the face with his slimed boot didn’t matter. Nothing could hurt me.

“Disgusting filth,” snapped Gildas. “Find a rag and clean this up, boy. My boots, too.”

Jullian trotted off and soon returned with a ragged towel. Once the mess was dealt with, Gildas ordered Jullian to pour the mead. “Remember what I told you, boy. Whatever I eat or drink, your protector eats or drinks, as well.”

“Aye, I remember.” So much for my muddled hope that Jullian had poisoned the damnable monk.

Gildas watched as Jullian poured, then prodded me with his boot. “Get up and get something in your stomach, Valen, or I’ll have to drag you to your cell. You remember Gillarine’s little prison? You’ve chains and silkbindings waiting.”

Gildas and I drained our cups in perfect unison. And in perfect unison, we gasped. The bone-cracking spasms came hard and fast; the light splintered.

“J-Jullian,” I croaked, aghast, “what have you done?”

Gildas paled and clutched his belly. Shudders racked his limbs. “The wretched little beast…poisoned us both.”

Not poison. The doulon. I wanted to weep and laugh all together. So bright a mind, but the boy didn’t understand. This would hurt Gildas for a while. But me…two massive doses in the space of an hour…The colored ceiling plummeted toward me, and I threw my arms over my head. My skin felt as if it were peeling away from my bones. Gildas screamed and collapsed on the floor.

“I’m sorry, Brother Valen. So sorry. I know it’s awful.” Jullian kicked Gildas’s knife away and shoved stools and table out of the monk’s reach. With the coiled rope that had bound his own neck, he tied the weeping, writhing Gildas’s hands behind him. Then, grabbing me under my arms, he dragged me, quat by quat, toward the stair. “I had to pour from the same pitcher—give it to you both—else he’d never drink it.”

Trumpets blared inside my skull and would not stop, no matter how I tried to crush them, and always the pain grew, squeezing harsh bleats from my ragged throat. In all my life I had never hurt so wickedly—and my body seized and begged for more. “Kill me. Please, god…”

Images flashed before my eyes and fractured before I could identify them. The world was crumbling, and even Gildas’s groans could not put it to rights.

“Come on, Brother Valen. We’ve got to get you up the stair. I know what to do. I found out about nivat in a book. As you asked me to.”

He forced me to crawl…nudging, shoving, yelling unintelligible words…into the night…into the cold that sent spears of ice into my lungs and my heart that hammered to bursting. Through the snow that seared my raw flesh. More steps. More stone. Endless misery. Endless agony…

At last he propped me against a ring of stone, grasped my head, and forced me to look at his face. He was so ragged…weeping…but he did not falter. “This is Saint Gillare’s font, Brother. It’s a part of the Well—your sianou. Nivat is like spirits for the Danae. When they have too much of it, they go into their sianous and it puts them right. You’ve got to go into the font. Back to the Well.”

Snow drifted through the strips of stone above his head. I could not comprehend what he asked of me. “Sorry. Sorry. I can’t…”

“You must let go of your body, Brother. Then it will be all right again.”

He threw water in my face—bitterly cold and tasting of starlight—and my body understood. He shoved. I crawled. Once my aching belly rested on the font’s marble rim, he tipped me forward, and I rolled into the burbling water. With a sigh, I yielded my boundaries and plummeted, and with water, stone, and the deep-buried fires of the Well, I purged spirit and flesh of my old sin.

“Just implant the lesson in your head, Gildas. Relief comes only when I say. Food and water come only when Jullian says.”

Pain-ravaged, slimed with vomit and worse, the man who had once been my friend slumped against the stone wall of the abbey prison cell. The manacle that held his ankle to the wall gleamed bright in the light of Jullian’s lamp. The mark on his cheek, where I had struck him to resolve his first doulon and teach him of perverse pleasure, was already swelling and would make a lovely bruise.

Jullian swore that no more than half an hour had passed from the moment I rolled into the font a madman until I climbed out again, refreshed and clearheaded. I would have believed it if he’d said days or weeks, for I’d had no sense of time at all. Yet I had carried with me the urgent understanding that I must return to physical form as soon as possible. Even so, we had gone to Gildas’s relief only after we had buried Brother Victor in the herb garden.

Our prisoner croaked a laugh. “One doulon does not enslave me, Valen. I’ll walk free and never look back.” He spoke bravely now I had refused to soil my hands with his blood.

“Very true. So let me show you magic, friend Gildas. A talented physician taught me how to enhance the effect of medicines fivefold.” I crouched beside him, placed my fingers on his brow, and triggered the spell. “The doulon is but a potion after all, which means—assuming a normal cycle of eight-and-twenty days, shortened by the extra-potent paste you prepared—you have perhaps two days until you feel the hunger ready to devour you. Perhaps only one. By that time, either the world will have fallen into the chaos you desire and no one will ever come to succor you, or Osriel of Evanore will be King of Navronne, and I will bring you to his justice for the murder of Brother Horach, Brother Victor, Thane Stearc of Erasku, Gerard of Elanus, and Clyste Stian-daughter. He will not be merciful.”

Gildas lunged toward my ankles as I headed for the door. “Wait, Valen, I can tell you secrets—”

I slammed the prison cell door and locked it. “Never step within his arm’s reach, Jullian,” I said, as Gildas yelled after us. “Never open the door, but just shove a water flask through the slot. He will beg and wheedle and play on your conscience, but this is no sin to confine him.”

“He didn’t listen to Brother Victor,” said the boy as we climbed the three short flights of steps back to the alley and the lighthouse door, trailed by Gildas’s hoarse curses and a last despairing wail. “I’ll vow he didn’t listen to Gerard or Horach either. This is justice, not sin. Not at all what he did to Thane Stearc.”

“Exactly so. Now, I must go. You’re all right with being alone, lad?” I hated abandoning him. “You’ll not go out again?” Victor and Jullian had stepped out to retrieve what was left of the abbey service books and stores when Gildas took them.

The boy shook his head and hung the magical lamp on its hook just inside the door. “Brother Victor showed me how to lock and unlock the door wards without magic. I’ll be sorry he’s not here to teach me more, but I’m not afraid and not alone. Iero and his angels are with me. Teneamus, Brother Valen.”

“Indeed, I’m sure they are. Teneamus, brave Scholar.”

I jumped lightly up and over the fallen masonry that I had scarce been able to crawl over two hours previous and sprinted for the cloister. As I worked the shift, the boy closed the lighthouse door and the ivory light from across the garth winked out, plunging the ruined abbey and the world into a sea of night and winter.

Chapter 34

The battle had been joined at Dashon Ra. The earth itself had told me of the assault while I had purged myself of nivat in my sianou. And now my senses perceived the dread results. A cacophony of drums, trampling boots, and rage-filled cries blared about the ancient mine and its rugged approaches, and I smelled battle sweat and loosened bowels and warm blood dripping on consecrated ground.

The Harrowers threw themselves against Thane Boedec’s warriors like the raging sea against the cliffs of Cymra, only these cliffs were not formed of granite, but of five hundred brave men who knew they were outnumbered ten to one. Strung out in a long crescent about the rim of the vast bowl, they had bent at the first wave. Torches and magelights flared bright in the driving snow, lighting the way for the frenzied mob that raced steadily upward from the east. Gods preserve my erstwhile brother, I saw no sign of Bayard’s Moriangi. But the banner of Perryn of Ardra flew alongside the orange pennant of Sila Diaglou at the solid center of the assault. Their wedge had already driven Boedec over the rim and onto the downward slope to the mine’s dark heart where Osriel lay bleeding—preparing to become a blood-addicted shell like Voushanti in order to preserve Navronne.

“We’ll get you down there,” said Philo. With his faithful comrade Melkire, the ginger-bearded warrior crouched beside me atop the west rim of the ridge, where Renna lay below the rock-gate stair. “But we’d best be quick. Old Boedec is as strong as lords are made, but none were made to withstand such odds as this.”

Of course they weren’t. Such was Osriel’s plan. When Boedec’s line broke, the Harrower legions would rush down into the bowl of the mine—and into Osriel’s trap. Only Voushanti and a handful of soldiers would stand between the mob and our prince. At that point Osriel would have to act—to summon power for enchantment—whether the Canon had reached its climax or not. It would be a race to determine which happened first. My blood thrummed with the imminent change of season, and my stomach throbbed with the pounding of Harrower drums. And Osriel did not yet know that Kol could give him the power he needed.

I snugged the dark cloak Voushanti had left for me and raised the hood to hide my facial gards. Then the three of us scrambled down from our perch and slipped and slid downward between spoil heaps and broken slabs, through snarls of iron and rope, and under rotted sluiceways. After Melkire twisted his ankle in a trench, I led the way with my better night vision, while the two warriors guarded my flanks. Voushanti had pledged their lives to protect mine.

The oppressive horror of the souls’ prison had not waned. The music of this ravaged landscape was as frigid as the frost wind that pierced flesh and bone, and as dissonant as the clangor of weaponry from the approaching combat. Yet something had changed here since the morning. On my every visit, these prisoned souls’ pervasive, virulent enmity for all that lived had left me shaking and ill. But on this night, I felt only confused anger and an overpowering grief. What had happened to their hate?

The wind whined and swirled powdery snow into our faces. Philo crept under a dry sluiceway, peering around the rotting supports to ensure no Harrower flankers had sneaked so far around the pitted vale. He waved us through. After a long, shallow descent, we encountered Voushanti and his sentries posted about the rim of the pit, a steep-sided grotto the size of Renna’s Great Hall, ripped out of the core of the mine. The Center of Dashon Ra matched the Center of the Danae dancing ground.

“Merciful Mother,” I whispered when I gazed down into the pit, for surely this place was the inverted mockery of the Canon’s heart. Where, in Aeginea, wheels of light turned to the earth’s music, here a thousand calyxes sat upon the layered rocks and ledges that lined the walls of the grotto, each giving off a bilious glow. And with the stench of leprous decay speeded a thousandfold, a monstrous, corrupt magic shaped of human torment and royal blood poisoned the air and earth. Its source lay in the center of the pit, where a dark-haired man had been stretched and suspended facedown across the black, gaping mouth of some deep shaft or sinkhole. His wrists and ankles were bound to iron stakes driven into the rock. Wide bands of gold encircled his upper arms, smeared with the blood that ribboned his shredded back. Only slight jerking movements of his shoulders told me that he lived.

Recklessly, I galloped and slid down a crumbled, near-vertical stair, unwilling to take the long way around to the sloping cart track that led into the deeps at the north end of the pit. “My lord, I’m here,” I yelled. “You need not suffer this. Voushanti, get him out! Saverian!”

The mardane followed on my heels. By the time we skidded to the bottom and dashed to the sinkhole, Saverian was pelting down the cart path, arms laden with blankets and medicine bags.

Strips of cloth bound Osriel’s eyes. Tufts of wool stopped his ears.

I touched his hand. He jerked, the binding ropes squeezing blood from the raw wounds about his wrist. “Valen?” he whispered. “Tell me.”

Stretching my arm across the empty blackness, I yanked the tuft of wool from his ear. “Kol dances the Center,” I said softly. “The change of season is not yet.”

A quiet noise that might have been a sob caught in his throat. I did not release his cold hand. “Hurry!” I called to the others. “Get him out of this.”

Deep walls and howling wind muted the noise of the approaching battle. The mardane and his men slipped a wide plank under the prince’s torso and another the length of his body, supporting him as they unbound his limbs. Carefully they lifted him away from the gaping shaft and onto Saverian’s blankets, where he lay quivering, gasping for breath. I could not imagine the agony of his fevered joints.

As I slipped off Osriel’s blindfold, Saverian unstoppered a vial and pressed it to his lips. “Mother of life, Valen, I thought you’d never come,” she said.

“Get me up,” Osriel murmured into the blanket. “Help me into my armor.”

“You’re mad, Riel,” said Saverian, near tears as she sponged some potion on his lacerated back and peeled away his shredded shirt. “You must stay down until I stop this bleeding.”

“If I am not to share their fate, then I must lead them, at the least,” he said, drawing his hands underneath his shoulders as if to rise.

Their fate…He spoke of his prisoners. He had spent this day of torment listening to the dead.

Voushanti squatted beside us. “I’ll send down your arms, Lord Prince. Then I’ll deploy my line farther up the hill, as you commanded.” Osriel jerked his head, but Voushanti looked to me for confirmation. I nodded, and the warriors left Saverian, the prince, and me alone.

“Valen, would you give him—?” Saverian’s stopped breath made me look up. I had thrown back my hood, and she stared at me, blue sigils reflected in her dark eyes. I’d near forgotten my newest gards.

Smiling and rolling my eyes, I took the proffered flask. But she quickly averted her gaze, and even amid these matters of far more import, I selfishly wished she had not. I hated that she might think me some freakish creature.

While she prepared another potion, I helped Osriel sit up. I knew he needed to be on his feet to get his blood moving, to feel alive. Strength would come. He had reserves I could not imagine, and a physician unparalleled in any kingdom.

“Breathe a bit, get warm, and drink this nasty stuff,” I said. “Then I’ll help you stand. God’s bones, you look a wreck.” Gingerly I bundled blankets about his torn shoulders and helped him drink. His face was the color of ash, save for the bruises and blood.

He drained the flask and opened his eyes. A faint smile tweaked his bloodless face. “You’re not so handsome as you might think, Dané. Looks as if Grossartius let fly his mighty hammer at your fine gryphon.”

“And why is your hand bandaged?” said Saverian, the moment’s crack in her brittle shell quite well sealed. “I’ll vow you’ve not cleaned that wound any more than the one on your cheek.”

“It’s a reminder from Ronila and Gildas,” I said, brushing dirt from Jullian’s bloodstained linen wrapping my pierced hand.

One of Voushanti’s men arrived with Osriel’s shirt, jupon, and hauberk, greaves, and gauntlets. Another dropped chausses, boots, and swordbelt at the prince’s side. Osriel dispatched the two men with his demand for a scouting report. “Now I would have your report, Valen,” he said, once they’d gone.

“Brother Victor is murdered,” I said, grieving again that the chancellor’s passing must be slighted amidst these dread events. “But Jullian is safely locked in the lighthouse, and Gildas is secured until his king can judge him. So we’ve only the priestess, her gammy, your brothers, and their soldiers to worry with. And Ronila is by far the most dangerous…”

While Osriel downed two flasks of ale and another of Saverian’s potions, I sketched out the day’s events. “You can’t imagine how fast Ronila can shift. Keep someone at your back at all times. And don’t take one step toward her, or you’ll find yourself somewhere else altogether.”

“You’ve already taught me that lesson.” Osriel reached for my hands for help to get up, and I hauled him to his feet. He grimaced and gripped his shoulders. “Would that I had a sianou where I could be taken apart and put back together again without this cursed sickness.”

“Perhaps, as the land heals…”

As I sensed the change that had come about in this haunted place, I recalled Luviar’s words: The lack of a righteous king speeds the ruin of the land. The king and the land were so intimately bound, that his blood could charge it with power. They lived and died together. Osriel’s great enchantment would be a terrible wrong, even if wrought with the Canon’s magic and not his own soul’s death. What could be less righteous than stripping the dead of eternity?

“Something happened with you as you suffered here today, didn’t it, my lord? Something’s changed here.”

His gaunt face hardened. “Nothing’s changed. Do you hear what’s coming down on us from the east? Have you brought me an alternative?”

“Only this hope that we can restore the land. Lord, you must not sacrifice these souls.” My conviction grew with every passing moment.

“Hope will not save us, Val—”

A thunderous blast shook the earth. As votive vessels rocked and toppled from their perches with a clatter, Saverian and I jammed Osriel between us and hunched to the ground.

A bloodstained young warrior, wearing the green of Evanore, raced down the cart path, Voushanti, Philo, and Melkire on his heels. “Boedec’s broken!” cried the youth, chest heaving, looking wildly from one to the other of us. When Osriel stood up, half naked and scarred with blood, the boy went white.

“What is your name, warrior?” said the prince as calmly as if he wore ermine robes and crown.

“P-Prac of Noviart, Your Grace.” The boy trembled so wildly his empty scabbard rattled.

“Report, Prac of Noviart. You’ve naught to fear from your duc, no matter how ill your news.”

The young soldier straightened his back. “Prince Perryn’s cadre split us in two, lord. Harrowers have engaged our reserves. Thanea Zurina has fallen. Her house—what’s left of them—yet holds the left, but not for long.” The left was the easiest approach to Dashon Ra. “The priestess d-demands parley.”

“Philo, find this brave messenger a sword to fill his scabbard and a drink to ease his thirst, then bring him back here for my reply. Melkire, I want a report from Renna. We must have no interference from our backs.”

As the three soldiers did his bidding, Osriel spun to me. “How long, Valen? I must be here when Kol grants us the power of the Canon.”

My sense felt the night yet rising, a bowstring stretching its last quat. “Not yet, lord. Soon, but not yet.”

“We’ll not be able to hold the mob off you for three heartbeats, Lord Prince,” said Voushanti, his jaw pulsing—his only sign of agitation. “We should move you into the fortress.”

Shaking his head, Osriel folded his arms and summoned Philo and the messenger. “Prac, tell the priestess I will meet her here or nowhere. I guarantee her personal safety, but offer no bond of truce with those who have tortured and murdered my warlords. Can you say that exactly?”

“Aye, Your Grace.” The youth, become a man again with a weapon at his side and the trust of his lord, bowed. Philo escorted him back the way he’d come.

“She’ll never come down here herself!” said Voushanti, near exploding. “She’ll expect sorcery.”

“She’s attacked because we’ve told her my power is weak on this night. My warriors are in disarray. Will she not believe in a demonic prince brought low?” He spread his arms to display his wretched state. “All we need is to slow down the assault until Valen signals I’ve power to act. Return to your post, prepared to escort the priestess here when she arrives. And, Mardane”—Osriel glanced from Voushanti to me and back again—“I issue this command as your sovereign king. Valen has no say in it, no matter the bond between you. Is that understood?”

Voushanti bowed stiffly and hurried away.

“We need to put these aside for the moment,” he said with a sigh, nudging his padded leathers and mail. “I’ll keep the cloak, at least, lest I be too frozen to speak. And, Saverian, if you have more of the samarth, I would be grateful.”

“Your purveyor of potions obeys, as always,” said Saverian harshly, shoving a vial into his hand. “I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive you for this day.”

Osriel drank and tossed her the empty vial. “I would regret that, whether or not you continue to keep me living. Now you’d best return to your hiding place. You, too, Valen. Sila mustn’t know you’ve escaped her trap.”

“Lord Prince, you must not—”

“Stay or go, Valen. I’ll do what I must to preserve this kingdom.”

I had no answer.

We upended a half-rotted cart to hide Osriel’s armor. The prince himself settled in the lee of the upturned cart. Bundled in blankets, he quickly lost himself in contemplation, the air about him fraught with spellwork.

Saverian gathered her flasks and jars and packed them away. I offered to carry her bags up to her hiding place.

“Stay with Riel,” she said. “Another time, though, I want to hear about the Canon. You said so little, but your face—it’s not only the gards that have left you…radiant.”

“I’d like to tell you,” I said, wishing I could erase the wistfulness that poked through her frayed emotions. My fingers twitched, as I fancied that I might touch the furrow between her brows and make it vanish. “As a part of your studies, of course.”

“Of course.” She started up the path, and I already missed her—so real, so human, our odd companionship grown as if by magic into a sweet tether, binding me to this human realm.

A hacking cough caused me to turn. Osriel’s head rested on his arms. So alone in his harsh resolution…

Of a sudden I charged after Saverian, instinct pushing me where I’d no thought to go. “We need Elene here tonight,” I said, breathless. “Something about his experience here today has made Osriel doubt his course. She, of anyone in the world, might be able to sway him when the time comes. I know it’s a great deal to ask. And risky. Holy Mother, I’ve sworn to keep her and the child safe…”

Saverian agreed without hesitation. “Elene is a warrior of Evanore. She belongs where she can fight the battle given to her. I’ll see to it.” And then my friend, the physician, smiled in a most enigmatic fashion. “I think all your instincts are reliable.”

I stared after as she hurried away. My blood warmed, bringing a smile to my own lips, while the wind erased her footsteps as if she had never been.

Melkire brought Osriel the news that Bayard’s legion had camped on the slopes before Renna’s gates. The Moriangi seemed in no hurry either to engage Osriel’s garrison or to join forces with the Harrowers at Dashon Ra.

A clever solution, Max, I thought, as I perched on the rim of the grotto at the end opposite the cart track. Be ready to make a quick assault in case Sila gains the upper hand, but don’t jeopardize the alliance with Osriel by overt action.

The rising blizzard hid the battle and muffled its clamor. Below me, Osriel had returned to his spellmaking. Fires popped up here and there about the pit—garish green and yellow flames that enhanced the vile colors of the luminous vessels and gave off a nasty odor. Shadows of unseen movement danced on the rocks, and the air filled with sighs and moans that were not the skirling wind. I didn’t think such tricks would frighten Sila Diaglou or her vile grandam.

My fingers tracing spirals in the dry snow, I strained to hear the music from the other plane that existed here. A few steps and I could likely be on that hillside where the dance was reaching its climax. Sky Lord save me, how I wanted to be there. I rubbed out my idle markings and listened for Ronila. We could guess Sila’s plans. The crone was the real danger.

Footsteps crunched beyond the veils of snow, and I heard Voushanti’s gruff challenge.

“They’re coming, lord,” I called down softly. “I’ll be close. The gods hold you.”

Osriel threw off his blankets and glanced up. “Thank you for your care, Valen.” He cocked his head with a quiet amusement that reminded me very much of Gram. “Tomorrow, remember, we renegotiate the terms of your submission.”

I could not but laugh at such a bold pronouncement in the face of the world’s end. “I doubt I’ll ever be free of you, lord.”

I ran lightly up a steep rib of rock that had once supported a wooden sluice. Lying flat on the ground beside the splintered trough, I could both get a superior view of the proceedings in the grotto and be in the midst of them with only two long strides and a stomach-lurching jump. Not that there was much I could do to help. Matters had moved beyond my talents.

Voushanti, Philo, and Melkire led the small party out of the storm and down the cart track. Sila’s orange cloak floated in the wind, revealing the steel rings of a habergeon rusty with blood. Beside the priestess walked a tall, gray warrior, whose baldric of woad bore the steel house emblems of a Moriangi grav. This was Hurd, I guessed, the military mind behind Sila’s legions. He might have walked straight from his arming room. Only his boots, caked in filth that blackened the snow, gave evidence of his day’s activities. Behind Sila and Hurd stood her faithful henchmen, the scurrilous Falderrene and the needle-chinned Radulf, both carrying spears. No Perryn on this day. Most worrisome, no Ronila. Where was the poisonous spider who had woven this web? My back itched. Every nerve end quivered as I stretched my senses, but discovered no trace of her.

“Is my brother not bold enough to face me even under truce?” said Osriel, hunched and shivering. His wet hair straggled over his face, and his cloak flapped, revealing his battered state.

“Prince Perryn is destroying the remnants of your warriors, Bastard,” said Sila, all serenity. The steel helm hung from her belt had molded her fair hair to her battle-flushed cheeks. “He saw no need to gloat. Though your tongue-block halts his speech, he channels his fury into his sword. Is it not time to call a halt to this slaughter?”

“Few dare challenge me on my own ground,” said Osriel, waving a hand that trembled far too much. His scattered magefires snapped and billowed erratically.

Sila knelt and examined one of the votive vessels, passing her hand across its bilious gleam. A disturbance rippled through the earth under my knees. Her companions, even the formidable Hurd, squirmed uncomfortably and backed away. “I was warned that you dabbled in unwholesome arts,” she said. “Tell me, has your halfbreed servant visited this place?”

“Pious Valen? Pssh.” Osriel sneered. “True magic frightens him. He pretends he is an angel in a world that has no use for childish legends.”

“He was to be mine tonight…so your brothers promised me. No matter what other terms we agree to, I will hold you to that. Are you not well, Prince?”

Osriel gathered his cloak tight, shaking violently. Three of his magefires flared and winked out. The dancing shadows slowed. “I’ve had my use of Valen and much good has it bought me,” he croaked. “Have him if you will. I assumed you already had him. My spy reported his meeting with your monk yesterday.”

Sila looked up sharply. “Valen is with Gildas?” Nicely planted, lord. Make her doubt.

Osriel shrugged. “These cabalist lunatics are inseparable. As to terms: I retain Renna. You cannot care; no gold remains here. And I’d keep Magora Syne; I’ve a fondness for the high mountains. I’ll be neither your prisoner nor my brothers’. My warlords”—the prince began coughing, deep, racking coughs—“must be paroled—”

Sila watched dispassionately. “I think you are in no condition to make demands, Lord Prince.”

Falderrene and Radulf stepped out from behind her. Holy Mother…

Osriel stayed Voushanti with a gesture and held his palm straight out. Green light flared for a moment from his fingers. But another coughing spasm soon had him clutching his chest, and the light winked out—as did the rest of his magefires. As Osriel’s foolery collapsed, the livid gleams of the votive vessels paled as well, and one by one, faded into nothing. What did that mean?

I peered anxiously through the murk across the side hill, willing Saverian to stay hidden, worried about Ronila. When would the crone make her move? When I looked back to the pit, Falderrene had raised a yellow magelight to stave off the night.

“The remaining gold—we divide—” Osriel’s breaths came harsh and strained between his bouts of coughing. He sagged against the cart that hid his armor.

“Soon, lord,” I whispered. “Hold on. Stand up, or she’ll pounce.”

“I think we’ve heard enough,” said Sila, turning her back on Osriel. Weapons bristled around her. “Falderrene, prepare your silkbindings. A sick man is no more trustworthy than a healthy one. Hurd, signal—”

Voushanti moved. He embedded his ax in Hurd’s arm before the grav could bring his horn from his belt to his lips. Radulf reared back, aiming his spear for Osriel’s breast, but Voushanti’s sword sliced the devil’s neck just below his needle chin. Philo bellowed, “Avant! Avant!” and placed his bulk between Osriel and Sila, while Melkire gave chase to Falderrene, cutting him down before he could reach the cart track.

Osriel, unruffled, retreated to the verge of the sinkhole.

Sila, protected by Osriel’s bond, watched the brief skirmish calmly. “That was foolish, warrior,” she said, picking up Grav Hurd’s dropped instrument. “Do you think you can hold back what is to come?” The horn blast pierced the darkened pit.

Of Voushanti’s sentries, only three answered Philo’s summons, and ten yelling Harrowers raced hard on their heels. The pursuers cut down one of the three survivors before he reached the cart track.

In the distance, torches and magelights and screaming hordes broke through the last defenses of Dashon Ra and flooded the lower slopes. As earth and sky and past and future muddied one another like great rivers joining the sea, I burst from my hiding place, ready to snatch Osriel to safety…

The stretched string of the world snapped inside my chest. As Earth itself heaved a great sigh, I stumbled to my knees, shaken by the power of a blood surge more potent than heaven’s own wine, more passionate than the drive to love’s release. “Now, lord!” I cried, throwing off my cloak so he could see me on the verge above him. “The change!”

Osriel raised his fists. In the space of a thought, midnight boiled from the bowels of Dashon Ra—plumes of purple and green and black that hissed in the snow. Warriors the size of Renna’s towers, steeds built to carry them, howling wolves with maws like caverns, and all with eyes of scarlet flame raced across the sky to surround the massed legions of Sila Diaglou and Perryn of Ardra, creating a barrier of terror that no man with half a mind would challenge. From the farthest reaches of Dashon Ra the shouts of battle lust and triumphant carnage transformed into wails of soul-deep terror. Yet these were but Osriel’s long-set illusions, designed to trap the Harrowers in the bowl of the mine; the truer horror yet waited.

“Smoke and puffery,” said Sila Diaglou, drawing her sword.

Standing at the verge of the black sinkhole, the prince touched the blood leaking from his torn wrists and drew circles around his eyes and sigils on his cheeks and brow. And then he touched his gold armrings and set his fingers glowing, and he knelt and touched the gold-veined earth, gleaming with the Canon’s magic. My gards turned to ice. Mother of night!

Sila’s new-arrived warriors gaped and moaned and let their arms fall slack.

“Grayfin, Harlod, Danc, Skay…” From the prince’s lips fell a litany of names—Ardran, Evanori, Moriangi—summoning those he had bound to him until the world’s end. With each name a splotch of gray slipped out of the pit intermingled with the purple and black clouds, and a shudder ran up my spine. The pall of illusion fell away from the votive vessels, unmasking their livid gleam.

The Harrower soldiers collapsed and buried their faces in their arms. While Voushanti’s sword held Sila and a bleeding Hurd at bay, the mardane harangued his own four men to ignore the roiling heavens and to maintain their protective line in front of Osriel. Sila lifted her eyes to the vague gray faces that appeared among the towering phantoms, and for the first time, appeared uneasy. “What have you done here, Prince?”

“He is a bold sorcerer. I like that.” A shapeless figure in brown hobbled away from a flash of scarlet light toward Osriel.

“Grandam!” Sila’s shock raised the hairs on my neck. She did not expect Ronila here. Which meant the old woman was making her move…

“No!” Cursing my distance, I leaped from my high perch, driving my body forward to clear the rock ledges below. I jolted to earth some fifty quercae from the prince and raced toward them across the grotto, yelling, “Take Ronila! Keep her away!”

“And our Bastard is a fine liar.” Ronila waved her walking stick. “Even now the Cartamandua abomination comes to shepherd his prince onto your throne, granddaughter. I think it is time to be quit of this nuisance.”

Osriel’s men did not understand threats from old women. Ronila nudged an astonished Philo with her stick. Melkire merely shoved her back with the flat of his sword.

The old woman tottered and growled. But then she stepped deftly to one side, raised her walking stick again and poked one of the surviving sentries so hard he staggered backward. I arrived in time to grab his arm before he toppled Osriel into the sinkhole.

“You will not touch my king,” I yelled, spreading my arms wide to keep her away from the others, keeping a wary eye on her empty hand. “You will not do murder here.”

Cackling, Ronila poked her stick at me—only this time, a blade protruded from the end of it, aimed straight at my gut. Voushanti launched himself into me, staggering me sidewise. Fire blossomed deep in my side. The witch growled and yanked the stick away. And then I was falling…

Crushed between Voushanti’s prone bulk and iron-footed Melkire, I sagged only as far as my knees. Fear and instinct and every urgency of life demanded I stand up again. The old woman’s leering face loomed in front of me as huge as the Reaper’s Moon, her wild white hair a corona, her bloody blade aimed at my heart. A din of screams and wailing seemed to fill the universe.

Yet Ronila’s blade did not strike. Her gleeful cackle twisted into such a wrenching intake of breath as comes only with pain. Shock dulled the feral hatred that glinted in her eyes. And even as I clutched my middle and stumbled to my feet, sure that my stomach and liver must fall out the hole in my side, the old woman wobbled and crumpled. Sila Diaglou stood calmly behind her, her pale hands drenched in blood.

“Child?” the old woman whimpered.

The priestess knelt and touched the blood bubbling from her grandmother’s lips as if it were a great curiosity. “Could you not see, old woman?” she said. “I value the sorcerer far more than I value you. He is the new world. You are but the dregs of the old.” Then she reached around Ronila’s back and yanked out her dagger, wiped the blade on the stained brown robes, and stuck it in the empty sheath at her waist.

All the air in my lungs might have escaped through my punctured flesh.

The priestess proffered me a smile worthy of an angel. “There, my beautiful Dané sorcerer, the hag shall not threaten you again. It is not too late to join me. Malena awaits. Are you not curious—? Ah, the witch has wounded you!” Her smile quickly faded as Hurd, a belt wrapped around his bloody arm, gave her a hand up. “Do you need help?”

“Keep away from me, priestess,” I croaked, stepping back. I could not allow thoughts of Malena and what she might or might not carry to distract me. “Your kindness is as bloodstained as your hate.”

“And I choose to keep my annoying servant.” Osriel stepped from between two of his guards. “This war is ended, priestess. The lighthouse stands. The Canon shall be healed. Command this traitorous grav of Morian, my brother, and the rest to lay down their arms.”

“Because you play with corpses?” Sila said scornfully, glancing up at the towering phantoms. “Once I speak to my troops, they will fight—no matter how frightened they are of your ghosts. You have no kingdom, Bastard of Evanore, and no subjects but the dead. My legions will follow me to the netherworld.”

“They shall wish for the netherworld, lady, when I am done,” said Osriel, in such tone as would shudder the most jaded soul. “I give you fair warning. Lay down your arms, or curse the hour you first saw daylight.”

“Your threats do not frighten me.” And yet, they should. Was that the difference? Was it only those with souls who felt the fear of losing them?

“Then our parley is ended,” said Osriel and turned his back on her.

The prince hissed a command, and scarlet streams of light flowed from the sinkhole. From the gray faces in the clouds erupted a howl that only one who had experienced the doulon hunger would recognize. Or perhaps one who had tasted blood and despair. Of all in that grotto, only Voushanti and I did not stare upward. Terror was written on the faces around us…and pity, too.

Melkire pointed to the sky. “Skay,” he said. “By the holy angels, it’s Skay. And Bergrond. Merciful Iero, what’s happening to them?”

“Hurd, form up these whiners,” snapped Sila. “I will have Renna by dawn. We shall dismantle this prince limb from limb as we dismantle his house stone from stone.”

The gray-faced commander bellowed orders to the ragged Harrowers, kicked and slapped them and got them moving up the cart track. Sila followed. A shoulder touch here, an encouraging word there, an admonishment not to heed the Bastard’s illusions, and they moved faster.

Halfway up the sloping track, she looked back and smiled down at me. She waved her hand at Osriel, hunched over the gaping hole. “How can you bear this ghoulish prince, Valen? We need not be rivals. You are the essence of magic; I have rejected and forsworn all such power. You honor all gods; I acknowledge none. You care for humankind and the long-lived; I despise them all. You yearn for decadent pleasure; I need none of it. I am death, as is this prince of yours, while you, Valen, are life itself—more than any cold Danae. Come with me, and I will give you a world cleansed and purified. You can change its face forever, giving every man and woman the chance to wear silk or work spells or dance on the solstice.” No matter her smile, her eyes chilled even so bitter a night.

“I do not argue with your vision, lady,” I called up to her, “but that you slaughter children and destroy all that is holy and good to create it. There must be another way. I’ll have no part of you.”

“So be it.” She shrugged and ran after her troops.

“Voushanti, you’ll see to Valen?” said the prince. His voice sounded hollow, as if he walked yet another plane, or as if he had fallen into the sinkhole after his blood. He knelt beside the dark shaft, the scarlet streams of enchantment giving his pale skin a ruddy cast to match the blood marks he’d drawn. Yet Sila’s words prodded me to move. Osriel was not at all like her.

“Lord Prince, don’t do this,” I said, limping across the drifted snow to his side. “Not before you tell me what you felt here this day. Not until you tell me why I sense no more hatred from these lost souls that even a few weeks ago twisted my bowels.”

Despair and grief stared out at me from my king’s bleak face. “Because I bled with them. Because I remembered them, as I promised when I took them captive. Because I knew their names.” He dropped his eyes to the roiling pit. “And now I must command them to go forth and live and die an eternal death for me.”

“Your very nature rebels at this crime,” I said softly. “Let them go.”

“I cannot.”

I knelt beside the bottomless hole that stank of death and corruption. “Think of the day we rode down from Renna, when you walked among your people who had been burnt out by the Harrowers. They had nothing before you arrived, and no more when you left save your care and your promise of hope. With but those few words from you, they stood straight and were able to do for themselves. You have given everything for love of these people and this land, and a lover does not torment his beloved. Use the power that has been given you. Let them go.”

“You have brought me no other answer, Valen.”

“Because it has lived inside you all this time, lord. Behind a mask. Hope is enough.”

He raked his fingers through his dark hair. “I would condemn us all.”

“Then we will die with love,” said a soft voice behind us. “And honor. And faithfulness. But I don’t believe we will die. I watched these Harrowers just now, and they are frightened, too, misled by a glamor—despair masquerading as hope. You are their king, Osriel of Evanore. Save them.”

When Elene knelt beside him, it was almost as if I heard the earth heave another great sigh. Or perhaps that was only me, watching surprise and weariness unmask his love at last.

Chapter 35

Osriel stood beside the sinkhole and called on those he had named to attend him. And so did every one of the gray phantoms in the cloud turn their empty eyes toward him. How he bore the cold weight of their attention, I could not imagine, for when I, by chance, met the gaze of only one, it placed a burden of lead and earth upon my shoulders.

The prince removed his gold armrings and held them in the scarlet light, and the phantoms’ eyes burned red and gold, so one could believe they listened. “Hear my commands and obey,” he cried. “I charge you, by the bond I hold, find all who bear arms on this field of woe—your brothers in war, whole or wounded—and speak to each soul what you know of death and life. And at the ending, give this message: A new reign of law and justice shall come to Navronne with this new year. Do this, and I count your service to me ended. Duty done, make your way through the world as you will and find those whom you would comfort at your parting from earthly life, and when the sun touches the sky, be gone to your proper fate. Perficiimus.”

The gray phantoms vanished from behind the cloud warriors, and an unsettling energy infused the air and land, like the building tensions of a thunderstorm. All the anger and confusion I had felt here was turned to eagerness. To hunting. Never had I been so glad I did not bear a blade. I did not want to hear what they would speak. I’d seen and heard enough of death and life.

Voushanti knelt at Osriel’s feet and spoke what none of us could hear. Osriel held out his hand. Voushanti kissed it, then handed over his sword and ax. And then the mardane turned to me, expressionless. I nodded, and he walked out of the pit and into the night. I did not think we would see him ever again.

Osriel knelt at the pit, his eyes closed as if he could hear his messengers. Elene kept vigil with him, her hand upon his shoulder. Philo formed up his three comrades at the foot of the cart track, weapons laid on the ground at their feet. The light of the votive vessels dimmed and faded. And so we awaited the end of the world.

Accounts differ about what happened on that winter solstice. Some say Iero’s angels visited the homes of the dead all over the kingdom and brought them heaven’s solace, while the Adversary himself visited wrath upon Sila Diaglou’s legions, showing them the paths of hell and sending them home repentant.

Some say the Danae brought forth Eodward’s Pretender, another young prince fostered in Danae realms. The guardians left him in the place of Osriel the Bastard, who had made one too many bargains with Magrog the Tormentor and was carried off to the netherworld. That this Pretender named himself Osriel was only to avoid the tricky business of Eodward’s will. Two copies of that document came to light with the new year, both proclaiming Eodward’s youngest son King of Navronne. All agreed that the first day of that winter dawned with a hope Navronne had not felt in living memory.

I know only what I saw.

When Osriel turned away from his enchantments, exhausted and at peace, Elene placed his hand upon her belly and whispered in his ear. It was the right time, when life displayed its truest mingling of joy and grief. For, of course, he had promised his firstborn to the Danae, and he could not break such fragile alliance as might come from this night’s work. They clung to each other for a while; then he donned his armor and became Navronne’s king, and Elene donned her fairest courage and became Navronne’s queen.

I saw no more than that. Saverian found me slumped in the corner of the grotto, trying to find my way back to Aeginea, and offered to sew up the great hole in me instead. Once assured that the blood soaking her garments was soldiers’ blood, not hers, I mumbled that my wound would surely heal of itself, and that her stitches would make my fine sea grass look like brambles, and that I had urgent matters to attend if I could just remember what they were. But indeed I came near collapsing on her boots from the great gouts of blood that would not stop oozing, though I felt shamed when I considered how Osriel had bled near a sun’s turning and was yet spinning out enchantments and traipsing off to meet with his brother Bayard.

Evidently the prince persuaded Bayard to round up the hardened elements of the Harrower legions and Perryn’s men, while Renna’s household garrison and the survivors of Boedec’s and Zurina’s legions gathered the Evanori dead for proper rites on the next day. After what Bayard’s men had seen happening in the sky over Dashon Ra that night, they were quite compliant. Many had been visited by the spirits of friends or brothers and had come to believe that Osriel had sent these spirits as a warning and a mercy to keep faith—as, indeed, he had. But I didn’t see any of that. Saverian had taken me in hand.

“I must go back,” I said thickly. It was very awkward after the physician had just spent most of an hour with her hands in my blood and flesh, and had given me some lovely potion to dull the wicked fire in my side.

“I suppose the ceilings are coming down on you again,” she said, emptying yet another basin of bloody water down her drainpipe.

“Not too awful as yet. No, it’s Kol.” As sense returned, the remembrance of Tuari’s impending judgment had me frantic.

She set her basin carefully on her table, as I slid my feet to the floor and put some weight on them to see if my legs would hold me up. “They’re still dancing, aren’t they?” she said.

“Until dawn. I doubt I’ll be allowed anywhere close. Kol and Stian are already at risk of ruin for bringing me to the Canon.” There was also the matter of Kennet. For all the Danae knew, I had killed him. I had to explain. Fear more than blood loss threatened to buckle my knees.

“Go, then,” she said. “I’ll be here if ever you choose to return to Renna.”

As I touched her narrow face, drawing her worry into a rueful smile, a cheerful determination captured my soul. “None shall keep me away. There are things that even Renna’s powerful house mage has yet to learn,” I said, grinning at the thought. “I do think the gods intend me to see to her instruction.”

I slogged back up the rock gate stair to Dashon Ra as fast as I could, holding my bandaged side. Saverian had come up with another cloak—I seemed to be shedding them like snakeskins—and chausses, so I was able to walk unremarked through the grisly business of battle’s aftermath. The snow fell gently now, laying a soft blanket on the cold faces of the dead. The waning night yet squirmed and wriggled uncomfortably, and I imagined souls passing on their missions of warning and mercy.

Once out on the hillside, I thought to shift, but my steps were halted by two weary veterans hauling a bloodstained cart loaded with weapons and armor. “I’ve heard Boedec had her, then lost her,” said one. “She can slip through a man’s fingers.”

My ears pricked, and I turned to listen.

“Harrowers turned on her,” said the other man. “Ran her off. I’d love to get my hands on her—slaughtered my whole village, she did.”

Gods, Sila was still loose! I pushed past them and ran down the slope, touched earth, and poured in magic. Only one other halfbreed Dané walked Dashon Ra.

She was hiding in the dry bed of the leat. I rested my forearms on the rim of the great trough and peered over the side. “Ah, priestess, what are we to do with you?”

“These whisperings are like to drive me mad,” she said, sitting up and shuddering as she glanced into the unsettled sky. “I’m glad for human company. Or at least mostly human. You can kill me if you want. Better you than one who holds grudges, which seems to be everyone. Perhaps before you do it, you could explain to me what went wrong. I was ready to take him down. We would have taken Renna by midday. Then, all of a sudden, my warriors began weeping and mumbling. Even the commanders. No one would listen to me.”

“Osriel held a more powerful weapon.” I climbed up the great sluiceway and perched on the rim. “I don’t want to kill you. I think I’ve given up killing altogether. Never was very good at it. Neither can I allow you to go free. I’d like you to understand what you’ve done…and what was done to you…and why Osriel is nothing like you…but I don’t know enough words to explain it.”

She sighed and brushed dirt from her face. “I’m too tired to listen. Besides, you’ll not change my beliefs. This world is corrupt beyond saving. The universe cares naught for our human politics. It demands purity. Plague and pestilence will accomplish the cleansing I could not. Just more slowly and with more pain.”

“You’re wrong,” I said. From our vantage I could see the fields of wounded and dead and those who tended them. “But clearly you must be judged by wiser heads than mine. Two realms have claim to your punishment, and I think…Will you come with me?” I jumped down from the trough and offered my hand.

She took it and jumped down beside me. “Nothing better to do at present.”

I threw off my garments and gathered my thoughts and memories. We walked back toward the gully. I listened for music as we climbed the rocky parapet…

…and by the time we reached the top, the cries of wounded soldiers had become the music of a single vielle, its strings picking out a pavane. The dancers were paired, one lifting the other or lowering, closing or separating but always touching, entwining their bodies in a single expression of grace, never stopping, as the music never stopped in its round. As far as we could see across the grassy hillside, the lines of sapphire, azure, and lapis flowed and swirled and bent, but never broke. Kol and Thokki danced the Center, and if grace and strength could speak of heaven, then their partnering was divine.

Sila’s face grew still. Stunned. “What is this?” she whispered.

The music swelled as it began another round, and slowly, one by one around the circles, the partners held their last position, then settled to the ground until only Kol and Thokki danced. He lifted her above his head, her arms and back and legs one smooth curve. Then Kol settled into an allavé with his own back straight and his leg a perfect line with it, and Thokki held above him. And then did the first light of dawn fall on them and the music fade.

“This is what you would destroy,” I said, tears pricking my eyes.

She did not respond. Did not speak at all, as the Danae embraced and bowed and vanished, one by one, into the morning. “Come,” I said. “We can go back now.”

But a small knot of Danae gathered atop the hill, and as I suspected would happen, several more were waiting for us by the time we climbed down the rocks. Sila was strong but not strong enough to resist three determined Danae. I did not run. “It is time for judgment,” I said.

Tuari and Nysse and ten more of the long-lived stood at the Center. Kol, Stian, and Thokki stood before them. They paused in their discussion, and all heads turned as we were brought up the hill.

“In the Canon, Tuari Archon,” I said, bowing. “I have brought you the hand of the Scourge. She is of our kind, but was nurtured in Ronila’s bitterness…”

The trial was long and required much discussion and argument. Such punishments as were to be meted out could not be Tuari’s decision alone.

I was cleared of Kennet’s murder. Ulfin knew that neither Kennet nor I had possessed a knife, and he had seen Ronila throw herself on Kennet as he himself brought Thokki to the pond.

For their part in bringing me to the Canon, Stian and Thokki were condemned to beast form for a gyre—a full term of the seasons. It was a bitter punishment and dangerous, lest some accident befall or some rash hunter failed to recognize them, but mild for the offense. The judges said they were brought into the conspiracy by their love for Kol and not of their own part, and indeed a marvel and no harm had come of my presence at the Canon.

But Kol was judged to have given long thought to his misdeed. He had begun my training and had failed to bring the issue of my talents to the archon. He had defied every precept of the Law and had taken fully on himself the risk of breaking the Canon. At noontide on the following day, he would be prisoned in his sianou, bound forever to slow fading with myrtle and hyssop. They accepted no plea from Stian to trade punishments with his son, no argument that Kol’s dancing was unmatched in any season. And the marvel of the Well’s recovery could not mitigate both Stian’s punishment and Kol’s.

Kol accepted the judgment without argument. “I did as was necessary,” he said. “I saw no other way. I would do it again.” Though many of the ten were uncomfortable with his sentencing, his own words condemned him.

“I can find your lost sianous, Tuari Archon,” I pleaded. “I can find the Plain. I just need time.” But they believed in swift judgment and would not yield. One look from Kol closed off further protests. He would not have me prisoned as well.

Sila Diaglou they condemned to beast form for as long as she might live. She said nothing. I did not know if she was yet mesmerized by the Canon or believed she was lost in dream. When they asked her what form she would prefer, she asked only that it not be vermin and that it be done right away.

Tuari took her. As she stood waiting to hear what they would do, he wrapped his arms about her from behind and whispered, “Do not be afraid.” Before I could blink, both bodies had vanished, and a sparrow fluttered along the ground as if its wings were broken. Moments later and Tuari was back, kneeling beside the bird. He nudged it with his finger, and startled, it flew to a nearby rock. I wanted to watch her as she tried her wings, but a flurry of birds rose from the ground, wheeled, and vanished into the morning, leaving none behind.

The Danae dispersed, one and then the other. As a courtesy to Stian, they would not execute Stian and Thokki’s punishments until Kol’s was done. The three of them were taken away and I was left alone at the Center, weary and sick at heart.

At nightfall, I took Philo and a cadre of men to Gillarine to take custody of Gildas. Evidently the doulon hunger already burned his flesh. I did not stay to hear his pained sobbing and curses as they shackled him for the short journey to Renna’s dungeon, but hurried to the lighthouse door. “Archangel!” I said, infusing the word with magic.

In three heartbeats, the door flew open. “Brother!” The boy peered outside as if to see if the moon had fallen or the earth cracked. The sheer joy that dawned on his young face warmed even such a cold night.

As I told him briefly of Osriel’s great magic, and how we had hopes that my peculiar combination of talents might help set the weather back to rights, he served me a small cup of ale, taking as much pride in his hospitality as a new householder. He offered me cheese and dried figs, as well, which reminded me how dreadfully long it had been since I had eaten anything. My aching side and hand had stolen my appetite.

“Do you think the brothers will come back to Gillarine now?” he asked, hesitant. “I can do very well here for as long as needed. But if they were to come…there would be singing…and they might raise the bells again. The quiet…I don’t mind it, but…”

“I’m sure they’ll come back. But you will always be the Scholar. The king will have it no other way.” I stood to go. “Iero’s grace, Scholar.”

“Iero’s grace…Valen. I don’t suppose you’ll be coming back here to take vows.”

I laughed and looked askance at my gards. “I think I’ve vows enough for three lifetimes. But if you’ve matters to discuss with me, you can always go to the font, yes? See if I’m at home?”

He giggled like a boy again and thought that was very fine, and said he would read more in the book of Danae lore and discuss it with me to see if it was accurate. “If not, then I might write a new book that will tell the truth of Danae.”

I left him then and jogged across the cloister garth to meet Philo and his prisoner.

“Brother Valen!” Jullian’s call turned me around when I was scarcely past the font.

The breathless young scholar stood atop the alley rubble. “I forgot. Do you want to take the book?”

“It served me well, Jullian, and bless you forever for finding it, but you know it’s of no use—”

“Not the book about the doulon, but your grandfather’s book—the book of maps.” He held out a square volume, bound in brown leather, the very book that had gained me admittance into the lighthouse cabal. “I thought you might have use for it.”

“Saints and angels! Gildas brought it!” I had no way to carry it with me or keep it safe, but to use it…“Quickly, let’s get back to the light.”

Gildas sweated and his guards cooled their heels while I sat in the lighthouse doorway and paged through the book to find what I needed—a wholly unremarkable fiché, little more than a line drawing without colors or gold leaf or any other elaboration. One smiling aingerou lurked in a corner. Janus had scattered five rosettes across the rough outline of Navronne. Touch a finger to one of the rosettes and a symbol appeared beside it—one displayed the symbol for a mountain, one for a sea, one for a water feature such as a well, and one showed a spiral that Janus had called the Center, before I understood what that meant.

I touched the fifth rosette, the one drawn in the northern half of the map between the arms of a divided river, unmasking a symbol I had not recognized until now. Surely the tiny prongbuck marked the Plain.

Heart swelling with excitement, I touched the aingerou, drew my finger from the Well to the Plain, and poured magic into the enchanted page. In my mind appeared a certain route—a path of roads and fields, hills and valleys, images so vivid that I could use them to find a destination for a shift—a birthday gift from my Cartamandua father.

“The gods ease your pain, madman,” I whispered as I closed the book and gave it to the boy for safekeeping. “I’ll tell you all about it when this is over.”

At noontide on the next day, when they brought Kol to Evaldamon for prisoning, I was waiting for them. Nysse, as always, stood at the archon’s side, and ten other Danae had come to stand as witnesses. Kol, hands and feet bound with braided vines, gazed out onto the sea—deep green on this day beneath the winter sun. My uncle’s proud face displayed no fear, though a Dané dropped a pile of fragrant green myrtle boughs and arm-length stems of dried hyssop only a few steps away. Stian and Thokki sat atop the cliffs under guard.

“Tuari Archon, I beg hearing,” I called. “I have brought you that which must change this judgment.”

When Kol glanced my way, I bowed. He nodded without expression and returned his eyes to the sea.

“What evidence can change what is confessed?” said Tuari.

“On the solstice, you said that if I could return the Plain to the Canon, you would judge these transgressions worthy, did you not, Archon? And worthy deeds merit no punishment.”

Tuari’s rust-colored hair was wreathed on this day with holly leaves. “I said this, but thou went incapable.”

“On this day, I am capable. Send whomever you will to judge me.”

After some discussion, it was decided that Nysse and Ulfin would verify my claim, and that Kol’s imprisonment would be delayed until our return. To the fascination of the Danae, I knelt and laid my palms on the earth. The route unrolled in my mind like a scroll of parchment, and I recalled the shore of the small lake until I could smell the marshland and hear the birds and the lap of the wavelets. “This way,” I said, and we made the first shift into Morian, retracing the route I had worked out from Janus’s map over a very long night.

In a matter of an hour, we stood in a thick winter fog on an island between the forks of a mighty river. I stepped along a long-faded silver trace and described the dancer’s astonishing leaps and his intricate footwork. And soon Nysse herself danced a kiran, echoing Llio’s last.

“It is the Plain, Tuari Archon,” she said when we returned to Evaldamon. “I can return there at any time. With time and work, it shall live in our memory as clearly as the Well.” Ulfin vouched for all she claimed.

And so were my uncle and grandsire and merry Thokki set free to dance again in Aeginea.

“So why art thou heartsore, rejongai?” said Kol, as the two of us strolled down the strand that evening at sunset. “Didst thou expect some other marvel than these thou hast described to me? The world is changing. And thou art fully of the long-lived and fully of the human kind. That is not at all usual. In the coming seasons thou shalt restore the Canon.”

“I feel knob-swattled,” I said, rubbing the wound in my side that ached more than it should. “Neither here nor there. The prince needs a pureblood adviser and has asked me to stay with him…and I desire greatly to do what I can to help him and teach him…but I want to be here and learn…and I need to travel and begin to reclaim what we’ve lost…and then, there is a woman…human…very human…”

Kol halted and put a hand on my shoulder. “Sleep, Valen. When thou art…knob-swattled…it is the call to sleep. Take thy season, and thou shalt wake clear and purposeful. It is our way. Necessary. No lesson is more worth the teaching. Renew thyself, that thy work shall be worthy.”

“Thank you, vayar.”

“Address me as Kol, rejongai. We get on well.”