Flesh and Spirit

Chapter 1

On my seventh birthday, my father swore, for the first of many times, that I would die face down in a cesspool. On that same occasion, my mother, with all the accompanying mystery and elevated language appropriate for a prominent diviner, turned her cards, screamed delicately, and proclaimed that my doom was written in water and blood and ice. As for me, from about that time and for the twenty years since, I had spat on my middle finger and slapped the rump of every aingerou I noticed, murmuring the sincerest, devoutest prayer that I might prove my parents’ predictions wrong. Not so much that I feared the doom itself—doom is just the hind end of living, after all—but to see the two who birthed me confounded.

Sadly, as with so many of my devotions, some to greater gods than those friendly imps carved into the arches and drainpipes of palaces, hovels, latrines, and sop-houses, my fervent petition had come to naught. I’d been bloody for two days now, the rain was quickly turning to sleet, and I seemed to have reached the hind end of everything…

“I’ve no quarrel with ye, Valen, ye know that.” The hairy brute stuffed my sweetly chinking leather purse into the folds of his cloak and returned to burrowing in my rucksack. “Ye’ve been a fine comrade these months. But ye’ve need of more care than I can give ye, and I’ve told ye, I can’t be hallooing with no monkish folk. If I thought so much as a slavey’s hovel lay within thirty quellae, I’d drag ye there.”

“And as you’re going to abandon me here, well…no use wasting good plunder on maggot fodder,” I said bitterly, teeth chattering, lips numb. The cold rain sluiced down the neck of my sodden jaque and collected about my knees in the ruts of the ancient road. My elbows quivered as I tried to hold my chest above the muddy water. This damnable goat track had likely not been used since they hauled in stone and wood to build the ghostly abbey tucked into the misty, folded land below us. “I’ve watched your back for a twelvemonth, you devil. Not a scratch have you suffered since Arin Fay.”

One by one Boreas pulled out the remaining carefully wrapped bundles: the onyx jewel case crammed with chains, bracelets, and jeweled brooches, the gold calyx, two daggers with ruby-encrusted hilts—the finest prizes of our infamy. Just one of the daggers could outfit a man with a decent horse, a sword, a thick wool cloak with no holes in it, and a pleasant trimonth of meat, drink, and fair companionship. I’d paid a pretty price in blood and flesh for collecting this bit of plunder, and—Magrog’s demons devour this beast I’d foolishly called friend—I wasn’t even to profit from it.

He stuffed my goods into his already bulging sack. “None o’ this lot’ll do ye no good. Wasn’t a monk bred won’t steal whatever he lays an eye on. And yer in no fit state to argue with them…or me neither, come to that.”

The arrow point embedded deep in my thigh and the fist-sized gouge that had started seeping warm blood on my back again bore ample witness to his verity on the last point. I did need help more than I needed my booty, and a wounded man could do far worse than a monastery. These concessions did nothing to ease my mind, however, as I was not yet at the abbey gates and not at all sure anyone would be traveling this particular road with night coming on and a three-year civil war and a sevenday’s deluge to keep folk by their own hearths.

I ought to have been angrier with Boreas. But gods knew I’d have done the same were he the one collapsed in the muck, wailing that fire-eyed Magrog himself could not make him take one more step. And I was certainly in no fit state to forcibly reclaim my belongings.

“Just get me down to the gate,” I croaked, another wave of chills washing me closer to the grave. “My share ought to pay you for that at least. And leave me one luné for an offering.”

“I daren’t. The baldpates’ll have me swinging ere I kiss ye farewell. No worry, lad. One of ’em’ll pass by here and see to ye. And their Karish god teaches ’em to give alms to them with naught, so you’re better off with no silver in your pocket.”

He shook his head and shrugged his massive shoulders as if the entire mystery of the holy universe was puzzling him at that moment. Then he pulled one last bundle from my rucksack—a flat, squarish parcel, two handspans on a side, wrapped in multiple layers of oiled cloth—and peeled open one flap.

“Have a care; the rain will ruin that,” I said, attempting to draw one knee up high enough that I could slide my foot underneath me. If I could just get back to my feet, find a thick branch to lean on, perhaps I could stagger down the hill a little farther on my own.

“Is it plate?” he asked, shaking the bundle and getting no sound. “Heavy enough, but it don’t feel right. I don’t remember nothing this shape.”

My left boot squelched into place under my hip, jarring the festering wound in my thigh, shooting bolts of white-hot fire up and down my leg. “Aagh! It’s a book. More valuable than plate. More valuable than those daggers to the right people. And I can send you to the right people if you’ll just get me to a leech.”

Boreas shifted backward, just out of my reach. “A book! Ye’re twinking me, right?”

He poked his dirty fingers into the corner of the parcel, and then glared down at me dumbfounded. “You donkey’s ass! Have ye an arrow planted between yer ears as well? All the rich stuff we had to leave behind and ye hauled out a blighting book?”

He threw the parcel and the empty rucksack to the ground and laid his boot into my backside. My shaking elbows collapsed, and I fell forward into the mudhole. Though I twisted enough to avoid a direct hit, I jarred the broken-off arrow shaft protruding from my thigh. Lifting my face from the muck and spewing mud from my mouth, I bellowed like a speared boar.

Unconcerned, Boreas crouched beside me, rifling my clothes. He tossed aside my bracers and the rag I had used to dry my long-lost bow, stuffed my knife into his own belt, and unwrapped the last bite of sour bread I’d hoarded for more than a day and crammed it into his mouth. Fumbling at the waist of my braies, he pulled out a small bag the size of my palm—a scrap of green wool I’d sewn myself and soaked in tallow until it was stiff. “What’s this?”

I grabbed for the little bag, but he snatched his hand out of my reach. “By Mother Samele’s tits, Boreas, you’ve got to leave me something.”

He yanked it open, sniffed at its contents, and then gaped at me as if I had sprouted three arms of a sudden, shaking his shaggy head until the drips flew off it. “Nivat seeds! But you’ve no bent to use such stuff…”

“Of course not, you clodwit. Would we have scraped and starved this year past if I were some misbegotten spellcaster?”

Lips curled in disgust, he pulled the silver needle and the jagged fragment of mirror glass from the little bag. “By the night lords—”

“The bag was hid in the jewel box.” I jumped in quickly to stop his thick head pondering too much. “The nob was surely pureblood. Richer than a prince. And surely Magrog’s henchman to practice such perversion.” I could stanch my babbling no better than I could stanch the blood from my shoulder.

He dropped the things back into the little green bag and crammed the bag into his pocket. “So you decided to sell the nivat on your own and jupe me out of my share. I thought I knew you, Valen. I thought you were my comrade.”

Rain pounded the soggy ground. My gut sent a warning, like a lightning flash beyond the hills. “I thought we could use the seeds to make feast bread come season’s turn. Offer it to the Danae. Change our luck. Come, you wouldn’t take everything.”

“Ye said yerself a man makes his own luck. I’m making mine.”

No plea could induce him to leave anything he thought he could sell. Nivat was very expensive, as were the quickened spells worked from it. Only nobles, pureblood sorcerers, or desperate twist-minds without any choice could afford either one.

Boreas straightened up and kicked the book parcel and the ragged rucksack toward my head. “The monks’ll heal your hurts if anyone can. Pay ’em with your valuable book.”

I dragged the rucksack under me, lest the slug-witted ox change his mind.

“You’re a coward and a thief, Boreas!” I shouted as he trudged off. “You stink like a pureblood’s midden!”

Only moments and he was gone, the heavy footsteps and ponderous breathing that had been a passing comfort at my side for a year’s turn swallowed up by the pounding deluge. He couldn’t go far. The light was failing. I could scarcely see the slender arches of the abbey church through the sheets of rain. Monks—especially these pious fellows out in the wilderness—put themselves to bed before a meadowlark could sing. Before a whore had her skirts up. Before an owl had its eyes open. Before…

Alehouse riddling threatened to squeeze out more useful thoughts. Shaking my head, I stretched out my forearms, dug my elbows into the muck, and dragged myself forward on my side perhaps one quat—the length of a man’s knucklebone. Ominous warmth oozed out of the gouge on my back. My leg felt like a molten sword blank awaiting the smith’s hammer.

I rested my head on crossed forearms. One moment to catch my breath…

Much as I pretended elsewise, even to myself, I could shape spells, of course. Mostly destructive things, minor illusions, a child’s wickedness. Nothing that could heal a wound. Nothing that could summon help. Nothing useful.

The driving rain splashed mud in my face. Sleet stung the back of my neck. The cold settled deep in my bones until I wasn’t even shivering anymore. I hated the cold.

“Magrog take you, Boreas,” I mumbled, “and give you boils on your backside and a prick like a feather.”

Groaning shamelessly, I jammed my left foot into the rut and rolled onto my back. The dark world spun like soup in a kettle, yet I felt modestly satisfied. I might be doomed to blood and water and ice—madness, too, if breeding held true—but by Iero’s holy angels, I would die face up in this cesspool.

Rain spattered softly on my cheeks and the ground, on the puddles, the leaves, and a large rock, each surface producing a slight variant of the sound, defining the world on the far side of my eyelids. The scents of rotted leaves and good loam filled my nose…my lungs…seeped into my pores. My body blemished that vast landscape like a fallen tree, soon to be rotted, dissolved, and completely one with that cold, dark, and very wet place.

Soft padding steps rustled the wet leaves, stirring up smells of grass and moss and sea wrack, everything green or wet in the world. Paused. Fox? Rabbit? Mmm…bigger. Cold rain and warm blood had long washed away fear. Moments more and I wouldn’t care what kind of beast it was. A faint shudder rippled through my depths. Terrible…wonderful…to dissolve in the rain…

Creaking wood and iron sent the beast scuttering away. Soft yellow light leaked around my eyelids—a lamp spitting and sprizzling in the rain.

“You heard him at the sanctuary gate? From all the way up here?”

“By Iero’s holy name, Brother Sebastian. His cry sounded like the seven torments of the end times. When I poked my head out the shutters and saw none lay at the gate, conscience forbade me to lie down again without a search.”

“Never use the One God’s name lightly, boy. And in future you must seek Father Prior’s permission to go beyond the walls, even when on duty.”

A warm weight, smelling of woodsmoke and onions, pressed lightly on my chest. If I could have moved, I would have wrapped my arms about it. Kissed it even.

The weight lifted. “He breathes. I’d call it a miracle you found him, but now I look, I’m coming to believe you heard the fellow, after all. For certain he’s been through the seven torments. Here, lend me your hand.”

Hands grabbed me behind my left shoulder, where Boreas had extracted a second arrow and a sizable hunk of flesh. I left off any thought of joining the conversation. Breathing seemed enough. Keeping some wit about me. Listening…

The two mumbled of Iero and Father Prior and Saint Gillare the Wise, as they laid me on my side on a wooden platform that stank like a pig wallow and then proceeded to tilt it at such an angle that all my painful parts slid together in one wretched lump. The cart bumped forward, causing me to bite my tongue.

“Was he left by highwaymen, do you think, Brother?” The eager young speaker labored somewhere in front of me, expelling short puffs of effort.

“Highwaymen don’t leave boots with a man, even boots with soles thin as vellum. No, as his outfit’s plain and sturdy underneath the blood, I’d name him a soldier come from battle. Doesn’t look as if he’s eaten in a twelvemonth, for all he’s tall as a spar oak.”

“A soldier…” The word expressed a wonder that comes only when the speaker can’t tell a pike from a poker or a battle from a broomdance. “One of Prince Bayard’s men, do you think?”

“He might serve any one of the three, or this mysterious Pretender, or the Emperor of Aurellia himself. Such matters of the world should not concern you. Once Brother Infirmarian sees to the fellow, Father Abbot will question him as to his loyalties and purposes.”

Bones of hell…one would think an abbey so out of the way as this one might not care which of the three sons of King Eodward juped his brothers out of the throne.

The cart jounced through a pothole. The older man grunted. I sank into mindless misery.

Anyone might have mistaken the cold uncomfortable journey for the everlasting downward path. One of the two fellows—the younger one, I guessed, not the wise Brother Sebastian—chirruped a psalm about running with Iero’s children in sunlit fields, a performance so cheery it could serve as proper torment on such a road.

Eventually we jolted to a stop. Above my head arched a stone vault of uncertain height, not an ever-raining sky, though a round-cheeked aingerou carved into a corner spat a little dribble of rainwater onto the wagon bed. The yellow lamplight danced on the pale stone.

“Run for Brother Robierre, boy, and tell him bring a litter.”

“But I’m posted sanctuary, so I must give—”

“You’ve walked me halfway to Elanus. I’ll stay right here and give the fellow his blessing.”

Elanus. A small market town. South? West? Ought to know. How far did we run? I’d been more than half delirious on the road.

Bells clanged and clamored from the church towers, and out of the night rose the sound of men singing plainsong, clear and strong like a river of music, quickening my blood like a fiery kiss.

“Brother, it’s the call to Matins!” said the boy. “You have to go!”

“All right, all right, my hearing’s not so bad as that.”

Matins—morning at midnight. A perverse custom.

The wind shifted the lantern so that its beams nearly blinded me. I squeezed my eyes shut again. The night’s edge seemed sharp as a razor knife. I’d always heard the Ferryman’s mortal breath dulled the senses.

A dreadful thought shivered my bones: Had the Ferryman himself been breathing at my ear? He’d even smelled of sea wrack. I’d never truly believed…

“I’ll send Brother Infirmarian,” said Brother Sebastian. “When he no longer requires you, hie you to prayers yourself. The good god excuses no green aspirants.”

“Of course, Brother.”

Footsteps trudged away. A warm hand touched my brow. “By Iero’s grace, find safety here, thou who fleest sword or hangman. By the saint’s hand, find healing here, thou who sufferest wound or sickness. By gift of holy earth, find strength here, thou who comest parched or weak. And by King Eodward’s grant and his servants’ labor, find nourishment for thy flesh and spirit. God grant thee ease, traveler.”

An interesting prayer…gift of holy earth…King Eodward’s grant…all mixed in with the Karish god Iero and one of his saints. For the most part, the Karish dwelt peaceably side by side with the elder gods, but I’d never before heard a joint invocation.

I lifted my head. “Perhaps, if you could just help me out of this corner…”

An uncomfortable ricketing tilt of the cart brought a pale, narrow face above me. The lamplight revealed the thickening brows and downy upper lip of oncoming manhood, and such delight and amazement as could only emanate from the same soul that sang cheery psalms while slogging a manure cart down a mountainside in the rain. “You’re alive!”

I didn’t feel at all sure about that, having come so close as to hear the Ferryman’s footsteps. “Not dead. Thank you.”

“No need to thank me, sir. It’s my duty, you see, assigned me by the prior, who was given the task by the abbot, whose authority is from the hierarch and the One God in Heaven. I sleep above the sanctuary gate, ready to hear the bell and open the gate for any who come. You’re the first since I was given the task. You do beg sanctuary, don’t you?”

His eagerness exhausted me.

“Yes. Certainly.”

“Thus you must have broken the law of God or king, or someone believes it so…” He tilted his head and drew his brows together. Clearly his excitement at receiving a supplicant was now tempered with consideration of my soul’s peril. My offenses were, indeed, countless, and my peril ever present.

“If you could just help me sit up.” So long tipped downward in the stinking cart had my belly mightily unsettled, not that there was aught left in it to spew.

The untonsured boy was as diligent with his wiry arms and gentle hands as with his words. By the time a gray-haired monk with darkish skin about his eyes, something like a badger’s markings, dropped a bundle of long poles on the paving, I sat across the lip of the three-sided cart, my head bent almost to my knees and my lip bloody from biting it.

“Jullian, unfold the litter. Let me examine what we have here. Ooh…” A glimpse of the broken, dark-stained shaft protruding from my black and swollen thigh was clearly the most interesting thing the fellow had seen that day.

“I hope you’ve a sharp knife, Brother,” I said, my voice shaking, “and a steady hand.”

Then he touched it, and the world slipped out of my grasp.

Chapter 2

“How do you feel this morning, my friend?”

I cocked one eye open. The smudge-eyed monk peered down at me, his arms overflowing with bundled linen and wooden bowls. Plastered walls hung with strips of green-dyed cloth rose up behind him to a timbered roof, and an array of narrow windows, paned with horn, admitted murky light. A smoking rushlight clamped to an iron tripod revealed ten more beds lined up neatly in the long plain room. From my odd vantage—I lay on my left side, some kind of bolster propping me up from the back and legs tipped higher than my head—the beds appeared unoccupied.

“I feel like Iero’s wrath,” I said. Every particle of my flesh felt battered; my leg throbbed as if the arrow point were grinding its way into the bone. My shoulder might have had rats chewing on it. Damp all over, I shivered helplessly despite a pile of blankets.

I had known better than to pull the damnable arrow out of my thigh when I had no help but Boreas, who was convinced that burying a live cat under an oak at the full moon would cure his crabs, and that spitting over a bridge rampart while wearing a moonbird’s feather would speed the healing of his broken hand. I knew little of the body’s humors. But one of a man’s great veins lay in the thigh, and I’d seen men bleed to death faster than a frog takes a fly while removing an arrow point carelessly from just the same spot as my wound. And we hadn’t been able to stop moving. When the Harrower priestess had thrown her legion of madmen against us, the battle had gone completely to the fiery pits, and six thousand other bloodied soldiers who had wagered their fortunes on the wrong side in this cursed war were soon to be right on our heels.

A halfwit would understand what the delay would cost me. Though I had weighed bleeding to death likely preferable to sepsis and amputation, in my usual way I had postponed the decision, figuring it was better to die tomorrow than today. Now the payment was falling due.

Mustering my courage, I broached the question gnawing at my gut. “You’ll take the leg, I know, Brother. But think you I’ll live to raise a glass again?”

The monk dropped his bundled linens atop a wide chest pushed against the end wall of the infirmary, then began arranging the wooden bowls on shelves already crowded with ewers and basins, jars and bottles. “If the One God’s mercy continues to hold sway, your leg will heal with no ill result. Your fever’s broken just this morn. Young Jullian will be certain his prayers are answered. You’d think the boy had delivered you from the gates of hell bearing sword and shield like the Archangel himself.”

“But it’s putrid, and when you remove the arrow—”

“The nasty bit of iron is two days out, lad, and for certain, you’ve the constitution of an ox. You’re on the mend.” The monk was a strapping fellow. Despite his circled eyes and his stubbled cheeks that drooped excess skin about his jaw, his face expressed naught but good cheer. He spread out an array of bundled plants on a long table that stood between the last bed and the stack of shelves. Perching his backside on a backless stool, he began picking leaves from the array. “I’m Brother Robierre, as it happens, by Iero’s grace the infirmarian of Gillarine Abbey.”

“Oh!” Astonishing how much better I felt straightaway. As if the jagged bits of a shattered mirror had put themselves together again. As if I’d pulled the veil off my contracted bride and found some girl I loved. I dropped my head on the pillow and crowed like a banty rooster. “May the angels scribe your name, Brother! The moment I’m afoot, I’ll dance you a jig and carry you to heaven on my back!”

A stoop-shouldered monk with piebald hair and a gray scapular over his cinched black gown scuttered out from behind me, casting a mildly shocked glance my way. The steaming crock he carried past my bed to the table left a scented trail in the air. Chicken—holy mother, could it be?—and onions and carrots and thyme and savory. My stomach rumbled uproariously.

Months had passed since I last tasted meat. In early summer Boreas and I had shot an aged squirrel, three bites apiece and broth from the boiled bones with little more than grass to throw in it. Then and since the Ardran legions had been squatting on land long raided, gleaned, and stripped. We’d had only bread like dried leather made from shriveled peas or even acorns ground into flour. And never enough. No planting or harvest this year in any of western Ardra. The summer campaign had been only one of Prince Perryn’s gross miscalculations in pursuing his father’s throne. Not even the worst.

“Thank you, Brother Anselm,” said Robierre. “I do believe our patient’s going to appreciate the soup today. Inform the abbot that our supplicant is awake, if you would.”

Piebald Brother Anselm nodded solemnly to the infirmarian and scurried away. To my delight, Brother Robierre put aside his activities and selected a wooden bowl from the shelf. I almost moaned as he filled the bowl from the tureen, acquired a spoon, and dragged a low stool to my bedside.

The good brother insisted I drink some concoction that tasted like boiled scrapings from a stable floor first of all. But after the first spoonful of the soup, I would have knelt to kiss the hairy toes that peeked out from his sandals had he but asked.

“Abbot Luviar has been most concerned about you,” he said as I reveled in the savory broth and tiny bits of succulent poultry deemed suitable for an invalid. “He’s had prayers said, asked blessings as we sit at table. He’ll be in to see you now I’ve sent word you’re awake.”

“Mmm,” I said, holding the last warm spoonful in my mouth before I let it trickle down my throat. “Iero’s holy angels…all of you.” I was feeling quite devout.

He grinned, an expression distinctly odd for a badger. “I’ll get you more.”

I had never shared Boreas’s horror of monks, but then I had never been fool enough to creep over a priory wall with a bursar’s coffer on my back. Boreas had been sentenced to the loss of one hand, a flogging, and a week in pillory, but managed to escape before suffering any of the three. Now he was convinced that every monk and lay brother passed his description about the realm tucked in sleeves or under scapulars, and that every abbot and prior was determined to hang him.

Sadly, my own direst peril had less to do with lawbreaking or sin than with birth and blood, circumstances for which no sanctuary could be granted. But I had no reason to believe that my loathsome family or the Pureblood Registry could find me here or anywhere. I’d shed them both at fifteen and had long since drowned myself in a sea of anonymity. I had no intention of bobbing to the surface. Ever.

Two more bowls of the brothers’ heaven-kissed soup and I took even the changing of the dressing on my thigh with good humor. Warm, fed, and clean—indeed someone had washed me head to toe while I slept—and out of the weather, and no one coming after me with arrows, pikes, lances, or hands outstretched for money…perhaps the boy Jullian was indeed the archangel who guarded the gates of Paradise. The truest wonder was that he had let me in.

I fell asleep as promptly as a cat in a sunbeam. When my eyes drifted open again sometime later, a long-limbed man of more than middling years sat on the stool at my bedside. A golden solicale dangled from his neck—the sunburst symbol of Iero’s glory worked in a pendant so heavy it must surely be an abbot’s ensign. Instead of effecting a modest tonsure like the infirmarian’s, he had shaved his head entirely clean.

Holding in mind my present comforts, I bowed my head and shaped my greeting in the Karish manner. “In the name of holy Iero and his saints, my humblest gratitude be yours, holy father. Truly the One God led my wayward footsteps to this refuge when the world and all its ways had failed me.” I didn’t think it too grovelish.

“Iero commands us offer his hand in charity,” said the abbot, “and so we have done. It remains to be seen what he has in mind for you.” His full-shaven pate, fine arched nose, and narrow, pock-grooved face made his cool gray eyes seem very large.

I squirmed a bit, suddenly feeling even more naked than I already was under my lovely blankets.

A younger monk, full-shaven as well, but with unmarked skin and dark brows that made a solid line above deep-set eyes, stood a few steps behind the abbot, hands tucked piously under his black scapular. Though his expression remained properly sober, his brow lifted slightly and his mouth quickened with amusement as he observed me under the abbot’s eye.

“What is your name, my son?” The abbot took no note of his attendant’s improper levity.

“Valen, holy father.”

“Valen. Nothing else, then?”

“Nay, holy father.” No title to mark me as nobility or clergy. No town or profession to mark me as a rooted man even if my father was unimportant. No association with any of the three provinces of Navronne—Ardra, Morian, or Evanore—or with their contentious princes. And certainly no colineal surname to proclaim my family pureblood, and thus my future beyond even an abbot’s right to determine. Especially not that. “Just Valen.”

“Valen Militius, perhaps?”

Another dangerous topic. The young attendant monk’s dark brows lifted slightly. Attentive. At the worktable, Brother Robierre’s head was bent over his mortar and pestle, plants and vials, but his hands grew still.

Though I tried to dip my own head farther, being propped on my side made it difficult. “Not a professional soldier, holy father, far from it, nor even a worthy freeman-at-arms. But I once carried a pike for King Eodward, Iero cherish his soul, and stood behind him as he drove the Hansker barbarians back across the sea. He called us his men of light, and so we all felt more than what we were born.” All true. And now the test would come…

“And what of noble Eodward’s sons?” He touched the clean linen that wrapped my shoulder and made a blessing sign upon it. My flesh warmed beneath the bandage. “Which of the three princes owns your fealty? Or do you hope for this ghostly Pretender of current rumor?”

“None of them, holy father. Though the sign of three speaks of heaven, these three sons are so far from worthy of their kingly father that an ignorant lout such as I am cannot choose. And though I reverence any issue of good King Eodward, I fear that naught but tavern gossip has delivered him a fourth son.”

Unless I could discover with which prince this man’s favor rested, I dared not say more. Perryn of Ardra, whom I had chosen as being the most intelligent and least openly brutal of the half brothers, was surely dead by now, or in chains, babbling his plans and the names of his noble supporters to his brother Bayard’s torturers. In either case, my oath to him was moot. He had shown himself mean and so stubbornly inept that my loyalty had been ruined much earlier. He certainly was not worth dying for.

I glanced up. The gray eyes held steady, the long, slender bones of the abbot’s face unmoved. “So your wounds were not earned in battle, then?”

Well, the battle had been over months before we’d charged Prince Bayard’s line at Wroling—in the spring when Bayard of Morian had allied with Sila Diaglou and her Harrowers. But such quibbling wouldn’t carry weight with this abbot. Not with a wound in my back, and the admission requiring me to declare not only that I had run away, but which side I had deserted. I needed a better story.

“Nay, holy father, rather my wounds stem from a private dispute with another man regarding property that belonged to me. Though right was with me in the matter, I believed I was going to die and so confessed my sins to a village practor. He sent me on the road with my wounds untended as penance, saying the One God would put me in the way of death or life as was his will.”

I held still and listened carefully, fighting the urge to add more words to this collection of nonsense, such as what village I’d come from or why I had suffered the strikes of arrows rather than knife or club. It seemed a very long time until the abbot spoke again.

“Was this, by chance, the disputed property, Valen?”

The dark-browed monk stepped forward, pulled a book out of his black gown, and passed it to the abbot. The abbot laid it on the bed in front of my face, a squarish book some three fingers thick, its brown leather binding tooled in gold with gryphons and dragons, long-limbed angels, roundels, vine leaves, and every flourish of the leather gilder’s art. Slightly damp at one corner, but I quickly verified that the dampness had not touched the fine vellum pages enough to damage them or smear the ink.

“If so, and if you have any idea of what you carry and can tell me how you’ve come by it, then I may believe your story.”

I swallowed, puffed out a strong breath, and touched my finger to the golden letters on its cover and the familiar sigil of a gryphon carrying a rolled map in its claws. “Of course, holy father. This is the original volume of Maps of the Known World, created by the pureblood, Janus de Cartamandua-Magistoria, the most famous cartographer in all of Navronne’s history.” That part was true, of course. My mind raced. “It was given me…seven years ago…when, with Iero’s grace, my service…scouting…preserved the Mardane Lavorile’s troop from capture by the Hansker. Knowing a scout would understand its worth, his lordship said it was fitting recompense for the lives I had saved. One of these wild Harrowers tried to take it. They think to burn all books, you know.”

“So you are familiar with the book, studied it no doubt, used its guiding spells when you served the mardane?”

Monks valued books. New initiates often brought them. And the Karish would certainly want this one. Legend said it could lead men to the realm of angels.

“Of course, holy father. I used it often in the mardane’s service. I treasure each page.” Though my valuing had more to do with the gold coins of pawnbrokers than the gold crowns of angels.

The gray-eyed abbot nodded. “I’ll accept this tale for now. Brother Robierre is scowling, for I promised not to tire you. Tell me, Valen, what do you ask of Gillarine Abbey beyond your fortnight of sanctuary?”

This answer was much easier than the previous ones, requiring no instant work of the imagination. “To join your holy fraternity, holy father. To repent my licentious life and serve the god Iero, if I may.” That is, to eat and stay warm, dry, and anonymous until I decided where to go and what to do next to revive a fortune that seemed to have reached its nadir. Soldiering, the only work I’d found in two years, had decidedly lost its attractions.

“Granted,” said the abbot with astonishing speed. “Brother Sebastian will be your mentor, instructing and guiding you in our rule and custom. Brother Gildas, you will inform Sebastian and Prior Nemesio of our new aspirant.”

The dark-browed monk bowed respectfully from the hip.

Once prayers and blessings had ushered the two of them out, Brother Robierre appeared at my side, bearing a clay jar into which I took a grateful piss. He then passed the jar on to the piebald Brother Anselm, who settled at the worktable and began to dip and pour and examine my output as if it were the waters of the heavenly rivers. I recited my stories over and over in my head so I’d not forget them if questioned again.

After a while, the infirmarian provided me with a thick posset, not so savory as the chicken, but sweet, warm, and filling. Setting the empty mug aside, Robierre reached his hand toward the book that still lay on the bed with me. Hesitating. “May I?”

Eyelids heavy, I smiled. “For thou, blessed angel of the infirmary, anything.”

He chuckled, lifted the book from the bed, and ran his thick fingers lovingly over the binding. “A Cartamandua book of maps…to have such a thing come to Gillarine…You will be besieged with pleas to see it. Few of our brothers, even those who labor in the scriptorium, will have glimpsed so rare and precious a work or one so storied. The very book that led the Sinduré and the Hierarch to discover young Eodward in the realm of angels, the book that shows the hidden places of the world. What strange roads it must have traveled. Who would have thought that one like you would possess a sorcerer’s finest—? Ah, I’m sorry.” His sagging cheeks flushed in kind embarrassment.

“You’re not the first, good brother, not the first.”

Strange roads indeed! Until five days ago, when I’d discovered the book in a deserted manse I happened to be looting as I ran away from a battle I’d sworn to fight, I’d last touched it eleven years before at a bookshop in Palinur. I’d been desperate for money—a state less familiar then than now. I’d had to settle for less than its full worth because the book pawner refused to believe I’d come by it honestly. Neither the good Brother Robierre nor the pawner would believe—nor would I ever tell anyone, could I avoid it—that old Janus de Cartamandua himself had given it to me, his ill-behaved and unappreciative grandson, on my tumultuous and unpleasant seventh birthday. My parents had been furious.

Chapter 3

The bells in the abbey tower fell silent. Brother Robierre had hurried off to the chapter house for the monks’ daily meeting, and Brother Anselm had retired to his herb garden, closing the infirmary door softly behind them so as not to wake me. I heaved a deep and pleasurable sigh.

On this second day of trying to sleep away my wounds in Gillarine’s infirmary, I had only three complaints of any substance. Firstly, the bells. Bells banged every hour day or night and set off a cacophony whenever the brothers were called to services, which seemed fifty times a day. Second, the shy lay brother Anselm devoutly believed that one window must always be left open in an infirmary to allow ill humors to escape the room, which caused a frigid draft whenever the outside door was opened. And third, endearing as I found Brother Badger, as I called the good infirmarian, a sick man should be exempt from excess praying. Feigning sleep was my only reprieve.

I tugged the blankets over my bare shoulder, luxuriated in the returning warmth from the hearth, and speculated about what delicacy the good brothers would bring from the abbey kitchens to fill my invalid’s stomach. I had always been a quick healer, but the brothers didn’t need to know that. Life was good.

“Comfortable, are you?”

My eyelids slammed open to reveal the abbot’s attendant sitting on the bedside stool. I’d heard not a step or a breath.

“Brother Gildas! How did you—?” Recalling my position as aspiring novice and the tedious duties that were like to involve the moment I was well enough, I checked my tongue and allowed my breath to quaver bravely. “Well, Brother, I’m as comfortable as a man can be with fever shakes and septic blood and holes in his flesh where there should be none. Bless you for asking.”

His dark brows lifted, and he pulled a wedge of cheese from under my pillow. “We’ll feed you even when you’re healed, Valen. And you needn’t fear I’ll tell the abbot that your devotions are perhaps more directed to his kitchen and his bed than his church at present. Every man here has his own reasons for piety.”

“The bounty of the good god is a fit occasion for thanksgiving,” I said a bit defensively, tucking the rest of my cache more securely under my head. “And surely he expects us to conserve that bounty for harder days.”

Perhaps it was their shaven heads that made this man and the abbot appear so intensely focused, their eyes dominant in their hairless skulls as if they might read a man’s very soul. Not that my soul was all that interesting—a man of seven-and-twenty summers who scrabbled from one job to another, doing as he needed to wrest a bit of enjoyment from a world that seemed worse off by the day. But at least this fellow was near enough my own age that he might remember something of a man’s needs.

“I do hear Iero’s call to the prayerful life quite clearly. But, in truth, Brother Gildas, I am yet a sinful man who enjoys the pleasures of bed and board overmuch. No matter how devoutly my soul yearns to reform, my body forever backslides.”

“And yet our abbot, whose eye is infinitely wise, judges you worthy of initiation. I’ve never known him so precipitate in judgment. He’d have you vowed before Saint Marcillus’s Day, scarcely a fortnight hence.” His head tilted as if to examine me from various angles, his deep-set eyes unwavering. “Well, neither you nor I may see the right of it, but the god scorns none with a good heart. We must have faith that he will illumine yours as he sees fit. Brother Sebastian has been charged with your guidance and instruction, but Father Prior has dispatched him to Pontia to investigate the rumor of two books brought in by traders. So I was asked to bring you these.”

He laid a worn book and a roll of parchment on the bed in front of me. “Your psalter, left by good Brother Horach, who passed to his next life not long ago. And a summary of Saint Ophir’s Rule, which you must commit to memory ere you take your novice vows. Brother Sebastian will discuss them with you upon his return.”

“A dead man’s book?” I said, drawing back from it as far as the heavy bolster allowed.

“He was not diseased, if that’s your worry.”

“No, no…”

I had long abjured the soldiers’ maxim that wearing a dead man’s boots or cooking in his pot would see your own life forfeit within a year. Books, as it happened, raised other problems.

“It’s just that…a holy saint’s book…for my eyes that have looked on so much of the Adversary’s wickedness to rest upon such precious pages seems sacrilege. Until I have confessed and labored out the days…months…of expiation, I doubt I could look upon a holy work without it bursting into eternal flame. And such a waste of a precious book that would be!”

Brother Gildas laughed—a pleasant, resonant sound—and shifted the book and scroll to the bedside table. “We must certainly get you up and working hard to soothe this burdensome conscience of yours. Do you not know that those who cross our threshold for sanctuary are cleansed of past offenses? You are a new man, Valen, whether you like it or not, as pure as a new-dipped babe. The only marks upon your soul will be those you scribe there from this day forward.”

The Karish hierarchs pronounced many tenets to admire, but this one—that an unwatered babe could be marked with evil, whereas a failed man of the world who had no intention of repenting his iniquities could be somehow purified by crossing a brick threshold—had always struck me as untenable.

I sighed deeply. “Oh. Well then, when my fever allows my blurred sight to clear, I’ll study both book and scroll.”

“If Brother Sebastian fails to return by tomorrow, I’ll come myself to quiz you on the Rule,” he said, rising from his stool. “And, of course, Father Abbot will require the details of your birth. We care naught for high or low, pureblood, noble, or common at Gillarine. But neither bonded men nor natural sons nor purebloods lacking dispensation from their family are permitted to join our order.”

“Of course.” I had the disconcerting sense that the monk felt my mind racing. “Tell me, Brother Gildas, where is my own book, the book of maps?” After the odd chance of happening onto such a rarity, I’d be a fool to lose track of it.

He smiled in a knowing fashion that I found somewhat annoying. “Safely locked into the abbot’s own book press. Father Abbot would not see such a treasure splattered with blood or possets. If you choose to leave before you take vows, of course it will be returned to you.”

He offered me a sip of the spicy caudle Brother Badger had left on the stool. I downed it gratefully. My awkward drinking posture left drips enough on my bed linens to make Brother Gildas’s point.

I would need to find the book. If this Elanus was a good-sized town, perhaps it had a knowledgeable pawner. A few weeks and I would suffer for my lack of silver. Of a sudden the beery sweetness of the caudle tasted of brine and bitter. Some of life’s unpleasantness could not be so easily evaded as Registry investigators or my family’s bloodhounds.

“Thank you, Brother. Iero grant you like mercy.” I licked a stray drop from my lips and let my eyelids sag, hoping the soft-spoken Gildas might forgo the prayers sure to accompany his departure. Like flies about raw fish, prayers seemed to cluster about every monkish activity.

But when his soft whisper came in my ear, it bore no pious sentiment. Holy words, nonetheless. “Mutton broth today.”

My laughter disrupted all my feigning. He smiled and vanished through the door as quietly as he’d come. I would have to watch my step with Brother Gildas.

With the skill of long experience I banished all thought of the future. Perhaps these good monks would solve all my ills—body and soul together.

My head had scarcely touched the pillow again when a clank of the latch and a damp, chilly whoosh of the draft signaled another arrival. A warm body hovered a handbreadth from my face like a restrained pup awaiting my word to begin licking. This one smelled of rain and mud, onions and innocence…and boy.

“Could this be the Archangel Jullian?” I said without opening my eyes. “He of the exquisite hearing and golden tongue, who shall have whatever service he needs of me from this day forward as thanks for preserving my feckless life?”

“Aye, it’s Jullian,” he said softly. “Are you asleep, then? I shan’t stay if you’re asleep. But I’m off sanctuary watch and on to kitchen duty as of this day’s chapter, so I’ve more time to see to you. Brother Robierre told me you’re healing astonishingly fast and are ready for visitors.”

I lifted my heavy eyelids and grinned. “Not asleep. Indeed I’m pleased for cheerful company. As long as you don’t make me pay for it by draining my wounds or poking my bruises.” Besides, the sooner I knew the ins and outs of Gillarine, the better, whether I chose to stay a season or not.

“I’ve brought you something to aid your healing. Water from Saint Gillare’s holy spring.” The boy held out a flask of amber-colored glass as reverently as if it held the saintly woman’s tears.

I drew back a little. “Water? Uh…I don’t…not usually…” I didn’t want to offend the boy, but I’d been leery of that ruinous beverage since my mother’s divination when I turned seven. Certainly many a soldier came to grief from it. “So kind. Thank you. But we’d best wait for Brother Bad—Robierre. I’m sure I heard him say my stomach was too weak for water as yet.”

He set the flask on the stool, then hiked up his coarse brown tunic and plopped down on the tile floor, leaving his face on a comfortable level with mine. Though the damp, matted hair cut bowl-shaped to his ears could have been any color, the fluff on the boy’s full lip and bony chin was red-gold in the lamplight and his skin ruddy. I judged him wholly Ardran. Most Navrons, especially the Moriangi of the riverlands to the north, bore some trace of either the black-haired Aurellian invaders of past centuries—my own ancestors—or the flaxen-haired Hansker who plagued our coast.

“I just wanted—Is there any further service I can offer? Something else I could bring you? A prayer I could offer? Whatever you need.” His voice belied his coarsening features and piped clear and boyish, putting him nearer twelve than fourteen to my mind. The ripe stench of less than diligent washing assured me he was entirely human male and no angel in disguise.

I propped my elbow on the bed and supported my head with my fist. “Mmm, I’ve a wagonload of curiosity. As you may have heard, a penitential pilgrimage led me here, but I was in such a state of sin and remorse that I’ve no idea what roads I walked or where I ended up.”

The battle had begun at Wroling Wood in southwestern Navronne—a damnable, confusing, twisted region of forested gullies more akin to god-cursed Evanore than the fertile hills and vineyards of gentle, golden Ardra. And between my delirium, the impenetrable trees, the wretched weather, and the eerie lack of human habitation along the way, naught had illumined our location since. The desolation was almost enough to make one believe the Harrowers had succeeded in their mad quest to erase all trace of human works from the land. In truth, that our flight had ended near any sanctuary but a bandit’s hut, much less by a house so prosperous as to have sheep bones to boil, was enough to make a man a devotee of Serena Fortuna.

Closing my eyes, I offered a quick apology to the divine sister of Sky Lord Kemen for my doubts during those wretched days, promising a libation next time I was blessed with a cup of wine. I thought it prudent to honor all gods and goddesses until someone wiser than me sorted out the contention between Navronne’s elder gods and the Karish upstart Iero.

“Gillarine lies eighteen quellae north of Caedmon’s Bridge and three quellae south of Elanus, which itself lies one hundred and seventy-four quellae southwest of Palinur. We sit ninety-three quellae east of Wroling.” The boy recited his numbers as if they were an alchemist’s formula.

I gave his information little credence. Boreas and I might have traveled ninety-three quellae in two days afoot when well rested, with full stomachs and the wrath of the gods scorching our heels. But we’d never come so far after months of poor rations and the soldier’s flux, and with my leg threatening to collapse the entire way.

At least it seemed I’d managed to keep us in Ardra. Even ravaged by war and fiendish weather, my birth province was yet the fairest of Navronne’s three. Morian was flat and ugly, its sprawling ports and trade cities infested with plague, mosquitoes, woolen mills, and rapacious trade guilds. And our proximity to Evanore, that land of devils’ mountains, yet left me queasy. Evanore’s duc, Prince Osriel, forbade purebloods entry into his lands. I’d been taught that his border wards would boil a pureblood’s brains until they leaked out his ears.

I grimaced and rubbed my shaggy head.

Jullian hunched his thin shoulders and dropped his voice. “I’ve heard a battle was fought at Wroling a sevenday since, Prince Perryn’s army routed by Prince Bayard and the Harrower legions. Gerard, another aspirant who took up the sanctuary watch after me, was told to watch for survivors, though Brother Porter said he’d heard they were all captive or dead, every one.”

Disgust at the waste raised my bile. As far as I was concerned, they could give the cursed throne to the Harrower priestess, Sila Diaglou—or to this Ardran child Pretender whom no one sober had ever seen. “Does your abbot favor Prince Perryn, then, to be willing to take in what’s left of his men?”

“The abbot holds Gillarine as a neutral field,” said the boy. His wide blue eyes shone, declaring his faith that a sainted man could make even such a ridiculous thing be true. “King Eodward built the abbey years and years ago. On holy ground, the story says. He gave the Hierarchs of Ardra dominion over it, but only as long as they fulfill the terms of his grant—to preserve and protect all knowledge and all supplicants—even those who know naught of Iero or his holy writs. He said the angels themselves, sent forth to journey among men, would know of this place, and might find their way here in their need.”

I couldn’t imagine the warring princes honoring so magnanimous a legend. But it sounded very nice. Far better than any number of places Boreas could have abandoned me.

“Holy ground this might be,” I said, “but alas, no one will ever mistake me for an angel. Your wise abbot can tell you.” Which left open the question Gildas had brought to the fore. Why would a perceptive holy man admit a stranger to his household so readily? Were his stores so plentiful he could afford to take on any vagabond who happened by? Serena Fortuna had ever been kind, but sensible caution had kept me free.

A blast of wind rattled the horn windows, ruffling the parchment and plants on Robierre’s worktable and setting his hanging herb bundles swaying. The spring auguries taken by Prince Perryn’s pureblood diviners predicted the coming winter would be the worst in living memory. Of course, a blind birdwit could predict that did he but bare his skin to the wind these past days. And the Reaper’s Moon had not yet shone.

I scooted a little deeper in the bed. The more I considered a house full of kindly fellows given to charity and good cooking, the better it sounded as a winter haven, prayers and bells notwithstanding. If I’d imagined it so easy to join up with a Karish brotherhood, I might have done so years ago. Best keep the path smooth.

“So, Jullian, clearly you are not some villein boy sent here to be a mere kitchen drudge forever…but schooled. An aspirant…preparing to take vows yourself when you’re old enough. Perchance…being a scholarly boy…of course, you can read?”

He sat up proudly. “Both Navron and Aurellian, though my Aurellian is not so fine. I read it as well as any in the abbey, but to think out the words to write a new text and set them together with proper variants is very hard. Not that my writing hand is ill. Abbot Luviar says I could scribe for the saint at heaven’s gate. He’s even allowed me to help in the scriptorium. Not to write, of course, not yet, but to clean the pens and brushes, help mix the inks, and even to rule and prick the pages. With so many books to copy, and new ones coming every month, everyone must help. And I try to read them all. The learning is a wonder.” The boy’s expression shifted as easily as light in an aspen glade.

“Well then, there is one boon you could grant me.”

“Anything.”

“My illness clouds my eyes, so that reading makes my head ache and all the letters swim together. Yet I must commit this scroll of your Rule to memory before Brother Gildas tests me, else I’ll be thrown out of Gillarine ten days hence to languish again among wolves and sinners to the peril of my soul. So if you could aid me…”

One might have thought I had asked Jullian to polish my heavenly crown. He carefully untied the ribbon that bound the scroll and proceeded to recount the fifteen laws of Saint Ophir’s Rule. Among the expected admonitions to abjure fornication, gambling, excessive drink, and the lures of worldly wealth, to forgo the practices and use of magic and other earthbound power, to pray the holy Hours and give absolute obedience to the commands of prior, abbot, and hierarch, lay the small requirements that declared a novice must be a free man of sound body and legitimate birth and be schooled so far as to read and do simple sums.

“Am I reading too fast, sir?”

“No, no,” I said, swallowing a curse. “I’m just fixing the holy words in my head.”

Of necessity, my memory had developed exceedingly keen. The balance of the world had never seemed fair to me—that reading was placed so high in the scheme of virtue while the skill to remember what others read or to make some use of it languished far below.

When he had finished the scroll, he picked up the psalter. “I could read you a psalm, to soothe your tormented humors.”

“Truly my head is so weighted down with words, it will not lift from my pillow. My tormented humors must get along as best they can.”

He thumbed through the book, paused for a moment, then slapped it down on the stool and snatched his hand away as if it had scorched his fingers. “This is Horach’s book.”

His anxiety surprised me. Karish held no squeamish notions about unquiet ghosts. “I’ve heard the fellow has no further need of it. You don’t think his spirit minds me using it?”

“It’s just…whenever I fetch water from the font, I can’t help but see…” He averted his face.

“See what?” I dragged his chin around again. “Come on, lad. Get it out. It’s not healthy to bottle up a story that turns your face the color of sour milk. And you’ve set up a keening curiosity that needs relieving, else my humors will be more tormented yet.”

“He was murdered,” said the boy in a solemn whisper. “Not a twelveday since, I found him in Saint Gillare’s shrine…in the font. Someone slashed his skin to threads and left him bound in the water until he bled out every drop in his veins. Brother Robierre said they had pricked his throat so he couldn’t scream.”

Spiders’ feet tickled my spine, and I felt an uncommon urge to ward my soul against Magrog’s incursions. I touched the book gingerly—not that I could have said what I was expecting. “Who did such a thing? Not a monk…surely!”

“Certainly not!” the boy sputtered indignantly. “Father Abbot questioned every one of us under pain of hell’s fire. He even sent to Pontia, and the magistrate brought his pureblood investigator. After three days here, examining us and the abbey grounds and questioning every villager within ten quellae, the sorcerer could say only that a nonbeliever had walked the cloisters. The magistrate said the killer must have borne some tormented grievance against Karish folk and sneaked into the abbey in the night to act it out.”

“Such a killing seems more than random grievance. Likely this Horach had made some enemy in his life—before taking vows, of course.”

Jullian shook his head vigorously. “Brother Horach was but sixteen, newly vowed, and had lived here since he was five—an aspirant like Gerard and me. Gerard hasn’t slept properly since, and he’ll not go into the shrine except in company.” The boy sat up proudly and straightened the water flask he’d brought me, as if to demonstrate he’d conquered such fears himself.

I nodded in sympathy, but could not shake my disturbance. Common disputes among those who lived in close quarters rarely caused such savagery. And a boy of sixteen…Ugly.

To make sure murder was no disease festering in these halls—like mold or pox that clings to old stone—I asked the boy to tell me more of the abbey and its works, and he was soon chattering cheerfully about the scriptorium and library, sheep and barley, and thirty-three holy monks and twenty lay brothers who were all that were left to occupy an abbey built for five times that number.

Before very long Brother Robierre blustered through the infirmary door with a mournful monk named Brother Cadeus, who needed a decoction of rose bark to bathe his filmy eyes. Cadeus, as it happened, was the abbey porter, who sat at the gatehouse in the daylight hours, dispensing alms and regulating entry to the inner and outer courts of the abbey. While Cadeus shared news brought by a starving mason in search of work—of a Harrower riot that left half the city of Montesard in ashes and of a new outbreak of murrain in a sheepfold near Avenus—piebald Brother Anselm arrived with a vat of mutton broth. They propped me up on pillows so I could feed myself.

“This world’s in a proper hellish season,” I said when Cadeus finished his news. I regaled them with tales I’d heard the previous winter—of Ardrans frozen in their beds, of ice rivers consuming Evanori villages in a day, of Moriangi chopping frozen fish from the rivers and eating them raw as the wood was too cold to burn. “…and then in spring I dragged myself half starved down to the Cumbran vale, hoping to hire on for planting, only to wonder at the evil-smelling cloud hung down in the vale. Turns out the crofters had found their seed stock rotted in the bins, and their lord had burned every one of their women as Magrog’s whores…begging your forgiveness, good brothers, for the unseemly language.”

While Jullian drank in every word, eyes as wide as if my reports were hero tales of Grossartius the Revenant, Brother Robierre repeatedly made the sign of Iero’s sunburst on forehead and breast as if the Adversary himself sat on my shoulder. Brother Cadeus nodded as if he had expected nothing else. “The roads are fraught with sorrow. Iero punishes humankind’s sinful ways.”

“Of course, sorrowful roads can lead to interesting places,” I said, swallowing another savory bite. “When the late blizzard hit Cumbra, a shepherd took me in. The snow buried his hut until only a spelled candle he’d got from a witch gave us light. We ate naught but milk and cheese for seven days and taught his favorite goat to walk on her hind legs and play ball games with us. And he taught me twelve new stanzas of ‘Caedmon’s Lay’…”

My tales were not even the worst I’d seen or heard. For eight or ten years now, self-named prophets had roved the length and breadth of Navronne crying out that our spate of cold stormy summers and savage winters foreshadowed the end of the world. Magistrates flogged the doomsayers, which succeeded only in making more folk who spent their days in a frenzy trying to placate the gods. I’d seen a man walking the length of the kingdom naked. I’d seen a cadre of women throwing burnt sheep in the sea. Villeins dangled so many charms and amulets from their wives and children, the whole countryside jingled like a tinker’s wagon, and painted their lintels or their foreheads with mule droppings to stave off ill luck.

A man could say what he would of such activities—and I had scoffed at the general foolishness as much as any—but two years had gone since I’d tasted wine from Ardran grapes, though war had never touched the precious vineyards. The vines had now frozen three winters in a row, and folks said they would never recover. Perhaps the bowl of the sky had slipped askew as Sinduri astrologers claimed.

One thing was certain. With grain fields burnt by soldiers or afflicted with smut from the cold damp, with plants unable to thrive in the changing weather, and herds dead or sickly, famine would surely strike again before the new year. And I’d been perilously close to starving three winters running—which unhappy counterpoint with the delectable soup reminded me that I could likely tolerate a few monkish restrictions.

I’d certainly no wealth or earthbound power to give up. Gambling held no allure but for the coin it could provide. And so long a time had passed since I’d experienced the pleasures of excessive drink or fornication that they were easy to bargain away when tucked in a warm bed with a full stomach. Magic was another matter.

I lopped off that consideration faster than a farm wife could wring a chicken’s neck. Did I allow thoughts of my worst troubles to take hold, my life would shrink to a hard black knot exactly the shape of a nivat seed.

Once Cadeus had gone, Brother Badger held his hands under his black scapular and peered into my rapidly emptying bowl. “When you’ve sopped up the remainder of your supper—not long it would appear—it will be time to take a walk. A man with such an appetite as yours must, of necessity, be getting stronger.”

“But it’s only been—”

“—four days since I took out the fiendish bit of iron. I know. But you’ve wallowed in your blankets long enough. Damaged sinews need using or they’ll knot or wither. You’ll thank me.”

The infirmarian snatched away my empty bowl and dropped a short brown tunic on my lap. He watched as I eased it over my head and bandaged shoulder and relinquished my lovely blankets. The air felt dreadfully cold on my bare legs. Indeed, as he eased me to my feet, my excessive height left the skimpy tunic excessively short, exposing half my rump and privy parts to Brother Anselm’s open window. “You are the Adversary’s lackey, Robierre,” I mumbled, shivering.

Brother Robierre was a mere half head shorter than I, and built with the sturdy bulk of a smith. Even so he called on Brother Anselm to help propel me up and down the long infirmary. I clutched at their shoulders, scarcely touched my right foot to the ground, and moaned and gasped, only muting my groans when young Jullian looked ready to pound the infirmarian for his cruelty.

“To feel the wound is only to be expected,” said the good brother, inspecting my bandages when he at last allowed me to sit again. “See? No fresh blood or drainage.” Adding insult to insult, he then insisted I drain Jullian’s flask of water from the abbey’s spring, swearing that the holy font had been resanctified since Brother Horach’s gruesome death.

“You’re a proper villain, Brother,” I said, wincing as I rolled over and let them prop my leg up again. “I’m not thanking you as yet. This activity has surely stirred up the poisons in my blood. And this drink fit only for dogs and horses, tainted by ill-let blood, will compound them. I could die from it.”

“You’ll not die today, Valen.” Chuckling, Brother Badger tucked me in more gently than my mother had ever done. This was indeed a fine and friendly place.

Chapter 4

“I need to be gone now,” said Jullian, scrambling to his feet not long after the bells for the Hour of Compline—night prayers—fell silent. “I’ve duties.”

The door banged behind him. He had been regaling me with descriptions of the various monks, while the infirmarian and his assistant hied off to pray again. Though guileless as a newborn calf, the boy had a wit about him. I felt as if I knew the denizens of Gillarine already.

Left alone, I wormed my way down into the bedclothes, more tired than I ought to be from another day of sleeping and eating and taking Robierre’s enforced exercise. Before I could settle, a draft from the door set the rushlights wickering. Another visitor. Boots, this time, curiously enough. Quiet, measured steps.

“Yes, I’m awake,” I said over my shoulder, wishing I could lie facing the doorway at least. “And pleased for visitors.” The infirmary was beginning to feel more like a public marketplace than a house of healing.

“Good. I’ve no wish to overtax you.”

The quiet boots and low, pleasant voice belonged to a gaunt man soberly dressed in secular garb and a round-brimmed felt hat. As he came round the bed, he grabbed one of Robierre’s stools. Under his other arm, he carried my book of maps.

My welcome froze on my lips, and I set myself ready to muster a host of ailments if the conversation grew dangerous. Jullian’s talk of magistrates and pureblood investigators still had me twitching.

“My name is Gram Scriptor,” he said, inclining his back and extending his open palm in greeting as southerners do. “My employer is visiting Gillarine and got wind of this magnificent volume. He’s an educated man of wide-ranging interests and bids me learn what I can of it while we bide here that I might record the information in his journals. Abbot Luviar graciously permitted us to view the book and suggested I consult you with my questions, if you felt up to it.” Scriptor…a secretary, then, of unnotable family.

“I don’t know that I could tell you aught you cannot read from the book itself,” I said as he settled himself on the stool.

He was something near my own age, and not a bad-looking fellow, save for an unhealthy gray hue to his complexion. His close-trimmed black hair, beardless chin, and conservative attire—ash-gray cape over an unadorned knee-length tunic of dark gray—accentuated the hollows in his cheeks. His eyes sat deep, dark, I thought, though that could just be shadows from his hat.

“If nothing comes of my questions, so be it.” A grave, modest smile softened his severe appearance. “At the least I can report to my master that I did as he asked, which is often quite enough to satisfy him once the…mmm…storm of displeasure…is past. Just tell me if I press too much or if you tire.”

I had to be careful. To refuse this fellow might offend the abbot. And I’d not wish the abbot—or this man, whoever he was—to conclude I’d stolen the book after all. Likely I knew enough to satisfy a besieged secretary. “Ask what you will. I’ll do my best.”

“I’m ever grateful.” He scooted his stool closer to the bed, so we could view the book together. He leafed through several pages. “Of course I’ve seen common maps—a few scratched lines and place names and perhaps a landmark or two. But I’ve no experience of such fine maps—a sorcerer’s maps—and so great a variety of them. The written explanations in the book itself are confusing. I thought perhaps that the lord who’d given it to you might have explained what kinds of maps these are and how their magic works.”

Gram offered me the book, and I turned a few pages, opening to a leaf displaying four small maps of different kinds. I stared at the page—its lines and symbols evoking far too much of memory. On his random appearances at our house, my grandfather had forced me to sit with him and look at his book, whispering in my ear of its importance, of its perfection, of its cleverness and magic, and how I must learn to use it. His breath had smelled of cloves, onions, and black ale, his body of unwashed skin and horses despite his fine clothes. Disgust rippled through me alongside the recollection. Those sessions had lasted only as long as it took me to spit on his shirt and wriggle out of his grasp. But his lessons had always begun with this page.

“My—Mardane Lavorile told me that every variety of map is represented in this book,” I began. “Most, like this one, are fichés.” I pointed to the rigorous little rendering of roads, mountains, and rivers—very like the great maps stretched and mounted on the walls of my father’s library. “It is accurate in heading, scale, and proportion, so that a lesser distance on the map implies a lesser distance in truth. And the details are as precise as the cartographer can make them…”

The secretary listened intently, as I explained about keys and compass roses, and interpreted some of the symbols—for mountains, water features, towns and cities, shrines and temples, and the like. He asked me to clarify a few points, but otherwise did not interrupt.

“This map, on the other hand”—I indicated a fanciful colored drawing of a town with buildings and bridges and roads all mismatched in size—“is of the type known as a grousherre. The streets and structures are drawn with proper connections and relative positions, so that you can know which road leads to which, or which house stands beside which bridge. But the size and proportion of each object is determined by its importance not accurate measure.”

“That seems a strange way to make a map.” Gram pored over the drawing for a moment, his face drawn up in a puzzle. “Makes me think the maker was an odd sort of fellow.”

I grinned. “Exactly my own thought. I’ve never seen the purpose of them, save for making a page where the cartographer could show off and splash around all his colors of ink.”

“So what about these other two? This one looks to be a coastline, but I don’t understand the markings.” The little map detailed the fanlike outlets of one of Morian’s great rivers and the creneled inlets and channels on either side of it. Tiny numbers littered the expanse of land and sea.

“That’s a portolan,” I said. “A navigation map. The marks are winds and tides and notations for sailors’ instruments. I’ve no skill with ships to be able to tell you more than that. And this last is an example of a mappa mundi—a rendering of the wider world as if viewed from Iero’s heaven. You can always tell them by their oval shape.” My grandfather had included three mappa mundi that spanned two pages each. “The one in the very back of the book shows the trade routes to Aurellia and to Pyrrha, the land of volcanoes.”

“Now, what of the magic? I’ve heard tales of Janus de Cartamandua’s maps…”

“Well…” I bit my lower lip, a reminder I often used to watch my mouth. This visitor had set me too much at ease. “I know little of that. I used only a few of the maps, as the mardane needed.”

Supposedly, unlike those created by my father or my brother, Max, or any other cartographer in Navronne, my grandfather’s maps showed the earth’s most secret and holy places—magical pools, sacred groves, the earthly dwellings of spirits and angels, places that no traveler would ever “happen” upon. Places that could be found only by using these maps. So I had been told.

“But the abbot says you used the guide spells that unlock their power. I’m sorry to press. My master is”—he cleared his throat and ducked his head, his gray skin taking on a rosy cast—“excitable. So I beg your indulgence. Whatever you can tell me would be valuable. I’m afraid he’s going to ask me to copy one of these before we leave the abbey.”

Though I didn’t begrudge him the knowledge, I sincerely wished the fellow would stop asking questions. Yet he was gently spoken and seemed a mournful sort. And I knew well of excitable masters who asked the impossible.

“You see this oval banner on the larger map,” I said. “It’s called a cartouche. Look carefully and you’ll find the words of the guide spell scribed there, or if the map is too small to have a cartouche, you’ll find it buried in the border decorations. But copying won’t give you any use of it. The mardane told me that the cartographer’s magic is in the rendering, not just the words and symbols.”

“Ah.” He sat up straight and sighed. “Well, that’s good news for me, if my lord will believe it. So how would you invoke the spell?”

“Speak the words of the spell while tracing your finger along your desired route. With the aid of the spell and a bit of common wisdom, your mind and senses will tell you when you stray from the path. It’s useful enough.” So I had been told. Endlessly.

“And that’s all?”

I sagged back onto my pillows. “If a fellow like me can do it, I’ve no doubt anyone can.”

Gram smiled again as he closed the book and stood to go. “I think you speak yourself an injury, sir. Your explanations were very clear, and you’ve surely a good head for maps and scouting. Someday perhaps I can return this favor.”

I appreciated his effort to be kind. Old resentments about family and books and written words could not but taint my answers. He had no way to know that maps were of no use to me. “Your employer…he would like to own such a book as this?”

“In truth, not. He gives all his books to Gillarine.” Gram cocked his head to one side, curiosity blossomed like a daylily at dawn. “But I thought you were taking vows. Don’t initiates give—?”

“Yes, yes, I am,” I said, gathering my wits. “But I wasn’t sure what to do with the book…or whether the abbot would actually want such a valuable one when the price of it could do so much in the way of almsgiving.”

Gram nodded and held out his palm again. “Abbot Luviar is very wise. He’ll guide you rightly. Heal well, friend, and thank you.”

Once he’d gone, I longed for some other visitor to break the evening’s quiet. Not right that such a gentlemanly fellow should lance old boils and leave me to suffer the stink.

No one came.

Rain entirely inappropriate to Ardra’s driest season drummed on the roof all night, slowing only when the blackness beyond the horned window yielded to gray. I slept fitfully, seeing far too much of both night and dawn. Daylight brought Brother Gildas.

Brother Robierre waved a wooden mallet he used for crushing seeds and pods, as he talked over my head with the dark-browed Gildas. “Ignore his complaining. Any man who can talk and eat as he does is fit enough to take wherever you will for an hour. Keep him moving, and send for me only if he collapses altogether.”

“Am I to have no say in this?” I said, spitting out the detritus of hulls and stems that showered from his implement. “My leg—”

“You have applied to take vows, including strict obedience bound by punishments both in this life and the next. If you insist on ‘having your say,’ perhaps you’d best reconsider your future.” Brother Gildas held up a white wool shirt he’d pulled from a black and white bundle in my lap.

“He’s not broken his fast as yet this morning,” said the infirmarian. He retreated to his worktable, where he dumped a bag of dried seedpods into a large wooden bowl and attacked them with his mallet as if they were a nest of Iero’s detractors. “Never saw a man relish our victuals as he does. Point him toward the kitchen, and he’ll keep apace.”

Shivering in the cold damp, I thrust my head and bare arms into the thick shirt. “There’s more folk eating bark soup than mutton broth of late, Brothers,” I mumbled. “Must I go barefoot?”

“Wear your own boots today. You’ll receive your cowl and sandals on the day you take your novice vows, which we do sincerely hope will be your choice.” Brother Gildas smiled as if to soften the sting of his earlier rebuke, while I fumbled with clean white woolen trews and black knee-length hose. When my tight shoulder bandage hampered me, he knelt by the bed like a trained manservant, smoothly tugging the stiff, heavy boots onto my big feet, tucking in the hose, and tightening the laces up my legs.

“Up now,” he said, rising and offering me his hand. “Don your gown. Then we’ll go walking to stretch your limbs, I’ll ask you a few questions for Father Abbot, and we’ll find sustenance before you wither.”

Ah, the questioning. No one had come to the infirmary on the previous day to test my knowledge of Saint Ophir’s Rule. Jullian, who had taken it upon himself to visit me at least three times a day, had reported that Brother Sebastian had not yet returned from Pontia, and Brother Gildas had been closeted with the abbot and “visiting abbey benefactors” all day “except when they went to see the progress on the lighthouse.” The presence of a lighthouse here, at least six hundred quellae from Navronne’s northern seacoast, struck me as an oddity, even allowing for my usual morning dullness.

The prospect of interrogation damped my already soggy spirits. Awkwardly I wrestled the common black wool gown over my head, not at all sure I could bring myself to take vows here—even for a season. Rules and restrictions and righteous preaching curdled my stomach like vinegar in milk. If I could find a buyer for the book of maps, then perhaps I could find a less restrictive haven, perhaps a lornly widow who needed pleasuring.

The heavy garment enveloped me from neck to ankles, an unlikely happenstance as I had never failed to be the tallest man in any gathering since I had reached my full height at nineteen. But even more extraordinary was the sense of safety that enfolded me with the thick black wool, the same as that worn by every other monk throughout Navronne. Sweet, blessed anonymity.

Most ordinaries viewed pureblood life as god blessed and couldn’t imagine why any of us would choose to forgo it. They didn’t understand about contracts and protocols, submission rules and breeding laws, all the things that had made me feel as if someone had bound me head to toe with silken cord and locked me blind and deaf in a coffin.

Under the oversight of the Pureblood Registry, pureblood families contracted out their magical services for a great deal of money. As Navronne’s nobles, magistrates, and clergy profited handsomely from the magic of our undiluted Aurellian blood, these parties had devised an inviolable compact a century ago, requiring every knight, magistrate, reeve, and sheriff to enforce the Registry’s rules. Not even a Karish abbot would dare disobey the fugitive laws. Harboring a common fugitive—a thief or a deserter—past his fourteen days of sanctuary would cost Abbot Luviar disgrace and ten years’ income—everything his abbey collected or produced—meaning ten years’ groveling to the local magistrates to return enough to allow the brothers to eat. But if the abbot was judged to have knowingly hidden a pureblood renegade—a recondeur—those magistrates would burn his abbey and his fields, and then they would hang him.

So they just couldn’t know. A recondeur with any sense learned quickly to keep his head down, his lies consistent, his past private, and his appearance unremarkable. I smoothed my warm, unremarkable wool layers and felt a grin split my face.

After fumbling briefly in the folds of his own gown, Brother Gildas pressed an alder walking stick into my hand. “A gift from Brother Horatio, our carpenter. Welcome to our brotherhood.”

He slipped his shoulder under my right arm, and we stepped through the infirmary door into a chill, watery daylight. The infirmary sat off by itself, separated from the abbey proper by a patch of wet grass and a soggy herb garden. Far across the sea of gray slate roofs and the warm yellow stone of sturdy walls, the vaults of the abbey church soared heavenward.

“We’ll visit the cloister garth first,” said Gildas, pointing toward the grander structures beyond the infirmary garden. “The abbey’s heart.”

A flagstone path led us across a rock-lined channel that funneled water under the infirmary and past a squat wooden structure with two massive stone chimneys. Its jumbled wood stacks and the heaven-blessed scent of hot bread proclaimed it a bakehouse.

The place seemed inordinately quiet. Water dripped from roofs and gutters. A fat, cold splatter on my head made me even more grateful for my wool layers. In his unending quest for cleanliness, Brother Anselm had bade me shave my face and trim my tangled hair the previous day.

Once we passed the bakehouse, the infirmary no longer blocked our view to the south. I shook loose of Gildas’s arm for a moment and stopped to savor the spectacle. Mists and smokes and occasional pools of pale sunlight drifted over the green, steep-sided valley and the river, a flat band of silver that looped around the abbey precincts. Beyond the sheen of the river, a field of barley rippled gently in the soft rain, as healthy a crop as I’d seen in five years. My throat tightened at the beauty of it, and my eyes filled with more than raindrops, which left me feeling a proper weakling fool. Since I’d left the nursery, I’d never wept but when I was drunk.

“I’m assuming you’ve seen grain fields, tanneries, mills, and sheep, all those things we’d find in the outer courts and south of the river—the River Kay, this is. If Father Abbot judges your calling that of a lay brother—suitable for manual labor, rather than the more challenging studies of a choir monk—you’ll live out your days in those surrounds.”

Ranks and privileges—even in a brotherhood. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Gildas offered me his shoulder again, but I shook my head and hobbled along beside him.

As we rounded the corner of the garden, the monk walked faster as if to keep up with his thoughts. “The true peace of the monastic life is found in prayer and contemplation, study and scholarship. We don’t allow speech in the cloisters, library, or scriptorium, but sign to each other for necessary communication.”

“Peace will be welcome,” I said, working to keep up with his brisk pace. “There’s little enough to be had in this world, and talking never seems to improve matters. Though truly, telling stories of an evening or singing chorus to a bard are fine pleasures…holy gifts…as well. I’ll wager you brothers come from everywhere and have much to share in that way—after all your studying and contemplating, of course.” Surely they talked of something besides gods and holy writs. Surely they talked. All this broody silence seemed unnatural.

“Within the framework of our discipline, certainly we converse—some of us more, some less. Brother Infirmarian says you’ve traveled all over Navronne and are overflowing with curious tales. I’d like to hear of your experiences.”

“No denying I’ve had restless feet…” My mind sorted through my spotted history like a washwoman picking through soiled and ragged linen. Sadly, I found little fit for display. Gildas wouldn’t be looking for adventures and oddments like those Jullian teased out of me on his daily visits. “I followed King Eodward all the way to the Caurean shores. After he died, I hired out on the docks in Trimori for a while, but the Caurean storms frosted my bones worse than Ardran winter. I think the Adversary’s domain is surely ice, Brother Gildas. Not fire at all. Is that false doctrine? The holy writs say the wicked will burn, and I’ve found that cold burns worse than fire.”

“I’ve not heard that point argued,” he said. Though he knit his solid brow, his face was not so sober. “Perhaps Brother Sebastian will pursue the question in your studies. Go on. Tell me more.”

“Well, I moved on to Savil and apprenticed to a tanner—honest work, but the stink is poison to a tender stomach such as mine…”

At the far end of the walk a plain rectangular building stretched off to our left. On the littered muddy ground behind it, three lay brothers, their gray scapulars tucked up in their belts, wrestled the trunk of a sturdy oak from a donkey dray. Another of the brethren was shifting a pile of new-split logs to the wood stores stacked neatly in the building’s undercroft.

“The lay brothers’ reach,” Brother Gildas said, nodding to the busy fellows when I paused in my babbling. “Their sleeping quarters and refectory, and the food, oil, wool, and wood stores for the abbey. So did you stay in Morian?”

I moved on carefully. “Nay. After the winter in Avenus, cutting stone in the quarries, I heard the call to labor on the hierarch’s new cathedral in Palinur. A fine thing to build for Iero’s own house…”

…and excellent pay on a sacred project, intended to proclaim Iero and his Karish church as triumphant over the elder gods and their Sinduri council. I had worked in Palinur only one season, though. The labor had been grueling, the hours long, and the punishments for any lapse in workmanship severe. And indeed, the proximity to my family and the attendant risks of being identified had made the royal city unpalatable. Once I’d padded my purse enough to last a season more, I was off to try something new.

It was not fear of discovery made me move so often. Recondeurs were rare, and every one of them was recaptured within half a year, hauled up for public flogging or humiliation, and then vanished from sight and speech, save for horrified whisperings among pureblood families about “close confinement” and “unrestricted contracts.” Every sorry soul of them failed in rebellion because the fool could not forgo using the bent to soften the hardships of ordinary life: hunger, cold, hard work, uncertainty. The Registry would never search the places I lived, because they’d never imagine a pureblood forsaking his comforts for a life where he’d not know when he’d eat next. I had refused to learn much of spellworking as a child—as I had refused to learn much of anything they tried to pound into my head—so I’d little to give up.

As it was, I’d just never found any occupation worth the bother of staying in one place. Restless feet, just as I’d told Gildas. Incurably restless feet, in fact. A disease.

The path turned sharply back toward the river. We left it behind and angled right into a brick alley.

“Gillarine seems well constructed,” I said, seizing an excuse to divert the conversation from myself. “What building is this to have windows so many and so fine?”

“The monks’ refectory,” said Brother Gildas. “You’ll be happy to hear that novices get meat three times a week and half again the portions of the rest of us. We use all our wiles to lure the worldly into harmony with the god.”

As I picked my way across the uneven bricks of the pooled and puddled alley, I caught a merry glint beneath his sober brow. Cheerful humors can redeem even excessive piety. I liked him.

“Gillarine must truly lie on holy ground to produce such bounty,” I said. “The patroness of travelers led me here, no doubt of it.”

“We’ve exceptional soil and water here. The font in Saint Gillare’s shrine is said to be rooted in a holy spring.” All the monks and friars I’d ever met seemed to wear a secret pleasure beneath their holiness, like gamers who carry skewed dice up their sleeves. Gildas was no different.

The brick passage squeezed past a coal store and kitchen building and then widened as we approached a colonnaded walkway that extended right and left and all the way around the broad green garth beyond it. The walkway’s tiles had been laid in intricate coiled patterns like those on Aurellian urns and doorposts, with the trilliot, the three-petaled lily of Navronne, tucked into its loops here and there, alongside the golden sunbursts reminding us of the One God’s glory.

Gildas laid a finger on his lips. I had not actually noticed the bustle of kitchen and bakehouse, the whacks and grunts of the wood choppers, or the complaints of distant sheep as we walked from the infirmary…not until we stepped into the cloisters of Gillarine and all such common sounds dropped away. The place was so quiet, I could almost hear my own blood flowing.

We crossed the cloister walk and paused at the edge of a vast square of healthy green. The garth was bounded on four sides by the slender columns and graceful roof arches of the cloister walks, and dominated by the church’s vaulted roof and slender towers, directly across from us. To our left loomed the unadorned bulk of the lay brothers’ reach. On our right, a round-domed structure with lancet windows of colored glass and a number of other fine buildings with many windows crowded the cloister walk. And in the center of the garth stood a shrine, its interlocked arches of delicate stonework looking very like a large birdcage.

Few monks were abroad. One sat reading on a narrow bench enclosed on three sides, one of forty or fifty such carrels tucked under the cloister by the church. Another hooded brother halted and bowed before passing into the shrine beneath a stone lintel supported by two lithe stone angels who had somewhere lost their wings. He quickly reappeared, a copper ewer in his hand.

Gildas pointed toward the shrine and stepped onto the cobbled path that led across the grass. I dutifully followed…

Darkness engulfed me. I staggered sideways, limbs quivering, joints turned to jelly. Weak…sick…gasping…starved for air and sound, as well as light. Gods of mercy, what have I done that I should be struck blind? Guilt and horror, the surety of death and vengeance wrung my neck like a hangman’s noose, while remnants of old sins chased each other through my conscience like brightly colored birds, only to be swallowed in the blackness.

And then, as quickly as the night had fallen, all was consumed by light, as if the unsullied sun of summers past shot its beams straight into my eye sockets. As an avenging angel come down from heaven, the light swept away terror and in its place left a bright and sharp-edged tenderness that wrenched my heart. I cried out and stumbled backward.

A sharp crack on my skull brought the world—the green garth, the shrine, the cloister walk, the dull morning light—into focus again. I gulped air into my starved lungs. A cherubic rump protruded from the low arch where I had whacked my head. I spat on my middle finger, slapped the little aingerou, and prayed its friendly spirit to protect me from collapsing or exploding. No battle wound or shock had ever afflicted me so precipitously.

Brother Gildas’s gaze flicked from my face, to the serene enclosure, to my hand that now gripped the carved sprite as if seeking only its structural support. I half expected his lip to curl and his mellow voice to denounce me immediately as a heathen blasphemer. But he merely gripped my waist securely and assisted me back into the alley, looking a bit puzzled.

“Perhaps we’ve overdone,” he said when we were outside the cloister bounds again. “And you with an unbroken fast. Can I help?”

The world was so bright. So sharp. I pressed my head to the cool stone of the refectory wall and drew a ragged breath. “A drink of something…ale…or wine…please.”

Anything to dull the glare that yet vibrated behind my eyes like a fresh knife wound, to soothe the ache that throbbed in my chest as if I had lost my last friend or heard the last song ever to be sung.

Gildas pried me from the wall and assisted me down the alley, through a wooden gate and a muddy herb garden, and into the steams and smokes of the abbey’s kitchen. Two lay brothers, half obscured behind hanging baskets and vermin safes, stood at two long tables, trimming or chopping vegetables—turnips, garlic, carrots, and leeks—while a wizened, stoop-shouldered monk worked alongside them, grinding herbs with mortar and pestle. A slight figure in a layman’s hooded cloak of brick red deposited a flat, covered basket on one of the tables and retreated toward a far door.

“Thank you, Squire Corin,” called a ruddy-faced, leather-pated monk who stirred an iron vat hung over the great central hearth. “We’ll hope poor Gram finds more appetite at supper. Brother Cellarer will send better wine for your master.”

“Jerome!” my companion called across the stone-floored vastness.

“What can I do for you, Brother Gildas?” said the ruddy-faced monk as he emptied a wooden bowl of chopped cabbage into his pot. With the efficiency of long practice, he set the cavernous bowl aside, snatched a long-handled spoon from a rack on the soot-blackened wall, and poked at the cabbage that sizzled and spattered in his pot.

“Have you a bit of something mild and sustaining for our newest aspirant?” said Gildas, steadying me as I sank onto a pine bench beside the door. “I fear I’ve overtaxed him on his first excursion from the infirmary.”

Brother Jerome spun around, his wooden spoon raised as if it were a hierarch’s crozier, ready to assert his holy authority in this domain. “The supplicant who brought the Cartamandua maps?”

The whole world seemed to stop and stare just then, even the departing layman, who paused in the half-open doorway across the room and lifted his red hood slightly as if to see me better.

“Aye, the same. Still recovering from his injuries and unfed this day. My misjudgment.” Gildas returned his sober scrutiny to me. “And I beg forgiveness for that,” he said quietly. “Unworthy of me to assume…uh…that your strength was greater than you showed.”

I waved off his concern. My leg and back had contributed naught to my weakness that I could judge. Yet if I told Gildas what I had experienced, surely nothing good would come of it. The monks would call it a sign of Iero’s displeasure, pile on penances or rituals to reform me, and likely send me away. If some god or spirit or magical being did live within that garth, it must—

The likely truth stung my skull like a pebble from a sling. The shrine…the font…the murdered Brother Horach! Some people said that spirits loosed in savage torment would linger in the place of death, become revenants. Had I somehow invoked his wrath…or his benevolence? The contrary nature of the encounter left it open to myriad interpretations.

The world moved on again. The monks were back to chopping and grinding. The beardless servant vanished through the door. Forgoing fruitless speculation, I breathed deep, pleased to smell the garlic and to feel the steam that hissed from the wilted cabbage as Brother Jerome tossed aside his spoon and emptied a crock of liquid into his pot.

Brother Gildas filled a wooden cup from a nearby barrel. I drained it before his hand had moved away. Lovely ale, new made, not old. “Iero’s grace,” I said, and he brought me another.

“I’ve a barley loaf and syfling cheese will suit a fragile constitution,” said Brother Jerome, once he had tamed his soup. Thick gray hair fringed his leathery tonsure. He rummaged briskly in the flat basket and extracted a wrapped bundle and a small crock. “Sent back from the guesthouse untouched. Father Prior says Lord Stearc’s secretary Gram is a sickly sort and I thought to bolster him, but all the fellow took this morning was Robierre’s strengthening tea.”

Ah, Gram—the mournful fellow who’d consulted me about the maps. He’d had an unhealthy cast to his skin. A lord’s secretary.

The loaf was chewy where it should be and tender everywhere else, and the soft cheese tasted of almonds. Unflinching, I ate every morsel of both and buried my disturbance in the homely comforts of a well-run kitchen. Jerome and his minions, as with all who worked in kitchens and brew-houses, wielded power I understood.

Brother Gildas and I bade the kitchen staff farewell and trudged slowly past the lay brother’s reach in a light rain. I felt almost myself again. Likely Brother Gildas’s estimate of my collapse had been right, naught but hunger and healing. I’d had little experience of common sickness.

“Gillarine seems a vastly holy place,” I said. Healthy grain, plump vegetables, untainted sheep, spirits in its garth…I doubted any house in Navronne could boast such bounty.

“Many in our brotherhood have found it so. I have discovered my own destiny here—against every expectation of my life.”

His words left an offer hanging in the air, something more generous than tavern friendships. More honest. I was gratified, and a bit astonished, at such trust. But if I probed deeper, he would rightly expect to do the same. And that could not happen. Of all the protections I had built over the years, the surest was to keep my secrets close.

Fumbling about for a new topic, I hobbled across a cart track that led from the lay brothers’ reach southward along the Kay. The view of the wide, shallow river and the mist-shrouded valley, bound by forested ridges and the high mountains far to the south, recalled Jullian’s odd tidbit. “Tell me, Brother, why would anyone be building a lighthouse so far from the sea?”

Even the broad River Yaronal that separated the kingdom from the brutish herdsmen to the east could be no nearer than two hundred fifty quellae, and likely unnavigable at that nearest point. Indeed, I wasn’t certain people built lighthouses on rivers, much less in green vales like these.

My inquiry, posed in all innocence, halted Brother Gildas in midstride. “Who spoke to you of a lighthouse?”

One never reveals one’s sources when queried with such severity. “Mmm…I don’t recall. So many people come in and out of the infirmary.”

After a moment, he smiled and nudged me onward. “Well, of course, you haven’t yet seen the church windows on a day when the sun shines, else you’d grasp the reference. Come now, tell me more of Palinur.”

A nice recovery, but I didn’t believe him in the slightest.

As we crested a slight rise between the cart track and the infirmary garth, a cloaked horseman barreled up the track through the increasing drizzle, passing just behind us. He vanished in the cluster of buildings behind the lay brothers’ reach.

Brother Gildas halted again, glancing after the rider and then to the infirmary, squatting peacefully with its back to the river. “Can you make it the rest of the way on your own, Valen? The hour is Sext, and I’ve duties before prayers.”

“Certainly. The air has done me good. I was beginning to feel like a sheep in a pen, shut up in that infirmary.”

With an admonition to inform Brother Badger of my weakness at the cloister garth, Gildas hurried off, not in the straightest path to the church, but in the same direction as the rider, soon lost to sight as well. A departure as enigmatic as his excuse. No bells had rung for the holy Hour. This place seemed to nurture mysteries: lighthouses, savage murders, an intelligent abbot who welcomed vagabonds like me, and a spirit in the cloister garth who did not.

Monastery life moved slowly, so I understood. Though abbots might be required to heed the winds of politics, their flocks of holy brothers sat outside of the stream of time and events, wrapped up in scholarship that spanned centuries and prayer and contemplation that spanned the boundaries of earth and heaven. So why, of a sudden, did I feel as if I were being rushed down a dark alley by a gang of smiling jacklegs who would pick my pockets and plant a shiv in my spleen before dawn? I hobbled quickly toward the infirmary.

Chapter 5

Vesper bells clanged and hammered. The monks were gone to prayers again, the lingering draft from their departure my only company in the quiet infirmary. Robierre had left me a brimming posset, dosed with extra honey in apology for sending me out walking too strenuously.

In truth my leg felt better recovered from the day’s adventure than my spirit. I could not shake my thoughts free of the murdered monk. Had this Horach truly made himself known to me? Surely of all residents of this abbey, I knew the least that might ease a tormented soul. But a man left himself open to mortal peril did he ignore the demands of the dead.

My fingers traced the smooth curves of the turned wood mug. The bells fell silent. The monks would go to supper after prayers, which meant near two hours alone here with naught to think of but a youth left in agony to bleed, unable to cry for help.

Before I knew it, I’d thrown my damp gown over my dry shirt, pulled my boots over my bare feet, and retrieved my walking stick. Guided by the church towers and wafting smoke that smelled pleasantly of onion and garlic, I limped across the infirmary garth and through the puddled passage between the kitchen and refectory, retracing our path of the morning. Pigeons’ cooing and the fading echoes of plainsong accompanied me into the deserted cloisters. Thick clouds had stolen the early-evening light.

I shivered. Saint Gillare’s wingless angels gleamed pure white against the dusk. The chill air, heavy with moisture, clung to skin like mud and smelled of rich earth and green grass. To retreat felt stupid and cowardly, yet now I was here, I couldn’t steel myself to step wholly into the garth. My hand squeezed the smoothed knob of the walking stick. There were other ways to approach uncertain ground than just blundering in.

Though I had denied it for years, adamantly avoiding occupation as a scout or guide as if to prove that denial, I had inherited the familial bent for route finding and tracking. My Cartamandua bloodlines were well documented, of course, enshrined in the Registry in Palinur before my birth and witnessed on the day I took my first breath. I’d always felt like a prized cow, bred to supply Navronne with the cream of sorcery.

I wandered down the south cloister, past the kitchen wall and around the corner into the walk that fronted the lay brothers’ reach. Dared I release magic here? Whether I used it in formulated spellwork or to trigger my family bent, it would leave traces, detectable by a Registry inspector. Or perhaps an abbey sanctified to Iero, its Rule forbidding use of magic, might be warded to prevent spellcasting and give off noises or explosions if I breached its protections. Every instinct said not to risk it, but then again, my instincts were unused to the requests of unquiet spirits.

I tossed some of Robierre’s stock of bergamot onto the grass that young Horach might use it for the Ferryman’s tally, apologizing that I’d naught better to offer. Then, clutching my walking stick, I eased myself to kneeling. Crouched at the verge of the west cloister, some halfway down its length toward its meeting point with the church, I laid my palms on the cool wet grass, shaped my intent, and released just a spit of magic.

My limited experience of such trials led me to expect an image of the square to resolve itself in my mind: the grass and stones, the shrine, the bounding columns and walkways, the size, shape, and source of the font. Not a visual image, but more of an understanding of structure, composition, direction, and history, and if I was fortunate, a sense of what obstacles, spells, or spirits might lie here. But the sensations confounded all expectations.

The earth pulsed beneath my hands, warm and living, its lifeblood a deep-buried vein of silver, as plainly visible to my eye as the shrine itself. The memory of all who had walked here wove a pattern in the earth, each path sharp edged against the clarity of a long and reverent quiet. The understanding of the garth’s composition and direction existed, not as some separate image to be analyzed, but embedded in my flesh as plainly as the skill of walking or speaking. And even beyond these marvels, something more teased at my spirit…

I breathed deep and tried to quiet my trepidations, to open my senses and push deeper. Just on the edge of hearing, the sighing notes of a vielle quivered in the stillness, and a woman’s clear voice intoned a haunting, wordless melody that swelled my soul with wonder and grief. A memory…and yet a presence, too…if I could but sort out the music and its meaning—

The unseen bludgeon struck again. Saints and angels! I toppled backward, landing hard on my backside. As on my first encounter with this place, the blow slammed me square between my eyes. Dizzy and befuddled, I pressed my fingers to my forehead, sure I’d find a bruise swollen the size of a cat. But, though my wounded thigh complained loudly that it was twisted to the point of tearing Brother Badger’s stitches, both brow and temples seemed intact.

If Brother Horach wanted my attention, he had gotten it. But did he want me to see what lay here—something far older than a youthful monk—or was he the one who so forcibly forbade my intrusion? I rubbed my brow and tried vainly to recapture the moments before the blow: the warmth of the earth, the silver thread of an underground spring, the music—so beautiful, so dreadfully sad.

I had long speculated that Iero was just another name for Kemen Sky Lord, Creator of Earth and Heaven. But neither Kemen, nor Iero, nor any god or spirit had ever made himself known to me so forcefully. I didn’t like it. My hands trembled and my stomach shifted uneasily.

As I stumbled to my feet and untwisted my gown, a brief burst of plainsong from the church intoned the perficiimus that ended every Karish prayer and service. Someone threw open a side door that opened onto the east cloister walk, directly across the garth from me. The monks would soon be filing out on their way to the refectory. Unwilling…unable…to explain what I had just experienced, I hobbled quickly through an arched passageway that divided the undercrofts just behind me.

The sturdy simplicity of the clustered buildings behind the lay brothers’ reach implied design for use rather than devotion. Lingering scents of roasted barley, yeast, and sweetly rotting refuse named the rambling structure with arched doors a brewhouse. The tall, windowless building set on stubby stone piers was likely a granary, its floor raised to discourage vermin and damp. Twilight had already gathered in the warren of wood and stone, and a light drizzle fell from the heavy sky.

The sudden sounds of a slamming door and a horse’s whinny, just as I reached the corner of the brewhouse, flattened my back against the stone wall of the deserted alley. No question the evening’s events had set me on edge. Heart galloping, I peered around the corner. A small muddy yard fronted a well-built three-story house with a steep-pitched roof and many fine windows. Soft light from the upper windows and a single torch in a door bracket illumined three saddled horses tethered by the stoop.

A man in a brick-colored cloak darted down the steps and wrestled a leather satchel onto one of the saddles, buckling straps to hold it. But the horse sidestepped nervously, the fellow’s arms were too short, and the satchel slid back onto his shoulders, dragging off his red hood. Fine boned and fair, he was younger than I’d guessed from his height. A tight braid bound his thick bronze-colored hair.

Blundering into strangers’ urgent business violated my usual practice, so I did not step out to help. In moments, Brother Gildas appeared on the stoop, holding open the heavy door for two other men. These two descended the steps slowly, one supporting the other. The more robust of the pair, a big, hawk-faced man with a narrow beard and meaty shoulders, barked an order at the squire—for the red-cloaked youth was surely Squire Corin from the kitchen. The house must be Gillarine’s guest quarters, these strangers the abbey’s noble benefactors.

The squire yanked his strap tight and hurried around to help the others lift the weaker man into the saddle. The gaunt, dark-haired fellow, racked with coughing as he gripped the pommel, was none but the gentlemanly secretary Gram. The hawk-faced man’s cloak fell back as he shoved his charge into the saddle. The sleeves of a hauberk gleamed from under his holly-green surcoat, and his jewel-hilted great-sword sparkled in the torchlight. A warrior, then, as well as a lord—Gram’s “excitable” employer.

Horrid weather to ride out. The faint drizzle had become an insistent shower, pattering on the brewhouse roof and dribbling from the gutters and downspouts. To get back to my dry bed in the infirmary, I had either to return through the cloisters or cross this courtyard, inviting Brother Gildas’s perceptive examination. If they would all just go…

Relieved, I watched as Brother Gildas gave the squire a hand up to his mount and retreated to the sheltered stoop. The warrior swung his bulky body into the saddle, exposing a device on his surcoat.

I uttered a malediction—under my breath, so I thought, but the lord’s head jerked up and twisted in my direction. Snatching my head out of sight, I slammed my back to the wall. Water sluiced down my neck. My skin felt as if swarming with midges.

Once, when I was eleven or twelve and lay in my bed bleeding from an encounter with my father’s leather strap, my elder sister, Thalassa, had chosen to break her longstanding habit and be civil. She told me of obscuré spells—certain patterns created in the mind and infused with magic that could cause one to be overlooked. In my usual way I had spat at her, called her a vyrsté—a pureblood whose parents had not paid enough attention to breeding lines—and ignored her.

Not for the first time, I regretted that choice. Embroidered in silver thread on the lord’s holly-green linen was a howling wolf with a lily under its paw—the device of Evanore and its sovereign duc, Osriel the Bastard.

Lords of the night! Afflicted with a sudden case of the shivers and a raging desire to hide, I hobbled back down the alley and around a corner of the brewhouse, doing my best to keep my stick and my booted feet quiet. Behind me, a man issued a sharp command. In moments, the three horsemen rode right past me.

“Teneamus!” Brother Gildas’s call followed them through the alley.

One of the three called an answer, softly enough no one but his companions and I could possibly hear. “Teneamus!”

Once the riders had vanished into the rainy gloom, I exhaled and took out as fast as I could down the alley. Though the torch was extinguished, lamps yet shone from within the guesthouse, but I saw no sign of Brother Gildas. As I hobbled across the yard and down the cart track that led through the lay brothers’ workyard, inside my sleeves I splayed the three middle fingers of my left hand, and inside my head I recited three saints’ names three times each. Whyever would a man of Prince Osriel’s party be welcome at a Karish abbey?

Chilled to the marrow, I stripped to the skin before diving gratefully into my bed. By the time Brother Robierre and Brother Anselm returned from supper, bringing me leek soup and hot bread, I had managed to stop shivering. As the two men changed my dressings and fussed about their evening duties, I put my mind to an escape plan should I need to abandon the abbey in a hurry. I would winter in a cave before crossing paths with King Eodward’s crippled bastard.

I ought to have had some sympathy with the youngest of Eodward’s progeny or at least with his pureblood mother. Though not strictly a recondeur—she had not actually run away—Lirene de Armine-Visori had defied her family and the Registry’s breeding laws by mating outside the pureblood families, an unforgivable offense, no matter that her lover was a king. Lirene had died when the boy was quite young, and stories named the halfbreed Osriel, raised out of the public eye, twisted in both mind and body.

Veterans who had served in Prince Perryn’s ill-fated campaign to wrest Evanore’s gold mines from his bastard half brother displayed wicked burn scars from Osriel’s mage-fire arrows and told of comrades snatched in the night and returned without balls, tongues, or hands. They described plagues of nightmares that afflicted their encampments, and men and women found wandering the tangled forests naked and mindless, their privy parts blistered from forced breeding with gatzi—creatures from the netherworld, pledged to Magrog’s service. And they swore that on every battlefield near Evanore, what dead were left to lie through the night were missing their eyes on the next morning. Which seemed not such a dreadful thing in itself compared to being dead, save that most Navrons believed a man’s soul resided in his eyes. Without a soul, a man was left with no hope of an afterlife, for the Ferryman had naught to carry.

It’s a soldier’s wont to top the next man’s tale. For years, I took no more stock in the stories of Prince Osriel’s evils than in legends of angelic visitations or of the Danae whose dancing supposedly nurtured fields and forests. Gods knew battle left enough mutilated bodies for every demonic purpose. The pox from unclean whores was a scourge that could flay a man’s loins, and drinking raw spirits squeezed from agueroot could scour a mind to blankness for a week. Yet over the summer, as Prince Bayard’s march across Ardra drove us toward Evanore, one comrade and then another swore me to find him should he fall in battle, and to pierce his heart before nightfall to ensure he was well and truly dead before Osriel the Bastard came for him. Such stern belief cannot but wear upon a man’s mind and take on the likeness of truth.

When the lay brother Anselm had hurried off to bed and the choir monk Robierre to the church for another bout of praying, I prowled through the infirmary stores. Using scraps of twine and linen from Brother Robierre’s baskets, I wrapped up small amounts of his powders and herbs—anything he had in plenty that I might sell or need. I discovered an herb knife with a nicked blade shoved to the back of a shelf, and I took that, too, bundling it with the medicines in a rag and stuffing the bundle under my palliasse with the bits of cheese and bread I’d saved from every meal.

As I worked, a lesser puzzle nagged at me. Pureblood families flaunted their unbroken descent from the decadent Aurellians by speaking Aurellian and Navron interchangeably. It was a useless skill that only they and hidebound scholars set store by now Aurellia was reduced from a great empire to a walled city a thousand quellae distant. But such childhood training penetrates very deep. Even after twelve years away from pureblood society, I could not have said in which language I articulated my thoughts. Therefore, I could wonder at the Aurellian farewell that Brother Gildas had exchanged with the Evanori lord. Teneamus—we preserve.

The infirmary was dark, a single tall rushlight left burning. After returning from his prayers, the yawning infirmarian had retired gratefully to his own bed in the monks’ dorter, declaring me well enough to survive the night with only Iero’s angels to watch over me.

The weather had taken a turn for the worse. Sleet clicked on the roof and the stone path outside the open window, threatening to freeze and rot what scanty harvest might have ripened in the disastrously short, cold summer. A month or more remained till Saldon Night, and I ought to be basking in Ardra’s golden summer, pleasuring a milkmaid out of her chastity in a haystack instead of shivering in my bed.

Unnerved by the day’s events, I was infernally restless. When my breath became visible in the air, I dragged the blankets over my head, abandoning my toes to the cold draft left by the waning flames in the infirmary brazier. My wounds itched and throbbed, more annoying than sore. But deep in my gut sat a small tight knot, cold and quiet for the moment, the threads that linked it to every particle of my being slack.

A disease had gnawed at my gut since I was seven, probably longer if one assumed the rebellious temper and indiscipline that caused my parents to despair of me in the nursery were its first manifestations. Every day of my life I had lived with an unrelenting restlessness. On occasion it would worsen, exploding into a tormenting fire in the blood and a virulent overexcitement of the senses—everything I heard or smelled or looked on exaggerated until my body felt raw. By the time I was ten these attacks had become a regular occurrence, and as I got older, the symptoms grew worse and lasted for days at a time. Even soft candlelight would blind me, whispers set my nerves screaming, and any smell stronger than porridge leave me nauseated. The knot in my gut was ever the precursor of an attack.

I lay wide-eyed, sated with the days of sleep, wishing I had been able to convince Brother Robierre to give me poppy extract again. He hoarded it so carefully. Said their plants were not propagating well in the foul weather. That the abbey had any healthy plants at all was a wonder. Perhaps their god had powers enough to protect his holy place.

Matins came and went, allowing me to forget myself for a while in the beauteous surge of their singing—fifty-three strong male voices honoring their god. What deity could fail to manifest himself with such power at his beck? Yet in the ensuing silence, the warning in my belly grew more insistent, and hot, as if Brother Robierre had made another incision and implanted a burning coal inside me.

I slammed a fist into the thin pillow wadded under my head. This is far too early. It’s scarce been a fortnight. I buried my face in the pillow, unable to stop the calculation. We had abandoned the battle before its second day and spent two on the road, then I’d lain two days insensible in this infirmary, and four more recovering…and I’d last dealt with this a twelveday before the battle. Twenty-one days. Since I’d first chosen to control my disease with magic, I’d never felt its waking sooner than twenty-eight days. The problem, of course, was that the remedy had become its own disease, and I could no longer distinguish one from the other.

So think of something else. The wind whined in the cold and lonely blackness outside the infirmary walls. The blanket wool tickled my nose. Propped up on my elbow, I drained the last of the weak ale Brother Anselm had left me, and then threw the mug across the square red tiles. The clay vessel shattered. No rushes on the infirmary floor. No straw. Brother Anselm thought them unclean. I curled my arms over my head.

This is no battlefield with the stench of death all around. No whorehouse after the women have moved on to other customers. No stinking back street with rats and refuse your only company. Nor even is it that wretched house in Palinur where your existence was an offense to those who birthed you. You’re fed and warm and healing. You’ve friends here already. You don’t need this. Let the cursed sickness burn itself out.

But the coal took flame in my gut, its fiery wounding spreading rapidly into my chest and limbs, into my head, my eyes, my dry tongue. I shoved off the blankets and lay there naked and exposed, unbearably hot as I tried to breathe away the pain. The light seared my eyes. The rain drummed like thunder; the wind bellowed like maddened oxen.

Why had I thought of my parents? If ever the gods had played a wicked prank on human folk, it was on the day they quickened my father’s seed in my mother’s womb to produce me. From the distance of so many years, my parents’ hatred seemed wholly out of proportion to my misdeeds—at least in the years before I learned to detest them in equal measure and was old enough to demonstrate it.

A spasm contorted every sinew in my back, as if a giant played knotwork with my spine. Cascading cramps wrenched my shoulder, legs, and belly. Ignore them. You’ve been abed too long.

On a small painted chest near my bedside lay my torn shirt, stained padded jaque, ragged braies, and hose, neatly folded and stacked. The monks had cleaned or brushed them as I lay insensible, and set them alongside my rifled rucksack. They wouldn’t have examined the bag too carefully. Surely. I just needed to see.

I grabbed the rucksack, knocking the stack of clothes onto the floor. Every object I touched seared my skin as if it were iron new drawn from a forge. Jerking the scuffed leather bag onto my lap, I prayed that what I needed would be there. I turned the bag inside out and fumbled at the thick seam. Intact. Blessed be all gods. Now for a knife…

Holding on to the wall, the rucksack looped over my arm, I hobbled across the tiles to Robierre’s worktable. I dragged the stinking rushlight close only to find it on the verge of guttering death. Muttering epithets, I snatched another from the stack under the table, set the fresh one aflame from the stub, and clipped it in the iron holder. Then, seated on the brother’s stool, I used his well-honed herb knife to rip the long stitches that held the newer layer of leather to the bottom of the rucksack. Great Kemen Lord of the Sky, Mother Samele, Lord Iero and your angels or Danae or whomever you dispatch to watch over your children be thanked. The little green bag—the one Boreas had not found—fell into my trembling hand. And the craving swept through me as a fire sweeps across a parched grassland.

In the pool of smoky yellow light I set out the shard of mirror glass, the silver needle, and the white linen thread, and spilled the tiny black nivat seeds—all that was left of my emergency store—onto the table. The fragrance of spice, dust, and corruption burst from the nivat as I crushed the seeds with Robierre’s knife. I could not rush, could not afford to be careless, yet the first monk who saw what I was about would know me as a cursed twist-mind, Magrog’s slave, a gatzé’s whore, and boot me over the wall to languish in the darkness with the rest of the Adversary’s servants.

A prick of the needle freed three drops of blood from my finger to mix with the aromatic powder, the pain of the bloodletting as exquisitely shrill as a virgin’s scream. My sinews cramped and knotted. My hands shook. Sweat beaded my brow, my arms, my back. Soon…hold on… Perhaps my injuries had made the disease and the hunger for its remedy come upon me early and so dreadfully fast.

Holding one end of the thread between two fingers, I let the other end dangle into the reeking little mess, using the connection to channel every scrap of magic that lived in me into the patterned spell. Touching the mixture directly with my agonized flesh would sap the spell’s strength before it reached full potency—a hard lesson I’d learned when first experimenting with this particular remedy. The black paste heated and bubbled. In the enchanted mirror glass I watched the otherwise invisible vapors rise from the unholy brew. Waiting…

A mixed-blood alley witch named Salamonde had given me the glass fragment on my fourteenth birthday. The disease had seared my gut and lacerated my senses with such virulence that day, I’d felt the Ferryman’s breath on my neck. For the first and only time in my life, I had swallowed pride and hatred and begged my parents for help with my sickness. My mother, typically, retired to her bedchamber and drank herself senseless. My father tied me to his favorite grate and beat me until I pissed myself, insisting that my malady was naught but my vile nature festered in my soul. He said no remedy existed for it. And so, on that night, for the twentieth time that year, I broke the locks on my room and ran away. By the time they dragged me back home three days later, old Salamonde had introduced me to perversion.

The rushlight flickered. I squinted at the glass. One final wisp of vapor drifted upward, taking the last of the earthy scent. I scooped the dark droplets onto my finger and onto my tongue. The potent liquor spread quickly to my pain-racked extremities…the satisfaction of cool ale on a parched tongue…the scent of rain after drought…

Groaning, I snatched up my rucksack and bit down on the leather strap, for the tasteless paste that was my salvation would not instantly quench the fire. The perverse remedy had first to feed the torment. As did I.

I gripped Brother Badger’s grinding stone and slammed it, edge on, into my wounded thigh. Once. Again. Fiery agony swelled to monstrous proportion…devouring my organs, my limbs, my senses…threatening to completely unhinge my mind…until the moment body and spirit teetered on the verge of dissolution, and then…

O, elixir of heaven! Rapture! An explosion of exhilaration engulfed every sense, every limb, every part and particle of my flesh and spirit, transforming pain to pleasure as quickly and as absolutely as the ax of a skilled headsman transforms life to death…

…and then with the same abruptness, it was gone, the convulsion of sensation past. Fire quenched. Cramps dissipated. Throbbing wounds silenced. Every shred of my being quivered with release, the searing heat of my flesh yielding to languid warmth like the aftermath of carnal climax, lacking only joy or merriment. Not oblivion, but assurance that the world was right and ordered exactly as it should be. The rucksack dropped to the floor. My forehead rested on the scratched wood, my dulled mind fallow, my senses throbbing in gratification. The knot in my gut unraveled.

The spell was called the doulon. Legend claimed the nasty little enchantment was Magrog’s wedding gift to Nemelez when he took his human bride to the netherworld—to ease the pain of their coupling. And more than just the ignorant believed that every invocation of the doulon opened a door to Magrog’s kingdom and allowed a demon gatzé to crawl into the earthly plane. Such was no concern of mine.

Some of those enslaved to the doulon burnt or mutilated themselves before they succumbed, for the degree of pleasure in the release always matched the severity of the pain that preceded it. I had not fallen so far out of mind as to do that—not yet, at least. Nor did I use it for ordinary physical discomforts that I could anywise tolerate. I told myself that these practices delayed the inevitable consequence. Every doulon slave went mad eventually, trapped inside a ruined body whose perceptions of pain and pleasure were irretrievably tangled. Unfortunately, between the disease itself and the nivat hunger, the consequences of stopping were equally dreadful. Once in the year just past, I’d had to wait three days until I could get nivat, and I would throw myself off a cliff before doing so again.

Move, fool. Quickly, before losing all sense, I licked the thread clean and purified the needle in the rushlight flame, packed all away in the empty green bag, and stuffed it in the bottom of my rucksack. No time or means to sew the flap shut again.

The bent, the power for spellworking, was the only virtue of my pureblood birth I’d ever seen, and for good or ill, I had chosen to abandon the small magics I had learned as a boy and whatever greater uses I might develop as a man and spend it all on this. I hobbled away from the worktable and threw the rucksack onto the painted chest. Naked and shuddering, I crawled under the blankets and gave myself to dreams of pain and pleasure.

Chapter 6

Between supper and Compline, as the gray light filtering through the infirmary’s horn windows faded, I was alternately dozing and perusing the intricate little drawings attached to the margins and headings of my psalter. Though lacking the elaboration and gold leaf one would likely find in the abbey’s service books, the little codex had been created with the care always given holy books. Had Brother Horach himself inked the illustrations? The copyist had surely borne a fascination with the natural world, inserting energetic and sometimes fantastical representations of stags, foxes, and racing hounds alongside the angels and vines that graced the prayers and psalms. I speculated as to whether he had suited the beasts’ postures to the mood or sense of the prayer, which struck me as a clever idea.

Yawning, feeling lazy and dull-witted as always on the day after the doulon, I traced my fingertips over the letters as I had so often as a child. In those days, believing I might remedy my persistent failure to decipher the mystery of written words, I had allowed magic to roar from my body’s center into the confounding shapes on the page—scorching no few books in the endeavor. The fingers are the conduit of magic.

I no longer wasted my resources on that particular exercise. I had come to terms with my incapacity and managed well enough all these years. But if these holy brothers discovered my lack, they would surely pitch me over their lovely wall. That was damnably annoying.

I slammed the book shut and hunched deeper in the bed, warm and dry again after the previous day’s unsettling excursions. Jumbled thoughts of murdered monks and abbey benefactors who just happened to serve unsavory princes had plagued me all the boring day—or at least when I could avoid thinking of my empty nivat bag and the difficulty of refilling it. I had trained myself to set that worry aside for a few weeks between necessity, refusing to allow the disease or its unhealthy remedy to set the course of my life. The attack, a full week short of the usual and with so little warning, had profoundly unnerved me.

Under the more direct beams of the rushlight, Brother Anselm worried over his colored chart that detailed astrological influences on the body’s humors, certain he would find some correlation with my relapse in the cloister garth. Sooner or later the earnest fellow would approach the bed with his piss jar or his magnifying lens or his well-polished lancet, asking politely to examine my eyeballs or the underside of my tongue or to take some sample of my regenerating bodily fluids.

I was trying to decide whether to give in to sleep and thus keep good Anselm at bay, when a blast of cold air heralded Jullian’s appearance in the infirmary doorway. The boy was as pale as an Ardran milkmaid’s ass. “Brother Anselm, Brother Robierre summons you immediately with his medicine box and both litters. We’ve wounded soldiers at the gates!”

“Who?” I said, sitting up straight as Brother Anselm jumped from his stool and dragged litter poles from beneath the vacant beds.

“Ardrans. Fifty of them at the least. Or a hundred…bloody…torn to pieces…”

The boy’s peaked complexion and strangled declaration indicated that the evening’s events had already profoundly altered his understanding of the world. Exposure to ugly injuries such as mine was one thing, but four or five cadres’ worth of battle wounds would be far different. Angels preserve the boy from ever seeing the battlefield itself.

It had required many a tankard to dull the images of my own introduction to the soldiers’ mysteries. I had never subscribed to myths of noble purpose or personal glory in battle, but I had believed that shoving a spear into a twitching body busily shitting itself could make a man of me. I’d blundered through innumerable bloody days since, as much avoiding other fools’ spears and axes as wielding my own.

Brother Anselm wrapped the litter poles in their leather slings, dumped them into the boy’s outstretched arms, and threw a stack of linens atop the load. After tossing a few loose items from the shelves into a wooden chest, he slammed the lid, fastened the latch, and hefted it onto his shoulder. Before you could blink, only the chilly draft remained with me in the infirmary.

The laws of sanctuary and the sanctity of abbey walls seemed suddenly flimsy.

Two of the royal brothers, Perryn, Duc of Ardra, and Bayard, Duc of Morian, had maintained a deadly balance for three years. As no one had produced Eodward’s authentic writ stating elsewise, Bayard claimed the Navron throne by right and precedent as Eodward’s eldest son. But Eodward had granted Prince Perryn regency in Ardra—the ancient seat of Caedmon’s line—and Perryn insisted that this demonstrated Eodward’s intent to name him king over his poorly educated elder brother.

The third and youngest brother, Osriel the Bastard, regent of Evanore, had taken no active part in the three-year dispute save his grisly reaping on the battlefield. Some said Osriel cared naught for ruling on earth, but aimed to supplant the divine Magrog himself as lord of the netherworld. Others claimed he was waiting only for his brothers to weaken each other so he could sweep them both aside with an army of gatzi.

Only in the winter just past had stories of a fourth brother—this child Pretender—risen, and as sure as dead men stink, before the rumor could gather strength enough to create him a rival, Bayard had made a devil’s bargain that looked to win him the day. He had allied with the Harrowers.

The Harrowers denied both the elder gods and the Karish upstart Iero, claiming that Navrons had lost their proper fear of the true Powers who ruled the universe. Their priestess, Sila Diaglou, said that our cities and our plowing had defiled the land and that our false religions had caused us to forget these Powers that she called Gehoum, and that was why the weather had gone sour and the plagues and wars had risen.

For years people had laughed at a woman speaking out as if she were the divine prophet Karus come back again, set on changing the ways of the world. Yet, in the last years of Eodward’s reign, when pestilence and storms grew worse and the king could pay no mind to aught but Hansker raiders—Sila Diaglou’s direst predictions come true—folk began to listen and nod their heads. More and more wild-eyed rabble, dressed in rags and orange head scarves, heeded her call for burning and destruction to “harrow” the land and appease the Gehoum’s wrath. Scorned by priests and nobles, she had grown her ragtag band of lunatics into an army to rival those of Navronne’s princes.

Throughout the summer campaign, while Prince Perryn dithered and regrouped farther and farther south, claiming that no rabble could stand against his knights and legions, the Harrowers burnt villages and fields and left us nothing to eat and nothing to defend. And then Prince Bayard and Sila Diaglou had joined forces and swept us up like chaff from a threshing floor.

The abbey bells clanged in an urgent rhythm. Distant shouts, mysterious door bangings, and running footsteps from the infirmary courtyard accompanied the summons. The evening reeked of danger. Unable to lie still, I threw off my blankets and pulled on my wool shirt, trews, and hose.

A brown-clad body burst through the door and pelted down the long room to Brother Robierre’s shelves—the other young aspirant, Gerard, a soft, stammering boy of fourteen. He shoved bowls and basins aside, knocking half of them clattering to the floor. Then he whirled about, dark stains on his arms and in his eyes. “B-b-bonesaws. Where does he k-keep them? He said the far end…”

I was already on my feet, alder stick in hand. “In that great iron chest down below.”

By the time I joined him, the boy’s trembling fingers had scarcely got the lid open. Together we lifted out two trays of small, fine instruments—pincers, scalpels, probing tools of thin wire, and the like—laid out between sheets of leather. In the bottom of the chest lay a number of larger, linen-wrapped bundles. The boy dragged out cautery irons, mallets, and strangely shaped implements of unknown purpose. I’d seen enough use of such tools to recognize the wide blade and thin, squared handle of the bonesaw.

“There. That one. That’s likely what he wants. And you’d best take the larger iron as well.”

The boy looked up at me like a begging pup, raising a small key in his hand. “And p-p-poppy extract. He said you’d know where to find it.”

“I’d guess that every wounded man who comes here learns where the good infirmarian keeps Iero’s salvation…” I limped to the corner of the room where the roof truss lapped over the wall, forming a high shelf, and lifted down the heavy iron casket that likely only Brother Badger and I could reach. “…but he chooses not to leave it loose about to tempt boys or weak-minded malingerers like me. It will be a boon to those you’ve seen, as will the care the brothers give them.” Saints and angels, I didn’t want the boy to start weeping.

I wheedled the recalcitrant lock open and handed over the precious brown flask. “Anything else?”

The boy shook his head, wiped his nose on his sleeve, and trotted out the door.

I stowed the nicked herb knife and the pilfered herbs and medicines in my rucksack and tied the bag around my waist with a length of linen bandage. Then I pulled my jaque over my woolen shirt, wrestled my boots onto my feet and my damp monk’s gown over all.

Caution demanded I bolt. To strike out directly across the River Kay behind the infirmary would get me away from the abbey quickest. But the church would hold valuables—calyxes of gold or silver used for noblemen’s offerings, or the offerings themselves—rare oils, coins, gems perhaps, or other gifts from wealthy benefactors and pilgrims. I made Iero’s sign on breast and forehead, vowing to take only enough to pay for my book. Stealing from a god’s house was a risky practice.

Though twilight lingered in the outer airs, night had already settled in the confines of the inner courts. The wood-splitters’ yard was deserted, the wood stacked in the voluminous undercroft, splinters and flakes neatly raked and dropped in weatherworn tinder baskets. The ripe stench of a latrine overlaid the scents of brewhouse and granary. All very natural. Yet I peered over my shoulder fifty times in that short journey, and gripped my alder stick so fiercely I likely put dents in the smooth wood. The guesthouse sat dark. I breathed freely only after I hobbled into the maze of gardens and hedges before the church.

I paused amid the overgrown yews, wondering at the quiet. Perhaps circumstances were not so dire as the fears of naive boys implied. Only a fool would pillage a church and abandon such a comfortable sanctuary without ripe cause. So instead of bearing right into the church, I headed left toward the abbey gates.

Just inside the massive outer wall of the abbey and its twin-towered gatehouse lay the walled enclosure the brothers called the Alms Court. In this pleasant space of fountains and mosaics, where, on ordinary days, Brother Porter dealt with visitors, five dead bodies lay wrapped neatly in linen. A lay brother sponged blood and dirt from a sixth corpse, while a white-haired monk droned prayers over the dead man’s battered head. The mournful Porter, Brother Cadeus, filled a pail at a splashing fountain and dashed it over the paving stones as if to expunge the horror.

Save for these few and a trickle of monks hurrying through with blankets, soup crocks, or rolls of gray linen bandages, the courtyard was deserted. I had expected it to be overflowing with wounded.

“Could you take this, Brother?” An overburdened monk thrust an ale pitcher into my hand. Tucking the heavy pitcher in the crook of my arm, I joined the procession. The gate tunnel itself was quiet, the sharp click of my walking stick and uneven clomp of my heavy boots on the stone paving far louder than the shuffle and swish of passing sandals and cowls. The thick wooden gates halfway along the tunnel had been propped open.

Beyond the vaulted entry lay a scene worthy of the Adversary’s domain. The broad sky blazed with orange-edged clouds and swaths of gray and purple. Torches had been mounted on staves, illuminating, not a hundred, but surely sixty or seventy bloodied soldiers sprawled on the puddled apron of grass before the gatehouse. They didn’t look to be in any condition to cause much trouble for the monks. I had seen the ravages a defeated army could work upon a town or village. And these men were defeated. The wounded huddled quietly, suppressing moans and gasps of pain while mumbling prayers and curses. Other men sat silent, twitching at every noise, each man closed into himself, glaze-eyed with exhaustion and hunger.

Monks moved among the crowd like bees in a clover patch, offering prayers, ale, bread, blankets, and strips of linen men could use to bandage themselves until others could see to them. Fires sprang up here and there as the river damp rolled in with nightfall.

Close by the gate tunnel, an Ardran wearing a ripped tabard and cloak over hauberk and mail chausses fidgeted near a small group of monks. His bearing proclaimed him an officer, as did the sword at his waist and the riding crop in his hand.

The moment the group dispersed, leaving only one stocky, bald-pated brother standing by the gate, the officer pounced. “An hour we’ve waited, holy father,” he said, his tight-lipped sneer more honest than his address. “My lord asks again when the abbot will come and grant his right of sanctuary. Nor have my lord’s wounds been attended as yet.”

“All in good time,” said the monk, his shaven head and the silver solicale that dangled on his breast gleaming in the torchlight. “Abbot Luviar works in our farthest fields today. Though we’ve rung summoning bells, we’ve no horses to fetch him. Perhaps you can explain to me: I’ve granted sanctuary to all comers, but none have entered. They say their officers will not permit—”

“No cowards or gutterwipes will pass this gate before their lord,” said the officer through clenched teeth, “and he will not share a common blessing given by some underling friar. He will have his proper reception.”

“Naturally, protocol must be followed.” The monk spread his hands in helpless resignation. “I’ll encourage our infirmarian to attend your lord immediately.” One could not mistake a barb of indignation amid the proffered roses.

“See that you do, monk.” The officer nodded stiffly and retreated to a knot of men in the very center of the field—a cadre of knights, twelve lances sprouting from them like a stand of needlegrass.

What lord lay there with no horses or banners? Some landless edane, no doubt, who thought himself Iero’s chosen for surviving when mardanes, ducs, and princes lay dead or captive. None of the regular soldiers paid him any notice.

Nestled above the tunnel between the twin gate towers was the room where, as Saint Ophir had commanded, one member of the Gillarine fraternity remained ever alert for those in need of sanctuary—certainly to my own benefit. As I weighed the efforts of finding another haven, someone poked his head from the window and yelled, “Hark, Father Prior!”

The stocky monk craned his neck to see the caller. “Must you shout so loud, Brother Cosmos? Even underling friars must maintain our wits and decorum.” His politeness had shriveled like a currant.

“There are more men on the ridge, Father Prior. Coming this way.” Brother Cosmos damped his volume, but he could not mute the quaver of fear that accompanied his report.

“Riders or foot?” said the prior, squinting into the murky evening beyond the firelit field.

“I’m not certain. They seem to move too quickly for foot. Perhaps one with better eyes should take up the watch. If we could just move these men inside—”

The prior sighed deeply. “The soldiers cannot move without their officers’ orders, so we must await Father Abbot. The newcomers are likely more sad cases like these.”

“But—”

The stocky monk silenced the protest with a warning finger. “Age does not preclude punishment for disobedience, Cosmos. Stay at your post. As the saint taught, good order will carry us through all earthly trials.” He folded his arms and surveyed the field, dispatching the monks here and there as they bustled through the gates.

Perhaps innocent men were not primed to expect trouble when dealing with such ugliness as war. Or perhaps the prior was just a fool. I had soldiered on and off since I was seventeen and knew that unexpected company rarely brought any good. The monks needed to get these men behind the abbey walls.

If I were to avoid any ugly encounters, I needed to be on my way as well. But first I’d get a better sense of where these men had come from, lest I blunder into the war I had abandoned. Almost a fortnight had passed since Wroling Wood. Some other noble boil must have been lanced in recent days to spew commoners’ blood.

A woodcart rattled through the tunnel. I stuffed the pitcher and my alder stick into the bed, gripped the cart rim for a support, and moved into the field. Once we reached the center of the crowd, I extracted stick and pitcher and wandered off on my own, searching for someone who could tell me what I needed to know. I stayed cautious. Little chance any would know me. But if some of these had fought at Wroling, I’d not want it to get about that I’d arrived at Gillarine so much earlier than they.

“Brother, can you help me?” A scrawny man with one arm bound to his chest was trying to roll a bulky comrade onto his side. The pale, slab-sided soldier was retching and choking, half drowned in his own vomit. The heat of his fever could have baked bread.

“Iero’s grace,” I said, narrowly avoiding losing my own supper as the poor wretch heaved again, mostly bile and blood. I set my pitcher on the ground and helped prop the fellow on his side. A cold like deep-buried stone weighed my spirit as I touched him. The gore-soaked wad of rags bound to his belly oozed fresh blood.

“Where have you come from?” I said to the other man, snatching my hands away from his friend. “I’ve heard naught of this battle. Where was it fought?”

The scrawny soldier gaped as if I’d asked him to explain the thoughts of women or the intents of gods. “In the wood.”

“The woods close by here? West beyond the ridge? Or more northerly, near Elanus?”

“A fearful dark wood.” He could be no more than sixteen. “They kept coming at us. Knights. Halberdiers. And the mad ones…screaming like beasts and waving orange rags on their spears.” He shuddered and swallowed a little twisting noise. I’d heard that sound before. Felt it. The terror that sat inside your gut and kept trying to climb out. The fellow didn’t know any more. He’d likely never left his mother’s croft until he was dragged off and told to kill Moriangi.

“Have you a cup or bowl?” I said. “And one for your friend?”

I filled two crude wooden bowls from my ale pitcher. The youth took a grateful sip, and I left him trying to give the bulk of his own portion to his friend. He ought to have drunk both portions himself. The wounded man wouldn’t live past midnight. I’d known it when I touched him, known it with the certainty that always gave me the shudders—a hint of my mother’s bent, I’d always thought, that showed up at random through the years, never biddable, never revealing matters I could do anything about. Control of death and life were beyond any pureblood bent.

On the near side of the field, a blood-slathered Brother Robierre sawed away at a whimpering soldier’s thighbone. Young Gerard sat on the man’s good leg to help keep the poor sod still, his gawking taking in every gruesome detail. Jullian, pale as a mist-dimmed moon, held the glowing cautery iron in a fire they’d built a few steps away. I gave the wretched proceeding a wide berth.

“Iero’s grace.” I approached a hollow-cheeked veteran who sat off by himself at the edge of the field, tending his feet. “Tell me, good sir, how close by the abbey was this terrible engagement? And in which direction?”

“Not so close as to threaten holy folk like you. We fought Bayard the Smith himself at Wroling Wood. The whore priestess of the Harrowers rode beside him.”

“Wroling! But I thought—” I caught myself before blundering into any confession. “I’d heard rumor of a fight there, but days ago. You must have given Prince Bayard a noble struggle.”

He spat and continued blotting his peeling toes with a scrap of dry cloth, pulling off bits of straw he’d used to stuff his boots. “Pssht. Three days’ killing and what’s left of Ardran honor is scattered to the winds. Unless Kemen Sky Lord brings forth this Pretender, the Prince of Brutes will be king in a fortnight, for all the good it’ll do ’im. When the orange-heads finish burning Ardra, they’ll burn Morian, too.”

He was probably right. But I needed to understand his geography. “Here, if you’ve a cup, I can ease your thirst. For certain, you’ve had a long adventure to get here from Wroling. Perhaps you went the long way round and ran into another fight along the way?”

Looking up at last, he wrestled a tin cup from his belt. “Nay, good brother. We’d all be dead if we’d had to face aught since Wroling. If there’d been horses to commandeer, we could have nipped off to these fine walls in three days or less, despite our wounded. But even His Grace and his lordlings lost their mounts there at the end.”

“Prince Perryn unhorsed!” Who’d ever believe the cowardly princeling would get close enough to combat to lose his horse? “He’s captive, now, I suppose. Or dead.”

“Aye, one or the other. At least that’s kept the Smith off our backsides. With noble prey ripe for plucking, he needn’t bother chasing dregs like us. A few unchartered knights is all they’d have to show for taking this lot.”

“But your lord lies just over—” Unreasonably disturbed, I held the pitcher poised above his cup. “Prince Perryn…you didn’t see him taken, then?”

“Nah. But he’s likely squealing in Bayard’s dungeons by now. Pompous prickwit.” The soldier licked his lips and jerked his cup toward the pitcher.

When I’d heard of Prince Perryn’s foiled plot to burn Navronne’s fleet—our only defense against Hansker raiders—because his brother Bayard commanded the ships, I was done with the Ardran prince for good. Who of any mind could wish for either the Smith, the Pompous Prickwit, or Osriel the Bastard to wear good Eodward’s crown? I feared the tales of a fourth brother, a Pretender, were naught but wishing dreams, wrought to hold off a kingdom’s despair.

As I filled the soldier’s vessel, my mind toyed with his news. If Prince Bayard had captured his half brother, the throne was indeed likely his, no matter what Eodward’s lost writ of succession had to say. In Evanore Prince Osriel squatted on the richest treasure in the kingdom—veins of gold to satisfy an Aurellian emperor’s wildest dreams—but most people deemed his sparsely populated domain too small to mount a campaign for the throne.

Over the soldier’s head the forested folds of hill and vale were enveloped in gathering gloom. With Perryn taken, Bayard would never chase down sixty wounded men, a few knights, and a minor lord. But if the Duc of Ardra had slipped Bayard’s grasp, and some pureblood scout had detected royal blood on this rabble’s trail…Brother Cosmos had seen riders on the ridge.

I shoved the ale pitcher into the startled soldier’s hands. “Riders are coming from the west. Drink up, put on your boots, and set a watch. Remember, you’ve no sanctuary as long as you’re outside the abbey gates. If by some chance a certain unhorsed lord were hiding here among you, and if by some chance the Smith were to get wind of it from one of his pureblood lapdogs…”

The soldier stared at me for a moment, and then over his shoulder into the darkness flowing down from the forested ridge and pooling in the valley on every side. “Yo, Tobit, Gerrol!” he called, snatching up his boots.

I sped away as fast as I could hobble. No bed or board was worth involvement in the princes’ bloody argument. I’d had my fill of killing. My leg was not up to running, but I needed no stick to propel me across the field toward the river and the cart road south.

Did these monks understand what was going to happen here? Bayard, Duc of Morian, called the Smith for his crude and thuggish manner, would surely slaughter these men to take his rival and might violate the abbey itself. Sanctuary was only effective if the pursuers respected the concepts of mercy and salvation. And in such regards, I had no confidence in either Bayard the Smith or Sila Diaglou.

The stench of charred meat hung over the crowd of wounded surrounding the infirmarian and his assistant. Jullian and Gerard were wiping bloody implements with bloody rags and replacing them in Robierre’s wooden chest.

I ought to warn the brothers. Robierre and Anselm would likely not come away from the field. And truly, as I thought of it, I owed them no debt, as their service had naught to do with saving me, but with their own gifts and obligations. But the boys…I’d given my word to protect young Jullian, and I didn’t break my word.

I pushed through the listless press and crouched down behind the boys. “Father Prior bade me send the two of you into the church,” I said quietly.

Gerard gaped at me blankly, as if too horror-sated to make sense of common speech. Jullian, though, snapped his head around. “Valen! What are you doing out here? Your leg—”

“I’m carrying Father Prior’s commands. Everyone must help in such a desperate time, even such as me. Come now, leave your task for those more knowledgeable, and get you to the church. You’re needed for…” My mind juggled to come up with anything that sounded reasonable.

“But we were told to help Brother Infirmarian.”

The glassy puddles beside my feet shivered. Horses.

“Well, all that’s changed. You’re wanted in church…for the singing…as so many of the brothers are occupied and your voices and hearts are pure…and we will need Iero’s grace very much with what’s to come this night.”

In an instant, Jullian’s puzzled expression blossomed into the most profound awe. His voice dropped to a whisper. “The dark times…the long night…come so soon?” He glanced quickly at Gerard, who seemed to comprehend as little as I did of his meaning, and then back at me. Jullian jumped up, dragged the other boy to his feet, and gave him a shove. “Gerard, run for the church! Go! Begin the psalm for the end times!”

Gerard scooted away. Jullian crouched down again, whispering excitedly. “I wasn’t sure you knew. This afternoon, Brother Gildas reprimanded me for my loose tongue…I mean, I had heard them say that your book could be the key and surely the god had sent you here, and so I assumed you knew of the lighthouse. But for this night to come so soon…”

My teeth thrummed with the approaching hoofbeats. Cries of dismay broke out from several sides. “Jullian, I’ve no idea what you’re saying, but you must go into the church with Gerard and say whatever prayers you can think of. Don’t come out until Father Abbot himself tells you it’s safe. Do you understand?”

Face glowing with more than the ruddy torchlight, eyes pooled with determined innocence, the boy ducked his head and raised his hand. “I understand,” he said, and then added softly, so only I could hear, “Teneamus.”

Chapter 7

I stared after Jullian as he sprinted for the abbey gates. But only for a moment. Matters were deteriorating too rapidly. The first outriders thundered across the fields toward the abbey, swords raised, cloaks and pennons flying. The little cadre of bristling lances moved slowly from the center of the field toward the gatehouse—away from the coming assault, which did naught but affirm what I suspected about the lord they protected.

“Father Prior!” Abbot Luviar himself ran out of the gatehouse tunnel as I picked my way across the uneven ground along the wall away from the gates. “In the name of the Creator, Nemesio, why are they not within?”

“Their officers refused. Their lord insists on you—”

“Run, Nemesio! Get him inside now. By my command as your superior in Iero’s service, under pain of your immortal soul, get the lord’s party through the gate. Do you understand me? Brother Broun, Fescol…ring the bells!”

The prior dashed into the murmuring crowd. As the alarm rippled in from the perimeter, Abbot Luviar strode straight out through the stirring soldiers as well. “Rise up!” he cried, moving from one to another, the golden sunburst on his breast glinting in the torchlight. “You must stand one more time. Rise up and take arms. Support your comrades to stand as well. Navronne needs your strength. Your children and your children’s children need your courage. If good is to be made of your suffering, then these riders must not find you asleep.” He tugged on weary arms and laid his hand on bent heads. “You are the men of Ardra, Eodward’s men of light! Mighty Iero will lift your arms, if you but stand. This fight is bigger than you know. The stakes grander than all of us.”

I was astonished. One by one, men who but moments before were ghosts of warriors, drained of blood and spirit, grasped pikes or spears and rose to their feet, drawing their fellows up to stand beside them and face outward. None of them seemed to notice the knights retreating toward the abbey.

I wanted to call after Luviar, “The one you protect is not worthy of more lives; he betrays his men for pride and greed!”

But the abbot was out of my reach. Like a tight eddy in the current of the shaping battle, he spun and touched and cajoled. “Rise up and the archangels will join you with their swords and shields. This cause you serve must not die this day. Show Navronne the strength of your resolve!”

Indeed, the abbot’s voice carried across the sea of bloodied faces like an archangel’s clarion, almost enough to draw me back into the conflict I had abandoned. Not for the cowardly prince I believed lay hidden behind the screen of his lancers, not for golden Ardra or industrious Morian or mysterious, mountainous Evanore. Yet, perhaps, for good King Eodward who had lived with the angels and dreamed of Navronne, the Heart of the World…

Even as I considered grabbing a weapon from one of the men too weak to use it, I shook off the fey notion. I was not ready to die for anyone or anything. To enter a fight at less than full strength was an invitation to the Ferryman.

I climbed the gentle apron slope of the wall and angled away from the gatehouse, resigned to a long and miserable journey. The abbey walls would lead me back to the river. Somewhere the monks would have built a bridge to open the cross-river pastures for grazing. The thick damp of the night resolved into cold spatters on my face. Unvowed, I had no cowl to shield me from the rain.

“Valen!” The call startled me, and I glanced over my shoulder. A pale face lined by dark brows appeared out of the night behind me. “You should get yourself inside the walls immediately, Valen.”

Iero’s bones, where had the monk come from? “Ah, Brother Gildas,” I said, “perhaps you don’t recognize the perils of this night.”

My gait was slow and clumsy on the uneven ground. Gildas quickly caught up with me, grabbed my arm, and drew me to a halt. “This world is naught but perilous. Nothing is simple. Nothing is innocent. And sometimes, those who think themselves the most worldly are the most innocent of all.”

I snorted at the concept of this monk telling me anything of the world. “Sometimes a man must look to his body’s safety as well as his soul’s. Bayard of Morian is hunting his brother, and any man who gets in his way is a fool. Soon to be a dead fool. Though Abbot Luviar seems to disagree, I doubt Iero would have us throw our lives away for nothing.”

Purposeless death was not the only risk in staying. Bayard would surely have pureblood attendants. Any interrogation of Gillarine’s inhabitants could be my downfall. Time only increased the Registry’s determination to recover a recondeur.

I limped past Brother Gildas. He darted in front of me and gently, but insistently, blocked my way. “The god has given your safety into our hands, Valen. Please believe we take that very seriously. You must not leave.”

I wanted very much to believe him. The drizzle had yielded to a downpour. My thigh ached. I was already shivering and had no provisions. All that awaited me in the dark and the wet were pestilence, Moriangi swords, and a hungry winter. “But these riders—”

“—will not find the one they seek. I swear to you they’ll have no cause to broach our walls. The dangers of this night are outside Gillarine, not in. Come. Hurry. And have faith.”

His grip was much stronger than I expected. And perhaps his faith, too. For it was more than the weather and my poor prospects that crumbled my resolve so quickly. Since I’d first taken up soldiering, I had hated the last moments before battle, when it seemed as if the boundaries between earth and body, between past, present, and future, between knowing and experiencing dissolved. But something about this place…every moment I stood on this field multiplied those sensations beyond bearing. As a wind blustering my hair and robe, I felt the sweeping onslaught of the Moriangi. As the sea crashing upon my knees, I felt the surging Ardrans step up to meet them. A horse neighed wildly in the distance and a cheer went up among the Ardrans. My soul ached, and I longed for wine…for mead…for hard spirits or poppy…for the doulon…anything so I would not feel all this.

As the cold deluge soaked my hair and funneled down my neck, I resentfully allowed Gildas to turn me around. “Answer me one thing, Brother,” I said as the monk steadied my steps. “What would it mean if I were to bid you farewell with the Aurellian word meaning we preserve?”

Though Gildas did not miss a step, his arm suddenly felt like a post. Moments passed. “Well, of course, preservation of knowledge is our charter here at Gillarine. Many here use teneamus as a challenge when our spirits flag. A reminder of duty and service to the god. You never mentioned that you understood Aurellian, Valen. Most aspirants must learn it from the beginning. What other talents are you hiding?”

My spine froze. I should have known he would turn the question on me. Stupid tongue-flapping fool. Come on. A story… “I was schooled early…a Karish charity school near Ymir…took to the language. I’ve a gift with the pronunciations, I’m told, though not the writing of it.”

Mumbling curses at my slip and thanking the gods yet again that my curling hair, light complexion, and excess height were so exceptional for pureblood stock, I hobbled back along the wall toward the gatehouse. The sloping apron gave a wide vantage. More riders broached the hardening Ardran perimeter. Arms clashed. Men and horses screamed…

“They should not shed blood upon that field,” I said, shuddering. As the last rays of sunlight pierced the cloud and sculpted the surging sea of bodies with orange and scarlet, the very thought made my veins burn and my stomach heave as they had in the cloister garth. Holy ground, Jullian had called Gillarine. Perhaps that was what I felt.

“Shedding blood is a great evil,” said Gildas. “Yet some causes demand it. Blood spilled in violence has great power for good.”

“Some causes, perhaps.” But not this one. I hobbled faster. “King Eodward could not have meant his sons to bring Navronne to ruin.”

“So you’ve no loyalty to any of these princes.”

“Loyalty never put blood back in a man’s veins.”

We reached the gatehouse just as the party of knights entered the arch, moving like a many-legged insect, stepping smartly around dented shields, bloody rags and bundles, and a few sprawled bodies that even the abbot’s call had not roused. In the center of the lancers’ spiked circle, sheltered from the rain by a cloak held over his head, was a stumbling smudge of silver mail and white-and-purple satin, a tangle of fair hair that ladies called spun gold, a blur of maggot-colored skin, supported on the arms of servants. How like Perryn of Ardra to keep his men in danger while he awaited a triumphal welcome to his last refuge. And now, for the moment, they’d saved him. I’d wager my grandfather’s book that he was more drunk than wounded. The cost of the pelisse his knights held over his head could likely have paid for a month’s provisions for his legions or a troop of mercenaries to aid us.

“Brother Victor,” called Gildas to a diminutive monk who stood in the vaulted entry staring, aghast, at the battle. “Could you please escort Valen back to the infirmary? My duties beckon…” Gildas planted a brotherly slap on my arm and jogged ahead alongside the lancers.

As Gildas and Prince Perryn’s party vanished into the tunnel, the Ardran troops’ brief resistance collapsed into a rout. Night and death rode pillion behind the Moriangi horsemen, as their central wedge plunged inward to slice the Ardran force in twain.

Brother Victor, a tight little man whose features seemed on the verge of sliding off his chinless face, wrenched his eyes from the field, took my arm solicitously, and urged me into the gatehouse tunnel. “Brother Valen? Why, you’re the supplicant who brought us—”

“Yes, yes, the Cartamandua maps,” I said, straining to see over my shoulder. “And you’re welcome to view them at any time, if you’ll just hold up for a moment.”

Halfway along the tunnel, the great oaken gates yet gaped. I drew Brother Victor into the space between the leftmost gate and the wall, where I could peek around and see what was happening here. I dearly wanted to understand it.

The abbot stood at the outer end of the tunnel, outlined against the flares of torches and steel. “Here, brave men, hurry! By Iero’s grace, find safety here, thou who fleest sword or hangman. By Saint Gillare’s hand, find healing here…”

But the Moriangi had encircled the retreating Ardrans and quickly barred the tunnel opening with leveled lances. The snort and snuffles of agitated horses and the chinking of mail and arms could not drown out the shouts of anger and the lingering cries of the wounded.

Through the crush advanced a small party of riders, the foremost being a bull-necked man on a chestnut destrier. Both man and horse were cloaked and furbished in scarlet and blue—not the deep-dyed vermillion and indigo of Aurellian-style finery, but common madder and woad.

Bayard, Duc of Morian, called the Smith, relished his particular ancestry as dearly as any pureblood. He claimed that his Moriangi mother, daughter of a common shipwright, had reinvigorated Caedmon’s royal line with uncommon strength. He made a great show of abjuring silks and jewels in favor of coarse woolens and hammered bronze and believed it made him one with his people.

Perhaps. I’d met those who honored Bayard as Eodward’s eldest child, and thus, lacking evidence to the contrary, Eodward’s rightful heir. Even in the king’s lifetime, Bayard’s ruthless campaigns against the Hansker were revered by those who lived in the vulnerable riverlands. But I’d met neither man nor woman, common nor other, who professed to love the man.

“Who has passed here, priest?” Prince Bayard’s horse was at noses with the abbot. “I would know what men have sought your hospitality this night.”

“Your Grace.” The abbot inclined his head and spread his palms. “Alas, only the dead have entered our gates this night. I granted all these men holy sanctuary, but they chose to fight instead. How will Iero judge those of us in authority who fail to avert such horrors?”

Hypocrisy among the powerful, even the clergy, did not surprise me. But I was shocked at the abbot’s blatant lie, especially in the absolute sincerity of its delivery.

Prince Bayard, of course, was experienced with both lies and hypocrisy. “Prove to me that no one has passed. My men were certain they saw knights at your gate. Surely your holy brothers have not been hiding swords or lances in their trews.”

The squires in his party snickered.

The abbot ignored the crude jape and swept an arm in welcome. “Enter as you will, Your Grace, though I must insist you leave your weapons behind. Your noble father’s grant specified Gillarine as neutral ground.”

Was that it? Had the abbot and his prior kept the Ardran soldiers outside the walls apurpose so Luviar could maintain his claim of neutral ground and thus retain King Eodward’s grant of this fruitful valley? He’d had an Evanori nobleman ensconced in the abbey guesthouse. But then why hide Perryn?

“Interfering with the capture of a traitor is hardly neutral!” Prince Bayard snapped, voicing my own thought. “All your pious mouthings these past months, bidding me negotiate with this poltroon my father sired…Now your true loyalties are revealed. You’ve set yourself and your holy brothers square in the sapless dandy’s camp, and if you’ve sheltered him, I’ll take this house down stone by stone while you hang by your bowels and watch.” Bayard’s destrier snorted, blew, and sidestepped. The prince drew rein with a heavy hand.

“Iero bids us open our doors in peace to those who request it, and we ask no questions as to past sins or future plans.” The abbot yielded no ground, his every syllable precise and clear. “We would welcome either of your royal brothers here as we would welcome your own honored self or the lowliest of your warriors or even yon priestess, your ally, who denies king and god and human soul. I assert that no one has passed this gateway to my inner precincts save those of my own flock and the dead. Leave off your weapons and come see for yourself, or send one of your men. But I would remind you that to violate our precincts lays an interdict upon the soul, unworthy of a man who would be Eodward’s heir and awkward for a man who desires the Hierarch of Ardra—my superior—to affirm his crown.”

“You presume much, priest.” I would not have been Bayard’s horse at that moment. Surely the prince’s ruthless hand on the reins must shred the poor beast’s mouth.

Bayard flicked a gloved finger at those behind him. A man dropped from his mount, bowed to the prince, and strode through the tunnel toward the Alms Court. My heart stuttered when the shifting lamplight revealed his cloak to be the color of claret—the color mandated for a pureblood working among ordinaries. And there was something else…

I stared after him as he passed by me. A short, broad-shouldered man with thick black hair and beard, his face half obscured by a silken mask. His walk so like a cat’s…smooth, confident, a touch of swagger…so familiar…Once inside the courtyard, he knelt and touched one hand to the earth, then rose and moved out of sight.

My feet shifted as if to follow. Brother Victor jerked hard on my gown. I came to my senses and shrank deeper into our niche behind the gates. Gods, if he saw me…I closed my eyes, not daring to so much as think until the firm footsteps passed us by again. Then I peered around the edge of the gate.

“The priest speaks truth, Your Grace.” The pureblood’s arrogance rang through that tunnel like struck bronze, his words properly blunt and formed entirely without passion. I would recognize Max’s voice anywhere. This was business. “The only Ardran soldiers in the courtyard are dead—six of them. I verified their state. Only one set of footprints in the courtyard beyond this tunnel is aught but monks’ sandals. That pair of boots walked out the gates, not in. No path beyond the three inner gates showed evidence of either passing soldiers or princes. Your royal brother certainly escaped Wroling with this rabble, but he either abandoned them along the way or is out there with them yet.”

Unsubtle, Prince Bayard wheeled his mount and charged back to the field. My brother, Max, swung his compact and brawny bulk onto his horse and rode after him with the rest of the party.

Slowly I relaxed fists and shoulders. It was more difficult to banish the echoes of taunts and mocking laughter that would forever taint the air about my brother like the stink shrouds a midden.

How logical that Max called the Duc of Morian his master. My father was shrewd enough to bind his children into the most prestigious contracts offered, unswayed by sentiment or relative virtue or even hard coin, come to that. Max prided himself on his wit and intellect, and ever ambitious, would have made certain that the contracts offered for his service were to his own taste.

“Come on, then,” said Brother Victor, tugging at my sleeve. “No need to watch what they’ll do now. We must pray for mercy and for the souls of captors and captives alike.”

No. No need to watch the macabre dance of victors and vanquished. Screams followed us into the now deserted Alms Court. I knew what Max had done here: crouched down and touched the stone, then let flow a bit of magic, calling on our family bent for a simple test we had learned as we learned to walk. Whereas roads and portals held the remembrance of all who had traveled them for a very long time—the abbey gates likely would reveal traces of Eodward himself—the lingering footsteps in a paved courtyard would tell the tale only of those who had passed this night.

I dared not read the footprints for myself, even assuming I could draw any magic on the day after a doulon. I dared not work any sorcery with Max nearby. My brother, a pureblood with more than ten generations of scouts and cartographers in his lineage, would not miss the residue of pureblood spellworking any more than he would have missed the invisible traces of soldiers’ boots or a prince’s tread.

So where were Prince Perryn and his lancers? As Brother Victor and I crossed the Alms Court and passed through the Porter’s Arch, I whipped my head around to look back at the gatehouse and the tiny windows of the sanctuary room, tightly shuttered now. A pulse of satisfaction left me smiling. Of course, the monks would need access to the sanctuary room from inside the gate tunnel, somewhere in the dark nooks and niches along the walls behind the gates, so that the watcher could descend swiftly to open the gates for a supplicant. Brother Gildas would know. And I’d wager my arm that a second stair would lead to the sanctuary room by way of the outer wall walk, so a monk would not need to cross a busy Alms Court to take up his watch.

“Please go on ahead,” I said to Brother Victor, slowing my already snaillike trudge. “My leg tires, and I’d like to…pray…as I walk. I can find my way to the infirmary on my own.”

The small monk vacillated. I argued. He yielded. “Well, if you’re sure, then. I do have duties. We must prepare to rescue those we can.”

As soon as he vanished into the maze of yew hedges, I left the path, squeezed through the thick barrier of hedges, and hurried across the bridle path that led into the outer courts. Sure enough, a few hundred quercae south of the Alms Court, a steep stair led to the walkway atop the abbey’s outer wall. Mumbling curses at my overtired thigh and at the cold rain that pelted my face and slickened the narrow steps, I hauled myself up the stair.

I limped northward along the wall overlooking the Alms Court. The walk came to an abrupt end at the south gatehouse tower. And snug in the tower wall sat an iron door, a convenient entry that would allow monks to take up their sanctuary watch or errant princes to slip into the abbey precincts without detection. The rain washed away their muddy footprints.

The wind blustered, flapping my gown about me like a luffing sail and bearing a nerve-scraping screech from the field below. Morbid curiosity drew me to the outer parapet where I could gaze down on the scene before the gates. Dark, still forms lay everywhere. A few shapeless creatures scurried among them on the peripheries where the rain had snuffed the torches—monks, searching for the living or blessing the dead, or perhaps scavengers, drawn from the forest on the trail of a war party like rats following a leaking grain sack.

The majority of Bayard’s men, some mounted, some afoot, crowded near a great bonfire not far from the gatehouse. A small mounted party sat slightly apart—Bayard, Max, and a third rider, a slender warrior clad in silver mail and orange cloak, her long pale hair streaming in the swirling wind. The priestess of the Gehoum.

Gehoum were not comfortable gods, not at all like the bickering husband and wife, Kemen and Samele, whose lusty inclinations had peopled the world with lesser deities and whose devotion to the earth had created the guardian Danae to enrich and protect it. Nor were they in the least like the benevolent Iero, the father/brother god of the Karish, who had promised to send angels to carry us all to his heavenly realm did we but forsake our sinful ways. Gehoum were blind immortal powers who cared naught for mortal beings who existed only by their tolerance.

Sila Diaglou, once a temple initiate herself, had traveled the cities and villages of Navronne since she was seventeen, calling for a cleansing of the corrupted temples and a return to blood penalties for those who insulted the gods—beginning with the five members of the Sinduri Council, all Karish, and certain Navrons who had degraded their bodies past redemption, that is, harlots and nivat-crazed twist-minds. When the Sinduri condemned her as apostate, she had staged a public rite of repentance in the temple square in Palinur. Rending her garments and slashing her own face and arms with a knife, she had abjured the elder gods as false and named herself high priestess of the Gehoum. Some people had wept to see Sila Diaglou’s fervent savagery. Some had laughed. No one laughed at her anymore.

Another soul-wrenching scream came from the center of the group. And then another. And another. My fingers gripped the gritty blocks of the wall until the hoarse, burbling cry abruptly ceased. The crowd shifted and surged. Then the screaming began again, but in a different timbre.

The Ardrans didn’t know where their prince had gone. They thought him left behind on the field at Wroling Wood. How many would Bayard and the priestess kill before they believed it?

Why did I stay and heed such dreadful doings? I could not aid the poor wretches. I ought to get back to the infirmary. But some stray shred of honor forbade me seek the comfort of bed while men so near were screaming out their last hours on earth.

Nor was I the only observer. A tall, full-shaven monk stood before the Gillarine gatehouse, the gold solicale on his breast glinting in the scalding light. Was Father Abbot pleased with this outcome? Was soldiers’ blood the price of his inviolate gates?

A chill shivered my flesh. Beyond the pool of firelight, the night shifted. I peered through the rain until my eyes felt screwed from their sockets. There! Another movement, like an inky worm slithering down the hillside. Of a sudden, a horn call pierced the night—no bright trumpet blast, but a low, hollow sound that settled like cold iron in the base of my spine.

The group by the bonfire disintegrated. Moriangi warriors raced to reclaim their mounts and with their leader—Bayard, I thought, from the size and shape of him—reinforced the pickets with a solid defensive line.

A wall of midnight taller than the gate towers swept toward the abbey across the dark plains, no surge of mounted knights or ranked halberdiers, but rumbling, roaring darkness itself. I’d never seen anything like it. Halfway across the plain, giant horses that breathed dark flames took shape and surged out of the cloud wall as if straining to break free of the encompassing dark, drawing it along in their wake. Alongside them strode black-helmeted warriors thrice the height of a man with mailed fists the size of boulders and lances as thick as tree trunks. But these monstrous creatures were but phantasms—an unliving vanguard designed to instill terror and awe, like an Aurellian legion’s guide-staff hung with skulls and jangling bells, or the gorgons carved into a Hansker longboat’s prow. It was the warriors who rode behind the cloud phantoms that struck my heart cold. Hidden as they were in roiling darkness, I glimpsed only a gray, twisted face here or a blood-streaked arm there. But in that stomach-hollowing, knee-weakening moment before their strike, I tasted a brutal hatred that could grind stone into dust.

The wall of midnight shattered the Moriangi picket line as an ax breaks a dirt clod. Horses reared and screamed. Some riders fell; some slumped in the saddle as their mounts ran wild.

Bayard’s defensive line broke and fled, only to be snagged from behind by the swift-moving legion of night. A few escaped by flailing their mounts to a gallop before the wall reached them. Max’s wine-colored cloak streamed alongside Prince Bayard’s blue and Sila Diaglou’s orange, as they rode helter-skelter into the night. Once at the top of a rise beyond the fray, Sila Diaglou drew rein and turned to watch as the monstrous cloud forms lost cohesion and the blackness settled over the battleground, extinguishing the bonfire and remaining torches. But after only a moment, she struck out again and galloped northward after the others.

The black fog enveloped the field, hiding the huddled prisoners, the dead, the injured, and the laggards. Wails of terror rose in chorus. As the wall of night rolled over him, the abbot dropped to his knees, arms extended. “Stay thy hand, O Lord of Night!” he cried. “Have mercy on these that lie before you! Let them pass!”

Suffocating with dread, I pressed my back to the parapet and slid downward to the wet stone walk, my arms flung over my head, praying the holy stones would hide me.

Bells. A clear, measured cadence. Gray light penetrated the dark cave of my arms and dangling sleeves. Dawn—wet, cold, and dismal. I unfolded my stiff, aching limbs and peeled my sodden gown away from my sodden undergarments. Was it possible I had fallen asleep? I remembered vividly where I was and what had made me huddle in a quavering knot at the base of the chest-high parapet. But the wall of night had overtaken the abbey well before midnight, and I could remember nothing since.

The bells changed from simple strikes to a pattern of changes: one-two-three-four, one-two, one-two-three-four, one-two. Prime—the dawn Hour.

Grabbing my stick and the edge of a granite block, I eased upward. My first tentative peek over the parapet propelled me to my feet. One harder look and I hurried down the stair and back toward the gates, ignoring the cold night’s ache in my thigh. The dead had moved.

I limped through the gates and into the churned-up ruins of a once-grassy field. Abandoned weapons, packs, ripped blankets, battered pots and cups lay scattered amid blood-tainted puddles and dead horses. Close beside the walls, a muddy, disheveled Brother Robierre sat weeping alongside five other monks, all of them drenched and trembling, several with hands clenched in prayer. Abbot Luviar, seemingly uninjured, moved from one to the other, crouching beside each man to offer words of comfort. But what comfort could there be?

Save for the seven monks, no living man remained upon that field. But neither did the dead men rest where they had fallen. They had been separated into Ardrans and Moriangi, the two groups laid out in orderly rows six wide and stretching across the field. None of this was so dreadful, save when one gazed upon the ranks of fallen warriors and realized that beyond the usual grotesque battle injuries, their eyes had been plucked out, every one of them.

The Karish claimed that stealing the eyes of the dead did not remove their souls and forever bar them from the afterlife. Yet of all the battlefields I had walked, many with far more victims than this one, none had so twisted my heart. The gaping bloody emptiness where joy or fear, knavery or kindness, intelligence or dull wit had once lived was worse than any death stare. And the careful placement of the corpses, the cold deliberation of the deed, was far more terrifying than any barbarian battle rite.

At the head of this lifeless array, a lance had been plunged into the muddy earth and an ensign tied to it. The pennon hung limp and heavy, even its color indistinguishable in the gray morning. I stepped forward and lifted its edge. The tight woven fabric was the deep, rich green of holly and fir, and embroidered upon it in silver were the three-petaled trilliot and a howling wolf, the mark of Evanore—the mark of Eodward’s third son, Osriel the Bastard, who purportedly had uses for the souls of the dead.

Chapter 8

On the morning after the assault—already referred to as Black Night—we buried ninety-three soldiers and one monk. Every able hand in the abbey, including my own, set to the grisly task. The cold mud weighed my spirits beyond grief, and as we laid the chilled flesh in the earth, I found myself mumbling, “Sorry. Sorry. Forgive.” I could not have said why.

I asked Brother Robierre and others who endured that night before the gates what they had seen. Those who could speak of the matter at all agreed on the vanguard of flame-breathing horses and cloud warriors the size of the church. None reported aught else visible in the fog. I did not mention the gray faces I’d seen or the mortal dread that had afflicted me. But I could not let go of the memory.

On that same evening, everyone who could walk was summoned to church for a service of mourning and repentance. Brother Dispenser ladled ysomar, the oil used to anoint the sick and dying, into our clay calyxes—the expensive indulgence signifying the solemnity of the occasion. As we carried our votive gifts forward to empty into Iero’s fire, the texts read from the holy writs were all of Judgment Night and the end of the world. The prayers did not sound at all optimistic.

Not allowed in the choir as yet, I stood in the nave with the lay brothers, wishing I could feel the same solace the brothers seemed to find in vague promises of a dull heaven. The music drew me through the hours like a strong current, and the scent of incense and burning ysomar evoked my childhood imaginings of divine mysteries. Candlelight reflected from jewel-colored windows, gleaming stone piers, and gold fittings, until the air in the vaults and domes of the church shimmered as if angels hovered there, the light and gossamer of their wings the evidence of their presence to us mortals below.

So much praying in this place. I’d not spent so much time inside a church on a single day in my life, save perhaps the day of King Eodward’s funeral rites. For the first time since escaping my parents’ house, I had donned a pureblood’s mask and wine-colored cloak—both stolen—and haughty air—inbred. I had lied my way into the half-built cathedral in Palinur and promptly hid in the gallery, lest someone recognize me or attempt to unravel the family connections of an unknown pureblood. Only to honor King Eodward would I have risked discovery. His public glory had been but a part of what he was.

Though I had been presented to the king at three years of age, as were all pureblood progeny, I had met him only once. I was seventeen and feeling slightly giddy, having just survived two fierce days of fighting the Hansker invasion at Cap Diavol. One of my comrades took out a tin whistle and played to lift our spirits. The song moved my feet, and I stepped through a jig, faster by the moment, the surge of life grown wild in me, having been so close to death.

A man crouched by our fire for a moment to warm his hands and watch. When the song was done and I dropped breathless to the ground, drinking in the laughter and cheers of my comrades, I recognized the king. Though I’d heard he often wandered through the camp after a battle, I’d never believed it. But none could mistake the three trilliots blazoned on his breastplate—one lily the scarlet of Morian, one Ardran gold, and one the silver of Evanore. Despite deep creases about his eyes, his hair and beard yet flamed red-gold, scarce touched with gray.

He spoke a few words of thanks and encouragement to each of us seven, all that remained of our cadre of twenty. When my tongue flapped loose, as has always been my worst failing, spewing some foolish comment comparing a soldier’s hardships and a king’s, he smiled as if my nonsense cheered him in the face of three thousand dead and a worse battle facing us at dawn. And when I chose to take the measure of the only king I was ever like to meet, staring boldly at him rather than dropping my eyes in deference, he did not avert his gaze.

Before or since, I’d never known anyone who left his soul so exposed for another man, a stranger even, to view—and so I witnessed King Eodward’s devotion to all who followed him and his grief for the price they must pay for their loyalty. Though I had already decided that the soldier’s life was not for me, I vowed right then to serve him until one or the other of us was dead—an easy promise, of course, as he was in his sixtieth year and had few battles left to fight.

As he rose to leave our fire and move on to the next, the king cocked his head at me again, half smiling, half grieving. “Your quick feet and saucy mouth remind me strangely of some I knew in my own youth, lad. If you’ve happened here from Aeginea, tell them I don’t think I’ll get back. Tell them…askon geraitz.” The words, neither Navron nor Aurellian, made no sense to me.

I scrambled to my knees and bowed my head. “Of course, anything you ask, Your Majesty, but I know not this place—”

His hand raised my chin, silencing me. “No matter, then, lad. Just dance.”

In the ten years since, I’d asked a number of people where a place called Aeginea might be, but no comrade or acquaintance had ever heard of it. Another of Serena Fortuna’s jests—of anyone in the wide world, my grandfather the cartographer would surely know.

Not that I would ever ask the mad old man. He had appeared at our house at random intervals throughout my childhood, pawing at me with ink-stained fingers and babbling meaningless words in my ear, pretending we were allies in the household warfare. Then he’d disappear again without changing anything, abandoning me to my enraged father and hysterical mother. If a bleeding child’s curses carried the weight of the gods, as some said, then the old gatzé had long since fallen off a cliff and taken a year to die.

Family. Not a topic to consider in a house devoted to the spirit’s health. It was a marvel any of my bodily wounds ever healed with such poison in my blood. Family was long over and done with. I kneaded my scalp and tried again to lose myself in the monks’ mournful music. Without result.

Max was the first member of the Cartamandua-Celestine household I’d glimpsed in twelve years. Contracted as Bayard of Morian’s hound. Walking straight into my refuge. Gods… My urge to run blazed like a new-stoked furnace, even as I argued how unlikely he was to return here.

Truly, Abbot Luviar’s role in this royal brawl ought to fright me more. Now there was a mystery worth the deciphering. If I, a man of thick skull and paltry skills, had come to see that the Duc of Ardra was an arrogant sham who would as soon sell the crown of Eodward as wear it, then why would the Abbot of Gillarine claim that prince’s rescue to be the salvation of Navronne? Had Luviar fallen into the same magical stupor as his monks and I had done, or had he watched as the Bastard of Evanore stole the eyes of the dead?

Gillarine’s safety seemed more ephemeral than I had hoped. Though not yet ready to abandon the place, I dared not relax the caution that had kept me free.

“Tell me, Brother Artur, do the Evanori warrior and his sickly secretary yet reside in the guesthouse?” I asked one of Brother Jerome’s assistants when he brought supper from the kitchen two days after Black Night. The unsavory thought had crossed my mind that the abbot was brokering some alliance between Perryn and Osriel through this Evanori “benefactor.”

“Nay, Thane Stearc and his party departed the day before Black Night,” said the grizzled lay brother, uncovering the bowl of carrot and leek chowder he’d brought me.

A thane! Not just some landed knight, but an Evanori warlord—descendant of a family who centuries past, along with the gravs of Morian, had bound their lives and fortunes to Caedmon, King of Ardra, thus creating the kingdom of Navronne. I dropped my voice to a confidential whisper. “It seems a scandal to find Evanori in a holy place. I was taught they served the Adversary in their heathenish fortresses.”

The monk’s broad brow crumpled. “No, no! The thane’s a scholarly man and Gillarine’s greatest benefactor since King Eodward passed to heaven. Thane Stearc studied here as a boy and has visited the abbey every month for all these years, bringing us new books and casks of wine, and donating generously to our sustenance.”

“But he serves the Bastard Prince…”

“Indeed not!” Brother Artur blanched at the suggestion. “Though he wears the wolf of Evanore while in Ardra to proclaim his neutral state, his house is Erasku, which straddles the border. The thane claims both provinces or neither as he chooses.”

Convenient, if one could get away with such juggling. The thane must be quite a diplomat or quite a warrior…or quite a liar. I hoped these monks were not so naive as to accept the lord’s word without solid proof.

The lay brother carried his soup to the other patients—monks wounded on Black Night. I ate slowly, so that when he brought his tray around to gather up my bowl and spoon, he had to wait for me. “So, Brother Artur,” I said quietly between bites, “I suppose you must carry a good lot of food to the guesthouse now.”

He shook his head, puzzled. “None at all. We’ve few visitors in the best times. I doubt we’ll see another till Lord Stearc returns.”

I dropped my bowl on his tray and slumped back in the bed, disappointed and mystified. No infirmary visitor had dropped the least hint of Prince Perryn’s presence.

The assault had left the abbey a dreary place. Brother Gildas did not show his face. Jullian spent a great deal of time in the infirmary, doing whatever small tasks the infirmarian assigned him, but scurried away whenever I so much as looked at him. Even genial Brother Badger wore a cloak of grief that lightened only slowly as the sun set and rose and set again, the life of the abbey taking up its plodding rhythm.

Though I had every reason to be satisfied with my prospects, Black Night and my odd experiences in the cloisters had left me on edge. I forever imagined dark shapes lurking in the shadowed corners of the infirmary. One night I broke into a nonsensical sweat when someone paused outside the horn windows with a blue-paned lamp and remained there for an hour.

To distract myself, I took to telling stories and reciting bardic rhymes in the hours between the monks’ prayers, though indeed I had to search through my store of experiences and fables for those that would not shock celibate ears. I also began taking regular exercise around the infirmary garth. My leg felt well healed, giving only a bit of soreness and stretching when I took long strides. Though happy to be up and about—activity suited me better than indolence now I’d made up for half a lifetime’s missed sleep—I was not yet ready to give up such a perfectly useful circumstance. I made sure to limp and grimace a great deal. I had a better chance of doing as I pleased if no one knew my true condition.

A tarnished silver medicine spoon I’d found in Brother Robierre’s chest of instruments and a blood-crusted gold button he’d gouged out of a soldier’s chest wound went into the packet under my palliasse—a pitiful lot of nothing. Memories of demon horses and gray-faced warriors left me chary of pilfering valuables from the church. Which meant, should I leave Gillarine, I’d surely need my book.

On one night in the quiet hours between Matins and Lauds, when my companions in the infirmary slept soundly, I tugged on boots and gown and crept through the darkened abbey. Three times I dodged around a corner and peered into the night behind me, imagining I’d catch someone following. But the only sign of life was a flare of light from the church. Someone’s lamp illuminated a sapphire outline from one of the colored windows. The wavering light set the blue-limned figure moving. I signed Iero’s seal upon my breast and took a long way around the cloister walk, offering a prayer for Brother Horach’s spirit.

The small, many-windowed library building nestled in between the domed chapter house and the long, blockish monks’ dorter in the east reach of the cloister garth. The scriptorium occupied the ground floor. One reached the actual library by way of an exterior stair.

A rushlight borrowed from the infirmary revealed the upper chamber to be unimposing. The white-plastered walls were unadorned, save for two tiers of deep window niches that overlooked the cloister garth. On the opposite wall, an arched doorway opened onto a passage linking the library with the adjoining chapter house and dorter. Backless stools of dark wood stood alongside five long tables, and deep, sturdy book presses with solid doors and sliding latches lined the side walls.

I opened the cupboard farthest from the door. A locked inner grate of scrolled brasswork revealed shelves crammed with scrolls and books. A careful examination through the grate indicated that the book of maps was not among them. I moved on to the next.

In the third book press, near the bottom of a stack of large volumes, I spied a leather binding of the correct color, quality, and thickness. No gryphon lurked amid the gold elaboration of grape leaves and indecipherable lettering on its spine, but then I’d never actually examined the thing edge on.

In hopes my search had ended, I assembled the spell components for manipulating locks: the feel of old brass tarnished by greasy fingers, the image of the bronze pins and levers that might be inside this type of lock, my intent in the rough shape of a key, ready to be filled with magic and applied to the lock. Then I began to step through the rules for binding these elements together to create an unlocking spell.

With lessons and practice the pureblood bent for sorcery could be used to shape spells that had naught to do with familial talents. Though my childhood indiscipline had prevented me learning the rules for many spells, I’d had a great deal of experience breaking locks as a boy and become fairly accomplished at it. Yet years had gone since I’d done much of any spellworking. Beyond my vow to forgo magic and thus avoid the fatal weakness of most recondeurs, I’d needed to hoard my power. Without sufficient time for the well of magic inside me to be replenished, I could find myself lacking enough to empower the doulon, and my nasty habit used almost everything my particular well could produce. But surely I could scrape together enough to break a lock.

I held the spell ready, touched my fingers to the keyhole, and released a dollop of magic. Nothing happened. The brass wasn’t even warm to the touch.

I tried again, adjusting my expectation of the inner workings of the lock to something simpler. Feeling the press of time, I applied a much healthier dollop of magic. With a loud snap, blue sparks and bits of brass and bronze shot from the keyhole. The grate hung loose, a severely bent latch dangling from the brass frame.

“Holy Mother!” I waggled my stinging hand. Mumbling curses at my ineptitude, I twisted the latch back into shape the best I could, pulled off the most noticeably broken pieces, and brushed the metal chaff under the edge of the cabinet with my boot. Gingerly, I pulled open the overheated grate and extracted the book. It was not mine.

I stuffed the book back in the stack and slammed the grate, using a bronze shard to wedge it shut. Once the outer door was latched, I proceeded to the next book press. And the next…

So many books. Useless things. Searching those damnable cupboards felt as if I walked down a street of noble houses, where lamplight and singing spilled out the windows, knowing I’d not be allowed through any door. Not that I yearned to read about the world in place of living in it. It just would have been nice to know I could get in if I chose.

With nothing to show for my search so far but a broken lock and a stinging hand, I came to the last cupboard.

“We would be happy to provide you books, Valen, did you but ask.” Pale light flared and died behind me.

I dropped my walking stick with a clatter and spun about, backing into a table that immediately began sliding out from under me. “Father Abbot!”

Abbot Luviar glided across the room and rescued the rushlight before I dropped it. “I’m sorry to startle you.”

How the devil had he gotten to the far corner of the library without me seeing him? He’d certainly not been lurking there the whole time. I straightened my gown and backed away from him until blocked by the yawning door of the book press. “I was just…restless. I’ve slept so much.”

“Understandable.” Smiling, he set the rushlight on the nearest table and retrieved my dropped stick. He carried no lamp of his own. “This is a fortuitous encounter. I’ve been intending to thank you for your service on Black Night and since. Your warning saved lives. Your tales lift hearts. Even the digging—”

“I didn’t help. Don’t thank me.” The last thing in the world I desired was any share of what this man had wrought on Black Night. “Perryn of Ardra should have stood with his men. Died with them.”

“Indeed, he should have,” said the abbot, using my rushlight to ignite a wall lamp, flooding one study table with pale illumination. “Events demanded otherwise.”

“Is he still here?” Anger worked as well as strong mead to embolden my tongue.

Revealing naught but weariness, Luviar propped his backside and his hands on the table. “The prince is safe. I’ll not say where.”

“I’d have thought holy monks would stay removed from sordid politics,” I said.

“Fleshly needs oft intertwine with the spiritual. How can a woman think of heaven while her children starve, or a man contemplate Iero’s great love as his vines wither?” His furrowed gaze fixed somewhere in the emptiness between us. “We cannot always see the full span of history as it unfolds. Sometimes I fear that to attempt it is to infringe the role of the One who sees all, past and future. Yet, if the Creator grants us sight—”

His hypocrisy forced a choking sound from my throat. He jumped up and offered me his hand. “Here, Valen, are you ill?”

“Must have jarred my wound when I stumbled,” I murmured, waving him off. “I’ll be all right.”

He passed me the rushlight. “You should get back to bed. Rest. Heal. Despite its current troubles, the world is a wondrous place, the earth itself God’s holy book. Each man must discover his place in the great story. May you find your place…your peace…at Gillarine.”

I bowed and hobbled toward the door. Behind me, Luviar unlocked one of the brass grates, pulled out a book, and sat down to read. His composure only pricked my fury.

Boreas had been right. Monks were naught but self-righteous thieves. No Cartamandua gryphon marked any binding in that library.

My days of sanctuary expired. As the only way a man of sixteen years or better could stay at the abbey beyond a fortnight was to take vows, that was what I resolved to do—at least until I could put my hands on my book. The monks insisted that my face revealed Iero’s joy coursing through my veins. But truly, my good cheer stemmed from imagining the faces of anyone who had ever known me upon hearing of my intent.

“Good morrow, Valen! Iero’s grace is full upon you this glorious morn!” Only two days after his return from Pontia, I had already learned that Brother Sebastian was excessively cheerful in the early morning. My mentor, a ruddy-cheeked monk with a round head, a neat fringe of gray hair bordering his tonsure, and an ever-immaculate habit, as might be expected of the son of a ship captain, had just come from chapter to disturb my morning nap.

“Brother.” Bleary-eyed, I hauled myself to sitting, keeping the blankets up to my neck as the morning was damp and cold. Five more beds had been claimed by coughing, wheezing monks who had taken chills on Black Night. Jullian crouched by the brazier, stirring a cauldron of boiling herbs.

“What is great, you may ask?” Sebastian’s face beamed as he snatched the black gown from the hook on the wall beside my bed. “Brother Robierre and I have decided that you may set sail from your sickbed today.”

“But I thought—”

“Sorry to lose your good company, Valen. But you’ll be healthier out of here.” Brother Robierre pressed a rag across a spindly old monk’s mouth as the poor fellow coughed up enough sputum to float a barque. Perhaps he was right.

Truth be said, I was a bit anxious at leaving my simple infirmary life behind for the mysteries of the monks’ dorter. As a child in a house devoted to the elder gods, I’d heard outlandish tales of Karish monks who ate children in their secret precincts, of barbed tails grown beneath their gowns, all manly hair plucked out, or even privy parts removed entire. Being older than age ten, and having met a good variety of folk along the years, and having even practiced Karish ways when times made it expedient, I knew such talk as nonsense. Yet missing princes, murdered monks, and their unquiet spirits had left me a bit more wary of Iero and his holy precincts.

As Brother Sebastian exchanged blessings and gossip with the patients, I donned my gown. My little bundle of provisions, medicines, and knife—now well sharpened—went into my rucksack along with my secular clothes. The empty green bag remained safely tucked away at the bottom.

“Until you take your novice vows, they’ll send you here to sup, so we’ll not lose you entirely,” said the infirmarian, grinning as he dispensed one of his potions to another man. “And you must come down here every evening to let me examine your wounds…”

“…and to finish your tale of that tin smuggler in Savil,” called Brother Marcus from the bed closest to the door. “You can’t leave us not knowing if the fellow got out of the cave.”

I laughed. “I’ve a better one, about the time I fell in with a caravan of—”

“Be off with you, Valen, or I’ll chase you out,” said Robierre, beckoning Jullian to replenish an earthenware bowl with his steaming decoction. “We’ve our work to do.”

“You’ve done well by me, Brother Infirmarian,” I said, taking a jig step and twirling foolishly into a sweeping bow. “You are Iero’s own artist with your lancets and caudles. I do thank you.”

Robierre bobbed his head, flushed a little, and went on with his work. Jullian watched intently, a ladleful of his pungent liquid sloshing noisily into the fire. I winked at the boy, grabbed the rucksack and my alder stick, and joined Brother Sebastian at the door.

“I shall strive to do as well by you as Robierre has done,” he said.

“You can stick your nose in his business, Sebastian,” Brother Marcus called after us, “and leave off telling the rest of us when our gowns are untidy or our beds ill made.” The red-haired scribe had taken a spear wound next his spine on Black Night and was dreadfully uncomfortable. He lay on his belly all day and all night, sketching odd little drawings on scraps of vellum laid on the floor under his nose. Robierre wasn’t sure the man would ever leave his bed.

Brother Sebastian chuckled, held open the door, and waved me out. “Tell me if we set too fast a pace, Valen. Your leg seems to be progressing well.”

We strolled past the herb beds and around the bake-house. “I was thinking that I should go walking in the countryside to strengthen it and cleanse my lungs from the sickly humors of the infirmary…”…and scout the possibilities for replenishing my supply of nivat.

Brother Sebastian halted abruptly. “That would not be at all appropriate. Though yet unvowed, you must draw a sharp separation from the outer world. Once your leg receives Brother Robierre’s clearance, you will be assigned outdoor duties more than sufficient to cleanse your lungs.”

“But—”

His raised finger ended discussion. We had reached the stair to the monks’ dorter, and he was soon busy showing me the rope bed and straw-filled palliasse at the south end of the long, high-ceilinged room where I would sleep.

The empty green pouch in the bottom of my rucksack soon became more worrisome than midnight massacres, eyeless corpses, or monks who explained naught of lighthouses or vanishing royalty no matter what wheedling I did. I had taught myself not to think of nivat or the doulon overmuch. The need could come to affect all a man’s dealings, his friends, his choices, until life took shape from it every day and not just the one day in twenty-eight…or twenty-one…that it devoured him. I swore I’d rather go mad from the lack than let it rule me. But always the hour arrived when my bravado withered.

I had already confirmed that Brother Robierre kept no nivat seeds in the infirmary. An exploration of the bakehouse, while its denizens were at Vespers, had revealed that Brother Baker kept his brick ovens clean, his floor swept, his barrels of flour and salt sealed tight, and his wooden boxes of herbs and seeds labeled neatly, though with no sketch or hint of their contents for any who had difficulty with letters. None of the boxes contained nivat. I would have to go farther afield to replenish my supply.

My hopes of moving in and out of the abbey freely were quickly squelched. Every hour of my day was scheduled: services in the church, meals in the infirmary, washing, and walking. I suffered endless lessons, everything from how to fold my gown and place it in the wooden chest at the foot of my bed, to the signing speech the monks used in the cloisters, to a history of the brotherhood so detailed I could near recite what Saint Ophir had for breakfast every morning of his four-and-eighty years. Even my times of “study and reflection” in the church or the gardens were scrutinized. If I dozed off, one or the other of the brethren would immediately walk by and rap my skull with a bony knuckle.

And so I decided to slip out at night. The monks were abed with the birds, and as the dorter had been built for a hundred and twenty, a wide gap of empty cubicles separated my quarters from those of the thirty-one men who slept at the end nearest the church. And in the main, I was well shielded from their view. Besides the common shoulder-high screen of carved wood that separated one monk’s bed, chest, stool, and window alcove from the next man’s, a folding screen of woven lath had been set across the central aisle to separate the novices’ cubicles from those reserved for the monks. And I was the only novice.

But not only did Brother Sebastian poke his head around my screen twice each night, as the Rule advised, but the very structure of the dorter thwarted me. My cubicle lay between the monks’ cubicles and the reredorter. Throughout the night, sleepy monks in need of natural relief made a constant procession down the central aisle, around the lath screen, and past my open cubicle toward the cold wooden seats of the rere.

Worse yet, I was expected to parade down to the church with the monks to pray the nighttime Hours. These interruptions came at such frequent and unholy times—Vespers before supper, Compline at bedtime, Matins at midnight, Lauds at third hour, Prime at sixth—I could not see how I would ever be able to absent myself long enough to acquire what I needed. The anxiety I tried to keep from ruling my life crept inevitably into every hour.

“It’s come!” Brother Sebastian hurried down the path from the cloisters waving a rolled parchment. “I worried we might have to lie twixt wind and water for another month.”

I slammed the wretched book shut. Excessive meditation was surely ruinous to good health and spirits. While my mentor had attended the chapter meeting that morning, I’d sat on this stone bench in the hedge garden, pretending to study. The characters on the page had tightened into seed shapes. Every scent—of yew, of grass, of smoke from the kitchen—taunted me because it was not the earthy fragrance of nivat.

“It’s the letter from Palinur. The last impediment to your investiture is removed.” Having been informed that I was schooled enough to comprehend Aurellian, Brother Sebastian had blithely deemed no further reading test necessary, and his oral quiz of my mathematical skills had been less taxing than a visit to any Morian trade fair. He had lacked only the proof of my birth.

Sebastian unrolled the parchment under my nose. I furrowed my brow and inspected the page as if I could comprehend it. His chattering implied the cathedral labor rolls had indeed confirmed my status as a freeborn and legitimate son of nobodies.

Neither bastards nor villeins were allowed to labor on holy works. When I’d wandered back to Palinur a few years before in search of work, I had assembled several tavern acquaintances into a poor but devout family, believable enough to testify and get me hired on at the cathedral. I had cheerfully imagined my mother’s face if she ever learned she had been mimed by a whore who had serviced Palinur’s garrison so often, she could identify the soldiers’ pricks blindfolded.

Brother Sebastian’s face shone brighter than the hazy sun. “The abbot has given his consent. And, most excellently, it happens that the Hierarch of Ardra himself has arrived for a visitation and will preside at your vesting! Come along with me, lad.”

Before I knew it, we had collected my secular clothes from the dorter and a provision bag from the kitchen, and he was bustling me through the doorway of the very guesthouse where I had been certain that the Duc of Ardra was hiding from his royal brother.

“Tomorrow dawn I’ll come for you, my son. Open your heart for Iero’s guidance.” Brother Sebastian pushed a canvas bag into my hands, and for a moment the animation of his round face yielded to a quieter sentiment. “You’ve a cheerful heart, Valen…yes, yes…Robierre has seen it as well, as has everyone who’s met you. Our brotherhood will benefit greatly from the vigor you bring. But nothing sours a graceful spirit more than taking a path it is not meant to walk, so we would have you be certain of each step along the way.” He grinned and retreated down the steps, waving as he disappeared past the granary. Guilt nudged my shoulder, but I quickly dismissed it.

The bag contained bread, cheese, and a traveling flask of ale, provisions for my journey should I decide to abandon the monastic life. An earthenware flask contained a liquid that had no smell. I wrinkled my nose. Water from the blood-tainted abbey spring was to be my only sustenance for my night of meditation. The bag did not contain my book. I wasn’t sure whether to be insulted that they thought I was so stupid as to abandon my only possession of value, or gratified that they considered me worthy of their company.

I explored the guesthouse, speculating as to where the abbot had installed his royal supplicant if not here. Though its chambers were not elaborately decorated, it was more luxurious than anywhere I’d slept in many years. Plum-colored rugs warmed the bare floors. Brightly woven tapestries blanketed the walls, depicting the events from the life of Karus, the divine mystic from the steppes of far Estigure whose unruly sect had grown into Iero’s Karish church.

A magnificent fresco in the dining room illustrated the familiar theme of the ordo mundi—the world’s proper order. In sweeping bands of blue, yellow, and crimson, the artist illumined the three spheres: the arc of heaven, where the holy saints lived with Iero and Karus; the base foundation of hell, domain of the Adversary and damned souls; and in between, the earthly sphere with its righteous layers of kings and hierarchs, purebloods and peasants, its somber labors and abject wickedness so vividly depicted and its true delights so blatantly ignored. Though Iero extended his hands toward the earthly sphere in invitation, only the winged grace of angels bridged the gaping emptiness between the spheres of heaven and earth. A sad oversight, I’d always thought. In this respect, the Sinduri Council offered a more pleasing view: that every arch, tree, window, grotto, and mud puddle had its pesky aingerou, a messenger to the elder gods. Thus common folk could hold a discussion with our ever-quarreling divine family by raising a glass in an inn or taking a piss in the wood.

It was tempting to build a fire in the hearth, relax on the fine couch, and contemplate this profound and beautifully wrought statement of humankind’s place in the scheme of things. But I dared not miss this chance to get out, acquire what I needed, and get back again without prompting uncomfortable questions from my hosts. Unfortunately the guesthouse held no valuables small enough to carry with me.

Though I had been instructed to leave my monk’s garb in the dorter for my vigil night, pragmatism had prompted a minor disobedience. Those who prowled the roads of Navronne, whether soldiers, highwaymen, or even the most devout followers of the elder gods, considered it unlucky to touch a wayfaring monk or practor. Interference with traveling clergymen had been a hanging offense since the days of King Caedmon’s Peace and the Writ of Balance. The Writ, a declaration of truce between the priests and priestesses of the Sinduri Council and the Karish hierarchs, had been proclaimed at Navronne’s birth by King Eodward’s great-great-great-grandfather—or his father, if you believed the legend that a beleaguered Caedmon, his beloved kingdom on the verge of annihilation by the Aurellian Empire, had sent his infant son Eodward to live with the angels for a hundred and forty-seven years.

As soon as darkness fell—the time when Brother Cadeus the porter gave up his post at the Alms Court—I downed one more swallow of ale, threw the black gown over my jaque and braies, and slipped out of the guesthouse. From the mouth of the gatehouse tunnel, I skulked northward along the outer wall, avoiding the track across the open field so as not to be observed from the sanctuary room. A wooded hollow near the junction of the track and the main road, where the tricky moonlight shifted shadows, provided a likely vantage for less benevolent observers. Prince Bayard would surely have set a watch on the abbey.

Only when I reached a lonely beech grove did I breathe again. I scoffed at my racing heart. What was wrong with me? These were monks after all, and they held no bond upon me. No matter what kind of exit I made, they’d likely take me back come morning if I vouched some saintly vision had changed my heart. This constant prickling of unease was wholly foolish—likely naught but my long-muzzled conscience thrown out of sorts in such a holy place. Laughing at the thought of myself shipped off to live in the realm of angels, I shouldered my rucksack again and set out along the mist-shrouded river.

Chapter 9

A quellé north from the abbey, the River Kay vanished into ripe-smelling boglands. The road, so firm and wide at Gillarine, dwindled into marshy tracks, scarcely distinguishable from the fen in the patchy moonlight. My steps slowed. No bogwight was going to lure me into a muddy death, doomed to take its place until the next unwary traveler set me free in turn! Unfortunately, a careful pace would never get me to Elanus and back in any sensible time, even assuming Jullian’s estimate of three quellae was at all accurate.

Thus, I chose to risk using a bit of magic again. If I didn’t acquire nivat, no amount of power would save me. As the moon darted behind a wad of clouds, I knelt to lay my palms on the earth and discover my way using my bent. I closed my eyes. The mud was cold and gummy and smelled of rotting timber, moldering leaves, and animal droppings. Softening the boundaries of my mind, I released magic to flow through my fingertips.

Inhale. The scents grew richer…stronger. Boot leather and greased axles, cut timber and hay had passed this way. Horses and donkeys. Flocks of sheep and pigs driven to town. Listen. Gurgles and trickles spoke of the river, not vanished, but merely hidden beneath and beside and around me, as powerful in its dispersal as in its joined form, just more subtle. I discovered traces of travelers…of voices. My youthful ventures in use of my bent had never been so vivid.

I stretched my mind forward and swept from left to right, as a draftsman ties his pen to a string and stretches that string from a fixed point to scribe a perfect arc. Within that arc I could sense the variance of terrain: puddles and gullies, sucking mud pits, submerged trees, plots of firmer ground, the tracks of thirsty deer and bears and skittering mice, and always the road like a band of sturdy cloth, woven of scents and earth and the quivering remnants of those who had trod or ridden or driven over it, talking, braying, singing.

So many sensations all at once…and the music…A number of singers had traveled this road, leaving behind telltales of their music. One of them…ah, what a gift…the plucked notes of a harp wound through present and past like a thread of silver, woven into the road for a while and then wandering off into the fens…a song to pierce the heart. A prickling crept up my arms, as if I were dissolving into the fens like the river and the road. Beneath my palms the earth swelled, as if a body lay beneath the mud and had begun to breathe. Somewhere eyes were opening…

Quickly, I scribed the shape of the land on my mind and yanked my hands away, rinsing the mud off them in a puddle and wiping them on my gown. A glance around the still, moonlit landscape revealed neither man nor beast. But as I set off again, I could not slough off the sense that my eyes were unreliable.

Forests and bogs were favorite haunts of spirits. Though aingerou preferred cities and other man-built habitations, and revenants preferred the places they’d lived or died, tales spoke of older beings who yet walked in the wild—the guardian Danae, whose dancing wove the patterns of the world and who could merge their bodies with ponds or groves, and the demon gatzi, who were but Danae corrupted to Magrog’s service. Both were said to whisk folk away from mortal life. I’d never run across any such creatures, so they didn’t worry me all that much, but it never hurt to keep one’s eyes open.

Holding the thread of path and direction in my head, I hurried down the road, humming the harper’s song that still shimmered in my head. The cheerful melody swelled my heart and kept the night’s terrors at bay.

The hour was not even Compline when the first glimpse of torchlit roofs and walls, and the first sounds of pipe, tabor, and raucous laughter set up a rampant thirst in me. I stripped off my monk’s gown, stuffed it into my rucksack, and trotted the last few hundred quercae up the road and across the ditchwork to the cross-timbered gate. A good-sized town like Elanus should have a fine selection of taverns, sop-houses, pickable pockets, friendly barmaids, and gullible gamblers, not to mention an herbalist or apothecary with nivat seeds to sell. Not to mention a tankard of potent mead to warm away the damp and make a man forget politics, holy men, and conspiracies for an hour or two.

A closer look dampened my optimism. Though the earthwork surrounding the hillside town appeared substantial, the wooden palisade atop it was rotting and the town watch lax and slovenly. My claim that I’d come in search of a secure bed on a journey to visit my brother in Palinur easily satisfied the two half-soused guardsmen who carried but one serious weapon between them—an iron-bladed bill hook that would see its best use as a club. They seemed more interested in my assertion that my brother had a job awaiting me in a Palinur tannery than in the motley bloodstains on my jaque or how I had managed to travel any distance in these perilous times, carrying no weapon but a walking stick.

“Bog iron’s failing,” said one of the reeking pair as he cracked some aged walnuts with his bill. His blotched skin was peeling. “Half the smelts are cold. Roads too risky to bring in ore, and them as might haul it are fighting or dead. Elanus won’t last a year more.”

The second guard sneezed and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Some Harrowers were through here yestereve, preaching. Lot of folk figure the orange-heads have it right. Won’t take but another smelt closing down for them to have us all burning for the Gehoum.”

“So they’ve gone now…the Harrowers?” I asked, glancing around uneasily, happy I’d taken off the monk’s habit. I didn’t need any ragtag from Black Night taking out their frights and vengeance on a monk. Harrowers didn’t honor the Writ of Balance. “You’re sure they weren’t soldiers—Moriangi?”

“Nawp. Only orange-heads, but soldierly, especially the woman leading ’em. They’re burning farms and outliers these last few days, them they say is offending their holy Gehoum. They burnt Mott’s granary, saying his plow was a curse. The watch snagged one of her hags for the pillory. Rest got away.”

“Mayhap I’ll be on my way sooner as later, then,” I said. “Wouldn’t want to cause them offense. But I’m for a tankard first.” I’d need to be careful leaving. The Harrowers would likely hang about the town to get their woman back. Perhaps theirs was the foreboding presence I’d felt on the road.

The town pillory sat just inside the gates. A frowsy woman, face streaked with ash and blood, yelled at me hoarsely as I hurried past. “The day of terror comes! The Gehoum will have their vengeance!” Her hair was strung up in a greasy wad atop her head and tied with an orange rag. She didn’t sound so much crazed as excited.

I sloughed off the worry, waded through a knee-deep gaggle of muddy geese that blocked the town’s main street, and happily inhaled the scent of civilization—dung, smoke, and burning fat. Just ahead of me, a ragged donkey boy leveled one whip and manifold curses, trying to get a charcoal-laden dray up the steepening lane.

The people of Elanus seemed a grim and unhealthy lot altogether, just like their town. At the edge of the road bony children dabbled sticks in the puddles, and cripples shook empty cups, bawling for a citré. Everywhere were hollow cheeks and peeling, unhealthy skin, and sunken eyes that would not meet mine. Orange head rags stuck out like bits of bright paint on a wall of gray.

As I strolled past an alley, trying to decide whether to locate a source for the nivat or the means to pay for it first, a burly man with a slack lip and a sinner’s nose pawed at my sleeve. “A bed companion this night, traveler? Or an hour’s pleasure?”

In the shadowed alley, a squint-eyed young woman opened her threadbare cloak to reveal a tight-laced bodice of ruffled lace. A slim, pretty boy with skin the color of milked tea leaned against the sooty brick, smirking as he shivered in naught but a stained silk tunic and a silver ankle bracelet.

“These two come all the way from Estigure. Blessed is the man who lies with divine Karus’s kin. Lay away blessings lest the world’s end catch you lornly.”

I sighed and let my eyes drink in the sights. “Regrettably I’ve other holy business must come first.”

The man waggled a finger and the girl spun in place, billowing her cloak and a filmy skirt, slit from hither to yon, offering glimpses of long, slim legs. The tasseled string that fastened her lacy bodice swayed most enticingly. My hands twitched as I imagined the smoothness of those long legs and the delights that lay underneath the shabby lace. Serena Fortuna had cursed me with overlong abstinence already, and now proffered the lonely prospect of winter at an abbey. No prayer I’d ever heard could sheathe a man’s ache.

With apologies to the goddess Arrosa for refusing her sweet gift, I worked to cool the growing heat in my loins. Think of battlefields, Valen. Winter. A starving belly. Monks. Nivat seeds. Family. “Perhaps later.”

His pitted, leaking nose twitched, and he licked his sagging lip, revealing stained teeth. “Five citrae will hold the girl for you until midnight. Ten for the boy. I’ve others as well. Locals. Cheaper, but blessed, all the—”

“I’ll come back if Serena Fortuna is kind.”

Even if I’d had the price, I wasn’t fool enough to give it on a promise. But I bowed to the girl, which brought a lovely flush to her pale cheeks and set her licking lips much finer than the procurer’s, and I winked at the youth, which replaced his smirk with a soft and subtle eagerness. Perhaps four years older than Jullian, he stretched an arm behind his head and thrust out one slim hip just enough to make a graceful curve.

I cleared my throat and dragged my eyes away. “Tell me, goodman, where in this sober town might I find good mead and honest dice?”

“Cross-hill toward the smelts, you’ll find the Blade. Tell Holur that Tigg sent you for a game and a taste from his cask. He’ll see to you.” He shrugged and turned his attention back to other passersby.

My stomach rumbled as I meandered down the lane that leveled off westward, “cross-hill,” rather than taking the steeper way that climbed the rounded mound of Elanus. A few tight-shuttered houses lurked among others collapsed into weedy ruins. The sweet pale smokes of peat fires laced with pork fat hung over the lane like mist over the bogs. At the far end of the lane, darker billows rose from the charcoal fires of the “smelts,” where the folk of Elanus teased workable iron from treasured pellets dug from the peatlands.

I’d tended a bog-iron smelter one autumn. Hot, smoky, tedious work to keep the fires stoked and burning evenly for days on end. I’d been no good at it. The sheer ugliness of the task could not but set a man’s mind wandering.

Just down the lane, a knot of shouting people broke into cheers. Peering over the bobbing heads revealed a squirming, muddy tangle of scrawny limbs and occasional glimpses of bared teeth and bloodied cheeks and noses. One of the boys, significantly smaller than the other, seemed favored by the crowd, and every twist that gave him a moment’s advantage elicited a cheer and a jostle of backslapping. A stringy man with bulging eyes collected coins from the onlookers. One lad would likely get a meal for his bruises, the other naught but a boot in the backside. I’d earned my share of both. When the pop-eyed man stuck his tin cup in my face, I showed him my empty palms, bellowed an encouragement for each of the boys, and moved on.

A wedge of hammered iron dangling above a lettered signboard announced an establishment blazing with light and bursting with jolly music and fine smells. The Blade. Ah, I did love a friendly tavern, a pocket of warmth and enjoyment amidst all the cold world’s ills. My spirits, far too sober with deceptions, politics, abbeys, and damnable diseases, perked up.

The doxy held the law at bay with tit and toe and tongue.

All while the bandit stole away that night before he hung…

As ever, the singing snared me like a hook trap. I joined in even before I walked through the door, and as I slammed the splintered plank behind me, a woman draped her arm about my neck and warbled the next chorus right in my ear. Laughing, I grabbed her waist from behind and whirled her about as the song required, while other men tried to pinch her tits or stomp her toe. Spoiling for action and good cheer, I let the music liven my feet to glide and pivot, heel and toe. The rhythm of the tabor took us up and down the room through the clapping crowd as I spun her dizzy and protected her from their gleeful pawing.

Well into the doxy and the bandit’s fourth escapade, we collapsed over a table in breathless merriment, and I first glimpsed the woman’s face. Beneath a lank cascade of mud-colored hair swelled smooth cheeks of a pleasant pink and naught else worthy of mention. My brother Max would have called her a mirror-bane.

“Two more on my coin, Holur!” she yelled over my shoulder as our pursuers abandoned us in favor of a new ale barrel being hauled in from the back room. “Though my head be swimming, my tongue is dry. And this fellow sings like a carpenter’s rasp.”

Coins rattled in the piper’s basket, and a new dance went on without us. Still laughing, I dragged the woman up and into my arms, my hands finding a sure downward path toward the generous curves beneath her skirt. Max had always been too particular by half. Such yielding firmness demanded further explorations. My feet moved to a more languorous tempo.

She moaned softly deep in her throat, and a pleasant heat rose from her skin and through her layered clothing. I drew her closer.

“La, sir! I can’t.” Trapping my neck in the crook of one elbow, the woman dragged my head downward until our foreheads touched. Then she grinned wickedly, and with a deft move, stuffed her tongue in my ear, leaving my own lips and tongue poised for naught. Before I could riposte, she slipped my grasp altogether.

She didn’t go far, though. A fellow with a dirty apron and skin the color and texture of oak bark held out two foaming mugs. She took one for herself and shoved the other into my empty hands, crashing her mug into mine for a toast. “To my brave defender!” she said with a smile and an ale-sodden belch. “My name’s Adrianne, by the by. Though I be loath—sorely loath—to leave so game and manly a partner, my da will beat me purple if I linger one jot more.”

“Alas, and I just arrived,” I said, discreetly using a sleeve to blot the remains of her sloppy kiss, as I grinned back at her. “Without knowing a soul to ask where I might find the proper seasonings for my Saldon bread.”

She giggled and touched my face with a plump finger. “Such a fine handsome fellow as you baking feast bread…it’s hard to imagine.”

“I’ve baked my own Saldon loaf since I was sixteen, even if I had to do it on a stone in a thistle fire,” I said and scooped her finger into my mouth for a lick and a nip. She tasted of garlic and ale and woman. “And as I’ve come to Elanus in search of work and already heard the bog iron’s failing, I’d best not lapse in proper honor to the Danae’s feast.”

“I saw a Dané once,” she said, dropping her head on my chest, either because she didn’t want to be heard by our rowdy companions or because she couldn’t hold it up any longer. “In the bog when I was late from town and cut across close to Movre’s Pool. Tall and beautiful she was. Naked, with her blue marks of magic glowing on her skin. Didn’t speak, though her light guided me safe through the bog.”

“More likely Iero’s angel than a Dané, if your tall, beautiful creature was also kind.” More likely yet another tipsy maid waked from a randy romp in a berry thicket. Legend named the Danae spiteful beings who once gave life to forests, lakes, and fields, but hated human folk. Supposedly a furious Mother Samele took the earth from the Danae’s charge and gave it to the impish aingerou after Kemen lay with a Danae queen and fathered Deunor Lightbringer. Even the Sinduri Council professed that if the Danae had ever existed, they did no longer.

The girl shook her head vigorously. “Not an angel. She’d no wings. Some say Danae have wings, as they vanish right in front of you, but my grandmere told me they just turn a corner that human eyes can’t follow.”

“As to my baking needs…I’ve only the clove, ginger, and pennyroyal.” I regretted cutting off the discussion, but the girl’s time was limited, and such a companionable encounter, a staple of friendly common rooms, should yield some fruit.

“Ah,” she said and dropped her voice to a liquid whisper. “Down Smelt Alley, third door, you’ll find Gorb the seedsman. You needs must bang the door and convince the pinchfist to open his locks and trade with you, but he’ll have both hazelnuts and nivat to sell. Mayhap”—she tilted her bleary gaze upward—“I should go with you. I’ll bake a Saldon loaf as well and take it to the bog. Da’s a smith and not got half the work he used to. Raises his yellow bile, it does. Folk pray to Iero about the war and the end times coming, or whine to Kemen and Samele about the weather, but naught’s offered a pin to the Danae that I know of, asking help to replenish the bog iron here at Elanus. They’re most forgotten.”

Serena Fortuna’s beneficence lay warm on my back. “Well, as you’re late home already and risking your da’s heavy hand, what if I were to visit this seedsman and fetch hazel and nivat for us both? I’ll meet you here tomorrow eve, and we’ll have a song and share it out. I’ll divide my ginger with you, too. This merry meeting will infuse our bread with luck.” I brushed my fingers around her cheeks and down her neck to other fetching curves, feeling her desire swell to meet my own. It had always made sense to me that magic flowed through a sorcerer’s fingertips. “I’d need your coin, of course, as nivat comes so dear. But better to risk a few lunae with me than your da’s bruises on these pretty cheeks, don’t you think?”

Her sigh, as I bent over and kissed her on the lips to seal the bargain, came near subverting my wickedness. Willing women with even one attractive feature had the disconcerting habit of making me lose all sense. But the nivat was of first importance. I summoned up chilly thoughts of Gillarine and its confining comforts. As my rousing fever cooled again, I pulled away. Damnable necessity. I might as well be gelded.

Adrianne bade a mooning, ale-sodden farewell to our merry company, leaving me with a mug of ale, a promise of all the dancing I might desire on the following night, and three silver lunae in my pocket. A smith’s daughter…probably the wealthiest girl in Elanus…a more tempting winter’s companion than tidy Brother Sebastian. All sorts of schemes flourished in the flush of the moment. I wasn’t greedy.

But from the talk I heard from other customers as I finished my ale, the heavy-fisted smith had only enough work to pay his debts and keep Adrianne from Tigg the Procurer’s hand until the last of the bog iron was worked. An empty-pocketed son-in-law would do naught for his choler. I’d need to sell my book to make the scheme work, and in that case I could surely do better than Adrianne. Not that I was in the market for a wife. My feet were too restless for shackling.

A rattling from the corner, punctuated by challenges to manhood, prayers to Serena Fortuna, and a caller’s flat tones, tempted me to a dice game. Sadly, I had never been able to summon even a glimmer of my mother’s bent for divination when it came to gambling. Best not risk Adrianne’s offering. Nivat was easily available throughout Navronne, being an essential ingredient for those who observed the elder gods’ feasts at the change of seasons. But the native plants—a kind of pepper once grown in Morian—had failed decades ago, and as the only surviving ones were cultured by sorcery, it was always expensive. Even the mead would have to wait. I drained my mug, bade Holur and his jolly piper a mournful farewell, and stepped back into the night. Leaving a tavern for a street, no matter how busy, always put the damp on my spirits.

Chapter 10

“That should do for whatever purpose you have in mind,” said Gorb as he wrapped the nivat seeds in a scrap of cloth and tied the little bundle with a thread. He stretched his tight lips into a smile no wider than the flare of his nose and dragged his dark little eyes up and down my height. “Oh, yes. Saldon Night baking, you said. As night devours the sunlight and spits it out again, you shall be well blessed.”

A plaintive tale of my need for Danae help with my witch-cursed prick had induced the seedsman to unlock his door. Truly, the story itself hadn’t moved him, but only my invocation of Adrianne as the proposed beneficiary of my reinvigorated better parts.

A wizened little fellow as dry and sharp-edged as his merchandise, Gorb supplied a quantity of black nivat seeds no bigger than my thumb, enough to bake three Saldon loaves or service my unfortunate craving thrice over. And for that he returned only nine citrae out of the three silver coins worth forty each. Iero bless merry Adrianne and blunt her father’s fist.

I shook the copper coins in my palm. Spending one of them on hazelnuts might blunt the speculation in Gorb’s hard little face. Though I hated wasting the money, nivat was used only for holy offerings like feast bread or for spellworking, and of all the spells that could be worked with nivat, only the doulon required it. I wished no rumors of tall sorcerers with unsavory habits lingering in a town the monks might visit. Fate might lead me to Elanus again.

So…a story…and how could I help but think of the cursed Boreas, the very one who had caused the need for this journey?

I leaned my head across the table and spoke softly so that Gorb’s brisk fingers came to a halt. “I met a man in the wood yestereve, a rough, hairy man near tall as me and twice as broad. He was laid up with the sweats, sick and drooling, pissing himself he hurt so wicked. He showed me plate and jewels he’d stolen from a rich man’s house and said if I would bring him nivat seeds, he’d trade me a jeweled dagger that would keep me and Adrianne for ten years or more.”

Satisfaction blossomed on Gorb’s countenance, and greed sparked his seedlike eyes.

“Iero damns those that steal,” I went on as if I hadn’t noticed. “But this would not be stealing to my mind, as the guilt of the theft would rest on the one who first took the dagger from its rightful owner. If I made the bargain honorably and filled my part as I vowed, no fault would come to me. So I said I’d find him nivat and return tonight at midnight to make the trade.”

Nodding slowly, the seedsman dropped his eyes. He shoved the packet across the table and briskly brushed the table’s detritus from the flowing sleeves of his green robe. “Twist-minds are an affront to the Powers. You say this depraved fellow lies close by Elanus?”

I straightened up and grinned. “I’m no fool to tell you that, Seedsman Gorb. You’ve a bigger supply of nivat than I can afford. But once I have my dagger, I’ll tell the man where he can buy more, and Serena Fortuna bless you with whatever arrangement you can make with him.”

He dipped an iron scoop into his barrel of hazelnuts and slid a few of them into my palm atop the coins. “Good fortune shared always comes back,” he said. His sharp chin quivered as if he were on the verge of weeping. Or perhaps laughing.

I paused in the smoky deeps of Smelt Alley and divided my store of nivat. Half went into the green bag, which I restored beneath the false bottom of my rucksack. I tied Gorb’s cloth packet, containing the remainder of the nivat, to the waist string of my braies, and tucked eight coppers into my boot. I spun the last coin in the air and caught it, already tasting mead and humming a tune to accompany its sweet fire.

But as I stopped in at the still boisterous Blade, thoughts of perfidious Boreas choked me worse than the smelters’ smoke, souring my mood. That pain-racked, drooling wretch I had described would not be him deprived of nivat, of course, but me.

Holur’s mead cask was empty. But a tankard of his best ale and a bowl of porridge soothed my ill humor, and I bawled every song and galloped the length and breadth of the Blade with every maid and matron that stepped inside—none of whom were Adrianne, all thanks to Serena Fortuna. When I tossed my fifth citré on the barman’s counter, ready to buy another round of ale, the lamplight caught the polished copper and flared like a red sunburst…which brought to mind solicales…and Karish monks…and the life waiting for me with the coming dawn. Before Holur could clamp his sticky fingers on the coin, I snatched it back, stuffed it in my boot, and with sober regrets bade him and all the company a good night.

The crier called second hour of the night watch—one hour till midnight—as I headed out for Gillarine. Elanus showed no signs of sleep. No surprise to that. The smelters had to be kept burning through the night. As I strolled past Tigg’s alley on my way to the gate, the catamite raised his head and moved a step away from the wall, beckoning me into the alley. He was alone.

I shook my head and raised two open palms in a gesture of peace—or poverty, if one interpreted gestures in marketplace dialect. The message was much the same: I couldn’t afford him, but bore him no ill will.

He nodded and slumped back against the bricks.

Though my taste ran usually to women, the youth was, indeed, beautiful. A torch burned in a bracket above his head. His mellow rose-brown skin and acorn-colored hair gleamed in the firelight. The deep blue silk of his scanty tunic rippled enticingly with his movements, and the silver bracelet on his bare ankle sparkled with a gemstone of matching blue…a sapphire?

I halted abruptly. That a catamite in the alleys of Elanus would be wearing a sapphire bracelet did not stun me half so much as the fact that I had admired that very bracelet in a noblewoman’s jewel box…just before I stuffed it in my rucksack and got myself an arrow in the thigh. Boreas!

My blood running hot, I beckoned the youth to the street. Down the alley, Tigg the Procurer was taking a lei-surely piss.

The youth summoned a smile from some secret place and lowered his dark lashes in a way that promised to share its source. Well past its days of breaking, his voice wrapped my body like silk. “What’s your pleasure, sir? Tigg has a room—”

“Shhh.” I laid my arm around the youth’s tight shoulders. Though he smelled exotically of cardamom and clove, his accent was directly from the riverlands of Morian, not mystical Estigure. Careful to keep him within sight of his master and myself obscured by the brick corner, I bent my head to his. “No custom from me this night, sorry to say, but I would offer you a citré for a question answered.”

He raised his heavy lids and buried his secrets again. “One citré buys only a small answer.”

“The bracelet on your ankle. I would know where to find the person who sold it to your master. My wife—a harridan the likes of which would drive Sky Lord Kemen himself to the netherworld—would forgive me the worst of my failings if I could but take her such a trinket. And though your beauty is most worthy of much beauty in its turn, I’m thinking this little treasure was not ruinous to buy. Your master seems a…thrifty man.”

“Your coin?” He stuck out his hand, all languorous invitation vanished.

I dug the copper from my boot and held it above his hand. “And your answer?”

A careless toss of his head threw his silken hair from his face. “Don’t think to get this bauble. Master covets it. He said I could wear it for the street, but not when I go with aught. Big hairy fellow gave it for a night with me most of a month ago. Said he needed the blessing of lying with Karus’s kin, as he was hunting a place to bed for the winter.”

“That’s all?”

The youth’s long lashes fell toward his smooth, empty palm. “We didn’t talk so much. He’d been a while without a decent lay.”

Disappointed, I brushed my hand across his, releasing the coin. It vanished under the hem of his tunic, and he stepped back so that my arm dropped loose and empty. Even a touch would cost me more. I didn’t begrudge him the necessities of his trade.

I eyed his slender form, neither hair nor blemish to be seen anywhere below his scalp. He brought to mind Stearc’s squire Corin of the bronze braid and elegant cheekbones…fairer yet than this one. I felt a shifting in my braies, which circumstance startled me a bit. I was truly a pitiable case. “Fare you well this winter season, lad, with worthy companions and a light hand from those who profit from you. Indeed, you are almost enough to sway a man who finds his pleasures elsewise.”

His eyes took light from the torch as he shrugged and settled back against the wall, raising one knee to prop his foot on the bricks. “One Mistress Kellna lives out by Graver’s Meadow and sells berries and rootstock here in the market. Some say she also buys and sells goods that are…outside the common trade. I don’t care much for women, but you might find her informative. She come by new stock this month past and made profit enough selling it on to Edane Groult down near Caedmon’s Bridge that she bought me two nights running for a new friend come to stay with her.”

I grinned. “By Graver’s Meadow, you say?”

“Aye. West on the first track outside the gates. Right fork at the old mill.”

“Thank you for that,” I said.

“Mayhap next time, you’ll let me sway your pleasure. You’re a leg up on most as come by here.” The boy’s gaze flicked down the alley, and his face paled. “You won’t say who told you?”

“On my soul, not a word.” I backed away quickly. When Tigg the Procurer stepped out of the alley and peered up and down the lane, I was well hidden behind a broken chimney.

I pulled the monk’s gown from my rucksack and drew it over my head, covering rucksack and all. Then I slipped out of the ruin, clasped my hands to my chin, bowed my head and shoulders as if in prayer, and hurried toward the town gate close behind the ragged donkey boy driving his empty charcoal wagon.

The woman in the pillory spat and yelled as I passed. “Karish perversion mocks the Gehoum. The earth will bleed to cleanse itself. You’ll pay, Karish! You’ll pay!”

No one paid her any mind, or me, either. Not the gate guards I’d talked to earlier. Not even the short sallow newcomer riding through the gates, wearing a gray silk mask that covered half his face, a claret-colored cloak, and the black-and-yellow badge of an itinerant inspector from the Pureblood Registry. I grinned behind my folded hands, strolled across the stinking ditch, and turned westward onto the track for Graver’s Meadow. Though the moon was well past full, its cold light kept me to the path.

Typical of Boreas to hole up for the winter in the first place he came to, a town small enough everyone would learn of him, and then to choose the bed of one who dealt in stolen goods. He’d never been one to think things through. And it was just like the devil to convince his woman to buy him a boy. I’d never understood what made women fawn on Boreas so—a big, hairy, unwashed brute with a gruff, foolish way about him, who definitely preferred partners with parts between their legs no female could provide. Not that he hated women. Women were his porridge, nourishing and sufficient for every day. Lads were his meat and spice.

As I walked I amused myself planning the encounter. Would it be more pleasurable to slice off the villain’s balls with one of our stolen daggers or to tie him up naked in the cold and let him watch me walk away with our booty? Once I’d settled somewhere—Pontia, perhaps, a town large enough to sell one of the daggers and still keep my head down—I’d send an offering to Gillarine to thank them for their hospitality.

The track kicked up sharply. The stream, narrower here, burbled and gurgled, cutting deep into the rocky slope, creating moss-lined nooks and grottos, each with its own watery music. As a child I had imagined such a cool, mysterious nook must be a Danae sianou—the holy place where a Dané gave up its body for a season and became one with the land. Sometimes I would leave feast bread there and pray to be stolen from my family. More often I would yell, stomp the ground, and throw rocks in the water, hoping to wake the sleeping guardian. Neither activity bore fruit.

A cold gust flapped my gown around my ankles as I stepped around fresh horse droppings. And then more. I bent down and passed my hand over a mound. Still warm. Several people had ridden up this path not long before. I swore under my breath, but I’d come too far to turn back. Likely more than Mistress Kellna lived up this way.

After consideration, I removed my monk’s gown and stuffed it into my rucksack. A lost monk might walk clear easier than my own self if I encountered ordinary folk, but the talk of Harrowers had unnerved me. And the captive woman had reminded me how they hated Karish.

My thigh was grateful when the path broke over the lip of the rise. The stream lay like a silver necklace across a rocky goat pasture, leading the eye toward a scant woodland and a cottage. A sweet, cozy little hideaway, cupped in the embrace of shallow chalk cliffs, easily defensible.

Unfortunately, the cottage was ablaze. A robust woman sprawled among the grazing goats with an arrow in her back, and somewhere Boreas was bellowing out agonized curses that threatened to crumble the earth beneath my feet. I would recognize his rumbling epithets anywhere.

I ran. Not back toward Elanus, which even a moron’s poor sense would demand, but toward the conflagration and the screaming. Boreas had saved my life at the battle of Arin Fay, taking a deep slash on his arm while striking down the halberdier ready to remove my head. We had exchanged the favor a number of times in the long months following, so one could say I owed him nothing—less than nothing since he had abandoned me half dead. But that first time, having seen the Ferryman’s hand as clearly as I would until the day I took ship with that grim spirit, I had given Boreas my oath to protect his back. I prided myself that I had never broken my sworn faith.

All too aware that the treacherous moonlight would expose any approach on the meadow track, I circled wide toward the cliffs to come up behind the house, racing as soft-footed as I could manage over the rocky ground. When I plunged gratefully into the clumped beech and oak grown up in the lee of the cliffs, the rush of the nearby flames was already waning. I crept cautiously through the snagging undergrowth of blackthorn and hazel.

The screams—hoarse now, choking grunts, wordless animal cries—did not emanate from the burning house, but from an expanse between the house and the chalk cliffs. Breaking free of the bracken, I sped through a stretch of scattered, pale-trunked beeches and caught myself just before hurtling into the open.

Beyond the bordering trees lay a rolling meadow, dotted with stands of rowan and birch. Nestled in a willow brake, a small, bean-shaped pond shimmered in the cold moonlight, its waters ruffled by the knife-edged breeze. From the pond spilled the stream that gouged the hillside. My soul swelled at the beauty of the place; my skin flushed and quivered as if the angel choirs themselves had come to sing in Gillarine Abbey church.

But my eyes were quickly drawn to a knoll at the heart of the meadow. At the apex of the knoll, five people gathered about a splayed figure, still as death. The angled moonlight stretched their long shadows across the slope.

A howl rose in my throat. Had I a weapon…a bow…a club…a blade longer than my finger, I would have set upon them, never mind the odds. But as in every juncture of my life, I was inadequate. Too late. Unprepared.

A scrawny, tangle-haired man stood at the base of the knoll holding six horses. With a smothered curse at my loose-lipped folly, I recognized him as Gorb the Seedsman. He’d not worn the orange scarf about his neck three hours past.

The five were chanting a pattern of four words, one each, over and over around their circle until I could distinguish the voices—three men and two women—and the Aurellian words: sanguiera, orongia, vazte, kevrana. Bleed, suffer, die, purify. With every repetition, the moonlight dimmed and the weight of night and despair descended upon my shoulders like an iron yoke. After the fifth or sixth time around, a tall, pale-haired woman in an orange cloak raised her arms, holding a short staff in her two hands as if to challenge the sky. Her clear voice incised the air like a silver lancet, and every hair on my flesh rose.

Powers of Night and Storm and Terror, of Desert and Ice, of Death and Life,

O mighty Gehoum, heed our sacrifice.

Withhold our doom as we cleanse this land of decadent pleasure,

Of all that distracts us mortals from our proper reverence.

May this blood and fire and pain be a sweet odor to fill the long night of thy passing

And bear upon its vapors our vows renewed to purge the world of all that stands between us and thy immortal being.

“Heathen witch! Magrog take ye to his everlasting fire!” The raw, choking curse came from the victim at their feet…Boreas, no doubt of it, not so dead after all.

“Feel the cleansing fear, mortal man,” said the tall woman, lowering her arms and bending over him. “Thou art a blight upon the universe, diseased, depraved, an insult to the Powers who control the world’s fate. Of all thy miserable existence, only thy ending will serve a purpose. Suffer and bleed and rejoice in the terror of darkness.” She plunged her staff into the ground…into the man…ripping a cry of agony from his very depths.

Horror rooted my feet as each of the five bent to touch him. Then Sila Diaglou—of course, the pale-haired woman was the priestess I’d seen at Gillarine, the warrior who could rouse people to destroy their own fields and cities in the name of repentance—led her companions down the knoll to Gorb and the horses.

The seedsman gave the priestess a leg up into her saddle. She laid a hand on his head and murmured, as if bestowing a blessing, and then she and her cohorts rode toward me. I hid myself as best I could and still be able to see them as they approached the wood. Using every skill at my command, I etched their features into my memory.

Scarce forty, Sila Diaglou was a handsome woman with a high forehead and intelligent eyes set well below thin brows. The diagonal scar that seamed each cheek tainted her beauty with cruelty. Her hair floated like beaten flax as she rode, yet her wide mouth lacked any hint of generosity or mercy. Her lips, and those of her companions, were painted black with blood.

The smaller woman followed, particolored skirts draping her mount and a fluttering orange scarf wrapped about straight black hair. No more than a doe-eyed girl, eighteen at best, she rode like a queen, soft, copper-hued features devoid of emotion. The three men, too, I memorized as they came: the one with a beardless needle chin and colorless eyes, the one with a malformed ear and oiled black curls tied into a club at his neck, the third with a dog’s face, all lumps and crags, with but a fringe of hair about his round chin and a dagged cloak of purple velvet. Weedy Gorb mounted his own beast and rode after the others.

I held still until they had passed out of my hearing. Then I raced to the crest of the knoll.

Spirits of fire and darkness! Stripped to his braies, wrists and ankles stretched and bound to wooden stakes, my old comrade leaked blood from every quat of his length and breadth. Blades had shredded his flesh and punctured his eyes. The priestess had plunged her staff through his middle, not through his heart or his bowel to kill him quickly, but through his side so that every breath, every trembling shudder, tore him apart.

Swallowing my gorge, I knelt beside him and spoke softly. “Ah, Boreas, you god-cursed gatzé, I knew you’d get in trouble without me.”

“Who’s there?” he croaked. His battered lips scarcely moved. His head rolled side to side, as if he might be able to see, if he but turned his bloody sockets in the proper direction.

Gently I stilled him. “It’s Valen, come to help you as I vowed I would.”

He gasped, a whooshing stridor that only after a panicked moment did I realize was a laugh. “So I’m dead then. Of all Magrog’s servants come to take me at my end, ne’er thought ’twould be you, Valen. And I ne’er thought ’twould hurt so wicked to be dead.” His dreadful laughter stretched into a sob.

“Hush now.” I bent over so he could feel my breath. “Neither of us is dead. The baldpates saved my leg and my life, so I’ve you to thank for that. I heard you were up here, and I came to—Well, that doesn’t matter. Holy gods, I’m sorry I’m so late.”

I could see no way to help him. Pull the stake from his middle and the splintered shaft would draw his entrails, and he’d bleed his life away in agony. Leave it and his every breath would be torment and still he would die. But only after long dreadful hours…or days.

“No luck today for neither of us. Threw the last of our loot into the pond, they did. After killing—” A croaking sob. “Ah, Kellna was a merry lay. I never understood when ye said the best girls danced with ye. But Kellna…she danced.”

“I’ll pay her passage, Boreas. I promise.” I ripped off my rucksack and scrabbled through the contents of the bundled rag. Nothing in the pilfered medicines would help him. Few did I even know the proper use of. But the little knife…“Hold still and I’ll get your hands free.”

With the pointed, finger-length blade of the stolen herb knife I split the ropes that bound his wrists and ankles. He could not move his tortured limbs without crying out, so I did it for him, drawing them to his sides. Then I laid my monk’s gown over him. His massive body trembled.

“Somehow they knew I’d nivat. Said I was a twist-mind…abomination to their Gehoum…and I’d be better use to the world bleeding. I tried to tell ’em…” Growing agitation had him gasping between words. Blood welled out from around the stake. “They’ve left me in the dark, Valen. There’s naught here. Naught. I’m fallen in a well that has no bottom. Don’t leave me this way…”

“Hold on.” I pressed my hands on his shoulders. “Let me think what we’re to do.”

Perhaps the stake wasn’t all the way through. With one hand on his shoulder to calm him, I touched the wooden shaft. Embedded deep in the earth, the stake did not move…

Dread…terror…suffocation… I was drowning in blood. In torment. Violated. Soul and mind raped with fire, then immersed in a cold midnight beyond bearing. Alone. Sensing a desolation so profound that it seeped into the grass, the earth, the very air.

I snatched my hand away. Lifting my face to the cold air and the moonlight, breathing deep to ease my shaking, I gave guilty thanks for life and light and the broad sky above me. What rite could create this dread that crushed the heart and devoured the soul, that stole the night’s glory and blighted this sweet meadow? The thought that I had brought down this vileness on my old comrade appalled me, yet plain sense said I could not have imagined such an outcome. As I could not undo my careless babbling, I saw only one way to make it up to him. No one deserved to suffer so.

“I can’t undo this, Boreas. I’m sorry. If I could—”

“Didn’t think so.” Pain snagged his rasping voice. His forehead felt hot beneath my hand. “Ye ought to leave. Don’t let the orange-heads pray over ye. Their prayin’ emptied me out, till I can’t think of naught but the dark—” Despair edged his words with panic.

“Hush now. You’ll not be alone. I swear it. Will you trust me?”

“Ye’ve never broke yer word.”

“Listen…you’ll not believe my plan for winter…”

I told him every detail of my rescue and the abbey. Of Jullian and Sebastian, of Brother Badger and Brother Gildas, of bells and books and prayers and mysteries. Of rich smells and jewel-colored windows and rippling barley. As I talked, I drew out the little green bag and used the mirror to crush the nivat on a rock. Trying not to inhale the scent, lest it trigger my own craving, I pricked my finger and worked my perverse magic.

“Here, now, I’ve something will ease you a bit. Give it a try.” I scooped up the bubbling black paste and poked it in his mouth.

Pain devoured him. Scoured and shook him as would a dragon lion of Syanar. I waited. When, at last, his ravaged body convulsed in ecstasy, I stabbed the sharp little knife—sure and fast and deep—into the hollow at the back of his neck. Forgive.