Flesh and Spirit

Chapter 11

The hierarch’s flat feet measured almost the same in their length and width. They pained him when he had to stand on cold hard granite slabs for long periods of time. I knew this because he crunched up his toes and splayed them out again, rocked from toe to heel, and rolled them to the side. He did not wear sandals, for, of course, he was not a vowed brother of any monastic order, but the highest-ranking clergyman in Navronne, a common practor who had achieved a rank on par with a duc. His embroidered slippers were soft purple velvet held on by white silk ribbons that crossed over his thick, stockinged ankles. Every little while he set one foot upon the other to rest it, leaving dusty smudges on the top of his fine shoes.

Feet and their various coverings and the grimy hems of gowns, robes, and other vestments were all I could see of my investiture rites. As I had for the past three hours, I lay prostrate before the high altar of Gillarine Abbey church, the unending prayers and admonitions rolling over me like the billowing incense smokes. My shoulder ached, my leg had stiffened, and my long straight pureblood nose had been rubbed raw by the same cold hard granite slabs that so tormented the hierarch’s feet.

Someone sprinkled water on my head and back. Drips rolled down the shaven patch at the crown of my head. Tonsured…great Kemen, Lord of Sky and Storm, what woman will ever lie with me now? Drips spattered on my black gown, absorbed by the layers of wool. Drips rolled down my bare feet, tickling. I tried not to twitch. My trembling was due more to the marrow-deep chill creeping through me from the floor than awe of my current intimacy with the divine.

I was not wholly irreverent. I honored all gods who professed an interest in human folk, and I respected custom and rituals that evoked the great mysteries of the world: death and birth, forests, ocean, and storms, music, copulation, and fermentation. But I saw no virtue in mere endurance and had never understood why a god would wish to be so long preoccupied with any one event.

Best keep my mind somewhere close to business. News brought by the hierarch’s traveling party had only confirmed my decision to stay here—plague had broken out in the Moriangi port of Haverin.

Pestilence, famine, war…how many times in the past few days had I heard mention of the end times? The long night, Jullian had said, as if it were a lovers’ assignation for which he had been awaiting only notice of the time. Before long these doomsayers were going to have me hanging bells on my ears and painting my forehead with dung.

I dared not close my eyes. Brother Sebastian had rousted me as the bells rang for Prime, scolding me roundly for sleeping, for sleeping in the bed, for sleeping too long, and for sleeping naked. “A monk must always lie down girded in no less than trews, shirt, and hose so he will not be late to pray the night Hours, so spake Saint Ophir in his Rule.” While I reluctantly rolled into the frigid air and drew on the clean underthings he had brought me, my mentor had tightened his lips at some additional transgression. “Are you yet a sapling like these boys who cannot yet control their fleshly dreams? Surely you did not profane your vigil night apurpose!”

It was the bed linens bothering him. I had shaken my head vigorously and shifted the treacherous appendage inside my trews, attempting to look properly humiliated while trying to remember just what had happened on my return from Elanus. Numb, exhausted, I had hidden my green pouch and the packet of knife and medicines in the garden maze outside the church and prayed that the bells I’d heard as I slogged over the last slope and down the road to the gatehouse were Matins and not Lauds.

But “fleshly thoughts” had dogged me all the way back through the bogs and woodlands: the taste and feel of Adrianne on my tongue and fingertips and the memory of the dusky-smooth limbs and silken hair of the catamite. Strange and perverse that such images could arouse me after I had murdered a comrade I’d sworn to defend…after I’d spent half the night scraping a hole in the soft black dirt of Graver’s Meadow and laying Boreas and his woman there, my last coppers on their eyes and some of Brother Badger’s herbs in their hands and mouths to pay their tally to the Ferryman. Somehow the simple rites in the darkening meadow had left me at peace, and then the feel of the living earth under my hands as I sought the road back to Gillarine had sent unseemly desires coursing through my flesh. Truly I was a lunatic.

The brothers were singing now. Something different this morning. From each side of the choir, right and left behind me, came a different melody—two songs twined around each other, all the beauty and simplicity of plainsong, but counterposed to make something larger and more wonderful. I had heard them practicing this work, but I hadn’t known it was for this occasion. For me. Well, for Iero, of course…everything they did, everything they said, was to honor Iero and his saints and prophets. Nonetheless, of all the good comrades I’d encountered through the years, none had ever made a song for me. I felt like an ass, grinning into the floor.

Music infused my bones and sinews, not only my ears and soul. As a child I’d been offered no training in any instrument beyond the minimum necessary for a “cultured man’s education”—that aborted on the day I smashed my music master’s three-hundred-year-old harp into a stone pillar. Alas, my voice did sound like a carpenter’s rasp, elsewise a bard’s life might have suited me most excellently. If only I’d been born to a family of pureblood musicians, perhaps I could have put up with all the rest.

Hands touched my shoulders. “Rise up now, son of Iero and Saint Ophir, and with thy solemn avowal will thy new life begin.”

Blessed gods be thanked! I tried not to appear a lumbering ox as I got to my feet.

The hierarch occupied a purple-draped chair between me and the high altar, a regal figure, though his upper lip drew up in the middle like a church spire, and the lower one, full and fleshy, drooped below it like the seedsman’s iron scoop, leaving two large yellow teeth on permanent display. In droning solemnity, he intoned, “Swear thou, chosen of the One God…”

I knelt before Eligius and a coolly serious Abbot Luviar and swore on my hope of grace and heaven to abide by the particulars of Saint Ophir’s Rule. I meant what I said, though, if anyone had listened very closely through the fits of coughing that overtook me at certain crucial moments, he might have noted that I altered a few important words, such as “for the duration of my novice vows” rather than “for the duration of my novice year.”

Graver’s Meadow had reminded me why I was careful about oath swearing. As the condition of the brothers’ hospitality, I would do my best to obey their Rule, but I would not bind myself beyond reason. So as I knelt before the hierarch, I ensured my vows were entirely accurate. They would last only as long as they lasted.

When the swearing was done, Sebastian and Gildas dropped a voluminous garment over my head, shifting it around so that the shortest sewn seam reached halfway down my breast, leaving the black wool cape open the rest of the way down. They adjusted the cowl’s soft folds about my neck and shoulders and then lifted its hood over my newly trimmed hair. The abbot himself knelt before me to slip my sandals onto my feet. And then it was done.

From the outside I must appear like these other monks, who rose from the choir stalls and followed the hierarch, abbot, and prior in orderly procession through the nave. But, as far as I could tell, my every failing and regret remained hidden under my cowl, alongside unseemly hatreds, new and old. Too bad. The morning’s prayers had promised that I might leave all such burdens behind.

After we washed in the lavatorium—a capacious room in the understory of the monks’ dorter where water channeled from the river ran perpetually through a waist-high stone trough—Brother Sebastian led me up the south stair to the monks’ refectory for the first time. Most of the monks were already seated at the two long tables along the side walls. Facing the center of the room, backs to the walls, they arranged themselves in order of age, as it appeared, or length of time in the order, which was much the same. At the small head table the abbot and the prior sat on either side of the hierarch. Reminding me with a gesture to keep silent, Brother Sebastian hurried me past the great gap of empty places and delivered me to the table at the lower end of the rectangle. To my surprise Jullian and Gerard squeezed along the wall behind one row of monks and past the long gap of empty seats and took stools on either side of me.

The large room was spare of decoration: no paintings, statues, or carvings, no color but the burnished walnut of the floor and the palest yellow on the walls and between the stone ribs of the high, barreled ceiling. Its truer grandeur was its extravagance of windows on all four walls. Though the chilly room had no hearth, its tall windows, composed of astonishingly clear glass panes, bathed every place, even mine, with light.

Once all were seated, lay brothers carried in bowls of soup and baskets of bread. My stomach was near devouring itself after a long morning’s fast on top of my night’s adventure. The moment the steaming bowl was set in front of me, I snatched up my spoon and dipped, reaching for the bread basket with the alter hand. The knock of my spoon on the bowl resounded through the cavernous room like a tabor’s whack. I looked up. No one else had moved.

I stuffed my hands in my lap and recalled other houses where the protocols were even less comprehensible than these. As a child, I had made an art of hiding under noblemen’s tables, tormenting the dogs, tugging on the hanging edges of the table coverings, tweaking startled ladies’ toes and wiping my greasy hands on their skirts, and drinking far too much wine from ewers I’d dragged along with me. I smothered a laugh, imagining the poor amusement I’d find under these tables.

It was a prayer we awaited, of course, intoned at length by Prior Nemesio. Once the perficiimus ended it, the abbot rang a small bell, and Brother Cadeus, the porter, began to read from a book sitting on the lectern. As the monks picked up their spoons and reached for bread, he announced the day’s text as the writing of Juridius the Elder, a practor of Agrimo.

Gerard stuffed his mouth and frankly examined my new cowl. Then he stretched his neck and peered around behind me. As I bent over my bowl for my next bite, I tilted my head his way, exposing the bare patch Brother Sebastian’s shaving knife had left, which felt roughly the size of a knight’s shield. The boy’s ready grin appeared around his mouthful of bread. I grinned back at him around my spoon and glanced at Jullian. The Ardran boy’s attention held firmly to his bowl, his face pale and solemn. I didn’t understand. He had no reason to be angry with me. Had Brother Gildas “reprimanded” him again?

I was no more than halfway through my soup when the hierarch replaced Brother Cadeus at the lectern. “Dearest Brothers, it is our delight to join you for this great occasion,” said Hierarch Eligius, spreading his arms so that his wide sleeves and mantle swept in great curved folds like angels’ wings. “A soul claimed for Iero’s service. A voice added to the chorus that carries our petitions night and day to the halls of heaven. But as your shepherd, I must use this example for instruction as well as celebration, to chastise as well as to commend…”

The hierarch preached of the ordo mundi—clearly installing himself at the top of the fixed order of the earthly plane and relegating heathenish Harrowers to the bottom. The monks sat motionless, attentive. Gerard’s mouth hung open slightly as if poised on the verge of speech. Jullian, though…Jullian’s eyes remained fixed on his bowl.

“Rather than pronouncing faith in Iero and his anointed clergy, and fighting to enthrone our rightful king from a proven son of Eodward’s body, some servants of despair preach another kind of chaos—that villeins and practors, scholars and servants must join in some whimsical preparation for an age of doom and darkness. They propound a sovereign of rumor, as if Iero might sanction a righteous claimant to Eodward’s crown conjured from peasants’ dreams and tavern gossip. Such deviance invites Iero’s wrath and must be purged from our midst!”

Blessed saints and angels…deviance! A word to make a man look to his purse and his neck. So hopes of a Pretender and this talk of end times were named anathema…and poor pale Jullian looked guilty as a married man caught with his hand under a harlot’s skirt. What had the boy got himself into? No more dangerous enemy exists than a holy man, especially when his writs and precepts get tangled with royal politics.

The abbot rang his bell. After more prayers, Prior Nemesio led us from the refectory. My soup remained unfinished, a casualty in a holy war.

Once down the stair, our orderly processional dissolved into quiet chaos. Many of the monks squeezed my arm or pressed my hand in companionable congratulations; others laid one open palm in the other and gestured as in offering—the monks’ signing speech for a gift of Iero’s blessing. As I accepted their good wishes, Brother Sebastian stood at my shoulder as proudly as if I were his own creation. For certain, the brothers were a friendly lot.

Once most of the brothers had dispersed to their afternoon’s activities, a hooded monk tugged at my arm and drew me around and behind an unlit hearth. “The hierarch will ask you about the book,” he said, his words penetrating my skull as much by virtue of their ferocity as by my hearing them. “You will not reveal its exact title or its history. You will not offer it to him. If you value the boy’s safety, see that it remains here.” Before I could respond, he hurried away.

I knew it was Gildas. I recognized the thatch of brown hair on the back of his hand. And who but Gildas would encourage me to lie to the authority I had just vowed to obey? He had recognized my lack of finer scruples early on. Yet it wasn’t so much his particular demand that left me bristling—I’d no wish for Hierarch Eligius to get his hands on my book. But his reference to Jullian sounded very like a threat.

People had to get along as they could in this world. Gods knew I’d done my share of wickedness along the way. But when the account for a man’s deeds fell due, the one to pay should be the man who made the choice to do them. Never friends…and never, ever, children.

“His Excellency wishes to congratulate you,” Brother Sebastian said, as he bustled me down the cloister walk toward the scriptorium, where the hierarch was inspecting the monks’ work. I was yet grumbling under my breath at Gildas’s high-handed manner when we stepped into the cavernous, many-windowed room tucked into the understory of the library.

The place was deliciously warm, though it reeked of sour vitriol and acrid tannin—ink. Amid orderly rows of thick, unadorned columns that sprouted at their crowns into great sprays of vaulting ribs, orderly rows of copyists hunched over sloping desks, writing or painting their pages. A severely stooped monk, wisps of white hair feathering his tonsure, moved from desk to desk with a basket of small flasks, replenishing the ink horns fixed to each desk by metal hoops. Other monks sat at long tables shaving quills or stitching folded pages together. Save for the soft scratch of pens, the whisk of knives, and the rustle of pages, the place was very quiet. Holy silence was kept here as in the cloisters.

“Ah, our new novice.” Hierarch Eligius’s unmuffled voice resonated like a barrage of stone against a siege wall, causing heads to pop up all over. He closed the small fat book that lay on a copyist’s desk, picked it up, and peered at the title. “A Treatise on the Nature of Evil written by Jonne of Lidowe. A truly noble work. Have you read it?” He wagged it in the air.

Uncertain whether I was expected to voice my answers or not, I shook my head.

“Do so when this copy is complete.” He dropped the little volume on the desk. “Brother Fidelio, you’ll see to it?”

The copyist nodded and dipped his pen again.

Brother Sebastian gave me a gentle shove, and I joined the hierarch just as he moved on to the next desk, his elaborate cloak jarring Brother Fidelio’s elbow. The monk sighed silently, set down his pen, and scraped at his work with a pumice stone.

Eligius squinted at the second copyist’s work. “You’ve a beautiful hand, Brother. Every character well formed and clear. The history of the Karish in Navronne is an inspiring text. But I would like to see more color and variety in the capitals. You must not starve the glory of presentation in some rush to completion.”

The chinless Brother Victor, my diminutive companion of Black Night, seemed to be in charge of the scriptorium activities. He flitted from one desk to another, answering unspoken questions from the copyists, fetching books from the shelves on the end wall, or using naught but his deft fingers to describe corrections to a binder’s stitching.

At the next desk, a scrawny, sandy-haired younger monk held his tongue between his lips as his blackened fingers drew tiny characters in long straight lists. The blank parts of the page were marked into columns with lines of light gray.

“A fine presentation, Brother, but this—” The frowning hierarch tapped a white-gloved finger on a tattered scroll held open by lead weights. “The Tally of Grape Harvests in Central Ardra in the Years of Aurellian Rule? Surely more uplifting pages wait to be copied—sacred texts, sermons, or noble histories that will turn men’s thoughts to Iero or his saints. Who chose this as an exemplar? Come, come, speak up.”

“Brother Chancellor gives out the work, Excellency,” whispered the sandy-haired monk, “and tasks us with the pages most suited to our skills. Not to set myself high, but both he and Father Abbot say I’ve a special touch for numbers, so perhaps—”

“I must have a word with the chancellor then, as well as with Abbot Luviar.” The hierarch glared across the room at Brother Victor, who leaned over a desk, heads together with a copyist.

The hierarch spoke to each of the copyists, his steepled upper lip rising high and stiff as he named more works frivolous or inappropriate. He condemned anything of mundane use: a scroll on glassmaking, a book on the building of Aurellian roads, an almanac that traced weather patterns in Morian over three centuries.

I was no judge of books and their uses. That a man could learn to make glass from another glassmaker, as I had learned to tan hides, brew ale, and cut stone from those who knew the work, made more sense to me than learning such things from blots on parchment. But then again, I could not see how a book reader would come nearer heaven by reading someone’s speculations on Iero’s parentage than by reading of the might of storms and sunlight over the river country.

The hierarch moved to a table where a grizzled monk traced his finger over a page in an open book while reading a set of unbound pages. The monk’s glance moved from one to the other and back again.

“So, Brother Novice,” said the hierarch as he peered over the shoulder of the monk and browsed through stacks that seemed to be awaiting similar examination. “Abbot Luviar has recounted how a journey of penitence brought you to this great conversion. A remarkable story.”

I cleared my throat. “A wonder, truly, Excellency. I feel uplifted. Reborn, as to say.”

He turned the pages of a small book, the colors of the inked patterns brighter than his ruby ring. “And you truly came upon Gillarine by chance?”

“Indeed, I wandered for days, bleeding and wounded, entirely confused as to my course. Having lived so short a time in the little village of”—I twisted my brain to come up with a name—“Thorn, and diseased with sin and violent behavior as I was, I was unfamiliar with any holy places in the countryside around. Even now, I could not tell you the location of that village or the true course of my wanderings, Excellen—”

Saints and angels! I almost swallowed my tongue. I had not noticed the man who stood stiffly in the shadow of a pillar, his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes dead with boredom. The scarlet surcoat he wore over his gray gown bore the hierarch’s gold-broidered blazon of mitral hat and solicale. Of modest stature, with close-trimmed black hair, long nose, and an air of unremitting superiority, he scarcely needed the violet mask that covered half his face to proclaim him pureblood. Protocol forbade an ordinary to so much as notice him without his master’s leave.

I dropped my gaze and attempted to shrink inside my cowl. “Truly, Saint…uh”—the name escaped me—“that is, the guardian of wanderers must have examined…watched…over me every moment of that…of that—”

“Yes, yes.” Eligius’s frizzled brown hair bobbed alongside the red cap that had replaced his mitral hat. “You carried a book of maps, did you not? Even that could not aid you?”

I dared not let the name Cartamandua arise in association with me in front of the pureblood. Why had I not thought to take a false name as long as I carried the book? It was not so long a stretch from Valen to Magnus Valentia de Cartamandua-Celestine to exposure.

“Alas, no, Excellency.” Think, fool. I spoke slowly, so as not to stammer as I crafted my tale. “Though I valued the book because of its connection to my lord Mardane Lavorile who gave it me, I read no holy places in its maps, which were mostly common drawings of rivercourses and the old Aurellian roads that interlace Morian. Little of Ardra. Little of practical use even when I was scouting for the mardane.”

“A frivolous work, then. And what has become of the book? Perhaps it is here being copied?”

“Why, I never thought of it as worthy of copying.” I scratched my head, turned about, and gawked as if to review the contents of all the copyist desks. “And none of the brothers took great note of it, save that a poor wanderer had a book at all. It’s certainly not one of these. I gave it up, Excellency, along with my secular garb and sinful ways. I’ve not even seen the thing since I determined to answer Iero’s call by taking vows. I can’t see how a map would guide a man’s soul to heaven.”

I dared not glance at the pureblood. Was he listening? Did his bent enable him to detect lies?

The hierarch pursed his odd lips for a moment and then relaxed them into a smile. “Very true. Stay faithful to true teaching, Brother Novice, and your course will be straight.”

Sensing dismissal, I bowed, as I had seen the others do, and backed away carefully until my back touched the wall between two stacks of shelves. The pillar blocked my view of the pureblood and his of me. I heaved a sigh, allowing the storm of anxiety to ease.

A lay brother poked the fire and carried a lit taper to the lamps that hung from iron brackets fixed to the pillars. Outside the windows, the haze had thickened into bulging clouds, dimming the sunlight and sapping the room’s warmth.

The hierarch summoned Brother Victor with a wave of his jeweled finger. “Chancellor, a word with you before I take leave.”

The little monk hurried to the hierarch, his hands tucked under his black scapular, his oddly skewed features sober and attentive.

“All of you, pay heed and bear witness to my judgment of this abbey’s great work of writing!” said Eligius. “A member of your fraternity has fallen into grave error…” He rebuked Brother Victor at great length, accusing him of supporting the deviant philosophy of those who preached coming doom by his choices of materials to copy. “…and so you are to immediately remove all frivolous and mundane materials from this room. Your abbot may keep or dispose of the exemplars as he sees fit. But this—”

He whipped the page of numbers right out from under the young monk’s pen and threw it on the floor. A long smear of ink marred the meticulously written page.

“—and this—”

The pages on glassmaking, the Moriangi almanac, meticulous colored drawings of a millworks, and several other part-written pages joined the first one on the floor.

“—and every page copied from a profane work is to be burned in view of all residents of Gillarine as a sign of error and rededication.”

Brother Victor’s horror-stricken gaze leaped from the crumpled pages to the red-faced hierarch and back again. The other monks looked stunned.

Parchment to be burned? Even I knew how appallingly wasteful that was. Though my family’s house was a wealthy one, my tutors had scraped and overwritten precious vellum time and time again. And who could measure the time and care these monks had spent on these pages?

“You, Chancellor, are to receive twenty lashes before sunset today and be confined for five days with water as your only sustenance. Set this room in order and your copyists to their tasks, and then accompany Eqastré Scrutari-Consil, who will carry out my judgment. He will also question each of you”—his jeweled finger denoted every one of the shocked brothers—“to ensure that you understand your duties to Iero and the ordo mundi.”

Scrutari-Consil stepped away from the wall and bowed to Eligius, touching his fingers to his forehead. With a limp gesture of blessing, the hierarch swept out of the briskly opened door and into the rainy afternoon.

Chapter 12

“This is outrageous, Broth—”

Brother Victor silenced the sandy-haired monk with a gesture. Other monks left their desks to lay hands on his sleeves or his back, to shake their heads in silent denial, or to offer, with eloquent gestures, comfort or anger or comradeship. The chancellor briskly sent them back to work.

Hands clasped at his back, the pureblood watched impassively as Brother Victor darted about his duties. The man in red and gray needed no word or additional gesture to assert his authority over the room.

Having naught to do, I pressed my back to the wall, attempting to shrivel out of sight. I would have slipped out of the door, but Scrutari-Consil had positioned himself within view of it.

Scrutari-Consil—not a family related to mine, thanks be to all gods. The Scrutaris were known as perceptives. They were often contracted as investigators and inspectors, expected to root out lies and deceptions or to oversee town administrators. His colineal name Consil was unfamiliar; I could not recall the lineal bent of every pureblood family. The name’s Aurellian root suggested adjudication, thus a bent that might lend itself to mediation, untangling puzzles, or rendering judgments. Better for my lies and deceptions if he favored the Consil line, though I truly would prefer the man burst into spontaneous flames like a phoenix and not regenerate until I was fifty quellae from Gillarine.

Eligius had addressed Scrutari with the pureblood honorific eqastré, an affectation that signified nothing. As a form of address between purebloods, eqastré indicated parity in rank. Between pureblood and anyone else in the world, such address had no meaning, for protocol dictated that purebloods were so far exalted by the gods that ordinaries could in no wise be compared with them. The only relationship permitted between an ordinary and a pureblood was that spelled out in a Registry contract. Sweat dribbled past my ears.

Brother Victor’s silent hands were busily directing his copyists. Though I had little experience with the monks’ signing speech, his instructions were easy to interpret. Those whose work had been halted were to gather their completed pages from the neat stacks on the holding tables and pile them on a long table littered with broken pens, empty ink horns, and less orderly piles of written sheets. They were to collect their exemplars, the original documents being copied, in different piles on the same table.

As each monk turned in his pages, the chancellor passed him a new book or scroll he drew from the cluttered bookshelves. Before the last had been distributed, monks had already spread new vellum on their desks and begun to measure and rule their pages with thin sticks of the same plummet stonemasons used to mark their plans. The pureblood strolled down the rows, examining the titles of the new works.

At first Brother Victor seemed inordinately calm. But as he began sorting the damaged pages and proscribed books, his hands began to shake, knocking over the heaps of pages, books, and scrolls more than once, leaving the table a heaped confusion. When he noticed me watching, a tinge of scarlet touched his pale cheeks. Abruptly, he summoned me to join him. He scooped up the piles of discard pages and dumped them into a large basket underneath the table.

When I reached the chancellor’s side, his small, neat hand—steady now—pointed first to the remaining heap of books and papers and then upward. For a moment I had the notion that he was saying something about heaven. But then I realized he merely wanted me to carry the things upstairs to the library. Grateful for the excuse to leave and for the rule of silence that prevented his use of my name, I pressed my palms together in acquiescence.

The rain, now a downpour, had the gutterspouts flowing. Water had pooled in the alley and at the base of the ascending stair outside the door. Moisture spattered across the threshold as I awkwardly tried to draw my cowl over my ungainly armload of books, scrolls, and loose pages. Feeling the pureblood’s eyes on my back did not steady my hands. Crinkling his red-rimmed eyes in disapproval, the stoop-shouldered monk set down his ink basket, yanked the heavy wool across the jumble, and stuffed a wad of the cloth into my already over-occupied hand to hold it there.

The open air cooled my incipient fever. The pureblood could not possibly have recognized me.

The stair was not half wide enough to carry such a load. I must either risk tumbling over the open side of the steps or scrape arms and elbows on the wall, thus smearing moss onto my new cowl. At the top of the stair I pawed at the brass latch of the library door, at the same time drawing up my knee to catch some book that was sliding out of my arms. If I took another step, some precious writing was going to drop into the chilly puddle that was seeping into my new sandals around my bare toes. By the time Jullian pulled open the library door, I was crouched in an immovable knot.

The boy gaped as if I were a lunatic. I waggled my brows and my chin toward my laden arms, hoping he or one of the monks in the room would catch my meaning before the growing heat in my thigh burst into flame.

At last understanding dawned. Jullian reached under my dripping cowl and supported the collapsing bundle as I waddled through the doorway. As the monks resumed their studies, the boy rescued the most precariously poised texts. I dumped the rest of the stack on the table beside them.

The boy and I blotted stray droplets from sheets and folios with a kerchief, stacked the books, set aside the scrolls in their cloth or leather cases, and straightened the loose pages. We had reduced the clutter by half, when one brightly colored page caught my notice. As Jullian laid another page on the pile of loose sheets, I gripped his slender wrist and pulled it away, staring at the one atop the stack. The crisply white vellum depicted a detailed diagram of mill cogs, inked in bright red and blue. A square outlined in the text gaped empty, awaiting a second drawing. I shifted several more of the loose pages and found the half-completed list of carefully drawn numbers, a streak of black ink left where the page had been whipped out from under the hand of the copyist.

What had Brother Victor sent out to be burned? Certainly not the pages the hierarch had selected. With so many sheets piled on the table, perhaps the chancellor had picked up the wrong ones…or perhaps he had assumed that I, a befuddled novice of less than a day who had never worked in his scriptorium—and thus was not subject to questioning at the hierarch’s order—wouldn’t notice he had switched them.

My suspicions were quickly confirmed. We had just spread out the last few pages, careful of the still damp ink, when Brother Gildas hurried through the library door. He shooed a puzzled Jullian back to his books, wax tablet, and stylus—implements of torture familiar from my own boyhood—then gestured for me to bring the stacked pages. Producing a key from under his scapular, Gildas unlocked the inner grillwork door of the last book press on the south wall and stowed the suspect pages, slipping them between the books along with scraps of vellum he took from a basket to protect the drying ink. One would have to rifle the entire collection to discover the forbidden copies.

As Gildas locked the grate, shut the cupboard’s outer door, and shot its bronze bolt back into its catch, I noted the brass solicale affixed on the door—the abbot’s sign. So the contraband now lay hidden in the abbot’s own book press. Astonishing.

His back to the other three monks, Gildas held a finger to his mouth, laid his clenched fist on his breast, and flicked his eyes toward Jullian. His message was quite clear: silence, obedience, the boy’s safety. He waited, his dark brow raised in query.

I pressed my palms together and inclined my head. As in the matter of my book, my interests coincided with his demands. I was the least likely man in the abbey to carry tales to the hierarch or his lapdog. Yet only the time and company restrained my anger and resentment.

Vowing to lie in wait for the damnable monk after supper and force an explanation from him, I started out the door to find Brother Sebastian, while Gildas smiled cheerfully, drew up a stool next to Jullian, and began to inspect the boy’s work. And then the bells took up clanging. Not a call to the Hours—Nones had rung while I was with the hierarch in the scriptorium, and Vespers would not ring for at least an hour more. These bells stuttered in an unbalanced cadence that summoned the community to lay down whatever duties occupied the moment and gather at the refectory stair.

Everyone rose quickly, gathering their books and tablets and locking them away. But as Gildas and the other monks hurried out the door, I hung back. The bells would ring twice more, allowing time for scattered brethren to stopper their ink, damp cook fires, or round up sheep and goats, and I determined to take advantage of the opportunity. A matter more worrisome than frivolous copying or hidden pages preyed on my mind.

Jullian, scratching one bare, mud-spattered leg with his sandal, held the heavy door open, waiting for me. He blinked in surprise when I dragged him back into the room and pushed the door shut.

“A moment, if you would,” I whispered. No finger twiddling would suffice for this. “I need to speak with you, and as you’ve been avoiding me so purposefully, and my life seems like to get more complicated now I’m vowed, I think this will have to do.”

Pressing his back to the doorpost, the boy glanced up at me with the sidewise aspect of a thief caught. This would take some care.

I perched my backside on one of the library tables. “Tell me how you came to live in an abbey so young. Your family, I suppose. Dead, are they?” I’d wager my life on the answer to that one.

It certainly was not the question he expected. He stared for a moment, as if to read my intent. Then he shrugged. “Aye. Mam died birthing when I was six. My da was clerk to a wool factor in Pontia, or, well, he wasn’t actually my da, as mine was dead. He said he’d no will left to raise a boy that wasn’t his. So he gave me the choice to go on to Cradens Abbey school that’s in Pontia or to apprentice to a dyer, as that fee was the best he could afford to pay. I liked schooling, so it was no hard choice. I heard he left the factor not long after that and went off to the fighting. He’s likely dead now, too.”

He spoke with assurance, not loud, but not whispering either, bold in his secrets and brave in his lonely confession. I knew that not every family was as easy to leave behind as mine. And the story was plausible enough.

“And does Brother Gildas always supervise your schooling?”

“For the most. Brother Fidelio used to tutor me with Gerard, who is great of heart and beloved of Iero as he saw an angel once, but who is slow of eye and head when it comes to reading. We’d work here, and Brother Fidelio would allow me to read whatever I would from the shelves while he taught Gerard. But when Father Abbot found me reading Aurellian plays by Vocaachus and Aerno…” His face brightened. “Do you know them?”

I shook my head.

“Well, they are very…worldly. Frivolous, the hierarch would call them.” A trace of indignation in his posture. “But their words make music in your head and lead you to consider all manner of things. Father Abbot says they are worthy of study, but perhaps not for boys, even ones who read Aurellian fluently.” His enthusiasm quickly overruled his resentments. Neither secrecy nor resentment were at all his nature.

“Ah, so you were given a new tutor to oversee your reading.”

“Father Abbot said that Brother Gildas could assign my books and lessons as he did for Horach, and I am not complaining, for I am allowed to read and learn all manner of things that—” He glanced up and bit his lip. “We should go down. The bell.”

The damnable bell was ringing its second course, but I could not let the moment pass. I bent over and planted my hands on my knees, which put my face something on a level with his. I hated what I would ask him. “Jullian, certain of these monks…Brother Gildas, say…they don’t…hurt…you, do they? Beat you, or threaten you, or…press…you in ways you would rather they not?”

“No! Never!” His pale cheeks took on the blush of an Erdru’s-month apple. “I am sent to pray without supper or to work extra hours in the pigsties or the stable when I err. No more than that.”

“But you’ve secrets with them…”

He stiffened, clamping his mouth shut with the pious stubbornness I had come to recognize.

“I ask because on Black Night you said Brother Gildas had reprimanded you, and you’ve seemed different these days since. And because when I was not much older than you, I lived rough, and sometimes, so as to eat and stay warm, I would allow men to do things I didn’t like. Some in this world, even persons who are greatly respected, will take advantage of a boy, and I would not have such things happen to one so clever as to read Voc…cernus and Ern—whoever they are. You are my brave rescuer, and I mislike secrets that damp your spirit.”

“But those have naught to do with—” He snapped his mouth shut again and examined my face as if to judge the story of my rough living for himself. After a moment, he blew out a great puff of air and lowered his voice until I had to crane forward to hear him. “The secrets are not of beatings or unwholesome things. Brother Gildas would never! He exhorts Gerard and me to guard our virtue and says everyone should be as pure as we are.”

He leaned forward, his forehead almost touching mine. For a moment a fire of excitement and conspiracy pierced his veil of caution. The child was near bursting. “The secrets are of Iero’s work, most excellent and righteous that I would tell even my mother did she live and were I given leave to. But you must not ask me. I was rightly reprimanded for my loose tongue, and again after Black Night when I took your warning to mean you knew things…things you didn’t know. Now I’ve sworn upon my mother’s grave that I will not speak to you of these matters until Lord Stearc—” He closed his eyes and thumped his head backward against the doorpost.

I was not yet ready to exonerate Gildas. Blackguards could misuse a child’s trust in many ways. If Gildas had not posed a personal threat to the boy to compel my obedience, then the danger must lie in these secret matters that linked the boy to my book and the contraband pages. So I caught the strand of Jullian’s guileless exuberance and tugged on it again.

“Until Stearc…the Thane of Erasku…until he does what? Come on, lad. The One God himself arranged our meeting. He likely gave me the book of maps as well and instructed his saints to guide my feet to your abbey gates. Why else would your tongue be so eager to tell me these mysteries? I’ve seen Prince Osriel’s vassal in your guesthouse. I’ve seen your abbot rally dead men to protect a prince even the sainted Gillare would abhor, and I’ve seen Brother Gildas cause that prince to vanish so a pureblood could not trace him. I’ve seen the Hierarch of Ardra nosing around your scriptorium finding deviance in almanacs and drawings of mill cogs, and meek brothers subject themselves to water drinking and lashes to hide those same works. And these only begin to touch the mysteries in this place. Truly, I think Iero intends you share the burden of your secrets with me.” The god had certainly piqued my curiosity beyond common bounds.

The cursed bell ceased its clamor for the moment. Its third summoning would signal punishments for latecomers.

Inside the Ardran boy’s soul there ensued such a struggle as to make the mud-soaked wrestling boys in Elanus look like pecking chickens. I thought I’d lost when he stood up straight and said, “Come on.”

But he didn’t set out for the cloisters. Rather, he led me through the inner doorway and down the passage toward the dorter. Only our footfalls and the spatter of rain sounded in the deserted corridor. Between the library and the monks’ dorter, a daystair descended to the cloister garth. Opposite the head of the stair, the passage wall bulged outward in a bay. Each of the five window niches of the bay had its own stone seat, damp from the drizzle that blew through the window port. Jullian stepped up on the seat of the centermost niche, motioned me to crowd in behind him, and pointed a finger out the port.

Most of the world had vanished into the mist. Off to our right lay the river and the low, ghostly structures of the infirmary garth. Directly below us several steep-roofed buildings crowded together, the most prominent of them very like the guesthouse in size and grandeur—the abbot’s house, I guessed. At least twenty mounted knights had mustered outside it, along with several pack animals. A liveried servant bore the red, white, and gold banner of the Hierarch of Ardra. I was amazed that no hint of such a large and well-armed escort had penetrated the cloisters when I’d climbed the stair not an hour since.

“Watch,” said Jullian quietly. “I cannot tell you secrets I’m sworn to keep. But there’s good reason the hierarch departs while everyone is summoned to the cloister.”

Riders and servants milled about for a tedious time. The bells rang their third summons.

“His Excellency must be napping,” I said. “We’d best go. You’ll just have to tell me.”

But Jullian caught my sleeve and pointed again. I leaned farther forward, allowing the damp stone seat and his muddy sandals to soak my knees so I could peer closer into the gloom.

Two men stepped from the door of the house. The one fellow was thickly draped in red, a broad-brimmed hat shielding hair and face from the rain. As he was handed up to a white palfrey from a carpet quickly spread across the mud, his sartorial splendor denoted him the Hierarch Eligius. The second man, slender and pale-haired, swung himself up with practiced ease to the back of a dappled destrier. His short cape revealed a jeweled sword hilt at his waist, fine tight-fitting boots snugged to his knees, and the purple and gold trilliot of Ardra on his surcoat.

“The hierarch came to fetch him!” I said, wishing I could disbelieve my eyes. I needed no device to identify Perryn, Duc of Ardra. “Your treacherous abbot hid the coward, and the damnable hierarch escorts him back to Palinur. Men of god! Holy men!”

“Shhh!” said Jullian.

But I was unable to keep silent. “This despicable villain dragged good men from their homes, starved them and bled them for months, promising help that never came, and then abandoned them to die. Now he sneaks away under the cloak of a traveling clergyman.”

“The abbot would not have him dead,” said Jullian. “Gillarine is neutral ground, holy ground. Sometimes duty and faithfulness demand unpleasant things.”

The riders, scarcely visible in the rain, wound slowly out of sight behind the ramparts of the church.

“What of the men the abbot kept from sanctuary to save him? What of the men this prince will lead into another slaughter? What have your tutors said of them? Is faithfulness only for the benefit of princes?” It wasn’t fair to chastise the boy, who only repeated what he’d been taught. He could not understand the world. “I suppose you pray for them, eh?”

The bells fell silent. “We’ve got to go now,” said the boy, his thin face knotted in concern.

“We’ll talk again, Archangel,” I said. I yet saw no pattern that linked Jullian’s safety, Cartamandua maps, and conspiracies involving abbots and hierarchs and royal dunces.

We raced down the daystair into the east cloister walk. The crack of a whip echoed from the alley between the chapter house and the library. The accompanying groan was muffled as if they’d given the little monk something to bite on. I clenched my fists and wished the man strength for this and the rest of his trial.

Prison cells were not as familiar to me as alleys and bawdy houses, but I’d experienced enough of them. Never for long, thank all gods. So close…unable to get out…no air to breathe. I’d felt lashes as well, many at the hand of purebloods who could amplify the sting with magic. But in any hour, I’d choose lashes over confinement.

Brother Sebastian glared as Jullian and I slipped into the back row of the monks gathered in the lay brother’s workyard. The entire population of Gillarine encircled a bonfire blazing brightly in the afternoon’s sodden gloom.

The abbot’s voice, calm and precise, pierced the smoke and mist. “The Hierarch of Ardra has chastised us for failure and distraction in our work to preserve humankind’s knowledge—the holy charter assigned us by King Eodward and ratified by the hierarch and his predecessors. These pages are the hierarch’s evidence of our ill choices. His Excellency has left us much to consider as to the divine ordering of this world, our place in it, and our duties to our god and king. Let us pray to the One God, Creator and Preserver, to guide us onward in the path of His choosing.”

A brother emptied the basket of crumpled vellum into the pit. After an initial smoky darkening, the sheets took fire with a thunderous rush, green and blue flames dancing amid the gold, illuminating the faces in the circle as the pages curled and withered. Tears dribbled down the withered cheeks of the stoop-shouldered monk from the scriptorium. No tears scored Brother Gildas’s face, though. Only resolve. Jullian stood beside me looking as if he might reach into the flames and drag out the blackened pages with his teeth.

“And now, my brothers,” said Luviar, “let a holy fire ignite our souls as we redouble our commitment to the work we have been given. Iero grant us wisdom and give his eternal protection to Navronne’s righteous king.”

Left unspoken was his opinion of the hierarch’s judgment, though I’d come to think the two had concocted this event as a shield for their political chicanery. Then again, perhaps I’d best give the rumor of a Pretender more credence than I’d done before. Nothing gives a rumor foundation so much as a clergyman naming it deviance.

The faint honks of geese drew my eyes upward. Long, wavering black wedges arrowed southward, far too early. Eqastré Scrutari-Consil stood out of the rain, just inside the shadowed undercroft. He leaned his back against one of the columns, his arms folded across his chest, watching and listening.

Sleep eluded me. Despite my near sleepless vigil night, despite the exhaustion of high emotions and taut nerves—or perhaps because of them—my eyes refused to close in the quiet intervals between the night Hours. An oppressive hostility permeated the deepening night, as if the eyeless shades of Black Night’s victims had gathered at my bedside. I could not silence the memory of Boreas’s wails, nor of his choked ecstasy as I wrought his murder. Danger. Villainy. By Lauds, I was near sick with it. When I glimpsed Scrutari-Consil observing our procession down the nightstair into the choir, my overstrung nerves snapped.

I could not stay here. Not with a hunting pureblood in residence. No matter my missing book; no matter coming famine. Twelve years I had remained free by moving on when I needed, forgoing attachments that might tempt me to linger past safety. With silent apologies to the monks who had welcomed me so kindly, and to the god Iero who had received so little service from my vows, I slipped out of the dorter into the cold mist and drizzle in the dead hours between Lauds and Prime. By the time I reached Elanus, I’d have daylight.

Life was never so simple, of course. I retrieved my nivat bag and other contraband from the hedge garden and tucked them securely in my rucksack along with my secular clothes and the blanket from my bed. But when I emerged from the abbey gate tunnel, a near impenetrable fog had blanketed the fields. The route through the bogs remained clearly mapped in my head, but just traveling the half quellé from the abbey to the road without getting turned around would be no easy matter. I had no time to waste. Two hours more and I would be missed. And the pureblood would surely hear of it.

Damn all! I ground my walking stick into the mud. Foolish to travel in such conditions. And even the ascetic accommodation of the abbey was a prince’s comfort beside what awaited me on the road. But neither argument could persuade me to risk one more day at Gillarine.

I glanced upward to the windows above the gatehouse. I would chance the main track from the gates to the road, rather than going cross-country as I had the previous night. If I was quiet, there’d be no danger of being spotted by the sanctuary watch. I poured the last dram of ale from my vigil night flask onto the path, praying holy Deunor and Saint Gillare to bless this fool’s journey. Then I gripped my stick, shouldered my pack, and set out. Fifty paces and I was lost.

The short-lived battle of Black Night had churned the field that fronted the abbey into muck. Without vision beyond my outstretched fingertips, I could not distinguish the well-defined track that had once crossed it. Mumbling curses at the need to spend magic—and on this field of all places in the blasted world—I knelt, marshaled what strength might shield me from the horrors wrought here, and touched the earth.

Spirits of night! How far had I wandered? I lifted my hand, shook my head to clear it, and then touched the cold mud again. The impression was the same. Bloodshed…yes. Seething anger…grief…the death terrors of men and beasts. A hundred quercae to my left, men had screamed out their last moments in focused torment of fire and blade. But as runners of nandia vines and sprouts of fireweed and hearts’ ease recapture a blighted field in one season’s turn, so had a certain sweetness veined this ground. Not a mask to hide the taint of war, but a balm to soothe its raw wounding, to quiet the din of sobs and screams, to blunt the lingering pain enough to counteract its ruinous poison. No music played here as yet. What heart that perceived such sorrow could sing? But someday…perhaps…the tread of happier lives could overlay the lingering horror. Seeds slept beneath the cold mud. Living.

Wondering, I turned my mind to business. Year upon year of crossing had created a solid track across the wounded field, easily visible to my talent. Only half a day since the hierarch’s party had slunk out of here, and some monk had left traces of his sandals since then. Still wary of Moriangi watchers, I stretched my awareness all the way to the road and swept it across the foggy landscape.

Deunor’s fire! Riders lurked in the wooded hollow at the joining of track and road—five…ten…I could not tell how many. I sat back on my heels and listened. Naught of man or beast scored the night this far away—which likely meant they did not wish to be heard. Wary travelers, perhaps. But the aura of villainy that had plagued me all night of a sudden had focus. Even a small party could spell danger in such times as these. They could be Harrowers. They could be Scrutari-Consil’s cohorts—Registry. Before I decided whether to retreat or run, I needed to know.

I touched earth again and sought an approach from the open fields—the direction they’d least expect. Once the route felt sure, I slipped through the pale night, following the guide thread in my head. Fifty times I thought I’d gone wrong; I’d never traveled wholly blind before. But just as the guide thread gave out, my feet felt the sharp rise of the hollow’s lip, and I came near breaking my fingers when my extended hands encountered the bark of a young oak.

Lamenting my bulky monk’s garb, I crept from tree to tree, now following soft voices and the weak lantern light that gleamed deep in the treed hollow. Somewhere beyond them, horses grazed.

“Dawn approaches. Are you prepared?” The woman’s voice, cold and clear as a knife blade, chilled my soul. Only one night removed from her depraved rites, I could not mistake the priestess were a thousand other voices yammering in my ear.

The muffled answer was a man’s voice, but I could not decipher his words.

“Witness this noble sacrifice, sister and brothers,” said Sila Diaglou, “even as you remain vigilant. May the sweet odor of his suffering serve the Gehoum, drawing out our enemies that we might confound and crush them.”

A few of them shifted position in the fog, and I used their footsteps to cover my own as I slipped closer. Embracing one tree and then another, I honed my every sense, so that I would not collide with one of the shadowed forms. Four of them besides the priestess…no more. Likely the same I’d seen at Graver’s Meadow. Not gathered close as they’d been there. But somewhere in the center would be the priestess and the victim…

“Sanguiera, orongia. Scream, Monk. The trump of your pain shall open this battle and win the night.” Sanguiera, orongia. Bleed. Suffer.

A whistling split of the air. A crack, as if a limb of dry oak had snapped. A heart-tearing scream told me they’d stood him upright near one of three trees, some twenty quercae from my position. I gripped the reins of my fury and held still, listening. The next lash told me which tree.

Not again. This would not happen again. And certainly not to one of the brothers…

Blocking out the cries ripped from a man’s pain in the name of purity, I touched earth and mapped the grove, recording every tree, every shrub, every rock, stick, trench, or dip that might betray my steps or slow them. I searched out true north and etched the sense of it into my bones so that I could orient myself without thought. It took longer than I wished, knowing that the lash continued to fall, but I also knew they had no intent to be quick about their brutal game.

When my mind held as much as I could reasonably learn of the grove, I crept toward the closest of the four watchers. Only at the last step did he look my way—Boreas’s needle-chinned murderer. With every minim of strength I had in me, I slammed my walking stick into the man’s throat. Then I darted away. I hoped I’d killed him.

“Who’s there?” As a loop snapping into a knot did Sila Diaglou’s remaining henchmen gather round her, only to unravel again when one of their company did not arrive. “Radulf?”

Brisk footsteps sought the victim. “Radulf is down, lady!”

“Find the intruder!” The priestess’s command slammed my gut like a fist. But I held still and did not flinch. “Falderrene, Malena, all of you, spread out. Do not let him escape! Hold, monk. We’ll finish with you betimes.”

“Quiet!” spat one of the men.

The light wavered, shifted. Another light bloomed, coloring the fog piss yellow. Close enough to hear the gasps of the injured man, the harsh breathing of their captive, and the hiss of whispered orders, I pressed my back to the slender trunk and waited for them to disperse.

The three spiraled outward from the site of their crime. Closing my eyes, I matched their movements with the map imprinted on my mind. Unable to see in the fog, they brushed stalks, snapped branches underfoot, disturbed rocks. As soon as they were spread out from their captive and the cold priestess who guarded him—not so far as I would like—I threaded my way between them. I had little confidence in my fighting ability, but I had a few other skills.

Yanking my abbey blanket from my rucksack, I returned to the downed man. He clutched his throat, wholly preoccupied with choking. I slipped his dagger from its sheath. If he died I would not grieve, but I could not shed his blood on that ground. Instead, I spread the blanket over his body, considered my intent, and constructed the most rudimentary of illusion spells—the only kind I’d ever learned to any effect. Once prepared, I stared, motionless, scarce breathing, toward the ashen cloud whence came the captive’s harsh breathing. I stared until I could just make out the priestess’s tall figure pacing a short path near the tree. She wielded a short blade.

“You intrude on matters you cannot comprehend, infidel,” she cried. “Dare you sully a sacrifice offered to the Gehoum? I am the tool of their wrath.”

You bring murder to Iero’s holy ground, Harrower, I thought, snarling. Against his might, you shall not prevail.

Touching the blanket, I fed magic to my working. And waited. As the arm of a siege engine seems to crawl on its skyward journey toward release, so my spell seemed to spend eternity in its binding. My heart near stopped when I felt the blanket shift…and then it swelled into the very awkward likeness of a giant monk. Or a giant tent. I didn’t care which way she saw it or how crude the work might be. I was already running.

“Infidel!” No coward, Sila Diaglou. She charged out of the fog, crashing through trees and scrub straight at my feeble working. “Falderrene! Morgaut! To me!”

Silently I’d circled wide of her, leaping rocks and pits, dodging saplings and branches and stones, to come up behind the tree. Before she could reach my illusion, I was fumbling at the quivering captive suspended from the thin-boled oak. I could scarce believe my luck—his luck. Two loose, twisted loops of rope were all that held his hands to the limb above his head. I slipped the loops off his wrists, grasped him in my arms, and drew him away from the tree. Though his pale skin ran dark with blood, he expelled only a faint hiss at my handling. He lifted his head—pale, too, shaven as it was, his dark eyes a stain on his white skin…Gildas!

“Valen?” Even in the wan light, I could feel his shock.

“Do I need to carry you?” I said, grinning, cheered to feel him supporting his own weight.

“No…no, not…but….” He shook his head. Though his speech stumbled, he gathered up his cowl and gown that had been stripped off his shoulders and left bunched about his waist.

“Then follow me.” I grasped his arm and pulled him along.

“I’ll bleed you for the Gehoum, infidel!” Sila Diaglou’s cry of rage followed us as I led Gildas on the shortest path out of the hollow. I didn’t expect her to follow, and she did not. As I supported the stumbling monk across the broken ground, the dwindling thunder of galloping hoofbeats signaled the Harrowers’ escape. As soon as I was sure, I halted.

“I think we’re safe now,” I said, supporting him by his arms, careful not to jar or twist his mangled back. “I’ll fetch Robierre…the litter.”

“No…no…I’ll be all right. Stupid to get caught out. But, Valen”—his gaze was hot—“what, in great Iero’s mercy, are you doing out here? How did you—? I don’t understand.”

“I could ask the same of you, Brother,” I said.

“Couldn’t sleep,” he said, after a moment. “I needed to think, and so I played the fool, wandering about out here in the night. Walked right into their little plot.”

“Exactly so,” I said. “Only, I seem to have lost my blanket as well—hung it up in a tree to distract them. Do you think Brother Sebastian will punish me?”

He laid his blood-streaked hand on my shoulder and flashed his white teeth in a grin. “I’ll see what I can do.” Despite the smile, his hand quivered like a maid on her virgin night.

When we reached the gatehouse, Gildas refused my offer to accompany him to the infirmary or even to summon Brother Robierre to see to him. “No need for us both to suffer reprimands,” he said, pulling his disheveled garments tight. “I’ll confess my folly to Father Abbot tonight, so he’ll likely not get after you until morning. Not at all, if I can manage it. I’ll say only what you’ve told me, mention nothing of rucksacks, and bless your name eternally in their hearing. But someday, good Valen, we will speak of this night, you and me.”

“I’m just happy you’re living,” I said. “The last fellow I rescued was dead at the end of it.” As I slogged back through the hedge garden, I glimpsed Abbot Luviar racing toward the Alms Court, robes billowing. And from the direction of the guesthouse, heading in the same direction, barreled the Thane of Erasku and his secretary Gram. I had not heard that the lord had returned to the abbey. Had I not been ready to collapse as battle fever and tight-held magic drained out of me, I would have gone back to hear what drew them so urgently to the gates. But I could scarce command my feet to carry me.

I slept astonishingly well, until the bells clanged and clamored, waking me to my first day as Gillarine’s newest and only novice.

Chapter 13

The fifth day of my novitiate began as had the previous four. In the dark. After the lengthy service of Prime, we washed heads, hands, and feet in the frigid water of the lavatorium, then broke our night’s fast with weak ale and bread left from the previous day. As every day, I slogged through these activities half asleep. A night of unbroken sleep had taken its place in the pantheon of unachievable delights, alongside my own private cask of mead and a Pyrrhan courtesan in my bed.

The daily chapter meeting began as usual, too. Abbot Luviar and Prior Nemesio sat beneath the grandest of the lancet windows, the one depicting Kings Eodward and Caedmon worshiping an enthroned Creator. Jullian and Gerard perched on low stools that flanked the door. In between, on crescent-shaped benches that lined the circular walls, sat the remainder of Gillarine’s thirty monks, ordered from eldest to youngest. Every size and shape of man.

At my first chapter meeting, Brother Sebastian had led me around the circle to introduce me, as if he were a swineherd and I his prized sow. We had skipped no one, all the way from the eldest—straight-backed Brother Abelard, mostly blind and nearing his ninetieth year—to the youngest—walleyed Brother Simeon, eight years my junior. Birdlike Brother Nunius; the aristocratic Ardran Brother Bolene; the cottar’s son Brother Adolfus, whose eyes and throat bulged like a toad’s…My memory for names and faces had been well exercised.

Sharing this clockwork existence of prayers and work with these men was no bad life by any means. I could surely bear the monotony and excessive piety for a season. It was only when I thought of living this way unchanging until I was the age of Brother Abelard that cold sweat dribbled down my back.

I had scarce settled in my own place at the lowest end of the bench, just next to Jullian’s stool and the entry, when every face turned abruptly in our direction. Brother Victor stood in the doorway, looking small and hollow-eyed and unsteady on his feet. Luviar motioned the pale little chancellor to his assigned seat without the least hint of sympathy, apology, or the conspiracy that I believed existed between them. Perhaps that was because the hierarch’s pureblood followed Brother Victor into the room.

I fixed my gaze on my hands, clenched in my lap. A frigid draft more appropriate to the Frost Moon than Reaper’s Moon funneled up the nightstair, swirled through the open door, and blew straight up my gown.

Scrutari-Consil had remained sequestered in the abbot’s house, conducting his interviews. My heart had lurched like a besotted beggar every time a new witness was summoned. Every town of any size and every fighting legion bought pureblood contracts, so it wasn’t as if I’d wholly avoided those of my own kind over the years. I told myself I just needed to keep to my usual habits…and pray no one spoke my name in his hearing…or mentioned my book.

I glanced at Brother Gildas. He appeared soberly attentive as always. To my surprise, I’d never been questioned about our encounter with the Harrowers. Prior Nemesio had cautioned everyone that Gildas had run afoul of them to the peril of his life and that I had chanced upon him and brought him back within our walls. Sometimes I wondered if it had really happened. I had collapsed that morning wrapped in my cowl, but I’d waked with a blanket thrown over me, and my well-brushed cowl hung neatly with my gown.

“Holy Father, a moment’s intrusion, if you permit,” said Scrutari-Consil without expression, touching his fingers to his forehead.

“Speak as you will,” said the abbot coolly.

The pureblood inclined his back to acknowledge the permission. Purebloods bowed to no ordinary but their contracted masters and the King of Navronne. “I must commend you on your brothers’ piety, Abbot Luviar, and on their…ardent…personal loyalty to you and your chancellor. My investigations of Gillarine’s scribes have revealed no purpose to their work but the One God’s glory. As the chancellor’s confinement is ended, I deem my work here complete…or nearly so.”

Luviar said naught.

Scrutari-Consil stepped farther into the room, his cloak billowed by the draft from the doorway. “I understand that some few members of this brotherhood labor in the scriptorium occasionally, although they are not considered scribes. I must question those persons that I may assure Hierarch Eligius I have been thorough in my obligations. And one more small matter…”

I tried not to fidget. I would not be on that list. He would have no reason to speak to me. Soon he would be gone, and perhaps I would be able to pass an hour without imagining my father’s sneer as he devised a method to control me for the rest of my life.

Hands at his back, the pureblood pivoted on one fine boot, as if to take a final appraisal of our faces. “…I require a review of your membership list. In my general scrutiny of Gillarine and its residents, I have perceived residue of sorcery. My duty to the kingdom and its law demands that I ensure that any pureblood in your brotherhood has received the proper family dispensation. Much better that I, a Karish observant, take on this review, than a Registry inspector, likely an unbeliever, intrude upon your holy precincts.”

Deunor’s fire, damnation, and all cursed gatzi! Never use magic, fool. Never. You know it.

The monks Scrutari had questioned insisted that a man could hide nothing from his magical interrogations. I knew better. To deceive a pureblood perceptive you just had to present plausible, consistent testimony and obliterate any distinction in your mind between the truth and the lie—perhaps a difficult thing for holy monks. For me, the lying was easy. Unfortunately, my history, cobbled up in an instant whilst I suffered from wound fever, was as thin as these monks’ finest vellum. And my name was now scribed on the abbey’s roster.

“Of course you may inspect our membership roster if you deem it necessary,” said the abbot, displaying no emotion the perceiver might probe. “But it would be a waste of your time. Only one of our brotherhood claims pureblood descent. His dispensation is duly recorded, and for more than twenty years he has forsworn the practice of sorcery as our Rule demands. Prior Nemesio can show you this man’s credentials immediately after chapter. As for those who assist in the scriptorium, one could say that every man in the abbey does so, whether he be the lay brother who tends the fire or the boy who mixes the ink or the choir monk who petitions blessings for the generous donors of our books. I see no need for you to interview every resident of Gillarine on some arbitrary quest for completeness. The hierarch would perhaps consider it a frivolous use of our time and that of his valued pureblood servant.”

Scrutari’s nostril’s flared in disbelief—as did mine, most likely. “Surely, holy fath—”

“Once you have reviewed the record Prior Nemesio will show you, your horse will be ready for your departure. Bear our prayers for good health and Iero’s blessings to the hierarch. Now please excuse us. We’ve business to attend before the bells ring for prayers.” The abbot’s demeanor stood no more yielding than a granite wall.

Though I applauded his decision, Luviar’s refusal made no sense, unless…I glanced at the young face beside me. Jullian’s eyes were fixed in the vicinity of Brother Nunius’s wrinkled neck, and his fingers clenched in a knot tighter than my own. He breathed in shallow fits.

“As you say, Father Abbot. I shall pass your message—and my conclusions—to the hierarch.” Stiff as Erdru’s prick, the pureblood touched his forehead and withdrew. Were I Abbot Luviar, I would not request any favors from the Scrutari-Consil family before Judgment Night.

An unruffled Prior Nemesio began the day’s business. Boring business. He invited Brother Nunius to speak on the fifteenth chapter of Saint Ophir’s Rule—that which addressed the management of an abbey’s lands and treasury and the apportioning of alms. My attention wandered.

Weak sunbeams shone through the lancet windows behind the abbot’s chair, transforming the colored glass into rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. I examined King Eodward’s features in the window, searching for some trace of the man I had met. He had been the exemplar of Ardran manhood—big and ruddy, beard and hair as red-gold as summer sunset, his bones sturdy and well formed, his face equally suited to laughter and sober intelligence. I glanced at Jullian—the boy was breathing again—and wondered about a rumored Pretender…a child…and an abbot who juggled hierarchs and purebloods and princes as if they were oranges. And told myself I was a lunatic.

By the time Brother Nunius’s sermon had labored to its conclusion, and the prior began assigning reading tasks for the day’s services and mealtimes, my eyelids were drooping. But somewhere between “Brother Aesculpius, Vespers” and “Brother Jerome, Matins,” he announced, “Brother Valen, Compline.”

Gods’ bones! They wanted me to read! Cold dismay wafted up my gown with the draft. My conscience bloomed hotly on my cheeks. Rabbitlike thoughts of escape drew my glance to the door, where I found Jullian staring curiously at me.

Except on the coldest or rainiest days, I was supposed to spend the hours between Terce and dinner pursuing my studies in my carrel in the north cloister. Brother Sebastian had selected a dreadfully thick book for me to study over the next months. I didn’t even know its name.

I riffled the pages of the book and contemplated the cloister garth and the shrine, mulling the problems of undead spirits and why one of them might have an interest in me, and of how I was to convince Brother Sebastian to read me the text I was supposed to proclaim at Compline.

I had already spent an hour concluding that I couldn’t possibly guess which of Saint Ophir’s brothers was a pureblood. My own appearance evidenced that “straight of hair, deep of color, short in stature, large in talent” was not an infallible guide to Aurellian heritage, but most purebloods did conform to the type. Whoever it was—and a careful recollection of every face in the chapter circle yielded no suspicion—either he was not insightful enough to connect me to the infamous Cartamandua recondeur or he had truly shifted his loyalties to the brotherhood and broken contact with the Registry. I was likely safe enough as long as I kept to my usual precautions. I hoped.

Inevitably, as it had all week, my mind returned to the incident in the wood. The more I recalled, the stranger it all was. The Harrowers had not been doing the same to Gildas as they had to Boreas. Sila Diaglou had said they wanted to “draw them out”—referring to her enemies. And Luviar and Thane Stearc had been running to the gates…

Ow! I bit my lip to keep from yelling aloud when Brother Sebastian’s knucklebone rapped my skull. I stuck my books in my pockets and traipsed after his wagging finger.

Though rigorous in matters of decorum, liturgical observance, and adherence to the Rule, the tidy Sebastian had been undemanding when it came to my studies. He seemed more than willing to believe that my healing shoulder wound restricted any writing tasks and that illness still caused my eyes to tire easily, limiting my reading. In the main, he complained I talked too much, and was forever exhorting me shift my verbal excess from flesh to spirit.

“Fine mornings are too rare of late,” he said as we left the cloisters for the maze of yew and hawthorn hedges in front of the church. “Let us discuss the lesson you were to master for today, and, at the same time, give praise for the sunlight. So, Brother Valen, the structure of virtue: Recite for me the seven great virtues and twelve great vices and expound upon their signs and meanings.”

If he had known my answers were all guesswork, he might have admired my cleverness at getting almost half of them right. Instead, he cheerfully scolded me as a slackwit, and charged me to obtain a wax tablet from Brother Victor and write out the two lists for the next morning.

“We do not expect every brother to be a scholar of Brother Gildas’s level, or even Jullian’s, who has as fine a mind as any student we have ever nurtured here. But you must master the basic precepts of divine order, be familiar with the holy writs, and the history—” The dinner bell brought a welcome reprieve from his kindly concern.

I’d grown quite fond of mealtimes, beyond the fine and plentiful sustenance. The week had taught me that the light-filled refectory was neither so serious nor so strictly quiet as the cloister or library, save during the actual reading that accompanied every meal. Which circumstance raised my hopes of garnering assistance to break the twin shackles of the Compline reading and my study text. Scrutari-Consil was gone. Gildas had shielded my abortive departure. Truly, excessive worry about the future wasted a man’s life.

“Iero’s grace, Brother Abelard,” I shouted in the ancient monk’s ear and took his arm on the refectory stair. “The sun feels a bit more seasonable today, does it not?” The crabbed old fellow frowned and shushed me, and shook off my hold. Horribly deaf, he proposed every morning in chapter to apply the rule of silence everywhere in the abbey.

Undeterred, I dropped back and offered my assistance to another of the elders. “Brother Nunius, someday perhaps you could teach me why we may give alms to ill-reputed women only in famine times. That part of the Rule left me confused.” At least I could speak of ill-reputed women.

“Indeed, it is a strict provision,” said the birdlike monk, graciously accepting my arm. “The fifteenth chapter is more important than most of us credit. Sometimes I believe I am the only one who pays it mind. You were not the only member of our family dozing this morning.”

Family! By the god’s toes, if I ever thought of the brothers as family, I’d bolt from here for certain. “Tell me, Brother, why does Saint Ophir forbid his brothers magic working? We’re taught that pureblood sorcery is a gift of the god”—and thus we pursued recondeurs as doubly damned, traitors to the divine, as well as to the king—“so should not our Rule promote its use in holy works?”

“An excellent question! Sorcery is a component of the earthly sphere just as wealth and gaming and pleasures of the flesh,” said the old man. “Whilst not evil in themselves, such worldly pursuits leave the soul ripe for the Adversary, who is ever seeking ways to subvert our better natures. Young fellows like you must work diligently to avoid such pitfalls as sorcery.”

“And so I shall, good Brother.” I laughed and released his arm as we reached the refectory door. “So I shall.”

“I need to speak with you, Archangel,” I said quietly, when Jullian arrived with the boiled fish and stewed parsnips. “A work of mercy that will ensure your place in the heavenly choir.”

He bowed his head for the prayer as the abbot rang the bell. “You should not have lied about your reading,” he whispered, his lips scarcely moving. “Lies are the Adversary’s tool.”

The mealtime reading had begun, so I had no time to question how he had guessed or why such a minor offense caused him to sit there tight as a tabor’s skin. No time to remind him that secrets are the closest kin to lies.

“You once offered me whatever I needed of you,” I said. “Surely the god wishes you to help me become a better man.”

He nodded without looking at me. “Meet me in the garden maze just after supper. Tell Brother Sebastian you need to meditate on those you’ve wronged in preparation for Saint Dian’s Day.”

His direction sounded a bit pompous coming from a boy of twelve. Of a sudden, my mad whimsy insisted on reviving itself. An Ardran Pretender…here. If such were true, the danger would be unimaginable. I buried the thought as quickly as it had arrived.

Yet as a drifting cloud grayed the light from the great windows, my spirits chilled. I could not shake the sense of unseen hands propelling me toward an unseen precipice, and even the lovely mound of parsnips touched with thyme could not disperse it.

Every day between Nones and Vespers, I reported to work in the kitchen. Though I could not seem to satisfy the meticulous Brother Jerome with my work—my chopping was uneven, my fish wastefully trimmed, and after the third time I scorched the porridge, he forbade me to come near his precious pots—I enjoyed those hours the most of all my duties. Yet on this day I fidgeted through the time as if I’d buckthorn twigs in my trews, and I came near yanking out what was left of my hair as we dragged through Vespers and supper. I couldn’t have said what I was expecting.

Fog had rolled in from the river again, studding the neglected hedges of the garden maze with water droplets. Sprangling branches spattered my face as I hurried down along the graveled path toward the center of the maze and the stone bench that overlooked a green-slimed pond.

“Brother Valen!” Jullian jumped from the bench like a startled cat.

“Are you expecting other oversized supplicants this night, Archangel?” I said with a grin, hoping to put him at ease.

Unsuccessfully, it seemed. He glanced over his shoulder and gripped his arms about his slight body as if gatzi were poised to jump out of the hedges and drag him off to the netherworld. Blue-gray dusk had settled over the abbey. The days were rapidly growing shorter.

“Of course not.” He bit his lip and sat on the bench again, curling his bare legs underneath him. His eyes would not meet mine. One would think it was he undergoing the humiliation of seeking aid from a child scarce dropped from his mother’s womb.

“I thank you for not revealing my problem to the brothers,” I said. “They’d pitch me over the wall did they find out. I’ve nowhere to go.” And unholy murderers lurked beyond these walls.

When I tilted my head to glimpse his face and gauge the depth of his worry, he turned away. “I’ll help you,” he said. “I did say I would. But I’ll not lie about it should anyone ask me.”

“A fair bargain and a great kindness.” I held out my psalter and my lesson book. “All I need is for you to show me which page and to read me whatever I’m supposed to say at Compline, and then to read me the passage about the great virtues and vices from the other book.” I could devise some explanation for not writing the lesson.

“How will reading you the passage help you? You’re required to proclaim the whole text, and Brother Abelard will complain if you get even a word of it wrong.”

“I’ll remember. It’s just—My eyes—” Of a sudden all my usual excuses felt inadequate. “It’s like a blindness in me, Jullian. I see the marks on the page, and I can tell one letter from the other if I work at it hard enough. But when I look at two or more together, they tie themselves into knots that won’t unravel no matter what I do. I’ve tried to learn since I was a boy, but it won’t come. I’m just…broken…somehow.” Or lazy-minded, stubborn, demon-touched, god-cursed, soul-damaged, or willfully obtuse—all the things my tutors, parents, and siblings had named me. I must be mad. I had never told anyone what I had just exposed to a child I scarcely knew. “But I’m not stupid. Read it to me exactly, and I can remember it exactly.”

Heaving a great quivering sigh, the boy laid the books in his lap and carefully smoothed the worn covers. Some fine friend I was, who had so pompously set myself to ward him from unwanted advances of the flesh, only to subvert his conscience, which he likely valued higher. As for my mad speculations, an hour’s contemplation as I worked in the kitchen had already convinced me I was an idiot. Any youthful Pretender of Eodward’s loins would be secured in some remote fortress under the protection of pureblood defense works, not scuffing about an abbey in sandals.

“All right, then.” Jullian leafed through the psalter until settling on a page bordered with flying geese. “This is tonight’s Compline—” His head jerked up at some noise from beyond the hedge.

When his gaze shifted to something over my shoulder, I was still too taken aback to ask what distracted him, for in that moment of surprise, I had glimpsed his face…not conscience ridden at all, but keen with excitement and anticipation.

“Brother Valen.”

I jumped to my feet, enough blood rushing to my face to feed a cave of bats. “Holy father! I—We—”

Jullian stepped immediately to the abbot’s side, halting my stammering with a now-obvious truth. The boy had known he was coming. Saint Dian’s Day…they had conspired to get me here!

“Sit down, Valen,” said Luviar. Joining me on the bench, the abbot pressed a finger to his lips and then flicked it in a quick gesture to the boy.

Jullian bowed and melted into the hedges.

“I needed to speak with you in private, Brother Novice. And as you have no doubt learned in these past weeks, privacy is not a condition of monastery life. Not physical privacy, at least, even for the abbot.” His brows lifted, widening his gray eyes in an expression I would have called good humor were this anyone but Abbot Luviar.

Annoyed with the boy and the abbot—and even more with my own stupidity—I kept my jaw shut tight and dipped my head in agreement, sure I was now to hear word of my dismissal.

“Hmm. Not so forthcoming as at our first meeting?” Luviar’s scrutiny felt bone-deep. “I suppose I must take responsibility for that. Though I am aware that not everything you told me of your journey here is entirely…accurate…I believe I understand at least something of your reasons for dissembling. Tell me, Brother Valen, were you a more capable pikeman in Ardra’s service than you are a cook’s helper?”

My skin heated. So he’d guessed that I was a deserter. Best not add more lies, if I could avoid it. “No, holy father.”

“Your past loyalties do not concern me so much as your current loyalties, Valen, and I’ll not hold you to account for choices made before you were in my charge.”

The failing light made it increasingly difficult to read his face, thus I dared not feel relief.

“I’ve seen and heard enough of you these past weeks to believe that I can entrust you with a task I need of you tonight. Your instincts are ever generous, whether to old or young—or those in peril. You accept what is without complaint, bridling only at matters of justice. And you live your days with relish, no matter their mundanity. You have a certain honesty about you that has little to do with truth or untruth. I am not a fool. But I’m not sure if you trust me, and that is imperative, for I must insist that you keep silent about certain matters that could compromise others’ safety. Matters of great importance.”

“‘For Navronne’? ‘For our children’s children’?” Bitterness at this man welled up in me and erased every other consideration, as if the slaughtered Ardrans’ blood rose from the ground beneath my sandals and their empty eye sockets glared at me.

Luviar did not flinch. His face and shaven head gleamed pale in the enveloping night. “Indeed, yes. Now, ask me the one question whose truthful answer might most influence your trust. I’ll answer you—truthfully—and then we shall see if we’re to proceed.”

“Only one, holy father?” Again and always, my imprudent tongue.

He remained cool and sober. “For now, one question. If I cannot satisfy you enough to gain your promise of forbearance, then I must think of some other way.”

So many possibilities…I was almost drunk with the thought of answers. Yet some of Gillarine’s mysteries were but simple secrets, and simple facts would explain them. I could ask about Jullian—but a negative answer would leave me more confused than ever, and an affirmative one was so dangerous, I was not sure I wanted to know it. No, the greater challenge to trust was this man’s character—which took me right back to the beginning.

“Why did you abandon Ardran soldiers to die—encourage them to die—for a prince you surely know is unworthy?”

He nodded, as if my question were exactly the one he expected. “We live in harsh times, Brother Valen, and as a man newly arrived here from the wide world, you know this as well as any. The lack of a righteous king speeds the ruin of our land. I speak not merely of war’s grief and devastation, but of the deepest mysteries of earth and heaven, for this conflict is but one piece of a grand and terrible mosaic, with some of the other pieces named Famine, Pestilence, and Storm.”

Why was it Luviar could set the hairs on my neck rising with words that would sound pretentious spoken even by a pureblood diviner? His gray eyes warmed with sympathy, as if he understood the unnerving nature of his converse and sought to soothe it even as he made it worse.

“In another age of the world, I would step not one quat in any direction to serve Perryn of Ardra’s cause. But as matters stand, neither could I allow Bayard of Morian to take the final step that would assure his ascension to Eodward’s throne. Not only because of his own faults, but for this: If Prince Bayard’s eye is no longer fixed on his hated rival, and his hammer no longer aimed at valiant Ardra, then his attention—and that of his new allies—will turn to any who dare assert that we must deal with matters more important than the succession. Their hammer will fall on those few who fight to assure Navronne’s future beyond one sovereign’s reign.”

“Assuring the future beyond one…” My mind raced, knotting and unknotting the strange events of the past weeks. “You’re speaking of this end-times teaching.” The long night, Jullian had said. The dark times. What the hierarch called deviance.

He propped his elbows on his knees and leaned forward to rest his chin on his folded hands, staring at the well-trodden path. “Those Ardran soldiers had pledged their loyalty and service to their prince,” he continued. “I, in an arrogance of intellect and conviction, stole that devotion and transferred it to a worthier cause. To Ardra, Morian, and Evanore—to Navronne and to the mysteries that bind our land to the future of Iero’s creation. Not to despair, but to hope.”

He had shaped his answer with an artist’s hand that took bits of colored glass and fit them together to create a portrait of kings and saints. I wondered again if Luviar had the bent—for persuasion, perhaps. For truth-telling, I hoped, for my curiosity was so inflamed, I could not have walked away had he sprouted a gatzé’s barbed tail in front of me. I could not say I trusted him, but, gods preserve me, I believed him. “Father Abbot, are you the pureblood at Gillarine?”

His head popped up from his meditative posture, and he laughed, a full-throated burst of cheer, as robust as Ardran mead and as unexpected as an honest tinker. “Is that your measure of trust, Valen? You think I am ensorceling you? Not at all what I had hoped to accomplish. But I granted you only one answer, if you remember. More will come only if you vow your silence. If you choose not, then no burden will be held against you, nor will I look further into your past. Now tell me if I should proceed or not. Lives may depend on your declaration.”

I scratched my head and tried to bury my qualms about holy men. Who was I to gainsay the abbot, after all? He had all but confessed to me that he supported what his superiors called deviance—high treason in the world of practors and hierarchs. I felt great kinship with all rebellious souls, even if they wore golden solicales. “What is it you want of me, holy father? Not a sevenday since I did swear to obey you in all things. And if you command I trust you and keep secrets, well then, who am I to say it is not holy?”

He sighed and spread his hands in acceptance. “I suppose that will have to do. Your task is simple. I wish you to meet with several others who recognize the enormity of the world’s troubles. They need you to demonstrate how to use the Cartamandua maps.”

My spirits, tickled with growing excitement, plunged. Of course it would be the book. Though, indeed, he had asked my aid, not for copying, but for use, which raised all manner of questions, such as where his friends wished to travel that no ordinary book of maps could take them. But this book—I was trying to avoid lies. “Father Abbot, I must tell you—”

No. I couldn’t tell him I’d never used it. Once I began changing my story, the perceptive abbot would surely unravel the rest of my talespinning. Then he would be forced to choose between his life and my freedom. I trusted no one but myself with that choice. Blood rushed to my skin with the misstep so narrowly avoided.

“The book is certainly magical, holy father, and thus appears differently to any eye that looks upon it. Its usage is likely different for any who attempt it also. I’ll share what I can, but in truth, as you’ve clearly surmised, I’ve had meager success at anything in my life, thus you’d best not expect too much.”

Luviar watched me silently. Waiting for me to confess more lies, I thought. I kept breathing and did not squirm.

At last he nodded. “Very well, then. All we ask is your best effort. At the opening of tonight’s Compline I will assign you to keep vigil in the church through the night. When the day’s-end bell rings, leave the church and return here. You’ll be met. And you will not reveal this plan or what occurs to anyone, on pain of your immortal soul.”

“As you say, holy father.” I bowed my head, placing a clenched fist upon my breast in their sign of obedience. Then, gritting my teeth, I broached the direst topic. “I am assigned to read at Compline tonight.”

“I’ll have Nemesio postpone that until tomorrow.” He stood and lifted his black hood, so that his body lost definition in the dusk. “Iero’s grace be with you, Valen. Teneamus.”

“Wait! What does that—?” As he turned his back to my rising question and hurried away, I would have sworn I glimpsed a flicker of teeth that might have been a smile.

Chapter 14

The abbot had failed to mention that the “vigil” he planned to assign me was a penance for dozing in chapter. Because he announced this judgment at the opening of Compline, I was required to prostrate myself throughout the entire service, which left me in no great patience for meeting his friends. Perhaps he thought I would be grateful that he was permitting me to abandon the punishment at the day’s end bell, rather than staying in place until Matins. But as the cold, unyielding granite bruised my too-prominent bones, gratitude came nowhere to mind. I could not even rejoice in the postponement of my reading.

Once the monks had snuffed the candles and retired to the dorter, a great chilly silence fell in the church. The vigil lamp gleamed emerald from the high altar. Brother Victor lay on the floor to my right. He had arrived late for Compline and reaped the same penance as mine. The chancellor had a slight whistle in his breathing that prevented any sensible thinking. Had I actually to remain in place for the full span of this vigil, the sound would surely drive me mad long before the bells rang for Matins.

When the bell tolled the day’s end, the time for all activities to cease and the monks to take to their beds, I rose from the floor as quietly as I could. Brother Victor did not stir as I padded down the aisle. His presence would not be happenstance. That the chancellor would be part of the abbot’s little plot did not surprise me, but it did give me pause. Luviar had not only been willing to sacrifice strangers to his “worthier cause,” but had yielded his own partisan to lashing, imprisonment, and humiliation. Why did I not heed my own warnings about holy men?

I hurried through the hedge maze and returned to the bench by the neglected pond, vowing to detach myself from this conspiracy as quickly as possible. No good could come from mixing religion and politics. And who could be less equipped than I to get in a fight over books? Did they think to stave off some threat to Navronne with almanacs and treatises on glassmaking? Build a bulwark of books against Hansker raiders, perhaps? That might be a use for the wretched things.

Night birds twittered. The sad little scrap of moon vanished in the west. No one came. I was on the verge of giving up, when light, steady footsteps approached from the direction of the cloisters. Closer. Then heavier, louder steps came running from two other directions at once. I spun like a potter’s wheel, but before I could see who was in such a hurry, some cursed villain dropped a sack over my head.

“Gatzé’s whore!” I shot up from the bench, pawing at the bag. A hempen drawstring held the rough cloth tight around my neck. I dragged at the rope, but succeeded only in strangling myself. Dust clogged my nostrils. The bag scratched my face and blocked my mouth. Hot. Close. Choking. I could not yell. Could not breathe. Terror welled up inside me like molten lava. No light. No air. Buried…

I flailed my arms and tried to twist away. My right arm slammed into solid flesh, and my left elbow crunched bone hard enough to elicit a curse. Two outsized hands caught my wrists and pinned them hard behind me. “Here now, just be still, monk.”

Jerking my shoulders and torso back and forth, I tried to use my size to some advantage, but the harder I struggled, the tighter the rope constricted my neck.

“Stop! Wait! There’s no need for force,” someone called. Pointlessly. No brutes would heed a man who spoke so softly.

I snarled and dragged them sideways. Feet tangled hopelessly in my gown, I toppled, dragging a heavy body down on top of me. My arms were wrenched back and up.

“Sentinels of the dark, he’s broke my foot!”

“Half a madman…what’s wrong with ’im? Hold on…” A heavy someone sat on me.

“Silence, all of you!” The soft voice whispered from somewhere in the spinning darkness. “Don’t hurt him, Furz. Get up. What are you thinking?”

“You told us to get him to the camp without him seeing where.” This from the brute who was twisting my arms from their sockets while I wriggled like a dying fish in a mudhole. His voice rumbled through my back and aching shoulders. “We heard he might be a danger.”

“A danger? He’s a monk! Get off him, and don’t hurt him anymore. We just need silence.”

As the weight rolled off my back, I wrenched one hand loose and tore at the bag. Dug in my knees and scrabbled forward in the muddy grass. Tried to shake free of the hands. At any moment I was going to heave up my guts or die or both. I groaned and writhed.

“What, in all holy—? Iero’s grace, just be still, Brother Valen.” A new voice penetrated my skull like a bolt from a crossbow. Not loud, but very clear. “We’ll take off the bag, if you’ll but close your eyes and be silent. This is a terrible mistake. Do you hear me, Brother? Please, just be still, close your eyes, and we’ll take it off.”

Swallowing my gorge, I nodded and tried to be still. My heart galloped like a king’s post messenger; blood thundered in my ears. Just let me breathe. Were spiders swarming over me, I would have remained still on his promise. I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Furz, get it off him,” said the newcomer. “Would you, please?”

“They jumped him,” said the soft-voiced one in quiet anger. “They weren’t supposed to—”

The decisive man interrupted with tested patience. “You should have waited. I told you that Gildas and I would see to this.”

I did not hear the response, for the bag was snatched away just then. Cool air bathed my face as I craned my neck upward, gulping great mouthfuls. Soon I was breathing normally, and sensations beyond suffocation returned. Rocks gouged my belly. My shoulders burned. My chin stung. My left foot, caught in my gown, was bent at an angle the Creator did not intend. I shifted to ease the strain, but the hands only gripped my limbs tighter, and a heavy knee crushed my chest into the ground.

Was every untoward event in all the world linked to Brother Gildas? Perhaps the whispering villain was Jullian, who seemed to be in the thick of these sordid matters as well. Instinct screamed at me to look on my attackers, so I could identify them if I lived or curse them as I died, but this mindless terror of suffocation kept my eyes tight shut and my tongue silent. I lowered my cheek to the muddy grass and inhaled the sweet scent of earth.

What foolish thoughts run through our heads in times of fear and peril. My cowl and gown were heavy with mud, clinging to my skin. Brother Sebastian would scold. I had no spare garments yet, as my height meant they had to be made new. So rid yourself of this sodden wool and you’ll get a full breath, said my unbidden thoughts. Everywhere my bare skin touched earth—face, one knee and thigh—felt free. The earth embraced me, warm and alive and forgiving…

“Release him, Furz,” said the decisive man, no denizen of heaven or hell, but entirely human and standing over my head. “We’ll guide him to the camp ourselves.”

“It’s taken the two of us to hold him.” The thugs growled in concert. “You’re a fool to let him go. The blighting monk’s got a gatzé in him.”

“Did you never consider that a man attacked from behind and smothered with a grain sack might take offense—even a Karish monk? Please, do as I ask.”

The weight came off my back, and thick fingers released my wrists. I rolled to my side and curled my arms in front of me, thanking every god for the gifts of air and unbroken bones, promising anew to reform my ways. Slowly I sat up on my heels, unwilling to push my luck by standing up. The two brutes hovered close enough to block the breeze, and this man, though firm and confident, was not their commander. Too much politeness from him, asking and saying please. And from the brutes mere obedience, no honorifics or respect. Obedience was sufficient, but without respect, I’d not rely on it.

As my heart slowed, my flush of gratitude yielded to the more usual mix of emotions I felt after a fight—embarrassment and anger. For all my height and natural strength, I’d never developed much technique. I’d had no combat training when I was young enough to develop true skill. Pureblood families valued physical prowess like speed and strength, and refinements such as grace and agility, but they had no use for fighting skills. Only barbarians or madmen would dare assault a pureblood. The Registry saw to that.

“We’ve no wish to harm you, Brother,” said the man who had let me breathe, my friend forever. “Somehow these two became confused. They understood that we did not wish you to see where you were being taken and mistook our concern. I would explain why such secrecy is necessary, but that will be clear soon enough, and we need to move quickly. Someone might have heard your shout, and explanations would be awkward. So please understand this binding will be just for your eyes. Just your eyes.”

When the cloth touched my face, I came near rising bodily off the ground. But before I could lash out, I comprehended what he’d said. Only the eyes. Not nose or mouth.

The blindfold in place, the clear-voiced man clasped arms with me and helped me to my feet. Average in height, perhaps a head shorter than me by the sound and feel of him. “We’ve a goodly walk ahead of us. Will your leg wound be a hindrance?”

I spat mud, wiped my mouth on my sleeve, and shook my head.

“Please believe me, Brother, we’ve no ill intent.”

Such silliness required a response. I kept my voice as low as his. “Suffocating a fellow and twisting his limbs from their sockets is a poor introduction for those with good intents. Does the abbot know you treat his novices so?”

“Abbot Luviar will be extremely displeased”—as soon as he spoke, I felt his good humor, warm enough to dry my sodden cowl—“and I promise, we shall do our best to remedy our failing. One moment…”

Lighter footsteps came up on my left side—the whisperer. Their movements stirred up the faint scent of wintergreen.

“I am going to give your arm to my companion,” said my friend. “He will guide you safely to our meeting place, while I dispatch these two oxen back to our camp and make sure nothing like this happens again. I’ll join you before you begin.”

Smaller hands took a firm hold on my elbow and forearm. “Tell me if I go too fast.”

It occurred to me that I could snatch my arm from this one’s grip, rip the cursed rag from my face, and run away. I could tell Abbot Luviar that his friends had dreadful manners and I would not put up with them, not even to get my questions answered. But I didn’t. Once I could breathe, the whole business was altogether intriguing. Much more interesting than Compline texts or the structure of virtue.

My guide used my crooked arm as a rudder, leading me along the gravel path, northward I guessed, for the breeze which had veered southerly all week was at my back. We turned once, and then again, and the surface under my sandals became paving stone. Scents of incense and ephrain from my right and the bulk of stone told me when we passed the church. We changed direction, veering around it, and when we had gone far enough that the church no longer blocked the breeze from my cheek, the path began to rise. The wind smelled of fish and river wrack, tinged by coming frost. My companion smelled of horses and woodsmoke and something…

“Careful, the pavement’s broken.” And then, “Left.”

In the distance behind me, the abbey bell rang. One peal. The first hour past day’s end.

“Steps here,” said my guide, after a while. “Three downward, then stop for a moment.”

Stone steps, not squared paving. Older, then. Out of the way. When I halted, my arm was released. Iron clanked softly—a latch. Oiled hinges. The hands took my arm again and guided me through the gate. We crossed flowing water on a sturdy plank bridge and then took a dirt path. The terrain leveled out, the damp tendrils of fog yielded to a cold dry breeze, and my guide picked up the pace.

Strange to experience the night as a blind man must. Birds flapping away, disturbed from a nest in the grass. Scuttering creatures. Wet grass, stagnant pools. A loon crying out the world’s sorrow. The path had been well trod, a narrow trough in the turf, sticky mud in its bottom, its drier, sloping sides little wider than my big feet. So my guide’s feet must tread the grass, while I walked the path. Or perhaps…I listened. The light footsteps squelched and scuffed much as my own steps did. Ah, a cart track, then, two troughs parallel.

Pleased with that deduction, I turned my attention to the person beside me. Listened more. Felt the hand on my arm shift to get a better hold, one finger now touching the skin of my wrist. I remembered. Inhaled. Considered. Felt my face crease into a grin. “So, Squire Corin, does the Thane of Erasku know you’re a girl?”

She halted. Yanked her hands from my arm. Stepped away. Said nothing. If we hadn’t already startled the moorhens, the force of her shock might have done it.

“I’ve not had this tonsure my whole life, you know,” I said. “And the world is not kind to girls on their own, so you’re not the first I’ve encountered in youth’s attire.” The world was little kinder to boys on their own.

She held silent and left me standing in the middle of a stubbled grain field blindfolded, without anything to hold on to. I didn’t think I ought to reach for her. She was probably terrified enough already.

“I’ll say, you had me mightily confused until today. But cutting your hair off might help. The braid leads a man’s eye into thoughts of touching—Uh…my eye, that is. Perhaps not others.” I shut my mouth and held out my arm.

She grasped my wrist and elbow, more firmly than before, and strode out at a faster pace. We’d walked two hundred quercae before she spoke. “You’re wearing a blindfold.” Her unmuted voice was mellow and richly colored, more like a dulcian than a flute. I’d made a mistake. She was slight, certainly, but a woman grown, not a girl. “How did I give it away?”

I considered the evidence. “Well, you and your friends aren’t monks. And after the abbot’s talk with me, I didn’t think your party belonged to any of our unsavory princes. That meant you were either someone altogether new or the thane’s men…Well, all right, I guessed. As for you in particular…You whispered when you truly wanted to yell at those men. That was part of it. And you trusted a monk not to hurt you. Which meant you’ve clearly not been at the game too long—you mustn’t trust anyone. And even when I was…suffocating…whenever you spoke, I thought Jullian was with us, though I knew at the same time he wasn’t. You see, in the refectory I sit next to Jullian, whom I’ll assume you know, and Gerard, the other lad. You don’t—please, forgive me if I offend you—you don’t smell at all the same.” Excitement would have only worsened the boys’ ripe stink.

“I don’t smell—” She convulsed with laughter, as alive as the good earth around us. Only a moment; then she closed it all up again. “Sweet Arrosa, save me. Of all things.”

“I won’t tell anyone. But you should be careful. You’ll give yourself away.”

“Thane Stearc knows,” she said. “And Abbot Luviar and Brother Gildas.”

“Ah…and the secretary…Gram…that’s who else was back there in the gardens, right? He knows.” Brutes would care no more for the commands of sickly secretaries than for the commands of pretty youths. And I’d smelled wintergreen, a medicament used for all sorts of ailments.

“He knows,” she said. Her voice was well controlled, but she really shouldn’t be holding on to people’s arms if she wanted to keep secrets. I’d felt far less anger from the brutes pinning my wrists than from her slender fingers touching my sleeve.

“And disapproves, I’d guess,” I said.

“I cannot come to the abbey as a maiden. Saint Ophir’s Rule permits only vowed celibate women or matrons in company with their husbands to stay in their guesthouse. The abbot dares not except me, lest he be called to account. So I take on this loathsome disguise. If the thane grunts and growls a bit for allowing me to play his squire, so be it. I won’t be left out. And if Stearc and the abbot agree, the opinions of others do not matter.”

I dearly wanted to ask, Why does his opinion make you so angry, if it does not matter? And, Is his grunting and growling the only price the thane exacts from you? But she was cocked like a crossbow again. Best avoid such personal matters until I knew her better.

“As you can imagine, I am afire with curiosity about what I’m doing in the middle of the night with devious monks and mysterious maidens and people who insist I cannot look upon the lands of my home abbey. But Father Abbot bade me trust him, thus I’ve little hope of soothing that curiosity. So, another question…”

Abbot Luviar had declared himself neutral in the royal war. I doubted that, preferring to believe in his “deviant” support of a Pretender. Yet even if the child Pretender was wholly myth and Abbot Luviar but a skillful liar manipulating me in service of one of the three princes, I could not believe his chosen lord to be Osriel the Bastard. More and more I needed to understand what I had seen and felt in that unnatural assault on Gillarine.

“As you serve the Thane of Erasku, perhaps you could tell me something of Prince Osriel and his powers.”

She gasped as if I’d planted my fist in her gut. “Holy gods! How—? Why would you speak of him…the vile beast…the damned soul? Here in the night…when we are unprotected.”

She dragged me faster. Before I could ask what protection we might need, the path kicked steeply upward, as if a mountain had been roaming the fields and decided to plop itself at our feet like a friendly hound. A gust of wind swirled around us, billowing my damp cowl and flapping the hood in my face. Soon rocks gouged my feet. Roots. Evergreens. Moss. Where the devil were we? I could not imagine we’d come so far as the eastern ridge.

I stumbled, flailing in the dark.

“Careful…” She caught me before I fell and steadied me. Then she proceeded a bit slower. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. It’s just that Lord Stearc is his own man. My lord bows to no master who sets himself up to rival Magrog in his cruelties.”

“I didn’t mean to give offense. One of the brothers told me that Lord Stearc holds no allegiance to the Bastard Prince. I just assumed, since Erasku is an Evanori hold, you would know the truth of the cursed land and its sovereign. When he slaughtered the Moriangi at Gillarine, I saw such sights…faces in the night…”

“Even the land cannot compel loyalty to a monster like Osriel of Evanore.” She spat as if the very taste of his name poisoned her. “Everything you hear of him is true. He twists magic into depravity, taints all that is good in the world. I’ll not speak of him lest my tongue blacken and rot.”

We talked no more for a while. She was bound up in anger and fear and purpose. I was trying not to trip and crack my head on the shin-high rocks that seemed to have sprouted from the hillside like hedge beans.

As the path leveled out, and the air spoke of damp pine, a smoky fire, and horses nearby, my guide halted. She released my arm and reached around my neck, tugging my head downward. “Let me get this off of you. We’re almost there.”

As she untied the cloth binding my eyes, I inhaled deeply, her hair tickling my nose. No, nothing at all like Jullian. “Thank you,” I said most sincerely.

“For what? Allowing our thick-skulled bodyguards to suffocate you? Giving you a laugh at my inept playacting?”

“I had a pleasant walk in the nighttime and an interesting conversation. My head remains intact. And I smelled someone who was not Jullian.”

The cloth fell away. I blinked. Her hair shone bronze in the starlight. Her pale lips curved upward. And the eyes that gazed up at me…great gods…so deep…reflections of heaven…

“Come, Brother Valen.” A slight emphasis on the Brother.

The blood rushed from my tonsured head, and no logical thinking prevented it going where it had no place. Blessed goddess of love, what had I done to abjure such a gift, even for a season? I touched her cheek…cool, silken…and felt the heat rush to meet my finger. “Ah, mistress, you are…”

Her breath caught and held one moment, suspending my thought. I bent my head toward hers…

A distant bell chimed the half hour. She shuddered and jerked her head away. “Time runs, Brother. You must be back in the church by Matins.” Her voice was hoarse. She pulled up her hood and strode away. How had I ever thought her male?

The path led between a stony bank and a forested gully, curving sharply upward. Slightly dizzy, aching with a need far deeper than lust—which great vice had most certainly tainted my soul as well—I watched her move as we walked. Had she led me into a blazing forest or a raging torrent, I would have followed.

Chapter 15

The Thane of Erasku awaited us with the impenetrable solemnity of a standing stone, the smoke of the small campfire curling about his solidity like the telltales of midsummer sacrifice. His thick arms enfolded the solid, leathery bulk of my grandfather’s book. Behind him, away from the fire, a gaunt, dark-haired man tethered a horse beside two others—Gram, the lord’s sickly secretary. No guards, tents, pots, or baggage were in evidence. No Brother Gildas in evidence, either, which surprised me. Likely he was yet suffering the effects of the Harrower lashes. The bruising always got worse before it got better.

“I thought you would never come.” The lord was fair bursting with impatience.

“We were delayed at the abbey, sire,” said the woman. “My apologies.” She bowed to the thane, and then moved around the fire to join him without acknowledging the secretary.

I remained on the near side of the fire.

“I am Stearc of Erasku, Brother,” said the thane. “I presume you know that. You’ve not endured too taxing a walk? My lad guided you properly?”

I bowed. “Indeed he kept me on the straight-and-narrow path, sir. And I managed not to plague him to distraction with my questions, though they are legion. I was too busy trying to determine where on Iero’s good earth we were.”

“And were you successful?” No excessive pleasantries here. The intensity that had shivered me to my boots at my first glimpse of him had not diminished. He was every quat a warlord; it was more difficult to imagine him a scholar.

“I am turned hind end first, my lord. In a thorough muddle.”

“You look a thorough mess. Mud, scrapes. Corin, is the monk’s courtesy hiding some mistake of yours? If such simple squire’s duties are beyond you, I’ll put you back to mucking stalls.”

Woe to the man-at-arms who mistook this commander’s orders. Why would such a man ever permit a woman—? Ah! A flash of inspiration struck me. A step to the side, where fire and smoke could not obscure my vision, confirmed that the lord’s long braid took on a certain hint of bronze in the firelight. And the arch of their noses was identical. Sire, indeed.

The woman lifted her chin as if weathering a familiar gale. “I was unable—”

“My Lord Stearc, we suffered an unpleasant mishap tonight,” said Gram, as he joined the other two in the firelight. No mistaking his firm, rich tone. Hard to imagine my decisive savior from the hedge garden to be the frail secretary I had glimpsed being helped onto his horse at the guesthouse. “The two guards who accompanied Corin to fetch Brother Valen set upon him as if to make him a prisoner. Something in their orders charged them wrongly. I’ve restricted them to camp tonight in your name and will investigate thoroughly tomorrow. Surely this good brother’s generous and forgiving nature has brought him here after so rude a meeting.”

I pressed a knuckle to my mouth to muffle a snicker. Generosity and forgiveness would never have brought me so far. But curiosity…Every moment with this odd troop—all of them angles and edges and raw passion—left me more enamored of their puzzle.

“Is Gram’s assessment accurate, Brother?” Lie at your peril, Stearc’s tone warned.

“It is more Abbot Luviar’s influence that induced me to come, my lord,” I said. “He intimated that your interests were of great importance to Navronne, which, of course, makes them of great importance to any loyal subject. And these two gentlemen were most sincere in their apologies.”

He nodded. Not happy, but immediate fury tamed.

The secretary had a convincing way about him with lords, brutes, and novices alike. As if to cinch my good opinion, Gram offered me a skin of ale he’d brought from his saddlebags.

“Your abbot explained what we need from you?” The thane wasted no time.

I was still relishing the robust ale, wondering if Gram would notice if I drained the skin completely. Reluctantly, I replaced its plug, yielded it to the secretary with a grateful nod, and returned my attention to the lord. “Only that you wished me to demonstrate what I knew of using the Cartamandua maps, which, as I warned Father Abbot, is little enough. And that I am to keep silent about this company and its interests.”

“Good. We need not waste time with discussion. Sit here.” Stearc pointed to a fat log rolled near the fire and shoved the book into my arms. “Open to the marked page.”

I’d not expected to be treated as a schoolboy. Hackles bristling, I sat on the log and opened the book to a place marked with a scrap of leather. The map filled the broad right leaf of the open book. Its features had been meticulously drawn in red-brown ink and delicately washed with green and rose. The emerald-green-and-black border had an exotic pattern to it.

From the time I’d left the cradle, I had been taught the rudiments of maps: the concepts of distance and proportion, the common symbols, the uses of compass rose, cartouche, and key. I had trailed about Palinur in my father’s wake, marking straggling lines on tablets of wax, and pens and brushes had been stuffed in my hands as soon as I could hold them. The shapes and colors of maps had pleased my eye, and I liked to imagine that I could envision the grass and rock, cities and rivers they represented. But never was I taken on a journey of discovery beyond Palinur’s walls as my brother and sisters were, because I could not master the most mundane of a cartographer’s skills. I could neither write the names and distances, nor read nor write a traveler’s notes. Maps spoke with shape and color and symbols, but the key to their wonder was written words. Of which I had none.

“What is it you wish to know, my lord?” I asked, suppressing long-festered bitterness. “I never used this particular map when I served Mardane Lavorile.”

The thane stood over me like some oak tree out of Ardra’s ancient forests, craggy and thick and overpowering. “If you have used other maps from the book, then you should be able to use this one. We have brought you to a place that appears on this map. Here.” He placed a thick finger on an angular mark near the center of the map—a hill. “We wish to discover if you can find your way here.” His finger skipped to another spot on the far right-hand side of the page.

I gaped up at him. “Now? At night?”

He lifted his finger to reveal the symbol—a tiny waterfall—my grandfather’s common designation for a waterfall, pool, small lake, or any other watery landmark. The name lettered beside the feature would clarify which one it was.

“If you can invoke the guide spell properly, you should have no difficulty, day or night. The distance is not far. Your abbot promised you would make the attempt. So do it, or end this before we waste more time.” He crossed his great arms and did not blink, his disdain as odorous as a pigsty.

Could I do what he wanted? Without knowing its bounds and scale, I could not judge distance from this map. Nor could I invoke a spell I could not read nor even discover what kind of water I was looking for without deciphering its name. But I had wits and other skills, and the lord’s game posed a challenge interesting enough to overcome my distaste for the family business. For, certainly, this whole evening was a game. These fine conspirators had brought me here blindfolded, assuming I could not judge distance or direction from the abbey, believing that the moonless night would obscure paths and landmarks. I’d wager they had staged the attack, just to throw me out of sense before we began. They expected me to fail.

I touched the skin of my throat, abraded by their drawstring bag. They believed me a thick-skulled vagabond pikeman who had fooled a lord by pretending to use his magic book. Perhaps, with a touch of pureblood instinct and magic, I could do exactly that.

Leaning closer to the blazing firelight, I examined the map—a simple fiché—more closely. Somewhere in its tangled mysteries of words, numbers, and symbols, a fiché would reveal place names and distances, compass headings, landmarks, and obstacles to travel. This particular map detailed a countryside of forested hills, a river and its side streams, one town and three villages, a few cart roads and common walking paths. A solicale designated some Karish landmark. Other symbols I was less sure of. Each mark had a neatly lettered name that could place it in this valley or far Estigure for all I knew. Dangling from the solicale was the impish aingerou my grandfather sketched into every map.

So start with the solicale. It must certainly represent the abbey. We had walked briskly for perhaps an hour to get to this starting point. That gave me an idea of distance and proportion. And we had walked northeastward, in the main, more east than north; I closed my eyes and remembered the wind teasing my right cheek and the shaven patch on my head, a frost wind from the south. Only when we started climbing had we changed heading back and forth a number of times, but no matter, for I had but to follow the path back down to the base of the hill. The night was clear, so I could use Escalor, the guide star, to get my bearing. If the direction from the abbey to this hill was northeast, then the watery spot they wished me to find would be southeast, half again the distance we had come—leaving a conveniently short return to the abbey for a novice who must be prostrate on the church floor by Matins.

“So, can you do it?” Stearc had his hands on his hips.

“I believe I can, my lord. I suppose you would not consider telling me what I’m looking for or why this is so important?”

“You’ve no need to know more.” For certain this man had not approved me for the task. Well, let him watch.

Making a great show, I placed my finger on the mark for this hill, drew it downward toward the abbey, and then across the page till I touched a walking path of the sort oxherds used to lead their beast carts to market or villeins might tread to field or woodland. Following the lines of path and road as far as they would take me, southerly through the fields and easterly into the hills of the valley wall, my finger traced a reasonably direct route to the water symbol. I noted the orange flame mark of Deunor along the way—likely a roadside shrine to the Lightbringer. Three short lines marked a dolmen, and near it lay two small arcs that told of burial mounds. That should give me enough. I closed the book.

“Will you not speak the invocation, Brother?” Stearc’s skepticism rang clearly.

“When I used the book before, I always read the spell words silently, my lord. I thought to follow the same practice here…” I paused, all innocence, as if expecting him to contradict me.

He did not, which confirmed another suspicion. He’d had the book from the abbot—which explained its absence from the library—and he had tried to use it himself without success. Why else would he waste this time on an unlikely prospect such as me?

“We should be off then,” I said, placing the book into his hands and suppressing a grin, “unless you wish me to go alone and find my way back here to report.”

“No need for you to return. We’ll know if you succeed.” His great jaw snapped shut. I was dismissed.

I bowed. “My lord. Gentlemen.”

As I walked down the path the woman and I had ascended, the three of them stood beside their fire, watching me. I assumed they would follow or ride out to catch me near the end. Or perhaps the thane had his own pureblood or a mage to observe me from a distance or who had set some magical beacon to announce my success. As to what waited at the end, a place no ordinary map could take them, my curiosity outweighed my caution. The abbot did not want me dead.

At the bottom of the hill I sought southeast, keeping the guide star on my left, and holding a balance between winter sunrise and the mountains of Evanore to the south. I knelt as if to relace my sandal. Touching fingertips to the earth, I spilled but a fragment of magic into the simple seeking, hunting a route to a sheep path and a roadside shrine dedicated to Deunor Lightbringer. A spare image resolved in my head, a simple pattern laid upon the landscape.

Once sure of my course, I set out across the open country. Even if someone was watching me, I doubted they could hear, so I sang the fifty verses of “The Doxy and the Bandit” as I walked, imagining clasping Corin’s slender waist as I spun her dizzy. Earth’s mother, what was her true name? Why hadn’t I asked?

Deunor’s shrine was little more than a chipped and gouged body, missing one arm, its head, and privy parts. The stones of the altar had been carted away, and the astelas vines that twined every shrine of the elder gods had been dug up. Country folk thought boiled astelas roots made a man virile. I’d no need for that unless this pestilential drought went on too long and my body forgot its dearest pleasures. Near three months had gone since I’d lain with a woman, and here the night air felt like velvet on my skin. Another brief seeking at the split of a path and I angled northerly again toward the dolmen and burial mounds.

The table stones and barrows were only dark outlines against the stars to the north. And just beyond them, the track branched three ways instead of the two marked on the map—assuming I had come to the right place so far. Instinct sent me down the southernmost, the oldest branch, judging by the myriad layers of feet that had trod there. As the map had suggested, the path petered out in the slopes of patchy grass and rock at the base of the craggy ridge east of the valley.

Now came the most difficult part—to find the water source in these trackless hills. A hint as to its nature would have been useful. With no more paths made magic by centuries of feet, and no sure destination, this seeking would require more power.

I scanned the horizon in a full circle. As far as starlight and good eyesight could tell me, no one watched. Kneeling on the rough ground, I closed my eyes and laid my palms on the earth. The wind blustered over and around me, scouring away the barriers of distraction and wariness, allowing my magic to flow freely. Where is it?

Images of pools and wells and bubbling springs passed through my mind, but none held for that one moment that proved it true. A little more…

I laid my forehead on the earth and released another fragment of power, expecting the pattern to resolve as it had earlier. My instincts would tell me the way. But before I knew it, I had pushed up my sleeves, hiked up my gown, and lay prostrate as I had been in the church a few hours earlier, bared arms spread. Instead of masonry and gilding, the dome of stars rose above my head, and beneath me lay the cool damp earth.

As I inhaled the scent of dirt and rotting grass, the boundaries of stars and flesh and earth dissolved. Worms burrowed beneath me, and ground beetles ticked their wings in their holes. A hare breathed anxiously in its den. Clouds drifted across the patterned stars above me, tickling the wool layers on my back. Far below, water trickled…deep…

Strip off these prisoning garments…touch skin to earth and air…feel the night’s embrace…reach through the welcoming earth to find the water… Against the urgency of these demands—spoken in the language of mind and flesh and bone—only some remnant thread of present sense kept me clothed. But the rest…

Reach…feel…embrace. Open your mouth…taste stone and stars…inhale the night…listen… I plunged my hand deep…felt the gritty loam give way…dry sand and pebbles graze my knuckles…until I touched the sweeter moisture…the secret places…the pulsing flow of life that told of moving water, deeper yet.

A bell pealed in the distance—a sonorous touch of bronze borne on the breeze. I jerked my head off the ground and rose up on my elbows. What had happened here? My heart raced like a fox at the hunt. I shook my head. Sat back on my heels and examined one bare arm to assure myself that it was not covered with dirt or crawling with beetles and worms from plunging it through the earth. Felt a rush of heat across my skin as I realized I was more than halfway roused in altogether unlikely ways, as had happened on the journey back from Elanus. Fires of heaven…chastity was making a madman of me.

I forced my thoughts back to business. The bell signaled another hour gone. How many since day’s end? I needed to head northeasterly again, for the water that trickled under this spot fed the abbey spring and its source lay in the ridge ahead of me. Though no overlaid image dwelt in the forefront of my mind, my body understood perfectly which way to go now, in the same way my blood knew which direction to flow in my veins. I scrambled to my feet, hurried across the barren field, and pretended I was not shaking.

The upward path was far too steep for this late of an evening. After so many days of idleness in the abbey, my body protested at the climb. My route had taken me up a treeless jumble of granite that scarred the eastern wall of the valley, a desolate crotch in the otherwise verdant ridge. No direct path. No easy ascent. I scrambled between boulders and across tilted slabs, cursing gowns and cowls and sandals. My sore feet kept skidding out from under me. Every slip meant whacked knees or elbows, abrading the skin through the woolen layers of hose and gown.

A glance over my shoulder for the tenth time in an hour and I yet spied no one following. I climbed.

At least another hour had passed, which meant perhaps one more remained until the brothers filed back into the church for Matins. I could just imagine Prior Nemesio’s glee at discovering a novice so ill-behaved as to abandon a penance. Poor Brother Sebastian; my mentor would be beside himself. And even if I broke my word and told them of the evening’s events, I would never be able to explain why I had taken on such a fool’s errand when the simple truth could have stopped it. The puzzle was just such an intriguing exercise, and Lord Stearc had been so sure I couldn’t solve it.

At the top of yet another slab, the rocks formed a wide shelf, backed up to a higher cliff. Behind me the valley of Gillarine, shaped by the sinuous hints of silver that were the looping river, stretched southward toward the mountains of Evanore and northward toward the heart of Ardra, Morian, and the distant sea. The abbey church spires rose out of the gently folded land to the southwest.

I was nearing the end of this journey. Instinct said to go south along the shelf rock and then straight east…which would mean directly into the cliff. I moved slowly, examining the rugged wall as I went, searching for cracks or splits or caves.

A short distance away an oddly shaped shadow detached itself from the wall. “Iero’s grace, Brother Valen, how was your evening’s walk? Not too troubling, I hope, despite its unsettling beginning?”

Fear burgeoned and stilled quickly. No matter that the only light was the dome of stars. I could mistake neither the pale gleam of hairless scalp nor the dark brow line nor the cool presence, spiced and warmed by good humor.

“Brother Gildas, the spider who sits in the web of all Gillarine’s mysteries. Of course, you would be here.” Would I ever learn to think? Of course, they’d have someone waiting at the end. They were testing me.

“I knew you would enjoy this puzzle,” he said cheerfully, “being a man of puzzles as you are.”

“You’re all right…healing?” Only days had passed since his encounter with Sila Diaglou’s whip.

“Thanks to you, I live. My scabs and bruises do but remind me—deservedly so—of my shame at falling victim so easily. So, can you finish this?”

I stepped toward him deliberately, continuing my examination of the wall. “Here.” A darker line creased the shadowed cliff halfway between us, a seam in the rock wider than first glance showed, a high-walled passage that sliced directly into the cliff.

I led, forcing myself to keep breathing until both the slotlike passage and my search ended. The cliff walls opened into a small grotto—a well of starlight, the circle of sky above it reflected perfectly in a glass-still pool, incised in stone.

As I paused in the doorway where the walls of the notch flared into the encircling stone, a movement atop the cliffs snared my gaze. Something bright. Something blue. But staring until my eyes felt raw revealed naught but stars. Perhaps one had slipped from its place and streaked toward the earth. A warning of evil times, diviners said.

Brother Gildas had joined me and stood at my shoulder. “Powers of night, you’ve done it,” he said softly. Wondering. “Ah, Valen, there is more to you than people think.”

He stepped past me and spun in place, scanning walls and cliff tops before walking to the rim of the pool. Even as he knelt and reached out to touch the water, I wanted him to stop. No sensible argument came to my lips, only that this was no common pool to be used in common ways. Something slept here. Power? Spirit? The generous earth itself? “Brother, wait—”

Too late. The rippling rings moved outward, marring its perfection. Gildas downed the water from his cupped hands and looked up at me, smiling. “Come, have a drink. You’ve earned it.”

Foolish. Nothing had happened. Clearly he sensed nothing out of the ordinary.

“I don’t drink water,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. He’d think me mad if I told what I felt here. “Don’t trust it. And unless you can dispense me from my penance, I must get back to the church.”

In fact, I could not have stepped within that grot were he fallen in the pool and drowning. Smell, taste, hearing, sight…my senses, of a sudden, quivered on the brink of explosion. My heart swelled with songs just beyond hearing, with words beyond knowing, with the desolation of a homely street where every door is locked to you or of winter sunset in the wild, when no hearth, no word, no welcome awaits. One step past the doorway and surely I would be flat on the granite, my skull cracked, my heart riven, as if I’d walked into the cloister garth fifty times over. Yet the sorrow that permeated these stones surpassed what a murdered youth of sixteen years could possibly know. This sleeper was not Brother Horach.

Gildas sighed and wiped his hand on his cowl. “I suppose you’re right. We’ve a distance to go yet before we can each put our secrets to rest. But you ought to come see the water. It’s so deep. So lovely. So pure.”

I dragged my gaze from the pool, shivering as if I’d plunged my whole body into its frigid depths. Oh, yes, I knew that water was cold. I did not have to see the frost crystals that rimed the pool’s edge to know. So little sunlight here. The encircling walls so like a prison cell.

“Are you well, Valen?”

Pressing my back and the back of my head against the wall of the passage, I closed my eyes. As if all at once, the activity of the night took its toll: scrapes and bruises, blistered feet, overstretched shoulders. The few quellae back to Gillarine might have been the road to heaven that practors and hierarchs told us was nigh impossible. And something else…deep inside my gut…a knot of fire. Blessed Deunor, no! With all that had happened…this new life…I’d scarce given it a thought. A night bird’s screech near ripped my ears. “Must get back,” I said. “The time…”

I fled, scrabbling back down the ridge, bumping, sliding, scraping on the rocks. More was wrong than mystic pools and overzealous bodyguards and wild chases through the night. The scalding in my gut did not cool. How long had it been? Five days since my investiture. Twelve…thirteen before that to Black Night, and one more…holy gods, nineteen days…and the last interval had been twenty-one.

The trek back to the abbey devolved into nightmare, my need quickly overshadowing the mysteries of the night. The garden maze, the green pouch tucked away under the rocks, the fragrant contents…Great Iero, let no one have found it. Let the Matins bell not ring until I am whole again. I had no idea how I was to manage it, but my growing frenzy to have the blood-spelled nivat in my hand…on my tongue…in my veins…permitted no logic or forethought.

Though as fit as any of the younger monks, Gildas could scarce keep up with me. “What’s wrong, Brother? One would think the Adversary dogged your back. Would we all had such long legs as yours to devour a quellé so swiftly.”

“I’ve been too long distracted from my prayers,” I said. “And I’d rather not have occasion to visit the prior’s prison cell. Though Father Abbot sent me on this mad venture, I’ve seen enough to know he’ll not shield me from punishment.”

I could not speak after that. My cramping legs and back threatened to seize if I slowed. By the time we reached the footbridge and the abbey wall, the threads of fire encompassed every part and portion of my body. The starlight scalded my eyes. I drew my cloak across my face, for the wind felt like a flayer’s knife.

Brother Gildas unlatched the iron herdsman’s gate, but laid a hand on my arm before I could rush through. It was all I could do not to cry out, for his touch felt like a gatzé’s fiery kiss even through the woolen layers. “He’ll not punish you, Valen. Tonight’s exercise was of great importance—Iero’s work. You performed better than any of us could hope. You will reap answers to the questions that tease you.”

Sadly, his concerned kindness could not soothe me. “I must…clean myself…before going to the church. Excuse me, Brother.” The mere effort of speaking caused spasms in my face and neck. I pulled away and ran across the field, past the church, and into the garden.

Where…where…? Beside the statue of Karus as the Shepherd…Divine Karus…good Iero…Kemen, Lord of Sky and Storm, help me. I dropped to my knees and scrabbled in the pile of rocks beside the statue’s base, frantic when I found only dirt. I had used my bent to create a void hole to hide my contraband packet here on the night I’d come from Elanus. Had I forgotten so much of magic that I had displaced or vanished them by mistake? I dug deeper until my fingers felt the cloth roll. Using my shoulder to wipe the sweat from my eyes, I rummaged inside the packet and grasped the little bag. I almost wept in thanksgiving.

I shoved dirt and rocks into some semblance of their usual aspect, tucked the green bag into my trews, and raced through the gardens past the lay brothers’ reach. Though desperate, I dared not cross the cloister garth, but rather sped down the west cloister and around the south in front of the kitchen and refectory, cursing the waning hour. At every moment I expected to hear the bells.

The trough ran around three sides of the lavatorium, angled slightly so the water would flow left to right. Each of the six shallow bays on each wall formed a semicircular shelf behind the trough, and from the center of each bay protruded a lead conduit that spilled water into the trough. I chose the bay nearest the cloister to take advantage of what little light the night provided. I removed my cowl and laid it on the shelf, as if preparing to clean it. Then I fumbled the green pouch out from under my gown and spilled half my remaining nivat onto the wide outer lip of the trough.

Everything took too long. The seeds were old and tough; I chipped another shard from my precious mirror fragment, using it to crush them on the stone. My fingers were cold and clumsy. I dropped the needle and had to scrabble on the stone floor to find it. It was near impossible to grasp the linen thread, and when at last the mixture of blood and nivat sizzled, I had to fumble with the glass to find an angle where I could see the vapors.

As soon as I released magic into the brew, I knew I hadn’t enough. Holy gods, what a fool I’d been. To spend my magic so recklessly on Luviar’s game. To lose count of the days. Bent over the trough to hold the mirror and the thread steady, my back, leg, and shoulders cramping until I was near weeping, I squeezed the last magic from my body and let it flow down the linen thread. And still the vapors would not cease their rising and signal the doulon ready.

As if taking voice from my fears, the bell pealed. I held my breath with the first tone, yet my weariness told the lateness of the hour. The next strike came and the next, until the ten measured strikes that signaled the call to services had been completed. The noise threatened to burst my ears, as if I stood in the bell chamber itself. Then rang the triple change, double, and triple that announced the beginning of a new day. The yawning monks would be donning gowns and cowls and sandals and starting their procession through the passage to the nightstair. And still the pungent vapors rose from the boiling nivat. The finished paste should hold no scent.

In the dorter passage above my head, the monks began to sing, tugging at my spirit with their music. Their music. Not mine.

I could wait no longer. I scooped the red-black droplets onto my tongue. As I braced my hands on the trough, my head dropped to hang between my shoulders. The first shuddering pain rolled through me…

Not enough. Not enough. Sobbing, I slammed my elbow into the stone trough, hoping more pain might jolt the spell into completion. Nothing. Again. Again…

As in famine times, when the crust of bread or sip of ale blunts the most acute hunger, but leaves the want and sickness, such was the incomplete doulon. The fire cooled; the cramps eased; the storm of my senses quieted. But I gained no release. No rapture. Every muscle and sinew ached. My veins felt clogged with clay. Only a few days—a fortnight at most—and I would have to do this all again, spend my reserve of nivat because I’d been shamed at my ignorance and determined to prove that I, the most useless of men, could accomplish what some proud lord could not. Now I would pay.

Exhausted and sick, I splashed the cold water onto my face and head, scrubbed at my hands and arms. Hurry! I packed away the needle, the mirror, and linen thread and tied the bag’s drawstring to the waist string of my trews. Then I threw on my cowl and ran for the church, brushing at the caked mud and dirt as I ran. As the procession descended the nightstair and entered the church, filling the vaults with songs of the Creator’s glory, I flew down the aisle and through the choir screen, and threw myself prostrate on the cold marble. Brother Victor had not moved.

Chapter 16

A storm rolled through the valley sometime between Lauds and Prime, bringing sleet and bitter cold—a miserable morning, highly appropriate for a day that had begun so wretchedly and got only worse. A few hours’ sleep had healed my bruises and blisters and soothed my torn and battered elbow, but done nothing for the doulon sickness. Plagued by both the indolence the spell always caused and the blood fever it had only dulled, I fell asleep in choir during both morning Hours.

Brother Sebastian pulled me aside after Prime to scold me for inattention, expressing shock at my bedraggled clothes. He dragged me to the lavatorium to clean them as best I could, and then sentenced me to kneel in the center aisle of the dorter clad only in shirt and trews. I was to pray and contemplate Iero’s gift of clothing while the rest of the brothers ate their bread and cheese and attended morning services. By the time he permitted me to don my damp gown and cowl for chapter, my blood felt like slush.

Matters worsened. Once my mentor had chastised me in front of the entire brotherhood, Prior Nemesio offered his own scathing reprimand and decided that my punishment should continue until the day’s end bell. No church services. No meals. No work or study. No gown or cowl. That this also meant no testing on the great virtues and no Compline reading was scarcely a comfort.

A somber Abbot Luviar approved the sentence. Brother Gildas raised his brows and shrugged ever so slightly. Jullian, sitting on his low stool by the door, would not look at me. I longed to strangle them all, though, in truth, anger was as difficult to muster as anything else.

The hours in the dorter passed in frigid misery. I tried to think, to make some sense of my experiences of the previous day, to sing under my breath, to plan where I would go when spring released me from this tomb. Sleep was impossible, but neither would my blood run anywhere useful like my head or my knees. So much for trust. Perhaps Luviar wanted me dead of frostbite so I could not betray his friends.

How stupid could a man get when his balls ruled his head? Why hadn’t I just grabbed the book when it was in my hands and set out for Elanus? But instead I’d had to strut my manhood like a gamecock.

I shifted my knees, wincing with the ache. Damnable baldpates. Boreas had been right about them. Boreas…by the dark spirits…

Once the gruesome image of his end took hold of my head, I could not shake it. What kind of woman could do such work? What kind of perverse soul could name it holy? As the memory churned inside my head alongside the night’s mad adventure and the bizarre sensations I had experienced at the pool, I could not but recall Brother Horach’s equally savage murder. Could a Harrower have decided that innocents should die as well as sinners and sneaked into the abbey to work their deviltry? With orange-heads roaming the neighborhood, it could happen again.

Brother Sebastian visited me at least once an hour to counsel and preach. On the next occasion, I interrupted a sermon on rooting out the vice of carelessness and tried to explain about Boreas and Harrower rites and Brother Horach. I had scarce begun when he stopped me, insisting I must refrain from worldly thoughts for the duration of my penance. As he left me alone again, I damned him and the rest of his fraternity to their fate.

By the time the bells rang Vespers, wind raked and rattled the dorter shutters and raced through the long room. Three more hours. I feared I would be unable to move when day’s end came, either from hunger or freezing. On his last visit Brother Sebastian had left a rushlight to hold off the dark. With aching knees and back, and incipient chilblains, I had no gratitude in me.

A quiet rustling at my back did not even prompt me to turn around. Probably Brother Sebastian again to tell me how sorry he was that I needed this kind of lesson. But to my surprise a mug appeared in front of my face, wreathed in steam and cupped in the small dry hand of Brother Victor. “Quickly, Brother Valen, you are wanted elsewhere for a little while.”

I would like to have said that, although hell would be a pleasant change, I would prefer to freeze than dance to his abbot’s command, but my lips were so numb I was saved from such an indiscretion. My trembling hands wrapped around the deliciously warm cup, and I drained the thing without taking a breath. “I don’t think I can do anything quickly, Brother Chancellor.”

He offered me the pile of black wool he carried over one arm. “I would suggest you try. We’ve only until the end of Vespers.”

The still-damp wool felt marvelous. And blessed hose to cover my legs. My numb fingers fumbled with ties and laces. Soon I was following Brother Victor down the passage, shaking out my legs to get the blood flowing.

Our sandals echoed in the deserted library. I could not imagine why we’d come. “Wait here,” said Brother Victor, and he disappeared into the corner beyond the last book press. The wind drove sleet against the window mullions. Ardran autumn usually waxed dry and golden. Landlords and villeins alike would be frantic to gather in what crops had ripened in this perverse season. Perhaps the bowl of the sky had slipped farther out of place.

A brief explosion of yellow light, brighter than ten lamps together, assaulted my eyes. A hiss and a snap, and the chancellor stepped into view again, little more than a shadow in my flash blindness. He beckoned me to join him. In the corner where I had ever seen blank walls—the same corner where Abbot Luviar had appeared so suddenly on my first visit—a doorway now opened onto a descending stair. From a hook on the wall, just inside it, the chancellor took a burning lamp. Or rather the implement he held appeared to be a lamp, and it appeared to be burning, though only cream-colored light, no flame, shone through its clear panes. Blessed saints and angels… Sorcery. In a house where magic working was forbidden. My feet dragged.

“Come on,” said the chancellor as I hesitated, beset by visions of dungeons and flaming depths.

“This isn’t where the hierarch sent you? To be punished?”

He puzzled for a moment. “Oh. The prison cell? Certainly not. Why would I take you there?”

“To improve my character?” I mumbled.

He didn’t smile.

We descended two long flights of steps, which by my reckoning left us deep in the earth under the scriptorium. My throat tightened. I reminded myself of Brother Victor’s only until the end of Vespers to convince myself that I could breathe in such a confined space. So deep.

Brother Victor halted when we reached a wide door at the bottom of the steps. Intelligent, inscrutable, he peered up at my face. “Father Abbot says he trusts you. That must certainly be true, as he commanded me to show you this without informing others of our party who have less confidence in your usefulness and character. I take no sides in that dispute as I’ve so little personal experience of you. I obey my abbot. But I’ll warn you that no one will find the doorway or this stair were you to tell of them.”

“I understand.” Perhaps the opening was hidden by an illusion spell, but I’d wager that an ax applied to the library wall would find the stair.

He pushed open the door and held it to let me enter.

“Blessed saints and angels!” My feet propelled me to the center of a chamber half the size of the church. There I spun like the axis of a wheel, my neck craned so I could view the dome of light above my head. Great ribbed arches of gray stone supported curved wedges of colored mosaic—brilliant, though, as if the bits were glass. Yet I had never seen glass laid in such a shape. And though I stood deep below the earth, the mosaic of light shone as bright as if the sun lay tucked between the dome and the scriptorium floor above it, casting a gentle clarity on the marvels that lay below. For the dome was but the magical capstone on more earthly wonders.

Books, first. The walls of the rectangular chamber, three or four times my height, were lined with shelves, not full, but holding more books and scrolls than I would have believed existed in all the world. Yet this library held much more than books. Ranks of tall cabinets lined the floor with only narrow aisles between. These cabinets, faced with grillwork doors very like the cupboards in the library, held tools—here the needles, spools, thimble, and scissors of a seamstress, there the common hammers, chisels, augers, and gouges of a stonemason. An entire cabinet was filled with a carpenter’s tools, another with a physician’s instruments. None of the individual items seemed extraordinary. Most appeared well used, though clean or oiled and generally well cared for.

I moved faster through the array, fascinated more by the breadth of the collection than the items themselves. Two doorways opened off the great chamber, one a mere closet, lit by the spilled light of the glass dome. A rope bed, piled with a rolled palliasse and folded blankets, and an old writing desk had been shoved up against stacked barrels and crates.

But the other, much wider doorway opened into a second domed chamber as large and beautiful as the first. By this time I was scarcely surprised to see a plow, a wheel and axle from a cart, millstones, a lathe, a loom, a potter’s wheel, and other, larger artifacts standing in neat rows on the floor. On the shelves that lined the walls from floor to ceiling, sat row after row of labeled sacks, earthenware pots, and glass jars. What would they hold? Food? Herbs? Potions?

No…the tools were for building and making and creating. The books would be for knowledge and understanding. For remembering. For beginning. The pots would hold seeds.

I turned back. From across the chamber by the outer door, Brother Victor watched with sober interest, his hands loosely folded at his waist.

Some of the pieces came together then. Luviar’s grand mosaic of war and famine and storm. The books on glassmaking, and drawings of millworks, and records of vineyards that no longer produced grapes. Were cuttings of grapevines preserved in these bags or jars? Surely those who could create domes of light and a door that opened with magic so powerful it stood my hair on end could preserve a living vine. Teneamus—we preserve. For the dark times. For the long night.

I gazed up at the shining dome, majestic in its beauty and magic. A promise of hope. “You call this the lighthouse,” I said.

The chancellor dipped his head in acknowledgment.

What was happening to the world? How did they know? What was the connection with my book of maps? I could not even choose where to begin.

“Come. Vespers will be ending soon.”

“But I’ve so much to ask.”

“In time, Brother Novice. Should you prove faithful, you’ll be told all. For now, I pray you be worthy of Father Abbot’s trust.”

“Of course. Certainly. I won’t say anything. Not to a soul.” Who would believe me?

Before I knew it, I was kneeling in the dorter again, shivering in shirt and trews. Save for the taste of leek broth in my mouth and the vision of light in my head, I might have thought the grand library a dream brought on by hunger and cold and a broken doulon. Nothing in my experience or imagination could have conjured such a place.

I dismissed my pique at the monks’ annoying discipline and spent the next two hours formulating questions to ask were I given the opportunity. I speculated on how the magic of the lighthouse was done and who in this place might have done it—the mysterious pureblood monk?—and I considered what I would have chosen to preserve were I stocking a magical lighthouse to sustain me beyond the end of the world.

I was almost sorry when the day’s end bell rang and good Brother Sebastian laid a blessing of forgiveness on my head and a blanket on my shoulders. Almost. As I hobbled off to bed, I thought my knees might gleam blue and purple in the dark—as tales described the enchanted sigils of the Danae when they walked the wild places of the world.

“All right, it was Father Abbot’s little surprise got me near dead from suffocation, not yours. But my skull will surely crack if you don’t relieve some of my curiosity.”

Jullian and I had met in the hedge garden after supper on the day following my long punishment. Though the maze still had me twitching at every noise, expecting grain sacks to be dropped on my head, it was the only place we could talk for any length of time. My Compline reading had been reset for this night, and gods bless the boy forever, he had fulfilled his promise to read it to me. Now, as we lingered in the gathering dark, I was trying to nudge the boy into some further revelation of Luviar’s conspiracy without breaking my promise. My immortal soul could not afford the burden of an abbot’s wrath. Sadly, I was having no luck at all.

“I’m sworn, Brother. Please, don’t ask me. I can say only that the abbey is neutral ground.”

So earnest in his honor. If he knew that I’d spent the time before his arrival stuffing my last supply of nivat into the parcel under Karus’s statue, he would run from me like one of these plaguey rabbits. Had these conspirators stored nivat in their lighthouse? The sudden thought cheered me past the point of sense. If I could only ensure a supply, I could stop thinking about this damnable curse altogether. I’d just have to discover how to get into the place.

“Tell me more of Palinur,” said Jullian, reverting to his favorite topic of conversation. “I can’t imagine such a grand city. Are there truly statues of every one of the Hundred Heroes set before the king’s palace? Though I know Grossartius is but legend, because Iero sends our souls to heaven or hell and not back to mortal bodies, he is my favorite of the Hundred. Is he quite large and well muscled? I’ve always imagined him bigger than Brother Robierre and taller even than you.”

A west wind had brushed away the previous day’s storm and left the evening astonishingly pleasant. Time yet remained before Compline, and I wasn’t ready to go indoors.

“I’d much rather talk of why, in all that’s holy, this flock of mad monks and gruff lords shares their secrets with a talkative boy of twelve-almost-thirteen.” While babbling freely of his studies and abbey life, the stubborn little donkey would speak nothing of his raising beyond what he’d told me in the library. “It speaks highly of your character. And, of course, Brother Sebastian says you are the brightest scholar ever to study here. You’ve much to be proud of—”

“You’ve heard it wrong! I’m not half the scholar Brother Gildas is. And Gerard is far more holy, for I’m so easily distracted when I think of what I’ve read and the adventure tales you’ve told us. I do talk too much, and I’m wholly untrustworthy, for I’ve told you more than I should already. The moment I’m sixteen, I’m going to take a vow of silence!”

So soon after our study of the great vices, I should have known better than to use the word proud. Truly, if he were Eodward’s child, I didn’t think he knew it.

I ceased probing and soothed his worries about excess pride and boyish sins with a lurid saga about Grossartius the Revenant’s return from the dead to serve King Caedmon. The bells began to strike. He jumped up as if a gatzé’s tail poked him from underneath. “We need to go.”

I sighed and unfolded myself from the bench. “Indeed. Brother Sebastian will have my skin if I’m late. My knees won’t survive more penance.”

The boy giggled. “I heard you made a sight, kneeling there in just shirt and trews all day. Brother Jerome said you were as blue as a jay and looked as if you might eat your sandals.”

I stuck my foot and its unchewed sandal out before us. “Thanks to holy Iero, no need for that.”

My Compline reading went very well, though I realized afterward that I had opened the page for two days previous—the page with the geese—and not the one I was reciting. Fortunately no one looked over my shoulder. Several of the brothers offered congratulations and kind words as we left the church. Brother Gildas stood last in the short line.

“You did very well for your first service reading,” he said, as we strolled companionably through the upper passage toward the dorter, anticipating the day’s end bell. “A bit stiff, perhaps, but practice should improve you. You are a man of many talents, Valen.”

Why did he keep saying that? It bothered me that he might be one of those who had less confidence in my “usefulness and character,” as Brother Victor had put it.

“So are you going to tell me what I was punished for?” I said softly enough that no one else could possibly hear. “My knees would very much like to know.”

“Soiling your clothes? Sleeping at services?” The good brother grinned cheerfully.

Such a friend could drive a saint to drink. “The grain sack was your idea, wasn’t it? To get me thoroughly muddled before your test.”

“I’m truly sorry for that,” he murmured, clasping his hands piously at his breast, looking straight ahead, and picking up the pace. “I had no idea it would distress you so.”

“Thus you owe me an apology—a favor.” I ducked my head lower and scarcely moved my lips. “And you know what I want: What does that puddle in the hills have to do with preserving knowledge and Evanori warlords and three—or is it four—royal princelings?”

“We cannot discuss such things here. Father Abbot warned you. I understand you’ve been given some enlightenment.” His mouth shaped the beginnings of a smile.

I wanted to kick him.

“Father Prior will surely assign you more readings after tonight, Brother Valen.” He spoke more boldly as we neared the library door. “As you succeed in your assigned tasks, you earn more trust…and more tasks. As it happens, Brother Chancellor has received word of a book of Aurellian poetry that might be available to borrow from a lord down near Caedmon’s Bridge. Brother Adolfus is to travel there tomorrow. Father Abbot says that, as a man so recently of the world, you might be of use in the negotiation.”

Oh, no. No more traveling with the abbot’s friends. No more of this conspiracy business. I hated being their ignorant pawn.

“As much as I appreciate our brothers’ trust, the god teaches me constantly of humility,” I said. “I’ve never been particularly successful at any single occupation, perhaps because my true calling is this quiet, retiring monastery life of simple prayer and simple service. I intend to devote my best efforts to making myself worthy of that calling, avoiding all things grand or mysterious…or dangerous…or deviant. Besides, my leg would never bear me so far.”

Surely it would be better to live out the season quietly and escape with my skin intact to enjoy what I could of the world before it ended. The doulon had me in its stranglehold, and were I ever so blessed as to survive its shedding, my diseased senses and explosive restlessness would leave me as mad as my grandfather. Not even such a wonder as the lighthouse would tempt me to use the bent for aught but my own need. Look where such had got me.

Gildas laughed in that way he had, encompassing his entire being. Then he laid an arm around my shoulder and pulled me close, heads together. “Grand and mysterious events have a way of catching up to us even when we have no such course in mind. Someday I will share my own story with you. Good night, Brother. Safe journey.”

He was still chuckling as he disappeared through the library door. I walked on toward the dorter, grumbling under my breath, yet unable to be truly angry with him. If only I had displayed my ignorance about the book. One would think I would have outgrown pride after so many years of stumbling so ineptly about the world. Seven-and-twenty years and I’d shed not a single one of the great vices.

The infirmarian had assured Father Abbot that exercise would be good for my healing thigh, thus Brother Adolfus and I were dispatched on our errand as the bells rang for Prime. The west wind’s respite had been too brief. Purple-gray clouds hung low over the mountains, threatening a miserable day.

The road cut south through the abbey grain fields, where a few lay brothers were reaping barley that stood astonishingly undamaged despite the storm. Abbot Luviar had charged Brother Adolfus to summon the local villagers along our way. Though bound in service to the abbey, they had not yet come to aid the harvest.

The toad-faced Adolfus made it clear from the beginning that he would likely not speak to me beyond our business. “Journeys are excellent occasions for contemplation of our life’s road through the vales of doubt, the fens of sin, and the occasional mountain peak of divine inspiration. Silence will be our guidepost.”

As this was the lengthiest statement I had ever heard from the man, I’d borne no great expectation of conversation. But I had hoped he might be one of the “cabal,” as Jullian referred to the abbot’s little group of conspirators, and thus be willing to enlighten me on our mission. I had no illusion that we were truly off to negotiate use of a poetry book.

Drawing up my hood and tucking my hands up my sleeves against the cold, I wondered how I might divert my “life’s road” to some nearby town where there might be a seedsman or herbary. To that end I had brought along the gold button and silver spoon. Though I’d likely not get the trinkets’ full worth, I might get enough to buy nivat for a doulon or two. Only enough seeds for one use remained in my pouch, and possessing even a small supplement might soothe this anxiety that dogged me. The disease lurked in my bone and sinews alongside the craving for its remedy, both waiting to take fire.

Shrines dotted the roadside. A patch of wildflowers drooped beside a wooden representation of Karus. Rotting travelers’ staves had been stuck in the ground about a painted statue of Saint Gillare. An older stone figure, halfway devoured by orange and red lichen, represented Erdru bearing his uplifted platter of grapes. A statue of Arrosa, her hand about a naked mortal’s member, had toppled over, leaving her poor lover separated from his better parts.

Beyond Gillarine’s fields and pastures, the landscape changed abruptly to rolling meadows of yellowed grass and ankle-high briar tangles, dotted with stands of scrawny trees. In one of these meadows, half a quellé past the abbey’s boundary fence, stood a ring of aspen trees. Legends called such rings holy to the Danae, who were said to especially love to dance there in autumn when the leaves turned gold. This dreary, precipitous autumn had tainted the leaves black, and they’d fallen before ever they were gold. What if they never gleamed gold again?

Fool, I thought, shoving away the dismal speculation. These monks will have you believing their end-times nonsense. Yet such belief as could create the marvelous lighthouse could not be so easily dismissed. The unseasonable cold and gloom seeped into my every pore.

Five quellae past the aspen grove, the cart track rose steeply for a short way, leveled out and traversed a meadow, then rose again, the terrain like a series of giant’s steps toward the southern mountains. The river was no longer a lazy looping band of silver, but a younger stream that plunged from the mountains and raced through a gorge off to our left. To our right a gray-green forest of spruce and silver birches mantled the rising hills, occasionally dipping its folds into the sweeping meadows.

We met neither seedsmen nor herb sellers nor indeed any people at all along the way. The first village we came to was well overgrown, red plague circles fading on its crumbling houses. We did not dawdle there. A second settlement showed signs of more recent disaster—tools and carts bearing but early signs of rust, painted sigils of ward and welcome still bright on the lintels. But a heap of decaying sheep fouled the nearby pastureland, and perhaps other creatures lay unburied, as well. We covered our noses with our cowls and hurried past.

As soon as we could breathe, a shocked Brother Adolfus fell to his knees and prayed for the missing villagers of Acceri, who usually worked Gillarine’s planting and harvest. Evidently the abbey had received no word of their distress.

He should have waited a quellé more for his prayers. A third village, Vinera, had burned mere days ago. The sharp wind off the mountains shifted a blackened shutter and ruffled a length of frayed, muddy cloth tangled in a smashed loom. No corpses were visible, but I could see what had happened. One of the stone hovels had been made into a charnel furnace.

“Who could commit such sin?” Brother Adolfus’s voice shook, as I showed him how the doors and windows had been blocked to prevent escape.

“Harrowers,” I said, snatching the fluttering orange rag from a charred post and grinding it under my foot. “They take the folk who’ll agree to follow them and send back raiders to slaughter the rest.”

We did not linger. Though I pulled my hood lower, so that I could see nothing but the muddy ruts and Brother Adolfus’s hem, the odor of burning lingered in my nostrils. Perhaps the world had already ended.

By late morning, we had completely lost sight of the river as we climbed a long series of switchbacks. Horses had traveled this road in the past day. A great rushing noise as of wind or water grew louder as we pushed on.

No gentle meadow awaited us beyond the crest of the climb, but a broad, treeless hillside, creased with a succession of low scarps. Beyond these alternating strips of vertical rock and grassy terraces, the land broke sharply upward into a formidable cap of barren rock. A blocklike fortress perched atop the crags, the grim ramparts more a part of the rock than distinct from it.

The road wound back and forth in deep bends to circumvent the scarps and traverse the broad terraces. Midway across the expanse, a waist-high cairn marked a branching of the track. The left fork arrowed across the slope toward the river gorge. The right snaked westward for half a quellé before beginning the ascent of the breathtakingly steep shelf road to the fortress.

“These mountain lords all think they are eagles,” said Brother Adolfus, gawking at the forbidding road we’d yet to climb.

As we slogged toward the cairn, backs bent and heads ducked into the wind that flapped our cowls and gowns, a simple arch of dressed stone came into view in the distance, spanning the gorge. Caedmon’s Bridge. Two broken columns marked the bridge approach, and a small mounted party, too distant to make out numbers, waited beside them. One rider galloped in our direction.

“Are these the ones who burned Vinera?” Brother Adolfus sounded ready to charge.

“I’d say not. Were they hostile they’d not be sending only one to greet us.”

My eyes did not linger on the bridge or the people, but rather scoured the rugged land beyond the chasm. Caedmon’s Bridge marked the boundary of Evanore, the land of trackless forests where the sun never penetrated, of rivers of flowing ice, of forbidden mountains where gods had made it impossible to breathe—the land of Prince Osriel and his terrible warlords and mages who served Magrog, lord of the netherworld. To cross Caedmon’s Bridge placed a man’s soul in mortal peril, so stories said, and would boil a pureblood’s brains.

Though wary of the Bastard Prince and his perverse magics, I had borne no fear of Evanore itself—until I looked upon it. Indeed the land seemed grayer than where we stood, as if the clouds that muted the sun were thicker there. Unreasoning emotion swelled in my blood. Not the sense-blinding assault I’d felt in the cloister garth or at the pool. Not pain or terror at all. More a directionless anger and a sorrow so deep as to make a stone weep. A fearsome thing, that looking upon a landscape could so wrench a man’s spirit.

Hoofbeats pounded the track from the bridge. The horseman drew rein at the cairn and waited there, patting the neck of his sidestepping bay as we approached. “Good morning, Brother Adolfus and Brother…Valen, is it?”

The dulcian voice erased all thought of the horrors behind us and the brooding land to the south. I yanked off my hood and looked up. She had cut her hair. The wind flicked the chin-length strands of bronze about her eyes and her cheeks, where a smile threatened to break through her sober courtesy.

“Master Corin,” I said, bowing to cover my own foolish grin. “A great pleasure to see you again. Brother Adolfus, this gentle youth is the Thane of Erasku’s squire.”

I tried not to drool or sigh or otherwise make a fool of myself. I even forgave her greeting me from horseback, the beast so close to me I could feel its exquisite temper expelled in hay-scented snorts and blows. The woman’s posture astride the beast presented me a full view of a shapely leg clad in scarlet hose—not peg scrawny as with so many of her noble sisters, but rather looking as if she ran and danced and lived with all of herself. Oh, dear goddess Arrosa, what I would not have given to run my hand upward along that red-clad limb.

Harness chinked and jangled in the distance as two other riders approached more slowly, leading a riderless mule. While I gripped my cowl tight against the wind, and my desires against even stronger natural forces, the woman turned to my companion. “Edane Groult is laid up with gout this morning, Brother Adolfus, so he asks if you would be so kind as to attend him in his hall. He has sent down two escorts and a mule to bring you up. Unfortunately, he did not expect two of you. My master was just departing on his way back to his hold and offered my services to greet you and convey the edane’s message.”

Brother Adolfus was nonplussed. “Of course I will ride up. Brother Valen could walk, but his leg is just now healing from a dreadful wound. I don’t know…to leave a novice behind…”

“The edane’s men will return for him, Brother. Meanwhile, my own lord is willing to delay his journey and provide Brother Valen company and refreshment for his wait.”

“Well then, that will do very nicely.” Brother Adolfus’s conscience seemed much eased at the thought of me being provisioned. I was less sanguine, seeing now how matters were to work out. No second mule would be sent. Some excuse would be given when I did not appear in the edane’s hall, while I would be dispatched on some ghost hunt with the Thane of Erasku. How much finer if I could wait here alone with Corin.

The mule arrived; Brother Adolfus mounted. As the monk and the nobleman’s two servants moved away, the woman extended her hand to me, allowing a smile to break through. “Would you accept a ride to the bridge, Brother? Blackmane will certainly carry us both.”

“Ah, mistress…”

Could she have presented any choice more painful? Saint Ophir had definite opinions on his followers having physical contact with women—a matter I had conveniently failed to recall as she’d led me blindfolded about the valley of Gillarine. I could have conveniently forgotten it again, save the horse appeared much more disturbed by the idea than her kind invitation would attest. He sidled and jinked so anxiously that a determined frown supplanted the woman’s smile.

“Alas, I am not permitted.” I stepped back to give the demon-cursed animal a bit more room. “And I don’t think your beast likes me all that much.”

“Nonsense. He’s as placid as a cow.” She said this with conviction, though, indeed, my distancing might have been a handful of sugar in the devil equine’s mouth. “Come along, then. As you answered our first question so well, we’ve another puzzle for you.”

She held to a slow walk, slower than necessary. I did not protest, and walked as close to her as the beast and I could bear. “I don’t suppose you might give me a hint about the purpose of these exercises with the book of maps. I’ve received no reward for my first success but chilblains, bruised knees, and a reputation for slovenliness.”

“I’m truly sorry for your trouble. The purposes of the cabal are not mine to reveal, but I vow they are of critical—”

“—importance to Navronne. To our children’s children. So I’ve been told. Lives depend on secrecy, thus a novice’s knees and unbridled curiosity are of poor account.”

“Many lives. You must believe that. Those who hold this responsibility have yielded everything in their lives to serve this need.” Her bitter argument took no heed of my teasing. And surely the horse was not responsible for the hard look she cast toward the bridge. Such an expression did not belong on such a face.

“One answer, then, and I’ll pry no more for the moment,” I said.

“Good Brother, I cannot—

“I would know your true name, mistress. And don’t say ‘Mag’ or ‘Popsy,’ for you are no more a villein girl than you are a lad. My mind finds a great void in its constant untanglings and unwindings of these dire mysteries, for I cannot set a proper name to one certain face. Perhaps if I could bound that face with a name and set it in a proper sequence with Thane Stearc the Formidable, Gram the Sickly, and Brother Gildas of the Mysteries, as for labeled jars on a shelf, it would not persist in distracting me from more serious thoughts. Elsewise I must strive to deserve more punishments just to give me more time for contemplating the question, and what would Iero and his saints think of such a sacrilege?”

Ah, Deunor’s fire, her laugh resonated in my bones as if I were a harp and she the player filled with passionate music. I would have babbled my nonsense the night through to hear such tunes as she could pluck on me.

“Elene, good Brother. My true name is Elene, but I would advise you not to use it in front of my father. For the time, my own folly has made me none but Corin, his less-than-satisfactory squire.” She kicked the bay into a gallop, and they raced through the hazy morning toward the bridge. I could not take my eyes from her.

Elene… The name, the flesh, the laugh played out the sweetest harmony of creation.

Chapter 17

“I suppose you wish to rest,” said the Thane of Erasku when I joined him, his daughter, and his secretary by the bridge.

“Good morning, my lord,” I said. “Indeed my feet are more bruised than a drunkard’s liver.”

Brother Adolfus’s mule had reached only half the distance to the fortress hill. As the goddess of love had produced no chain of circumstances that might leave me alone and naked with a similarly unclothed Elene, I was feeling a bit mulish as well.

“You’re most kind to offer to wait with me for Edane Groult’s transport, Lord Stearc, but please do not feel it necessary to delay your journey. Surely those clouds will split at any time and beset us with rain. Be on your way and godspeed!”

The three of them stood between the crumbling columns. Shards of white marble, stained and streaked with black, littered the flat muddy ground. What forces had shattered pillars as broad as my armspan? Even broken, they rose to twice my height. Lightning, perhaps, or siege engines, used in some long-ago attempt to destroy Ardra’s only link with Evanore for a hundred quellae in either direction.

Elene stood at her father’s side, one step behind his massive shoulder. The gray daylight revealed even more likeness between them, if any personage so ferocious and intimidating as Stearc of Erasku could be said to resemble a graceful woman. Their noses were blunt, cheekbones prominent, and jawlines square—hers formed in ivory, his in granite. The air around them seemed to quiver like heat rising from paving stones in deep summer.

The thane snorted. “You’re not such a fool as to think this meeting is by chance, are you, monk? We’ve—”

“Excuse me, my lord.” Gram stepped out from behind Stearc, slightly stooped, black hair whipping in the wind. The secretary looked younger in the daylight, though even more wan and weak beside such exuberance of life as this father and daughter. “I’ve the provisions you required me to pack for the good brother.” Head inclined in deference, the gaunt secretary proffered a wineskin and a canvas provision bag. “I’ll bring the book, and we can discuss our needs as Brother Valen takes a moment to catch his breath.”

“If he can do this at all, he should be able to do it quickly,” grumbled Stearc. “He can fill his belly as we wait for sunset—assuming the damnable sun still exists behind these clouds.”

Thanks be, Gram’s good sense prevailed. I sat on a round of marble and made sure Stearc’s impatience did not worsen from waiting for me to devour the barley bread, soft cheese, and good ale. A fire would have been pleasant, but I’d no mind to delay my refreshment until I’d given the lord my answer to today’s puzzle. He’d likely throw me from the bridge when I refused to help. I could not waste more magic on their ventures. Only a few days and I’d need everything I could muster.

“My lord, if you’ve brought me here to question me further about the maps,” I said, when I was well through the little feast, “I’m afraid I’ve no more to tell you. I demonstrated everything I know in your first test. Any man with the knowledge you hold could have done the same.”

“Evidently not,” snapped Stearc, clasping his broad hands behind his back as if to keep from throttling me. His leather jaque strained with the display of his chest. “Others attempted to use the spell and trace the exact route you took. But they experienced no extraordinary guidance from the map. In hours of searching, they never came nearer the Well than the cliff. What caused your attempt to succeed where others failed?”

He leaned toward me, the pressure of his interest weighing like an iron yoke. Mouth stuffed with bread, I shrugged. But in truth I was not so nonchalant. So the eerie little pool Gildas and I had found…the Well, they called it…was indeed one of the hidden places that only my grandfather’s maps could reveal. The wind poked its chilly fingers under my gown.

I’d not used the guide spell of the map, only my bent and my instincts. What did that mean? I was not familiar enough with the more obscure pureblood arcana to know. My father could not find such places without using the enchantments of my grandfather’s maps—one of the matters that embittered him so sorely, I’d always thought. Max had always been more adept at tracking than at route finding. But then, I had been adept at nothing.

“Perhaps someone told you how to find the Well.” Stearc might have been a magistrate. “Or you ran across some mention of it in documents at the abbey.”

I came near choking. “No, my lord, I certainly did not read of the place. And I doubt—”

“Show him, Gram.”

The secretary sank to the grass just in front of me, sat back on his heels, and opened the book on his knees, searching for the page he wanted.

“Here, Brother.” He turned the book to face me.

I wiped my hands on the empty provision bag and tossed it aside, then took the book. The open page contained two small maps. The secretary pointed to a grousherre, painted in bright reds and yellows. The map was too small to have a cartouche. The tiny words embedded in twisting vines and leaves that filled the narrow borders of the little map would hold the spell.

The characters flowed together like a river of ink as soon as I looked on them, of course, but I needed neither cartouche nor border to tell me what this map depicted. The meticulous drawings of fortress, bridge, columns, river, and branching path were enough to identify the very place where we sat. Interesting that the twin columns were shown whole, each of them bearing a capital in the shape of a trilliot. King Caedmon had been the first to order the wild lily of Navronne sewn onto his cape and his banner and emblazoned on his armor.

My gaze swept the grass between us and the gorge. Among the shards of marble tumbled around us might be those very capitals. Such an odd sensation for that moment, as if I lived in both times at once and might soon see Caedmon himself defending the bridge, as his warlords retreated into Evanore to hold its mountains and gold against the invading Aurellians. The black-haired invaders from the east—my ancestors—had turned their acquisitive eyes upon Navronne when they discovered that the minor sorceries they could accomplish in their own land were not only easier to work, but took fire with power here. They called Navronne the Heart of the World.

And then, of a sudden, I envisioned my grandfather, a scrawny, squinting old man, his lean shoulders hunched, his thick hair gone white, beard yellowed around his mouth, sitting alone by a campfire on this hillside, his long fingers like spiders’ legs sketching this scene in his worn leather traveling book. Alongside the delicate pen strokes that represented the objects in the map, he would scribe a column of inked letters and numbers, noting the measures and proportions, names, and colors he would use to bring out the message he wanted to convey with this grousherre. He had chosen to show the fortress much smaller than the columns, had decided to depict the thrashing river of less moment than the bridge that crossed it or the overgrown paving stones of the approaches. Grousherres were about relative significance rather than accurate measure.

“Brother?” Gram remained sitting on his heels, facing me across the book.

Fire washed my cheeks. I shook off the cascading visions and the hostility and resentment that inevitably accompanied thoughts of my family. “Sorry. What is it you wish me to find?”

The secretary laid his slender finger on the largest object on the map. “This.”

“Oh!” I had assumed the great tree that spread its ghostly branches across the entire page was but part of the book’s decoration. Naught but straggling grass grew anywhere on this hillside. Certainly no tree stood where the map suggested, at the cairn where the path from the valley divided into two. “These maps were drawn years ago,” I said. “If the tree was ever here, it must have been cut down.”

“Perhaps the tree is only hidden,” said the secretary, softly encouraging. “Try it.”

“Try what?” I said, blank for the moment.

“Invoke the spell of the map!” bellowed Stearc, throwing up his hands. “What do you think? Spirits of night, must we be forever plagued with idiots and fools?”

“Give me a little time with the brother, my lord, and I’ll explain what we seek…as we agreed.”

Gram’s quiet insistence held sway. The thane betook himself to the brink of the river chasm. Elene’s glance wavered, but after a moment, she followed dutifully after him. They strolled onto the bridge—a fearsome thing to my mind, no more than one horseman wide and lacking parapet or railing. There they sat, legs dangling over the unseen void.

Gram blew out a great puff of air as if he did the same, though his precarious state seemed more related to his testy lord. “Please excuse my master, Brother. He is in a most difficult position, his life forever balanced on a knife edge. Those things he would do to right matters—deeds he has trained for his entire life—slide ever farther out of his reach.”

“Because he conspires against his own lord, the Bastard Prince?”

No matter whether Osriel himself came to power—Kemen Sky Lord protect us from such a pass—whichever of the other two brothers became king would need to make alliance with the Bastard Prince to prevent his rival doing the same. Evanori lords who had failed in fealty to Osriel would be safe nowhere.

Gram’s gaunt features twisted into a wry mask. “Indeed, that’s a part of it.”

He tapped the page again. “So, to our problem: We have learned that this particular map will lead us to a location of great importance, a place where we can leave a message. Those who must receive the message live nearby, but we aren’t sure exactly where. And we need their help. But we’ve had no more luck with this map than with the one to Clyste’s Well. And so, again we ask your assistance.”

“But if they live nearby, surely this Edane Groult—”

“Edane Groult has no dealings with these neighbors,” said the secretary dryly. “He would not recognize them were they to sit on his shoes. Or if he did, then his aged heart would stop.”

My skin began to creep. How far did Abbot Luviar’s arrogance of intellect take him? If he could redirect a man’s loyalty to his prince, what could he do with a man’s loyalty to his god?

“What neighbors might these be, living so close to the cursed land?” I said, sounding bolder than I felt. “I am pledged to holy Iero’s service…”…and to Kemen’s and Samele’s and that of all and any gods and goddesses who allowed men to keep their skin and balls and fingernails and enjoy life without excessive torment. Unlike Magrog the Tormentor. The Adversary.

Gram lowered his head for a moment, as if in prayer, then lifted it again and glanced at me, though not so far lifting or so long glancing as to confront me as an honest man. “Good Brother Valen, we propose to deal with neither the Bastard Prince nor the Adversary nor their demonic lackeys, I promise you. Tell me, have you not read the inscription carved above your abbey’s gates?”

“When I entered the gates of Gillarine, I was in no state to be reading anything, Master Gram,” I snapped. I had the sense he was patronizing me behind his quiet manner, so like a monk himself. I didn’t like it.

“The inscription says, The earth is God’s holy book.” He said this softly and with sincere reverence. Without hint of superior laughter.

“I’ve heard the abbot say that,” I said. In point of fact, out of all the prayers and mumblings I’d heard throughout my stay at Gillarine, it had been one phrase that made sense to me. It spoke of worth in common things where others saw naught. And it recalled the words of the sanctuary blessing: by Iero’s grace…by gift of earth…by King Eodward’s grant… And now these men spoke of holy wells. Of hidden trees. Of unseen neighbors whose presence might stop a man’s heart. Of my grandfather’s maps that could guide men to—

I stared at Gram. His dark head was bent over the book, only a swath of his wide forehead visible. A lock of dark hair had fallen forward, but surely underneath it, his eyes would be wild and fervent. Holy men. Madmen. I fought to keep sober. “By my soul, you’re hunting angels!”

He was too intent upon his folly even to blush. “Not precisely. We believe there’s been some confusion through the years. Your god may send angel messengers to tend our souls and guard us from temptation, but care of the earth is charged to other beings. Their stories have been told for as long as men have sat around fires under the stars. They live in realms of earth, not heaven, protecting and enriching the land they walk—that we walk—yet ordinary men cannot find the way to their dwelling places, save by luck or magic. Somehow, the pureblood cartographer who drew these maps could discover them whenever he chose, using only his pureblood bent. And now, using one of his maps, you have opened the way to one of their most hallowed places.”

Struggling to keep from laughing at his sincerity, I touched the naked figures that supported the ribbonlike borders at the map’s four corners. One was the aingerou my grandfather had stuck into every drawing in the book, claiming he did so because I was so fond of them. But the other three figures, two male, one female, poised on toes, legs stretched and bent as if dancing on the page, were no round-bellied imps, but tall and graceful with perfect bodies and flowing red curls. Angels, one might say, though they had no wings. This all began to make some sort of perverse sense. “You speak of the Danae.”

Gram stood up, pulling his billowing cloak tight. “The long-lived have retreated far from humankind. They may be extinct, as reports claim. But a reliable source tells us that if we leave an offering at this tree before the sun reaches the zenith, a Dané will surely come at nightfall to fetch it, if even one yet exists. Then we could present our petition.”

A surge of good humor threatened to plaster a grin on my face. I brought my hand up as if to mask a cough. “An offering…so you’ve brought nivat seeds to buy a parley.” For if the Danae loved feast bread flavored with nivat, lore said they would bargain gems to obtain a quantity of the seeds. Nivat no longer grew in the wild.

“Yes. But first we must find the tree.”

I breathed gratitude to Serena Fortuna and controlled my excitement, bending my head over the map again lest he mark my improved humor. “A marvel that would be, Gram, to discover the Danae after so long. I’ve doubts I can help you, but with Iero’s grace, I’ll see what I can do.”

The wind blustered, snatching at our hair and cloaks and the fine vellum. I smoothed the page and held it to prevent its tearing or wrinkling. My fingers tingled and pricked as I brushed over the inked drawings. Spellcraft, certainly, as much a part of this book as compass roses.

I rotated the book to the left and then to the right, allowing my eyes to travel the lettered border and my lips to move slightly—Gram was watching very closely. Then I laid a finger on the bridge approach and dragged it to the branch point of the path whence the roots of the great tree spread like a spider’s web across the painted hillside. All the while my mind was racing, sorting through the magical tricks that pureblood children learn as they learn to breathe and walk. If only I had listened better to my despised tutors.

“I don’t think we can find this tree where it is not,” I said. “But when I touch the roots on this page…perhaps…” Leaving the prospect dangling, I shut the book and gave it back to Gram.

I would need a few things to make this work. When I stood up and stepped a few quattae to my left, I made sure Gram could not see what my foot encountered. “Do you accompany me this time?”

He bowed in acknowledgment. “One moment, if you would. Lord Stearc would join us as well.”

While he hurried off to fetch the thane, I reached down and grabbed the wadded canvas provision bag underneath my foot and stuffed it up my sleeve. Then I began to prepare a small voiding spell, the finest boon for a boy who wished to hide purloined items—wine, coins from his father’s purse, his mother’s divining cards, his man-smitten sister’s love philtres, or his brother’s prized knife. Strolling through the clutter of broken marble, I also sought a plant of some kind…Ah, there! Tucked up beside a boulder-sized chunk grew a scrabbling astelas vine. Astelas had nice spreading, hairy roots.

The others were returning from the bridge. Cupping my hands to my breast, I dropped to my knees, bent forward, and touched my forehead to the earth. Thanks to the summer’s incessant rains, which had left the ground damp and pliable, I was able to pull up the astelas, roots intact. Before rising from my prayerful posture, I stuffed the plant up my sleeve alongside the bag.

At a respectful distance, my companions waited for me to complete my devotions. The first spell structured and waiting, I closed my eyes long enough to prepare a second—this one an inflation, the simplest kind of illusion. When it was ready, I rose and joined the others.

“One thing before we go,” I said. “As I prayed Iero to guide our steps, I recalled that each time I’ve used the book, neither human nor beast has accompanied me. Perhaps that circumstance has somehow contributed to the successful outcome.”

“The book says nothing of such a practice,” said Gram, “but we can certainly lag behind, if you believe it might help. It’s almost midday. If our first attempt should fail, we’ve no time for another today.”

“Exactly my thought,” I said, delighted at his practical reasoning.

“Just get on with it,” said Stearc. Was the man ever other than angry and snappish? “We can walk. Corin can bring up the horses. We’re no womenfolk needing to be coddled.”

I refrained from smiling or glancing at Elene, who had drawn up her hood. “All right then.”

As I strode briskly across the hillside, I honed my spells, straining to recall the nuances of skills so long unused. I could afford no explosions or sparks this time. I also plucked the leaves and stem from the astelas, scattering the bits and pieces of greenery by dropping them between my cowl and gown so they drifted to the ground as I walked. By the time I reached the cairn, only a thick clump of roots remained of the plant inside my sleeve.

As I knelt beside the pile of stones, I quickly traced an arc on the lichen-covered stone from the earth to a point a handsbreadth above the ground and back down again, allowing magic to flow through my hands into the voiding spell. The substance of the stone retracted—squeezed aside, as to say—to create the void hole, a gap in the side of the cairn. I reached in and scrabbled in the earth, spreading and burying the astelas roots as best I could.

Now the second spell—the inflation. Magic swelled and passed through my tingling fingers into the buried roots. Trusting that I had remembered enough, I unraveled the voiding spell to close the gaping hole. A gamble, this. To use the bent as I’d sworn not to do. To spend power that I would need within days. But to throw such an opportunity back into Serena Fortuna’s face was surely more risky yet. I rose and waited for the others to arrive.

“I see no tree,” said Stearc, planting his hands on his waist, uncomfortably near his weapons. Gram and Elene flanked him, the secretary paler than ever, the woman flushed and rosy after tethering their horses a few hundred quercae up the hill, then running to rejoin us.

“Though the cairn is not shown on the map, the map spell led me straight to it,” I said, feigning puzzlement. “Each step away from it jibes wrong.”

“The tree should be here,” said Gram, crouching low to examine the cairn. “We should be able to see and touch it as Gildas saw and touched Clyste’s Well. The journal speaks of the Sentinel Oak as a meeting place of the two planes.”

The cairn bore no markings. The rocks had likely been piled up to mark the path when snows lay deep. The secretary’s long thin fingers brushed the stone and earth around the cairn. He looked up. “My lord, come. There’s something here…”

I stepped back, allowing Stearc a place to kneel beside his secretary. “Take down the stones,” he said. “Corin, come. Lay to it.”

Elene and the two men dismantled the cairn before I could breathe another prayer. And there, protruding from the ground, was the rough-hewn stump of a modest-sized tree. Its dead roots, a nice thick, woody spread modeled from the astelas roots, poked from the earth here and there. I felt as proud as a father must upon viewing a new-birthed son.

The thane folded his arms and regarded the stump. “It seems smaller than the description of the tree would warrant.”

I wanted to mount a defense of my progeny: Too large and it would have disrupted the cairn. Smaller and you’d not believe. It is so nice and woody, well aged in its appearance. And I’ve not created so substantial an inflation in twelve years, at the least, so credit me a bit, fearsome lord! The stump should last a month or more if no one worked a spell of unraveling on it. Unraveling spells—the bane of a boy’s illusions—had been as common in my family’s house as arguments.

“The map brought you here, Brother Valen?” said Gram, frowning. “You’re sure?”

“Nowhere else. The guide thread I feel as I follow the map’s course fades even these few steps away.” I returned to the secretary’s side and knelt beside him. Spits of rain struck my face and pocked the disturbed earth about my lovely stump.

“Nothing for it but to make the attempt,” said Stearc. “If the monk is wrong—of which I have little doubt—we’ve lost nothing but a day already wasted. The morning has almost run.”

Gram, still troubled, nodded. He shifted one of the smaller stones left tumbled about from the destroyed cairn and laid it at the base of the stump carefully, as if judging a precise orientation. Elene watched him, and I watched her, wondering at her pinched lips and stormy brow. Some enmity ran deep between these two—both of them people I would be pleased to account my friends.

I kept my preoccupation with Elene’s expressive face well hidden beneath the shelter of my hood, shifting my attention only when Gram pulled a small bag from the pocket of his cloak and set it on the stone. A distinctive scent, of pepper and almond, of dust and mushrooms, flooded the air. Blessed Samele, I could have picked the man’s pocket twenty times over!

I touched the little bag. Oiled canvas. Common brown. Very like the provision bag hidden in my sleeve. Slightly smaller, closed with a black silk cord instead of a leather tie. Surely enough nivat for a year or more. It was all I could do to refrain from snatching it up and racing the coming storm back the way we’d come, past Gillarine and all the way to Palinur. Sell half the seeds and I would be set for half a year.

But I’d never get away. These three rode horses and carried swords and smoldered with passion about their madness. Deception was a healthier course. Patience. Depending on how the next few hours went, I should be able to take what I wanted with none the wiser.

I withdrew my hand and stood up. “Great Iero, shed your blessings here.”

Gram held an open hand out to Elene. “Do you have the box, Corin?”

From the pocket of her jupon, she drew a small tin box that she handed to Gram. He sprinkled some of the contents on the stone and shifted the bag of nivat to cover what he had just put down.

“Salt,” he said, as if sensing my question. “To hold the Dané here while we speak.”

“Why would you do that?” I said, aghast. No matter that I did not believe anything would come of his offering or his message. Some things were so wrong that it was better not even to mime them. “Fetter a Dané? Bind it? When you’ve come begging their favor?”

“It’s only to stay the sentinel long enough for us to speak. We’d never force them. But we must be heard. If we knew another way, we’d use it.”

“They’ll never forgive you. Of all things, Danae are free.” My grandfather’s stories came back to me. None could bind the Danae to field or forest or bog. “They choose their own places, Gram. That’s why you give them feast bread…to induce them to stay. That’s why you leave an undisturbed plot when you plow a new field or set aside a wild garden when you build a new house, so the Dané who tends that plot of ground can yet come and go at will. Elsewise he might leave to find another place, or she might be trapped amid the human works and die. Bind them, and you’ll lose everything before you speak one word of your message.”

“This whole scheme is madness,” said Stearc. “We must proceed as we decided. This fool of a monk doesn’t know what he’s doing. Nor do we. Come, Corin, we need to set up a shelter before this everlasting rain washes us into the river.”

“We try as we can, lord,” said Gram, more to himself than anyone.

The thane strode off toward the horses, and his daughter followed. Gram shook his head and started up the hill after his master. A few steps and he paused, waiting for me to join him.

The clouds had closed in over the southern mountains, and veils of rain and fog drifted over the river and the bridge. The fortress had vanished into the murk. Confused, unreasonably disturbed, praying their oiled bag would protect the nivat seeds from the wet, I joined the secretary, and we trailed after Stearc and Elene.

Gram walked more slowly than Stearc and his daughter. Though he seemed at the verge of speaking several times, he never did. Perhaps I had offended him with my blunt speech—silly, as I thought about it, to argue over legends. He could do as he liked with his foolery.

“So am I to wait here, too, and help you pursue some other plan should this one fail, or is someone from the fortress truly bringing a mule to fetch me?” I said after a while. “I’d rather see the outcome of this venture. To see a Dané…blessed saints, it would be a miracle. But if I’m to go up to the fortress, I’d as soon leave before the rain worsens.”

Gram lifted his head, roused from his thoughts. “The edane will send his mule for you eventually. We were able to arrange a delay, but only until midafternoon.” A few more steps and he stopped to rest. He glanced up at me, a thoughtful expression on his face. “I’ve already revealed more than Thane Stearc would approve, and he’ll not wish you to remain. However, I could argue it with him…”

“No, no. He seems a difficult enough master. I’d not put you more in the way of his wrath.”

Gram chuckled and glanced out from under the soggy locks of dark hair now dribbling water down his deep-carved cheeks. “That is a kindness, Brother. I could wish you were around us more often. Perhaps we would stay civil. Though our goals are like, our opinions diverge mightily, and to argue with anyone of the house of Erasku is a futile exercise. They are the harder rock from which the mountains of Evanore have sprouted.”

Stearc and Elene had moved the horses into the lee of a low scarp that split the hillside. They were already unloading packs and satchels.

“I’ve sensed that,” I said, relishing my view of Elene’s delicious body as she went about her work. “And the squire demonstrates as virulent opinions as the lord. At our first meeting, after that unfortunate encounter with a grain sack, I made the mistake of asking Corin about Prince Osriel.”

“Indeed?” We plodded uphill again. “And you lived to tell about it? The house of Erasku has no use for the Bastard.”

“Corin’s vehemence was reassuring. When Prince Osriel attacked the Moriangi at Gillarine—” Of a sudden, the memory laid a blight on my fey mood. “I just wanted to make certain your little test was not enlisting me in the Bastard’s legion.”

“Ah. I’ve heard fearful stories of that raid—apparitions, a cloud of midnight, the mutilation of the dead. You do well to keep cautious of the Bastard’s poisonous madness. Thane Stearc walks a difficult path, unable to side with any of the three. We had a narrow escape from the abbey that night.”

“So who does he favor for the throne? Who do you favor, for that matter?”

Gram shook his head in the same hopelessness I felt. “Both Perryn and Bayard have young children. If the brothers maintain a stalemate, Lord Stearc believes we may be forced into some sort of cousinly union and a regency. Not a happy prospect when spring brings Hansker raids.”

We had reached a level with Stearc’s camp. The secretary rested his back against the scarp, expelling a relieved sigh. He cocked his head. “Tell me, Brother Valen, if we fail tonight—and I am no more sanguine than my master—and we arrive at some new insight that invites your participation, may we call upon you again? I do value your aid…and your advice.”

“I don’t seem to have much choice in the matter. This is all a great mystery, and I’m thinking my head will burst soon with wondering.” Indeed my mind was hopelessly jumbled as I tried to link the Danae to the lighthouse and the end times. What interest had Danae in books or looms?

Gram’s wry, twisting smile granted a moment’s grace to his stark face. “Your abbot must enlighten you further, Brother. Tell him what you’ve learned this day, and he will likely supply the rest…in far more civil terms than Lord Stearc would do. We need men and women of courage, goodwill, and varied gifts. Clearly you have a gift where this strange book is concerned.”

“Well, we’ll discover the truth of that at sunset, I suppose.” I returned his smile, regretting the need to deceive the mournful fellow.

Indeed, I felt privileged to be allowed such glimpses of Gram’s private self. Servants of volatile lords had to control themselves quite strictly. The secretary had been forthcoming to a degree others had not, and I held no prejudice against madmen. The armies, the alleys, and the finest pureblood houses of Navronne were filled with them.

I offered him my hand. “For now, farewell, sir. I must hike up this monstrous hill before I am soaked through. You’ll convey my respects to the thane and his man?”

He nodded graciously and took my hand, showing no surprise at the unclerical gesture. The fingers that circled my wrist were firm, but cold, and his own wrist hammered with a blood pulse that spoke of more excitement than his quiet manner displayed. Or perhaps it was merely the racing heart of an unwell man who had pushed too hard to climb a hill.

I did not take to the fortress road, but hiked only as far as the next scarp that banded the hillside. Though Stearc’s party lay hidden behind their own step of rock just below me, the dark ribbon of the cart track was clearly visible down the hill from them. The darker smudge and scattered rocks marked the fine stump where my year’s salvation lay waiting. I huddled against the short wall of rock, sinking into its shadow, drawing my cowl and hood close to shield me from the rain. Anyone coming down from the fortress to fetch me would see no one on the road or in the fields. Come dusk, I would put the last step of my plan into action.

The hours passed slowly. Sleep crept over me like the clouds and fog drifting across the gray-green landscape. Yet whenever I started, from grazing my cheek on the rock as I slumped or from the cold drizzle on my hairless patch of scalp when a gust of wind lifted my hood, the light seemed unchanged from my last waking. I was only wetter and colder. I settled deeper against the rock wall. Pretend you’re warm; you’ve done that often enough. Just stay awake…

Yawning, I played out the plan over and over again. As soon as the light fades enough to leave shapes and landscape indistinct, slip down toward the stump. Pray the rain continues. They’ll never see you. Empower the illusion. Replace the bag of seeds with the empty provision bag that will now appear exactly the same. To empty the nivat into the provision bag and leave the empty one behind would take too much time. One last touch of magic…a flash of blue light as the night closes in…easy, as you creep away unseen. Then the long trudge up the hill to the fortress. I’ll think of a story for Brother Adolfus…for the edane whose mule driver won’t have found me…Sympathize with Gram and Elene that their Dané eluded them…sympathize tenderly with Elene…

My eyelids weighed like lead…and still the game played out…over and over…

Trigger the spell…creep silently…careful…timing…all was timing…switch the bags…slog upward…a story…one more lie…a flash of spiraling sapphire in the night…

I sat bolt upright. Deunor’s fire, it was almost dark. The wind had died. The rain had stopped. Banners of fog lay in every hollow and niche, the world now colored with charcoal and ash. I shook off the dregs of sleep, cursing my everlasting carelessness. How long would Stearc wait to scoop up his bag of nivat and yell at Gram to devise him another plan? Impossible…unbearable…that my scheme or my magic should go to waste. Scooping up a fistful of earth, I recklessly poured magic into seeking a route through the twilight.

Once sure I would not tumble over the scarp into Stearc’s lap, I sped downhill. But I had not traveled half the distance when I glimpsed lights of deep and varied blue moving through the fog. A few steps closer, until the scene halted my feet and left me gaping. Exactly as I’d seen in the fog of my dreaming, the light was drawn into long coils and spirals…into delicate vines and leaves that hung in the thick air…living artworks as bright and rich-hued as the windows of Gillarine Abbey church. They drifted in sinuous unison away from the demolished cairn. Away from the tree—an oak of such a girth its bole could house a family and of such expansive foliage it could shelter a village beneath its limbs.

“Wait!” Gram’s cry bounced off the rocks and fell dead in the thick air. “Please! Hear our message…for any who dance in Aeginea. We need your help. Envisia seru, Dané.”

The blue lights paused and shifted, turning…the movement revealing the canvas for the artist’s magical pen…long bare limbs entwined by sapphire snakes, and flat breasts traced with azure moth wings, half hidden by a cascade of curling red hair…a pale cold face upon which a glowing lizard coiled its tail about a fathomless eye, while the reptile’s scaled body drawn in the color of lapis stretched across an alabaster cheek. So beautiful…so marvelous.

“Human voices are thorns in our ears.” The voice of the wind could be no more soulless. She was already moving away.

“Our estrangement shadows our hearts.” The speaker’s dark shape—Gram’s shape—moved between me and the apparition. “Meanwhile, the world suffers, and we seek to understand it. Can we bargain? Will you convey our request to Stian Archon or Kol Stian-son?”

I wanted to scream at Gram to move out of the way so I could see more, yet I could not accomplish even that. My limbs were frozen in place, stricken powerless with wonder. But I smelled her…woodrush and willow and the rich mold of old leaves and shaded gullies…she came from the fen country.

Everything of my own life—past, present, thought, sense—paled and thinned, having no more substance than smoke alongside the substance of her. I felt starved, fading.

Standing beneath the spreading branches, the Dané paused and cocked her head to one side, raising her brow so that the lizard’s tail twitched. “Bargain…and forget betrayal? Forget violation and poison? Forget thievery?” She breathed deep of the night air. Her nostrils flared. Her lip curled. “Thou canst not claim ignorance, human, for thy very blood bears the taint of betrayal and thy flesh stinks of thievery. The long-lived do not forget. Offer recompense for betrayal; uncorrupt that which thy poison has corrupted; return what was stolen, and we might consider a hearing.”

“Theft? Poison? I know naught of—”

No need for Gram to finish his claims of ignorance. She had vanished in a rush of air, as if she had wings to bear her back to heaven. And no spreading oak stood at the cairn. Only my ugly stump.

Sodden, chilled to the marrow, I sank to my knees and tasted all that remained of the night—charcoal and ash, empty of magic. I pressed my forehead to the cold earth and wept.

Chapter 18

“Brother Valen! Are you injured? We heard a cry.”

Bobbing lantern light announced Elene well before she knelt beside me and brought her face down near my own. Even without sight I would have known her. She smelled of fennel soap and horse, damp leather and wet pine smoke, of a warm human woman, not the woodrush scent of the cold Dané.

“My lord, over here!” she yelled. And then quieter, “Brother?”

“I sprained…fell…I was on the way…the fortress…” My lies limped into nothingness. I inhaled and began again. “I stayed back to watch. Waited up the hill. Saw her.”

That was all I could muster. I could no more explain the fullness of grief that had overwhelmed me than I could explain my pain in the cloister garth, my dread at the pool in the hills, or why in the name of heaven a Dané had come to a tree stump conjured from a weed. I knew only that when the blue sigils vanished, I felt as if some great door had opened in the world and all joy had rushed out. Were the king’s own minstrels surrounding me, I could not have sung with them or danced to their music.

“So it was not just the three of us who saw and heard. Lord Stearc and I each thought we were dreaming. Gram even spoke to the creature! But you look dreadful, Brother. Are you sure you’re not hurt?” Elene laid a hand on my shoulder, and the sheer kindness of it came near setting me weeping again.

“I’ve not been myself of late,” I mumbled. “Ill. No sleep. So much praying. A different life.” I tried to sort myself out, dragging a sleeve across my face as I sat up. How long had I knelt here weeping like a babe bereft of its mother’s tit? My reaction made no sense at all. I hated feeling so helpless, so at the mercy of emotions without cause. “It’s nothing.”

I’d wasted the day. Wasted my bent. Of course, the Dané had taken the nivat. She would not have come at all if not for the seeds. So beautiful…so strange and majestic and proud…such magic…

Ah, stars of night, that was what hurt so dreadfully. To look upon such power that dwelt so near us, in tree or pond or meadow, and yet so vastly distant. Never had dirt and ignorance and uselessness weighed on me so. The damp, heavy wool of my drab monk’s garb itched and choked me. Stories said the Danae danced to the music of the stars. Easy to see how people might mistake such a being for a messenger of heaven.

“Brother Valen! What are you doing here?” Stearc’s sudden presence assaulted my spirit like a cadre of Moriangi foot soldiers.

I shook my head. I was doing well to sit up, trying not to feel anything, terrified that my next move would ignite the fire in my belly. My waste of magic likely meant that the next doulon would be no more successful than the last. And then my nivat supply would be gone. Ass! Ignorant, blind, rock-headed ass! I wanted to slam my head on the rocky ground. All the images I kept at bay descended on me at once: the pain-frenzied youth in the Palinur alley, thrashing in his own filth and vomit, the whore in Avenus whose eyes screamed when you touched her hot, rigid limbs, paralyzed with cramps and seizures. Better to slice my own throat than end like that.

“He stayed to watch, sire. He says he’s not injured. We should tell him—” After a sharp gesture from her father, Elene bit off whatever else she wanted to say.

“I’ll vow I believed you a charlatan, monk,” said the thane. “That a nobody, a cowardly hireling bowman with no family of consequence and an arrow wound in his back, could interpret the book when better men could not seemed unrighteous and impossible. But it seems I erred.”

I did not even bristle.

The thane crouched beside me, his oiled leather jaque gleaming in the lantern light, his hawkish bearded face flushed with zeal and thirsty with curiosity. “Sword of the archangel, I cannot comprehend what we just saw. I’ve never believed any of these legends. How did you do it? What key have we missed in this confounded book?”

“I don’t know.” Luck? Fate? How could anyone believe that I—a man of so little skill that I never had and never would accomplish a single thing of worth in my life, so blindly thick skulled that I could not untangle the meanings of the simplest markings on a page, and so weak of will that I had enslaved myself to the doulon—had done anything to summon such a being? “I did only what I’ve done before.” Exactly nothing. I could not explain it.

Gram arrived shortly after the thane, moving slowly. The secretary was stretched tight. His black cloak and the sharp light on his deep-etched features made him look like death itself.

“We should get back to our blankets,” said the thane when he spied Gram. “Foolish to stand here in the cold. Come on.”

Before I could resist, Stearc grabbed my elbow and hauled me up as if I were no larger than Elene. No threads of fire shot through my limbs, demanding the doulon’s solace. Thank the gods for that.

Stearc grunted an order at Elene, and father and daughter hurried off. Gram and I trailed behind as if drawn along in their wake.

“You removed the salt,” I said.

Gram nodded as he muffled a bout of harsh coughing.

“I’m sorry.”

“You were right,” he said, and absently pushed damp hair from his face. It promptly fell down again. “It wouldn’t have made any difference to bind her. She wasn’t going to do what we asked in any case.”

We found no more to say on the short walk down the hill.

A sullen Elene thrust a blanket into my arms when we reached their camp, and then retreated to a spot well away from us. Stearc removed his swordbelt and tossed it on the ground beside her. Her mouth tight, she rummaged in one of the saddle packs, set out stone, rag, and oil flask, and set to cleaning and polishing his long-sword. Her silence bulged and stretched near bursting.

They had pegged a canvas awning to the stone and supported it with three hinged poles and a tangle of rope. The ground underneath was damp but not soggy. Bundled in cloaks and blankets, Gram and I squatted beside the lantern, as if the weak yellow light might warm us.

The thane pulled out a wineskin, took a few swallows, and tossed it at Gram. “Now we know the nivat works, we should try again. Perhaps a different creature would be more accepting.”

Gram took a long pull at the wineskin. “She is a sentinel,” he said, rubbing his forehead tiredly. “One charged to watch the boundaries between human and Danae. She would most likely respond to any advance here. Her own sianou is probably somewhere nearby. But after hearing her, I believe that other Danae would reject us as well. Her dislike was not some private matter.”

“But it was aimed directly at you.” Elene made no attempt to mute her voice or her hostility. “Have you done something without telling the others?”

“Hold your tongue, squire, or be sent home. I warned you.” Stearc jerked his head. “Go see that the horses have not pulled their tethers. Now.”

Though Elene clenched her jaw in the very image of her father, she slammed the sword back into its sheath, jumped to her feet, and snatched up the lantern.

“Hear me, Corin.” Gram rushed into the angry silence as the woman strode into the night. “The only betrayal I know of is Eodward’s failure to abide by their terms and return to them. Perhaps they’ve come to think of that as stealing what ‘belonged’ to them. Their help. Their care. No theft is mentioned in the journal.”

Their family quarrel could not hold my attention this night. The mention of King Eodward’s name sparked in me like flint on steel. Eodward who was said to have lived with “angels” for a hundred and forty-seven years. Eodward who had asked a saucy-tongued pikeman to take a message—

“Aeginea.” The word spilled from my lips.

“What’s that, Brother?” Stearc and Gram said it together, as if they had forgotten I was there.

“When you spoke to the Dané, you mentioned a place called Aeginea. What is it?”

Though I addressed Gram, another bout of coughing rattled the secretary’s chest. The answer came from Stearc instead. “Aeginea is the Danae’s own name for the lands where their archon holds sway, where they celebrate the turning of the seasons and dance the pattern of the world they call the Canon. Though we don’t see the name on any of Cartamandua’s maps, we believe it exists both within and apart from our own land.”

“It is Navronne,” said Gram, hoarse from his cough. “The Heart of the World.”

“And King Eodward…what does he have to do with all this?” I was half afraid to ask, sensing a tether of obligation reaching out from the past to bind my choices. Somehow doubly bitter after having seen a Dané.

“That is a very long story,” said Stearc. He stretched out on the bare ground, wadded a blanket under his head, and pulled his cloak around him. His hand moved out and touched the swordbelt, loosening his knife in its sheath. “Too long for tonight. We should sleep now.”

I was as wakeful as if my wastrel drowsing up the hill had been a night’s unbroken sleep. Even after the thane began snoring, my thoughts would not keep still.

Though Elene’s departure with her lantern left us in the dark, I heard Gram rustling about in the packs, unstoppering a flask, drinking something that seemed to soothe his cough better than the wine had done. He must have sensed my wakefulness, as well, for he began to speak softly, as if not to wake his master.

“Almost seventy years ago, a young Janus de Cartamandua-Magistoria first found his way into Aeginea. I don’t know how he accomplished it. Who truly understands pureblood sorcery? But while traveling there, he encountered a human man of some eighteen years. The Danae called the youth Caedmon-son, and said his father was a man they honored as a friend of the Danae and the one human who was ever true to his word. History tells us that Caedmon’s four elder children were slain as the Aurellians drove through Morian and into Ardra. The Danae told Cartamandua that Caedmon had begged them to foster one remaining child—an infant son. The Danae archon, one named Stian, agreed to take in the child and a tutor sent by Caedmon to see to the boy’s education.

“Writings and papers in the tutor’s possession, as well as the tutor’s testimony, corroborated the story. Though fascinated by Cartamandua and his tales of Navronne’s struggles with the Aurellians and the Hansker, the young man had no interest in returning here. Life…time…runs differently in Aeginea. Though their seasons follow one upon the other at the same pace as ours, their days can seem like a year or an hour—much as a river spans only the distance from Elanus to Palinur, yet meanders faster and slower through straights and eddies on its way. And a human’s life spends more slowly there—we calculate seven of our years to every one of theirs.”

“Eodward,” I said. Of a sudden, dry history took on new life and meaning. Like Stearc, I had never truly believed in the legend, only in the man. One hundred and forty-seven years would translate to one-and-twenty—the age of Eodward when he appeared from nowhere to reclaim Caedmon’s throne. “How do you know all this?”

“Lord Stearc has come into possession of a journal relating to those days. Its accuracy is unimpeachable.” Clothing rustled in the dark. Gram’s hunched silhouette blocked out the stars in the clearing sky. “The Danae insisted Cartamandua swear to keep the secret of Eodward’s existence.”

“But he didn’t.” No one in my family would have kept such a secret. Not if the telling could enhance their prestige among the other purebloods.

“For a while, he did. But twenty-one years later, when all realized that Aurellia had become a fragile, decadent shell, Cartamandua told a friend about the young man—Caedmon’s living heir. This friend, Sinduré Tobrecan, was the high priest of Kemen, and it happened that Tobrecan’s closest boyhood friend Angnecy had just been anointed Hierarch of Ardra, the followers of the elder gods and those of Iero and divine Karus linked by this strange mechanism of fate. Seeing hope for the future in their own friendship and in the miracle of Eodward’s life, they convinced Cartamandua to lead them to Aeginea, using his book of maps. There they beseeched Eodward, who had aged little in all that time, to return to Navronne and take up his rightful throne, lest chaos descend upon the kingdom with the fall of Aurellia. The Hansker longships were poised to attack and drive us into barbarism and savagery.”

“And this time, he came,” I said, wondering. “He was one-and-twenty.”

“It was not an easy choice. Eodward loved and honored his Danae family, and considered himself one of them. His Danae mother guided his training, as is their custom, and he rode, danced, and hunted with his Danae father, brother, and sister. But from Cartamandua’s first visit, Eodward had dreamed increasingly of Navronne—a land he lived in, but had never really experienced, for as you have noted, the Danae realms are our own realms. We but tread different paths. When Eodward decided to come here, he vowed to return to Aeginea before they danced the Winter Canon thrice more.”

“But he didn’t,” I said, remembering the words he’d spoken to me on that long-ago battle’s eve. Tell them I don’t think I’ll get back…

“He could not. He had a thriving, glorious kingdom that needed him desperately. The Danae, still bitter at Cartamandua for breaking his vow, and unhappy with Eodward for his leaving, named Eodward’s failure to return as betrayal, compounding their own long grievances with humans. After a time, the king began to age as humans do, yet he fully intended to return to Aeginea as soon as his children were strong enough to carry on his work. He died still believing the Danae would forgive him and that he could live out his days among them.”

I shook my head. “He knew he would never go back,” I said. “His children were never worthy to succeed him.”

“Clearly not.” Gram sighed and hunched his blanket around his shoulders. “And other things have happened in the years since that caused the Danae additional grievance—perhaps this violation and the thievery she spoke of—and they’ve forsaken all human contact. Now we need their help again, and I don’t know how we’re to get it.”

“But you won’t tell me why. It’s this business of the lighthouse and the end times.”

“I am but one player in a very large game. You should sleep now, Brother. Tomorrow we’ll decide what to do next.”

While Gram was speaking, quiet movements in the dark on the far side of the snoring Thane of Erasku told me Elene had returned. “Tell me about Corin,” I said on a whim. “I sense a restless spirit there. Is he reliable? Trustworthy?”

“Reliable?” Gram laughed bitterly. “If the world could take shape from one will alone, then it would surely match young Corin’s vision of how things ought to be. And it would be a world so just and fair…so glorious and compassionate…your Karish angels would choose to live here in Navronne instead of heaven. Do not doubt. Should every man of this cabal fail, Corin will carry it ahead alone come heaven or hell, victory or ruin.”

I smiled as I pulled up my blankets, a moment’s respite from a pervasive despondency. All through that long night, I heard restless movements from two pallets besides my own. Only the Thane of Erasku slept much that night.

“Unable to read while you are walking?” said a disbelieving Brother Sebastian.

I stood before him in the monks’ parlor outside the dorter, damp, dirty, and exhausted, more from the night without sleep than the few quellae of the journey. After a predawn breakfast of cold cheese, Stearc had ordered Elene up to Fortress Groult to inform the edane that Brother Valen had wandered into their camp after getting lost in the rain and fog. Brother Adolfus returned with her, as it transpired that the poetry book was one that the abbey had already copied. That fact hardly surprised me. We had arrived at the abbey shortly before midday, and I prayed my mentor’s annoyance would not forbid me dinner.

“After vowing to improve your attentiveness, you get yourself lost. And atop this foolery and despite all your promises of obedience, you refuse to honor your elder’s wish to join him in your avowed duty of prayer along the route.”

“I am sorry, Brother. The jarring of walking, especially with my limp, makes the words on the page run together. I’ll strive to improve this weakness in the future as the Blessed Gillare heals this lingering mortification of my flesh.” Even lies came hard today.

“Clean yourself and fetch your new spare gown and cowl from Brother Tailor,” said Brother Sebastian. “Report to Brother Jerome for the rest of the afternoon. After Vespers we shall sit down and work out your reading syllabus and examination schedule for the next month. We must pay more rigorous attention to your studies and deportment.”

I bowed and thanked him, dreading the unhappy exposure sure to come very soon now. I would suffer yelling, admonitions, and penances until my hair turned white. But at least I had achieved one of my aims. Luviar would surely not dismiss me after my unlikely successes with the book of maps, whether I could read or not. Somehow, even that small accomplishment could not cheer me. The world felt old. Broken.

Of course, Brother Jerome would be out of sorts that afternoon. He complained of having only barley vinegar to use for his pickling, as the grape harvest had failed, and that salt had grown so dear he had to be a pinchfist with it just when he needed it most. Brother Sebastian must have sent word of my transgressions. Instead of allowing me to sit in the warm kitchen and chop turnips or carrots to go into his crocks of vinegar and salt, Brother Refectorian had sent me to the cold, stinking butcher house to bleed and strip a pig.

As I wrestled the massive carcass in a vat of steaming water to scrub off its hair and buried my hands in its stomach cavity to sever and draw out its entrails, I imagined the scene in the guesthouse. Stearc, Gram, and Elene were likely head to nose with the abbot, the chancellor, and Brother Gildas—probably Jullian, as well—all of them bathed, dry, and drinking hot cider, talking of magical libraries, beings of legend, and the end of the world, while I was rendering a sow.

Sullen and resentful, I sorted all the nasty bits. White, lacy caul fat into the bowl for present use. Bung and rectum onto the waste heap. Emptied guts, destined to hold Brother Jerome’s fine sausage, into the brine crock along with the emptied bladder and stomach. My new spare gown was clean no longer, and my sandals and feet were splashed with blood and filth. Brother Sebastian would have no mercy.

The heart and liver had just gone into a bowl for the kitchen, and my sore hands had just plunged another length of gut into the cold running water of the butcher house conduit to scrape it clean, when I glimpsed a brickred cloak in the vicinity of Brother Butcher. The two of them stood outside the doorway of the wooden building. Though my hands were freezing, my face grew hot enough to cook the damnable pig. Was I to be forever splattered, filthy, or slug-witted in front of Elene? Bad enough that half my skull was bald and I stank worse than Jullian.

“Brother Valen!” Brother Butcher, a lay brother with a neck as wide as his head, also possessed a bellow worthy of his victims. “The squire says you’re summoned to the abbot.”

Blessed release! “Of course, Brother. I’ll stop off at the lavatorium to wash, and then—”

“Not so, Brother Novice. Brother Sebastian has sent out word to all that you’re to hop to your duties with no dawdling or digression. They wouldn’t have sent for you now did they want you to come later. So be off with you. I’ll take on your pig.”

Sighing, I dropped the gut back into the crock, plunged my arms into the conduit flow, and scrubbed at them with my numb fingers. After a handful of icy water to my face and a swipe with the only clean spot on my gown, I hurried through the butcher house, and bowed to the thick-necked lay brother. Though wet and freezing from fingertip to armpit, blood and offal still grimed nails and pores and the cracks in my skin. I grabbed my cowl from the hook by the door and threw it on.

Elene’s hood covered her hair, and she did not speak as she marched away. Brother Butcher watched from the doorway as I followed meekly after her.

“Good day, Squire Corin,” I whispered from under my own hood as we hurried past sheep pens and pig wallows. “I certainly hope your return to Gillarine was more fragrant than mine.”

“The abbot is always welcoming, though we don’t come here for the hospitality.” Her tone smacked far too much of serious affairs.

“Well, of course, you don’t. Though I don’t see that purposeful misery will solve any of the world’s problems, either. Which leads me to ask…”

She tripped briskly up the steps that crossed the low wall dividing the abbey’s outer and inner courts, and rather than take the eight steps down, she jumped straight to the ground, as nimble as a cat. I jumped as well, which left me feeling something like a mast with billowing sails, as my gown caught the air. My thigh did not even twinge when I landed.

I paused for a moment and watched her walk ahead toward the lay brothers’ yard and the brewhouse, the sight of her an antidote to my dogging melancholy. She moved like a dancer or a juggler, not frail or bony, but well muscled, her back as solid and well formed as her front. A most pleasing view, though truly it seemed very odd to have the luxury of examining a woman in breeches and jupon while I traipsed behind her in skirts.

She peered over her shoulder. Best get my mind back to business. We would soon be in the inner precincts where even quiet conversation could be noticed and overheard. Two full strides and I caught up with her.

“…which leads me to ask, Is someone ever going to tell me what is coming, so I can decide whether to keep watch upward to see the bolt of fire from heaven or downward to see the ground open underneath me? Will the world end in fire or ice, Squire Corin? Though I have my own guess as to that.” I shivered as the damp wind blew off the river, smelling of dead fish.

She slowed just a bit. “I told them they ought to be honest with you. But my father won’t hear of it, because—”

“—because he heard I had an arrow wound in the back. He despises me as a coward, and thus believes me incapable of keeping secrets.”

“For Abbot Luviar to be dismissed for sheltering a deserter would be disastrous to our cause. But you’ve proven yourself, so you deserve to hear the truth.” She planted herself in front of me, hands on her hips. “The earth itself will not end, only the life we know—cities and towns and villages, plowing and planting. Herds are dying. Famine and disease will bring barbarians, not just Hansker, who will surely come first, but wilder folk from the north and west. Yet they, too, will lose all they have. Summer will vanish, and, in the struggle to survive, men will forget books and tools and art and all the things we’ve learned in centuries. The Harrowers will get what they want. We will see the end times, but with no blessed ending in heaven.”

She believed this quite sincerely. I could tease no further. “How do you know? How do they know? Yes, the weather is foul, the war cruel, sickness rampant, yet we survive. Navronne has suffered before. Nobles are always underestimating the strength of common folk. What’s different this time?”

“Where are the monks, Brother? Where are the students who once came to Gillarine for schooling—fifty in my father’s time, with more hoping to come? How many villages lie ruined like those between here and Caedmon’s Bridge? Where are the grapes of Ardra or the summer fruits of the river country or Evanore’s wild boar that sustained my ancestors when the Aurellians forced them to live in caves like beasts? People abandon faith and paint their foreheads with dung. We don’t know why our downfall will happen. Everyone has a theory. Brother Victor thinks our present cycle of history just happens to be worse than similar ones of the past. Abbot Luviar believes that some dread event has caused a rip in the binding of earth and heaven. But those of the cabal are men and women of intelligence, wisdom, and a vision that is broader than one abbey or one kingdom or one faith. Besides, it has all been seen by a friend of my father’s. Now, come. They’re waiting for you.”

“Thank you for telling me,” I said, as I caught up to her. “I won’t betray you—any of you. I’m actually quite proficient at keeping secrets.”

She didn’t respond. As I considered all she’d told me, one word rose from her tale like a youthful blotch on a girl’s clear skin.

“Elene…”

She picked up the pace through the passage between the granary and the brewhouse, where the cloying smell of roasting barley was so thick it could choke a man.

“Corin…”

We strode across the guesthouse yard where I had first glimpsed her face. An exposed place. Three men in green livery approached the guesthouse from the direction of the stables. Anyone could pop out of the door or the five different passages that opened on the yard or could peer out of the myriad windows of the house.

But the blemish had swelled into a boil, and despite the risk of being overheard, I laid a hand on Elene’s shoulder as she grasped the brass door handle. “Seen…you mean foreseen, as by a pureblood diviner?”

She dragged the heavy door open and slipped out from under my hand before she answered, else I might not have barged into the columned atrium after her in full view of the group in the guesthouse parlor. By the time she said, “Yes,” it was too late.

As Brother Victor passed around a tray of steaming cups, and Gram worked at a writing table, a short, robust woman robed in mauve and blue silk stood talking with Abbot Luviar, Brother Gildas, and Thane Stearc. Her heavy black hair had been twisted and wound into a great loop, fixed to the back of her head with a gold fan, spread like a peacock’s tail. The blue, green, and gold sprawl of interlocking beads on her ample breast proclaimed her a Sinduria—a high priestess of the elder gods. The thick stripes of kohl outlining her eyes and the eyes graven on her silver bracelets, set with pupils of opal and lapis, proclaimed her a pureblood diviner. And her shock when she saw me, quickly followed by amusement, quickly followed by triumph and contempt, proclaimed her my elder sister.

She raised her finger and pointed through the parlor doorway straight at me.

“Oh, Deunor’s fire, Lassa, don’t. Please don’t.” My voice echoed like frogs rasping in the fine antechamber.

But she was a Cartamandua, and so did my twelve years of freedom end with her one contemptuous word. “Recondeur.”

Chapter 19

“Magnus Valentia de Cartamandua-Celestine…a Karish monk. What divination could have prepared me for this?” Thalassa’s laughter left her breathless. “Have you been driven out of every other house in Navronne in only twelve years, little brother? Or have you conquered every woman’s heart with your everlasting charm, so that the only ones left to share your bed are celibate old men and guileless boys? Do these monks know what you are?”

The others had come out of the parlor and now stood in an awkward half circle ten paces from me, gawking.

“I have lived a life of my own choosing,” I said, closing my eyes so I could no longer see Elene, clapping a hand to her mouth, or Brother Victor, his odd features so eloquent in condemnation, or Gram, peering at me curiously, as if I were something not quite human. “I have bound myself where I would and walked away when I would—”

“—and great rewards it has brought you. I can see and smell. But I’ll not believe you are here because you have chosen a life of purity and service. Even this corrupt and failing world has not changed so much. I’d advise you to check your valuables, Luviar. And look to your daughter, Lord Stearc. Valen bedded every serving girl and lad in Palinur before he was fifteen. Evidently he can breathe on a woman and set her fawning—maybe men, too. We were never able to prove he does it with magic.”

Thalassa had ever been adept at making her point. Sorcerous seduction was one of the few crimes for which a pureblood could be arrested. As with everything forbidden, I’d tried it. But I left it behind when I learned of pleasuring.

“I knew it,” said Stearc, growling. “By rock and stone, a pureblood renegade…he endangers us all with every breath. We should kill him—”

“My lord!” said Abbot Luviar, moving slightly to the front of them all, his pock-grooved face unsettlingly flushed. “We do not speak of murder in Iero’s house! Whatever his status in the secular world, Brother Valen is a vowed novice of Saint Ophir, my responsibility and my charge.”

“Father Abbot,” said Brother Victor, “the law is clear. If we do not turn him over and even the remotest hint of his status as recondeur becomes known, the consequences could ruin us. We don’t know if the lighthouse can survive the destruction of the abbey. Whatever else, you and Gillarine will be lost to our cause, and the stocking of the lighthouse will surely come to a halt. With the royal succession near settled, our position is precarious enough. Yet, if we give him up, he knows enough to bring us to ruin.”

Brother Victor’s emotionless logic was far more terrifying than Stearc’s outburst. But then again, naught should terrify a dead man, and I was dead, no matter whether or not these people allowed me to keep breathing.

“The hierarch will welcome his information about our plans and use it. The lighthouse is compromised, as are the identities of those in this room—”

“Of course,” I said. My skin burned. My soul burned. “Because I refuse to live as a slave to my family and the Pureblood Registry—allowing them to tell me whom I may speak to, what profession I must follow, whom I will marry, and what children I will or will not breed, allowing them to sell my life to the highest bidder—then I must necessarily be untrustworthy.”

“It is not merely your refusal to submit, Valen,” said Thalassa. “It is that your refusal to submit is the key to your nature—wholly and entirely a servant of your own pleasure. I would not trust you with my dog lest you have discovered some amusement in tormenting dogs. I cannot and will not stand idle and allow you to escape the consequences of a lifetime’s self-indulgence.”

“You know nothing of my life,” I said.

She broke from the circle and walked slightly behind me, so that I would have to turn away from the others in order to face her. I refused to turn, though I felt her examination taking in my filthy habit and offal-stained feet and the sweating, blood-grimed hands I clenched at my back.

Every bone and sinew demanded I run. But I was not so naive as I had been at eight, when Thalassa had taunted me into my first break for freedom, only to stand smirking as my father hauled me home by my hair. The liveried men outside would be Thalassa’s escort—pureblood warriors with magically tuned senses. She could summon them with a thought.

“You even foul your monk’s costume, Valen,” she said.

I held my tongue and my position, trapping the familiar hatred inside until my skin stretched with the size of it.

After a moment, she drifted back toward her fellows. Only thirty, she moved with the imperious gravity of a lifelong queen. Though her temple position left her exempt from the mask and cloak required of purebloods when mingling with ordinaries, her gown and jewels certainly met the Registry standards of conservative elegance. A Sinduri high priestess, one of the five highest-ranking servants of the elder gods. Our father must be preening.

“Abbot Luviar, I must and will report my brother to the Registry. Our family has endured twelve years of disgrace that will be relieved only when he is returned to our discipline. I am, as ever, wholly committed to our task, but we must find other means to accomplish our goals. Valen is mentally unstable and entirely untrustworthy, and I’ll vow that any help he has given you has been purest chicanery. You needn’t fear for our secrets. I’ve ways to ensure his silence before he is remanded into Registry custody.”

And that chilled me to the marrow. The Sinduri were known to have potions and spells to alter the mind. My bravado crumbled in an instant. “Holy father, please, don’t let her—”

Luviar’s hand stopped my begging before I completely abased myself. “Sinduria, Lord Stearc, friends and brothers, before we undertake some drastic course, we must proceed with our conclave. Rightly or wrongly, I took it upon myself to bring Valen into our circle. And despite his regrettable lack of…candor…he has been of great assistance. We cannot separate our needs and his abilities from his fate. So let us sit and consider both issues together.”

The abbot swept through the door and into the parlor, Brother Victor on his heels. A seething Thalassa followed. Lord Stearc waved Gram and Elene into the room ahead of him. He himself remained near the door, as if prepared to rush back through and prevent my escape. Only Gildas was left with me.

He shook his head and grinned. “I thought I had guessed your secrets, Brother, but I will say you have confounded me. A pureblood sorcerer. And Janus de Cartamandua’s grandson on top of it. I shall surely wake up tomorrow living on the moon.”

He took my arm, and we strolled across the atrium as if going into supper in a nobleman’s hall. As we stepped onto the plum-colored carpet of the parlor, he leaned close and whispered, “Be patient, friend. We’ll not abandon you.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, bolstered by his friendship. “I needed a refuge. I never intended—” But, of course, intention had naught to do with anything. I had knowingly put them at risk. Only now did the callousness of that choice hit home.

Six straight-backed chairs formed a circle next the hearth. Gildas joined the abbot, Brother Victor, Stearc, and Thalassa, who were already in place. Luviar waved me to the last unoccupied chair of the inner circle, between Gildas and Brother Victor. Gram humbly pulled up a stool just behind Thane Stearc. Elene, a proper squire, remained standing beside the door to the atrium, her hands clasped at her back, eyes straight ahead, her face a mask.

“I cannot credit that you would admit Valen to our deliberations, Luviar,” said my sister, her bead collar clicking as she shifted in her seat. “He should be confined. He will try to run away. It is his lifelong habit. The sooner I blind his knowledge of our secrets the better.”

“I appreciate your sentiments, lady,” said Luviar. “Yet the tale of our experiments with your grandfather’s book might give you a new perspective. Of course, we must evaluate Brother Valen’s contributions differently in the light of this new information about his lineage. Gram, would you please report on the events of these past few days?”

The secretary stood, bowed respectfully to the abbot, Lord Stearc, and Thalassa, and began a detailed, well-structured, and as far as he was capable, accurate account of our search for the pool known as Clyste’s Well. Nauseated, my throat parched, I slumped in my chair as he recited. The knowledge that Thalassa’s accusations were substantially true did not improve my disposition in the least. The room felt unbearably hot. I wished I dared throw off my cowl or open a window.

Gram paused his recitation to ask Brother Gildas to confirm our discovery of the Well. Brother Gildas stated soberly that to his fullest belief, the pool was the one for which they had been searching. “…though I saw no evidence of a Dané guardian there.”

Before the secretary could move on to the tale of the tree and the encounter with the Dané, Thalassa leaned forward. Her painted eyes, already larger than life, widened into great dark windows. “So you believe that Valen read our grandfather’s book of maps, recited the guide spell under his breath, and led you unerringly to a Dané sianou?”

The abbot looked puzzled. “Yes.”

“Go on. Tell me the rest.” Rouged mouth fixed in judgment, she folded her arms and sat back, biding her time, poised like a cat on the brink of a grand leap.

I closed my eyes and sank lower in the chair. I tried to bury my head in my hands, but I could not bear the stink and had to stuff my hands up my sleeves instead. My sister was going to tell them I could not read. Then she would relate how I had made an art form of lies since I was out of the crèche, how I had preferred to steal what I wanted rather than be given the very same thing by people I loathed, how I had destroyed everything of value I had ever touched, that I had spent three-quarters of my life from age five through fifteen besotted with drink, and had broken every rule of civilized society as if it were my sworn duty.

The wretched part was that, once she had told them those truths, they would believe everything she said of me, true or not. I hated that thought more than I had hated anything in a very long while. I hated what I had seen on Elene’s face. On Brother Victor’s. On Gram’s. At least I’d not had to witness Jullian’s reaction. Recondeur—traitor to family, king, and gods, one who spits on the power to work magic, the greatest gift given to humankind. And the boy already thought he knew the worst of me.

I pondered how I could possibly wrest some shred of dignity from this day. Stripping a pig now sounded like an afternoon’s delight. Meanwhile, Gram took up the story from our meeting on the hillside below Fortress Groult, ending with the Dané vanishing into the night.

“You actually saw one of them…spoke to a Dané?” For the first time, Thalassa’s attention was diverted from scorn and anger, her expression open in sincere astonishment.

“She spoke to us is more like it,” said Stearc. “She certainly did not listen…” He assessed the encounter as he had before—wondrous, but accomplishing nothing of substance.

“Have you anything to add, Brother Valen?” asked the abbot, startling me out of my gloom. “Anything that you observed that Gram has left out? Lord Stearc says you seemed…caught up…in the incident. And we need to know exactly what you did to invoke the power of the map on both occasions. Did you bring some pureblood sorcery to bear beyond that held in the book?”

They were all staring at me again. Luviar’s inquiry had reminded Thalassa of her day’s pleasure—righteous duty and personal entertainment entwined. She was near bursting, her heavy loop of hair quivering, her full red lips ready to spew condemnation for years of my petty insults and my not-so-petty offenses against her and the rest of our kin.

Well, nothing for it. I sat up straight.

“I was indeed overcome by the sight of the Dané,” I said, feeling lingering echoes of my strange grief even as I spoke of it at such a distance. If I was to attempt honesty for a change, I could not ignore the experience. “I’ve seen naught in all my life…in all my travels…in all my dreams…so fearsome and, at the same time, so marvelous. I felt this…immeasurable grace…that they yet live. Someone once told me that the Danae were the living finger of the god in this world. Perhaps that’s what I felt…that I was unworthy to see such a wonder.”

Though I had begun my confession hoping to garner sympathy—any advantage that might help mitigate a dismal future—somehow I had wandered very close to emotions I had never thought to share with anyone, especially one of my family. Profoundly unsettled, I continued. “I cannot tell you how I found the correct place to leave the nivat or even how I was able to locate the Well, except that it was some odd mixture of luck and ordinary experience at finding my way about the world and, yes, inherited talents. But it is impossible that I invoked the power of the maps.”

Puzzlement and disbelief had them shifting in their chairs, but I allowed no interruption. If I dared so much as look at them, I’d never go through with this.

“As my sister is yearning to reveal, I am afflicted with a disorder of the mind, a blindness that leaves me incapable of deciphering written words. At a more appropriate time and place, I will beg forgiveness for this and all my deceptions, holy father and good brothers, hoping that you will understand my fear in the face of your great kindness when I came here wounded and desperate. My experience of family is difficult—the details best left unspoken—but I assure you that I professed my vows with sincerity, if not…without reservation. As to how my disorder affects my use of my grandfather’s book—my book, as it happens, not my family’s, as he gave it to me on my seventh birthday—it means I cannot read place-names or written spells, and so must rely on my instincts, inborn talents, my knowledge of maps, and my spellmaking skill to interpret the drawings.”

I resisted the urge to add more. No need to humiliate myself further. If I was to be shipped off to Palinur to the gentle discipline of my family and the Pureblood Registry, I would get my fill of humiliation.

Stearc mumbled oaths. Brother Gildas masked a grin with curled fingers. Gram looked thoughtful and, for once, did not drop his eyes when they met mine. Unfortunately he was too far away for me to read anything in them—not that I was likely to see anything at all rewarding. Elene remained in the doorway, but now her back was to me. Probably for the best.

“Do not allow him to get away with this,” said Thalassa, tight as a moneylender’s fist. “Were Valen standing at Mother Samele’s right hand and suggesting I ascend her holy mount, I would not move one step forward, lest I fall into Magrog’s pit. He is a consummate liar—”

“Sinduria, if you please.” Gram’s quiet insistence drew their attention away from me, for which I was grateful. “Lady, the last time we spoke of Janus de Cartamandua, you indicated that he was very ill. Does he yet live?”

Not shifting her glare one quat, Thalassa jerked her head in the affirmative.

“Impossible!” The old man had been half in his grave before I’d run away—past seventy years old and addled beyond use. And gods knew I’d wished him dead often enough before and since. How could he not be dead?

“Brother Valen, did your grandfather know of your difficulty with reading?” Gram pursued whatever mad line of reasoning he had begun without altering his tone.

“Everyone in the house knew of his willful ignorance,” Thalassa snapped before I recovered wit enough to answer. “Valen’s only disorder is his despicable, intransigent soul. Surely you cannot swallow this playacting?”

“Please, Sinduria, hear me out.” Gram raised his hand but not his voice. “The causes of your brother’s condition are not relevant here. Only whether Janus de Cartamandua knew of the problem, which you have confirmed that he did. So, Brother Valen, your grandfather gave you the book on your birthday. Do you believe that he intended you to use it? Or was his intent merely to give you something of value to cherish or to sell?”

“To cherish? Hardly. Every time Capatronn—my grandfather Janus—returned to that house, he tried to teach me of the book. I hated it. I hated him. I did everything I could think of to be free of his lessons. But he insisted, saying that I must use the book to follow in his footsteps, and that our family would come to be the most powerful in the world. He was crazed with the idea and made me swear over and over, on holy writs, on shrines, on my life, and always, always with my blood, that I would use the book when I was old enough. When I was ‘free to do as I pleased,’ he put it. He stank—”

Gods, I could still smell his sour body, the stench of urine and ale and his rotting teeth when I saw him last. And I could see him on so many occasions before that, his black eyes bulging as he made me prick my finger yet again and slap the aingerou that supported the mantel over his hearth, leaving a bloody smear.

I reined in my disgust. “He was…is…mad. It was unpleasant.”

Gram nodded as if I had just given a recitation of the great vices and virtues or an accounting of the abbey grain stores. “So I would guess that reading is not essential to your use of the book. That would explain your success. And if you, as a…an ill-mannered, rebellious boy…refused your grandfather’s tutelage, that would explain your uncertainty as to how that success was accomplished.”

A nice hypothesis, but I didn’t see what difference it made. If I didn’t know what I had done, then I could scarcely repeat my “success.” But the gaunt secretary had tangled the others in his thread of reasoning. When he leaned forward on his stool, scarcely visible around his lord’s thick shoulder, they leaned forward to listen.

“Two matters require we consult the Danae. We must discover if they can shed light on this upheaval in the natural world, and we must present our request with regard to the Scholar. My Lord Stearc sees no hope in further approaches through the Danae sentinels. Danae have ever distrusted humans, and now, it seems, they despise us. Which means we must travel farther into Aeginea and directly approach those among the long-lived who might yet retain some fondness for Eodward. Stian and Kol are our only hope to be heard.”

Brother Victor had been rubbing his lip thoughtfully as Gram spoke. Now he dropped his hand to his lap and crinkled his brow even more. “Rightly spoken, Gram, yet the Dané’s reference to thievery and violation is worrisome—clearly obstacles in our path, though we’ve no idea what they mean.”

Good to hear of crimes they could not lay at my feet; I had never stolen from the Danae. Though the consideration of how close I’d come to stealing the offering of nivat gave me a sudden shiver. The damnable, cursed doulon.

The chancellor turned to Thalassa. “Lady, have you had any success in learning more of the Danae’s withdrawal from human intercourse?”

“No. The old man is confined to his room and speaks nothing of sense to anyone.”

“You have mentioned in the past that his ramblings include frequent references to…a person you cared not to name. Is it possible…?” Brother Victor was surely a master of diplomacy. His gaze flicked to me, and my sister did not whisk his head off with some priestess’s spell.

“Yes,” she said, twisting her mouth in distaste. “Valen was ever his favorite. No one could understand it. When he gave that vile, undisciplined child the last extant copy of the most precious book in the world, our parents—”

Thank all gods, she stopped, perhaps realizing that the seamier aspects of the Cartamandua-Celestine household were perhaps not the proper topic for a serious group of monks and lords come to discuss the end of the world. I had arrived at the same conclusion in my own rant.

Gram was standing now, his sober tunic hanging loose on his thin body. “Abbot Luviar, it seems to me that the god has brought us at least a slim hope of answers,” he said. Bathed in the smoky light from the tall windows at his back, less stooped, he took on a certain dignity. “Brother Victor is correct. Before we can approach the Danae, we must understand these grievances that have caused them to retreat from human contact. And we must learn how to use the maps to travel in Aeginea beyond the sentinels, for that is where we’ll find Stian and Kol if they yet live. Gildas has found no way to move past the Well, yet we know that Eodward visited the Well and walked as far as the ‘valley beyond it to the east,’ implying that he traveled from the west as from the abbey. So we are clearly missing something. As Brother Valen is the only person who has taken us even so far as this, I believe he holds the key both to these answers and to our interaction with the Danae.”

“Pssh!” Stearc regarded me with a look appropriate to rotting meat. “How do you propose for him to discover these answers that even you have failed to unlock? The man cannot even read his own book of maps. I say the danger a recondeur poses far outweighs any service he can offer.”

I stopped listening. Were they ever going to ask my opinion? Such an odd group of people. The enigmatic abbot. Brother Victor, whose unflappable, relentless reason was more unnerving than Stearc’s contempt. The Evanori warlord, himself a cipher—a scholar and warrior, a man who treated his secretary with a remarkably even hand while bullying his own daughter. Stearc seemed genuinely caught up in this mad venture. Worried. They were all worried, even Thalassa. It was easy to imagine my sister had come here solely to bait me, but she was a member of this group. Intelligence, wisdom, and a vision that is broader than one abbey or one kingdom or one faith, so Elene had said, referring, among others, to a member of my family. Truly a wonder of wonders.

“…see your reasoning. You think to have him question his grandfather.” Brother Victor’s quiet conclusion stung me awake like a stealthy wasp, as if Brother Infirmarian’s lancet pricked a mortified wound.

“No!” I yelled, on my feet before his last word had faded. Pain and hatred and crippling memory exploded from that incision like pus and septic blood. “You cannot force me to do that! I have naught to say to any of them. The old man is mad. You heard her say it. I won’t.”

“Brother Valen…” Several of them said it. They were all standing now.

“I cannot,” I said, fighting to hold back the onslaught of the past. “You don’t understand. Tell them, Thalassa. Tell them what happened every time Capatronn left to go adventuring.” The only person my father loathed more than me was Janus de Cartamandua, but pureblood discipline forbade him touching his own father.

I was already halfway to the door…shaking…furious…when I realized I had nowhere to go. Turning my back on them, I retreated toward the window, where I clutched the iron frame and stared into the yard. I tried to recapture my wonder at what I had seen at Caedmon’s Bridge—a living magic in the universe. Such a sight should leave all other events trivial. But all I could see, all I could feel, all I could hear were my grandfather’s conspiratorial whispers and his robust chortling as he rode away on his great horse, leaving me alone to face my father’s strap. Even my hatred for the man who beat me until my bowels released and confined me hungry and bleeding in my spell-darkened room could not match my hatred for the man who kept promising to set me free of it and never did. I had sworn I would never look at my grandfather again. Never speak to him. Never listen to him. He should be dead.

“Destroy my mind with Sinduri magic if you wish,” I said through gritted teeth. “Send me back to pureblood slavery if you wish, or throw me in the river with a stone hung round my throat. But do not ask me to sit in a room and have a civilized conversation with my grandfather.”

I did not hear their hasty deliberations as I pressed my forehead against the cold glass, raging and swearing—at myself more than anyone else. What use to be so angry over past misery? I had set myself free of that house, and if I had found only fleeting enjoyments and unsavory habits to soothe my restless nature, well then that was unfortunate. But at least I had made my own choices, whether to tan hides or steal a dagger or soldier for a king, whether to bed a woman or winter in an abbey or expend my magic on the doulon. At least I had lived.

When Brother Gildas broke away from Abbot Luviar, took my arm, and led me from the guesthouse and into the garden, I did not speak to him. I would waste no words on them ever again. I would lift not one finger to conspire in their madness.

The evening was still, a pale silver sheen of flagging sunlight behind wads of gray wool clouds. For once, the only storm raged inside me. Back in the guesthouse Thalassa was surely recounting the wicked tales I had so cleverly diverted earlier. Even worse, she could be telling them the whole sordid story of my childhood. Gods, how I hated the thought of that. But I would not waste any more time trying to explain.

Gildas held silent as we strode between the hedges, past the scummy pond, past the statue of Karus and uncountable images of saints put there as reminders of how we ought to live. I soon realized the monk was not leading me anywhere in particular. Thalassa’s two guards followed at a discreet distance, ready to pounce should I breathe wrong.

Rabbits sat paralyzed in the center of the path as we approached, darting out of our way just before we stepped on them. Two magpies screeched at us and then at each other and at the squirrels chasing through the hedges. Thunder rumbled from beyond the mountains.

I stared numbly at the path, my steps gradually losing their initial frantic pace. Eventually the bells for Vespers rang, and as the last tones drifted into silence and birdsong, my most acute fury seeped away. Still, Gildas waited.

“Don’t you need to be back at the guesthouse deciding what to do with me?” I said at last. “I’m not going to run off—not with those two brawny goslings prancing after me as if I were their dame. They’d have no second thoughts about violating the cloisters to chase me down, if that’s what concerns you.”

“I belong with the cabalists little more than you,” said Gildas. “I’ve been involved with them only three years. I help where I can, but my primary role is different from that of the others. They’ve not even told me how to open the lighthouse as yet. Only Victor, Luviar, and Stearc know that.”

“They’re all mad. Gods…Books and plows and Danae. Monks and princes, warlords and my sister the high priestess. An abbot who plays them all like strings on a vielle.”

“The ever-sensible Gram has not told you the connection between all these things?”

“It makes no difference. I’ll not dance to their music no matter what.” I shook my head. “And they’re not likely to tell me any more now, are they? Just more of my mind for my sister to obliterate lest I spew my guts to the hierarch and betray you all.”

We strolled through the hedge maze, a flock of sparrows twittering as they pecked at the worms the week’s rains had washed onto the path. Plainsong wafted faintly from the church, the pure melody twining itself around my anger, soothing my aching head.

“You must confess you are an enigma. What are they to think of you—a pureblood who throws away his position…his magic…to chop vegetables in a monastery? A man who could vie for power with princes, yet who has not bothered to learn to read?”

“Tell me of your vocation, Gildas,” I snapped. “Was it your mother’s prayers brought you here? My mother used predictions of my tormented demise to amuse her friends.”

“You don’t want to hear of my mother. She forbade us to eat berries on the last day of the week, for all know that the seeds would sprout vines in our bellies to grow out our ears if swallowed on Samele’s day. My mother believed that if she left a trail of blood between her door and the town well, a gatzé would come and grant her three wishes. Every child in Pontia would follow her to the well each day, taunting, asking what was her wish. She died with her veins flat from bleeding them. She—Well, you are not the only man with difficult family.” He barked a laugh.

I stopped in midstride. Harsh, lonely…of a sudden Gildas reminded me of a Pyrrhan exile I’d once met. Pyrrhans believed the world beyond their land’s borders existed only in their imaginations, and thus every day spent outside Pyrrha felt askew—outside of time, in the wrong place. A blessed grace that Gildas had found a place he valued so deeply as Gillarine. “Ah, fires of heaven, Gildas…I’m sorry.”

Flushed from chin to the crown of his shaven head, he averted his face and nudged me forward again. “You’d no way to know, unless thought reading is a Cartamandua bent.”

“I’ve always imagined you at the very least some noble’s younger son, done out of inheritance by an elder brother or sister and sent off here unwilling. Perhaps even our rumored Pretender.”

His smile tightened. “Not in the remotest instance. My family had nothing. Certainly nothing I wanted. They were not…scholarly…and my mind hungered for more stimulation than stitching leather to fit other men’s feet. Pride of intellect led me astray for many years—until I began to look beyond the material world for answers. Humility is a difficult lesson.”

No one had ever shared such a clean and honest piece of himself with me, especially on so private a matter. In my first days at the abbey he had offered me his friendship, and caution had made me refuse him. Too late now. I regretted that as much as any consequence of this wretched day. “At least you’ve a mind for lessons. Some skulls are too thick.”

He grinned and shook his head. “Come now, we have no time to recount our mournful pasts. You need to decide what to do next. Right now they’re debating whether to send you to Palinur as a novice of Saint Ophir, as Abbot Luviar wishes, or as a recaptured recondeur in the high priestess’s custody.” He cocked his head in inquiry. “Truly you have a right to know why the abbot wants to keep you on his leash. Shall I tell you?”

“Do as you like.”

“Gram could recite it better, I suppose, with his tallyman’s mind. But here’s what I know…Twenty years ago, Brother Victor and Brother Luviar, scholars and visionaries of extraordinary perceptions, came to believe that certain changes they saw in the world were serious enough that they needed to prepare. Their studies and calculations intimated that some twenty-five or thirty years might pass from the depth of crisis until men and women were ready to hear again of books and plows. They recruited a few people to help them build the lighthouse to survive the worst. Being of middle years themselves, they decided they needed a younger man to stand with the lighthouse, a Scholar who knew both the content of the books and how to use the tools they had chosen to preserve. Even in so short a span, much knowledge could be lost. If those who know how to warp a loom are dead, who will prevent others from burning the loom to stay warm?”

I said nothing. I preferred to forget these people and their plotting. They needed no vagabond jackleg to help them.

My lack of response did not deter Gildas. “And what if we were to lose all those who can read? City dwellers are most susceptible to plague. To ravagers. If the cities die, if learning dies, we are sent back to the land, to nights in the wild forest with spirits we can no longer tame with words, to awe of these Gehoum—the Powers who make the sky grow light or dark, whose righteous wrath is fire and storm…” His words trailed off.

An icy breath traced my spine, very like the night Sila Diaglou plunged her stake into a bleeding Boreas. I shuddered. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were the diviner in this cabal,” I said.

He laughed away the mystical fog that had settled over him like the haze cloaking the river in the night. “I’ve no magic. I only read the sayings of diviners and heed them.” He waved for me to keep walking as he talked. “Luviar and Brother Victor chose one of their finest and most versatile students at Gillarine’s school to be their Scholar, a young warlord of Evanore.”

“Not Stearc!” I said, not believing it even as I said it.

Gildas nodded, tucked his hands up his sleeves, and rounded a corner between the straggling yews. “Stearc applied himself to read every volume as they stored it away and to learn the working of every tool. But when blight hit the vineyards, and King Eodward had still not named a successor, Luviar and Victor began to believe that the dark time could last longer and lie deeper than they’d thought. The lack of a strong and righteous king makes the coming decline far more severe, you see. Stearc agreed that they needed to prepare someone younger to become the Scholar.”

I halted again and stared at his hairless skull and well-hewn face, at the clear, unmarked skin, at the brown eyes never lacking in irony, tucked under the line of his dark brow. “You.”

No wonder he forever smelled of sheep or smithing or yeast and barley. No wonder he was forever reading. He was the one chosen to survive and remember and, when the time was right, teach. The keeper of the lighthouse. The memory of a bed crammed up against stacked barrels aroused a dreadful understanding.

“Great holy Iero, they’re going to shut you in there, aren’t they? Seal you in the lighthouse. So you’ll survive the worst. Alone…for years…alone…”

“That was the original intent. Don’t look so horrified! I thrive on solitude and silence. It is the only peace we’re given in this world. And consider, I would have infinite occupation and no interruptions. However, a few months ago, we received new information that threw our whole plan into doubt.”

He moved on. I followed, unable to ignore the story. A rabbit sat chewing in the middle of an intersecting path, scampering away only when we were close enough to step on it.

“Stearc brought your sister into the cabal. He knew and respected her from other dealings with the Sinduri. She worked a grand divination, a whole day of incantations, burning herbs, and magical water basins, a marvel such as those of us raised outside pureblood halls had never seen before. And what she augured confounded the cabal. Two hundred and ten years until the dawn. A very long night indeed. Too much solitude, even for me! Somewhere along the way, Stearc had come by the private journal of Eodward’s tutor—a Moriangi monk named Picus, sent by Caedmon to accompany and educate his son in his exile. And so, thoughts turned to the Danae.”

Lost in imagining the dreadful destiny they had planned for Gildas, I failed to grasp the connection. “I don’t understand.”

As joyful evensong floated from the church, Gildas laughed again, not so merrily this time. “It seems we are both condemned to a life we would not choose. Instead of granting me a few decades of peace, solitude, and study, they wish me to go live with beings who despise humans, disdain scholarship, and who fight among themselves over which tree belongs to whom. If it can be arranged, I am to live in Aeginea.”

“Live with the Danae? Seven years for one…thirty years. So you would be…what?”

“According to this fey reasoning, when the madness fades and men realize they need what I can teach, I shall be but nine years past my fiftieth birthday—no older than Abbot Luviar, a hale and vigorous man. And perhaps not even so advanced as that in terms of health and strength, for once back here Eodward remained a man in his prime until well into middle age.”

“Deunor’s fire!”

And as I contemplated this mad scheme, the most personal of Gillarine’s recent mysteries unraveled as well. No more wondering why the abbot had allowed an unsavory vagabond to join his holy brotherhood. He must have thought my grandfather’s book a gift from Iero himself. Had I not told him that I had successfully made use of the book, he would likely have kept only the book and sent me away. And I would still be free. After twelve years evading the prison of my birth, my lies had caught me up at last.

“Ah.” Gildas halted in midstride and pointed down the path. “It appears as if the decision has been made.”

Thalassa’s two liveried guards hurried toward us. I imagined shackles tightening about my wrists. My gorge rose.

“Strike me,” said Gildas, grasping my shoulders and spinning me about to confront him. Fiery excitement bloomed in his face.

“What?”

“Strike me and run. Through the cloisters to the bridge behind the infirmary. Wait at the dolmen in the grain fields south of the river. I’ll tell them a shortcut—misdirect them. As soon as I can, I’ll bring food and coin, whatever you need. But wait for me. Promise.” He grinned and let his grip slide down my arms, shaking me out of my astonishment. “The cabal will find a road that is not built on the backs of dead men.”

“Ah, Brother, you must not—”

“Strike! Go!”

A hopeless scheme. But life’s breath to one suffocating.

I drove my fist into his smiling face. His smooth skin broke and the fine bones shifted as I summoned the pent fury of the day to fuel the blow. My aim was not merely to play the necessary part, but to keep him blameless, for his gift was not only the strike, but the suspicion that must inevitably surround it. I knew well which injury could harm him more. Make one worse, and the other might be eased. They’d blame his misdirection on his muddled head.

“Iero’s grace, Brother,” I said, as he crumpled into the yew hedge. And then I ran.

Chapter 20

“I should just go,” I said, as I blotted stray water droplets from my neck.

A storm had blown in soon after I reached the ancient stones of the dolmen, and the broad lintel stone, though something like a roof, did little to shield a man from wind-driven rain. The worst of the storm had passed somewhere between the ringing of Compline and the day’s end bell, but by the time Gildas at last popped out of the fog, I was thoroughly soaked and incomparably edgy. I had waited more than four hours, telling myself every moment that I was a madman to do so.

“No! You must not stir from here,” said Gildas softly, crouched close enough I could make out his face. Voices carried in the fog. “Your sister insists that you’ll run fast and far. They’re scouring the countryside, the river, and the woodland tracks. They’ve alerted the watch in Elanus. They’ll never imagine you’ve remained so near the abbey and in a barley field to boot. Even the purebloods—You’re one of them, Valen. Surely you’ve spells to conceal your path, spells to confuse them.”

“I’m not at all good at spellcasting,” I said. “Obscuré spells are unreliable at best, and I’ve never made one work. I cannot just sit here.”

“Be patient. They’ll soon tire of useless searching in the dark. And the moment they decide to wait for dawn, you’re free of them.”

Gildas’s eyes flashed in his pale face, blotched and swollen from encountering my fist. Though breathless from his hurried journey, his voice was tight with excitement. I had been on the run too often for excitement, and I was much too close to the abbey to feel free.

“I’m sorry I had to come here with so little. But I didn’t want you to wait any longer without word. I hadn’t counted on you putting me in the infirmary!”

“Yet you’ve brought me Iero’s own gift.” Upon his arrival, my wet, battered, and bedraggled friend had shoved a fat wineskin into my hands. “And I do thank you for it and for this chance, but I daren’t wait longer.”

“You need your secular clothes; they’ll be watching for the cowl. And if you’re going to avoid towns until you’re well away, you need food. Give me another hour.”

I turned his head so I could see his swollen jaw. “Holy Mother, I am sorry for this. You oughtn’t be trotting around with a bruised head. You’ll get dizzy and fall in the river. And you must not be caught helping me. Do you even understand what they’ll do to you?” He’d be god-blessed to see daylight ever again.

His teeth flashed in the rainy darkness. “Your sister’s purebloods questioned me before Compline and now think I’m asleep. I can get into the dorter and the kitchen without anyone the wiser. But they’ll certainly be back to question me, so I’ll send one of the boys with your things. The abbey will be in such an uproar, they’ll be able to slip in and out easier than any of us. And they admire you so.”

“No!” I said, sharper than I intended. “Not the boys. Of course they’d do anything you ask them. But no, please. I’d rather do without.”

I had no reason to believe Jullian or Gerard would still “admire” me in any way, assuming they ever had. Even so, I refused to put them in jeopardy. At least Gildas was a man and had some idea of the world and its horrors, but those boys…they would die in prison.

“They’re very careful and I’m sure they’d not betray you, but if you prefer, I’ll come myself during Matins. Promise you’ll not leave before that. I’m quite recovered.” His hands squeezed my shoulders, solid and reassuring. “You saved me from Sila Diaglou’s whip, Valen. Did you think I’d forget?”

I wrestled with fear and need and the desire to be gone. I could likely survive the next few days with no money, no food, no secular clothes. But of course I had a far more urgent lack. Four days gone since my incomplete doulon. Saints and angels, how I hated this. “Brother, if you can…I’ve left a packet hidden in the garden all these months, a few things I’d not like to abandon. A knife. Some extra medicine for my leg.”

One look inside the bundle and he would know. By sight or scent, nivat was unmistakable. If Gildas had risked so much to get me this far, then perhaps he could even forgive a bit of perversion.

“I’ll bring whatever you like.” After I described how to find my bundle, he gripped my shoulders. “An hour. You are in the god’s hand, Valen.”

“And you, good friend,” I said, as he sped through the stubbled field, vanishing almost before I could blink. “Be very careful.”

You’re a fool to wait, Valen. Better to be caught running than squatting like a toad. It was the same argument I’d had with myself all evening. But for twelve years, doing the unexpected had kept me free. Gildas would do as I asked. A fascination had captured him since the moment he’d learned I was pureblood, driving him to help beyond reasoned friendship. If we were successful, perhaps he’d have a chance to tell me why.

Pulling up my hood, I settled back against the cold stone and took a long pull at the wineskin. Though I expected ale, the essence of grape and oak warmed my gullet. Oh, friend Gildas, blessed be your name. And mighty Erdru, holy lord of grape and harvest, how could you have so cruelly abandoned your worshipers? I took a second drink, feeling the wine scald the hollows in my belly. With every swallow, I named Gildas holy.

I ought to sleep. The coming days would be long and difficult, and sleeping bodies were harder to locate with magic. But the events of the past weeks roiled in my head like cream in a churn, and strangeness hung about me like a fever. Through the hours of waiting, I had imagined I was hearing things through the drumming rain…sounds like sighs and breathing, like worms gnawing their way through dead flesh, like heartbeats and green shoots struggling to break through the mud and rock. I kept my hands clasped tightly in my lap, remembering the earth breathing under my hand as I searched out the route to Elanus. If I laid my palms down tonight, I felt the eerie certainty that I’d detect a heartbeat.

Holy ground. Of course, the world was infused with divine mystery. Everyone felt such things on occasion—saw faces in the clouds, experienced a day in the midst of winter when it felt as if spring had leaked through the boundaries of seasons, felt prickles when walking through a darkening wood. But I had never thought myself closer to such mystery than the next man. Signs and portents had never shaken me, never driven me to any action beyond kissing the nearest aingerou or pouring a libation for the appropriate deity. But here in this valley…in the cloisters, on the road, in the hills. What was happening to me?

Likely what I felt tonight was nothing save these ancient rocks. Simple and stark, dolmens were scattered in the open country throughout Ardra. No one knew what purposes they had served—burials, ceremonies, boundaries, markers. Yet anyone with even a touch of magical sensibility would recognize the power that lingered about them.

And I had seen a Dané. Only now as the rain spattered on the stone and showered softly on the barley could I recapture the wonder of it. They lived…beings that could dissolve into earth or water or tree. Beings that could hear the music of the stars and weave life into the fields with their dancing. Knowing the legends were true…the world could never look the same to me.

A breath of wind swirled the mist, bearing the powerful sweet scent of rotting grain. I pulled my hood lower, huddled the wineskin closer, and drank again, closing my eyes. I didn’t want to see what beings might live in a place so ancient. I didn’t want to hear the creaking as the stones shifted with the breathing of the earth. I shuddered. What had Gildas said? If the cities die, if learning dies, we are sent back to the land, to nights in the wild forest with spirits we can no longer tame with words, to awe of these Gehoum…

“Brother Valen?”

The soft voice sent me to my feet with my stomach in my throat. Giddy with the wine and foolish musings, I imagined all sorts of things before I associated the voice with the human shape standing near a mound of musty grain stalks ten paces away. “Mistress Elene?”

“Yes.”

I pressed my back to the stone, peering into the darkness, trying to glimpse other movement. “Have they sent you to drag me back? I warn you I won’t go other than feet before, and I don’t think you’re capable of overpowering me on your own. Or perhaps you’ve brought comrades?”

“I’m quite alone.” She stepped under the lintel rock, water cascading from her cloak. Her wet hair curled about her face. “I spied on you and Brother Gildas in the maze and followed you out here, determined to bring you back. When you stopped so close, I believed you were having second thoughts. So, like a moonstruck chit, I’ve hidden behind that pile of sour barley all this time debating whether to speak with you or just to pray you would go back on your own.”

I did not mistake her reference to “moonstruck chit” for any more than description. Nor did I tease her about it. Her face, so pale in the night, was tied into much too sober a knot.

I sank to the ground again, leaning against one upright stone. My feet and my back reminded me of two exhausting days, a sleepless night, and a butchered pig. “I’m always glad for company, mistress. But I can’t believe your father would approve.” Certainly not after Thalassa’s jibes.

“He won’t.” She matched my position against the other upright. “My father would prefer having a son and flies into a rage when I show any independence of mind. Even when he can’t find reason to refuse a request, he seeks a way to make his acquiescence unpleasant. If I’m to be chastised anyway, I might as well do as I please now and then.”

“Thus your cheerful life as Corin the Squire.”

“He calls me Corin even when we’re alone.”

This confession was couched in such rueful exasperation that I laughed in sympathy and tossed her the wineskin. “So we have both cursed our families with unfulfilled expectations. At least you bear no fault for your father’s disappointment, as I’m sure a scholarly man such as Stearc will recognize eventually. My family has no such consolation. I was a dreadful, obstreperous child, who set out from the crèche to turn their well-ordered household bottom side up and who maliciously tormented every unfortunate who stepped within my view. My sister’s reports of that are perfectly true.”

Elene took a single swallow of wine and slowly replaced the plug. Earning my eternal gratitude, she tossed it back to me. “I think your sister does not know you as you are now.”

I took a very long swallow. Perhaps the wine would blunt the whispering seduction of the night. The mist curled around my cheeks and tickled my ears like a woman’s tongue. The earth pulsed beneath my legs and backside. The richness of Elene’s voice drew soft fingers up my thighs. To keep talking was an effort.

“Nor do you know me, good Corin. If you’re feeling guilty for leading me into that little mess this afternoon, don’t. I am quite good at embroiling myself in messes on my own.” I shifted position, moving close enough to offer the wineskin again.

She shook her head and leaned forward, her knees drawn up, her hands clasped firmly in front of her legs. I could feel her breath on my face. I could smell the barley on her. The layers of damp leather. The woman underneath. Foolish to allow such distraction…

“If I’m to feel guilty, then I’d rather more fault than an accidental meeting to justify it.” Her voice played like music in the night. “I came here to ask you—No, to plead with you. The cabal needs you, Brother Valen. I’m surprised at Brother Gildas helping you escape. I never judged him a man to care about anyone’s personal safety. He is quite single-minded. But he is a fool if he thinks the lighthouse cabal can succeed without your assistance. Your sister has tried everything to glean the information we need from your grandfather with no result. And since the day the gods brought you to Gillarine, each of us has tried to unravel the book of maps and got no farther than a bare cliff and a crossroads cairn.”

“And how do you propose I assist you? Do you understand the somewhat limited prospects for a recaptured recondeur? Until the day I die I’ll not be allowed to piss without three guards watching me. You’re all mad anyway.” Her choice of conversational topic cooled my rising fever.

“The life of a pureblood…I’d always thought it holy. Your people live hidden, so honored, valued, protected, elevated beyond all of us who must struggle with everyday life, as if you spend half your days in heaven, returning only long enough to produce wonders. I thought a recondeur must be soul-dead to leave such a noble gift as sorcery behind. Yet I cannot believe that of you.”

How could I explain that the favor of kings and a life of luxury, ever shielded from want and war, was not worth the price? What ordinary would ever believe it? Few purebloods besides my own mad self had ever believed it. Everyone who’d ever known me swore that I spoke such heresy to excuse poor skills and willful ignorance, or to service childish whim made stubborn by “unfortunate conflict” with my father. All agreed my nature insupportably perverse. Yet my belief was rooted as deep as any knowledge or understanding I possessed.

The night hid her expression, leaving us a certain intimacy, like comfortable bed partners after the frenzy is past. “Mistress, when your men threw that grain sack over my head, I was convinced I would die from it. No matter that the bag was loosely woven. No matter that your intent to let me live was soon clear, and that the restriction of my sight was part of a well-considered plan. Had the sack been woven of spider’s silk wound with gossamer, the cord about my neck softer than angel’s wings, and your bodyguards’ hands as gentle as your own, it would have made no difference to my horror and dread. I could not breathe. Pureblood life was very like that for me. Now it will be worse.”

“Surely, whatever your problems in the past, your family will see you’ve changed.” She was truly naive.

“Ah, lady, you don’t know my family.” I touched her face, so pale in the fog, cool and damp. And my hand slid around the back of her neck, pulling her gently toward me while stroking the downy hair and soft skin, feeling the strength and pride of her. So alive…

Her breath caught, but she yielded, warmth flooding her skin under my fingers. Imminent danger…escape…caution…vows…all slipped away, the pulse of the night driving me where I’d no intent to go. It had been so long. The ache within me grew, trapping breath in my lungs, obliterating thought as my lips touched hers…

Torches flared from the direction of the abbey. Shouts accompanied them and were answered from the mist on our flanks. Blessed saints and angels, how stupid, how inexcusably weak, lust-blinded, and incautious, could a man get? She wanted me taken.

“Magrog have you, woman!”

Elene shot up from the ground in the same moment I did. “Brother Valen, wait! I didn’t—”

I didn’t dally to hear her excuses, but sped southward into the fog, stumbling blindly until I stopped cursing perfidious women and threw every sense I possessed into the race. Feel the thicker mist hanging over the river on your left…smell the wrack and weed…hear the whisper of water in its deep channel. Feel the road on the right…the tread of feet…of wheels…of hooves and paws for a thousand years…the restless horses patrolling there…waiting for you to stumble. And the earth underfoot…

I stopped and tore at the laces of my sandals. Throwing them off, I ran barefoot, feeling the prickling stubble of the barley field and the cold, sodden earth. Instinct warned me of holes, channels, and rocks and guided me southward, upward, away from the abbey.

The fog swallowed the torchlight and voices, and my bare feet were light, little more than a mouse’s tread through the fields. I slowed a bit and controlled my breathing so as not to give away by gasps and gulps what I gained by speed.

A pale line emerged from the fog—a rampart of stone—the abbey boundary, a waist-high rubble wall out here in the fields, not the smooth-dressed ashlar of the abbey’s public face. I slapped my hands on the top and leaped over the wall, trying to remember the terrain to the south, the route Brother Adolfus and I had traveled toward Caedmon’s Bridge. Broad meadows between the road and the river, broken by swaths of trees, and then the short steep climb toward the higher meadows, the giant’s steps toward the mountains.

Chest heaving, I knelt and pressed hands and forehead to the earth. Stretched my mind forward. Swept it across the landscape. Safety…haven…guide me… The night shifted a little. Left. A path limned with moonlight. I popped up and ran.

The breeze swelled, swirling the fog, thinning it here and there. Patches of stars appeared and were as quickly obscured. Angle right and around to avoid a spring and a thicket. Foolish as it was to hope, I began to think I had eluded them. My destination—the refuge—felt near.

Hoofbeats to my right. On the road, much too close. Torches again. Damnable beasts to bring pursuit so fast.

I burst through the edge of the fog. The night was clear; the stars gleamed above a lush meadow, broken only by a ring of trees with smooth white trunks and bright gold leaves. I’d thought these aspens were already bare…

“Ho there! Get him!” The hoofbeats dulled when they left the road for the grass of the meadow. Or perhaps my heart thudded so ferociously that it drowned out the sounds of pursuit.

A searing finger touched the back of my neck. Of a sudden my feet felt shod in iron. Stumbling, I dragged them onward, unwilling to concede the race. Another bolt touched my back—no mundane weapon, but sorcery, a brutal binding of limbs and will.

I was so close to the ring of aspens. What safety might lie there when I had already been spotted, I could not imagine. Yet I believed that to reach it must yield victory. Only a little farther…a few steps…

A third bolt took my knees, and I crumpled a mere ten paces from the rustling trees. The stink of horses and diseased leaves gagged me as I fell.

Until the end of days I would swear that a naked man, a dragon traced in blue fire upon his face and limbs, reached out to me from the grove. But it was too far, and the fourth bolt of fire made the night go black.

They rolled me onto a palliasse thinner than the one in the monks’ dorter, and with only hard floor, no sling of ropes underneath it.

“Can he breathe properly? Swallow?”

No, I wanted to say. He cannot breathe, not if you’ve put him in a cell. The place smelled of rusted iron and musty stone, fresh straw and old piss. Prisons were prisons, even in an abbey.

“Indeed, sir abbot, all those things. We are not permitted to injure him.” The perfumed man who had hauled me up from the ground and thrown me over his saddle sounded as if he’d a broom up his backside. His scent was cheap; his contract with Thalassa must not pay well. “The spell merely prevents voluntary movement. He is probably awake even now.”

Fingers shoved my eyelids open and I stared directly into the yellow glare of a lamp. My eyes blinked and watered. From behind the glare two shadowy faces looked down at me.

“There, you see, sir abbot. He hears us. The recondeur seems a bit unhappy at his state.”

Trapped within the bonds of my flesh, I struggled to strike…to scream…to move…half crazed already.

A cool hand rested on my forehead. “I regret you could not trust me, Valen,” said Luviar. “I would have protected you. Trust breeds faith. And faith, honesty, and compassion are the roots of honor. With your gifts and a smattering of honor, you might have done great good for the world. May Iero transform your intransigent heart.”

The blurred faces moved out of view. The lamp was taken away. My skin shrank as the yellow light wavered, latches rattled, and a door was opened, stirring the musty air, causing wild shadows to dance about the low, mold-patched ceiling.

Please don’t leave me here!

The door slammed shut. The locks clicked. The darkness and the walls closed in.

Chapter 21

Voices, light, and cheap scent yanked me into full awareness. This event was not a waking. I had not slept. But at sometime in the long frigid night of suffocation and terror, I had clawed open a hole in my mind, a deeper darkness void of thought, a place to huddle and stay sane. Now, unrelieved by sleep’s murky unwinding, I could remember exactly the events of day and night that had led to my current position flat on my back, eyes open, in the abbey’s prison cell.

Thalassa’s kohl-lined eyes and her long straight nose hovered above me. She laid a finger in the center of my forehead, whispered a word, and an invisible whip stroke tore through me from head to toes. A mighty unraveling.

I curled up in a knot and rolled to the side, muting my cry in a fit of coughing, my gritty eyes squeezed shut. My spine stung.

A hand closed over my mouth and pressed tightly, as if to silence my cough, even while another pressed from the back of my head. The hands—Thalassa’s, surely—were quickly removed, and I felt a void at my side as she moved away.

“Silos, inform me at once if you sense one scrap of magic from this cell,” she commanded. “We’ll silkbind his hands at the first hint of it. And tell the monk he may bring something for Valen to drink. But no ale or spirits. And nothing to eat for today. I wish the recondeur to remain sober, and a hungry day will remind him of his manners. We leave for Palinur in an hour.”

“Yes, Sinduria,” said the scented lackey.

Had anyone ever suffered such a sister? Between Thalassa and Elene, I vowed to swear off women altogether. Would Elene have let me take her body just to fulfill her holy purpose?

A swish of silk on stone and the door slammed shut behind Thalassa. I remained huddled on the palliasse, trying to summon the resilience that had sustained me as a child, trying to convince myself that I would not bend to their will just to avoid another night like the one I had just endured. The deepening cold bruised body and spirit, weighing as iron-linked mail on my limbs. I could not stop shaking.

The door opened and closed again. Light danced at the edges of my eyelids. Someone wearing sandals walked the five steps from the door and crouched beside me, smelling of damp wool and the boiling herbs of the infirmary, overlaid with traces of mud and grain fields.

“Sit up, Brother Valen. I’ve brought you water. You need to drink and change clothes, and then we must pray for your true repentance and a safe journey.”

“I don’t drink water, Brother Gildas,” I said, my voice as rough as if my night’s screams had been aloud instead of trapped within my skull.

“They’re not going to give you anything else for a while, and if you fail to cooperate, they’ll force it down you. You are no longer a child to take petty victories from stubbornness. Now, sit up.”

Men of insight. If my childhood had been lived out among ones like these, I might have turned out differently. I rolled onto all fours and sat back on my heels, cramming my frozen hands into my sleeves. Gildas sat cross-legged on the floor in front of me, holding a green pottery flask. Beside him sat a small brass lamp and a pile of clothing that could be none but my own stained jaque, braies, and boots.

“How is it you are here?” I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “Are you a pris—?”

He pressed a finger to his mouth and jerked his head slightly backward toward the ironclad door at his back. Its upper half was a thick grate. Anyone in the darkness outside the door could see and hear what went on in the cell.

“Father Abbot sent me,” he said. “I told him I bore no grudge for the bruises, and assured him that my incompetence could not set you free again. Your guards—both of them—are purebloods.”

So they did not suspect his complicity in my escape. A touch of resentment cooled my good feelings. I supposed Elene thought Gildas too valuable to their little cabal to reveal his role in the night’s fiasco. At least he had tried to help.

“Drink this, and dress yourself in your secular clothing.”

I unstoppered the flask he gave me, sniffed at it, and stuffed the stopper back in again, pretending my throat did not feel like gravel. Water—my foretold doom. My mother might be a wretched parent, but she was a talented diviner. “So my novice year is at an end, is it?”

“For now. The Sinduria and Abbot Luviar have agreed that you will not be permitted to hide behind the cowl as you face the consequences of your transgressions. However, the abbot wishes me to remind you that you are not released from your vows. You remain sworn in obedience to him and to the Rule of Saint Ophir and are not to speak of certain events. Can you tell me which ones?”

I shoved the water flask back into his hand. “Despite what everyone believes, I’m not stupid.”

“Come now, tell me. I’m required to hear your recitation.”

“I’ll not reveal any of his—” My tongue balked at the word secrets. I began again. “He assumes I’ll tell of the—” I tried to say lighthouse but was unable to speak the word.

Again, and then again, I attempted to speak of the abbot and Gillarine and the conspiracy. I pressed my hands to my head as if to trap the words that kept escaping somewhere between my mind and my mouth, but concentration seemed to make no difference. Danae, lighthouse, conspiracy…I could not voice them.

“What have they done?” I tugged at my hair until my scalp burned. I was awake. In control of my body. Surely I could command my own speech. Surely…As I spewed half sentences and fragments, I remembered Thalassa’s hands squeezing my mouth and head and began to understand. “Is that why you’re here? Did they send you to test her damnable spell?”

Frantically, I sped through thoughts and memories in search of holes or gaps. Nothing of current or past events seemed to be missing, but then, how would I know?

“Valen…” Gildas laid his hands on my shoulders, but I knocked him backward.

“Listen to me! Listen!” Gildas got back to his knees and reached for me again. I twisted and shoved him away, but I could not both concentrate on the gaps in my speech and grapple with a man so determined and so surprisingly strong. Eventually he caught my upper arms and squeezed them tight to my body, shaking me until I met his gaze. “Be easy, Brother. This is well done. They’ve put a simple binder on your tongue with regard to these matters. Nothing more. I promise you. Father Abbot would allow nothing of a permanent nature. Yes, they wished me to test you. As the restriction is now proved, nothing further should be needed.”

“Am I to thank Luviar for that?” I said. I thrust my forearms between Gildas’s and slammed them outward to break his grip. He winced and rubbed his arms, and I was glad of it.

He did not touch me again but crinkled his brow earnestly. “You ran, Valen. Blame the one responsible”—his face was all apology—“and forgive him. Now we need to move on. They’ll be coming for you soon. The Sinduria wishes to leave for Palinur before Prime.”

He picked up my old clothes and held them out to me. “Though you must relinquish the cowl and gown, Father Abbot says you may keep the shirt. A biting cold has settled in since the storm.”

Stiff with anger at Gildas, at the monks, at myself and everyone else within Gillarine’s walls, I made no move to take the stack. What had come over me in this place? I knew better than to trust anyone.

His eyes flicked quite obviously from me to the bundle. And then again. The third time he did so, I held out my hands. As he laid the neatly folded clothing on my open palms, his warm fingers grasped one of my hands and guided it to the middle of the stack. And there I felt a small wad of tallow-stiffened canvas, drawn closed with a leather thong.

I glanced up quickly, my heart galloping.

Raising his thick brows and smiling ruefully, he released the bundle and stood up. “You are a man of many virtues, Valen. Be very careful as you don these worldly garments again, lest you be snared from the path of right…or reason. There are always choices to be made, even in the life you were born to.”

Hot blood flooded my skin until I felt as if I must glow brighter than the lantern. I hated that he knew. What was wrong with me of late, worrying so much about what people thought of me? Gildas was but an overzealous monk. Gram a meek secretary. Jullian a smooth-chinned whelp. I could always find new friends.

Laying the stack beside me on the palliasse, I stripped off my cowl and gown. The stiff jaque bound tight over the thick, loose wool shirt. As I pulled on the braies, I quickly tucked the bag of nivat away and tied it safely to the waist string.

“And now drink the water—yes, you must. Then we’ll pray.” Gildas held out the flask.

My mouth felt like a nest of thorns. I had to drink something. He observed me closely as I drained the tasteless contents of the flask. Ugh…a drink for cows…

My stomach roiled at the first sip. Then a cramp twisted my gut, and my overheated skin blossomed into a cold sweat, as if my mother’s divination had truly come to pass.

“Valen, what do you feel? It’s only water.” Gildas might have been shouting down a well.

“I don’t usually drink—” The word poison came to mind as I hurriedly found the rusty pail in the corner of the cell, ripped off its cover, and vomited up every drop of the foul stuff. Even when it seemed everything must be out of me, I could not stop heaving.

Gildas knelt beside me as I huddled over the bucket. His hands felt like ice on my blistering forehead. “Come, lie down. I’ll tell Father Abbot and the Sinduria you’d best not travel today. Ah, friend…what strange miracles happen in this world. Nothing is out of the realm of possibility.”

He half carried, half dragged me to the palliasse, and threw the thin blanket over me, then grabbed his lamp and hurried out the door. Before his footsteps died away, I had fumbled my way back across the floor to the bucket, retching.

The rest of the day flowed together like wet ink on a page. As feeble daylight waxed and waned through a slot high on one cell wall, a string of visitors paraded through my cell—the abbot, Thalassa, Gildas, Thane Stearc, one at a time and then all together, talking and arguing too softly for me to hear. I could pay them no mind anyway. I was on my knees in the corner hunched over the fouled bucket, trying not to vomit up the entire contents of my skin. Brother Robierre questioned me between spasms, examining my tongue and fingernails, eyes and throat.

Even Gram came. He stood in the corner for a while, arms crossed, watching the others as they watched me. After a while he stepped close, laid his hand on my shoulder, and mumbled some incomprehensible sympathy.

As the Compline bell rang, I crawled back to my palliasse. Brother Robierre returned soon after. “The worst seems past,” he said, once he had verified that I was alive. “Were you trustworthy, we could have made you more comfortable in the infirmary.” I had never heard the kind infirmarian so frosty.

“No matter.” My raw throat made everything sound harsh.

He wiped my face with a damp rag and laid yet another blanket over me. “The abbot charged me to inform you of my findings. You were not poisoned. Anselm found naught in your spew or your blood. Your body tells me that you are entirely healthy. So this must be some condition of your blood. Perhaps sorcerers cannot tolerate blessed water. I’ve not treated your kind…purebloods…before.”

I shook my head and laughed. “Purebloods were never my kind.”

He did not see the humor. “Then perhaps it is the soul-poison of a man who would so betray the gifts of the good god and so endanger those who welcomed him as a brother. I will petition Iero to break your sinful spirit, Valen. Here—” With deft hands, he raised my head and emptied a vial of something strong and sweet down my gullet before I could protest. “Now you’ve settled a bit, this should ease your stomach.”

“I’m sorry, Brother,” I mumbled, dropping my head to the palliasse, feeling his draft sapping my remaining strength. “But you cannot possibly understand.”

He stood to go. “One more thing…Young Gerard was supposed to serve in the infirmary this evening, but the lad has not been seen all day. You ever took an interest in the boys, and someone told me you might know where he was off to.”

“No…sorry. Truly.”

The iron door clanged shut behind Robierre.

The day’s end bell had rung at least two hours since. That had been the last time I heard movement in the dark stairwell outside the door. Only two pureblood guards, Gildas had told me, and even purebloods had to sleep. Head pounding from holding off the effects of Brother Badger’s draft, I crept across the floor and touched my finger to the bottom of the door. Despite the doulon looming ever closer, I could not afford to hoard my magic. Flooding power into the spell, I drew my finger up and around in a sweeping arc on the stone beside the door, and back to the floor again. Then I grabbed my boots and crawled through the void into the stairwell. Still no sound.

The touch of open air on my cheek guided me up one narrow stair. I avoided brushing the wall. Hopes rising, I turned and slipped up the second course, bare feet soundless. One more turn, one more climb. I glimpsed a rectangular opening filled with stars…and then a squat silhouette blocked the opening.

“Do you think us fools, recondeur?”

I charged upward, barreling into the man, but at least three more bodies flung themselves on top of me as I tried to choke the life out of the one under my chest. It took them little time to wrestle me off their comrade, back down the stair, and into the cell. While two men held me down, two more folded my hands, fingertips interlocked and tucked inward, and bound them with silken cord, effectively precluding any application of magic. By the time they had unraveled my voiding spell and slammed the iron door behind them, the bells rang Matins.

Once I stopped fighting, Brother Robierre’s draft drugged me out of thought. The image of a gawky youth with a slow head and a ready grin quickly became tangled with that of riders in wine-colored cloaks and a naked man glowing with blue dragon sigils…

When the bells rang for Prime, the two purebloods arrived to release my hands and bring me a cup of small beer. They found me awake already, sitting on my palliasse, attempting to formulate some grand speech to throw at my captors or some scheme to get free. But thoughts of a dutiful boy who was not where he was expected had distracted me. Which made no kind of sense. Gerard had likely had enough of bells and prayers and righteousness.

The window slot yet gleamed gray when Thalassa swept into the cell impeccably coiffed and gowned—today in vermillion that set off her black hair and acorn-colored skin. Gold disks at her temples held back her veil and accented the thick black lines curving about her eyes. She dismissed her men to wait outside and close the door behind them. “Stand up.”

Sadly, my morning’s meditations had revealed naught to say worth the effort of irritating my throat and naught to do worth the trouble of remaining seated. As a boy I had fought until they forced me—to eat, to dress, to stand, to yield—the forcing far more horrid than whatever submission I had refused. Somehow I had lost that kind of resilience. I could not bear the thought of my sister’s pureblood lackeys laying hands on me again. I stood.

“A few rules before we go,” she said, nodding in approval at my wordless acquiescence. “No matter how you have abased yourself in these past years, you are pureblood, and you will remember your manners and discipline on this journey. The majority of our escort will be ordinaries, and you will maintain distance and detachment as you were taught. I see no need for you to speak at all, in fact, but I will leave you capable lest you fall ill again. I expect no repetition of your foolish escapade of last night. I would prefer to have left you unrestrained for the journey, but that is clearly impossible. Until you give me your word that you will not attempt escape, and convince me that you mean it, your hands will remain silkbound and your feet shackled.”

She paused, chin lifted, as if waiting for me to lash out. But this was not the day to fight. My knees felt like mud. I needed to eat. I closed my eyes, longing for her to vanish.

She didn’t, of course. “Punishment and restriction await you in Palinur, as you well know, but your behavior in the next days will influence my recommendations as to their severity and extent. And despite what you would prefer to believe, my opinion will carry weight with both the Registry and Patronn.”

“I have no doubt of that, Sinduria serena.” I bowed from the hip and touched my forehead with my fingertips, as was proper to a pureblood of superior rank—which was any one of them at present.

Clearly my intonation of her title and the proper female honorific struck her as insufficiently reverent. When I straightened up again, her full lips were tight, and her dark eyes sparked like struck flint. “You will submit, little brother. You have squandered your life and your talents. The time has come for you to focus your attention on something beyond your own pleasure. And we will begin that return to discipline now,” she said, and handed me a small piece of embroidered white silk.

I unfolded the fabric and stared at it for a moment, my fingers tingling with the minor magics woven into it. One edge straight and slightly stiffened, the rest irregularly shaped. One oval opening for the eye, its borders elaborately embroidered in white thread. Neatly sewn tucks to shape it around nose, mouth, and chin. A mask, or rather a half mask, for purebloods covered only one side of the face when appearing among ordinaries. The half mask was a symbol of our second self, the sorcerer within us that “ordinary” eyes could not see. The mask set us apart, enhanced our mystery, and gave us a certain anonymity among those we did not care to have know us. Only ones like Thalassa or the Gillarine pureblood, whose positions mandated other facial decoration or required family dispensation, were exempt from the discipline of the mask.

“It won’t fit as your own should and will. But Silos had an extra and was willing to loan it until we get to Palinur.”

No restraint they would use to bind me would be so loathsome, as she was well aware.

“You believe you know me, Lassa, and in some things”—I flipped the mask between my fingers—“your judgment is correct. But I will never be like you or the rest of our kin. I have walked free in this world, and I won’t forget it.”

But this was not the day to fight. So I lifted the scrap of silk to my face and aligned the stiffened edge down the center of my forehead, nose, and mouth, feeling the spider-thin fabric tighten across my left cheek and brow. Its spelled weaving caused it to adhere along its borders and around my eye and hairline and lips, imperfectly in this case. Silos’s face was clearly wider than mine; the thing reached halfway across my left ear. The silk smelled of his cheap perfume.

Thalassa cocked her head to one side as I lowered my hands. “Not comely, especially with your ridiculous hair, but sufficient to remind you of who you are. Perhaps, with a return to discipline and some time for thought, you will come to appreciate your position.”

She summoned her two guards, short, sturdy men with the straight black hair and deep skin color typical of purebloods. They wore green half masks trimmed in purple to match their livery and wine-colored cloaks. They silkbound my palms together, fingertips tucked in, as they had in the night. Then they affixed a lightweight shackle to my left ankle, draped the dangling end of the chain over my wrists so I would not trip on it, and led me up the prison stair.

We emerged in the yard between the library and the abbot’s house whence Prince Perryn had ridden out with the Hierarch of Ardra. A party of horses and ten leather-clad men-at-arms waited near the front door. What appeared to be the entire complement of the abbey—monks and lay brothers—filled the rest of the yard. Many somber. Most gawking. Neither Stearc nor his daughter nor his secretary was present.

A new storm was upon us. The sharp wind tore the layers of scud that fronted massive gray clouds. Cloaks and gowns flapped like pennons.

Abbot Luviar and Prior Nemesio stepped from the front rank, exchanging farewells with Thalassa. I gathered that my sister’s public business at Gillarine had something to do with sheep breeding contracts for her temple’s flocks.

Jullian stood alone between the lay brothers and the monks, staring at me in shocked disbelief. His eyes traveled from the mask to my bound hands to the loop of metal about my ankle and the slender chain draped over my wrists. I tried to catch his eye…winked at him…but it was as if he could not recognize me behind the mask.

The face that had drifted in and out of my troubled dreams all night was nowhere to be seen. Young Gerard, great of heart, but slow of eye and head when it came to reading, was not there.

I turned to the abbot, interrupting the inane formalities. “Is Gerard not found yet?”

Thalassa stiffened and raised a warning finger. “Silence, recondeur.”

“Please, he is a friend…a good boy. Father Abbot—”

“We have a party searching,” said Luviar. “You indicated you had not seen him.”

“Not since dinner on the day I returned from Caedmon’s Bridge. If I could help…Lassa…Sinduria serena…perhaps my skills could—”

“You might possess the skills to search for the boy, Valen,” said Thalassa. “But you have long since squandered trust. I cannot permit it.”

“But—”

“Silos, see the recondeur onto his mount. Bind his wrists to the saddle, his foot to the stirrup, and his horse to mine. Then you may aid Abbot Luviar in his search as we discussed.”

The abbot said nothing.

Hatred flooded my veins in that moment. I hated Thalassa and her purebloods and their smug righteousness. I hated the abbot and his single-minded passion. I hated past, present, and future with equal bitterness, and I hated the estrangement I saw in Jullian’s eye. I hated that they would not allow me to help one of the few people in the world I’d give a pin for, and I hated that my sister’s warning stayed my feet—if I misbehaved again, the future could be even worse. The desire to run was an arrow piercing my lungs. Most of all I hated that after twelve years of running, I could think of nowhere to go but away.

The perfumed man in the green mask and wine-colored cloak took my arm, but I shook off his gloved hands for one moment. For these past weeks, the men of Gillarine had given me a place, and I could not depart without acknowledging their kindness. Touching my bound hands to my forehead, I faced the brothers of Saint Ophir and bowed from the hip. Then I allowed Silos to lead me away.