Flesh and Spirit

Chapter 22

Lukas, the sallow valet, scraped the last hair from my chin and dabbed at my face with a damp rag long gone cold. It was tempting, as always, to poke him in the ribs or let fly a particularly foul obscenity, just to see if he would flinch. He wouldn’t. Of years somewhere between forty and fifty, the dried-up little ordinary had likely come into pureblood service when he was twelve. He knew very well that his position and livelihood depended on absolute discretion and perfect deportment in the face of temperamental fits, sorcery, and even forced service to a creature of such reprehensible character as a recondeur.

Released from his unwelcome ministrations for the moment, I drifted over to the window, rubbing my head that still felt itchy and odd. Almost three weeks had passed since leaving Gillarine, and my hair was at last the same length all over. Scarcely a knucklebone long, of course. Lukas had trimmed all of it to match my regrowing tonsure. Neat. Seemly. Like my shaven chin, clean, trimmed fingernails, and the plum-colored silk shirt and unadorned pourpoint of sober gray velvet Lukas laid out on my bed. Like my temporary accommodation here in the Registry palace—a small, barren chamber, high above the unhealthy airs of the streets, its window discreetly barred, its door firmly locked, and its walls wrapped in spells that made it impossible I work any of my own. The molds of pureblood custom and protocol were squeezing me back into the shape laid out for me before my birth. No blood, no mess. No breath. No life.

I pressed my forehead to the glass. Snow again today. Frosty Palinur sprawled down the hill toward the river, the unfinished towers of the cathedral protruding like bony arms reaching for heaven’s mercy—only too late. The groves and vineyards that blanketed the gentle hills, rolling toward the horizon and beyond, were buried in killing frost. Sky, cloud, and horizon formed one chilling mass of gray, a pure reflection of my spirits.

“Your shirt, plebeiu.” If such a stick could be said to enjoy anything, Lukas enjoyed addressing me by the low title, reserved for purebloods in disgrace. He assumed I cared.

Lukas dangled the silk shirt from his bony hands, playing another of his games by remaining stolidly beside the bed, so that I must walk over to him to be dressed. If I stood my ground, I would be late. Yet to dress myself in the presence of a servant was a breach of pureblood protocol. Either offense would reap punishment: a meal withheld or reduced to bread alone, an extra hour added to my day’s humiliation, or my lamps extinguished an hour early. Every infraction, no matter how small, earned its consequence. Brother Sebastian would approve.

I crossed the room. As I stuck my arms in the soft sleeves of the shirt, the locks on the door snapped open, and a chill draft blew in a thickset man muffled in a claret-hued pelisse. He whipped off his mask, and snowflakes flurried from his hair and shoulders onto the polished wood floor.

“Magrog’s prick!” The oath burst out of me like an untimely belch. Though I was working with great diligence at discipline, I was not yet ready to face more of my family than my excessively prim, excessively hostile elder sister. Besides, I had last seen my brother, Max, on Black Night, attending Bayard the Smith. “What the devil are you doing in Palinur…here?”

Lukas scurried to take Max’s things and hang them on the brass wall hooks. With a drawn-out sigh, Max pulled my one chair out of the corner and sat down, raising his thick, bristly eyebrows. “Manners, little brother?”

Blast him to the fiery pits! To abase myself to my brother soured my stomach. But Lukas would relish reporting any lapse in protocol. Gathering up the personal opinions I’d strewn about for public viewing, I clenched my teeth, touched my fingertips to my forehead, and bowed deeply from the hip. Purebloods did not reveal emotions. Purebloods did not develop friendships. Purebloods must remain detached from other people so that their magic, which belonged to their family or contracted masters, would not be tainted. Every human relationship must be rigorously shaped and strictly constrained by manners, protocol, and titles awarded according to rank, gender, and kinship.

“Greetings, ancieno. Please forgive my humble welcome after so many years. Alas, I’ve no refreshment to offer, no gossip to share, and you have already found the only seat in my apartments save the bed. And having no idea of your current title, I can add no more honor to the greeting. Are you as elevated as our sister?”

I chose not to mention I’d seen him with Prince Bayard. I was falling easily into pureblood habits. Secret knowledge was liquor in our veins.

“You tread a bridge of sand with speech like that, plebeiu. Did they permit such impertinence in the Karish monk-house?” Max grinned and propped his muddy boots on the bedcovers, just missing the gray velvet garment. “Damn, I wish I’d seen you gowned and shorn! The mere consideration of our wild, truculent Valen all prim and prayerful has me thinking gatzi have turned the world backside before.”

“Willing submission comes easier, ancieno. Would you mind very much if I continued to dress? I am required to be ready at Terce—third watch.” He’d likely not know the Karish term that came so naturally to me now.

He waved his hand, weighted heavily with a ruby and sapphire ring. “Wouldn’t think of interfering with your duties. Pardon me if I enjoy the sight overmuch. I certainly don’t want to be seen out there in the streets gawking at you, but it quite thrills me to watch you brought to heel. You’ve caused us all inordinate trouble.”

I motioned Lukas to continue. He dropped a second shirt of fine wool over my head and then added the pourpoint with its interminable buttons down front and sleeves.

“I arrived in the city late last night and heard the news,” Max continued. “The infamous Cartamandua recondeur brought to heel at last. Our family disgrace—well, not lifted, but relieved. Nothing can erase what you did. Did you know you cost Patronn his royal appointment? Twelve years he’s lived now without a contract of his own. If you thought he detested you before…well, you surely know more than I about that. Do you think he still has the strap?”

Clearly my sins had not taxed Max’s humor as sorely as they had my elder sister’s; he had always enjoyed my punishments and humiliations inordinately. Yet I could not help but feel his excessive good cheer rooted in some circumstance beyond my capture. “You appear to have prospered despite my transgressions. What kind of contract do you serve? Lassa’s given me no news of the family.”

In fact, my sister had hardly spoken to me in our eight miserable days on the road. And though she had hovered about me like a bee on clover during my two days’ testimony before the Registry, taking every opportunity to warn me against demonstrating my tongue-block in front of my questioners, she had not visited me since the judgment.

“I’ve a respectable contract, though it’s paid less than half what a Cartamandua of my skill should command.” Max pulled off his gloves one finger at a time. He fondled his grand ring, turning it to catch the light. “At least it’s active scouting and advance work, not scrawling maps. Bia’s taken the Cartamandua bent as well and is working for Patronn, inking his revisions or some such tedious task. Nilla has entered the eerie realms of divination. Two and two…so the family balance is left to you. Or do you still resist the call of your blood and the demands of discipline, presuming to some profession beyond the family bent? You’ve skills in so many areas, as I recall. Perhaps you’ve developed healing powers, or you’ve chosen to teach fertile young minds to read…”

As he rattled off a list of scholarly and magical pursuits, I stood mute. Every response that leaped to mind would reap more punishments.

He shoved the jeweled ring onto his thick finger and raised his eyes to meet my own, his smile as gleeful as that of a huntsman who bends his bow at a hobbled buck. “Come, tell me. What are you, Valen? You’ve surely not taken the bent for divination, else you’d hardly have let yourself be captured. But then again, why would I expect you might be competent at anything?”

His were but a child’s barbs, no matter that they stung a nerve grown raw. If I refused to let him see more, perhaps he would win only a child’s pleasure from them. So I changed the subject. “I can’t imagine the twins grown enough to choose their bent. They were what…eleven last time I saw them…twelve? All ribbons and sulks.”

Lips pursed in discontent, he settled back in his chair. “Our little sisters have grown up. Nilla is the beauty, as you might guess. Her looks got her a decent match—Luc de Galeno-Mercanti, a physician thrice her age who is contracted to the Duc of Avenus. Her divinations focus on her husband’s patients—a bit unsettling for them, I think. Perhaps now you’re back under discipline, the Registry will allow her to birth a child before her husband is wholly incapable. Bia’s minor rebellions ceased when she saw what happened to you—or perhaps when Matronn locked her in her room for half a year lest she follow your course. Patronn has not yet found a husband for her. Neither girl is happy with you. I’d recommend you stay out of their way. Easier in Nilla’s case, off in the damp of Morian as she is. But Bia—”

“I’ll watch my back.”

Lukas knelt to tie up my hose and lace my boots. I scarcely knew my younger sisters, Petronilla and Phoebia. They had been but wasps in the garden of family. Max and Thalassa had been the snake and the shrew. So what was the snake doing here?

“Who is it holds your leash, Max? Your master must be headquartered in Palinur. Or has he loosed your golden chains so far as to permit random family visits?”

“My master’s business has brought me to the city,” said Max. “Business of critical importance to Navronne’s future. I’ve no leave to discuss it—or him—with anyone save family. Yet I doubt such exceptions should be extended to you. You might be tempted to use the information to buy your way out of your unhappy lot. Only a sadist or a halfwit is going to consider a contract for a twelve-year recondeur. You know nothing of leashes, little brother. Not yet.”

My brother rocked the chair back on its rear legs, his bulk overflowing it. From the time I shot past his height at age ten or so, Max had always managed to be sitting when we were together. And he had always enjoyed taunting me with the privileges he earned from being the dutiful elder, while I suffered the consequences of my errant nature. Evidently, nothing had changed.

“Keep your secrets, ancieno,” I said. “I am, as ever, hopelessly unreliable when it comes to family loyalties.”

Having finished with my boots, Lukas picked up a hinged contraption of delicately engraved silver from the small table beside my bed. With perfect patience he waited for me to kneel before him so he could slip it over my head. He could not completely hide his delight in this particular duty.

“You must excuse me from any further conversation,” I said, as I dropped to my knees. I thought I had managed the encounter well, but it was impossible to hide bitterness at this point. Not with Max here.

My brother lowered his chair legs to the floor with a jolt, watching goggle-eyed. “Ah, fires of Deunor, they have done you proud, Valen,” he whispered. “You, the lad who threw fits when locked in his bedchamber ten times the size of this room.”

A delicate silver band three fingers wide encircled my throat. From it graceful silver coils stretched up my neck to support a mask that covered the left half of my face. This mask was not smooth, accommodating silk, but rigid silver that sealed my lips closed, blocked one nostril and one ear, and obscured one eye. Lukas latched the cursed thing at the back of my neck and fastened the thin metal strap that held it over my head. The Registry judge who had insisted on the mask had been most annoyed that in all my tedious accounting of my twelve uncontrolled years, I’d not implicated any ordinary he could hang.

A grin materialized on Max’s broad face. “Does it close in on you, little brother? Does the world appear warped, with only one eye to observe it? Can you feel the restraint, the control? Spirits of night, how you must loathe this.”

I ignored his baiting as I rose from the floor, fighting the urge to ram my head into the wall, practicing Brother Sebastian’s lessons to shift words from tongue to spirit and allow them to float, discorporate, into the ether. Lukas settled a garish yellow cape lined with ermine about my shoulders, adjusted its drape, and pinned it to the left with an amber brooch just as the cathedral bells struck nine.

The key snicked in the door lock again. Two snow-dusted men in wine-colored cloaks and silk half masks entered, carrying deceptively plain bronze staves. Without meeting my brother’s eyes, I touched my fingertips to my forehead—half flesh, half metal—and bowed to Max and then to my jailers. The Registry men quickly silkbound my clenched hands—we were all quite experienced at this now—and I followed the two down six flights of stairs and out into the street.

Our boots crunched in the frozen muck. On this, the tenth day of my punishment, our route led to the Stonemasons’ District, a familiar haunt from my days working on the cathedral. There I was to spend the hours until sunset exhibited on a public platform, my foot shackled to a loop of iron.

Ten days, ten districts. Two more days to complete the round of the twelve districts of Palinur, and two additional days in the Council District after that. I had reaped the two extra days for a breach of discipline—attempting to throttle my guards the first time they approached me with the silver mask. Since then, I had been a model of submission; the consideration of wearing the silver mask for one extra turn of the glass made me physically ill.

The frost bit at my exposed skin, and I hunched my shoulders, trying to induce the folds of the ugly yellow cape to cover my hands. The cold would be wicked on my immobilized fingers this morning. If only the wind would die down, my layers of fine clothes would keep the rest of me warm enough. Better than most of the poor devils in the streets.

My daily excursions through Palinur—the city I knew best in all the kingdom, a city of culture, beauty, and friendly, expansive people—had shocked me. Filth piled up in the streets. The residents’ faces gaunt and frightened. Diseased. Once-prosperous avenues were scarcely more than rubble, wooden houses burnt, stone ones picked apart. At least half of the great statues of the Hundred Heroes that ringed the palace precincts had been toppled and no one had bothered to set them upright. So many stones had been stolen from the low wall that joined the statues that it had the look of a snaggle-toothed jawbone. The richest city in the kingdom was no longer any different from the rest of Navronne.

As we hurried across the expanse of the central market, it seemed even smaller than yesterday. Seedy and grim, the pocardon or “little city” of shops and carts took up less than a quarter the area it had when I had first left home. Though a piper’s mournful tunes still quickened the air, the denizens of the market, who long ago would snatch an awestruck runaway from the street and lead him in a merry reel through the market stalls for the sheer joy of it, had vanished. And on this morning, the shoppers who had once laughed and made way for those dancers snarled at each other over blighted turnips and tufts of mud-caked wool—or glared at a tall freakish sorcerer in an ermine-lined cloak and silver half mask being herded through the lanes by two pureblood guards, and cursed him for squandering privileges they could never aspire to.

On this tenth morning the gaunt face of the royal city had taken on a more immediate tension—beyond the matter of starvation and hopelessness and unseasonable winter. From the moment we left the Registry tower, I had the same eerie sense as in the hours before a battle—the uneasy quiet, the fingers of fear reaching through skin and bone to grip the soul, the blurring of boundaries between earth and sky, between past and future. I could not shake the sense that Palinur, hitherto untouched by the war, was soon to bleed as well as starve.

Above the citadel that crowned the hilltop, Prince Perryn’s gold and purple pennant whipped and snapped in the sharp breeze alongside the white trilliot of Navronne. But Max was here on his contracted master’s business—the business of our prince’s mortal enemy.

The earth itself will not end, only the life we know—cities and towns and villages, plowing and planting. I had not believed in the lighthouse cabal and their talk of end times. But my days in the royal city had given me pause. We were not yet to the solstice—only days past the equinox—and ever-temperate Palinur was buried in snow and ice. The arrow of war was aimed at the heart of Navronne, which was the Heart of the World. What if Luviar was right?

Though it was an ordinary day for working, hardly anyone was abroad amid the mills and tool shops of the Stonemasons’ District. Small groups of men huddled together in alleyways, halting their conversations to stare as we passed. Grinding wheels and grimsaws stood idle in the workyards, winches and chains snared in unbroken ice beside piles of old scaffolding, rotted and tangled with dead weeds. Even the crowd of ragged boys who capered alongside us each morning, hurling taunts and frozen mud clots, numbered but twenty or so, less than half the size of the previous days. Only the pigeons seemed lighthearted, making free of the stoops, benches, and rooftops, fluttering upward in great swarms as our little procession marched through the gray morning.

We turned a corner into an open square, where all the streets of the Stonemasons’ District came together. Here, as in every district square, Aurellian pipes and conduits fed the district well—this one topped by a pyramid of rose marble. And here, as in every district square, a pillory and flogging post stood on a raised platform. In front of the empty pillory, the Registry had installed a stone block and surrounded it with a ring of iron stanchions linked by silken ropes.

Caphur, one of the pureblood attendants appointed by the Registry to oversee my punishment, jerked his head for me to climb the platform and mount the block. Though a youngish man of modest size, he had inordinately heavy jowls that grew prodigious crops of hair. When I was in place, he attached the shackle about my ankle to the iron loop affixed to the block. Then he and his partner, whose name I didn’t know, took their places outside the circle of stanchions.

The two purebloods would prevent curious ordinaries from touching me. As my Registry judges had emphasized so tediously, the purpose of this exercise was not physical harm, but “education by way of unseemly exposure to the common population.” That is, a reminder that the “simple” demand of submission to my family and the Registry protected me from such filth, ignorance, and drudgery as existed among ordinaries. That is, shame and humiliation. They had neither understood nor appreciated my laughter at this pomposity.

All in all, this aspect of my punishment could have been far worse. To stand outdoors was cold and uncomfortable, but far less painful than a lashing and, for one with my peculiarities, infinitely preferable to close confinement. A smirking Caphur had told me that the Sinduria had particularly recommended this exhibition as the best way to teach me the lessons I required. I needed to consider that. My sister knew very well of my particular terrors.

Across the square a pyramid-shaped block of granite marked a frowzy lane. Allowing my eyelid to sag, I imagined I could hear Frop the Fiddler sawing on his vielle at the Plug and Feathers, situated halfway down that lane, and feel the music that always set my feet dancing as I downed the taverner’s strong mead. A little farther down the lane and around the corner, squeezed between a tool grinder’s shed and a smithy, a man could indulge in a hot bath and a friendly whore at the Bucket Knot, my favorite sop-house, a warm and welcoming place.

Smiling to myself, I installed Elene’s face and lush figure in my imagining, whirling her to Frop’s music and hearing her laugh as she had on that morning at Caedmon’s Bridge. Ah, gods, what pleasure to touch her…to feel her naked warmth beneath me, her heart racing from the dance…

A stinging blow to my frozen flesh shattered my vision. The wind had whipped the hem of my heavy cape into my face. Elene had betrayed me. So no warmth to be had in visions either.

Unlike the first nine days, it took an hour for more than urchins and beggars to gather. But the chance to gape at a pureblood eventually overcame even the mysterious anxieties of the day. The yellow cape announced my offense. Scarred laborers hefting buckets or tool satchels, hollow-cheeked matrons clutching ragged children with haunted eyes, and shopkeepers wearing dirty aprons and furrowed brows drifted into the square like autumn leaves collecting under a maple, speculating aloud as to my identity, my history, my magical talents, and my future, knowing they would never be told such mysteries. They were likely wondering if the silent guards were going to do anything more with me. Likely hoping for something interesting, such as a nice flogging or maiming.

I kept my back straight and my unblocked eye open and focused forward as was required of me. My exposed right cheek stung with the cold. Though the mask shielded the left cheek from the wind, the silver chilled quickly, cooling the sweat that had formed beneath it as we walked. Soon the masked half of my face grew colder than the other, as if encased in ice that penetrated my flesh and froze my bones, as if knives mounted on the inside of the metal half face lacerated my cheek and brow.

As the ragamuffins spat and lobbed mud balls at my back without interference from the masked guards, the people grew bold with their comments: Soul-dead…demon-cursed…real silver…Has he flesh under the metal, Mam? That fur’s no sheep’s coat nor rabbit’s…Don’t have to work…Don’t even have to fight, they don’t…Everything’s given…god-given…while we starve. Never saw one of ’em so tall. He vomited his gift right back at the Sky Lord’s feet…their cocks metal, too? Cover a pureblood female and their Registry’ll cut off your cock. Spat on the Gehoum…Should burn all them as betray the Powers…Throw ’im in the river with that mask and he’ll sink…meet the gods he’s cursed… recondeur…traitor… As if I could not hear them. As if I stood somewhere far distant behind a barricade of silver.

Afternoon brought more snow and new waves of muted gossip that rippled through the assembly. Forbidden to turn my head so my exposed ear might hear better, I heard naught of the reports.

As evening approached, my neck and shoulders ached miserably. My fingers felt dead. My nose ran unceasingly, stimulating a subtle panic that I would soon be unable to breathe. Despite my layers, I could not control my shivering. My exposed eye welled with tears from the bitter wind, and no amount of blinking could clear it, threatening my sole occupation. I derived some amusement from observing the odd folk who came to gawk at me, those like the tall, slender man in a sky-blue tunic who stood apart at the back of the crowd, his long hair plaited with green ribbons. He must enjoy spectacles; he had come every day.

A small, purposeful shift in the increasingly restive crowd signaled a new arrival making his way to the front. He soon stood immediately in front of me, a small person cloaked in black. Holy mother…I blinked rapidly and risked a reprimand by swiping my upper arm across my eye. The man wore a cowl! He lifted his hood just enough that he could see as high as my face, allowing me to glimpse his own odd features that looked as if they were ready to slide off his chin. Brother Victor.

Great merciful Iero, they’d come to rescue me! Somewhere under his scapular would be an ax to hack the chains away. I strained to see through the flurries and gloom. Perhaps Gildas was here…or Stearc. The Evanori warrior could take on Caphur and his friend. Surely…My hands trembled in their unyielding wrappings. My blind eye leaked tears unrelated to the cold. Buck up, you great ox! Why just now at the verge of freedom did the loathsome horror of this captivity threaten to undo me?

After only a moment, the chancellor dropped his hood and raised his palm, five fingers spread wide in Iero’s blessing. But as he lowered his hand, he briefly held it vertically, fingertips heavenward, at his breast—the brothers’ signing language for the abbot—and then clenched his fist and pressed it to his heart. Obedience. And then…nothing. Gods. Nothing.

Anger flooded from my hollow breast to my frost-nipped cheek. How dare they lay their pious obligations on me?

Discipline forbade communication with an onlooker, but surely the little monk must see the flush of fury heating my face. He stood there for a while longer, his small hands folded piously. The milling crowd gradually swallowed him, and I could not judge when it was he left the square.

Gildas had said Luviar would not release me from his tether as long as he had use for me. What did he think I could do for him, trussed up like a string doll forced to perform for laughing children? Damnable holy men! I hated them all.

Chapter 23

On the eleventh morning of my exhibition, as we marched into the Temple District, we passed no more than ten people. Though I remained maddeningly unenlightened about events in Palinur, I judged the situation had gotten worse. Five temples faced the great circle—those of Kemen, Samele, Erdru, Deunor, and Arrosa. Throughout the day, liveried servants bore every size and shape of burden up the broad steps of the brightly painted buildings: calyxes and caskets small and large, crates of statuary and rare fruit, wine casks, grain sacks, urns, and caged birds. Someone even led a matched pair of white oxen into Kemen’s gold-columned temple. Offerings to placate the gods. The wealthy people of the city were worried. I imagined I could smell the nivat. Some of the boxes surely contained that most favored offering.

Though I tried to banish the thought of nivat as soon as it arose, my mind would not let go of it, and I found myself plotting ridiculous ventures to slough off my bonds and snatch the most likely containers. Whatever would I do when I needed it again?

I had used my last supply on the journey to Palinur. After three days on the road, Thalassa had accepted my word that I would attempt no magic and allowed me to travel with unbound hands—my salvation two nights later when my disease struck and I was forced to pay the price of my incomplete doulon. That her aide Silos—he of the cheap scent and well-aimed firebolts—had eventually detected my spellworking, and that she had angrily bound my hands and shackled my feet for the rest of the journey, did not matter. Neither of them had found the mirror or the needle or discovered the truth. I owned one secret for a while longer, from all but Brother Gildas. The worst part of this whole disgusting mess was that these unpredictable intervals between attacks of my disease had fueled a subtle anxiety that never left me.

Thoughts of Gildas led inevitably to thoughts of Brother Victor and what he could be doing in Palinur. I scanned today’s crowd. He wasn’t here. Surely he would not have come all this way to deliver one more warning to keep me mute. If the cabal no longer needed my help, then how, in Magrog’s fancy, were they planning to contact the Danae? Bah, I thought, let the pious pricks flounder.

Reminded of the wonders I had seen at Caedmon’s Bridge, I let my imagination stray. I imagined the Dané woman dancing in the moonlit fields beyond the abbey, joined by the man with the dragon sigils. The Danae twined the lives of trees and lakes, rocks and stream into their dances, so stories said, joining the elements of the world in a great pattern, so that a vine in Ardra and a river of Morian and a rocky pinnacle of Evanore became part of one great whole. What magic, what vigor, would enliven such a dance. Under my breath I hummed the harper’s song I’d heard on the road to Elanus; the Danae would dance to such music as that. I could almost feel them leaping and whirling…caught up in the moment as I had been in the Elanus tavern…stretching, driving, pounding their feet—

“Attention, plebeiu,” snapped the voice in my ear. Caphur’s fingers dug into my arm and jostled me. “Open your eye and look upon the ugliness of the ordinary world. You are forbidden to escape your punishment in sleep.”

The squalor of Temple Square and the gawking crowd scrubbed away the glorious image, and the howling wind deafened me to the music of memory, leaving only a starved ache in my chest. Legends and stories…the Danae might live, but no pattern existed in this ugly world. In all my years of running, I had never felt so alone.

As the day waned, the torments of flesh obscured those of spirit. The snow turned to sleet. My face felt stripped raw from peppering ice and the abrasion of freezing metal. The wind drove ice-bladed knives through clothing and flesh and bone. Every part and portion of me was frozen. I could scarcely see, and my clogged nose forced me to breathe through my mouth—the pinched half of it outside the mask. I struggled to remain calm. Only the approach of evening held off despair.

“Harrow! Purify!” A scuffle broke out in the back of the twenty or thirty remaining gawkers—a mix of elaborately gowned temple aides, beggars, and idle drovers, and the tall, odd man in the sky-blue tunic.

I pressed my snow-crusted arm across my eyes, trying to blot the tears and drips. A bony youth, wearing a Harrower’s orange rag tied around his head, had pushed to the front ranks, supporting himself on a crutch. Half of one of his legs was missing. He waved a clenched fist at me. “Them as flout the gods cause these evil days. Them as serve the Snake of Ardra or the Bastard of Evanore, them as worship in corrupted temples or Karish halls…they bring forth the pestilence. Only Prince Bayard sees the truth. But the drums ye hear be not the valiant Smith’s drums but the drums of doom. The Gehoum howl on the wind! The earth cries out for harrowing! Make it level. Make it smooth! Purify!”

He raised his hand…

His missile glanced off the silver mask just over my cheekbone. Pain lanced through my skull. Eyes watering, I staggered backward.

Caphur jumped down from the platform and briskly kicked the offender’s crutch out from under him. The youth crashed to the pavement, and the masked guard touched his bronze staff to the fallen lad’s back. The tip of the staff glowed red. Smoke curled upward from the ragged cloak and burst into flame. The boy wailed…

Great Iero’s hand! Though the mask trapped my bellowing curses in my throat, I lunged at Caphur, swinging my bound fists at his bristly jowl like a bludgeon. But my shackled ankle brought me up short, and I crashed into an awkward heap, one foot on the platform, the other foot and knee twisted behind me, still on the block. The Registry man dodged my blow without a glance.

The Harrower youth flailed and screamed. A few onlookers rolled him in the snow and beat at him with hands and cloaks to smother the fire. Others ran away. Caphur stepped back and waved his staff, pointing at one and then another of the murmuring crowd until they backed away from the platform.

Caphur’s partner dragged me to my feet and motioned me back on the block. I wrenched my shoulders from his grasp. He raised one finger in warning and motioned again.

There’s nothing to be done, I thought. Not today. You’ll only make things worse. Grinding my teeth, I stepped up and dropped my arms, straightening my back and head as was required. My overseers faced the crowd, staves gripped firmly in their hands, prepared to defend me. I could not stop shaking.

A tall woman bundled in ragged cloak and orange scarf pushed to the front and pointed a long finger at the fallen youth. “Heed the work of arrogant princes! Their pet sorcerers, abominations to the Gehoum, can slay us at their will. Noble and pureblood live in corrupted luxury and praise imaginary gods, whilst we burn, our children starve, our grapes fail.”

Her voice seared the gloomy afternoon with lightning—blazing far beyond the group in front of me, reaching into alleys and byways, shops and taverns. “Tell your brothers and sisters. Fetch your cousins and uncles and friends to lay hand to the Harrow. Not until the false princes and false teachers have been purified will the Gehoum set the seasons right again.”

The last of the temple aides scurried away toward the green-and-red painted temple of Samele. A sudden bluster of wind raised whorls of snow and then died as quickly as it came. As two ragged citizens piled snow on his blistered back, the crippled youth began to whisper between his sobs, “Harrow. Purify.”

The woman in the orange scarf took up the chant, tended and nurtured it as if it were a budding flame, moving through the crowd and touching one person and then another on the shoulder. Though only a few in the crowd wore orange rags, many joined her in the chant. More and more, until the words pulsed like a soft heartbeat. “Harrow. Purify…”

At the boundaries of the square in every direction, torches winked out of the gloom and flowed toward the center like fiery streamlets emptying into a lake. The Harrowers’ chants echoed from the painted facades around the square, the pulse become war drums.

Sleet clicked on my half-metal face. The wind whipped my cloak as if it were tissue. Had the cursed sun not yet set behind the blackening clouds? Shackled to the damnable block, I had no pleasant thoughts about being the center of a riot.

The urchins and beggars scattered like dry leaves in the wind. The remaining drovers ran for their rigs. The man in the sky-blue tunic had vanished. My guards hefted their staves higher, and for once I rejoiced that they were sorcerers. The flood of fire swept toward us.

A shouting arose among the chanters. They pointed toward the golden-domed Temple of Samele, where a short robust woman, wearing the green and gold robes of Samele’s priestess, stood on the broad steps between the green and red columns. Torchbearers stood to either side of her, and their light glinted in the gold fan rising from her long black hair. Even from such a distance I could see the dark lines about her eyes like a mask. Thalassa.

The streamlets of fire curved toward the temple, as if they had encountered logjams in their course. When the chanters in front of me hurried off to join their fellows, the rabble-rousing woman hurried away into the dark streets, her evening’s work done. The burned youth lay abandoned, already half buried in snow. Melting gobs slid from his blackened flesh.

Two ranks of green-liveried guards poured from the temple and fanned out on either side of Thalassa as she began to exhort the mob. Half deaf as I was, I could not understand her proclamation, but only the hisses and jeers that punctuated it. Flaming torches arced through the night, thrown toward the temple. Thalassa raised her hands and the torches shattered into showers of sparks that fell back on the crowd. Did Mother Samele appreciate the advantages of a pureblood Sinduria?

Mesmerized, I scarcely noticed as Caphur unlocked my ankle. But he tugged at my arm and I half stepped, half stumbled from the block and the platform. As my shepherds marched me away, I twisted my head to see over my shoulder. A green veil of light now hung over the surging throng. The line of temple guards, wielding clubs and staves, had surrounded the mob. Screams and curses rose louder.

The lurid scene was soon lost to view. With grim urgency, the guards rushed me through rapidly darkening streets, winding ever upward toward the Registry tower that sat near the lower walls of the citadel. As we crossed the deserted marketplace, a large troop of horsemen—perhaps seventy men with no visible colors—galloped toward the broad causeway that led to the palace gates. The pennants billowed heavy and listless on the battlements, only half visible in the swirling snow and sleet. I halted in my tracks.

Caphur growled impatiently. “Keep moving.”

When I shook my head and raised my bound hands in the direction of the banners, he lowered his staff and stared, as well, touching the shoulder of his partner and pointing where we looked. The trilliot—the white lily of Navronne—still flew on the castle of Caedmon and Eodward, but the purple and gold banner of Perryn of Ardra was nowhere to be seen.

Yet, even as the world shifted, mystery took a stranglehold on my spirit. From across the empty expanse of trampled snow, the tall man in the sky-blue tunic and green ribbons stood watching us. I blinked and squinted. His feet were bare. On such a day. Wondering, I raised my bleary eye, met his gaze, and knew him. He had once reached out to me from an aspen grove, his bare skin glowing with sigils of blue fire.

Caphur snatched my arm and dragged me stumbling from the square.

I paced my tower room in the dark. Though shed of my frozen finery, I was not yet warm. Once free of the hateful mask, I had dared denounce Caphur as an arrogant coward for burning a cripple. That outburst and my violent behavior in the Temple District had cost me food, light, and fire. Lukas had provided me one flask of watered ale for my supper and dressed me in dry layers of cambric and plain, padded wool, but had left my little brazier unlit and taken away my lamp. Tomorrow would likely bring more extensive penalties. I grabbed a blanket from the bed and wrapped it about my shoulders. So be it.

My pacing took me to the window again, back to matters of far more import than impotent recondeurs or even scorched madmen. Frost rimed the corners of the panes. After three years of war, could Palinur have been taken without a fight? Certainly Ardra’s prince had fallen. The missing banner was no mischance, no oversight. Not in these times. Yet Bayard’s banner had not been raised. I saw no evidence of battle in the night and storm beyond the tower, only scattered fires in the lower city. Thank the gods for the snow and damp that would check the spread of flames.

And then there was the matter of the barefoot man. Here in my tower room, it was easy to blame my nonsensical conclusion on cold, hunger, and a yearning to see something of hope in a world disintegrating before my eyes. He’d had no dragon wings scribed on his face or on the bare legs that poked out from under his pale tunic, yet I felt a certainty that stripped of his odd attire he would display the dragon marks. A Dané here in the city. A Dané I had seen before. Stories said Danae died if they remained too long in cities or man-made dwellings.

Locks rattled and the door slammed open. “Magnus Valentia de Cartamandua-Celestine, stand forward.”

I spun away from the window and backed into the shadows. Perhaps my penalties had come earlier than expected. A midnight visitation was every prisoner’s nightmare.

The lantern dangling from a fleshy hand illuminated a thickset man with a fat black braid and a drooping mustache. He wore his black silk mask in the horizontal fashion, covering only his eyes and brow as some pureblood families prescribed. Caphur and his partner stood behind the newcomer.

Stepping out of the shadow, I dropped the blanket and bowed to my principal Registry overseer, Sestius de Rhom-Magistoria, some colineal relation of my grandfather’s family. “Domé.”

“Prepare to go out.”

“Of course, domé. If I might inquire—”

“You may not.”

Of course he would answer no question of mine. I could imagine the instructions of the Registry judges. Keep the prisoner ignorant. Keep the prisoner frustrated, isolated, and on edge, not knowing what humiliation will befall him next. Prove to him that he has no control over his life.

Suppressing pointless fury, I laced up my damp boots, snatched the yellow cloak from the hook, and fastened its clasp at my shoulder. Then I turned to Sestius, the silver mask in my one hand, a silk one in the other, and the inquiry posed on my face.

“Use the silk. We’re in a hurry. But bring the other. You are not finished with it yet. More insolence and you will be wearing it for a year.”

I bowed and slipped on the silk mask. It felt like a second skin compared to the silver. But I did not escape every discomfort. Caphur brought out his roll of silk cord and bound my hands. Tighter than other days. Showing his teeth, he also made sure that the silver mask came with us. Bristly hair poked through the silk of his own mask around his bulbous chin. Likely his family discipline mandated a clean-shaven face, else Caphur could have grown a beard the size of a hedgehog in three days’ time.

They whisked me down the stairs, where a party of two torch boys and eight or ten armed ordinaries waited. Only an extraordinarily dangerous night would occasion purebloods to call in extra escorts.

We hiked briskly through the deserted city, skirting the main streets and marketplaces. Ice coated every blade, twig, gutter, and cornice. I shivered in my ermine-lined cloak and thanked the Lord of Sea and Sky that the wind had abated.

I could not imagine where we were off to so late, until we climbed a long flight of worn steps to a crossing lane that bordered an ancient wall. The otherwise straight bulwark of stone, the remnant of some early defense work, had been designed to circumvent a notched pyramid of native rock. In the notch, water bubbled from moss-lined cracks and dribbled into a pool the size of a wide-brimmed hat. The pool, called the Aingerou’s Font, never dried up and never froze, and every spring a different variety of flower grew out of the cracks in the rock. Even lacking the Cartamandua bent, I could have found my way to this lane from the depths of the netherworld. For fifteen wretched years I had resided not half a quellé from the Aingerou’s Font.

The tree-shrouded lane followed the ancient bulwark past the Font to a walled stone house built in the grand Aurellian style. Large airy rooms enclosed inner courtyards, the sprawling structure ornamented with pedimented windows, meticulously designed gardens, fluted pillars, and brightly painted arches. A bronze gryphon, grasping a rolled map in its claws, loomed above us from the iron gate. As Sestius rang the bell, my entire being felt as hollow as my growling stomach. I was home.

The gate swung open before the echoes of the bell faded. A man in green livery motioned us into the snow-draped courtyard. Caphur dismissed our escorts, dropping a small pouch in their gawking leader’s outstretched hand, while the man in green exchanged a private word with Sestius.

I stood stiffly by, my mind skipping from one thing to another, unwilling to acknowledge the arrival of a moment I had dreaded for so many years. Three lamps hanging from iron posts lit the path to the front door. Lights shone from a few rooms: my father’s study to the left of the entry door, the reception room to the right, my mother’s bedchamber around the corner on the right. Horses had been here before us. Four or five. They’d been led around to the stables. The hedges had grown tall. The ancient lime tree had lost a limb; it would never survive this kind of cold. The green livery…one of Thalassa’s men from the temple then…Was she here?

Focus, Valen. You must keep your wits. Keep your temper. Control your tongue. Submit. I had to convince them that I was chastened, else I would spend the rest of my life in silken hand bindings and silver masks and ankle shackles.

I gazed longingly through the gate that was closing behind me, back down the lane where the Font bubbled quietly in its niche. Someone now sat in the niche beside the mumbling spring. Startled, I squinted down the dark lane. Holy gods!

The gate clanged shut, closing off my view.

“Move along, Magnus Valentia,” said Sestius, opening his hand toward the front door in invitation.

The overseer trudged through ankle-deep snow toward the skewed rectangle of light that streamed from the now open door. I followed dutifully behind him. But somewhere deep inside me rose a tickling sensation that quickly spread to my chest and throat and mouth. My cheeks quivered. Droplets pricked my eye. I pressed my lips together, but to no avail. At last I slammed my fists to my mouth, attempting to muzzle the laughter I could not stop. How foolish…how wondrous was life.

Sestius halted and narrowed his eyes. He laid a hand on my arm. “What is it, lad?” His testy authority yielded to a gruff sympathy. “No need to be afraid.”

No need… Another quake of hopeless hilarity shook me and I tried to wipe my eyes with my wrist. Sestius appeared confused.

“What has possessed you, plebeiu?”

“Ah, domé, pardon…please. It’s just”—I pressed my wrist hard against my mouth—“no one ever calls me Magnus Valentia. Any more than they call my brother Maximus Goratia, or my elder sister Thalassa Minora, or my younger sisters Phoebia Terrae or Petronilla Terrae. You see, my father named us all after geographical features, and it was left to us to dig around in them for names that didn’t sound ridiculous. And you tell me not to be afraid…so kindly…and here I am coming home after twelve years away, looking like some gangle-limbed canary and with my hands—”

He did not understand in the least. How could he? He had not seen what I had.

“Please forgive me, domé. I am just inexcusably ill-mannered, and lightheaded as I’ve not eaten since morning and these days have been exhausting, as is only right, of course.”

I needed to stop babbling. And I should very likely beg some god or other to remove the grin that would not leave my face. Life was as sublimely absurd as my name—some barren little island off the coast of Aurellia, inhabited entirely by great gawky birds. Why else would I imagine that I had seen the intricate outlines of a brilliant blue dragon coiling down the bare limbs of the man sitting beside the Aingerou’s Font? Or that I would swear that he wore green ribbons plaited in his curling red hair and had met my gaze with eyes the color of aspen leaves in autumn? I had not been mistaken. I was being followed by a Dané.

Bowing respectfully to Sestius, in whose word lay the power to extend my unfortunate exhibition in the city, I waved my bundled hands toward the door. He huffed a bit, and looked at me as if I were a lunatic. Which I supposed I was. But perhaps, if the world was going to end sometime soon, it didn’t really matter.

We walked down a short brick passage, Caphur and his shadow trailing behind us. I was still smiling when I stepped into a vine-hung courtyard with a giant lily-shaped brazier blazing in the center. My father was waiting.

Chapter 24

The little courtyard had only a latticework roof of scrolled iron, yet the colored flames that danced in the lily-shaped brazier left the enclosure excessively warm. Appropriate, I supposed, as the courtyard was dedicated to Deunor Lightbringer. Lamps hung from iron posts, adding yellowish light to the orange and red firelight.

My first glimpse of my father sobered me quickly, causing a certain constriction in my chest I had experienced since I could remember. In the view of the world and more particularly, the Pureblood Registry, the powerfully compact man standing beside the flaming brazier held my life in his hands.

Oh, he could not kill me without consequence. A pureblood, even a recondeur, was too valuable an asset to dispose of without extreme justification. But pureblood heads of family, male or female as lineal customs or contracts dictated, wielded the power of a despot over their offspring by way of the entitlement to negotiate unbreakable contracts for those children’s professional services, marriages, and rights of procreation. They could even sell their services to a murderer, as long as that murderer agreed to abide by the terms. Unless one became the head of family or achieved extraordinary rank in the ordinary world, as Thalassa had done, a pureblood never lived other than as a bound servant—a cosseted slave.

My father’s appearance had changed very little in twelve years. Though he must be approaching sixty, he was as broad through the shoulders and as tightly built as Max. His wide hands and short thick fingers that could wield pens and brushes with elegance and precision had once choked the life out of three Hansker raiders…as he had reminded me on many unpleasant occasions. His long straight hair, gathered into a thick horsetail in the back, remained solidly black, though his forehead, always high, now extended halfway across the top of his head—a tonsure of a kind, to be sure.

I pressed my wrist to my mouth. The fey humor had not deserted me entirely. Concentrate, Valen. Manners.

“Patronn.” I dropped to one knee on the brick paving and touched my bound hands to my forehead.

Though I knelt to acknowledge my father as head of our family, my resolution to mind my manners did not extend to the words of honor and respect a son would normally offer at such a time. He would not believe them anyway. Neither did I wait for his permission to rise. He was not a king.

“It seems the gods have granted you good health,” I said, once on my feet again. I kept my tone neutral. “I presume Matronn fares well also.”

My father perched half sitting on a stone altar where the household left platters of bread and pots of honey as feast gifts for the god. His dangerous, well-groomed hands were loosely clasped at his firm waist, where a belt of gold shells draped handsomely across a tight-fitting pourpoint of purple and gold brocade. The hands and posture were deceptive. He was not at all relaxed. His dusky complexion, typical of purebloods, had taken on a ruddy cast, and his full lips, so like Thalassa’s, formed a thin straight line. No mistaking his state of mind.

“Your mother has no desire to see you.”

Not surprising. Seeing me, she might be forced to acknowledge my troublesome existence, a task she had avoided diligently since my earliest memory. “That’s unfortunate. Please convey my salutation.”

Petty as it was, I could not subdue the satisfaction that coursed through me as I stood before the man I had once named Magrog the Tormentor’s twin. I now stood a full quercé—four hands—taller than he. His seed might have grown me, but I liked to think I had taken naught of my parents but the black color of hair and eyes, the straight nose, and the magic of their blood.

A fidgeting Sestius, having removed his mask and retrieved a roll of vellum and the silver mask from Caphur, interrupted this tender reconciliation. “Eqastré Cartamandua-Celestine, we must complete the prisoner transfer. I cannot comprehend why the recondeur’s punishment has been interrupted…and at such an hour…”

My father snorted contemptuously. “It was certainly not my doing. Evidently someone in the Registry, higher placed than you, Eqastré Rhom-Magistoria, felt it risky to have any one of us exposed to the rabble during this unsettled time.”

He motioned Sestius to the table beside him. As the administrator unrolled his scroll, my father’s cold gaze traveled over me. His nostrils flared as his eyes fixed on my silkbound hands. “No surprise to hear that Valen has shown himself insolent and violent,” he said to Sestius. “But I’m surprised you found it necessary to curtail his use of magic. He was never competent.”

“We’ve witnesses that he cast spells to aid his escape from the Karish abbey and attempted more on the journey to Palinur. He is completely untrustworthy. Here—” Sestius tapped a spot on one of his pages. “You must acknowledge the transfer of custody, though, as you were informed, we will keep our men here.”

“I don’t like strangers in my house. My daughter, the Sinduria, has insisted on providing Temple guards as well.” My father pressed his thumb on the page, triggering a spell that would identify him to the Registry. I felt very like a hanging goose at the poulterer’s.

“Though I am sure the Sinduria’s attendants are well qualified, the Registry must supervise the recondeur’s restriction until his sentence is completed.” Sestius rolled his papers back together so tightly he could have used the roll as a cane. “Your son has three days’ punishment to fulfill, at the least. And as he physically assaulted and verbally abused one of his overseers today—a man protecting him from harm from a rapacious mob—I intend to see him flogged before we’re done. I advise you keep him on a short leash.” Sestius never allowed sympathy to interfere with discipline.

My father brushed his wide fingers over the silver mask that lay on the table. “Valen will not escape his duty again. If I have to pry up every rock in this kingdom, I will secure him a contract with a master who can control him.”

Of course, Patronn would wish to remind me. The Registry inserted certain standard clauses into pureblood contracts. Clauses requiring adherence to Registry breeding rules. Clauses requiring recognition of the Registry as arbiter of all contract disputes. And protective clauses ensuring we were maintained in safety, dignity, and luxurious accommodation appropriate to “extraordinary beings of proven magical lineage.” In running away, I had forfeited my rights to those protective restrictions. Whatever master he selected for me would be permitted to ensure my faithful service in any way he chose—confinement, whips, isolation, starvation…

Sestius took his leave, ordering Caphur to cooperate with Thalassa’s temple attendants and to report any conflicts. I remained standing near the brazier, sweating beneath my fur-lined cloak, my face itching beneath the silk mask. My good humor had completely faded.

As the outer door closed behind Sestius, two men in green livery appeared at the inner door. A whiff of cheap perfume identified one of them as Thalassa’s temple attendant Silos, the observant fellow whose hands wielded paralyzing firebolts and whose nose sniffed out spellmaking. Worse and worse.

“You may escort the recondeur to his quarters,” said my father, walking past me as if I did not exist. “I’ve no need and no wish to see him any more than necessary. He is not to wander the house or grounds unaccompanied. His meals will be taken in his quarters unless I specifically summon him to dine. Work out your guard schedule with these Registry people.” He waved at Caphur to join the two in green and then flicked a wrist to dismiss us all.

A hundred retorts popped to mind as my father left the courtyard. At fifteen I would have spat them at his back, sauced them with curses and obscenities, and forced the guards to drag me to my bedchamber. But I held my tongue. I had tasted freedom, and until the day I lay rotting in my grave, I would not give up hope of regaining it. If yielding present satisfaction to lull my captors was the price required, I would pay it.

The east wing was the oldest of the sprawling house, little more than low, musty chambers with small windows huddled along two sides of an overgrown court, on that night draped in snow. The walls were thicker there, and consisted of irregular, alternating layers of brick and rock that gave them a rough appearance. I remembered the rooms as being filled with broken furniture, old carpets, spiderwebs, and beetle husks.

Most of the windows gaped darkly. The low-pitched wavering mewling of a cat in heat came from one dark corner of the square. Silos dispatched his companion to show Caphur his quarters and the facilities of the house and then motioned me toward a section where light gleamed through thick shutters. I had to duck my head to enter.

Despite the rough exterior, a habitable apartment awaited me—two connecting rooms, a bedchamber and a sitting room, cleaned and furnished. Though not the broken sticks I remembered, its accoutrements contrasted starkly with those of the main house. A plaited wool rug on bare stone instead of thick carpets on mosaic and tile floors. An earthenware basin for washing instead of Syan porcelain. A hard chair instead of velvet lounges. A small eating table with two backless stools beside it. A coal scuttle beside the hearth. No hanging maps or exotic artifacts to remind visitors of the Cartamandua talents. No magical cards or bronze water bowls left easily available for Celestine divinations.

Coals blazed in the sitting-room hearth. A kettle hung over the fire, and a bathing tub sat beside it. A shirt of fine linen lay neatly over the chair back. My sour-faced Registry valet stood beside the hearth, eyes unfocused, hands clasped properly behind his back.

“You must be Lukas,” said Silos, latching the door behind us. “Assigned for personal service by the Registry.”

The valet bowed stiffly.

“As I am sure the Registry overseers have informed you, the Sinduria Cartamandua-Celestine has arranged for me to supervise the recondeur’s confinement while in this house,” said Silos.

“Yes, domé.”

“Overseer Caphur will be taking his orders from me as well.”

“I understand, sir. I was told to see to the plebeiu’s bathing upon his arrival. Do you approve?” I enjoyed seeing Lukas’s face darken and shrivel like an old grape at Silos’s assumption of command. My valet clearly did not believe a Registry employee, even an ordinary, should be taking orders from a temple attendant, even a pureblood.

Silos was unfazed. “Proceed with your duties. Unfortunately this wing has no piped water, but you’ll find the household staff efficient and accommodating. You’ve been shown the kitchen?”

The valet nodded, bowed, and departed through the courtyard door. A soft whining and a skin-prickling heat burst infused the room as he passed through the door. They hadn’t bothered to mute the door ward, designed to alert my guards that someone had left the room.

Fine as a hot bath sounded, I wasn’t sure I could bear another hour with Lukas. At least the rules of household privacy would keep both Registry and temple guards at bay while I bathed.

“I’ll take those off now,” said Silos softly, pointing at my hands, startling me out of my murky deliberations.

The temple guard had slipped off his mask and hung it over his belt. Large ears poked through his dark straight hair. Though his address was proper as always, his wide face expressed neither gloating nor severity. Perhaps forty, he seemed a bit soft around the edges for a Sinduria’s bodyguard. But our confrontations at the abbey and on the journey to Palinur had taught me not to take him lightly, despite the unprepossessing body and his fondness for flowery scent.

“I’d be grateful,” I said, extending my arms. “I hope you’ve less constricting means to ensure my good behavior while I’m here.”

As Silos unwrapped the silk-clad lump joining my arms—I could no longer swear the bloodless bundle was hands—one side of his mouth curved upward. “You wouldn’t be imagining I’m going to tell you about our precautions, would you? I’ve not forgot you had the better of me on the road.”

“I didn’t escape,” I said. Happily for me, Silos’s skill at spell detection lagged his skill at hurling paralyzing firebolts, else I would be a madman already. On that night of my last doulon, somewhere between Gillarine and Palinur, my spellworking had not waked him. He’d only detected the magical residue in the morning. For the rest of the journey, he had mumbled curses at himself.

“I was too slow picking up on what you were about. That won’t happen again.” He slipped off the cords and tossed them on the table. Then, kindly, he peeled off my mask and threw it down beside the bindings. “Tell me what spell you worked that night, and I might tell you some of the ways we have to keep you from running away from this house.”

“Ach…” The cords had left deep grooves in my flesh. I fumbled to unfasten the clasp on my horrid cloak, but my fingers felt like clubs. I shook them vigorously and moved closer to the fire. As my fingers throbbed, I shot him a halfhearted grin. “Tell me what protections you’ve set up here, and I might tell you what I was doing that night.”

He shrugged in mock apology as he unhooked the clasp for me and threw the yellow cape over a chair. “I’ll say only this. There’s only the one passage out of this courtyard, and you will be sure to meet either me or my partner, Herat, or this Registry man, Caphur, if you should venture it. This door will remain locked—only a formality, as your father requests it—but we will know of any comings or goings. You may walk in the yard in company with one of us. Your needs will be taken care of. The Sinduria sent a personal attendant for you…an ordinary…but this Registry fellow, Lukas, was here already.”

His equitable manner emboldened me. “Can you tell me, good Silos, what news in the realm? I’ve heard naught of the world since we left the abbey. But Prince Perryn’s banner no longer flies above the citadel.”

Silos went to one of the windows and ran his fingers along the iron frames—checking the locks, I assumed, or installing wards. Though common wards could prevent spellworking, they could not disrupt a pureblood’s bent. Unfortunately, tracking and route finding in this chamber would lead me nowhere but to the door.

“I’m sorry, plebeiu,” said Silos. “You remain under Registry censure, thus are not privy to news. Your sole task is to attend your own behavior and submission to your family.”

Ludicrous. The world was crumbling and I was supposed to be concerned with masks and manners. “Of course, that’s true,” I said, straining to remain civil. “And you are pureblood and must serve the Registry’s wishes, as well as my sister’s. But even the Registry does not interfere with a man’s duty to the gods. So surely then, as a servant of the goddess Samele and her high priestess, duty-bound to reclaim a soul who has been dabbling with Karish ways, you are permitted to discuss matters of worship…of the temple. Such as the rioters today…some of them Harrowers…so many…”

“Once Sila Diaglou declared for Prince Bayard, Prince Perryn gave her Harrowers the run of the city to appease them. But they’ve no loyalty to buy. Instead they’ve put themselves on every district council. They run out the magistrates and judges with fearmongering and threats of burning, then name their own to fill the places. And they’re doing the same in the temples.”

He moved to the door and ran his fingers about the perimeter. “Three months ago, Jemacus, second to the high priest of Erdru, burnt his temple in Trimori and declared himself a Harrower. We’ve heard he’s on his way here and that half the priests in Erdru’s temple are his men. Every temple staff is eating itself with suspicions and examinations. Chaos, that’s what the Harrowers want. All of us eating roots and cowering in caves. What ‘purity’ lies in chaos and ruin?”

I shook my head, trying to recapture a memory as fleeting as starfall. Jullian had once said something…that someone had told him everyone should be made pure like him and Gerard.

A sudden anxiety stabbed through every other concern. How could I have forgotten? “Silos, did you find Gerard—the boy at the abbey?”

“Is this a matter of your soul as well, plebeiu?”

“Yes. Well, of course it is. He is my vowed brother.”

He raised his eyebrows, but did not argue. “The boy was not within the abbey precincts. We found his footsteps mingled with many others outside the walls, but could discover no definite direction to them. We’ve no reason to believe he’s harmed.”

Likely the boy was tucked safely in his own bed back home, having decided that girls were more fun than celibate monks or studious Jullian. Likely. So why couldn’t I believe it? Ready to be done with this wretched day, anxious for Silos to depart, I squatted and held my hands closer to the little brazier.

The temple aide brushed the dust from his hands and jupon. “I’m off now. Behave yourself, plebeiu. I don’t like you twisting words and dealing lightly with the gods to get your way.” He remained stiffly by the door, his lips set in a prim line, waiting.

Of course. Manners. I stood up, touched my still-tingling fingers to my forehead, and bowed. Every pureblood was my superior. “Good night, Domé Silos.”

As soon as he was out the door, I hurried to the bedchamber window. The cold night air took my breath as I yanked the balky casement inward and peered into the night. A quivering energy about the window indicated more magical alarms to warn of my escape. My poor skills gave me no hope of shaping an unraveling spell. Thus, for the moment, I let my eyes adjust to the dark sloping lawn and the thin line of beech trees and low wall that separated this wing of the house from the lane and the Aingerou’s Font.

No movement was visible through the leafless branches. No dark blur against the night or the embankment. No blue dragons scribed in light on muscular limbs.

I gripped the casement and stared into the empty night until I was so cold I could scarcely move. Dealing lightly with the gods… perhaps I had been. A catch in my throat threatened to unleash emotions I had no use for. Somewhere the lonely cat was still wailing.

When Lukas returned to undress me for bath and bed, he snorted and slammed shut the casement. Thank all gods he was not pureblood. They would hang me before I bowed to him.

“I cannot sit in that room all day and pick at my scabs,” I said as I strode down the cobbled paths of the knot garden. “My father said I was not to roam unaccompanied, so accompany me or explain it to him, whichever you choose. He very much outranks you, domé, and is not happily thwarted.”

Caphur, the Registry overseer with the hairy chin and short legs, dodged snow-laden branches and tripped over broken paving, struggling to keep up as I sweated out the frustration of a long night of little sleep and an entire morning of doing nothing. I felt ready to tear down the garden walls with my teeth.

The squalling I had thought was a cat had broken into cackling and screams early that morning. Only one explanation had come to mind: They housed mad cartographers as well as recondeurs in the east wing. My grandfather was confined not a hundred quercae from my apartment. By midday, I was half crazed with the racket…and the thought of its source. When Lukas arrived with my dinner, I bolted through the door into the open air. Though only one alarm had triggered, not two, prickly Caphur had spotted me instantly and latched on to me like a wasp.

The din from the corner apartment quickly drove me out of the overgrown courtyard, through the brick arch, and around the washhouse. I remembered this garden as the sunniest of the little patches of nature sprinkled about my family’s rambling house. Not that there was much sun in evidence this day. Moisture-filled clouds bulged and sagged onto the roof tiles.

The meticulous plantings of the knot garden appeared flat and soggy under the patchy snow, blackened leaves and dead stems instead of colorful swaths that shifted hue and pattern through the year as the various plants bloomed and faded. Silos and the second temple guard posted themselves at the outer wall, lest I take the wild notion to fling myself at the piled stones and skitter over them like the lizards that lived there in true summer. Tempting to try it anyway. Caphur alone, I might challenge. The bristle-faced Registry man was strong, but not particularly quick. Burning the Harrower youth had shown him unimaginative and brutish. But Silos…My body well remembered his precise and paralyzing sorcery as I ran from Gillarine.

No, escape would be impossible as long as my guards were so edgy. I had to wait. I had to behave myself, to lull them into belief in my compliance. Stupid to have walked out like this.

When I tired of circling the same half quellé of path and the same gnarled blockage of grievances, I returned to my chambers, bearing some faint hope that Lukas had not disposed of my meal in his haste to report my ill behavior. To my dismay and astonishment, I found my father seated beside my brazier.

“Patronn,” I said, genuflecting.

He flicked his hand in a gesture that I interpreted as “continue with what you should be doing, if you can possibly complete it before I get too impatient.” So I sat on one of the stools while Lukas, wearing no expression but smug superiority, deftly removed my muddy boots, replaced them with gray slippers, and blotted the damp from my shoulders, back, and head with a soft towel. Unable to stomach the yellow cape, I had worn no outer garment, despite the chill.

Protocol forced my valet to withdraw to the bedchamber and close the door once his sartorial duties were completed. Poor nasty, spying Lukas. I rose and awaited the reprimand to come.

“You didn’t run.” Less anger than I expected. Suspicious, though, and a bit off-balance. Almost tentative. I had never seen my father this way.

“You did not forbid me to breathe, Patronn. Only to intrude on your sight. I’ve never seen you in the knot garden.” I would keep my temper. Or, at the least, I would force him to lose his first. “Did you wish me to run? Silos’s firebolts are impressive and quite debilitating.”

“I’ve had an inquiry about a contract.”

Bravado drained into the region of my great toe. Max had been right; anyone interested in the contract of a recondeur was more likely brute than saint. No point in asking the identity of the inquirer. My father would tell me or not at his pleasure. Why had he come here—to watch me tremble? Did he imagine that terror at a perilous future would make me beg him for a lifetime’s forgiveness?

“That must be gratifying,” I said at last, clasping my hands at my back. At the least, I would give him no leverage.

He leaned forward, his dark eyes blazing of a sudden. “If you had ever shown just one minim of appreciation…of…of…loyalty…”

“Appreciation? Loyalty? For what?” I gaped at him. What skewed perception had him using such words with me in such aggrieved fashion? “Lord of Sea and Sky, I was your child! I never asked to be some weapon of war between you and the cursed gatzé who fathered you.”

I would not accept assignment of blame for our difficult past. After twelve years of drowning all serious thoughts in mead and dancing and the requirements of survival, I’d had far too much time to think these past weeks.

“I know not why I am as I am, or why you have loathed me since my earliest memory, but you tried to beat it out of me because you hated him. You made me, Patronn. You birthed me with your cock, and you formed me with your strap and your hatred. Now, unfortunately for both of us, you must deal with me. So do as you have ever done…as you damnably well please.”

So much for keeping my temper.

Livid and shaking, he shot from the chair, pointing one finger as if to loose lightning at me. “How dare you speak to me in such fashion? You are no child of mine.”

His declaration—the foulest, the most dreadful condemnation that could be spoken from a pureblood father to his offspring—fell between us with the impact of an iron gauntlet thudding to the floor. Something—those irretrievable words or the sight of his trembling hand—infused me with inordinate calm. I pulled up to my full height and enjoyed looking down at him. “Then let me go.”

“Oh, no,” he said, moving to the door, his rage held dangerously tight. “I have responsibilities to this family—something your unnatural soul will never understand. This contract will remove your face from my sight, your foul speech from my hearing, and the burden of your existence from my shoulders. Every pureblood will see the sweetness of this resolution and marvel at the ways of fate. Command your valet to dress you appropriately, Valen. Tonight our family will celebrate a sealing feast, and by tomorrow the unseemly past will at last be put to rest.”

He slammed the door before I could answer. I lifted the chair where he’d sat and threw it at the door. Dust and cushions and splinters of wood and stone rained down on the woven rug, but the chair came to rest on its side. Intact.

I bellowed and laughed at the same time, as this rebellion came to the same pitiful ending as every other. Was my life to be the very archetype of futility? Nothing changed. Nothing settled. Nothing accomplished. Every day I’d lived under his roof I had prayed to hear that I was not Claudio de Cartamandua’s child. Now, even if I could believe it true, I knew it made no real difference.

I clamped my hands at the back of my neck and squeezed my head between my forearms, trying to crush the useless rage and nonsensical terror that had set me on this course of madness so many years ago. For it was not just the enmity between me and my father and my grandfather—the anger, spite, and bitterness that had forever plagued this house—that had me ready to slam my head into the stone. The flaw was in me. Somewhere I was broken, not just in my ability to decipher words on paper, but in my ability to live in this world.

One of my childhood tutors, the first and last who had ever bothered to listen to my rants, had argued that the duties and restrictions of pureblood life were no more demanding than those of any privileged family. One had to pay for the position one inhabited in this world, he’d told me, and I should be grateful for what I was given. In a frenzy I had shoved him into a brick wall and ransacked his study, pawning two of his precious books for the money to get myself royally drunk. I was eleven. In the years since, logic nagged that his arguments had merit. But my body and spirit yet refused to accept them.

Somewhere in my gut grew this septic knot, this disease that made me lash out in madness at the merest hint of constricting walls, that imbued me with unnamable fears and cravings that tormented my body, savaged my senses, and sent me crawling to the doulon. I had thought I would grow past it, that my disease was an artifact of an unfortunate childhood and that making my own choices would reduce its power. The days at Gillarine had fooled me into thinking I might win. Though I’d known full well that I—an unscholarly man of scattered beliefs and feeble principle—did not belong in Ophir’s brotherhood, I had managed to accommodate the abbey’s discipline without going mad from it. But now my problem was worse than ever. This sense of entrapment, loss, waste, and emptiness threatened to undo me. I had never felt so hollow, so helpless, or so afraid.

The door to the bedchamber opened softly behind me. A few tiptoed steps. A breath of air as the door to the courtyard opened and closed. Cowardly Lukas. He likely thought I would kill him. He didn’t realize that I was no good at that either.

I slept most of the afternoon. Rain hammered on the slate roof and dripped and pooled in the courtyard, making freezing soup of the snow. As the charcoal-colored daylight gave way to darkness, Lukas braved the bedchamber to light the lamps. I felt him creep to my bedside.

“No need to wake me,” I said. “And I’ll not break your arm. You’re not worth the punishment I’d reap.”

He jumped back as I swung my feet to the floor and ground the heels of my hands into my eyes. When I at last looked up, he was pouring steaming water from a pitcher into the earthenware basin. Behind him, hanging from hooks on the wall, were such an array of brocades, velvets, and furs as could finance a small army for a year—my assigned costume for the evening.

The signing of a contract outranked any celebration of god or saint in a pureblood household. With the exception of my grandfather, who had not been allowed at table since I was thirteen, everyone would be at the sealing feast: my mother, Thalassa, Max, if he remained in Palinur, Bia or Nilla, whichever of the twins Max had said was still living in this house. It would be unthinkable for them to miss such an occasion, no matter their duties or preferences.

I considered refusing to change out of the rumpled gray pourpoint I’d slept in, but only briefly. Might as well maintain a little dignity. If I behaved, perhaps they would not bind my hands. That one circumstance might yield a sliver of an opening for the flimsy scheme I’d come up with as I had moped and drowsed and toyed with a spider I’d found crawling across my nose.

Might…perhaps…a sliver… The best plan I could come up with was idiocy. But I could not sit placidly and allow them to enslave me. As for the consequence of failure, I could see nothing worse than what I faced already. I’d escaped this house before and had been sure I’d find a way to do so again, given time. But I’d not expected a contract offer so soon.

Two hours later, I was washed, shaved, trimmed, and buttoned and laced into my finery. I wore no jewels; my father would not trust me so far as that. His tailor must have hired half a village to come up with such elaborate garments reasonably fitted to my measure in so short a time. Even so, Lukas had to stitch up my undersleeves of red and gold striped silk to show through the slashed sleeves of the green velvet pourpoint, and take hurried tucks in the rear of my black silk breeches. The tailor must have assumed anyone with so long a leg must also be broad abeam. At least no mask was required. Sealing feasts were not public spectacles; the only ordinaries present would be household servants.

If I was successful in my attempt, perhaps I could draw out the gold thread that picked the borders and seams of my green velvet and sell it for enough to eat. I laughed aloud at the image of my unsewn finery flapping loose as I raced through Palinur’s sordid alleyways.

My despairing humor elicited a shocked expression from Lukas, who had spoken not a word since my waking. He pinned the yellow cloak at my shoulder. A ratcheting of the door lock and a blast of winter air brought Silos and Caphur…and their ball of gray silk cord.

“By the Creator, Domé Silos, am I not to eat or drink at my own sealing feast?” I said, facing the open door squarely as they moved one to either side of me. I clamped my hands tight under my arms, fingering a small porcelain cup I’d kept from breakfast.

“Fold your hands, fingers in, recondeur,” ordered Caphur.

“Domé Cartamandua would not have you run tonight, plebeiu,” said Silos quietly. “The stakes are greater now, as you well know, and your history speaks against you.”

Stupid to run, after all. Thalassa’s man had done his work well. The outer walls of my apartments had proved impervious to spells. Guards would surely be standing in the arched passage—the only exit from the courtyard—and every step of the way into the main house would be watched. Only the overgrown wall of the courtyard was left as an escape route. And the voiding spell I had prepared to tunnel through it could not be quickened until I touched the wall—a very long way across the yard.

But when had futility ever slowed me? This house felt like a tomb, the masks and cloaks my grave wraps, this contract the seal that would close the stone behind me. Despite my rage-fed swearing and mindless vows, I did not want to die. So I ran.

The moment I broke the plane of the door, I released the spider I had so carefully nurtured in the little cup, pouring magic into the illusion that would make him seem the size of a cotter’s hut. Caphur screamed, which pleased me. Then I screamed and pitched forward into the muddy garden, my back burning as if set afire like that of the Harrower youth in the Temple District.

Icy slush seeped around the edges of the yellow cloak and slowly penetrated my layers of silk and velvet. Beneath my face and chest, my voiding spell left a rapidly filling mudhole where daylilies had once grown. I could not move.

“I’m sorry, plebeiu. We can’t have that. Not tonight.” Silos’s voice remained quiet and unruffled as his firm, yet not ungentle, hands dragged me up and brushed the dead leaves and crusts of ice from my clothes. The remnants of my spider rained down over the courtyard like flakes of black snow. I had never even touched the wall.

“Magrog’s fiends, that’s wicked,” I croaked. My throat felt scorched. “Where did you learn to do that?”

Silos clapped me on the shoulder, grasped me securely by the arm, and guided me back to my apartments, where a smirking Lukas wiped my face and sponged my velvets. A red-faced Caphur hobbled my ankles with shackles and a very short chain and proceeded to incapacitate my hands. At least the yellow cloak was sodden, filthy, and totally unsuitable. To wear a cloak between the east wing and the main house was a bit excessive anyway. I wasn’t even late for the festivities.

Chapter 25

Candlelight splashed over the grand oval table from two long candlebeams of polished ebony, suspended from the coffered ceiling by silver-braided ropes. Reflections of the hundred tiny flames gleamed in silver spoons and sparked and shimmered in gold-rimmed platters, green enameled bowls, and etched glass goblets. The members of my family gleamed and sparkled, too, as they gathered about the knee-high stone table that stood at the heart of any pureblood household—whether or not that household had a heart.

Silos had bade me pause just outside the dining room as he locked an inner door behind us, thus cutting off one possible escape route should some miracle free me from my shackles. So I waited in a small arch, hidden by the shadows that pooled in the corners of the dining room, masking the sideboards and servers’ tables. I fervently wished I could remain there unnoticed and unremembered.

My father, resplendent in a stiff pourpoint of red brocade, a heavy pectoral chain banded with rubies and emeralds, and a red mantle worked in gold-embroidered gryphons and lined with white fur, stood at one end of the oval table. He watched with folded arms as Max settled my mother onto her pile of cushions.

My mother’s sculpted cheeks looked peaked. The heavy kohl diviner’s lines about her eyes appeared more ghastly than I remembered, as her thick black hair was now streaked with white. But her well-filled white bodice glittered with diamonds; her black mantle was lined with the long silvery fur of the Denab fox; and her diamond-ringed fingers still leaked power enough to make the light around her shiver. My mother was a formidable enchantress. And a drunkard. When the doors to the main courtyard opened just behind her, the scent of wine wafted across the vast room to my niche, though the shimmering carafes on the table had not yet been broached.

Thalassa, her green cloak glittering with raindrops and her hood draped gracefully about her neck and shoulders, swept through the gilded doors and hurried toward the outsized hearth. The marble mantel was supported by twin carved gryphons, each taller than two men of my height. There she embraced a thick-waisted young woman in dark blue silk, my younger sister Phoebia.

Bia had grown slightly taller than Lassa, though her body had failed to develop the curves of our robustly female mother and elder sister. Black braids, plaited with pearls and silver cord, wound thick and shining about her head, and her skin had developed a deep coppery hue, which I thought quite pretty, and an immense grace, considering the dreadful bout of girlish pustules that had afflicted her as a child. She had always resented her twin sister’s more fortunate complexion. Mine, too, though my pale coloring, so different from other purebloods’, had earned me a full measure of her ridicule. Bia looked tight and anxious tonight, her gaze darting about the room until it settled on me.

“Here he is!” Phoebia’s exclamation echoed sharply through the room, causing Thalassa to jerk her head around and hushing the quiet talk among the three at the head of the table. “Samele’s night, he is so tall!”

Silos motioned me farther into the room. I moved slowly, so that the humiliating clatter of the chains against the floor tiles might sound less like a millworks. We halted at the edge of the thick rugs and the jumble of embroidered seat cushions that bordered the table.

Five pairs of eyes stared at me, seven if you counted the “second eyes” drawn about those of my diviner mother and sister.

“Manners,” whispered Silos.

Though tempted to throttle him, I settled for a glare. Who likes to be reminded of irksome duties they are resigned to fulfill?

Taking a knee was, of course, impossible with my ankles hobbled. “Patronn,” I said, touching my bound hands to my forehead. “Greetings of evening and feasting.” Neither his rigid posture nor unblinking glare relaxed in the slightest. But then again, protocol mandated only some acknowledgment on the part of the superior, not anything of graciousness or welcome. I rose when I spied his fist clench.

A second bow, this to my mother. “Matronn, the years have not dimmed your presence.”

A spasm in her shoulders might have been a response. Her painted eyes never left her cup.

And one for Lassa: “Sinduria serena, your goddess must be grateful indeed for your courageous defense of her temple yesterday.”

I almost added my own thanks. Whether or not she had intended it so, her appearance on the steps of Samele’s temple had diverted much ugly attention from me. But then again, I would not have been exposed but for her self-righteous meddling. So, no exceptional greeting for Thalassa. She, at least, opened her palms in my direction, before turning away to speak to my mother.

Though Max was elder, Thalassa’s rank trumped his place in the order of greeting. My brother looked dashing in knee-high boots of pale calfskin, studded and buckled with gold, and a handsome topaz-and-copper-colored doublet that set off his dusky skin. The plain gold band about his forehead caught the light, yet his eyes sparked far brighter. His business in Palinur must be going well. He grinned at me as I bowed.

“Ancieno, to see you twice in two days after so long away staggers the mind…”…and I would quite like to know what causes your smug cheer.

And finally Bia: “Serena pauli, you have grown fairly. I promise not to set your braids afire tonight.”

Her lip curled and nostrils flared. I half expected flame and smoke.

I could well imagine my parents’ harsh reaction to the least hint that Bia might follow my lead. Any sympathy she may have had for my cause had likely withered under their heavy hands. But as I lowered my wrapped hands from my forehead, I extended them toward her and shrugged in what semblance of humor I could manage on a night when my soul languished in a pit from which it might never emerge.

“Vyrsté.”

Bia whispered the nasty word across the table, but my father heard it. Faster than an angel flies to heaven, he stepped around the table to her side and whipped a palm across her cheek. The slap echoed sharply in the silence. “Never in my house.”

To impugn a sibling’s blood purity was to impugn the family’s blood purity—an unconscionable slander. My sister glared at me unchastened, the mark of Patronn’s hand deepening the rich color of her cheek. What would she say if she’d heard my father’s outburst of the afternoon?

I bowed to Bia again, pressing my hands to my breast in sincere apology. How awful that my presence made her willing to suffer Patronn’s wrath. Awful to see that nothing had changed in this house. Awful that her rebellion had not taken her away from it even for a few years. She likely assumed I was mocking her. In truth, my stomach gnawed itself as it ever had when my father struck any of us.

“You may take your accustomed place, Valen,” said my father, affable again as he sat on the piled cushions beside my mother. “Despite your lack of apology, I’ll not insist you sit at a separate table tonight. As the terms of this contract offer specify a lifetime extent, and I am unlikely to summon you back for any reason, this evening will be the last time your presence or absence at this table need be remarked. The rest of you, be seated so we may begin our celebration.”

A hollow welcome, to be sure. The uneasiness that had festered through the afternoon at the abrupt and unlikely offer for my contract flared anew, an unformed anxiety lodged near my breastbone. A lifetime contract—not unheard of. But such an agreement would most often occur after several shorter successful ventures or with exceptional recommendation. What made unskilled magic in an undisciplined package worth gold enough to please my father? I could think of no reassuring aspect of a blind offer for my entire life.

“Are you reciting your Karish prayers, Valen? Take your place.” My father’s eyes smoldered behind his ungracious humor.

My “accustomed place” was halfway down one side of the table, between Lassa and the empty place that was Nilla’s. As her home in Avenus lay too far distant for her to attend on such short notice, her place was marked by a porcelain bowl filled with rosebuds. How had they marked my empty place all these years? A tin plate of thorns?

The ornate gold cup of the head of family sat at the vacant end of the table opposite my parents—a concession to my mad grandfather’s continuing existence. My father had assumed the duties of head of family sometime near my fourteenth birthday, after presenting evidence to the Registry of my grandfather’s worsening mania and need for confinement. It must gall Patronn sorely that the old gatzé yet lived.

Bia lowered herself to her cushions gracefully. She sneered as my attempt to do the same came near toppling me into the long, shallow libation bowl that adorned the center of the table. Silos caught my elbow and helped me down, preventing the unseemly disaster. After politely assisting Lassa to her cushions as well, he withdrew to the shadowed arch. Max coiled easily into the place between my mother and Bia, kissing our younger sister’s hand with a rakish grin and whispers that prompted girlish tittering.

Once we were in place and a steward had poured the wine, my father raised his crystal goblet. A skull-like grimace masqueraded as a smile. “So many of us together again…it does my heart good to see it. Though our recondeur remains lamentably unchastened, we receive him back into our embrace tonight, while at the same time celebrating an exceptional opportunity for him to do his duty by the family. Amid the vagaries of political change—the rise and fall of princes and kings—the Cartamandua name yet soars. The blood that fills our veins makes even our dregs prized. Let us offer proper reverence to Kemen, Lord of Sea and Sky, to Samele, Lady of Earth and Wind, and to our family’s especial patron, Deunor Lightbringer, Lord of Fire and Hearth, for this restoration of our honor.”

With each invocation he raised his cup higher. Then he poured half of his wine into the bronze libation bowl and drank the rest in one swallow. The steward had to refill my mother’s cup before she could do the same. My father’s face flamed scarlet at this slight delay in ceremony. Once my mother had tipped a paltry spoonful of her wine into the bowl and drained the rest, my three siblings poured and drank in their turn.

Truly we were a sorry excuse for a family. No matter the future, the prospect of a curtailed stay in their bosom did not grieve me.

My own crystal cup sat gleaming like a great ruby of temptation, within easy reach for one with usable hands. The smell of the potent vintage came as near anything to driving me into groveling submission. Ah, gracious Erdru, Lord of Grape and Harvest, if I must be shuffled off to some grim lot, could I not at least be drunk?

I leaned toward my elder sister. “Will your goddess overlook my failure to join in this pious practice?” I said in a mock whisper. “Perhaps you could hold my cup for me…”

Lassa ignored my irreverence. Instead, she raised her refilled glass toward my scowling father. “Patronn, my mistress, divine Samele, surely guided me to the recondeur’s hiding place among the Karish. I offer the goddess the entirety of my evening’s refreshment and advise the rest of you to do the same. With the realm so unsettled, we must not take our debts to the divine lightly.”

My elder sister had never shied from conflict with my father, but was far more diplomatic than I had ever been. She had certainly displeased Patronn by leaving his control for temple service when she was sixteen.

Thalassa proceeded to empty her entire cup of wine into the libation bowl and prevented the steward refilling it. Bia hurriedly did the same. I came near moaning at the scent.

When it became clear that no one else was going to give up their wine to the gods, my father signaled the servants to begin serving the meal. “It matters naught who sits Caedmon’s throne,” he said. “Our interests will be well served with any outcome.”

“Not so, Patronn,” said Max, whipping out a jeweled eating knife. “Navronne needs strength on the throne. The Hansker grow bolder every day that Perryn and Osriel refuse to recognize Prince Bayard’s legitimate claim. Traders tell us that the Velyar and the Sydonians have sucked all use from their own lands and will be on the rampage by spring, as if they can smell our weakness. Prince Bayard is the only one of the three who knows how to fight barbarians.”

“Bayard is a barbarian,” said Thalassa. “Who else would make a pact with Sila Diaglou? The Harrowers will bring him down in his turn. Did you know they consider purebloods as blasphemous aberrations in need of ‘cleansing’ the same as Karish priests or Sinduri? At least Perryn could have—”

“Never fear, sister,” said Max. “My prince can control a few ragtag fanatics. Perryn of Ardra is a weakling dandy who tried to cheat his way onto the throne. He couldn’t even hire a competent forger. Now that Perryn’s cowardly ass is bared for all to see, Osriel will have no choice but to heel as well. He hasn’t mages enough or warriors enough to challenge Bayard on his own. Evanore’s gold can rebuild whatever these mangy Harrowers tear down better than it was before. Let the storms of purification rage their little while…and rid us of a few laggards and slums…”

Bia laughed uneasily. My mother drained another cup. Max raised his wine cup with one hand, and with a motion of the other drew from it a burst of colored sparks, swirling the flying particles into a glittering ring that hovered over his head.

“…and if the fanatics win the day and chaos reigns”—with a quick spread of all five digits, he dispersed his crown into a shower of color that tickled my nose—“then who is more likely to survive than a pureblood, who can terrify the fearful masses with a twiddle of his fingers?”

Fool, I thought. What do you know of survival? Unless he had learned to conjure food from grass or wine from bare vines, neither finger tricks nor Cartamandua magic would fill his belly if these end times came to pass. He had seen war, but his royal contract would have assured that he had never gone hungry, never slept but coddled in furs, never lacked for clothes, servants, or gold enough to buy whatever he lacked. I looked around the table at my family, entrenched in this strange world I had so long refused, and of a sudden, felt older than all of them. They had no idea what they faced if the Harrowers had their way.

As if summoned by Max’s cheerful bloodthirst, servants descended on us like a plague of silent gnats, carrying platters of roast duck that I knew would have skin like crisp bits of heaven, delicate fish sprinkled with rosemary and nuts, and plump vegetables golden with saffron.

Unable to partake, I closed my eyes and imagined myself away from this table. How fine it would be to be sitting in the light-bathed Gillarine refectory eating stewed parsnips, stolid Brother Cadeus scratching his nose as he droned some interminable lesson at the lectern, Brother Robierre kindly buttering old Abelard’s bread, and Jullian and Gerard sitting on either side of me, grinning at each other around their soup spoons. Such a room needed no marble hearth to warm it. I had not thought I would ever miss the abbey so.

Which thoughts, of course, led me back to the nagging worry about Gerard. Had the boy ever been found? He’d not seemed at all a rebellious sort, but always performed his duties cheerfully. What would lure him from the security of Gillarine? Gildas had thought to send him to the dolmen with my provisions, but I’d told him not to. Deunor’s fire…had he done it anyway? What if the boy had gotten lost or tripped and cracked his head on a stone in the night? No, no. Gildas would say something if he’d sent the boy into danger. And then my thoughts slipped further afield. How much more interesting this dinner would be were the members of the lighthouse cabal our guests—enigmatic Luviar, incisive Brother Gildas, the scholar-warrior Lord Stearc and his intelligent secretary Gram, and Elene…Elene in a woman’s gown that clung to her ripe figure…

“…but I was surprised to hear of the Karish hierarch’s move. After so many years of loyalty to Perryn, to turn on him so abruptly.”

Thalassa’s comment snagged my attention. My eyes snapped open.

“The hierarch saw which way the wind was blowing,” said Max, gesturing to a serving girl to sauce his meat with fruit conserve from a red enamelware dish. “Providential that he would find the long-lost writ so soon after Prince Bayard trounced Perryn at Wroling, don’t you think?”

Deunor’s fire! Eodward’s writ of succession…

Thalassa waved away the servant trying to install frosted grapes on her plate. “The Sinduri meet at dawn to discuss the implications. Bayard’s debt to this hierarch could alter the balance in favor of the Karish apostates. Though we’ve tried to remain neutral throughout—”

“You’re saying Hierarch Eligius found Eodward’s will?” I burst in, unable to withhold longer. All eyes turned to me.

“This Karish priest claims he’s found Hierarch Angnecy’s copy of the missing writ and that it names Bayard king,” said Thalassa, her tone unemotional. “Even if the document is authentic, one wonders at the timing.”

Tales said Eodward had made three copies of his will. One he had hidden in some place of safety where it would be revealed at his death. The other two he had entrusted to the two clergymen who had brought him back to Navronne, Sinduré Tobrecan and Hierarch Angnecy. But no verified copy had ever been brought forward. Angnecy had preceded Eodward in death, and his successors as Hierarch of Ardra had long professed ignorance of any such document. Tobrecan had died in Evanore in the same month as Eodward, and his copy had never surfaced. In the early days of the war, Prince Perryn had produced a writ that cited his own name as heir—purportedly Angnecy’s copy. But the paper had been declared a forgery by three witnesses out of five. In any case, no one would accept it as valid without the confirmation of either of the other two copies.

Thalassa’s ringed eyes, smoky and shadowed, met mine for the first time that evening. I’d have sworn I felt their heat drill through my skull. “As a result of the ‘astounding revelations’ contained in this newfound writ, Hierarch Eligius has withdrawn his support for Perryn and turned him over to the Smith.” Her voice took on a more sober cast. “The implications are profound…as even you can well imagine.”

I recalled the abbot’s warning: Once the succession was settled, Bayard’s hammer would fall swiftly on those who had not supported him wholeheartedly. And Thalassa, who had tied herself to conspirators who insisted that the world’s survival trumped the rivalries of princes or clergy, sat directly in that hammer’s path. By allowing me to hear this news, she had—knowingly and deliberately—laid a weapon in my hand. Were I ever to find a way around her tongue-block, I might sell her secret, perhaps buy myself some consideration in royal circles. Was she so confident in her spellmaking? Or did she believe my new master would assure I had no such opportunity? Or was she telling me something altogether different?

Max brandished a fist-sized portion of duck on his knife. “Are you surprised at your Karish friends’ perfidy, Valen?” He grinned at me. “Perhaps your sojourn in the abbey gave you a taste for adult intrigue instead of childish tantrums.”

“Valen remains eternally self-absorbed,” said Thalassa, reverting to her lighter tone, as if I were not present. “His head is empty, his most important concerns his belly and his male endowments.” She nodded to my mother as if to apologize for so indelicate a reference. “I doubt he holds to a single monkish virtue. Even if he knew aught of serious matters of the world, he’d not lift a finger to involve himself.”

Why was it that my sister’s unrelenting barbs brought to mind the Abbot of Gillarine and his admonitions to obedience, his lessons about honor and the need to divert personal interest and loyalty to higher purpose? Lassa was a member of Luviar’s circle—those who had committed their lives to the purpose that gods worth our honoring did not mandate terror or ignorance or unthinking subservience. I watched my elder sister as she picked at her meal and sparred with Max, and confessed that I did not know her as well as I thought I did.

“Never saw anyone so sly as that abbot.” Max devoured another bite of duck and distracted me from rethinking Thalassa’s motives. “Luviar, is that his name? Prince Bayard was dreadfully unhappy to learn the fellow allowed Perryn to sneak off with the hierarch. The Karish eunuch will pay for that bit of chicanery. I’m not so happy with him either. Sullied my reputation with that little vanishing trick, he did. I’ll find out how he hid the simpering snake in that monk-house if I must strip off his holy robes and dangle him over a bonfire to do it. If you know the secret, Valen, I might find it in my heart to pour that cup of wine down your throat! Tell me, little brother, have you ever had such a sober month since you gave up Matronn’s tit?”

I shrugged. As Max leaned over and smacked a great kiss on Matronn’s hollow cheek, I glanced at Thalassa to see her reaction to Max’s talk of the abbot. Even considering Max’s penchant for exaggeration, I found his words disturbing. But my sister ignored us all as she spooned honey from a dish and dribbled it on a piece of bread. She handed it across to my mother, who had eaten nothing all evening.

While Max preened and related grand tales of the victory at Wroling, I closed my eyes and tried to plan my next move. Which was, of course, entirely impossible. Every scheme died with the same thought: a lifetime contract with a stranger who could restrain me as he saw fit, who could decree that I would never again see the light of day, who could prevent me ever speaking to another human being if I did not track his enemies or poison his wife or work whatever other magic he required of me. I would live without recourse. Without protection. Bound. Saints and angels, preserve me. I dragged my ragged thoughts back to the present before I vomited in my empty plate.

“…and that was the very same Karish house where Valen was hiding?” said Bia. “What strange fortune!”

“If I’d only known,” said Max, cocking his head thoughtfully and narrowing his eyes at me. “I could have dragged him back here weeks ago. Were it anyone but Valen, I might wonder whether he was caught up with Luviar’s treasonous games.”

“I’ve heard Bayard will take control of Palinur before morning,” said my father. “The Registry has advised us all to strengthen our house wards to fend off this Harrower rabble. Prince Osriel is expected in the city as well.” He tore at a dried fig with his teeth. He was relishing this occasion.

Max licked his fingers, smirking. “Did I mention Evanori gold? The Bastard Prince cannot squat atop such treasure any longer, playing his nasty little games and scaring children. He must acknowledge Bayard as his king or prepare to face his wrath.”

“Osriel is an abomination,” said Thalassa with disgust.

My mother, who had been emptying her wineglass with regularity and trying unsuccessfully to avoid looking at me, shuddered and drew her mantle close. Her dull gaze flicked to me again. “Claudio,” she whispered, tilting her head toward my father, her kohl-ringed eyes sunken, her hollow cheeks paler than ever, “I’ve Seen this Osriel, who steals the souls of the dead. He craves the life of angels, but is forever barred from their realm.”

As happened every time my mother spoke the words “I’ve Seen” in just that way, the room took on a certain tomblike staleness, and the candle flames dimmed as though viewed through smoked glass. Creeping fingers tickled my spine, as they did whenever events recalled the doom of blood and water and ice she had once spoken for me.

Lassa laid down her knife and stared at my mother, as if to glean the wholeness of the vision with her own talent. Max shuddered and tossed another cup of wine down his gullet, averting his eyes.

My father alone remained exempt from the effects of my mother’s pronouncements. Dabbing at his mouth with a square of linen, he savored Max’s and Thalassa’s reactions with the same gusto he chewed his meat. “Let Thalassa worry about the Bastard’s soul,” he said. “Think. Osriel surely wishes to examine this purported writ of Eodward’s will. Perhaps even challenge it. I’ve heard he possesses Tobrecan’s copy, though he has never produced it. No wonder that, if Bayard’s name is cited. It’s likely long burned.” Patronn smiled with bloodless lips. “If Bayard can persuade Osriel the writ is sound and that alliance is in his best interest, the war is over. We shall all prosper, even—”

“Valen?” The throaty whisper came from the direction of the kitchen door, along with a sneaking giggle. “My boy come home? My good lad grown? Why hast thou kept this news from me, Claudio?”

“Raphus! Petro! Where are you?” bellowed my father, jumping to his feet. “Get the madman out of here!”

My grandfather hobbled quickly across the tile floor, astonishingly spry for a man of more than eighty summers. A green-and-yellow patterned robe flapped over stained tunic and loose trousers. Food was the most pleasant of the likely substances clotting his matted white hair and beard. A fetid stench preceded him.

My mother recoiled and clapped a lace handkerchief across her mouth and nose as he planted a kiss on her cheek. Max wrinkled his nose and sucked at his wine cup when my grandfather grabbed a wad of his hair and jiggled his head affectionately. Bia, rigid, stared down at her plate as if to pretend a madman wasn’t patting her coiled braids. But even as he touched the others, his bright mad eyes fixed on me.

“Where hast thou been, boy? Hiding, I think. Good. Good. How old be thou, Valen? How old? Come now, tell me. Thou shouldst be close to the day.”

“Seven-and-twenty, Capatronn,” I said, bile in my mouth. “And how old are you? Too old to be living, I think. Too wicked to be living, certainly.”

He chortled gleefully and clapped his hands as he rounded the end of the table, his bare feet attempting a dance step. I stared at the libation bowl, the etched bronze glinting sharply in the candlelight. I sought the scent of wine instead of my grandfather’s reek and tried to imagine it was dulling my senses…dulling memory, hatred, and revulsion.

“Wicked certainly. Yes. But I’ve told no secrets, and they’ve not found thee, have they, boy?”

My father charged through the door to the kitchen, still shouting for my grandfather’s pureblood caretakers. The other servants who cowered in the shadows—ordinaries—were not permitted “adversarial contact” with any pureblood. Thus they could not wrestle my grandfather back to his room. Silos was nowhere to be seen.

Meanwhile my grandfather crept up behind me and whispered in my ear as he had always done, lapsing in and out of Aurellian and Navron. “We’ll show them, boy. Prasima—how long till thy birthday? Claudio keeps me shut away, so I know not the day or season. Tell me. Prasima coteré—how long till thou’rt free forever?”

“You’re too late, Capatronn,” I said. I did not whisper, but held up my silkbound hands so he could see. “They found me. And I doubt I’ll ever be free again.” But I would. I would, else I’d be dead or as mad as he was.

“Shhh…” He pawed at my shoulders, stroked my arms, and pried at my chin, trying to turn my face toward his. “All grown up now. Tall, aren’t thou? Not like these dull fools. I knew it. Tall and beautiful…so far above. Stand up and show me. But how long till eight-and-twenty? On that day thou shalt be free of them forever. Tell me.” He hammered his fist on my shoulder. “Tell me, Valen. I’ve kept thee free. Given everything for thee alone. How long?”

Somehow, seeing him in the flesh sapped my fury. However hateful and cruel the old gatzé had once been, he was only mad now, echoing this old nonsense in my ear. His dementia had ever been fixed on my birthdays. “Ten…twelve…weeks until my birthday, I think.”

He wrapped his arms around me from the back as if to heave me up. He was still strong. “Stand up, boy. Stand up and let me see. So cruel…so cold…they despise any who are not like them in all ways. But they’ll never break thee. I saw to it.”

“Leave me be, Capatronn,” I said in exasperation more than anger. “Live or die as you will, old man, but just leave me be. You never took me away. You never set me free. I had to do it all myself, but I failed.”

I shifted around to face him as a tired man instead of a defiant child, so that this once in all my life he might believe what I said. “I don’t want your—”

My mouth hung open, paralyzed in the moment. The insult I was poised to throw died unspoken.

My grandfather’s face was a landscape of suffering, creased with pain and scarred with madness, his skin rough and tattered like leather left to rot. He had chewed his lips raw. And his eyes…Lord of the Sky, I had never looked so close…so deep…coal black and searingly hot, a damned soul gazing out from the maw of hell, begging for one word of consolation…filling with tears even as he bobbed his head like a mummer’s puppet.

“Ah, Clyste,” he whispered, touching my cheek with a dry trembling finger. “Not even for thee could I allow it.”

Two brawny men dragged him away before I could react, before I could ask what he meant or why he invoked that name, a name perched on the edge of memory and mystery.

“Wait!” I said. But the caretakers were already bustling him out the door.

“What was all that?” asked Max. “He wants to throw another party for your birthday?”

“Yes,” I said, struggling not to reveal that I was as bewildered as I had ever been in my life. “Perhaps he thinks I’ll turn into something useful when my years are eight-and-twenty—the perfection of seven times the magical balance of four.”

My livid father straightened his fur-trimmed mantle and stood at his end of the table. “Despite this unseemly interruption, our feast is not yet done,” he said, his voice quivering with anger.

It would not have surprised me to see his leather strap appear in his hand. But it was merely a scroll of parchment that he snatched from a silver tray a servant set beside his plate. The scent of hot beeswax drifted on the warm air. “This night we seal the first and last contract of our recondeur. When the opportunity arose this morning, I felt Serena Fortuna’s blessing enfold our house once more. Valen needs a strong hand, a master who can control his violence and deceit and bend him to his duty. And yet our family will never stoop to unworthy contracts, even to salvage what we may of Valen’s honor.”

“Perhaps you would like to review the document, Valen?” He brought the scroll around to my place and unrolled it on the table in front of me. “Tell me, do you find any terms you would like to change? I can have pen and ink brought.”

Cheeks on fire, I squinted and strained to make out the letters that might hint at whose name was listed on the contract. But of course the sun still rose and set, and the earth still plowed its course through the stars, thus the blotches mixed and mingled on the page like swarming bees, defying my comprehension. Sweat rolled down my neck. I wanted to scream at him to tell me who my master was to be. But without hope of altering his gleeful course, I would not give my father the satisfaction of begging for an answer I would learn soon enough.

“No objection or qualification?” He snatched the page away and returned to his place, pleased with his little joke. “So we can proceed, then.”

My mother unsnapped a gold disk from her neck. She turned it over and over in her hand as my father positioned the ends of a red silk ribbon looped through the tail of the page and dripped a puddle of wax from a small pewter ladle onto the joining.

“Who is this master, Patronn?” said Thalassa. “Should we not be told before the papers are sealed? Of course it is entirely your and Matronn’s decision, but my position makes certain demands.” I was amazed to hear she didn’t know.

“No one in the temple will question my choice, Thalassa,” said my father, frosty and imperious.

He jerked his head at my mother. My mother pressed her disk to the wax and held it. After a moment, she lifted the slip of gold, threw it on the table, and reached for her wine.

My father affixed his seal beside my mother’s. “Who but royalty deserves the service of a Cartamandua-Celestine? The Duc of Evanore will send his man to retrieve Valen tomorrow morning.”

My flesh went cold as a widow in winter, and the bottom fell out of my stomach. The Duc of Evanore…My father had contracted me to Osriel the Bastard.

“Patronn!” Thalassa jumped to her feet. “What are you thinking? Valen is your son!”

Phoebia gaped at me as if I were already some flesh-eating monster. Max clapped his hands to his head and collapsed backward onto his dinner cushions, roaring with laughter. My mother emptied her glass and waved for more wine.

“Mind your manners, Sinduria,” snapped my father. “You are still my daughter, and you sit in my house.”

Thalassa snapped her fingers at a servant who scurried away to retrieve her cloak. “Never again, Patronn. Not as your daughter, at the least. You have disdained my path since I first submitted to the temple, and you have scorned my position that brings honor and respect to all purebloods. I do not think the Registry will refuse me independent status. Not after this madness.”

In a swirl of silk, my sister crouched beside me. “Forgive me, Valen,” she said softly. “I’ve never understood this bloody war between you and Patronn. I still don’t. But I’ll do what I can.”

I stared up at her, numb, scarcely comprehending what she was saying. What uses would the Bastard have for me? Tracking down corpses and gouging their eyes? Seeking the path to the netherworld? Mapping the realms of the dead? I’d heard that his mages tried to keep a victim living while they took his organs for their dark workings. Perhaps they needed more power. Perhaps I was to hang in their web while they stole my magic…my blood.

My sister pressed a cold hand firmly to my forehead for a moment, and then swept from the room, leaving me with naught but a sensation like an arrow piercing my skull and a deadness in my soul.

Bia wailed at my mother, horrified at the thought that the Bastard Prince himself might walk through our door.

My father bellowed at Silos. “Set extra guards about the western walls tonight and lock the courtyard gate. Reinforce the wards on Valen’s door. The man who lets him escape will never see daylight again.”

Max was still chortling as Caphur and Silos led me out of the noisy brilliance of the dining room and into the quiet night. I hobbled through the ice-skimmed slush, my thoughts as frostbit as the night.

“Your Registry valet has returned to the city, plebeiu,” said Silos after a while, as we threaded the courtyards and brick passages. “I think he was afraid of you.”

The pain in my head dulled. I allowed myself to see nothing, feel nothing. This night’s events could not possibly pertain to me. My father could not have bound me to the monster of Evanore for the rest of my life. My grandfather could not be something other than I had always believed. His words…the same words he had babbled in my ears for as long as I could remember…could not be demanding new interpretation now I was old enough to hear them. And the name he had invoked…Clyste. Clyste’s Well, they had called the walled pool beyond Gillarine’s valley, a Danae holy place. I could do nothing about any of it. Osriel…holy gods…for the rest of my life.

“The bodyservant sent by the Sinduria will attend you tonight,” Silos continued, as if I might care.

Even when we stepped into my warm apartments and he began to unbind my hands, my trembling did not cease. Caphur poked up the coals in the brazier and left. Silos bundled the silken cord into a ball and unshackled my ankles. I did not move except to wrap my arms about my churning belly. Probably a good thing I had eaten nothing.

“The Sinduria will do what she can, plebeiu.” Only as Silos raised his eyebrows and nodded a good night did I heed him. “But do not try to escape again. More than me will be watching the walls tonight, and they’ll not hold back as I do.” He closed the door softly behind him.

Someone appeared in the doorway of my bedchamber, but I could not be bothered to look. I had to decide what to do. My head felt like porridge. My gut ached.

“I’ve been sent to attend you, Broth—plebeiu.” The youthful voice cracked like a donkey’s bray.

Purest disbelief spun me about. “Jullian!”

Chapter 26

The boy must have grown three quattae in the weeks since I’d left Gillarine. Whether it was the green temple livery or the grim circumstances, he looked older as well. And though forthcoming with news of Gillarine, he no longer babbled with the tongue of innocence. Resentment and withholding laced his every politeness.

“I’m truly sorry to hear Gerard’s not found,” I said, forcing my thoughts to focus as we sat close to the little brazier, devouring the cold roast duck and soggy bread he’d brought from the kitchen. “He didn’t take anything with him at all? Has he family?”

“Not even his cloak. And he has only his gram in Elanus; she hasn’t seen him. Father Abbot fears he is harmed and that’s why he brought me away from Gillarine, besides to come here and take your messages and pass on his. I ought to be back there searching for him, not—” He pressed his lips together.

“Not playing servant to a recondeur.”

His downy cheeks flushed. “The lady—the Sinduria—believes I’ll be allowed to stay with you wherever they send you next. She’ll set up some way for me to get messages back and forth.”

My head swam with heat and fear. Thalassa had sworn to help. Gods, she had asked my forgiveness and threatened to break with my father, and I’d scarcely given her a thought. But she would have sent Jullian before she knew where I was going. “No. You cannot stay. It would be a comfort…more than you know…but after tomorrow, they won’t allow it. I won’t allow it.”

But tonight…Somehow Jullian’s presence moved me to decision. To action, however useless.

“Who has come with you to Palinur? Brother Victor, I know, and you said the abbot…”

“Father Abbot and Brother Victor have been summoned to appear before the hierarch tomorrow at Terce. Brother Gildas and I accompanied them. We’re staying at a priory here in the city. When he left Gillarine, Father Abbot spoke to the brothers as if he weren’t coming back. He gave the care of the lighthouse to Father Prior—”

“Nemesio? Is he mad?” I threw the bone onto my half-filled plate, the last bites of meat still attached. “Nemesio likely betrayed him to the hierarch!”

“Prior Nemesio helped build the lighthouse with his own hands.” Though he kept his voice low, the boy could have cracked nuts in his jaw. “His father and brother are carpenters, villeins of an edane with great landholdings in Morian. We’d not have half the tools and seeds were it not for him. He would never betray the abbot. Never. You don’t know us at all.”

Clearly not. How easy it was to look backward and see myself as young and stupid and unforgivably self-absorbed. Had I aged so much these few weeks? The boy’s deepest grievance sat before me as bald as a monk.

“And you don’t know me, either, do you?” I said, wiping my greasy fingers on the table linen. “A traitor to god and king, you think. Not the wounded soul you rescued at the sanctuary gate.”

“Aye. I don’t know why Father Abbot thinks one like you could help us.” He began twiddling his eating knife. “He said I was to obey you on my soul’s life.”

His chin jutted bravely, but his eyes flicked from his knife to my hands as if hell’s fire might come shooting from my fingers. Best he never see Silos’s tricks.

I sighed and reached for his wrist, stilling the dangerous play of the knife. If I were to trust him at my back, I preferred him to think me a man and not a monster. “Listen to me, Jullian. Surely some men must come to Gillarine with all sincerity, believing Iero has called them to your life…your good and holy life…and then chafe at the rules and break them and not understand why. Eventually they realize that they are meant for other things—to marry and have children, perhaps, or to farm their own ground, or to soldier for their king. All good and holy things, too. It just takes them some time and grief to discover the truth of what the god intends. That could happen, could it not? That has happened at Gillarine, I’m sure.”

“But you never intended to be our brother—”

I held up my hand to hush him. Why was it this boy demanded such painful honesty? I had lived my whole life believing what others said of me, while screaming to the world and to myself that I didn’t care. Now a half-grown innocent forced me to seek explanations I had never bothered to unravel.

“I’m not speaking of my stay at Gillarine. You’re right about that. I was hungry, cold, and wounded, and I needed sanctuary, which you and your kind brothers gave me. But this other matter…I did not come to pureblood life of my own choice, but was born to it, and so one could say the god meant me for that life. Yet from my earliest days, before I could even consider such things, I chafed…sorely…at our rules and did not understand why. For good or ill, I’ve broken every one of them, much as a failed monk might do while wrestling with his destiny. Many of my deeds are simply my own wickedness, and people are right…you are right…to condemn me for them. But my choice to be a recondeur…Jullian, the belief is so strong in me—just as fierce as your belief in the abbot and his lighthouse—that the gods or fate or destiny must surely intend me for other things than this. Likely not the monastery either, to be sure…but something…and I have to keep searching for it, else I must admit I’m mad as well as sinful and deem my whole life a waste. I am not ready to do that. Not yet.” Though the glass was rapidly emptying.

He held quiet and stared at his greasy plate, littered with bones and scraps. Then, abruptly, he jumped up from his stool and vanished into the bedchamber. When he came out again, he carried a large canvas bag.

“Jullian, please don’t leave. I need your help to—”

He plopped the heavy bag into my lap. “Are you to ask your grandfather our questions tonight?” he said, still resentful. “Father Abbot said that’s what you would do.”

The surety of this assertion confounded me, for only as I sat here talking to the boy had I accepted that I must speak to the madman before I left this house. “I wasn’t—Not exactly. I—”

“Father Abbot said I was to tell you that he trusts you. Open it.”

Skeptical, I drew open the bag. In my lap lay my grandfather’s book of maps.

I was dumbfounded. Luviar believed these pages held the key to preserving the knowledge of the world through two centuries of darkness, and he had just entrusted them to the hands of a liar and a thief, a traitor to god and king, a prisoner incapable of escaping his own house.

I felt Luviar’s cool gray eyes on me, as if he stood beside Jullian, and I imagined the arch of his brow and the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. What kind of magic did a man wield to unravel men’s souls and mold them to his bidding? Here at the nadir of fortune, the abbot had granted me a moment of profound grace. In thanks, I would have done whatever he bade me.

Wrestling with time and possibility, I smoothed the leather binding and reshaped my plan. “I must speak with my grandfather before I leave this house tomorrow. If you’ll help me get out of this apartment for a little while tonight so I can do that, I’ll take this with me. I can’t promise. But I’ll try to get Father Abbot’s answers as well as my own.”

Though he did not smile, Jullian jerked his head. His mortal judgment had been stayed, but I was not sure for how long. He put his hands on his slender hips. “So tell me what to do…”

Protocol granted even a recondeur bound to the Monster of Evanore privacy for anything involving bodily intimacy. Thus, if someone in my father’s house took the wild notion to visit a violent renegade in the middle of the night, he or she would hold off long enough for me to finish bathing. Jullian was smaller than Lukas, so it was only natural that it would take him longer than Lukas to haul enough hot water from the kitchen. I would have perhaps an hour.

“…so if anyone comes, just say I’m unclothed and you’ll bring word when you have me dressed again. You must be firm and sure. No wavering. No apology. You must think like a servant of Samele’s Temple. Though not a pureblood like my guards, you would consider yourself above the house servants. Can you do that?”

“I think so.”

“Be sure, Jullian, for if you’re caught…”

“The Sinduria told me the consequences if I’m caught helping you. And I told her that I would do whatever was needed for Iero’s work.” His thin shoulders were stiff and square.

I had not thought I had a smile left in me, but the image of this Karish aspirant with a cracking voice and downy lip saying such a thing to a high priestess of Samele could not but make my face twitch. “And my sister truly arranged this…approved of your helping me?”

“Aye. She said she wasn’t sure you’d be willing to speak to the old man, but I was to tell you that you’re the only hope for getting sense out of him. And that she was glad she was there to keep the Harrowers off you. I wasn’t sure what that meant.”

“Yes…well…that’s another story. But if the occasion should arise…when you see her again…tell her I’m glad of it, too.” My sister baffled me.

We pulled the tub from the corner to the rug before the brazier. Then I sent the boy off to the kitchen for the first pail of water, describing how he could take a slightly longer route and verify that no guards were posted at the corner apartment or inside the courtyard.

A purple and black tunic, black breeches, hose, and boots had been laid out in my bedchamber. The silver mask had been laid beside the clothes. I swallowed hard and vowed not to think again of tomorrow, but only of tonight, and how in the name of all gods I might get sensible answers from my grandfather.

I changed out of my fine clothes and into the plainer garb more suited to sneaking about in the night and stuffed the book of maps back into its bag.

The locks rattled, and the door flew open. Jullian lugged in a heavy pail of steaming water. I took it from him and dumped it in the tub. “Only one man inside the courtyard,” he said, breathless. “He’s standing in the corner at the outer wall, where there are no rooms. It’s too dark to see your door from there, but he came running the instant I stepped out. They’ve closed the archway gate to the rest of the house, and he must unlock its magic to let me through each trip. There’s two more fellows in pureblood cloaks posted just beyond the gate, so only a step will bring them into the yard. I heard more voices outside the walls. Lots of them.”

“You told the fellow you were coming out again?”

“Aye, but he went back to his post in the corner.”

“Good enough. It means they trust my door wards to warn them if I step out. Take a bit more time on your next trip. Tell the kitchen maids the bucket was too heavy, and you’ll need to fill it more times with less in it. Tell them I’m demanding the water be hotter. Blame me. They’ll understand that.”

“Very well.”

“If someone seems suspicious, and you think I need to get back here, or if you need me for any reason, drop your pail outside the corner apartment. I’ll hear it. But do not—now, listen to me—do not lie to the two at the gate or to any other pureblood. You’ve no experience at lying, and as sure as fleas bite, they will detect it in you. If they ask you if I’m out of my room, tell them the truth. Tell them what you think of me. Tell them I’m a servant of Magrog half again your height and could break you over my knee—which is entirely true, and I’ll do it if you try making up stories. Keep your abbot’s secrets as you’ve ever done, but blame me for this whole mess. Do you understand?”

He hesitated.

“Blame me, Jullian. They cannot do worse to me than they’ve already done, unless it is to hurt you or the brothers of Gillarine. I’ll sit right here with this book all night if you don’t promise.”

“Very well. I won’t lie to them if they should ask.”

I grabbed the book and a shielded lamp and slipped through the door alongside him, so the ward would be triggered only the once. Flattening myself against the wall, I listened as he met the guard and they walked toward the gate. Then I crept across the courtyard to my grandfather’s door.

The windows of the corner apartment were dark. From inside came a soft, low droning, as if a dulcian player had got stuck on one mournful note, and no matter how he wrenched and blew, he could not change it. The absence of charged heat about the locked door meant I had only a lock to break, not magical wards. I dared not use a voiding spell—it was too “loud,” too different and would surely be detected by those guarding this courtyard. Rather I touched my fingers to the lock and assembled an unlocking spell, hoping to have better luck than I’d had in Gillarine’s library. Trying not to rush, I loosed a bit of magic to flow into the spell and through it into the old bronze pins, shifting them ever so slightly, feeling my way. Such a slow dribble of magic would not be noticeable in the midst of the heavy wards elsewhere in the courtyard. As long as I didn’t get impatient…or run out of time…

By the time the last pin released and I pushed open the door, my teeth were vibrating and Jullian had taken a third trip to the kitchen. At least my eyes had adjusted to the dark. I stepped in, closed the door behind me…and almost retreated immediately. The stench was near unbearable—every foulness a confined human could produce.

A couple of low stools and an unlit brazier took form in the shadows. There was little else to be seen in that barren darkness but a clutter of clothes and blankets on the floor. The droning note came from the far left corner of the room, a mournful song of mind-death and despair.

“Capatronn,” I said softly. “Are you awake?”

I picked my way through the clutter. Not all clothes on the floor, no…parchment…pages and pages scattered everywhere. And amid the various stinks hung the familiar mix of tannin and vitriol—ink.

“It’s Valen, Capatronn. I’ve come to talk.”

He was huddled in the corner, eyes open, staring into nothing. I set the lamp on the floor, far enough away he could not kick it over, and tilted the cover open slightly. He clutched a wad of vellum sheets, and a string of drool sagged from his mouth and pooled on the crumpled pages. Those who label madness as release from pain and worry have never encountered such a sight. In that moment pain and worry entirely comprised my grandfather’s existence.

“Capatronn, can you hear me?”

As if I’d struck him, his head jerked, and his hands flailed wildly, his pages flying everywhere. “Valen! My good boy…I feared they’d taken thee!”

“Shhh…we must be quiet.” I sat down in front of him, leaving the bag containing the book in my lap. To settle him I had to catch his flying hands and hold them tight.

He bobbed his head, chewed his raw lips, and snatched his hands from mine. “Yes, quiet and careful. They’re close tonight…I feel them close. They touch me.” He shuddered and tapped his bony fingers on his skull. “Careful, lad. Careful. ’Tis no life for thee.”

My skin prickled. “No one’s close. I need you to tell me some things I’ve never understood. Secrets, I think.”

He pressed his knuckles to his mouth, his gaze darting anxiously around the dark, filthy room. “Secrets. Bargains. Promises. Contracts. Everything is secrets and contracts. For thee. To be safe. To be free.”

I hardly knew where to begin. But the chill beneath my layered clothing and the mystery of the watcher at the Aingerou’s Font set my course. “Capatronn, who is Clyste?”

“Cannot tell that. The contract…thou canst not know.” He gnawed on his bleeding knuckles.

“She’s a Dané, isn’t she? Her sianou—her place of guarding—is a pool in the south of Ardra, only a few quellae from Caedmon’s Bridge near Gillarine Abbey. Clyste’s Well, they call it.”

“Ahh…” He put his hands over his ears. “Thou canst not know. Don’t say it. He’ll think I told thee and put me in the daylight dark.”

“Who’ll think it? Patronn?” Why would my father care if my grandfather told me one more story about a Dané? And what did pureblood contracts have to do with beings of legend?

“Daylight dark and nighttime dark…no light ever. No drawing then. No painting. No scribing. Then I’ll go mad!” As if he realized the absurdity of this statement, he planted his hands atop his head and cackled as he let it fall back against the wall. When the manic laughter shifted into shuddering sobs, I came near giving up hope of any sense. But after a moment, he leaned forward, tears glinting on his cheeks, and whispered, “Too late for Clyste anyway…too late.”

“Why too late?”

“She told them naught of our bargain. So the others locked her away to punish her. Chained her with myrtle and hyssop so she could not take bodily form. Bound her to slow fading. So young…”

The others. Other Danae. She was one of them.

I tried to ask more about the Danae, but every question became a knife thrust, wrenching sobs from his bony body. I had to try something else.

“Look, Capatronn, I’ve brought my book.” I pulled it out of its bag and eased around beside him. “I thought you might look at it with me as we did when I was a boy.”

His spasms waned as I allowed the weight of it to rest on his knees and opened it, ready to snatch it away if he tried to harm it. But his finger hovered over the title and then glided, not quite touching, over the glorious elaboration of gryphons and angels wrought in emerald green, scarlet, and gold that glinted in the lamplight. “I made this. I. When my head was right. The finest maps ever in the world. Mine.”

“Yes, indeed.” Madness had clearly not dimmed his self-admiration. “Remember, you gave it to me when I was seven. Patronn was furious.”

“Spited Claudio with the giving. He exacted such a price…keeping me from thee. Beastly. Shamed me to bargain with my own blood. So it pleased me to spite him. But my mind was forfeit…failing…and I had to give the book early.”

“And I was a wild, horrid child who never appreciated the gift. You made me swear to use—”

“Only after eight-and-twenty!” He snatched my hands away from the book and crushed them in his bony fingers, still incredibly strong. “Go not into their lands until thou art free. Only then. Thou gave me thy promise. Swore on the aingerou with thy blood. Thou must be careful with the book…Wait until the time is right and thou canst walk every corner of the world without bond or bowing to any. Thou’lt remain as thou art. Promise, Valen. Promise! I betrayed her so thou couldst be free.” His eyes and hands and head twitched.

“I always thought you meant I’d be free of Patronn, free of this house. But you didn’t, did you?” I eased my hands from his grip. He clenched his gnarled fingers to his breast and I enfolded them in my palms. “You meant something else altogether.”

“Free of them. Free of their Law, free of their dread summoning. Thou shalt be the greatest of the Cartamandua line. Our family will be powerful beyond dreaming. Thou shalt map the whirlpools of time, the vales of memory, perhaps even the very bounds of heaven and hell. But I cannot tell thee. Forbidden. Punished. Mad…” His eyes flared hot and wild in the dim light.

“It’s all right, Capatronn. I’m here and safe.” I changed course again to soothe his rising agitation, tacking toward answers like a sailing ship against the wind.

I turned a few pages of the book. “Let’s look at the maps—tell me again how their magic works so I can use them after I turn eight-and-twenty.” Time was running, and I had to calm my own frenzy. “Anyone else must read the spell in the cartouche or the border, but I—You knew I could not read words and might never learn. So how could I ever use the maps?”

“Foolish boy. I taught thee.” He shuffled through the pages to the first map and tapped his finger on a tiny mark at one corner. “I opened this book to thee, who art without words, yet complete. For thee only, every map has one. Feed it magic…trace thy path and feed it, too…and the land will open its arms to thy skills. Not yet though…not yet.”

I nudged his dirty finger aside and uncovered a grinning aingerou. He had put one on every page. “So I touch the aingerou and release magic into the page. Then I trace the route, feed it magic as well, and I can find my way without reading. Is that right?”

He clapped his hands and chuckled. “Clever, is it not? And thine own power will take thee farther yet, for thou art of my blood, thy bent incomparably strong.”

It was all I could do to hold back my finger from the page, but I dared not work spells here.

“Earth and air and sky are one whole,” he said. “At the boundaries of thy knowledge—the boundaries of the world’s map—walk and listen and feel the joining of earth, air, and sky, seeking thy desire. Take up thy pen. Thy blood—Cartamandua blood—bears the magic; thy fingers will funnel it through pen to page and the way will be clear. Travel the way thou hast scribed, and begin again.”

“But I don’t use—” No. No need to confuse him. I had never needed pen or ink to envision a route. When he had enjoined me to “feel the earth” back when I was a child, I hadn’t understood that he meant some abstract “sensing” of the universe that would only take shape when marked on paper. I had believed he meant for me to lay hands on the dirt as we did when tracking footsteps.

“Claudio never could do it. He draws only what he sees, for his mind is clay. Thou, lad…thou art quicksilver.” His trembling fingers turned the leaves, one by one, touching, but not quite touching, the inked features, the bright drawings on the grousherres, the elaborate designs of frames and cartouches. “Thou shalt find the places even I could not.”

But unless I could get free of Osriel, I would have no opportunity. Someone other than me would have to lead the cabal into Aeginea. “Tell me, must others use the aingerou as well—before they can use the written spells?”

“No. The book is thine alone—not for Claudio, not for Josefina, not Max or the rest. With the gryphon charm canst thou permit others to use it as it was made. Thy choice.”

The gryphon charm…great gods…no wonder he’d had me recite that bit of doggerel until my head split. “So I touch the gryphon—this one”—I pointed to the gilded beast on the front cover—“work the charm with a person’s name, and that person can use the book. My choice.”

He bobbed his head happily. “Thy choice. Thine own book forever.”

“Tell me, Capatronn, do any of these maps show a way into Aeginea?”

His fingers paused in their explorations, and he raised his face, stricken. “Go not to this place where I am, Valen…to this dark place…this mad place.”

“No, no. I just want to see the map you used to find Eodward. It must be very fine. Beautiful. Showing the power of your blood, of your art and magic. Then I’ll know which map not to follow until I’m eight-and-twenty.”

He leafed through more pages until he reached the very heart of the book. The open page displayed a wholly unremarkable fiché, little more than a line drawing without colors or gold leaf or any other elaboration. Very little lettering. One might have thought it a preliminary sketch bound into the book by mistake. The landform outlined so vaguely was certainly Navronne.

“No map can show the way,” he said. “Aeginea is everywhere. Nowhere. But this”—his tremulous finger drifted across the page from small notations of a tree and an arch to five rosettes scattered here and there in no particular pattern—“depicts its heart and its mystery.”

His chewed and broken nail touched a rosette, causing another symbol to appear beside it like a shadow, only to fade as he moved on to the next. I glimpsed the symbol for a mountain and another for the sea. A third, located beside the rosette at the top of the map, I didn’t know, but the fourth showed the same waterfall symbol he had used for Clyste’s Well. If that one did indeed depict the Well, then the tree and the arch must certainly be Caedmon’s Bridge and the Sentinel Oak.

“This is the Center,” he said, reverently, as he touched the fifth rosette, which was nowhere near to being the accurate center of the other symbols or the page itself. If the arch was Caedmon’s Bridge, then it lay well south in Evanore. Its shadow symbol was a bolt of lightning, a notation I had never learned. “Here is where the Chosen dances to bring all life to joining.”

His grizzled mouth and chin worked in tight spasms, as he gently smoothed the worn edges of the page. His eyes filled with tears.

“Saved only this one map of them all. Promised Clyste to destroy them, so no human could travel there. The long-lived had grown to despise and fear us. Clyste said I could keep my promises without the maps. But this is my life’s greatest work. Our family’s glory.”

Thus we reached the heart of the matter. “Why, Capatronn? Why do the Danae despise us so?”

He shuddered and jerked, and I was afraid he would retreat again. But he took a quivering breath and gathered his spasming limbs. Summoning control, I thought. Every emotion, every physical expression required constant mastery to prevent it running wild. His head jerked and his eyes squinted and blinked as if someone was striking him.

“We lie,” he said at last. “We betray. They cannot grasp our nature and dance it into their patterns. Sometimes our needs make demands of us they cannot understand.”

“As with Eodward who did not return to the Danae, though he had promised he would.”

My grandfather bobbed his head. “That was but one of so many. They did not blame me for that one. Nor for the Scourge.”

“The Scourge?”

“Some humans want to drive them away. They foul groves and springs, trees and fields. Sometimes”—he leaned close and dropped his voice—“they damage the Canon itself. The long-lived never speak of it lest we learn the power we have over them. It is their direst secret: that they cannot cross the barriers of tormented spirits. If the guardian is not joined with the tainted sianou when it is poisoned, she cannot return to it. The Canon is corrupted, and the guardian wastes with grieving. If joined, the guardian is trapped—ah, holy ones—trapped inside the sianou. Chained as if with myrtle and hyssop, but chained with poison, and so he does not fade, but dies there. Both land and guardian lost forever. Forgotten. And so is the Canon broken.”

“Tormented spirits?” I said, wrestling with the ideas of dancing that could be broken and Danae who could be murdered while outside their bodies.

“Violent death. Corrupt blood.” My grandfather’s face crumpled. “They did not blame me for those crimes—nor any human save madmen. They could not believe that any reasoning creature would purposely break the Canon. And they knew I loved the dance. Ah”—he clutched his heart—“to see the dancing in Aeginea again. But never will I. Never. I am lost until the last ages of the world. They do not forgive.”

As fog lifts from the mountains, revealing snow-draped crags and sunlit pinnacles, so understanding grew in me. Not only about the world and coming chaos, not only about the savage rituals of Harrowers and royal bastards, but about what I saw in front of me. I took his chin and drew his face around so I could look on his pain-racked visage. Every word of sense, every moment of stillness, cost him dear.

“Capatronn, what did you do that the Danae have punished you so terribly? That they have broken their last ties with humans? You must tell me, Grandfather.”

“I”—his brow creased; his lips twisted and fought to shape the words—“stole from them. A treasure they did not value. I had the right, but they could not forgive the loss of it. And then I failed her. Ahh…” He gasped and gripped his head in his hands, drew up his knees, and curled into a knot. The book slipped off his lap.

I laid my hand on his trembling shoulder. “What treasure? What was worth all this?”

His fingers curled and he drew his fists to his head as he began to rock. “Cannot tell. Cannot. Secret…secret…secret.” Though he was trying not to, he moaned…louder by the moment.

“Can I help you? I could stay a while.”

“Naught.” He shook his head wildly, even as he clamped his jaw over a scream, and wrenched his shoulder from my hand. “Naught can be done. Go.”

I quickly gathered up the book, stuffed it in the bag, and snuffed the lamp. As I crept through the darkness toward the door, my grandfather began retching violently. The stench of vomit and loosened bowels followed me to the door.

“Go!”

“For the book…Grandfather…thank you.” I pulled the door closed behind me. Breathing deep of the clean, wintry air, I leaned on the thick oak that muffled his rising screams and wished that most futile of all wishes: that I could begin again and weave the knowledge I had just gleaned through the days of my life.

Swallowing hard, I crept silently through the frozen courtyard. I stopped in the rose arbor, brushed the snow from the stone bench, and sat, pulling the book from its bag again. The book must go back to Luviar, and if it was ever to be of any use to the cabal, I had to open it to them. Tonight, for I might never have the chance again. I had to trust that they would use it wisely, accounting for the information I would send them. And so, accompanied by the unholy melody of my grandfather’s screams, I touched the golden gryphon and recited the bit of verse he had pounded into me years ago.

With mighty sinew, beak and claw,

Feathered wings and eagle’s eyes,

The gryphon guards its nest of gold.

Ripping, flaying sinew raw,

Crushing rib and limb and jaw

Of all who seek its agate prize,

Save for the…wily…hunter…Luviar…bold.

I fed magic into the charm, which was supposed to impart whatever virtue you named to whomever you identified as the hunter bold. As a boy I had always inserted my own name as the hunter, wishing for strength to fight off my father’s next beating or cleverness to elude recapture when I ran away. I had hoped to use the golden nest and agate eggs to pay for my own house or buy my own contract, before I knew such possibilities were as much myth as the gryphon itself. I’d not even known how to quicken a spell in those days.

The golden gryphon pulsed with warmth and light, and I considered whether to give access to anyone else. To leave it with only one seemed risky. So Gildas. He was younger, less prominent, and the Scholar, who needed to find the Danae. And one more? I considered Stearc, but settled on Gram, the secretary, instead. Clearly the conspirators relied on Gram’s intelligence. And he understood the Danae better than any of the others.

Once done, I packed the book away and peered around the edge of the arbor to watch for Jullian. When the slight figure trudged down the path from the kitchen, lugging a heavy pail, I followed and slipped through the doorway behind him into the warm and comfortable apartment. The bathing tub was filled to its brim.

The boy about jumped out of his skin when I grabbed the door from his hand and closed it softly behind us. “Did you see him? Did you learn anything about the book? Is he truly mad?”

“Yes to all three. But first, did you have any trouble? Any suspicions?”

“The pureblood—not the one in these green clothes, but the other one in black and yellow—stopped me on the last trip and asked if I liked serving you. His hand was on my head as I answered, and I felt…unclean.” The boy averted his eyes.

“That was Caphur,” I said. “An overseer from the Pureblood Registry. Very skilled at his work, and he doesn’t like me very much. I hope you told him the truth.”

He nodded. I surmised that Caphur had approved his answer. I did not press to hear it.

I sat on the chair and summoned him close, lowering my voice even more. “So tell me, how did the abbot and my sister plan for you to send them information?”

“The false priestess said I should tell the people here that she had thought-summoned me back to her temple,” he said. “Or I could ask for Silos and tell him a particular word she gave me, but to do that only if things were very bad. Elsewise, I’m to wait until she sends for me.”

I kneaded my scalp. The plan was much too obvious. No one would believe Thalassa summoning the boy in the middle of the night so soon after getting him assigned here. Having grown up with a brother like me, she didn’t understand what trouble Jullian would have with lies. And I could not risk his safety by having him sneaking about with secret passwords.

“We’re going to do things a bit differently. In a little while, I am going to start yelling at you and throwing some things. I want you to run both to Silos, the fine-scented temple guard, and to Caphur, the one in black and yellow, and tell them that I’ve frightened you. Tell them you want to return to the temple and that, of course, the Sinduria will allow it. Only that.”

“But—”

“You can’t take the book. You might be searched. I’ll hide it here under my palliasse, and the Sinduria can retrieve it. Here’s what you need to report to her…”

They weren’t going to like what I told them—that my grandfather had stolen some treasure from the Danae but refused to name it, and that they should look to Prince Osriel, who mutilated the dead, or these Harrowers, who sacrificed violated bodies to their Gehoum, as the root of Danae hatred for humans. He had even claimed such rites broke the Canon. What did that mean? Was it possible that some ritual dance could determine the fate of the world? Now I had seen a Dané, anything seemed possible.

Perhaps the conspirators could use this new knowledge to strike some bargain with the Danae and find out. And any stolen treasure of my grandfather’s was likely to be in this house. If they could persuade the Danae to say what he’d taken, Thalassa could likely find it. Three of the cabal should be able to use the book, at least, leaving them with no need for a Cartamandua to guide them. Whether these things fulfilled their need, I couldn’t say. I had no more lei-sure to think.

“…and lastly, I need you to tell Brother Gildas…only him, please, no one else, for I am sorely shamed by it…that I desperately need to see him. Tell him that I am…beset by my old sins…and need Iero’s grace that only he can bring before I go to my new life. Can you remember all that?”

The boy rolled his eyes, a portrait of pained tolerance.

Despite my guilt at burdening a child and a holy monk with my perversions, I could not restrain a smile. “Well, of course, you can. The brightest scholar ever come to Gillarine. And the bravest. And the kindest. A light worthy of a holy lighthouse. Tell me one thing, lad; you’ve never—No one’s ever said aught to you of your real father, that he was…special…in some way?”

He shrugged. “Mam told me he was a scribe who drank so much his liver rotted. She showed me his portrait that his sister drew on a bit of bark, so I could know him. But she said good riddance to him and that my new da was the better man.”

So much for legends, rumor, and Valen’s clever insights. I squeezed the boy’s thin shoulder. “Godspeed, Jullian. You make me wish to be a better man.”

This time, when I picked up the padded chair and threw it into the wall, two legs broke off. The stools, the upended table, and all the scraps from our dinner splashed into the overfull bathing tub, inundating the rugs. While making silly faces at Jullian to soothe his fear, I yelled and cursed and threw myself at the door until the hinges snapped. As soon as the door crashed into the courtyard, he ran. When Caphur and Silos found me, I was ripping up my fine clothes and dropping the silks, brocades, and fur-lined cloak into the greasy water. A knot burned in my gut.

Thoughts and plans roiled in my head all through that long night as I lay tied to my bed, feeling my disease and my craving devour me and praying for Gildas to come. My grandfather had been trying to protect me, not from my family, but from the Danae. He had violated their trust…a man who had traveled their lands for years…who had guided a high priest and a hierarch to Eodward and brought them safely back to Navronne. Janus de Cartamandua had turned thief, and in retribution for his crime, the Danae had severed their last ties with untrustworthy humans and threatened the grandson whom, for whatever inexplicable reason, he favored. To shield me from their vengeance he had let them take away his control of his mind and body. Great gods, what had I ever done to deserve such a sacrifice? What secret bargain had he made with this Clyste? And why would one more birthday set me free of the threat?

The Dané at Caedmon’s Bridge had confirmed his story, speaking of thievery and treachery, of poison and bargains broken, and she’d said that we must return what was stolen before they would deal with us. What treasure had he stolen that could exact such a dreadful price? A “treasure they did not value,” but were determined to have back. Something he believed he had a right to.

The knot in my belly drew tighter, shooting bolts through my limbs, setting off firestorms of cramps in my calves, back, and biceps. Warnings. All my life I had ignored warnings, putting them out of my mind as fast as they were issued, for I believed them but more shackles on my freedom. I could not imagine what significance my grandfather attached to the age of eight-and-twenty. Yet, while lacking weeks until that mystical occasion, I had used the book in some fashion to intrude on a Danae holy place and to summon one of them to an unwanted meeting. Now Danae followed me through fields and town. And even before I’d used the book, the earth that was their domain had pulsed under my body as if it were alive, and their holy places—the cloister garth and the pool in the hills—had barraged my senses like siege weapons. What did my grandfather fear might happen to me? Perhaps I had worse things to dread than a lifetime of bound service to Osriel the Bastard.

Amid these fearsome questions rose wonders, too. My sister’s help…the abbot’s faith…and one phrase that hung vivid and poignant in the cold night, like the last, lingering tone of plainsong. Unimportant to any but me. My grandfather had altered his book for me…who art without words, yet complete. What did that mean? Why did those words from a madman soothe a hurt so deep and so raw? Another mystery to occupy my mind in the bleak days to come.

As the hours crawled by, cramps, sweats, and insidious craving claimed one part and then another of my body. Events and words, hopes and beliefs blurred together, impossible to sort. By morning, I could not think at all.

Chapter 27

“Brother Valen.” The voice sliced through the pain like a steel claw through skin. “I’ve come to give you counsel.”

“Gildas?” I whispered harshly. Lord of Earth and Sky, let this be Gildas. I could not open my eyes to confirm it, lest my head fall apart, lest my teeth crack and fall out. The disease had come full upon me in the night. And the hunger.

“Yes. Iero’s blessings be upon you this morning, Brother. I understand this fear that sets you trembling. And you are right to seek the Lord Iero’s grace before embarking on this voyage of duty. I wish I could change what is, but I’ve brought at least temporary comfort. You must seek the ultimate solution for yourself.”

Praise all saints if temporary comfort meant nivat. “Iero’s grace, Brother Gildas.”

“Sirs, I presume you will leave us some privacy to speak of a man’s immortal soul.”

A wave of flowery scent had me gagging, and the fingers that tugged at the ropes about my chest and legs might have been a gatzé’s flaming tongue. “He looks ill. Perhaps he needs a physician, not a practor.”

“Would not the prospect of bondage in Evanore give you pause for your soul’s health, sir?” Ever-calm Gildas.

“Bound service, monk, not bondage. Purebloods have duties that ordinaries cannot comprehend.” Ever-prim Silos.

Go away, I thought.

“Vowed initiates of Saint Ophir have duties that heathens cannot comprehend. But we shall not argue those things here. I am this man’s mentor and confessor, and merest decency demands your tolerance. Please step out whilst I pray with Brother Valen.”

Pounding footsteps, crashing doors, slamming shutters. One might think a herd of cattle had stampeded through the cold room. Silos and his scent vanished. Then I felt the scrape of razor knives that was but soft breath on my face. I dragged my eyelids open.

“I don’t know precisely what I’m doing here,” he said quietly, his eyes remarkably unworried under his dark brow. “To encourage such perversion of the body is a great sin. Brother, you must give up this horror.”

“I’m like…to give it up in the coming m-months,” I said, my teeth clattering with chills, not fear. “It’s a sickness drove me to it. Please believe me.” Stupid to care what he believed.

“A sickness?”

“Never had a name for it, and now it’s so tangled with this cursed spell…” The spell that had me yearning for boiling oil to scald my feet or a hook blade to tear my skin. “Please, Brother, I beg you tell me you’ve brought it.”

“I found a bit in the priory kitchen. Not much. I didn’t know how much you needed. What must I do?”

To hear that Gildas was willing to help had me sniffling like a maiden. I’d not been able to think beyond the possibility of obtaining the nivat. I’d known naught of how I would manage the using, bound as I was. I tried to concentrate on the task. “At my waist…the green bag.”

Gildas dug through the layers of blankets and clothing. “The Sinduria said you hold the book of maps. I should take it out when I go.”

“You can’t. Caphur…the Registry man…he’ll sense its magic. Think you’re stealing. He’ll take it. Lassa must retrieve it. I can’t—Sorry I can’t help more. Tell Luviar I would if I could. Willing.” I could not examine my growing resolve to aid the cabal, only regret that my damnable weakness and blighted future left me useless to them. Beyond such fleeting concerns lay only pain and need.

“I’m glad to hear you’re willing. This devil prince must not have you.” I fought not to scream as his fingers fumbled at my waist. “I know people of influence in this city. We’ll see you safe with us by midday.”

Even as I despaired of its fulfillment, his ferocious declaration warmed me beyond measure.

He drew out the little green bag I had so painstakingly kept hidden through the past weeks. “Now tell me what to do.”

“How much did you bring?”

He unwrapped a scrap of cloth and showed me a generous mound of seeds, enough for at least three or four doulons. Amid mumbled prayers and thanksgiving, I told him how to crush the seeds and that he must free two of my fingers so I could work the magic. “…only twenty seeds. No more.” Only enough to ease my sickness.

As a youth, I’d seen the doulon-mad wallowing in refuse heaps and filthy hovels, scarred, starved, and forever shaking, tongues thick, unable to articulate a clear thought. One old man had scratched his skin off, trying to rid himself of invading “beetles.” Even enduring the pain of giving up the doulon would not have healed his broken mind at that late stage. I’d always been careful.

“And the rest of the seeds?”

“Into the green bag.”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to free your hands entirely?” he said, a few moments later, looking dubiously at the two fingers of my right hand he’d wrestled out of the tight silk bindings. “We could rewrap them after.”

“Too slow. Won’t take long for Silos to detect spellmaking.” I would not have my savior compromised. “Now, p-prick my finger. Draw blood.”

He jabbed the silver needle into my fingertip, and I managed not to scream. He had to grip my bundled hands and hold them over the crushed nivat so the blood could drip, as I was too unsteady and too awkwardly positioned to do it.

“D-don’t t-touch the stuff,” I said, as he squeezed my two trembling fingers together to hold the thread steady. “The instant the fumes stop rising, when the scent fades, help me get it to my mouth. Then get out.”

He nodded, his expression curious, but not disgusted as I’d feared.

“Bless you forever, Brother,” I whispered, as I released magic to flow through my fingertips and bind the nivat to my blood.

Gildas fixed his gaze to the mirror fragment. I could see neither mirror nor fumes nor even the mound, but only glimpse a distorted reflection of the bubbling mess in his clear eyes. It looked huge and evil. I closed my eyes, ground my wrists against the rope to sharpen the pain, and tried not to vomit into my friend’s lap as he crouched beside my bed.

“Now,” he said, in what could have only been moments. Or perhaps I merely lost sense in the meantime. “It looks black and thick, as you said. No fumes rising in the reflection. Shall we?”

I nodded, unable to speak. He used my own fingers to scoop up the reeking glob and put it to my mouth.

I convulsed. Howled. Drowned in fens of pain and pleasure…of guilt and shame and joyless rapture.

“What have you been up to?” The flower-scented Silos burst through the murk of my perceptions. He tugged at the ropes. Spent an inordinate time checking my hand bindings and fussing over the bloody marks about my wrists.

I raised my leaden eyelids to a glare of cloudy midmorning streaming through the open door. Gildas was nowhere in sight. I hadn’t noticed his going. Neither had I felt him tuck my fingers back into their shroud nor seen him pack away the guilty evidence that now poked reassuringly into my hip.

“Nightmares,” I said, my tongue thick. Had the world burst into end-times flames before my eyes, I would yet sink into blessed sleep, burying the remnants of my shame. I had never felt so drained. So heavy.

“You work spells in your dreams?” Silos dropped my limp appendages heavily onto my belly. “A good thing I came and not Caphur. Your clerical friend did not tuck the extra cord about your fingers. What has he done with you? He looked smug as an adder as he left.”

I closed my eyes and smiled. “Brother Gildas cleansed my soul. When the Bastard Prince eats it, he will suffer a flux.” As I’d learned on the journey to Palinur, Silos’s skills at detection were less impressive than his lightning bolts.

“You are a fool, plebeiu. And the Sinduria is a greater one to indulge you. Perhaps when I tell her you’re working magic with the Karish, she’ll reconsider. Last night she petitioned the Registry for your transfer to her custody, saying this contract your father has arranged is evidence of madness in the Cartamandua line. Her petition was refused.” He sniffed the air and poked about the bedcovers.

Shadows chilled my comfortable warmth at his mention of the future. “She’s wrong”—my father was not mad, only soul-dead—“but I’ll not tell anyone that. Tell her I can keep secrets.”

Secrets. Only as I said the word did it penetrate my iron skull that Thalassa had unraveled her tongue-block. I had talked with Jullian and my grandfather of Danae, even speaking the word lighthouse to the boy. I dragged my heavy arms across my face and whispered the word into my sleeve just to make sure.

Surely this meant my sister trusted me; Abbot Luviar trusted me. Blessed Jullian had sent Gildas to succor me. And Gildas had promised they’d come to my rescue. Perhaps they did need me for their plan. In a wash of unreasoning euphoria, I smiled into my sleeve and mumbled louder, “Need to sleep now.”

Silos unknotted the ropes and tossed them aside. I giggled like one of my little sisters.

“Too late, plebeiu. Prince Osriel’s man has arrived earlier than expected.” He shook me again.

Eventually his insistent prodding stole my good feeling. Dully I dragged my cold, heavy body to sitting. As my hands were yet cocooned in silken cords, I persuaded Silos to help me take a piss in the jar. He refused to wipe the crusted drool from my face.

“You should not have frightened off your valets,” he said, his mouth curled in distaste. “Though I suppose you’d best learn to groom yourself anyway. I doubt the Bastard Prince will provide you a bodyservant.”

Stupid Silos. What did he think I’d been doing for twelve years? Of course, I’d had my hands to use. Perhaps this prince would just cut them off. I pressed my wrist against my mouth to contain my rising gorge. No, no, the Bastard wanted my magic. He was paying for it.

Scarcely able to stay upright, I straightened my garments with my elbows and wiped my face with my sleeve…three times before I realized the offending substance remaining on my face was merely my skin. The open-necked purple and black tunic hung loose over my wool shirt, and they had provided me no belt.

When Silos held up the silver half mask, I could not summon control enough to disguise my loathing. And pride seemed unutterably foolish at the moment. “Ah, domé,” I whispered, begging, “not that one. Please, I cannot breathe in it.”

“Your new master provided a silk mask for the journey and a standard pureblood cloak,” he said apologetically, “but, as you are yet under Registry restriction, you must be delivered wearing this and the recondeur’s yellow. Your protocols within Prince Osriel’s house will be his choice, of course.”

No protections in a recondeur’s contract. My master could require that I wear this mask forever. My stomach clenched. Sweat dribbled down my back and sides as the pressure of Silos’s hand on my shoulder buckled my wobbling knees. He latched the band about my neck and secured the strip over my head, leaving me half blind, half deaf, and completely muted. Suffocating.

I panicked, trying to clear my clogging nostril, trying to suck enough air through the exposed half of my tight-bound mouth that I would not die. I scraped my arms across my face as if I could dislodge the hateful metal, and when I could not, I slung my bundled fists wildly into Silos, dug my feet into the rug, and lunged forward. My grandfather’s whimpers and screams drifted through the open doorway as they did in every hour in that house.

“Settle, plebeiu,” said Silos. He grasped my flailing arms and shoved me down again. “Settle. You’ve plenty of air, if you’ll just calm down.”

His firm assurances eventually slowed my heart, and my gratitude set me weeping. He knelt to shackle my ankles, then hoisted me up and propelled me through the door.

The unending symphony of madness from the corner apartments accompanied our journey through the courtyards and arches. Poor devil. I sniffled like a sentimental drunkard. I’m as mad as you, Capatronn. They’ll lock me up in my own filth, too.

Ssst…Silos. My sister beckoned to us from a grape arbor threaded with dead vines. We’re here to save him.

Silos did not turn his head. I slowed, glancing over my shoulders. Seeing with only one useful eye made everything seem flat and out of proportion.

I bumped Silos’s shoulder and nodded toward Thalassa, who now crouched behind a statue of Erdru with his goat’s legs. Or were they her goat’s legs?

The temple guard prodded me to keep walking. I stepped in front of him, forcing him to stop, grunting, jerking my head, and pointing my hands toward my sister. Look at her. Are you blind?

Silos paused and spun in a slow circle, stopping only when he faced me again. “Stop playing, plebeiu. I don’t know what you want.”

I whipped my eyes back to the statue. And then to the arbor. Thalassa had vanished. Far behind me, my grandfather cackled. Frenzied, the voice of my fear sealed behind the metal half lips of my mask, I dodged in front of Silos again, pounding my bundled hands on his temple badge and then on my own chest.

“No, plebeiu. I cannot take you to the temple.”

Grasping my shoulders, he turned me around and gave me a gentle shove toward the main house. Halting again, I tried to show Silos where Abbot Luviar perched beside a crow on a lichen-covered column. Then I pointed out Gildas, grinning from behind a dormant tree.

“What is it, plebeiu? What’s wrong with you? Move along.”

I hobbled forward. Blinked. The garden was empty of all but me and my jailer.

One more glance over my shoulder. The naked man sat cross-legged, tucked into the frost-glazed shrubbery, his gleaming dragon sigils silver in the morning haze. Eyes the crisp gold of autumn aspen observed us. Curious. Disdainful. The world blurred as I turned away, my throat swollen with grief. Illusions. Visions. Not real.

We passed through an arched gate and into the house.

Crystal lamps chased the gray morning from the columned reception room. I blotted my damp face on my sleeve and forced myself calm, trying to grasp what was real. I was surrounded by the familiar—the richly colored tapestries that my ancestors had brought from Aurellia, the luminous marble statue of Kemen and his belt of stars, wrought by some Pyrrhan master centuries ago, and the enameled urns and gilt caskets brought from exotic Syanar and set here on pedestals shaped like bundles of reeds. Beneath my feet gleamed the silver and blue mosaic tiles that my grandfather had salvaged from a ruined temple on the isle of Caraskan, shipped to Navronne, and reassembled here to display the order of sun, moon, and earth.

Just beyond the vulgar and exotic display of my family’s wealth shone the burnished breastplates of four well-armed warriors who flanked the doorway to the outer courts. The warriors stood at attention, lances at rest, their surcoats the rich, dark green of holly leaves and blazoned with the silver wolf of Evanore, a white trilliot under its paw.

Silos closed and locked the inner door behind me. Holy gods…whoever you are…please wake me from this nightmare. Where were distracting visions when I needed them most?

“This is he?” The words scoured skin and soul like windblown sleet.

The speaker walked in alongside my father. Though the mailed forearms that bulged from his holly-green surcoat were formidable, and his thighs might have been piers for Caedmon’s Bridge, it was his face that caused my bowels to seize. Where half of mine was encased in graven silver, half of his was fleshless scars, leathery creases and ruptures surely caused by burning oil or systematic beatings with hot irons that destroyed flesh and sinew and underlying bone. The eye buried within this horror was but a dark slit. The other, fathomless in its emptiness and limitless in its disdain, briskly scoured my sorry turnout.

When Silos prodded my back, I bowed ungracefully to my father and the visitor at once. The planets beneath my feet spun in their paths.

“Magnus Valentia de Cartamandua-Celestine,” said my father. “A male pureblood of seven-and-twenty years, his bloodlines registered before birth, witnessed and verified through ten generations. Contracted for unspecified service to His Grace, the Duc of Evanore, for lifetime duration.”

Of course, this grotesque man was not the prince. Osriel was the youngest of the three brothers, close to my own age. This man’s hair, trimmed close to his skull, was mottled gray.

He clasped his gloved hands behind his back, well away from the sword sheathed at one hip and the Evanori battle-ax ready at the other. “Recalcitrant, you said. Incorrigible. But I did not expect shackles in his family home. Is he violent, mad, or merely undisciplined?” He did not sound as if he cared which.

“Not mad,” said my father. “Undisciplined certainly. The hand bindings prevent his triggering any spellworking. The shackles prevent him trying to escape his duty. He has willingly participated in armed combat, so I would put no violence past him. Mardane Voushanti, I clearly spelled out his history when we spoke yesterday.”

Unfair! I yelled inside. To hint at violence to this stranger when I can’t defend myself.

“It is no matter,” said Voushanti, returning his gaze from my father to me. “My lord imposes his own discipline. He anticipates training a pureblood to his service, a pleasure he has not yet indulged as he has always found the standard contracts too restrictive. Now if your documents are in order…we are in a hurry.”

At a small desk of polished rosewood, my father unrolled the scroll he had sealed at dinner. Mardane Voushanti flicked a finger at one of the warriors, who opened the door. A servant carried in an iron casket and deposited it on the desk. The Evanori lord accepted the scroll. He exchanged bows with my father. And thus was I sold like a slab of meat. Silos’s iron hand gripped my arm, else I would have run, shackles or no, flaccid limbs or no, madness or no.

An excruciating cramp shot through my arms and shoulders, followed by a wash of heat and a shuddering release—an instant’s euphoria before my spirits plunged to the depths, as if an uncrushed nivat seed had only now dissolved to work its perverse magic. One rapturous sensation, swept away in a heartbeat, leaving me dizzy…hungry. The doulon, unmistakably. I had never experienced such a momentary burst, more than an hour after the use.

Matters moved quickly. The lord refused wine. They murmured farewells. My father did not speak to me, but watched calmly as the four warriors brushed Silos aside and herded me into the weak and frigid daylight of the outer courtyard.

The warriors unshackled my feet and lifted me onto a horse, binding my wrists to the pommel and feet to the stirrups. A groom sawed at reins and halter as the demon beast thrashed and bucked. Every one of the grooms and warriors cursed and swore until the mardane himself came and laid a hand on the vile equine’s head, quieting it for the moment.

Even before we rode away into the midday gloom, the door to the house was shut and the lamps extinguished—as was all light within me. No one had come to my rescue.

The shock of noise and activity as we left the secure walls and wards of my family home was almost enough to banish my waking stupor. Bells clanged in frantic warning from every tower. Panicked citizens mobbed the streets, loading wagons, herding children, geese, and pigs toward the lower city, as if they might escape the coming change, or toward the citadel, as if their missing prince might magically develop a spine and save them. Bayard’s hammer was falling.

Voushanti rode in front of me, his snow-dusted back stiff and straight. One Evanori warrior rode to either side and two more behind. Wind blustered and whined through the streets, carrying the scents of ash and offal, stirring up eddies of new snow on stoops and walls, and whipping Navronne’s white trilliot that yet flew alone on the heights, two days after Perryn’s fall.

Few in the crowds wore Ardran purple. For the first time in three years, Bayard’s pikemen roved the city, their scarlet and blue badges spread like a fungus through every square, along the promenades and the grand steps that linked upper and lower city, and at every major street crossing. The orange head scarves of their Harrower allies colored the streets like splashes of sunflowers floating on rivers of brown and gray. Like a plague of locusts, those wearing the rags wrought destruction far beyond their size: smashing windows and doors, toppling carts and statuary, throwing burning torches into gaping shop fronts. Bayard’s men, better armed but outnumbered, made no move to stop them. The Harrowers believed cities corrupt. Given a free hand, they would level Palinur.

As we crossed the heart of the Vintners’ District, three men wearing orange rags upended a barrel into the public fountain. Acrid steam billowed and hissed. The black water heaved, sluggish, oozing. Three tar barrels lay empty beside the stained stonework.

Twelve districts. Twelve fountains. Valves and conduits bearing the city’s lifeblood.

Black smoke billowed from at least three directions. The three men lifted another barrel. No one stopped them. No one attempted to stay the burning.

I wanted to scream at those running away: They’ll not stop with the city! Vineyards. Villages. Aqueducts. Bridges. These lunatics will bring the end times. But spelled silver sealed my lips. My pleas and warnings bore no more sense than the snarling of a beast.

I clung to the saddle, my head rattling like a tin drum in a hailstorm, every sinew complaining as if I’d fought a ten-day battle. Twice more a rapturous burst took me away from the misery, only to abandon me in the same instant, sicker than ever. Never had I felt so wretched after a doulon. Had I told Gildas to wait until the fumes vanished? Or how many seeds to use? Holy gods, what if he’d used all of them? The desire to touch the green bag, to reassure myself that the supply was intact, soon became a torment. My hands twisted against the implacable silk that held both touch and magic at bay.

“Hold!” Voushanti drew rein sharply as we approached the broad causeway that led from the palace gates into the upper city. Drums rattled in the distance.

My horse balked and whinnied. A warrior grabbed my mount’s halter and dragged his head around, while I gripped the pommel with my wrists and forearms until my shoulders burned.

Hoofbeats approached, keeping cadence with the funereal drums. Leather creaked. Harness jangled. Not a hundred quercae in front of us, ranks of Ardran knights rode slowly down the causeway, past the fallen statues that ringed the palace precincts. Swords sheathed, bereft of lance or mace, hundreds of them passed…the palace garrison…and behind the knights, mounted officers herded the massed men-at-arms, stripped of pikes and halberds, heading for the city gates. For surrender.

Here and there a wail of mourning rose in concert with the whining wind. Yes, mourn for Ardra, I thought, besieged with images of fertile vineyards and golden grain fields and the glories of long-ago summers. Mourn for Navronne. For our children’s children to be birthed under the Smith’s wreckage.

Yet what did all this signify if Navronne was returning to the primeval forest…if all cities were to end? As the mardane and his warriors led my horse back the way we had come, I hunched forward over the pommel and looked no more upon Ardra’s shame.

“By the night lords!” The mardane spat the oath through clenched jaw and reined in again.

A party of Bayard’s soldiers, bristling with lances, blocked the end of a narrow lane behind us. I blinked. At the head of the party rode a square-faced knight. At his side rode an iron-visaged woman, wearing light mail and a brown surcoat blazoned with orange.

“Identify yourselves, and declare why you should not stand down and yield your arms,” said the leader, his voice young and brash. The single blue band on his scarlet baldric proclaimed his inexperience. When the baldric began to crawl across his breast like a striped snake, I begged it silently to stop.

The few citizens abroad in the lane vanished into the side alleys and doorways. Voushanti rode forward on his own, stopping just short of the Moriangi. “I am Voushanti, Mardane Elestri, commander of His Grace Osriel of Evanore’s household guard, escorting my lord’s retainers. You’ve no cause to hinder us, young sir.”

“The Bastard does not honor the Gehoum,” snapped the woman, before the young knight could respond. “These men must disarm or pay forfeit.”

“His Grace of Evanore has maintained neutrality throughout this petty dispute, sir knight,” said Voushanti, his words as crystal hard as the icicles dangling from the sagging balconies. “And he expects his officials to move unhindered throughout Navronne as they have since his father’s death. Perhaps this…warrior…at your side does not comprehend the protocols of royalty or that my master’s displeasure is not incurred lightly, even by his royal brothers or their favored priestesses.”

A faint green luminescence rose from Voushanti’s sword and from the shipped lances of his own four warriors. The Moriangi shifted backward, so perhaps more eyes than mine saw it.

“Lord Voushanti, m-my apologies.” The young knight held his ground beside the woman, though his teeth rattled like the Ardran drums as he waved his men backward. “Pass, as you will.”

“Blasphemous weakling!” The woman hung back as the lancers marched away. Then she wrenched her mount’s head around and vanished behind them into the smoke and gloom.

“Quickly! This way,” said Voushanti, pointing down an alley scarce wide enough for his warhorse. “She’ll set an ambush.”

He led us through the maze of broken streets and crumbling arches under the causeway. These remnants of some early incarnation of Palinur had been exposed when the new palace approach was built by the Aurellians. In normal times the narrow, stinking lanes served as a haven for thieves, cutpurses, and very large rats.

We emerged from the ancient warren into the wide boulevards of the Council District, streets of small, elegant palaces favored by the king’s household, royal relatives, high-ranking clerics, as well as the foreign embassies that had sat abandoned since Eodward’s death. Just ahead of us, a party of six or eight Moriangi troopers rammed a hitchpost into the door of a fine house, bursting it open in a shower of splinters.

A little farther down the street, another party, blazoned with scarlet and blue, dragged a writhing man from a house and threw him onto the pavement next to several mortally still swordsmen. A woman in servants’ garb stood watching. Calm. Quiet. The soldiers closed in around the man and laid into him with clubs and feet. As his screams tore the air, the serving woman tied an orange scarf about her head and strolled away. I could not but wonder how many Harrowers served in wealthy houses, silent, deferent, behind the wards that families like mine believed impregnable.

Another turning took us out of the din and into a muddy back lane between gated walls where servants and delivery carts would travel on better days. The only sounds in the dim alley were the breathing of our own beasts and the jingle of harness. At the second or third break in the wall, a tall gate of black iron swung open soundlessly. No grind of gears or squall of hinges accompanied the closing, once we had passed inside it. My clammy skin itched beneath the layers of wool, silk, and fur.

The back of the house stood bleak and unwelcoming. Small windows pocked the tall gray wall, stained with rust and soot about gutters and empty torch brackets. A stone kitchen house lurked dark and shuttered, its chimneys cold. An empty cart had been shoved into a corner of the yard. Dead leaves and dirty snow filled watering troughs. I lowered my eyes, afraid of what phantasms I might see lurking in these shadows.

Mardane Voushanti dropped lightly from his saddle and waved a gloved hand at me. “Get him down.”

The warriors released the horse and me from our unhappy partnership. When one of the men knelt to reshackle my ankles, I shook my head frantically and pounded my bundled hands on his shoulders. But for the silver mask that forbade speech, I would have abandoned all pride and begged him not. To face this life…this master…bound and shackled…fear came near choking me. The lock clicked shut. Two of the warriors grabbed my arms and almost carried me down a short flight of steps into a musty corridor. Everyone was in a hurry, and neither my mind nor my feet could keep the pace.

We threaded a maze of empty storerooms, of laundry rooms furnished with rusting tubs and a few stiff rags hung on suspended frames, past coal bins and linen rooms that smelled of moldy herbs. From the servants’ halls, we emerged into a grand foyer, poorly lit and shrouded with cobwebs and dust.

Voushanti halted before a tall door. Every finger’s breadth of the dark wood had been carved with beasts and symbols and set with slips of gold and chips of gemstones. Its centerpiece was a snarling wolf with smoldering garnets for its eyes.

“A warning, pureblood.” The mardane gripped a strap of the metal mask and pulled my face close to his, forcing me to look into his eyes…black, bottomless, one spark of red fire at the center, chilling me to the marrow. No past, no future in those eyes. “His Grace dislikes liars and gaping fools. Remember it.” As if I weren’t rattled enough already. When he looked away, I almost sobbed in gratitude.

One of the warriors dragged open the door. Another shoved at my back. I stepped through, trying to hold my head high without falling on my face.

The cavernous room was as dark as a well of tar. A few threads of gray sketched tall narrow windows, but heavy draperies barred what modest illumination the overcast morning might provide. Across the room lurked the wolf from the door, grown huge, its fist-sized eyes of garnet pulsing with life. I stepped back, blinking in dismay. But this phantasm was no more than pulsing coals in a cavernous hearth.

No sooner had I exhaled than a streak of blackness darted between my legs. Claws scrabbled on wood. Then, slightly above my head, disembodied in the dark, no wolf, but a cat blinked—its yellow eyes sharp and gleaming like faceted citrine. My sluggish heart thrummed like the Ardran drums. Saints and angels, fool, take hold of your mind.

Voushanti’s hauberk gleamed in the crimson glow as he tossed a rolled parchment on a table and bowed in the direction of the most profound darkness in all the gloom, the end of the room to our right. “The pureblood, Cartamandua-Celestine, Your Highness. The contract is in order. He is your bound servant until the last breath departs his lungs.”

The warmth of the gleaming coals did not touch me outside or in. A lung-frosting chill and a faint medicinal odor pervaded the room. I needed to bow to him. Curse the damnable doulon. Why could I not gather my senses? Of all days to have this horrid reaction. Of all hours. I fought my roiling belly, pressed my fingers to my forehead, and concentrated on keeping my knees steady as I inclined my back. After a suitable interval, I rose again…slowly…using a glimmer of red on the wood floor as a touchstone to prevent my spinning head losing all orientation.

I could manage this. A thousand times I had passed myself off as sober when muddleheaded with mead.

First, stop the damnable shivering. The silver mask would reveal my tremors even in the minimal light of the dying fire. I could allow him to think me wary and disciplined, or carefree and ill behaved, but he must not think me weak or afraid. My future…my freedom…depended on carving out a position in this household, a position of respect if I could manage it. Yet here I was, near drooling. I inhaled, deep and slow, and forced my body rigid.

“Have you presented his task?” Low. Clear. Large and deep. Larger than the room itself. Rumbles and echoes and nuances beyond hearing. Not human…

I shook my head sharply, trying to stifle fear with reason. Of course he was human. Somewhere in that unnatural dark were a man’s head, body, limbs, eyes. Crippled, so I had heard. Deformed. Surely he was but an ugly sorcerer with ugly habits—like members of my family. His eyes would be watching me. I summoned every discipline I knew. My soul would not go easy into his grasp.

Voushanti clasped his hands at his back in a military rest. “My first concern was getting him here safely, my lord. The streets worsen by the hour. I knew you wished to interview him before his assignment. Perhaps you even wish to give the commands your—”

“Do as I commanded you, Mardane.” The voice was a lash.

The mardane bristled, but swiveled to address me. “Your first duty for your new master will be to locate two prisoners in whom he has an interest. The two were taken from their beds earlier today, but are held neither in palace dungeons nor city jails. Tracking a person from a known location should be a minor exercise for one of your bloodline—even one minimally trained, as we understand you to be. Our lord prince will accept no excuses for failure. We shall remove your restraints, of course, and provide you garments less noticeable. Do you comprehend?”

Making sure not to look at Voushanti’s dreadful face, I bowed very slightly in acknowledgment. My mind raced—or at least plodded as fast as was possible through knee-deep mud. Freeing prisoners…not so bad a task as I’d feared. And I was to be loose in Palinur, my hands unbound. I knew a thousand hiding places…

A whipcrack split the murk, a fiery lash encircling my ankles. The shackles shattered into pieces and clattered to the floor. The hobble chain dropped with a loud clank, almost stopping my heart.

The half-faced Evanori stood to one side, inspecting my cooling ankles, his hands clasped in relaxed unconcern behind his back. When his unsettling gaze slid upward, expectant, I squeezed my eyes shut, afraid even to breathe. This whip was not leather, but magic, the hand that wielded it hidden in the darkness.

Another whipcrack. I bit my tongue so as not to cry out. This time the fire encircled my neck and the top of my head, as the metal neck and head straps broke away and the silver mask clattered to the floor. Quickly, I lifted my bound hands and stretched them well away from my belly.

This time the bolt of power flew silently. The air shivered as if a giant sword had whisked by me, its speed and ferocity making it invisible. I blinked. The silken bindings stretched and drooped from my fingers, then frayed into threads of gossamer that floated to the floor. Free!

But the mardane quickly gripped my arm and shoulder in such fashion that he could lay me flat should I blink wrongly. My moment’s exaltation snapped like a dry twig. The unruined half of his face twisted slightly. “It is certainly as you surmised, my lord. His nature is true. The rebellious spirit does not forsake him.”

“Erase any thought of escape from your mind, Magnus Valentia,” breathed the voice from the shadows. “Do not think I cannot reconstruct these restraints or provide more…restrictive…ones should they prove necessary. Though obedience is required by your contract, I know you disdain the rules of your kind, as well as the ordinary courtesies of honorable men.”

I tried to reclaim some dignity in word if not posture. “My word, given unreserved, is inviolate, Lord. But I do not honor promises given by others in my name.”

“Fair enough. So you will understand why we hold surety for your good behavior.”

The door opened, and one of my escorts led in a prisoner. His slender wrists were bound behind him and silk scarves shuttered his eyes and mouth. A tiny sound issued from his throat. Not a sob. Not a wail. Only the choking sound of terror tight reined, of constricted throat and bound heart, of determined courage. Jullian.

“Damnable cowards!” I yelled, rage exploding from my being’s core. “What kind of lord…what kind of man…holds a child hostage? How dare you—?”

Voushanti deftly shifted his grip, snaring my right arm in a shoulder lock, bending my neck forward so forcefully I thought it must snap.

“I do only what is necessary to compel your obedience,” said the voice from the darkness, cold and deep. “Fulfill your contract, and the lad will survive…this day.”

I wrenched free of the mardane and dropped to my knees beside the boy. Fear and anger flailed the cotton wool within my skull, so that I could scarcely articulate words. They had brutalized this boy on my account. “Jullian, it’s Valen here. Have they hurt you?”

The boy shook his head sharply.

“His safety is in your hands, pureblood,” said Voushanti, his voice stark as midwinter.

In my hands. Indeed. I gathered the rigid boy close, turning him until his back lay against my chest, laying one hand on his ruddy hair and one hand on his breast. His heart fluttered like a rabbit’s throat. “I want him free.”

Voushanti snapped, “You have no—”

“Free and healthy as he is right now,” I barked into the midnight where the master lurked, ignoring the treacherous servant. “You can throw me in a pit dungeon and lock the trap for a thousand years before I allow him to be your pawn.” I could not consider complexities or strategies, but only a certainty that swelled greater than the doulon craving—this outrage could not happen. “Your word, Lord Prince, or I do nothing for you ever and your contract gold is wasted.”

“Free, then, and unharmed, once today’s task is done.” The voice breathed malice that settled like a cold snake alongside my spine. “But not you, pureblood. Not ever. You claim your given word is inviolable. So swear to me of your own will—without reservation—that you will not run. Prove it this day, and you will have my word in exchange: I will not ever use the boy against you.”

Good that I could not hold more than one thought in my head at a time, that I was too dull witted to weigh the balance of this bargain. Yet he was not asking an oath of obedience. Only submission. I spun Jullian around to face me and gripped his narrow shoulders, quickly before I could reconsider.

“I vowed to protect you, Archangel. Do you remember? And so I’ll do. My master is noble Eodward’s son, thus we must assume he is a man of his word as well. So have courage and say your prayers. While I’m off doing his bidding, you can practice your Aurellian verbs, for I know you have difficulty with them. Teneo, teneas, teneat…teneamus… eh?”

The boy’s chin lifted ever so slightly. And then he nodded.

I rose and faced the massive dark in the corner of the room. How does a man yield his lifeblood willing, slit a vein and watch the scarlet flood sap his strength and sentience, silence the music of the world, still his feet? Madness—this foggy mantle the doulon had laid over me that allowed naught of sense, only anger to burn through—that was the only explanation. I bent one knee, inclined my back, and touched my fingertips to my forehead. “You have my word, lord prince. I will not run. Not ever.”

“Without reservation?”

“Without reservation.”

“Very well, then! Be on your way.”

Voushanti bowed to his lord, pulled me to my feet, and hurried me out of the room. “I will outline your morning’s task as we go,” he said when the door had closed behind us. “Speed is of the essence…”

Chapter 28

Blood is unique. Pureblood families insist that each child’s blood is identical either to the father’s or the mother’s, and that the only variance that prevents one of us growing into an exact copy of that parent is malleable “nature.” But those purebloods gifted to follow routes and tracks must surely know better—that blood bears the imprint of a singular being who loves and hates and quivers in terror, who sings psalms or grows parsnips or strips pigs—because blood lays down an excellent, unmistakable path to its source.

Though I had no idea whose blood it was, the clotted mess in the sooty, brick-paved courtyard was sufficient to trigger a magical response when I applied my mind to the problem. If only I had more mind.

“Which way?” demanded Voushanti, his voice muffled by the hood that draped his mutilated face. His hand encircled my upper arm with the grip of a pawnbroker holding his last citré. The engravings on his wide gold wristband seemed to writhe in nauseating rhythm with my pulse. “Where were they taken? A month you’ve squatted here staring at this puddle. We’ve—”

“—no time. I know that.” I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes, trying to focus on the whereabouts of the unnamed captive whose blood had been so callously shed in this deserted yard. But as quickly as the route to his present location took shape in my mind, the lines and turnings faded again, as if I’d drawn them in breath frost on a window glass. Twice more in the past hour on our way through the chaotic streets of Palinur, I’d felt the shattering explosion of the doulon and the almost simultaneous disintegration of sense. My mind was in tatters. “West, I think. Toward Riie Doloure. There’s an old fortress…”

Was this a true impression or was it only that talk of missing prisoners recalled a tale I’d once heard about a private jail? Aurellians had inflicted cruel torments on Navron prisoners, not allowing guilt or justice to interfere with retribution, and certain Navron nobles rued the day King Eodward had proscribed such practices. A young thief had once told me of his escape from a grim lockup such men used for torturing “grudge prisoners”—those who bore their especial ire or contempt. Determined to spread word of the dread place before he could be recaptured, the youth had spat out his gruesome story, clutching his burnt, empty wrists to his belly while a fellow vagabond dressed the poor sod’s whip-gouged back with goose fat. I’d had no other comfort to offer a lad of fifteen, facing life with no hands.

“Riie Doloure—are you sure?”

I shook my head to clear it and pressed my palms to the pavement beside the dark sticky pool. Icy water dripped on my hands from the cornice that sheltered the unseemly blotch. Hold the lines this time. Ink them on your senses. The Bastard Prince has Jullian until this task is done. The traces were so faint. Brick and cobbles did not hold impressions like bare earth. And Palinur bled from every pore this day, confusing me even more. Time crawled by, stretched like a waking cat, and then sagged into a filthy puddle. “Riie Doloure. Yes.”

Voushanti dragged me up and shoved me past broken statuary and trampled herb beds toward an elaborate iron gate dangling from one hinge. An aingerou, tucked under the brick arch, spat snowmelt onto the uneven cobbles. I tried to step over the puddle but misjudged the distance and stumbled right into it. Slush seeped into my boot.

“What’s wrong with you?” said Voushanti, jerking me through the gate and into the deserted lane. “Your family vouched you were in good health. Said you’d never had so much as a boil on your bum in your life. Are you drunk?”

“No sleep,” I said, hurrying alongside him, grateful I was free of shackles and mask at least. “No food. Doesn’t promote my best work. I’ll not warrant—”

“Sick, starving, or dead, pureblood, you will locate these prisoners. Our master has an interest in them.”

“You should have scraped up the blood and brought it with us, then,” I snapped, refusing to meet his glare. I could almost forget his eyes’ unnerving lifelessness if I just didn’t look at them. “I could sniff it for you like a hound on the scent.”

He would not tell me anything—neither the two captives’ names nor why Prince Osriel cared about them nor who had dragged them from this house with deadly force. Unfortunately, he understood that names or reasons would not help me locate them. Only a physical link could do that; blood served best.

We hurried round a corner into choking smoke and worsening chaos. A troop of Moriangi men-at-arms entered the square at the same time, and Voushanti retreated a few steps to let them pass. We wore poor men’s cloaks that hid my good clothes and his mail shirt.

As we waited for the soldiers to have their fill of shoving and bullying, inspecting bundles by ripping them open and scattering pots, statues, aprons, and blankets in the filthy snow, men’s voices rose in plainsong from the courtyard we had just visited. My sluggard mind snagged on the oddity—plainsong here in the city. The melody was familiar, a setting used only at the Hour of Sext—noontide. And then my thoughts drifted back to the blood-splashed yard. The design wrought into the ruined iron gate had been a solicale. A Karish household, then.

The soldiers soon moved on. But as the mardane and I crossed the square and followed the turnings my instincts laid out, an urgency that had naught to do with Voushanti propelled my steps. Our search for these unnamed prisoners had begun at a Karish house where men sang the Hours. And noontide was the hour of execution.

The crumbling square called Riie Doloure had likely inherited its mournful title from the squat, ugly edifice that overshadowed it. Plain round towers pocked with arrow loops marked the four corners of Fortress Torvo and the walls of its blocklike keep. In the style of ancient Ardra, no creneled battlements, but rather steep conical roofs of lead topped the four great towers and two lesser ones that flanked the gatehouse.

On this day doloure took on added meaning. Half the squalid houses and shops that lined the cobbled square were smoldering ruins, the other half still burning. Dark smoke billowed in evil clouds, abrading my throat. The snow melted into black slush that soaked my feet and numbed my toes. A jubilant rabble crammed the space before the gray stone walls and gate towers, cheering and shouting over the roar of the flames as ash and embers showered on them like unholy rain.

“The fortress? Inside?” The voice boomed in my ear.

“Yes…yes…maybe.” Clutching the scratchy layers of my cloak over mouth and nose, I closed my eyes and scrabbled through the denser fogs and smokes inside my skull to find the traces. No good.

“Be sure, pureblood. This is no feast-day frolic to venture. Hurry.”

I found a patch of unpaved ground, dropped to my knees, and pressed palms into the ash-rimed muck, seeking a stronger link. My fingers squelched in the filth, and I fumbled with the pattern in my head. Awkward. Slow. By the time I grasped the life thread strung from the clotted blood at the Karish house, my skull felt switched wrong way out, raw and throbbing.

“Beyond the wall,” I whispered, wiping my hands on my cloak. Beyond the impossible crowd.

My eyes itched and watered. Voushanti hauled me up, and we skirted the surging mob, dodging shattered stonework, trampled grain sacks, and fallen beams that pulsed with dying embers. Snowflakes transformed to raindrops in the heat, then vanished in a hiss when they struck hot ash or stone.

The throng shifted and surged like a living beast, and though only a few orange scarves peppered the crowd, guttural cries for purification pulsed like its heartbeat. “Give us blood to cleanse the filth! Fire and blood! Slay the blasphemers!” Faces shone with mad fervor. Surely naught of Palinur would be left for Bayard to claim. As for the people captive in this wretched place…prisoners…

“Who are we hunting?” My voice, harsh and strained, could have been a stranger’s. “Why won’t you tell me?”

Voushanti squeezed forward along the narrow boundary between a ruined shopfront and the mob. “Because the answer should make no difference.”

Sila Diaglou stood atop the fortress walls. Not dressed in a warrior’s garb today. Her filmy orange robes flared in the wind like more flames, gifting the willowy, pale-haired woman with a majesty and magic that infused the scene with purpose, as if she were the carved prow of a great ship. She raised her spread arms to embrace the scene of smoke and chaos. “Sanguiera, orongia, vazte, kevrana,” she cried. “Bleed, suffer, die, purify. Die to the world. Abandon those who cling to your old self, and live henceforth in repentance for as long as the streams of time carry you forward. Harrow the earth, that the Gehoum shall be appeased.”

A savage roar rose from the crowd. “Sila! Sila!”

To either side of the priestess, stolid and proud, stood three I’d seen at Graver’s Meadow—the doe-eyed girl, the man with the dog’s face and dagged purple cloak, and the man with the oiled black curls. Perhaps the needle-chinned man had died of my blow. Other ragged men and women cavorted along the parapet, waving orange rags, garlands, weapons, and other things round and heavy that they tossed into the crowd. Another cheer shook the ground. Glee and greed and an insatiable hunger surged through the pressing bodies like an incoming tide. A certain darkness, the foulest bile, ate at my throat. Heads…the round heavy things tossed from the walls were human heads, now passed from hand to hand atop the mob, evoking new waves of cheers.

Great Kemen Sky Lord…holy Iero…whatever your name…guard us from madness. No prayers for Sila’s Gehoum, though. I invoked no powers that took pleasure in headless corpses. Evil rioted in that courtyard. If we could save some poor wretch from such a fate, I would league with Magrog himself. Perhaps I had.

“Inner bailey, outer bailey, or belowground?” The Evanori’s voice grated in my ear, interrupting my sudden hesitation. “Speak.”

“Not belowground. But inner or outer? I don’t know.” If I could just think…

“By Magrog’s deeps, man, what use are you?”

He scanned the mob. As suddenly as a judge’s hammer falls, he grabbed a scrawny man in a ragged coat from the edge of the crowd, bundling him into his massive embrace. “Gert, old friend! Our day has come at last! The earth shall be cleansed. Harrowed!”

He thumped the bewildered fellow on his chest and then shoved him back into the river of people bereft of his orange scarf.

“Tie it on,” he said, cramming the damp rag into my hand.

I tied the scarf about my neck, while he absconded with one for himself. We shoved our way through the heart of the press, Voushanti digging his fingers into my flesh, while waving his free hand and chanting the same words as the rest.

The gates stood open, guarded by Moriangi warriors, spears leveled and ready. But the mob was restrained by their own discipline, not the threat of the warriors. Ten men and women, dressed no differently from their shabby fellows, stood in the front rank, hands stretched to the side as if withholding the pressure of the hundreds. Each one of them wore an orange scarf.

When we came up behind these ten, Voushanti grabbed my chin and pulled my ear close to his mouth. “When I give the word, you will follow me. Stay close. Do not slow down. On your life and the boy’s, speak no word until I tell you. Do you understand?”

A bellow of agony rose from the fortress and rippled along my spine. Only its beginning timbre identified the victim as a man. I nodded.

Raising the engraved gold band that he had slipped from his left wrist, he clasped his hands in front of his face. “Ready?” he cried. “Now!”

A glare of red brilliance shattered the gray noonday. The whole world paused for that moment; shocked faces turned upward toward the light, shouts and laughter sheared off in midvoicing. I thought I had gone deaf. What in the name of all gods had he done?

The big Evanori sped toward the gate, his gray cloak flapping. I raced after him, agape. Voushanti and I existed between breaths, between swings of the great pendulum that ticked off our lives. No human eye perceived us. No human hand could halt our passage…across the short bridge…through the tight gatehouse…and into the courtyard of hell.

A grim, narrow, smoke-filled slot of a yard squeezed between inner and outer walls of undressed granite. Ruffians armed with pikes and swords stood behind three seated men wearing the red robes and wide-brimmed hats of judges. Flame soared and dark smoke billowed beyond the walls behind them, as would befit Magrog’s own tribunes.

Though Voushanti and I existed in profound silence, events inevitably moved forward. A cage of iron poles against one wall bulged with battered men and women, and under the whips of two filthy guards, a stake-cart vomited more human refuse into the cage. Guards dragged a bloodied prisoner from the cage and threw him on his knees in the dirt before the tribunal. Words were exchanged.

We heard none of it. And no one marked us as we dashed across the yard.

A soundless hammer fell, witnesses waved their hands gleefully, and the silently screaming man was hauled toward the blood-slathered gallows that stood in the center of the yard. A bare-legged man and a silk-gowned woman already dangled from the crossarm—the woman crook-necked and very dead, the man in his death throes, his hands scrabbling weakly at the rope choking the life from him. Lashed to a frame at the end of the platform, a second man slumped dead in his bonds, his steaming entrails newly spilled out across the bloody hands of his executioner.

I halted, aghast, not so much at the brutality of this tableau, for such vileness too often passed for justice in this world, but at seeing the faces of the damned. The woman, mercifully, I did not know. But the man in the last agonies of strangulation was Brother Victor, the small scholarly chancellor of Gillarine, and the one whose life lay splattered so casually on this altar of savagery was Abbot Luviar.

O mighty gods! My heart stopped. My gorge rose. My clenched fists slammed my temples as if the blow might jar my sight to look upon a different truth. Luviar, the passionate heart of Gillarine, the one man I had ever met who could make a jaded soul feel worthy of a god’s notice, butchered like a beast. Helpless grief and impotent rage stole breath and voice and filled my soul and limbs with lead. And guilt…oh, gods of night, if we’d arrived but moments sooner…if I’d had a clearer head…

Voushanti raced up the steps, motioning me to follow. Surely it was the force of his will that stirred my feet, for I had no will, no strength, no courage to face such ruin. He waved and stomped his foot. He grappled the dangling body and supported Brother Victor’s splayed legs, lessening the strain on the slender neck. The little monk spasmed and heaved a violent breath, breaking my paralysis. He lived.

I flew up the gore-slick stair and snatched the blunt, curved blade from the hand of a bull-necked man beside a headsman’s block. He gaped, bewildered, at his bare hands. At the limit of my height, I stretched and slashed the rope above Brother Victor’s head. The monk slumped into Voushanti’s grasp.

Spinning in place, I scoured the yard and the cage, searching for another familiar shaven head and dark brows, sure that he, too, must be a victim of this outrage. “Gildas!” I bellowed.

Noise and confusion fell on my head like a collapsing mountainside. The executioner’s bewildered gaze met my own, then blazed with understanding. “Treachery!”

“Useless ass!” Voushanti screamed in fury. “Run! Now, or the boy dies!”

Voushanti hefted Brother Victor over his shoulder and raced down the steps, his threat piercing the thunder of astonished outrage that surrounded me.

Spurred more by rage than fear, I leaped from the platform and sped after him, slashing randomly at any hand or blade within my armspan. If Voushanti’s own neck fell foul of my blade, I would not weep.

We were most of the way across the yard when the Harrowers on the walls finally grasped what we were about. Sila Diaglou stretched her orange-draped arm over the milling horror and pointed straight at us. “Those three! Seize the blasphemers who dare defy the Gehoum!” she cried, her rich contralto as cold and deep and relentless as the tidal currents in Caurean Sea caves.

Sharp commands rang from the Moriangi troop at inner gate, and a half dozen warriors pushed through the crowd around the gallows. We dashed into the gatehouse tunnel.

“Halt and drop the blade,” snapped Voushanti, once we had passed into the dark. “Now.”

My hands and feet obeyed the command, whether by his will or magic or my own choice, I could not have said. I saw no possibility of escape without his connivance.

A warm limp weight was thrust into my arms. “Stay close. If you have a hope of life, do as I say.”

“Can you work the spell again?” Gildas could easily be the next to have his bowels ripped out.

Red light flared dully from his hand and then faded. “No.”

“But the others back there…”

From beside me came the unmistakable sound of a sword sliding from its sheath. No doubt the ax he wore strapped to his belt had found its way into his alter hand. “They have no hope of life.”

The warriors were on us then, great looming shadows in the dark—distant daylight outlining their bulk. The tight passage restricted Voushanti’s opponents to two at once, preventing a quick slaughter. I kept to the deepest shadows behind Voushanti, positioning Brother Victor’s slight body across my shoulders while the Evanori efficiently dispatched two, then four, then five pursuers in a blurring flail of sword and ax.

“Now,” he gasped as the sixth man fell, “run!”

I bolted. I could have carried two of Brother Victor without slowing, yet we had no route but through the mob. Those outside the walls could not know we were the objects of Sila Diaglou’s wrath, and so it was not deliberate opposition that forced us to a standstill, but merely the crush of overexcited bodies.

“Stand aside,” shouted Voushanti, over and over, forcing a path through the press, angling toward the side where the crowd was thinner. “Our brother…wounded by raiders…by Karish infidels…Let us through!”

Voushanti’s ferocity and our orange scarves gave us passage. But the mardane’s cloak had been torn halfway off. We had reached no more than halfway across the square, when a woman noticed the Evanori blazon on his surcoat. “Damn all, he’s the Bastard’s man!”

Haggard, starving faces, alight with manic fever, closed in, pressing us toward one fiery border of the square, crowding between us and our escape. “Who are you?” yelled a hollow-cheeked man. “What are you about? Who’ve you got there?”

“The Bastard defies the Gehoum…thinks to rival them…” The murmurs grew hostile. “Don’t trust him.”

Voushanti waved them off, spinning a half circle with his fouled ax and the bloody tip of his blade. Yet inevitably they pressed us backward, ever closer to a row of blazing houses. Even through the layers of wool, my back blistered. Brother Victor moaned and shifted in my arms. In moments the mob would devour or shove us into the fire, unless the Moriangi soldiers who had begun slashing a ruthless path through the mob got to us first.

I closed my eyes and imagined my hands penetrating the muck beneath the cobbles, summoning the ruined landscape I had touched with mind and magic: the fortress like an angry wound on the world…the dingy remnants of lives lived solely in its vile shadow…the present devastation—half walls, scorched rubble, fallen beams, blazing tenements leaning sideways at precarious angles now that their supporting neighbors had collapsed…and the past—ancient stones, broken and buried beneath centuries of filth…beneath shifting land and blighted building. Necessity…desperation…escape… Certainty flooded into my bones.

“This way,” I shouted into Voushanti’s back. I whipped my heavy cloak over Brother Victor and my own head, leaving only enough of a gap to see my way. Then I turned my back on Voushanti and the mob and dashed straight through the wall of fire.

“Wait, fool!”

Veils of red and orange and blue snapped and roared, engulfing the tall house. To my dismay, we found no sanctuary beyond the dissolving timbers. Flaming debris and flared ash rained down as I clutched the limp body and leaped over a blazing beam. I had no hands free to knock away the embers that singed the back of my hands or set the damp wool of my cloak smoldering. My boots stank of scorched hide, and my feet screamed in agony as I waded through coals and ash. I could not hear for the belching thunder as another wall or bench or barrel exploded into flame, could not think for the suffocating smoke and fear.

Where was the safe, secure stone? I felt it here. Its pattern lived in my mind. Instinct told me we needed to go down. Smoke and garish flames made the patches of darkness too deep to penetrate with watering eyes, yet I dared not slow enough to hunt. To the right the hillside angled sharply upward. To my left a half-timbered wall groaned and sagged as moisture boiled away. Behind me, Voushanti yelped and cursed as an exploding barrel shot burning staves into the air like the brands of Syan fire jugglers. I had to let my feet guide as they would…and, in moments, my boot skidded on the brink of emptiness. Littered with charred debris and rills of flame, an ancient stone stair plunged into the earth. Unhesitating, I sped downward.

The stair led into a stone-lined trench. A sewer, I thought at first, so narrow I almost cracked Brother Victor’s head on the wall. But as the way angled across the hillside and behind the rows of burning houses, worn steps broke the walls here and there, leading off into jumbles of stone and earth that might once have been far older houses. So perhaps this was an ancient street, its worn base and shoulder-high walls laid with native stone, only this bit of it exposed.

Though fire raged beyond the walls on either side, air flowed gently through the trench, just enough to shift and cool the falling ash without fanning it to flame. The lane widened slightly into a small high-walled courtyard. In its center a stone ring encircled a gnarled apple tree, astonishingly untouched by fire. I hurried past the tree. By the time I thrashed through a snag of dead brush and half-frozen offal and stumbled into an abandoned tanner’s yard, all traces of the ancient stone had crumbled into the hillside rubble, and we had left Riie Doloure well behind.

Coughing, gasping, welcoming even the lingering stench of a tanner’s vats, I sank to my knees and untangled my cloak. I threw it down on a crusted drift of snow and laid Brother Victor on top of it. His cowl and gown had been stripped away, leaving only his torn and bloody shirt that could neither keep him warm nor cover the vile evidence of his battering. A painful shudder racked his frail body with each wheezing gasp. Broken ribs, like enough, but at least he breathed. His abraded neck had swollen around the arrowed gouge of the noose, but not enough to choke him. One eye socket had been crushed, the eye now little more than pulp.

“We can’t stay here,” said Voushanti. The warrior was bent over a few steps away, hawking and spitting, one hand planted on his knee. His left arm dangled slack, blood welling from a filthy wound just above the elbow. “Get him up. We have to go.”

Brother Victor’s hands and body jerked frantically, as if he were trying to defend himself, and his lips moved in a constant soundless stream of words. I bundled the charred edges of my cloak around him. “Easy, Brother,” I whispered, wishing I could tell him he was safe. What could Osriel want with a holy monk? “I’ll try not to hurt you.”

“Valen?” His undamaged eye blinked open—a bruised hollow overflowing with pain. “Iero’s grace, you’ve come.”

The spark of hope in his bleak face stung worse, by far, than my seared skin. The implication of his greeting, that his god had somehow ordained me to make things right, choked me with bile. I needed to be designing some strategy, constructing some spellworking to protect him, but the events of the morning floated and churned in my sluggish thoughts like refuse in an oily backwater: Gildas and nivat, blood and fire and Jullian, Bayard’s vengeance and Osriel’s inscrutable purpose. How could I rescue a man from the Harrowers, only to turn him over to Osriel the Bastard?

A quick glance over my shoulder revealed Voushanti well across the yard, plunging his sword into an ice-crusted drift that still displayed some areas of white through its mantle of soot and ash. His fouled ax lay on the ground beside him. His wounds and heaving exhaustion had eased an unspoken fear that he was something other than human. Perhaps, if I could divert his attention and retrieve the ax before he picked it up…

I grabbed a scrap of old hide from the ground and began shaping a divexi—a noisy or frightening illusion designed to ensnare a watcher’s attention. But I stumbled through the steps. How did you determine what manner of beast had worn this skin? I could not remember, and without knowing, I could not steal its noise or motion to infuse the spell. I floundered with the interlocking threads of enchantment.

Across the yard, Voushanti pulled the cleaned blade from the snow and wiped it on his cloak, awkward as he favored his injured arm. He sheathed the sword and snapped his head around to look at me, a spark of red piercing the gloom. He raised one hand, and a flare of red light blinded me. I blinked and squinted and turned the scrap over and over in my hand, trying to remember…

“Can you lead us out of here, pureblood”—Voushanti squatted beside me, sword sheathed, clean, dry ax snugged in the strap looped over his belt. With one hand and his teeth, he finished tying off the bleeding wound in his arm with the strip of hide that had been in my hand—“and not through a conflagration?”

My stomach heaved at the unnerving gap in my perception. How had he gotten here so quickly? A blast of wind pelted my face with snow. I wrapped my arms tightly about my churning gut. No pain this time. No answering ecstasy. The raw threads of my spell lay in my mind unquickened as I’d left them.

Voushanti tilted his head, watching me, his half-mutilated mouth twisted upward. “Our master waits. Or is your word as valueless as your family insists?”

I gathered the scattered bits of sense enough to speak, not daring to look at his eyes. “I swore I would not run, Mardane, and I will not. But I never said I would drag others into slavery with me. What does your prince want with him?” Osriel, who stole the eyes of the dead.

“This is not the time to discuss our master’s intents. Care you so little for your Karish brother that you would abandon him untended or drag him into this battle that rages around us without hope of succor?”

Melting snow under my knees soaked my wool hose as I feverishly discarded one plan after another. My father would not allow me past his house wards; neither would any other pureblood answer a recondeur’s plea. Certainly not on this day. Thalassa would likely help; she knew the little chancellor. But the temples were halfway across the city, and if the sacred precincts were not already burning, they would be overrun with wounded and frightened people. The others I knew in Palinur were tavern keepers, whores, alley rats, many of them kind and generous, yes—I had ever called them friends—but none knew more of me than my name and favorite songs. On a day when every man and woman’s survival was in balance, how could I command enough trust to shelter a man snatched from the gallows?

Voushanti scrambled to his feet and extended his hand, the gold wristband gleaming brightly in the murk. Brother Victor lay wrapped in the cocoon of my cloak, struggling to breathe. Of all the facts in this failing universe, one stood clear and invariant. The monk would die if I did not get him help soon.

Cloud and smoke had grayed the midday to little more than dusk. Wind flapped my soot-grimed sleeves, drove flying snow down my collar and up my billowing tunic, and stung the burned patches on my hands and legs and face. Without my cloak, I was already shivering. My mind was numb, my reservoir of schemes barren. “You cannot expect me to believe the Bastard Prince will heal him. He must have some use for him.”

Voushanti whipped a knife from his belt. I jumped when he tossed it on the ground in front of me. “I have risked my own survival to preserve this monk’s life, which should demonstrate something to a man with limited choices and half a mind. Have you some other plan to save him? If not, then take my knife and one simple thrust will save him from my master’s depredations. A second thrust will take care of your own problem.” Cold, blunt. He did not care what I chose.

Every tale of Osriel’s depravity swirled in my head, yet he had sent me to rescue good men from a terrible fate. Voushanti himself had shown naught but courage in the fight. I could read nothing from his dreadful visage save icy challenge. Perhaps it was weakness or some other consequence of my shameful state, but I trusted his word.

He nodded as if I’d spoken it aloud. “The storm has come early upon us, Magnus Valentia, and much of Palinur has yet to burn. We’d best be moving before we are consumed.” The Evanori scooped Brother Victor into his powerful arms, handling him as gently as Brother Robierre would have done. “Now, tell me the way out of here.”

Osriel had an interest in Brother Victor’s life, and for now my master’s will would prevail. As for later…we would see. Pressing forehead and palms to the fouled earth, I reached out to find a path through the dying city—through layer upon layer of building and burning, of births and deaths, of commerce and art and piety, of cruelty and war, the footsteps of centuries. A simple route revealed itself. I raised my head and pointed down an alley that would lead us back to the house where the Duc of Evanore waited.

Indeed my course was clear, as nothing had been clear in all my life. The day had scribed two images on my soul, images that demanded I answer for my ill choices: Jullian, quivering in his silent terror, and the wise and passionate abbot of Gillarine splayed and gutted like a beast. Both my fault. Because I could not think. Because I could not act. Because I had clung to mindless pleasure to dull the pain of living. Always I had insisted my perversion harmed no one but myself. Who was there to care if Magnus Valentia de Cartamandua-Celestine, lack-wit recondeur, burnt out his senses or locked his useless mind away in a ruined body?

I clenched my fists and wrapped my arms about my eyes and ears, miming that deadness as if to silence conscience for one last time. But Jullian’s terrified silence and Abbot Luviar’s cry of agony gave my shame a voice I could no longer put aside.

And so, as I stumbled to my feet and followed Voushanti out of the tanners’ yard, I left a litter behind in the filthy snow: a fragment of a mirror, a silver needle, a linen thread, and a few black seeds that rapidly vanished into the muck. I threw the empty green bag into a smoldering house. Never again. Ever.

Chapter 29

“You are not forbidden illumination, Cartamandua.” The lamplight from the passage set Mardane Voushanti’s freshly polished mail gleaming, delineating his bulky shadow in a bronze glow as if he were Deunor Lightbringer himself. The warrior quickly dispelled the illusion by stepping out of the doorway, only to return with one of the passageway lamps, giving me full view of his half-mangled face and worn leather. He displayed no sign of bandages or discomfort from his wounding.

Illumination. Upon our return to Prince Osriel’s dismal dwelling, Voushanti had whisked Brother Victor away, declaring the monk would be cared for, while two of Osriel’s warriors had deposited me into this fusty little chamber. In the hours since, as the gray daylight faded beyond the slot window, I had sat with muddy boots propped on a dusty clerk’s desk, and unshaven chin propped on my curled fingers, seeking illumination. The woolly tangle that had snarled my thoughts and actions throughout the day had at last unraveled, and the mysteries of past and present now surrounded me in stark, immutable stillness like a ring of standing stones: my grandfather, my master, the Danae, Gillarine, the end of the world.

“Unless you’ve brought me dinner or answers, I would prefer you take your lamp and go,” I said, too tired to mask bitterness and self-loathing. I did not expect answers any more than I expected word of Jullian’s fate or Brother Victor’s health. Everyone I’d met since Boreas had deposited my dying carcass outside Gillarine had excelled at keeping me mystified and on edge. Tonight, though I had defined and bounded these myriad puzzles, I could declare none solved.

“You’ve not cleaned yourself. Are these breeks not fine enough to cover your pureblood arse?” Voushanti prodded the stack of neatly folded fabrics he’d brought along with a water basin and towel soon after our arrival. A mardane, a landed baron and warrior of more than average skill, both military and magical, serving me like a housemaid—one of the lesser standing stones, but a curiosity, nonetheless. Why was I so sure that deeper investigation would reveal this man had no home, no family, no history or ambition that linked him to anyone but Osriel?

“Tell me, Lord Voushanti, was the spell you worked at Riie Doloure of your own making, or was it Prince Osriel’s work?” I believed I had deciphered the answer to this particular puzzle. Quickened spells could be attached to objects and keyed with a triggering word, allowing those with no magical talents to use them at will—but only once or twice without a new infusion of magic. Voushanti’s limited usage of the spell in Riie Doloure made me doubt he was the originator. And his gold wristband would be a perfect spell carrier.

“Our master will answer questions or not, as he pleases. Just now, he requires your attendance in the proper garb of a royal advisor. So dress yourself or I’ll do it for you, and I am no genteel manservant.”

Though for once in my life I desired no company but my own, I had to answer this summons. The last doulon interval had been but eighteen days. I bore no illusions about what was to come. Even if I survived the ravages of the doulon hunger long enough to shake free of it, sooner or later the disease that gnarled my gut and flayed my senses, prompting me to seek its comforts, would leave me a drooling lunatic. But in the past hour I had vowed to Luviar’s shade that for as long as I had wits, I would give what aid I could to those who fought for his cause. For now, my hope of illumination lay with Osriel the Bastard.

Voushanti remained stolidly beside the door as I stripped off my scorched and bloody garb and used my shirt to scrub the soot from face and arms. The water in the cracked basin was long cold. The tiny coal fire in the rusty brazier could not have kept a rabbit warm.

Where was reason and the proper order of the universe? Abbot Luviar, a man of vision and passion, hung from the gallows with blowflies feasting on his bowels, while my worst injury from the day’s events, a deep burn on the back of my hand, had already scabbed over. And Brother Victor, a man of intelligence and reason, lay fighting for breath, while I was to parade as a royal advisor in a house run by spiders, feral cats, one mutilated mardane, four warriors…and, ah, yes, one prince who stole dead men’s eyes, brutalized children, and salvaged tortured monks.

Was fortune no gift of a harried goddess, but rather purest chance? Perhaps the Harrowers had guessed the truth, that the universe was naught but chaos, and mankind, fearing the impenetrable, uncaring powers of night and storm, had only imagined these kindly mockeries of ourselves that we called gods.

Luviar would have refused such a hopeless premise. Given voice from the grave, he would argue that a beneficent Creator had instilled in humankind the means to shape our own destiny. In the throes of such guilt as plagued me this night, I desired desperately to believe that. The abbot had given me the grace of his trust, and I had failed him. Now I had to find some way to make amends. My meager vow was all I could devise.

The clean clothes were plain, but fine—a silk shirt of spruce green, a pourpoint of blood-red brocade. I swiped at my hair to remove flakes of ash and splinters.

The mardane handed me the claret-hued cape and mask. So, ordinaries beyond Osriel’s household were to be present at this interview. This day had left me beyond surprise.

Voushanti guided me through the winding passages back to Prince Osriel’s chamber. Though night had fallen, I could see more of the house than I had in the morning’s confusion. Tiered candle rings veiled with cobwebs lit the domed foyer, a circular space cold and bare of any decoration save massive pillars, weighty arches, and a dozen elaborately carved doors. Two Evanori warriors guarded one pair of doors and swung them open immediately upon our arrival.

“His Grace awaits,” said Voushanti. “You are on trial here, pureblood.”

The mardane pivoted smartly, drew his sword, and took up a guard stance, face outward between the two warriors, leaving me to pass through the open doorway alone. His remarks but confirmed my own conclusions. Jullian’s presence, my oath not to run, the hidden identities of our day’s quarry—I had been on trial all day. How had Osriel known how to manipulate me so thoroughly? And to what purpose?

Myriad teardrop-shaped lamps of colored glass illuminated Prince Osriel’s chamber—a grand hall, hung with thick tapestries of dark reds, greens, and gold. Above the hanging lamps the high, barreled vault hosted lurid depictions of the netherworld—scenes of naked, writhing humans being herded by grinning gatzi toward a lake of fire. In one broad panel a triumphant Magrog, crowned with ram’s horns, presided over a charred desolation from his throne of human skulls.

My eyes could not linger on the fantastical paintings above my head. The focus of the great hall was a vaulted alcove to my right, where the impenetrable darkness of the morning had yielded to shifting shadows. In front of a curved screen of wrought gold sat an elaborately carved chair of squared oak, knobbed spires rising from its back. To either side of the chair, fire blazed in great brass bowls. The bowls rested on the backs of gray stone statues depicting chained slaves twice my height. The chair was occupied.

Considering the size of the chair, I estimated its occupant to be a person of a man’s moderate stature, though the voluminous folds of a hooded velvet gown, colored the same spruce green as my garb, left sex, size, and demeanor indeterminate. Yet that person’s presence was immense. No storm building over the river country, where the turbulent air of the mountains clashed with hot wind from the eastern deserts and the moisture of the Caurean Sea, could have such monumental force pent in its clouds as the power shivering the air about Osriel’s throne.

“My Lord Prince,” I said, “or at least so I presume.”

Even as I made my genuflection, touching my fingers to my forehead, I fought to control my fear. This house and its macabre trappings were designed to intimidate.

A slender, refined hand gestured me up. A man’s hand, bearing a single heavy ring of graven gold, almost too large for the finger that bore it.

“See, now, that I am a man of my word, Magnus Valentia.” The voice from under the velvet hood hinted at the first stirring vigor of the storm wind. His ringed finger pointed behind me.

I spun in place to discover a goggle-eyed, unscarred Jullian standing roughly in the place I’d left him that morning. He was unbound, his thin shoulders firmly in the grasp of a wary Brother Gildas. Rarely had I felt such a rush of relief and pleasure.

I had feared Gildas lost at Riie Doloure—the lighthouse Scholar, the hope of a kingdom rapidly destroying itself, my friend. The irony struck me that my need for nivat had likely saved him, removing him from the priory before the assault. And Jullian…

The boy’s anxious eyes searched, taking in my cloak and mask and the looming presence on the dais behind me. Then his clear gaze slid past the eyehole of my mask, met my own eyes, and as a nervous sparrow finds a branch to its liking, stayed a while. His face brightened. I smiled and nodded and breathed a prayer of thanksgiving, wishing he did not have to hear what I had to tell.

Reaffirming my vow to guard the lad and his cause, I turned so that I could both address the prince properly and assure myself that my two friends would not vanish in candle smoke. I crafted my words carefully, estimating what might be expected or permitted in this room, assessing what might be my master’s purpose, and cataloguing the news I wished to convey to the remaining members of the lighthouse cabal. “My lord, I appreciate your generosity in permitting me to share this fulfillment of our bargain. Were poor Brother Victor brought in to be released to his brothers as well, with the painful results of his ordeal at Riie Doloure well healed, then I could ask no better return for my submission.”

Gildas stiffened, shock and dismay carving their very sigils on his brow. “Victor alive…captive…here?”

“You must improve your bargaining, Magnus Valentia, and learn to discipline your loose tongue,” said the man in the chair, his voice sinuous as an adder, smooth and coiled with danger. “Here I’ve given you a gift—releasing the boy to his Karish friend, rather than setting him adrift in the sea of Palinur’s destruction as your ill-considered pact would have allowed—and you express your gratitude by sharing our private business with a stranger.”

Prince Osriel’s displeasure settled on my shoulders like an iron yoke. Yet no flaming bolts flew across the room to set me afire. No muting spells were triggered in my silken mask. After the magics of the day, I expected anything. So I pushed farther. A limited future gives a man certain advantages in such a game.

I bowed toward the prince again. “My apologies, lord. Clearly you knew of my association with the monks of Gillarine when you brought these two here. As our venture to rescue their brothers from Sila Diaglou’s clutches was so nobly wrought, I assumed that the fate of the two captives, certainly to the summary of one salvaged life and one grievous…most grievous…death, would not be hidden from them.”

Jullian’s face drained of blood. Gildas, now holding his emotions close, did not seem to notice, but the chalk-faced boy would surely have dropped to his knees had the monk not maintained such a firm grip on his shoulder.

The swirling shadows darkened, and thunder rumbled just at the edge of hearing. The prince waved one hand at the door. “Brother—Gildas, you called yourself?—please take your young charge and go, bearing with you my sincerest cautions as to the dangers of the streets. Charming as it is to encounter an actual Karish monk, my sorcerer and I have important business to attend, and it seems I must school him beforetime.”

Without voiced command, the outer doors swung open. Gildas, his dark brow knotted, inclined his head to the man in the chair. As he urged the shocked Jullian ahead of him, he glanced over his shoulder, pressed the backs of two fingers to one cheek, and jerked his head at me. The two fingers were the monks’ signing speech—an admonition to use thought before speaking. The jerk of his head and the granite set of his mouth were a more universal language—a promise that he would do what he could to set me free. Such a small gesture to put steel in a man’s spine. In my deepest heart, I blessed him.

As the doors swung shut, and I was left alone with the still figure in green draperies, all warmth fled that hall. I imagined frost rime spreading on the slave statues and ice spears growing on the corbels and brackets. The shadows deepened, as if their very substance had increased, as if all those who had ever stood in this hall had been sent away empty, their darkest thoughts and fears kept here as the price of their release. By the time my master spoke, I could scarce contain my shivering, though I mustered every shred of control I possessed to stop it. I was not afraid of him. Not anymore. What could he do to me that was worse than what I had brought upon myself?

“You tread a crumbling verge, pureblood,” he said ever so softly. “Do you think that because my bloodlines are impure, and my body less than perfect, my mind is also flawed?”

I clasped my hands behind my back. “Your Highness, my awe of your talents grows by the moment. To create a cloaking spell such as Mardane Voushanti wielded this morning at Riie Doloure is the work of a skilled sorcerer. To create this aura of terror”—I waved to encompass the hall, feeling proud that my hand did not tremble and my teeth did not chatter—“is the work of a masterful perception.”

I strolled to the foot of the dais, striving to prove that fear did not paralyze me—as much to myself as to him. “As I have not observed your physical imperfection for myself, I could not possibly judge it as a source of weakness, though you are clearly not the horned giant of rumor. And as you have surely been told, I take neither pride nor pleasure in my bloodlines, so I could hardly view another man as ‘lesser’ for not sharing them. If I were ever to sire children of my own, I would as soon throw them to wolves as submit them to the Pureblood Registry. What is it you wish from me, my lord? You seem to know a great deal about me, whereas I know naught of you but tales and the single fact that you dispatched me to save two good men from the gallows.” For what? That was the question whose answer was the key to the man in green.

A movement of his hand and the shadows parted, exposing the bronze-inlaid marble steps in front of him. “A brash mouth you have, Magnus Valentia. More sober-minded than I expected. I was told you were an ignorant buffoon who made jest of all things serious, including your own talents. But then again, this day’s events must sober even the most slack mind. Come closer and we’ll talk a bit about your friends. And, Magnus”—I shuddered at his particular enunciation of my name, as if he had catalogued every mote of my being and tethered it to his discipline—“always remove your mask when we are alone.”

I climbed the few steps to the dais, tugging the silk from my face and tucking it in the glove loop on my belt. Whatever Osriel’s game, subtlety played a far greater role than crass brutality.

Moments passed before the prince took up the conversation again. He propped his elbow on the wide arm of his chair and rested his chin on his hand. Relaxed, it appeared. The man seemed as changeable as sunlight in the river country. “Your friend, the Chancellor of Gillarine, fares as well as could be expected of a man who came within a heart’s thump of learning the truth of his god. His injuries have prevented my use of him, but they will heal, given time enough.”

I could not disguise my astonishment. “My lord, I thank—”

“Do not thank me,” he snapped, slamming his hand to the chair arm. “You cannot feel gratitude when you suspect I have unsavory motives for snatching the monk from the Ferryman’s slip. I prefer honesty from my servants, not mimed groveling, as if I were some simpleton to be swayed with pretense. Actions that counter my wishes reap my punishment. Not thoughts.”

The colored lamps swayed as if a wind teased them. Weakness raced through my veins and sinews. “Of course, my lord. I only—”

“What would be the pleasure in having bound servants if their thoughts did not resist my own?” Though the prince had not moved, and we were alone, these soft-spoken words emanated from the region of my shoulder, as if the hooded man crouched behind me, his pale lips not a finger’s breadth from my ear. “The delight of power is not commanding an army of sycophants, but rather bending one resilient mind beyond its comfortable boundaries.”

I suppressed a shudder. Refusing to look over my shoulder, I inclined my head to acknowledge his point—and to compose my expression. I could not allow him to see when his tricks unnerved me. “I appreciate your desire for honesty, my lord. Naturally, I am concerned for Brother Victor’s safety and future in the care of a powerful lord I know only from dread rumor. Nevertheless, I am grateful to hear news of his state. Accept my thanks or not, as you please.”

“Tell me about the lighthouse,” said the prince, reversing tone again as if he were two men at once hidden in his robes. This simple request might have been an inquiry about the weather beyond his walls. Yet it startled me out of measure.

That he might have discovered the existence of a collection assembled over so many years was not so unexpected. What other circumstance would send me on a chase for members of the cabal with Jullian held hostage? I did not believe in such weighty accidents of fate. But I did not expect so direct an assault or so prompt. My promise to keep Luviar’s secrets left me scrambling for a response. “The lighthouse, Lord Prince?”

The prince’s hands hooked on the squared oak arms of his chair and pulled his body slightly forward. The air between us compressed my chest. “We are not here to dice, Cartamandua.” Each syllable pronounced precisely. “I know these monks have built a great treasure house, a cache of books and riches gathered from all the known world. I have uses for such things. Only two men have ever known how to open the way into the vault. One of those lies dead; the other lies unspeaking in my guest chamber. Events will not wait on healing salves and poultices. Thus I remember something else I’ve heard: An initiate of Ophir’s order was allowed to visit this treasure house, an initiate with sorcerous powers of his own. A promising development, is it not? If this sorcerer cannot provide me with a monk to open the way, then perhaps he can open it himself.”

Damnation! The detail that I had visited the lighthouse was quite recent and quite specific. If he could read thoughts, he’d have no need for my answers. Thus, either he had twisted the juicy tidbit from his captives—Jullian or Brother Victor—or someone else in the cabal was telling tales.

No one had told me the full membership of the cabal. I refused to believe any of those I knew a willing betrayer. The nature and power of their beliefs colored them virtuous in my eyes—even Thalassa, now I looked at her deeds with my childish blinders removed. Then again, if the past few days had taught me anything, it was that I was no good judge of character.

The possibility of an informant gave me little hope of deception; thus I was left with no choice but to test my master’s dictum here at the beginning. “Clearly I cannot maintain pretense with you, Lord Prince. I am sworn to silence about the lighthouse and must hope that my promises to you gain credibility from my refusal to break my vow.” I rushed onward, hoping to forestall his explosion. “And before you pass judgment, let me also state that neither honor nor intent makes one flyspeck of difference in this case.”

His attention threatened to crush both mind and soul. “How so, pureblood? If your intent is disobedience, then it makes a great deal of difference. You’ll not enjoy discovering how much so.”

I worked to maintain a measured tone, as if on any day I might be found denying the wishes of Magrog’s henchman. “Your diligent informants have reported that my undisciplined childhood left me untrained in sorcery. They must also have reported that I lack the basic skills of an educated man. But perhaps the implications were not made clear. I cannot interpret the spells of others. I have no background even to guess what any complex working might be and no trained intuition to know how to go about discovering the answer. I cannot read books of magic, even if any pureblood family would allow a recondeur to touch their most prized possessions. So I cannot possibly unravel this spell that opens the brothers’ store-house for you, even if”—I hesitated only briefly before throwing down the gauntlet—“I chose to do so.”

Footsteps and voices beyond the doors distracted the prince before his gathering wrath could break upon my head. When the door opened to Voushanti, I found myself able to breathe again.

The mardane hurried across the room, not bothering to bow. His heavy cloak was dusted with snow. “Skay has confirmed that Prince Bayard’s men control the city gates this hour. The guards are stretched thin and shitting their trews for fear of the Harrowers. I’ve transport ready.”

“Excellent. Have Saverian see to the monk while I ensure my pureblood’s good behavior.”

“We’d best be quick, my lord. We caught three Harrowers trying to climb over the wall. Our…inquiries…revealed they were hunting the little monk.” Voushanti bowed and left.

“Alas, we shall have to continue our discussion another time.” The prince rose from his chair. Not short, not tall. His voluminous velvets prevented me deducing more of his size or shape. He pointed a finger at one of the blazing bowls atop the slave statues. The fire bloomed scarlet, then vanished, dropping an inky mantle over his left shoulder.

“I believe the time has come to bring my fractious brothers to heel,” he said. “Thus I’ve decided to remove my valuables—including my very expensive pureblood—south to Evanore, far from this precarious city. Until we meet again, you will remain in Mardane Voushanti’s sight at all times and obey his commands as if they were my own. You will strictly maintain your pureblood discipline. And you will not discuss this day’s business—my business—with anyone. Now tell me whether or not you choose to obey these orders. If you think not, we can just get on with the necessary unpleasantness.”

His mild-spoken menace did naught but inflame my curiosity. He had some use for me. To make the best use of my position, to protect my friends and aid their mission, I needed to learn of my new master or, at the least, prevent him interfering with the cabal. “Does not my duty require me to be at your side, lord? I should protect—”

“Honesty, Magnus.” The second bowl of fire bled and died. My skin felt the flash of heat.

I bowed and touched my forehead. “As you command, Your Grace…” Though, honestly, I would prefer the freedom to choose my own course.

Chapter 30

We rode out within the hour. In the kitchen courtyard, where Voushanti had first brought me to Osriel that morning, three of Osriel’s warriors waited beside a mule-drawn wagon draped in mourning garlands of dried laurel and black ribbon. A stone coffin occupied the wagon bed. Brother Victor—

“The little monk sleeps, pureblood,” said Voushanti at my mumbled curse. “But not his final sleep.”

I gaped at him, unable to contain my horror. “You hid him in a coffin?”

“The Moriangi will not inspect Lord Osriel’s dead. Now, mount up.” He pointed at a beast waiting patiently behind the wagon. “We’ve found a docile steed for you tonight.”

Prince Osriel did not see us off.

Palinur lay eerily quiet as we plodded toward the city gates. Winter held the world fast in its grip. Ice sheathed toppled statues and charred wreckage, and hung in great spikes from gutters and balconies. Churned, filthy snow lay deep in the byways. Hunched figures scuttled into alleyways as we approached and darted out again only after we passed.

No Moriangi gate guard dared so much as glance at Prince Osriel’s pureblood or his “fallen knight” in the coffin, not when a warrior of Voushanti’s complexion growled hints of the Bastard’s retribution should they do so. But neither did anyone want the responsibility of violating Prince Bayard’s order that no one breathing was to leave Palinur that night. We were passed from one guard captain to the next—the events a blur of torchlight, waiting, repeated stories, and anxious, stuttering progress. I rejoiced that I was not expected to speak. Exhaustion weighed on my limbs like the burdening ice.

Eventually Voushanti convinced Tiglas Volti, a seedy-eyed senior guard captain, of the mortal risks in insulting Prince Bayard’s neutral brother—a brother whose vaults of gold, once opened, would likely dispense their contents as far spread as the Bastard’s goodwill…even so far as senior guard captains. Eventually, the portcullis slammed shut behind us, and we rolled into the night.

“Get out of the tent or you’ll be folded up in it.” Voushanti’s ugly face poked through the slit in the canvas for the third time since he’d called me out of a dead sleep. The patch of sky behind him was a sunlit blue.

I slipped on my mask and crawled toward him, every bone and sinew complaining, breathing through my mouth to avoid the persistent stench of old sweat, old ale, and old vomit woven into the shelter’s fabric. I’d never known a tent that was aught but cramped and stinking. “If you don’t give me time to stretch and take a piss before I climb onto that devil horse again, I’ll make both sides of your face look equally ugly,” I mumbled, as he backed away from the entrance.

I had no idea how far we’d ridden after leaving Palinur behind. I had fallen asleep in the saddle, waked only long enough to break a drover’s nose when they threw me into the wagon bed. I’d thought they were going to put me in the coffin. I didn’t remember being stuffed into the tent.

Voushanti awaited me in an alder thicket frosted with new snow. Pale sunlight glittered through the crusted branches. “Just beyond these trees lies a party of His Grace’s retainers,” he said as I unfolded my stiff limbs like some great chick from too small an egg. “We’ll be traveling with them. Remember your orders. Keep to your pureblood practices. Once you’ve relieved yourself, follow me.”

“Voushanti!” I called after his departing back. “What of Brother Victor?”

He paused. “My lord yet has hope to extract some return for all our trouble to get him.”

I took that as good news. “Where are we going? What does the prince—?”

“South.” He vanished into the trees. A flurry of black-birds scattered and circled above the thicket.

I saw no sign of horses, wagon, monk, or coffin in the vicinity of the brown and white tent. But scents of woodsmoke, burnt porridge, and horses wafted through the leafless trees, along with the muted clatter and bustle of an encampment. My most urgent needs met, I followed Voushanti down the well-trod path into the brake.

The busy camp sprawled across a broad clearing. Soldiers moved among the horses, leading them to water, cinching saddle girths, and picking ice and stones from hooves, while servants collapsed tents, rolled blankets, and stuffed packs. One very large tent yet stood in the center of the trampled snow. The green and white colors of Evanore hung limp from its center pole, along with several other pennants of various colors.

Beside the large tent, a group of well-armed men and women encircled Voushanti, their craggy faces contrasting sharply with their jeweled rings and brooches, gold-etched sword hilts, and fur-lined cloaks. Evanori warlords—at least five of them among the small group—each a petty sovereign in his or her own right with bloodlines far older than purebloods, bound by oath to Caedmon’s line since the kingdom’s founding.

“…while he attends to his business,” the mardane was saying. He might have been a toad addressing a gathering of eagles. “Prince Bayard is not yet seated in Palinur. Our spies report he is paying calls on several noble Ardran houses before announcing his victory, while Harrower raiding parties spring from the brush like grouse before beaters…”

The lords seemed attentive, but not deferent. Voushanti was clearly not one of them. Though his manner and accent witnessed to his Evanori blood, his mardane’s rank was an Ardran grant, not Evanori inheritance. His authority was strictly Osriel’s.

“His Grace will see you at Ygil’s Moon. Do not disappoint him.” Such woe and ruin as Voushanti’s tone promised would have sent Magrog running from his throne of skulls.

The proud warlords dispersed slowly, eyes hooded, mumbling among themselves. A round-headed lord in a steel cap and tall boots glared at Voushanti as if to argue, only to think better of it. He tightened his mouth in disgust and turned his back sharply. Perhaps more warlords than Stearc of Erasku viewed Eodward’s youngest son as an abomination.

Two of the Evanori turned to intercept the man in the steel cap, thereby facing me straight on, not ten paces distant. A flood of pleasure warmed my veins, and I fought to keep from laughing outright, which was a wholly unreasonable reaction to encountering a warrior who would prefer me dead and his daughter who had betrayed me.

Elene controlled herself well. After one startled blink, she averted her gaze. But little more than a touch of her father’s arm drew Thane Stearc’s eye my way. The frown lines about his mouth and hawkish brow deepened. He, too, glanced away quickly.

Though a sword hung at her waist, Elene no longer stood as Stearc’s squire, but as a woman of Evanore, a descendant of warlords like these. Her wide-legged trousers were suitable for riding, her breasts unbound beneath her copper-colored shirt and fine-linked habergeon, her cropped bronze hair now grown long enough to twist in numerous tiny braids laid flat to her head. I might have been looking on the goddess Mother Samele herself, the exemplar of the earth’s health and strength. My hands ached to touch her cheeks, flushed with the cold, and stroke the hips that filled her trousers so delectably…

Great gods, I felt like a witless pup, after a month imprisoned, with no hopes to spare for pleasures of mind or body, and before that a novice vowed. Of a sudden my grievances with the woman seemed of no more substance than the frost vapors rising from the sunlit tents. Somehow I found myself willing to believe that she had acted out of devotion to her cause—at least while I stood so near that tantalizing flesh and bright spirit. So much had changed since I’d seen her last.

The man in the steel cap snapped orders to break down the large tent. Elene stood by as her father and Voushanti exchanged stiff courtesies. No love lost between those two men. Stearc’s arched nose flared as they spoke. When Voushanti moved on, Stearc began arguing with a bear-like man about whether their party should travel together or take separate, shorter roads to their strongholds. Elene joined in, her cinnamon eyes flashing. No demure maiden she.

As custom and protocol prescribed, no one spoke to me or acknowledged my presence with anything but sidewise glances. Only a pureblood or his contracted master could initiate interaction with ordinaries. Pureblood discipline required me to maintain that distance. After his pointed warnings, the mardane would surely be watching. And these two…I could give no one cause to suspect their divided loyalties. No matter their opinions of Osriel, I had no illusions that others of these fearsome folk conspired to preserve books and tools in preference to their duc and his gold mines.

I tore my attention from Elene and wandered through the rapidly dwindling camp, seeking any sign of Brother Victor. Cheered to discover the emptied coffin abandoned in the trees, I drifted toward the three wagons. One was packed with household goods, one with hay and grain sacks. A severe woman in a plain cloak was helping the older servants climb into the third wagon. Before I could sidle close enough to peer inside, the woman looked up—and did not drop her eyes. Her look of scorn near torched my cloak. Donning my own best disdain, I strolled on past her and her charges, hoping she cared more for Karish monks than purebloods. I’d have wagered my prick that poor, battered Brother Victor lay among the bags and bundles in that wagon bed.

I retreated and sat down on a fallen tree. Elene stood listening to a tall woman with iron-gray hair and cheekbones as angular as the crossguard on her sword. Happy for once to be ritually ignored, I stared at Elene and imagined and yearned until her rosy flush expanded to her neck and ears, and she yielded me a sidewise glance. Ah, if only we were back under that dolmen in the rain…

A dark-haired man bundled in a thick black cloak hurried out of the great tent, lugging a worn leather satchel. He caught sight of me at once. Of course, Gram would be here, too.

I winked and twiddled a finger at the sober secretary. Gram whipped his glance around the company until his gaze settled on Voushanti’s back. He raised his eyebrows and flashed me a grin, then ducked his head and moved on about his business.

I buried my grin in my hands. How fine to discover friends here. I’d no expectation of seeing anyone I knew ever again—save perhaps Brother Victor. Of a sudden I found myself anticipating the coming journey with excitement. Somehow I’d find a way to speak with them.

When Gram strode past her field of view, Elene scowled at his back. No softening of that enmity. For some perverse reason, that consideration cheered me even more.

By the time the cumbersome party moved out, some fifty of us altogether, the rare blue sky had skinned over with clouds, and snowflakes flurried like dandelion fluff. “Stay close, pureblood,” said Voushanti, as I tried to find the right combination of knee and hand, curses and cajoling to prevent my beastly mount from shedding me. “I’m charged to keep you healthy.”

The mardane moved into the vanguard beside the iron-gray woman, the lord in the steel cap, and Stearc. They scarce looked at him. Someday I would insist someone explain why Voushanti’s presence made a man’s bowels churn.

Elene rode two ranks behind, alongside two younger men who eyed Voushanti’s back with a mix of awe and terror. Over the course of the first hour, I maneuvered my balky mare to her side, close enough we could speak with little risk of being overheard. “May I ask where you are bound, mistress? ’Tis a wretched season to trade hearth fire and good company for a perilous road.”

“My father and I have business southward—a Karish school in which he takes an interest.” A glance my way, quickly controlled. “And then, as do all those loyal to the Duc of Evanore, we return home for Lord Osriel’s war-moot, the first he has summoned. We’re curious to learn if Evanore’s position of neutrality in this vile conflict is to change. Perhaps his pureblood advisor could enlighten us?”

I imagined Voushanti’s ears straining to hear my disobedience. I kept my eyes on his broad back. “Alas, I’ve no leave to discuss my master’s business. In truth, having been in my lord’s service only a single…unhappy…day, I’m not even sure of our destination, save that it be south—which seems to leave half of Ardra and all of Evanore a possibility.”

She bit her lip and bowed her head, which made me believe she knew of Luviar. “My sincerest apologies, sir. I’m not accustomed to pureblood company, or what is proper to ask. So often we can give offense…hurt, even…when none is intended.” Her voice shook a little. “I’d suppose you bound for Prince Osriel’s great fortress at Angor Nav or, perhaps, his smaller house at Renna.”

I nodded with as much hauteur as I could summon. “My life has changed dramatically of late, mistress, and I find life more pleasant when I forget unintended slights. You know, though we’ve not been formally introduced, you resemble a lad I once knew—a squire of marginal talents, though exceeding fair for a boy. I would not be surprised to see his position vacant.”

She kept her eyes on the road, snowflakes dusting her flushed countenance. “Indeed, sir, the portion of your face that I can see resembles that of a man I once knew—a monk of marginal piety and excessive interest in matters he had forsworn. I would not be surprised to see his habit uninhabited.”

“Thank all gods that men grow wiser as days pass.” I could smell her even in the cold…fennel and lavender and leather. But for the snow, one might have imagined us on a pleasure outing in happier times.

Impelled by dreary wisdom, I left Elene and dropped back to ride in the fourth rank for a while, sharing curses of weather and Harrowers with a new-bearded youth who rode as if soul bonded to his mount. The weather worsened by the hour, blowing snow and increasingly cold. We passed several villages burnt to ash. Other cots gaped open to the weather, perhaps one in five showing signs of habitation. In the distance, dark shapes—wolves or wild dogs—loped across the snow-covered fields, which did naught to soothe our unhappy horses.

Gram rode several ranks behind me, his cloak and hood bundled about him. At every stop I tried to draw him aside, hoping he might hint at what use the cabal would make of my grandfather’s story, but we were able to exchange only a few empty words. The warlords demanded his attendance. His bottomless well of facts about Navronne’s history fueled the lords’ never-ending arguments of politics and war. By evening, the rigors of the journey had sapped all conversation.

We sheltered that night in a burnt-out inn, its broken walls blocking the wind. I maneuvered a seat next to Elene as the company shared out hard bread and bean soup. “The boy and the Scholar,” I mumbled into my bread. “Safe?”

She bobbed her head over her soup.

“And the book?”

Elene turned to the iron-gray Thanea Zurina, who sat on her right. “No matter how difficult the journey, I’m happy my father chose to leave Palinur,” she confided. “When one sees both Temple priestesses and Karish practors deserting the place, one must think the gods themselves have given up on it. With so many clerics, the roads south should be safe enough for children and valuables!”

I smiled and drained my bowl. Thalassa had book, boy, and Scholar and was taking them south.

On the next morning, once we persuaded the horses to move out of their huddle, four of the seven lords split off and headed west on the Ardran high road, taking all the wagons and two-thirds of the soldiers. I had caught nary a glimpse of Brother Victor, but assumed he traveled with them. The rest of us, perhaps twenty in all, continued on the less-traveled way that led south past Gillarine toward Caedmon’s Bridge. We kept a slow, steady pace, stopping only to water the horses or pick ice from their hooves. Just after midday, one of our scouts reported a disciplined cadre of orange-blazed Harrowers bearing down on us, he said, like Magrog’s chariots of doom. We spurred our mounts and fled.

For a day and a night of driving snow and merciless cold, we forced our way southward across rolling, frost-clad barrens of dead fields and vineyards. Every time we believed we had shaken the pursuit and slowed to ease the strain on our mounts, scouts raced from the rear with the news that they had come up on us again. Fifty Harrowers, the men said, led by a squat, ugly man with a face very like a dog. Voushanti forbade me to go back with the scouts to confirm that he was Sila Diaglou’s henchman—one of Boreas’s executioners. The warlords were spoiling for a fight, but the lord in the steel cap agreed with Voushanti that Prince Osriel would wish neither his neutrality compromised nor his noble supporters slaughtered in a useless confrontation with lunatics.

The relentless pace and ferocious weather took a toll on all of us, but most especially Gram. The cold flayed him. Skin gray, his features like drawn wire, he rode with back bent and head dropped low to deflect the wind. At noontide on the third day of our flight, when we stopped in a snow-drowned glen and scattered grain for the beasts, he clutched his mount’s mane and whispered hoarsely that he’d best remain where he was unless Prince Osriel’s pureblood could magically transport him from the saddle and back into it again. Stearc pressed him to drink some medicament from an amber flask, but he waved it away. “I’d rather have my wits,” he croaked. “I can hold until we find shelter. All the way home if need be.”

We had little prospect of shelter. The towns of Cressius and Braden had refused to open their gates to us. No village had defenses enough to withstand a Harrower assault while we slept. Everyone was exhausted—save perhaps Thanea Zurina—and we’d had three horses pull up lame that morning. I feared for Gram’s life if we didn’t ease up. And if the Harrowers took Stearc, Elene, and Gram—saints forbid—what would become of the lighthouse cabal or their hopes of appeal to the Danae? Not an hour later, a solution presented itself on the horizon.

“We divide our forces,” I said, sketching a map in the snow. “While a few of us lure our pursuers into Mellune Forest, most will remain out of sight at the forest boundary. There’s good cover and Lord Voushanti is very skilled at…hiding…people for short periods of time. Once we’ve got the Harrowers into the wood, the rest of you can continue on the road south at a more reasonable pace…stay alive…”

Even Aurellia’s imperial road builders had declared Mellune Forest impassable. A snarled swath of beeches, pines, and scrub, inhospitable Mellune traversed a jagged ridge that split Ardra into the wine-growing plateaus of the west and the dry, rock-strewn grazing lands to the east. Its unstable landforms, altered by frequent avalanches and raging floods, provided no reliable markers for guides. Except, perhaps, for a Cartamandua.

Using my bent to devise a route, I could divert and delay our pursuers, keep them on a short leash while getting them thoroughly lost in the wood. After a suitable time, I would abandon them to find their own way out of trackless Mellune, and lead my companions off to rejoin our company for the remainder of our journey to Evanore.

I thought Voushanti would split his hauberk. “You’ve no leave to go off on your own,” he snapped, when I stopped to take a breath. “Prince Osriel—”

“—would not wish Thanea Zurina, Thane Stearc, or Thane Gar’Enov’s only son and heir to fall captive to Harrowers,” said Gram hoarsely. “Will you tell us that a single pureblood has more value to the Duc of Evanore than three of his warlords? If so, then offer us a better plan. Even if you leave me to rot at the roadside as you ought”—scarlet spots stained the poor fellow’s pale cheeks—“you’ll be but fourteen men and two women against fifty. And the scouts say these are no rabble, but Sila Diaglou’s disciplined fighters.”

The mardane had no answer. The snow kicked up by the onrushing Harrowers swirled on the stormy horizon. Unwilling to allow me off on my own, Voushanti insisted on accompanying me.

Faster than a frog could take a fly, I was kneeling in the snow, pressing my hands to the frozen earth, and releasing magic through my fingers to seek out the beginnings of our route. When the guide thread took clear shape in my head, I sat back on my heels and looked up at Gram and Voushanti standing over me.

“I don’t like this, pureblood,” said Voushanti. His wide hands flexed and fisted. The red core of his mutilated eye pulsed like coals. A red crease at the corner of his mouth looked like blood. “Only fools split their forces.”

“Complain to Prince Osriel,” I said. “I won’t see these people—his people—run to ground.”

The mardane stomped away toward the gully where Stearc, Elene, and the rest had taken cover. His three warriors awaited Voushanti and me at the forest boundary. Only the secretary lagged behind.

“We’ll see you in six days at Gillarine,” said Gram. He offered me his hand, feverishly hot, and steadied me as I got to my feet. “Unless…Perhaps the gods have sent you this opportunity. With your skills and the weather to hide you, you could take your own road at the end and stay free of the Bastard. Osriel treads perilous paths, Valen. No one knows his plans or the extent of his power.”

“I’ve given my oath not to run,” I said. “It was necessary; Gildas can tell you. But my soul has acquired stains enough all these years without my sitting on Magrog’s lap. So you can be sure the Bastard will have little good of me. Godspeed, Gram. Teneamus.”

“Teneamus. I’ll not forget this, my friend.” He turned his back and trudged slowly toward the gully, his shoulders racked with coughing. Wind and snow and failing light erased his footsteps as if by a sorcerer’s hand. I shivered and headed into the trackless wood.

Chapter 31

“Up with you, pureblood. The hounds are baying. No time for sleep.” The hand on my shoulder shook me so hard, the blanket slipped off my head. Bitter cold bit my cheeks and plumed my breath as I squinted into the night. Trees. Snow. Unending trees and snow.

“Leave off the bone rattling, Mardane,” I said, groaning. “As if a man could sleep with his blood frozen and his backside raw…”…and his hipbones throbbing from too long astride, and his stomach devouring his liver for want of a meal not eaten on the run, and his mind a roiling backwash of questions, mysteries, and anxieties that neither misery nor exhaustion could quiet. Not the least of which mysteries was how to shake the fiendish Harrowers, now the time had come to leave them behind. We just couldn’t seem to move fast enough.

When I had suggested this diversion scheme, I never expected it would mean six god-cursed days of lacerating briar tangles, ice-coated avalanche snarls, unending hours in the saddle, no fire, no sleep, no respite. We’d had to keep our pursuers close, but not too close. If we got so far ahead as to discourage them, or they realized too soon that we had split our party, they might double back on their tracks to escape the forest and hunt down the others. Gram. Elene. Stearc. Every hour I could give them was a boon. But next time I had such an idea, I would stuff a boot in my mouth.

“We can’t wait for Nestor.” Voushanti’s proffered hand hauled me to my feet. “The orange-heads are already coming up the gorge. Maggot-ridden halfwits must have legs like mountain goats. I’ve sent the last of the horses downslope, but that won’t confuse them long. So let’s make an end to this. Lead us out of this tangle and onto high ground, where these two and I can take them on, and you can run like hell’s own messenger to join the others.”

Voushanti’s temper sounded far more equitable than my own. The crash of brush, grunt of horses, and shouts of oncoming Harrowers bounced through the darkness from tree to tree from every direction at once, clawing at my already shredded nerves.

Philo, one of our three companions, snatched up my blanket and stowed it in a rucksack before I could wipe the sludge of unsleep from my eyes. The missing Nestor had gone in search of water to refill our depleted flasks, as we could not afford a fire to melt the snow. The third warrior, Melkire, stripped weapons and food packets from our abandoned saddlepacks and stuffed them in our belts, rucksacks, and pockets. We’d ridden our horses to frozen, quivering uselessness. Now we were afoot. I could only pray our pursuers fared no better. Deunor’s fire, there were so many of them.

I dropped to my knees and scraped away crusted snow until I could touch my palms to the forest floor and heed only the sounds of Mellune: the snap of frost-cracked limbs, the sough of overburdened pine fronds giving up their load of snow, the beating hearts of burrowers. Delving deep, I inhaled the faint aroma of the earth warmed by my hands, tasting pine resin and galled oak, dirt and mold on my tongue. As magic flowed from fingers through earth, my mind reached south and west through rotting trees and frozen soil, shearing through buried stone and dense thorn thickets, seeking a path to Gillarine’s valley and the wide River Kay that fed it. Tell me the way, I said as I examined the landscape unfolding in my head. Reveal your paths.

Perhaps it was the unaccustomed practice, or the fact that I no longer hoarded magic against the demands of the doulon, but my route finding had grown more assured over the past days. Or perhaps the need to accomplish something of worth in my life had at last forced me to fully accept the bent of my blood, no matter its connection to my parents. Or perhaps it was only that Mellune Forest and I had become intimate acquaintances.

The grim woodland straggled straight down the spine of Ardra, grown up in thin, sour land, broken by sills and ridges of limestone, its trails choked with briars and snake-vine since ill weather and disease had all but exterminated its game. Deadfalls, snarls, sinkholes, and gullies had diverted us constantly, making my carefully laid course of southward-spiraling circles resemble the route of a headless chicken. Our purpose was delay and confusion, but for our pursuers, not ourselves. I prayed I could get us out before we starved.

The route took shape in mind and body, a gray pattern of fading game trails, a dry watercourse, a logger’s track, long abandoned. High ground, Voushanti wanted. So I shifted the thread slightly here and there, searching for a more elevated way.

Beyond the southern boundaries of Mellune the land opened into the rocky pastures of upper Ardra. A single modest hill, crowned by a scarp, and a few scattered protrusions of dense black rock presented the only defensible positions. The mountain drainages—the upland valleys like the vale of the Kay where Gillarine lay—would give us much better cover, but the inexhaustible Harrowers would be stripping our bones before we made it so far afoot.

“Come on,” I said, scrambling to my feet.

Snapping branches and spitting snow, I broke through a wall of snow-laden bracken to find the narrow streambed that would lead us up a seamed ridge, heading the direction my gut named southwest. A chorus of terrified whinnies said the pursuit had discovered our blown horses.

The blizzard had abated on our third day in the forest, which worsened the cold, but lent us more light. Above the canopy of trees the stars shone clear and bitter, providing illumination enough to reflect on open snow and depositing inky shadows under trees and scrub.

An hour along the way, my purposeful spiral took us along the bank of a pond. There we found the signs of a Harrower camp and all that was left of Nestor. The thirsty fool must have walked right into their hands. The Harrowers had shredded his flesh and staked him to the earth as they had Boreas. I blessed all gods I had not eaten that night. Nestor’s mouth had been packed with dirt to silence his cries as he bled and died.

“We leave him lie,” said Voushanti harshly, snatching up Nestor’s waterskins that lay abandoned in a willow thicket. His boots and weapons were missing. “We’ve no strength to spare and no time. Move out, pureblood.”

Closing my eyes, I sought my guide thread, happy I did not need to touch the ground here. “This way,” I said and moved westerly.

Philo joined me, whispering the Karish prayers for the dead. Voushanti followed, mumbling curses with the passion of a lover scorned. But Melkire dropped to his knees beside the savaged body. I held up to wait for him, then blurted a malediction as the warrior dipped his thumb in Nestor’s blood and marked a spiraled circle on his own forehead.

“What the devil are you doing?” I said, anger and disgust raising my bile. The Harrowers had licked Boreas’s blood from their fingers.

“Nestor is a son of Evanore,” said Melkire, his eyes hard and fierce in the starlight. “The mark binds my memory, so that I can bring a full account of his deeds and his end to his family.”

I walked on. I had to find them a place to make a stand.

“I’ve not heard an untoward sound for an hour,” said Philo, passing Voushanti a waterskin. We had climbed to the brink of a limestone scarp to rest and drink. “We should get away from here and make camp, else we’ll not be able to move by morning.”

“No,” I whispered, plastering myself to the ground and peering over the edge of the scarp into bottomless darkness. The creeping up my back felt like an army of spiders. “They’re still coming. I need to understand how they can stay so close on our trail in the night.” I had my bent to guide me, but how could the Harrowers determine which crisscrossing trail of churned snow we had trod the most recently?

Voushanti hushed the two young warriors and wormed up beside me. “I sense them, too.”

Before very long, yellow light blazed from the wood—a torch, I thought as it moved through the trees. But the wind neither shook nor snuffed it. The silent procession passed below us like wraiths. Perhaps forty men. Fewer horses. They had muted their harness with rags. Only their tread in the snow and the occasional whuffle of a beast marked their passage.

Their leader bore the light—a gleaming ball of piss-yellow brilliance that emanated directly from his hand. And as he walked, he held one hand in front of him, fingers stiffly spread, and he turned his head from side to side, sniffing, his nostrils flared wide like some great hound. Sorcery. I knew it. As he vanished into the thicker trees, a gust of wind swept down the scarp to flutter his cloak—worn purple velvet with a dagged hem. The dog-faced man had tasted Boreas’s blood, watched the priestess lash Gildas’s back, and stood on the fortress walls with Sila Diaglou as Abbot Luviar was gutted. I prayed he would rot in this demon wood.

“Come on,” I said through gritted teeth. “We need to move faster. That one might have other skills.” He was Sila Diaglou’s companion in slaughter, either a pureblood or a mixed-blood mage powerful enough to create light in this overwhelming night.

Though purebloods were unmatched in native talent for sorcery by virtue of their untainted Aurellian descent, any ordinary with a trace of Aurellian blood carried potential for the bent—as did Prince Osriel by virtue of his pureblood mother. Most mixed-bloods became market tricksters, potion sellers, or alley witches, like old Salamonde, who had taught me the doulon spell. Registry breeding laws had assured that little talent remained outside pureblood families, but always a few took their talents seriously, training and testing with others of their kind, calling themselves mages. Purebloods disdained them, of course, and named mageworks trickery. Prince Osriel had already taught me elsewise.

Another day. Another night. The rapacious cold cracked bone and spirit, dulled the mind, and transformed limbs and heart to lead. Using my aching hips and legs to break a trail through thigh-deep snow, laced with broken tree limbs and frozen bracken, became purest misery. Sticks snagged clothes and flesh. Pits or sinkholes beneath the crusted snow left me floundering on my face at every other step. The sweat of my exertions froze beneath my layered garments.

I clung to the gray guide thread in my mind, checked and rechecked it, pouring magic into each test to be sure I followed true. My companions dragged me up when I fell, brushed me off, and trod carefully in my steps. We had to lose these devils, else they would follow us to Gillarine. Stearc’s clever choice of a rendezvous now seemed incalculably stupid.

We pushed across a broad meadow. It troubled me to find a clearing where my instincts said none should be, yet I dared not stop to assay another trial of magic, lest I freeze there in the open. It might have been a single hour or ten sunless days that we traversed that meadow.

My head swam with sleepless confusion, my frozen flesh no longer able to feel the pull of north or south. Southwesterly should take us higher, so that we would emerge, a day or so from now, atop Pilcher’s Hill where Voushanti could mount a defense. Yet every instinct cried that safety lay downward. And downward did not feel like southwest. Thoroughly muddled, I fell to my knees at the bottom of a long slope and scrabbled in the snow.

“Where are we?” gasped Voushanti, even his leathern toughness on the verge of shredding. “We’ll have no feet to stand on or hands to wield a sword, if you don’t find us a place to make a fight.”

“Just need to find the blasted hill. This terrain is all wrong.”

My fingers might have been wooden clubs for all I could feel of them when I touched earth. I poured magic from my core but sensed nothing of the land. Which way?

An owl screeched from atop a spindly pine. I rubbed my frozen hands together. Breathed on them. Stuffed them under my arms, trying to warm them enough so they could feel. Another shriek and a spread of dark wings drew my eye to the treetops. And there, shining in yellow-white splendor between the branches, hung Escalor, the guide star. North and south settled into their proper positions in my head.

“Mother Samele’s tits!” Sitting back on my heels, I laughed aloud at ignorant fools and their earnest blindness.

“Spirits of night, lunatic, will you be quiet?” Voushanti would have throttled me if he’d not been doubled up by a spreading beech, his lungs wheezing like a smith’s bellows. “Never knew a man could move so fast in such cursed weather and still have breath to cackle like a gamecock.”

I pressed my wet, filthy sleeve across my mouth to contain the hilarity that simple sense could not. Bound up in pureblood sorcery and earth-borne mystery, it had never crossed my mind to look up for guidance. The owl’s dark wingspan ruffled against the starry night.

As I pleaded with my aching legs to unbend and bear my weight again, I watched the kindly bird preening. Thus I caught the glimmer of sapphire brilliance in the leafless branches of a giant beech nearby. I held breath and dared not blink. From the snarl of twigs and branches, an arm scribed with blue fire reached out to host the wing-spread owl’s claws for a few heartbeats before the bird took flight. My heart came near stopping.

Twice in the past few days I’d believed us irretrievably blocked, facing the choice to be overrun by our pursuers or reverse course and meet them head-on. In both instances escape had come by seeming chance. A falling rock, dislodged by some scuttering animal, had exposed a stairlike descent of an impossibly sheer scarp. A bolting fox had revealed an unlikely passage through an avalanche slide the size of half a mountain. Now I wondered. Chance had never been my ally.

We could not linger. But I touched the earth once more and sent my whispered gratitude into the roots and rock, hoping that the one who aided us would hear. Would he have a dragon scribed on his face? Were his eyes the color of autumn aspen? Was that arm the same that had offered me refuge in an aspen grove as I fled Gillarine? Earth’s Mother, how I longed to know.

Of course, the Danae despised humankind. How could they not, when the Harrowers’ grotesque rites poisoned them? Yes, they had driven my grandfather mad, but he had stolen something precious from them. Danae were the essence of magic, the gift of beauty and grace below heaven. Even angels brought down the god’s righteous fury on sinners.

We ran. Onward. Downward. Slipping and sliding on wooded banks. The owl arrowed southward ahead of us, as if scribing the path across inked vellum, and my fatigued mind gratefully relinquished the guide thread it had gripped for eight unrelenting days.

Soon the trees thinned, and a flat wilderness of mottled white spread out before us. Darker patches marred the starlit landscape as if unseen trees cast shadows on the snow. Clouds burgeoned behind the ridge we’d just descended, hiding Escalor and her companion stars. Wind gusts brought flakes drifting from the heights. We had to hurry. If any of our pursuers were yet mounted, flat ground would be our end.

The owl glided in a circle above our heads, then soared serenely toward the heart of the wilderness. Instinct affirmed that refuge was near, though perhaps not so directly across the flats.

“This way,” I said to the three who had just arrived at my elbow heaving and coughing, their collected breath enfolding us in fog. I pointed to the wing-spread owl. “She’ll lead us to safety.”

I slid down the last few quercae of the steep embankment and struck out across the flats. In our weakened condition, a shorter distance likely outweighed the increased danger of exposure. Voushanti and the others trudged after, well behind me.

Fifty paces into the wilderness, I heard…or perhaps only felt…an unsettling noise beneath my feet. Instinct screamed warning. I motioned the others to halt so my dulled senses might register the sound, and I cupped my lifeless fingers over my nose and mouth, breathing out my last warmth to thaw my nostrils. Then I inhaled slowly, felt, tasted, and listened, as my father and grandfather had tried to teach me when I was small.

Water. Mud. Rot.

Appalled, I dropped to my knees and speared my hands through the snow and into the cold muck that lay just below. Dead trees. Rotted marsh grass. Burrowed frogs, cold and still. Old droppings and tufts of animal hair caught on buried willows. A harper’s distant song…Ever so faintly, the sounds, the smells, and the land’s retained memory seeped through the winter’s blanket. And nowhere did I find my guide thread. Fool! Blasted mindless idiot!

Dulled with cold and yearning for finer magic, I had forsaken my own path to follow the owl. And the Danae, who had no use for humankind, had brought us here.

“Stop! Go back!” I shouted hoarsely, peering at the treacherous landscape through the darkening night. I knew exactly where we were. How could my sense of distance be so far askew? It seemed impossible we could be so far south, but I had traveled here before. “Step not one quat outside our tracks. This is bogland.”

“What of you?” shouted Voushanti, wind blunting the edges of his words. “We have ropes—”

“I’ll be all right. Go around, stay on the side slope, head straight southward…that way. Only two quellae to Gillarine. Hurry!”

Thank all gods, the three were in no mind to argue. Voushanti’s beard and eyebrows were frosted pure white as if he had aged fifty years in an hour, and Philo and Melkire might have been but four glazed eyes in unfleshed skulls. They were in no state to fight anyone.

I watched until they had made it back to solid ground safely and vanished in the thickening snowfall. Then I shoved magic through my buried fingers and sought a path deeper into the bog. The trickster owl had vanished, leaving me no choice but to twist its vicious cleverness to my own purpose.

The route fixed firmly in my mind, I wiped my frozen, muddy hands, bundled them in my cloak, and set out across the snow-draped fens. The falling snow would blur my footsteps and mask the inadequacies of my spellworking long enough to close the trap—a snare I believed had been set for every human abroad this night, pursuers and pursued.

An irregular mound, well into the heart of the bogland, provided enough substance and variety for my purposes: a leafless willow, a sheep’s leg bone, a rotted branch, a charred stick. I structured two spells, one to serve deception, one to serve fear. Then I waited, stomping my sore feet and flapping my aching arms to keep my blood moving. Dawn was near—as much of it as I was like to see with the weather closing in.

As the moments slid by in abject silence, fear nagged that I had miscalculated yet again. I could scarce muster the strength to shake the clinging snow from my cloak. While I became another stupid beast rotting in the bog, the Harrowers would follow Voushanti straight to my friends.

“Aaaagh!” I yelled in inarticulate fury, yanking my hair to force blood to my head. “Come find me! Any of you…come do what you will! Show me your face if you dare!”

My grandfather had warned me. Such torment as the Danae had wrought on him displayed a cruelty colder than this cursed winter. So whence came my sentimental folly that because they were beautiful and magical and caused my knees to grow weak with unfounded yearning, they had a benevolent interest in me? Perhaps the one writ with dragons had invited me into the aspen grove the better to destroy my mind.

Anger kept me living. I shivered and coughed and honed my spells, determined they would be sufficient to end this wretched journey.

They came in the purple gloom that passed for sunrise. Harrowers flowed over the ridge like a tidal surge, cries hoarse with triumph and fury when they spotted me in the open. I noted with grim satisfaction that they had dropped at least a quarter of their numbers since I’d seen them last. At their head rode the dog-faced man, his orange scarf flying, the glow of his hands like a bilious sun leading their way.

I fell to my knees and fed magic into my mound of sticks and bones, recalling the appearance of my departed companions to shape the illusions of harried travelers, stopped to succor a fallen comrade.

The yowling Harrowers swept onto the flats without pause, and even the shouts of the first to flounder did not slow the rest. When the yellow glow failed—snuffed by mud or fear—their triumph turned to dismay.

Weary and mind-numbed, they did not think to stay calm and press through the muck to seek firmer ground. Rather, weighed down with mail coats and supply sacks and weapons, burdened with legends of bogwights and sucking ponds and trickster Danae, they felt their feet sinking and their clothes waterlogged, and they panicked, as I had gambled they would. I touched the charred stick and set wispy tendrils of flame adrift from my hand until the cold numbed my fingers and I could conjure no more of them. The gloomy landscape was dotted with winking flames, and the men in the bog started screaming.

Half of the Harrowers killed each other, trying to use their comrades for stepping-stones. Others drowned quickly, pulled down by panicked horses or tangled in dead vines and rotted trees swept down from the mountains in long-ago floods. Some wandered, crying for help in the neck-deep mud, climbing on hillocks only to have them sink under their weight. After a while I could only hear them, for the blizzard rose in full fury, and human eyes could not penetrate past the length of my arm. The cold and the mud would finish them. The memory of Luviar butchered, of Nestor and Boreas condemned to slow agony, of tar-clogged wells and villages burned to ash, crushed what glimmers of mercy blossomed in my soul. These gatzi would have ridden my friends to ground.

I huddled on my islet in the center of the bogland, a driftwood club ready should one of the lost find his way to me. Only when my ears assured me that neither man nor beast roamed the upland banks did I press my hands into the muck to seek the path back to firm ground.

I jerked them right out again, then bent double and retched bile until stomach, chest, and throat were raw. The terrors of dying men and beasts permeated the pools and hillocks, and I could not find my way. I sank to the ground, buried my face in my frozen cloak, and begged the earth’s forgiveness for the horror I had wrought.

Chapter 32

Valen fiend heart! The mocking cry stung like a tutor’s rod on cold knuckles. Cold…what wasn’t cold? The world, all life, and certainly every part of me was frozen. No one ever listened when I said how I hated the cold.

I trudged onward. One step. Then a rest. Another step. Hip-high drifts covered the path that would take me away from the treacherous bog. Perhaps the insulting name, a relic from childhood, etched itself so vividly in my imagination because I longed so fiercely to believe that another living person existed in this wintry desolation.

Fiend heart… Soon I’d be imagining I heard iron skull or lead wit or gatzi prick, though the damnable girl would lob that last stone only outside adults’ hearing. I smiled…more of a grimace, I imagined, as I could not feel my face. Lassa, please be real.

My sister had once enspelled a connection between her favorite insults and my ears, so I would never fail to hear them. I’d never learned the skill, but on one precious occasion, I had managed to reverse her spell and bind one of mine to her. “Toad witch,” I mumbled into the folds of my cloak for the fiftieth time on this dreadful afternoon. If she were within ten quellae, she would hear.

“Magnus! Magnus Valentia!”

“Brother Valen!”

I paused and surveyed the gloomy distance. No one in sight. I pulled my hood tighter and fretted that these faint voices, too, were naught but wishing dreams.

Hellish dreams of mud and ice and suffocation had clung to me like draggle weed as I had crawled out of the bog hours and hours ago, too tired and too afraid to walk, unable to bear another route seeking lest I buckle under the weight of guilt and horror. That I managed to reach solid earth, that I was not drowned or dead, astonished me. I had dug a snow cave to wait out the blizzard and had drifted in and out of sleep, dreaming of long limbs marked with blue sigils embracing me, choking me, setting me afire.

The wind mourned over the frozen fens. Did beasts feel this way after emerging from their winter sleep, as if ice crystals flowed in their veins? I feared the oncoming night. Find me, someone. Please. I hate the cold.

Lights moved around the hillside toward me. Torches. Spits of gold against a sky the color of ripe blueberries. I sank to the ground, closed my eyes, and rested my back against a boulder. Let someone else break the path through the drifts. Friend or enemy, wraith or bogwight, I didn’t care.

“Gracious Mother, Valen, what have you done this time?” My breathless sister’s painted eyes swam huge and worried from her fur-lined hood. “This Voushanti said you were facing fifty Harrowers alone in a bog, and that you’d saved Stearc and Gram and these Evanori lords. But they couldn’t find you in the storm. I called and called—No one believed when I claimed to hear you, but I knew. How is it you’re not frozen dead, fiend heart?”

“B-been thinking w-warm thoughts of you, serena toad witch. Whatever are you doing in the neighborhood? Did you bring them my boo—?”

She hissed, pressed her hot hand on my lips, and jerked her head backward. Several shapeless figures approached from behind her, one leading a donkey.

“Watch your tongue, Valen. And I do mean that. The answer is yes.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Listen carefully: I came to continue my negotiations over new sheep pastures for the Temple and was shocked to discover the shambles. Do you understand?”

“Shambles?” I croaked, wretchedly confused.

But she had squeezed her painted eyes shut, and her words kept flowing, so softly no one but I could have heard them. “Who or what is this Voushanti? I See naught but death about him—blood and fire and torment. He says he’s taking you to Evanore as soon as the weather breaks. Bound to the Bastard…Holy Mother, Valen, I cannot help you more. I must return to Palinur immediately. With Luviar lost, Victor captive, and what’s happened here, the lighthouse may depend on my office.”

The aura of her divination tickled my spine, as the newcomers joined us, their faces taking recognizable shape in dark wrappings. Indeed, Voushanti brought an ill odor with him everywhere. But I was more confused about her passing hints. “Lassa, I’ll be all right, if I c-can just get warm. But what shambles—?”

“Silos!” She snapped, jumping to her feet. “He needs hot wine! And get a mask on him before I report him to the Registry. Good monk, bring your linens. No diviner is needed to see to the pitiful whiner. Lord Voushanti, take up your charge, though even my scoundrel brother is unlikely to run today.” Excessive sisterly sentiment would never burden Thalassa.

Voushanti loomed over me like a frost giant, but he said naught as the others ministered to me. A somber Silos took Thalassa’s place and offered me a steaming wineskin. My fingers couldn’t grasp the leather, so he poured the stuff down my raw throat. O, great Mother Samele, grant my glorious sister a place at your side! Silos’s masked face drew up in disapproval as I hooked my elbow about his, preventing him from removing the skin until it was half empty. “Careful, plebeiu. You cause everyone trouble when you’re out of your head. Have you a mask with you?”

He pulled the half mask of purple silk from the pocket I indicated and slipped it on me. Cold, wet…it felt like fish skin.

Thalassa threw a blessedly dry cloak about my shoulders as Brother Anselm, the piebald lay brother from the Gillarine infirmary, examined my hands and feet. I despaired of ever being warm, shivering uncontrollably as he marveled that I showed no signs of true frostbite after crawling in the snow for most of a day. Voushanti refused to consider a fire, though I assured him that the dog-faced man and his Harrowers were no longer a threat. I could not bring myself to tell him why.

They insisted I ride Brother Anselm’s bony donkey back to the abbey. As the monk led the plodding beast along the embankment, I looked out on the flats—still and silent, the horrors of the morning hidden beneath the mantle of fresh snow. My sister walked alongside me, and her gaze followed mine. “What happened out there, Valen?”

I shook my head and shuddered. “Just don’t walk there, Lassa. Don’t ever.”

“When did they strike?” I said.

Brother Anselm, the donkey, and I slogged up the last slight rise between us and Gillarine. I had dismounted the balky ass. Walking eased my stiffness and kept the blood flowing in my hands and feet. Save for the marrow-deep chill and a general weariness, I’d come out of the day’s events astonishingly well. But all relief had fled when the shy assistant infirmarian at last explained Thalassa’s references to “shambles.”

“’Twas on Saint Eldred’s Night, Brother Valen. You were not a fortnight gone from here. Some hundred or more raiders, both Moriangi and Harrowers, come twixt Matins and Lauds. Their fire arrows and torches took the scriptorium first. Then the church. Then the rest.”

“Great Iero’s mercy!” We had reached the top of the little rise, and the sight took my breath. The windows of the abbey church, whose brilliance in sun and candlelight had spoken of angels’ wings, gaped black as hell’s maw; the groins and buttresses mimed the naked ribs of a skeleton. The wooden buildings—infirmary, brewhouse, stables—had vanished, their remains hidden beneath a pall of gray snow. Gillarine Abbey stood broken and dark.

“We were blessed most walls were stone.”

But the slate roofs had fallen when the supporting timbers burned—a pureblood firemaster attached to the Moriangi raiders would have seen to that—smashing at least a third of the inner courts to jagged ruin. Only the gatehouse and walls stood unmarred. The damnable cowards had marched straight through the sanctuary gate to wreak their holocaust.

“What of the brothers, Anselm? By the One God…” So many good men lived here: the kindly, skilled infirmarian, Robierre; garrulous Cadeus the porter; old Nunius, who reveled in holy minutiae…

“Eleven passed to Iero’s heaven on Saint Eldred’s Night, three succumbed to injuries since then, and five more fell to lung fever—Abelard and Nunius, the eldest and weakest of us who breathed too much smoke or bent to the cold. Dear Brother Robierre died saving poor Marcus from the fire. With the ground so hard frozen and neither hands nor time to spare for digging, we’ve had to lay them in the cellars.”

“Ah, Brother…” The physical ruin paled beside such a loss. What words could express sorrow enough? Neither sympathy nor helpless anger could repair this wound or ease the future it boded. The survivors’ trials were only begun. They would yet have more than twenty to feed and clothe. “What of your stores? And, blessed saints, what did they do to the orchard?” The trees still standing looked leprous, not burned, bark hanging in rags, trunks gouged and seeping, branches broken. More than half had fallen, bare roots frosted like nests of white snakes.

“The undercrofts were gutted for the most. Naught burns like spilled oil and dry grain. We’ve a few bales of wool left, though smoked and charred, and Brother Jerome, Iero welcome his cook’s soul, fell to a Morian blade defending his last root cellar. But the orchard now”—the lay brother’s wide face crumpled like an old rag—“that weren’t the soldiers. No man, but only the One God himself sent us that trial. A root rot, Brother Gardener said, that spread through the trees at the same time the murrain come to the sheepfold. It’s the sickness in the world, as Father Abbot so often warned of, come to Gillarine at last…and now we’ve heard tidings of his own passing.”

Anselm’s stolid presence faltered but did not break. His gaitered sandals crunched the snow, and he encouraged the tired donkey with a soft pat and an assertive tug on the lead.

“Prior Nemesio has taken us well in hand. And the good God grants us fortitude. To share the trials of his poorest in this land must surely bring us grace. A blessing we’ve none with your appetite to feed.” He chuckled softly, then sighed. “We could use a cheerful story adventure as you’re wont to tell, though. We rejoice that our brothers live with the saints, and we know that Iero will give us all we need, do we but ask, but truly we feel a dreadful sadness come upon us with this untimely winter.”

Sadness. Yes. More than the failing light and ruined buildings. More than so many good men dead. Gods grant you peace and care, good Robierre, as you gave so many, and Jerome, may you feast at the god’s own table. A pervasive sorrow held the abbey in its grip, a grieving in the stones and earth that felt as if the sun would never relieve this falling night. The thick dry cloak Thalassa had given me felt thin as gossamer.

As Anselm and I led the donkey across the field toward the gatehouse, the shy lay brother continued his stories of the raid and its aftermath. I’d never heard so many words from the infirmarian’s assistant in all the weeks I’d lived at Gillarine. Perhaps trials did bring out new strengths in us.

Behind us, on the road that stretched northward toward Elanus and Palinur, Thalassa, her faithful Silos, and her five temple guards had vanished into the darkening forest, determined to reach Elanus before nightfall. My sister’s parting kiss yet burned on my forehead. A kiss from Thalassa. She must believe I was going to die in Evanore. Unfortunately, I could not ease her concern. What use would the Bastard find for a mind-dead former doulon slave?

“Thank you for rescuing me yet again,” I’d said after she yanked my head down and planted that unexpected kiss. Then I’d stooped to whisper in her ear, “Teneamus.”

I’d never seen her smile like that. Genuine. Pleased. Sad. “Hold on to your soul, little brother,” she’d said as she mounted her palfrey. “Be well.”

“I’d be happy enough with warm, Sinduria serena.”

She’d rolled her eyes and ridden away. I was happy she hadn’t told me whether I would ever see her again.

“I’ll put old Dob to shelter; then we’ll find you a bed and a bite,” said Anselm as we slogged through the gatehouse tunnel. A snarl of thick ropes and harness protruded from the drifted snow, and the wooden gates lay twisted from their hinges. “I needs must ask Father Prior if you’re to be housed in the dorter—which is now moved to the abbot’s house as it’s got a roof—or in the guesthouse. That new lord’s come today is most forbidding, I’ll say.” He nodded at Voushanti’s retreating back. The mardane had hurried off ahead of us to see where Philo and Melkire were bedded down. “Some folk I knew as a lad would call him marked of the Adversary. You’ve not renounced your vows, have you, lad, or been dispensed from them?”

“Just taken on new ones, Brother,” I said, feeling an unexpected heat in my cheeks. “Lord Voushanti is my new master’s proxy.”

We trudged through the Porter’s Gate and into the trampled gardens in front of the dark church. Anselm frowned. “So you’ll to the guesthouse, then. We’ve a fire laid. And you’ll need dry clothes. Secular garb. You take a good rest tonight, and I’ll put a flea in Father Prior’s ear to ask if Lord Stearc might have left some things would come near fitting you. I’ll send a posset as well, to stave off chills and damage from frostbite. Not so excellent as Brother Badger would have made for you, of course.”

Summoning a smile, I clapped him on the shoulder in thanks.

Once left alone, the sad emptiness of the abbey gripped my spirit sorely. Despite the cold, I lingered in the familiar paths and courts. To rush toward fire and food seemed somehow lacking in respect. So, rather than taking the straighter way to the guesthouse, I wandered past the church into the north cloister walk and looked out on the cloister garth—the abbey’s heart.

Rubble littered the square, the angular bulk of fallen cornices and corbels bulging awkwardly beneath the snow, alongside the birdcage shape of Saint Gillare’s shrine. Though every building showed damage, the primary target of the raid was obvious. The walls of the abbey library and scriptorium had collapsed completely, crushing the eastern cloister walk. Naught was left but heaps of scorched stones and charred beams. The chapter house on one side and the monks’ dorter on the other gaped open on the sides that had adjoined the library. Both structures were gutted shells. Of the jewel-like chapter-house windows, depicting Eodward and Caedmon, only one soot-marked pane remained, bearing the outline of an upraised hand.

So what had become of the magical lighthouse and its tools and books and seeds, gathered to sustain humankind past these dark times? Its creators had surely built it to endure through end-times chaos and destruction. Was this raid Bayard’s vengeance for the abbey’s sheltering Perryn? Or was this Sila Diaglou’s handiwork? The lighthouse would be anathema to her, a promise to undo the chaos she worked for. I thought back to her savage attack on Gildas…a ploy to “draw out” her enemies…and Luviar and Stearc and Gram running for the gate. Yes, she knew of the lighthouse and its creators.

Firelight flickered in the far corner of the cloister, where the great hearth of the calefactory was required to remain lit until Saint Mathilde’s Day. As I rested my back on a slender column, a handbell broke the oppressive silence, ten measured rings calling the monks to the Hours, a thin, strident summoning compared to the sonorous richness of the bronze bells fallen from the belltower. The pattern of two, three, and one, followed—Vespers, the Hour of peace. But I felt no peace and could not shake the sense that more than bodies and buildings had been shattered here.

I believed in the gods and their creatures—whether they were named Kemen or Iero, angels or Danae or gatzi. Even a dolt could see that the universe was no soulless clockwork, but infused with life beyond human understanding—wondrous and mysterious, perilous and exquisite. But as to whether the deities truly listened to our prayers or desired our votive gifts or libations or blood sacrifices, I’d been content to leave that study to wiser heads. And never had I given literal credence to the god stories and myths I’d been told—of Deunor’s stolen fire that lit the stars or of the Danae whose dancing nourished the world and held it together. Not until I looked on the ruins of Gillarine and knew in flesh and spirit, breath and bone, that the Canon, the pattern of the world, was truly broken.

Curious, apprehensive, I knelt at the edge of the cloister walk and brushed away a patch of snow. The grass of the garth, so thick and green but a month ago, lay yellow and slimy. I pressed my hands to the earth.

Nothing. No slamming darkness. No piercing light. No music of grief or longing to wrench my soul as it had every time I’d tested this particular patch of earth. I felt only the sickness of the outer world that had intruded here. Plague into the sheepfold. Rot into the orchard. Fire and death into the cloisters.

Wiping my hands on the hem of my cloak, I sat back on my heels. Stories nagged at me. King Eodward had built this abbey on “holy ground.” I had almost forgotten the first death. Young Brother Horach had been brutally murdered inside Saint Gillare’s shrine, where the holy spring bubbled up into the font. Harrowers poisoned the land’s guardians with violated corpses. That was what Sila Diaglou and her cohorts had tried to do with Boreas. I recalled Graver’s Meadow, the lush grass and shimmering pond that swelled my spirit as if the angel choirs sang in the abbey’s soaring vaults. Easy to believe a guardian had lived there.

What if the legends of Eodward and the angels and Gillarine’s holy, fertile ground had given someone to believe the abbey spring a Danae sianou? And what if that someone had tried to poison the guardian Dané with the murdered Horach? The plan would have failed, because the true sianou lay at the spring’s source in the hills at Clyste’s Well. Clyste would have lived on, locked away for her part in my grandfather’s crime, yet still infusing the abbey fields and flocks with her own life and health, a balm to such horrors as Black Night. And then I had opened the way to her holy place…

Faces, events, information shifted, twisted, and settled into a new pattern like tiles into a fine mosaic. Gerard had disappeared on the night of my attempted escape, only days after I had led Gildas to Clyste’s Well. And only days later, pestilence had come to Gillarine.

I jumped to my feet, horror and certainty wrenching mind and heart. I knew what had happened to Gerard. Tears that had naught to do with the cold blurred my vision. Murdered. Great gods in all heavens, they had murdered the boy to kill the Danae guardian of the abbey lands. I knew it as I knew my own name. And now I understood what crime had been committed, it became clear who had committed it.

I stepped into the cloister garth and spun as I yelled, violating the holy silence and the land’s grieving. “Where are you, monk? Gildas, come out here and tell me what you’ve done!”

Blind and stupid, Valen. Self-absorbed wretch. From the moment I had stepped into this abbey he had played me like a vielle. How had I not seen? Great Iero, he had all but told me outright. I belong with the cabalists little more than you, he’d said. And, 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. Righteous wrath. Everyone should be pure like you and Gerard, he had told Jullian. Horach had been his student…and an innocent, too.

The part of me that believed I was unworthy of this place, that bore gratitude and affection for Gildas, who had welcomed me with good humor and allowed me to imagine I could be friends with scholars and men of substance, cried out that I was wrong. But I was not. Not this time. Clyste was dead. And so was Gerard.

“God-cursed child murderer!”

Brother Cantor intoned the opening note of Vesper plainsong as if to correct the abrasive timbre of my shouts, and then the voices—so terribly few—joined in the chant. Perfection, continuity, clarity…the music swelled as their procession approached the ruined cloisters.

Sila Diaglou’s spy had told her of the lighthouse. But he couldn’t tell her how to get into it and destroy its contents, because he was not privy to that secret. And a runaway novice had disrupted their ruse to lure Luviar and Stearc into her clutches with a bloody Gildas as bait. No wonder his hands had been left loose that night; he had offered himself to his Gehoum—a noble sacrifice. So he had waited until Palinur and given her Luviar and Victor. No wonder Gildas had looked dismayed when I told him Brother Victor had survived the gallows—not only because the chancellor was in Osriel’s custody, but because the little monk could reveal who had betrayed him and his abbot.

Where are you, betrayer? I tugged at my hair. Gildas would not be at prayers. The worm would lurk in the heart of the cabal—with Gram and Stearc and Elene. I ran for the guesthouse, forced by shattered walls and rubble to circle south of the lay brothers’ reach and past the ruined kitchen. Across the yard. Up the stoop.

“Come face me, gatzé! Tell me how clever you are to fool an ignorant pureblood!”

I slammed through doors and kicked aside the toppled furnishings and soot-grimed couches littering the dark rooms of the ground floor. A single rushlight burned in a tripod holder near the stair. I sped up the narrow, winding ascent. Yelling. Heedless.

The middle floor was dark. I raced upward and burst into a firelit chamber that smelled of scorched plaster and spiced cider.

Stocky, pale-skulled Prior Nemesio knelt by the meager fire, a sooty poker in his hand. He was alone. His startled expression quickly smoothed into satisfaction. “Brother Valen! It’s Iero’s own blessing to see you safe here again.”

“Where is Gildas?” I snapped.

“At Vespers, I would think.” Worry carved a mask on his big-boned cheeks. “What’s wrong? Brother Anselm said you’d had quite an ordeal. I offered to bring his posset so I could tell you—”

“Where are the Evanori—Thane Stearc, his secretary?” I said. Jullian had vouched that Nemesio was one of us. “I must speak with them outside Mardane Voushanti’s hearing.”

“That’s what I’ve come to tell you. Thane Stearc and his party moved on to Fortress Groult with the rest of the Evanori. When they saw what’s happened here, they dared not stay.”

Cold dread bound its fingers about my rage. “Did Gildas go with them? Or Jullian?”

“Brother Gildas thought they would do better to remain here. It’s entirely unsuitable that an aspirant run about the countryside in the midst of—”

“Father Prior, Gildas murdered both Brother Horach and Gerard.” My hands trembled with scarcely held rage. “We must find him. Confine him.”

“What slander is this?” Nemesio surged to his feet, his thick neck scarlet. “Gildas is your vowed brother! The lighthouse Scholar!”

“I’d wager my life that Gildas is a Harrower. He took Gerard to Clyste’s Well and bled him to death. You must send this news to Stearc right away. Don’t you see? Gildas betrayed Victor and Luviar to Sila Diaglou. He knows your identities. I’d give much to be wrong, but to be certain, we must secure him tonight.”

“I cannot credit this.” Prior Nemesio chewed his full lips. “Gildas is a pious man. Holy and generous. Hours ago, when the Sinduria said she’d heard your call for help, both he and Jullian wished to set out with her at once to succor you. Your sister refused, unwilling to risk his safety. The two of them went straight off to the church to pray for your return.”

I glanced about the room, dread and helplessness threatening to undo me. “Father Prior, where is the Cartamandua book? Please tell me that Stearc took it to Fortress Groult.”

“No.” Nemesio looked up. Uncertain. “Gildas kept it. To study, he said—”

I bolted for the stair.

Plainsong floated on the bitter air, along with the mingled odors of charred wood, of broken sewage channels, of incense and peat fires. The monks stood in a circle about the high altar of the ruined church, under vaults now open to the sky, and sang of their god’s joy and care. Depleted ranks of lay brothers stood in a small area of the nave that had been cleared of rubble and dirty snow. Only a few heads moved as I sped through the nave yelling Gildas’s name and Jullian’s.

The boy was nowhere to be seen, and, as always, the monks’ hoods were drawn up, hiding their faces. Knowing the search was futile, I snatched a lit candle from the high altar and intruded on their circle, peering at the hands clutching tattered psalters. Gildas’s hands, backed by their thatch of wiry brown hair, were not among them.

I replaced the candle and strode out of the church, cursing. Halfway across the trampled garden, hurried footsteps behind me spun me in my tracks.

“Brother Valen? Is that really you?” The hard-breathing monk lowered his hood. The round head and fringe of gray hair identified my novice mentor.

“Yes, Brother Sebastian.”

“The mask makes it difficult…and no tonsure anymore…” Uncertainty snagged his speech.

“I’m happy to see you alive, Brother. But I’m in a great hurry.”

“Well, of course, I knew it was you. Not so many purebloods come here, and none so tall. Brother Gildas said this pureblood life”—he fluttered his hand at my mask and my clothing, giving no impression of having heard me—“has changed you. Secular law forbids me to speak to you, but Saint Ophir’s Rule says you are yet my charge.”

I stepped back, brittle with impatience. “Excuse me, Brother. Unless you can say where Gildas—”

“Brother Gildas is gone off to Elanus. Left something for you, he did. Said you would come looking for him…angry…saying terrible things. Said he wanted you to have this.” From his cowl Brother Sebastian pulled a thumb-sized wooden box, tied with a string. He laid it in my hand. “And he said to tell you that an archangel would be his shield when the last darkness falls. Brother Valen, what did he—?”

“How long?” I said, scarcely able to shape words. My shaking fist threatened to crush the little box. “When did he go?”

Sebastian hesitated, his unsteady gaze not daring to meet my own. He expelled a sharp breath, as if he knew how close he stood to the blood rage threatening to crack my skull. “Just after Sext I encountered him coming out of the chapter-house undercroft, where we’ve stored what supplies we’ve salvaged from the fires. Young Jullian was with him. I remarked that they had missed the service—understandable, as they had just ridden in this morning with the Sinduria. But I said that I would expect to see both of them at Vespers. Our vows must not founder on the shoals of trial and sorrow. That’s when he told me they had borrowed a horse from the Evanori and would be off to Elanus right away on Father Prior’s business. Then he gave me the box and the message for you. The two of them rode out well before Nones.”

“Thank you, Brother Sebastian. Please excuse me.” Nones rang two hours before Vespers. I gave no credit to the stated destination. Gildas was taking the boy and my book to Sila Diaglou.

“The night drowns us, Valen,” Sebastian called after as I hurried away. “Go with Iero’s light.”

I ran for the guesthouse. Nemesio would know if the Evanori had left horses for Voushanti and his men. If so, I could ride out…use my bent to follow Gildas. But before entering the guesthouse, I paused by the stoop and ripped open Gildas’s parting gift. One glance and I launched the damnable thing into the night, scattering its contents into the churn of mud and snow. I could not find a curse vile enough for Gildas, and so I cupped my arms over my throbbing head and leaned against the stone wall, screaming out self-hatred and rage. The scent lingered: spicy, earthy, pepper and mushrooms, lighting an ember in my belly, where lurked a diseased knot the size of a fist. Nivat’s claws settled into mind and body, ensuring I could not ignore it, could not forget, could not commit what wit I had to any other cause but servicing my hunger.

Smug, Silos had called him that morning in Palinur, and rightly so. Gildas, the scholar who had surely read about herbs and medicines among all his studies, would have known that giving me too much nivat would turn my head to muck and would grow my craving when the need came on me again…and again…and again. He had abetted my escape before calling down Thalassa’s hunters and then so very kindly had fed my perversion. He knew his service would put the weak and gullible fool in his debt, give him a leash to control the ignorant sorcerer. Who in the world had measure for my folly?

I shoved open the guesthouse door. Harsh reality dispensed with my silly imaginings of riding off on my own to retrieve Jullian. Of a sudden every fiber and sinew of my body ached. Exhaustion weighed my limbs with armor of iron. And Voushanti sat on the stair beside the rushlight, paring his fingernails with his knife.

“So, pureblood,” he said, without looking up from his task, “I thought perhaps you had gone wandering again. Lost yourself in the bogs and forgotten your oath.”

“I do not break my oaths.” Though I too often failed in my striving to keep them. As with Boreas. As with Jullian. Gildas would use the boy to manipulate me, as he had used the nivat. His shield. His hostage. When the last darkness falls…

I kicked a broken chair out of my way and tried to muster some semblance of a plan. Perhaps I could convince the mardane to let me “aid the brothers” in a search for Jullian and Gildas. “Tell me, Lord Voushanti, is our master Sila Diaglou’s ally or her rival?”

“You needs must ask him that yourself. I’ve had word he’ll be here tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? Here?” So soon. I’d expected…what? I was too tired to imagine.

“Prince Osriel’s plans ripen. He needs neutral ground for an important parley, and this place happens to be convenient.” He stood and stretched out his shoulders. “We’ll likely move fast after tomorrow. I’d advise you to sleep off these past days’ trial while you can.”

He would never allow me to go out. I shrugged. “Tell me, Mardane, do you ever sleep?”

His face twisted in his grotesque mockery of a smile. “When my duties permit. Tonight, I keep watch.” He moved aside just enough that I could squeeze past him to reach the stair. No doubt I would find him there in the morning.

The nagging ache of failure filled my boots with lead as I climbed to the upper chamber. A meal had been laid out on a tray—bread, boiled parsnips, dried apples. Anselm’s posset sat in a pitcher by the hearth. Too weary to eat, I pulled off my sodden boots and hose, sat cross-legged on a woven hearthrug, and poked up Prior Nemesio’s fire.

A cabal that thought to preserve humankind past the end times. A master who stole dead souls. Fanatics who used tormented spirits to slaughter the land’s guardians and unravel the fabric of the world. How in the name of all gods had a man who prided himself on keeping his head down stumbled into events of such magnitude? Stumbled…had I?

My thoughts wandered back to Wroling Wood, to the day Boreas and I had given up on Perryn of Ardra and deserted his legion. When we spied the tidy manse, sitting unguarded in the forest outside Wroling Town, we thought Serena Fortuna had at last acknowledged our meager libations. Unfortunately, rodents had found the larders before us, and we had to be satisfied with inedible spoils. We stuffed our rucksacks and ran, arguing about whether to head straight for Palinur or to pawn the goods in a lesser town. I had laughed at finding my book after so many years, crowing that an unwelcome gift could pay me twice over.

Just as we dropped from the outer wall to head for the road, the Moriangi outriders attacked. The arrow strikes pitched me into an overgrown ditch, thick with soggy sedge and brambles. Boreas dived in beside me, blackening the air with his curses. Our attackers, caught up in a blood-frenzied pursuit of hundreds like us, failed to stop and ensure we were dead.

We lay in that ditch waiting for nightfall, hearing the pursuit pass over and around us. I bled into the sodden earth throughout a long afternoon, praying that the rain would not turn to ice and seal my foretold doom, longing to be warm and dry and safe, to be free of pain and feel my belly full. And when I at last staggered out of the ditch, half delirious, my gut and heart and blood had led us…driven us…here. Straight to Gillarine.

I stirred the coals and asked the question that had squatted in the back of my mind since I’d waked in Gillarine’s infirmary. How was it possible that I had traveled ninety-three quellae in two days, starving, delirious, and half drained of blood? I could not answer it any more than I could say why my heart ached so sorely in the cloister garth of Gillarine, or why I wept when I looked on a Dané, or how a man who reveled in impiety and scorned all consideration of family had come to think of a Karish abbey as his home. My fists overflowed with shards of mirror glass, but I could not put them together in any way that made sense. I could not see myself anymore.

Perhaps I must have faith that whatever…whoever…had brought me here would show me the rest of the way. I dragged the tray of Gillarine’s bounty close and poured a generous dollop of Brother Anselm’s posset into the fire as an offering for Iero, for Kemen, for Serena Fortuna or whichever god or goddess might welcome it. As the sweet liquid sprizzled and scorched, I wolfed down the food and downed the remainder of the posset, pretending it cooled the fire in my gut. I would need my strength in the coming days, whether or not I chose to run. I would need it for Jullian. For my grandfather and his book. For the lighthouse cabal and the treacherous, dangerous Danae, whom we must beg to help us hold the world together. I had no time for weakness.