Song of the Beast

Chapter 8

An exceptionally tall and broad-shouldered Elhim met us at the southern watchpost of Cor Neuill and led us down the ribbon of trampled mud and snow to the headquarters of the dragon legion. The weather had deteriorated all day, and pregnant clouds hung low over the snowy peaks. Alfrigg grumbled continuously as he hunched in his fur-lined wool cloak against the fine stinging sleet. “What use is the world’s richest contract if I’m but another scrap in the An’Huim glacier?”

The Elhim, shivering in his thin, shabby cloak, cocked a pale, frosted eyebrow at the massive leather merchant on his tall horse, as if trying to imagine the anvil-jawed Udema frozen in a river of ice. But his only comment was, “Not far to go, your honor.” Then he bent his head forward again, a damp lock of fair hair falling over his left eye. He slogged down the gently sloping road, leading us toward a squat, stone building that might be perched on the edge of the clouds, for all we could see beyond it.

I was shivering, too, though my cloak was quite adequate. Terror and cowardice are far more potent than any winter storm. Now that the day had come, I could scarcely keep from turning tail and riding as fast as I could go, as far from any dragon as I could get. On my lips was an unending prayer to Keldar to show me what I needed to see on this visit, as I could never attempt such brazen stupidity again.

Smoke drifted lazily from the chimney of the headquarters building and from the campfires scattered among the hundreds of tents, only to be swirled away by the gusting wind. Having sung at Cor Neuill several times, I was familiar with the layout of the encampment. The commander and his adjutants slept in the permanent quarters, while the foot and horse soldiers and aides, the cooks, grooms, herdsmen, and other functionaries that hovered about a clan encampment were relegated to the tents. Not the Riders, though.

The Riders lived with the dragons down in the vast bowl of Cor Neuill that lay hidden in the storm beyond the headquarters building. Each man ate and slept, lived and fought with the dragon to which he had been bound in a rite so secret that no one outside the Twelve Families of the Ridemark had ever witnessed it. In that rite the Rider was attuned to his dragon’s bloodstone, a thumb-sized jewel of dark red that the man would wear for every moment of his life from that day forward, slaying his own mother if she but laid a finger on it. The jewel allowed the Rider to impose his will upon his bound dragon, controlling its rage and directing it wherever he chose. With the stone he could also control other dragons in a limited fashion and protect himself from their assault. And the jewel infused him with fire that made his skin spark when touched, a matter of mortal consequence to anyone the Rider touched when drunk or angry.

As far as anyone knew, no one outside the clan had ever possessed a bloodstone or ridden a dragon. Even within the Twelve Families the privilege to ride was reserved only to a select few. Legend said you could tell at birth which child of the clan would ride the dragons, for his mother’s birth passage would be scorched as he came into the world, and his eyes would burn with golden fire. Perhaps it was true. In all my observations, however, it was only cruelty and arrogance that flamed in a Rider’s eyes, and the knowledge that no man was truly his master. They cared only for the honor and traditions of the clan, nothing for territory or power beyond their own. They lived only to destroy, leaving to kings and princes the business of whom to burn.

A hundred hard eyes glanced our way as we rode through the encampment. Interest waned just as quickly, and they turned back to their business of mending harness, darning socks, sharpening weapons, and cooking supper over the fires that struggled bravely against the gusty wind—the usual activities of a military camp. Accompanying them were the usual smells of woodsmoke and bacon, horse dung and leather, and, as in all Ridemark camps, the faint odor of brimstone. There were women about, not the whores and gap-toothed washing women found everywhere that soldiers lived, but sturdy, capable, cold-eyed women dressed in the same black and red capes as the men. The women of the Twelve Families rode to war with the men, performing most duties equally with their clan brothers, except for riding the dragons.

A sullen young woman took our horses and led them toward a lean-to on the side of a substantial stable, while the Elhim directed us through a leather-curtained door into the blast of heat from an open hearth. Some thirty black-caped men and a few women occupied the wide, shallow single room of the headquarters. Many of them were clustered around a large map table. At the far right end of the room three warriors conferred with an officer seated at a folding field desk. Chests and trunks were stacked about the room, and two Elhim clerks stood over them, ticking off items on lists. Even in a Ridemark camp, Elhim’s skills with numbers were useful. Several young aides darted about filling drinking cups from steaming pots.

The curtained-off areas in the corners of the room would be sleeping quarters, and just across the stone floor, opposite the door we’d entered, was a wooden door that led outside again. Few who were not of the Twelve Families were ever allowed to pass that door, so I had been told on the visits in my youth. Few would have any desire to do so, of course, for the doorway led out to the rim of Cor Neuill and the horror that lived there.

The Elhim took us to the man at the field desk, a giant of a man, well past middle age from the evidence of the scant, grizzled hair on his boulder of a head, but with the muscled chest and tight girth of a man half his years. His nose had been broken at some time, for it resembled a hawk’s bill, and as he turned his cold, light eyes away from his subordinates to look at us, I shriveled inside. Of all the ill luck ... of all the commanders who could have been assigned to Cor Neuill, it had to be the high commander himself, Garn MacEachern, the very man who had stood in my cousin’s garden the day I was warned away from his dragons, the very man who had watched from the shadows as I was arrested and condemned.

Panic throttled my tongue. Fear must have been written all over my face, for Alfrigg raised a frost-rimed eyebrow at me as he waited for me to speak. What half-crazed rat had ever walked so boldly into the fere-cat’s lair?

“The leather merchant and his man,” said the Elhim haltingly in the tongue of the Ridemark clan. “Come to present the proposed contract for supply of Riders’ armor to the commander and quartermaster.”

Alfrigg bowed respectfully, yet kept his jaw lifted and his broad back straight. “Your excellency,” he said. “Greetings of Jodar and his six brethren to you.”

I bowed, too, quickly turning sideways between Alfrigg and the commander as Alfrigg had instructed me. Not looking at either party, I translated the merchant’s words. Alfrigg was a masterful businessman, dealing as much in his uncompromising honesty and self-confidence as in leather goods. He knew his bargaining would go better if he kept the attention focused on his own open face and imposing presence rather than on any intermediary, no matter how necessary. It suited me well to have MacEachern’s gaze drawn to Alfrigg and not to the rivulets of sweat dripping down the sides of my face or to the gloved hands that I clasped behind my back to keep them from shaking. Astonishingly enough, my words came out clear and calm, absolutely at odds with the chaos inside me. Perhaps Keldar was guiding my performance, as Roelan had done so often when I was young.

With me to translate and his Elhim scribe to write, Alfrigg had corresponded at length with the quartermaster, a thin, squinting man with a tic in one eye, so that much of what was to be discussed that afternoon was mere formality for the benefit of the commander. The Riders were impressed that the merchant had brought his own interpreter. I made sure to stumble and grasp for words just enough that they had no need to ask how I had grown so facile in their tongue. A great many songs were composed in the language of ancient Elyria. And, too, Goryx my jailer had spoken nothing else.

After the brief formalities of agreement, the two scurrying aides brought a tray of tall pewter goblets steaming with pungent spiced wine. My throat was parched. But even the blazing hearthfire had not yet warmed the blocks of ice in my boots or the throbbing lumps in my gloves, and I dared not fumble a cup right under MacEachern’s nose, so I shook my head at the pockmarked young man who held the tray. Alfrigg glared at me furiously. Because I was Senai, my refusal could be viewed as an affront to my Udema employer, or, even worse, as an affront to the Ridemark clan. Most Senai, even impoverished younger sons who were forced to seek employment, scorned those of the Twelve Families as “mongrel”—neither Senai nor Udema nor of any other identifiable heritage. Those who had climbed to so high a rank as MacEachern and had reached the inevitable conclusion that they could never be accepted into Senai society were very sensitive to Senai insults. I needed to smooth things over quickly.

“Master Alfrigg,” I said, just loud enough that the Riders could hear the honorific, “as the weather is so unsettled, I will forgo the honor and pleasure of taking refreshment with you and the commander and proceed with the duties you have assigned me. Please command me, sir.”

The curl of MacEachern’s full lip told me that I had succeeded in earning his scorn by thus abasing myself to a Udema. Alfrigg, of course, assumed I was snubbing him again and could not hide his irritation. “I would not presume to hold you here while you could be useful elsewhere. As always you show excessive attention to your duties.” He then proceeded to ask if I could be shown examples of the Riders’ gear and perhaps clarify with a Rider a few of the requirements noted in the contract. The financial and delivery details, which Alfrigg and the quartermaster were to sit down and solidify, needed no interpretation.

MacEachern nodded curtly and summoned our Elhim guide, who had been standing quietly beside the door since our arrival. The slight was easy to interpret; clearly I was not worthy of a guide from the Ridemark itself. Well and good. I did not want his esteem. “Take the merchant’s servant to speak with Bogdar. Request my brother in my name to answer whatever is needed.” With that we were dismissed.

Alfrigg and the quartermaster retired to a vacant table with their ledgers and scrolls. MacEachern wagged his finger at one of the officers who had moved away upon our arrival. But as the Elhim and I pulled our cloaks tight about us and headed out the wooden door on the northern wall of the room, the commander leaned back in his chair, sipping his hot wine and watching us go. I hoped it was just his relishing the idea of a Senai serving a Udema merchant that made him stare, but I couldn’t help wondering if there was some way he could see through my cloak to the purple scars on my back or read my soul to discover my hatred for him and my loathing for what he had made of me.

Once the Elhim pulled the wooden door closed behind us, I breathed easier ... at least until the icy wind sucked my breath away. We stood on an exposed outcropping of rock, roughly semicircular in shape, approximately forty paces in any direction. The flat side was the long northern face of the headquarters building, and the semicircular perimeter was a waist-high wall of granite slabs. Directly opposite the wooden door, at the apex of the circular wall, was a gap wide enough to walk through. The wind had scoured the rock platform clean of snow save in the corner to my left, where a crusted, roof-high drift obscured the joining of the wall and the building. Beyond the wall, above and below and in any direction, was the storm, layer upon layer of thick gray clouds, their undersides shredded by wind-driven sleet and snow.

When the red and gold lightning split the boiling clouds, an observer might reasonably conclude that somehow the seasons had become confused and sent the harbingers of summer rain into the winter sky. But the mistake would endure only until their eardrums shattered with the noise—not thunder, but the screams of dragons—soul-wrenching despair, mindless hatred, raw, murderous bloodlust that tore at the very center of your being. No being in the universe could fail to be turned to quivering jelly by the trumpeting bellow of dragons. No tongue but would invoke the Seven Gods and beg for their protection at the sound. No ear could hear in it anything of beauty, joy, or harmony. For years I had tried to understand how the most terrifying of cries could be the tool of the most gentle of gods, how Roelan could transform the cruel and brutal screams of beasts into music of such power that I was left trembling in ecstasy. I had never found an answer.

Perhaps the shock of MacEachern’s presence had lowered my defenses. Perhaps it was the terror that had engulfed me since I had entered the camp, or merely the fury of the tempest and the proximity of the beasts, but when the inevitable moment came, I could no longer protect myself as I had on Callia’s roof. I could not close my ears or force my thoughts away when the cry shattered the gray afternoon. For the first time since my release I heard a dragon’s roar.

“Roelan!” I cried, unthinking, unheeding, doubling over in agony. No pain I had endured in Mazadine could match what I experienced on the ramparts of Cor Neuill. The unbridled wildness tore at my chest as if a knife had opened me and a great claw ripped out everything inside. The noise hammered relentlessly in my head, causing red smears in my vision, as if immortal Vanir had set up his fiery forge behind my eyes. I clenched my frozen hands to my breast. “Roelan, have mercy.”

The god did not see fit to answer, but as a wing of green and copper gossamer split the cloud a seeming hand’s breadth from my face, then was swallowed up again, the Elhim caught my elbow and put his mouth close to my ear. “Steady, my friend. The path is steep and narrow and will be iced over.” His calm, quiet voice eased the pain as a salve soothes a burn.

“An old wound,” I whispered, though he made no remark on my odd behavior. “The cold affects it wickedly. I always forget.” No one with a dram of intelligence could have accepted my feeble explanation.

“May you be healed of all your hurts,” said the Elhim, guiding me firmly toward the gap in the wall. “Bogdar is encamped very near the bottom of the path, so it will not be far. We’ll not be required to go around the valley.”

Somehow his steady reassurance enabled me to regain control, to close my ears and focus on the ice-glazed path that zigged and zagged down the cliff face through the clouds, seemingly without end. The blustering wind whipped our cloaks. A great gout of flame spurted just beyond the next turning of the unsheltered path. The sleet turned instantly into a spray of hot rain; the ice on the path melted away; and melted snow dribbled down my neck from my hair. The Elhim flung his arm out, pressing me against the cliff face, a deed well done, as the blast of hot, brimstone-tainted air that followed might have toppled us—especially the slight Elhim—off the steep path.

“Thank you,” I said as we headed downward again, dropping below the thickest part of the clouds into sheets of driving sleet. From the last traverse, we looked down upon a desolation of soot-blackened puddles and frost-rimed skeletons of trees, of scorched, barren rock and frozen ruts. In the distance, arcs of fire spanned the valley like hellish rainbows. Immediately below us and around the perimeter of the valley wall were vast, stinking stockades of pigs and cattle and other herd beasts brought in never-ending streams to feed the dragons.

The Elhim led me through a milling herd of nervous, bleating sheep, deftly avoiding the wet, dirty beasts and the worst of the foul mud. Once past the stockade gate, we followed the track up a slight rise toward a shelter scarcely larger than a soldier’s tent, consisting of little more than three stone walls and a roof of sod tilted toward the back wall. The fourth side had no wall but a leather curtain, and it faced the center of the valley. Another identical shelter stood some fifteen hundred paces beyond the first, and, though I could not see it for the sleet, another beyond that one, and another, creating a ring around the wasteland—a ring of power. In each of the dens lived a Rider wearing a bloodstone.

A dragon could not pass between two bloodstones unless commanded by its Rider, and then only in fearsome torment, thrashing its tail and blaring its cries, requiring every mote of strength and control its Rider could bring to bear. When I was a boy living in sight of dragon camps, I had watched the beasts try to escape the Riders’ Ring. Only for the first few days in a new encampment would they attempt it. After that they stayed as far from the ring of bloodstones as possible. Individual Riders would leave on occasion to take their mounts out on patrol or maneuvers, or to go drinking or whatever else they did, but rarely did they leave a gap of more than two in the Riders’ Ring, as the wide spacing made it extremely difficult for the remaining Riders to control the dragons. Riders lived with their beasts and desired nothing more, so it was said. Their clan brothers of the Ridemark made sure they wanted for nothing.

When we reached the first shelter, the Elhim called out, “Denai Bogdar! A visitor!” We heard no response save a howl of wind flapping the leather curtain. “I say, sir. Bogdar! A request from the Tan Zihar.” As did many Ridemark servants, the Elhim spoke mostly Elyrian, laced with common words of the ancient speech.

“He’s not there.”

We whirled about to see a bear of a man standing behind us, carrying a wine cask on one shoulder as if it were a pillow. He could have palmed a boulder, his hands were so large, and like every exposed part of his body they were covered with thick, wiry brown hair. His mustache and beard were trimmed close around his protruding jaw, but the rest of his hair he wore long and knotted into a thick braid that fell halfway down his back. So much hair must have done somewhat to keep him warm. His bulging shoulders and oaklike arms were bare where they emerged from a leather vest that hung open to display the wiry forest of his massive chest. Tight leather breeches and thigh-length boots completed his attire, along with the purplish-red, square-cut jewel gleaming at his throat, held on with a leather strap. The eyes under his thick, overhanging brow were everything I knew to expect from one who wore the bloodstone at his throat and the dragon mark on his wrist—contemptuous, uninterested, and as friendly as an adder’s eye.

“Bogdar’s gone to stand watch on our royal pain in the ass.” He jerked his head toward the center of the wasteland. “Won’t be back until the night watch.”

Royal pain ... “Hostages,” I said in surprise. “You’ve hostages in camp.”

“Florin brat.” A frost-glazed mudhole hissed when he spit into it. “Make a dainty sweetmeat for my kai.” His kai ... his bound servant ... his dragon. The dragons were never given names.

While I considered the wretched plight of a hostage—a royal child, more often than not—forced to live in a stone hut in the center of that bitter wasteland, shivering in the frigid weather, surrounded by the unending terror of bellowing dragons and their hellish fire, saved from gruesome death only by men such as this one, the Elhim launched into the purpose of our visit. “... and so, Denai Zengal, it is the Tan Zihar’s wish that this man’s questions be accommodated, the better to provide for you and your noble brotherhood.”

It seemed ludicrous that such a man as Zengal would consent to answer the mundane inquiries of a leather merchant’s assistant, but in fact he agreed easily and led us to his own place, the next link in the chain of the Riders’ Ring. Just outside the leather curtain was a firepit with a haunch of mutton dripping over the fire, filling the air with its savory aroma. A neatly stacked pile of logs and kindling lay beside it. The Elhim and I warmed our hands as Zengal summoned an Eskonian slave to replenish the stack. The slave was chained to a wood cart that he would drag from one Rider’s hovel to another every miserable waking hour of his life. The Rider gave the spit a turn, dropped his wine cask just inside the leather curtain, and led us inside.

As one who had visited every possible type of dwelling from caves to grass-roofed shacks, from refuse heaps to palaces, and who had spent a considerable time around military camps, I believed I knew what I would see when Zengal pulled back the leather curtain of his stone hovel—spare, utilitarian, unclean except for the weaponry that would be honed and oiled and ready in its proper place. But the shelter was nothing at all like I expected.

Following the Rider’s lead, I dodged a hanging lamp of silver and crystal and removed my muddy boots before stepping onto the layer of rush matting and thence onto the wool carpet of finest Eskonian design. The hut was small, no doubt, and sparely furnished, but the bed was a knee-high mound of fine, thick furs from the rarest of beasts like snow leopard and tundra fox, and I didn’t need the evidence of women’s undergarments strewn about to note that it was large enough for more than one. The clothes chest was polished sirkwood, bound with gold-studded straps, and a row of golden goblets set with amethysts stood on a small shelf on one wall. His weapons were of the same quality: a dagger with a curving hilt of silver, chased with gold, an Eskonian scimitar, its guard inlaid with jade. Hung in a place of honor was a plain coil of oiled leather, each of its three strands knotted along its considerable length and tipped with steel. I came near heaving up my long-forgotten breakfast at the sight of it. A dragon whip. Designed for a hide a knife could scarcely penetrate, for scaly flanks and leathery skin encrusted with stonelike jibari, not for human flesh, not over and over again until the underlying muscles were useless and the skin screamed at the slightest touch.

“Well, do you want to see or do you not?” In one hand Zengal held a goblet of wine and in the other a pair of dark-stained leather greaves he had just removed from a hook on the wall. The Elhim sat cross-legged on the carpet with pens and paper, looking up at me expectantly, ready to take notes as I had asked him to do. “They must fit exactly or you can’t grip with the knees, and they have to be thick—dragon scales are like knife edges—but flexible enough to bend and hold. You see?”

For the next hour he showed me every piece of the specialized garments the Riders needed to survive astride the deadly monsters: the elbow-length gauntlets, the chin-to-groin vest, the stiffened-wool mask and helm to prevent sparks from igniting hair or damaging eyes. By the time we were finished, the Elhim had ten pages of fine-scripted notes, and Zengal stood naked but for the bloodstone at his neck. He downed his fifth cup of wine, unconcerned as the icy wind from the uncovered side of his lair frosted the hair on his massive body. No foolish Senai modesty here. I shivered inside my wool layers, thinking of Callia. I wanted to smile at the remembrance of her teasing, but the red mark on Zengal’s wrist goaded and mocked me. I ached to strangle him and every Ridemark villain.

I managed to examine every piece of the Rider’s equipage without fumbling or dropping it. I asked how it might be improved, what measurements should be taken, everything that I might be expected to ask and nothing beyond it. Zengal answered willingly and at length, as will any soldier when discussing the necessities of his profession. Only once were we interrupted—when a dragon bellowed so near that the blades on the wall quivered in the firelight and the earth rumbled beneath our feet. While I battled to display nothing of the weakness I had shown the Elhim, Zengal fell silent and stepped to the edge of the rush matting, staring out into the gloom. Several answering blasts seemed to disturb the Rider, but not enough to prevent his downing the rest of his wine and refilling his cup yet again from the cask. He turned a blank face to me as I knelt on the carpet pretending to inspect the pile of scorched armor. I swallowed the lump in my dry throat and said, “That’s a fearful sound. I never thought to be this close to the dragons. And I’ll confess it’s damned uncomfortable when they sound so ... angry.”

Zengal snorted. “They’ve no minds to be angry with. It’s the way they are—vicious, bloodthirsty. The way they will always be.”

While continuing to check the Elhim’s notes against the leather goods, I asked him common questions about dragons. Seemingly uninterested, he answered nonetheless. Sparks swirled in the wind beyond the doorway. Another cry came, closer than the last. I felt the blood rush from my face. The Rider burst into bellowing laughter. He bent over me, somehow more fearsome in his nakedness than if he were armed. “Are you afraid a dragon is going to stick his tongue in my lair to taste your sniveling flesh? Rest easy, tailor. They’ve been fed this sevenday, and you’re far too bony for their taste. As long as you’re with me, you need fear Davyn here as much as you fear a kai.”

When the Rider named the Elhim who sat an arm’s length from me, I almost lost the thread of my questioning. Davyn—the name Narim had given me to find help on the Vallior road. Coincidence. Of course it was coincidence, I thought ... until I handed him the Rider’s gauntlet and found his pale eyes fixed on my own. By the Seven Gods ... He knew who I was. But I had no time to dwell on it. I was rapidly running out of things to ask about the Rider’s garb, and I’d scarcely begun working up to what I needed to know.

“It doesn’t upset them, then, when strangers are about ... doing things they’re not used to? Even if I were to start ringing bells, say, or yelling or screaming?”

The Rider spit into his firepit and dipped another goblet of wine from the cask, sucking it down in a single breath. “Upset? Do you think these are Senai ladies? There’s nothing in the world can upset a dragon. Can you upset a volcano? Can you disturb a lightning bolt? Can you offend a whirlwind? They do what they do, and lucky for you and everyone like you, I and my brothers don’t let them do it unless we tell them.” He turned his spit once again, then settled himself, still naked, on his bed of furs, sucking down yet another cup of wine.

I wanted to scream at the man. I wanted to ask him why Callia lay dead, and Gerald and Gwaithir and Alys, and all the rest. Nothing made sense. I’d never been closer to a dragon than the rim of this very valley. I’d never touched a Rider until my feeble attempt on Callia’s attacker. I’d never done anything they could consider a threat. Anything.

“Aye,” I said. “The Riders protect us all ... even the vile Florin spawn who sits out there in the center of all this.” I pulled on my boots as if to go, then stood up waving my hand at the wintry desolation. “How is it done ... to keep a hostage alive out there with the dragons?”

Zengal belched and shrugged. “We make another ring,” he said, his words slurred with drink. “Three of us with the brat every hour of every day. Damned waste of time playing nursemaid. They always end up dead, after all.” He stroked the golden cup in his hand and turned it so the firelight made the jewels gleam. “But the rewards are fine enough.”

“I heard a story once that a hostage escaped from a dragon camp, right past the beasts. How could—”

In a move so light and quick as to belie his size and state of drunkenness, the naked Rider pinned me to the stone wall with a callused hand about my neck. Sparks flew in the deepening gloom, stinging my face and neck, and the thick, sweet odor of wine fouled what breath I could get. “It’s a lie!” he screamed. “All lies, those stories. There were no kai in the lair, no Riders. They’d all been sent away. Ordinary soldiers were guarding the hostages ... paid by spies for their treachery. No black-tongued singer could make the kai let hostages go free. It is impossible!”

“Of course not,” I squeezed out, gasping and choking, my neck starting to blister with the touch of his hand. “I would never believe it. Just wanted ... Just curious. That’s all.”

The Elhim backed away, fumbling at the knife sheath at his belt.

Zengal shook me as if to make sure I was paying attention. “The devil set out to shame us because his father was burned by the kai. He bribed, tricked, lied, let everyone think the Twelve Families had grown weak. But we saw it stopped, didn’t we? Taught him, didn’t we?”

“Yes,” I croaked. “You taught him. Silenced him forever.”

The Elhim had a dagger raised to strike, but whipped the weapon behind his back when the Rider let go of me and stumbled toward his wine cask again.

“I should go,” I said, trying to will strength into my knees and flatten myself against the wall to keep my distance from the Rider. “You’ve been extremely helpful, Excellency, but I’ve taken far too much of your time.”

Zengal grunted, staggered past me, and fell onto his fur-lined bed. The wine cup dropped from his hand, the spilled wine soaking eagerly into his fine carpet.

I would not have been human if I did not look on the bare, exposed back of the drunken Rider, thinking of the dragon whip on the wall and the moment’s satisfaction it promised. It wouldn’t even matter that I would be dead in the next moment. But my hands could not grip, and I had no strength, and nothing would be changed ... except perhaps myself.

I carried with me the image of Goryx and his beatific smile as he left me broken and bleeding in my cell after a day’s beating. He would touch my wounds, then lick his fingers and his lips and groan softly, his small eyes bright with unholy pleasure. When I had looked in the glass at my cousin’s house, my face bore no resemblance to the one I had worn for my first twenty-one years—only death and emptiness where Aidan MacAllister, beloved of the gods, had once looked back at me. But I knew the face of evil, and the face of death was preferable. I pulled on my boots, tightened my cloak about me, and stepped out into the storm.