The Blood Knight

1 Lost

Anne Dare murmured the words to the song, a favorite of hers from when she was younger.

She noticed that her fingers were trembling, and for a moment she felt as if they weren’t attached to her but were instead strange worms clinging to her hands.

With blood-red lips…

Anne had seen blood before, plenty of it. But never like this, never with such a striking hue, so brilliant against the snow. It was as if she were viewing the true color for the first time rather than the pale counterfeit she had known her whole life.

At the edges it was watered pink, but at its source, where it pulsed into the cold whiteness, it was a thing of utter beauty.

With snow-white skin

With blue-black hair…

The man had flesh gone gray and straw-colored hair, nothing like the imagined lover of the song. As she watched, his fingers unclenched from the dagger he’d been holding, and he let go the cares of the world. His eyes went round with wonder as they saw something she could not, beyond the lands of fate. Then he sighed a final steaming breath into the snow.

Somewhere—very far away, it seemed—she heard a hoarse cry and the sound of clashing steel, followed by silence. She detected no motion through the dark trunks of the trees except the continuing light fall of snow.

Something chuffed nearby.

In a daze, Anne turned to find a dappled gray horse regarding her curiously. It looked familiar, and she gasped faintly as she recalled it charging toward her. The snow told that it had stamped all around her, but one trail of hoofprints led in from over a hill, the direction from which it must have come. Part of the way, the prints were accompanied by pink speckles.

The horse had blood in its mane, as well.

She stood shakily, feeling pain in her thigh, shin, and ribs. She turned on her feet to take in the whole of her surroundings, searching for a sign that there was anyone else nearby. But there were only the dead man, the horse, and trees stripped to bark by winters winds.

Finally she glanced down at herself. She wore a soft red doeskin robe lined with black ermine and beneath that a heavy riding habit. She remembered she’d gotten them back in Dunmrogh.

She remembered the fight there, too, and the death of her first love and first betrayer, Roderick.

She pushed her hand under the hood and felt the curls of her copper hair. It was growing back but was still short from the shearing she’d had in Tero Galle what seemed like an age ago. So she was missing hours or days, not ninedays, months, or years. But she had still misplaced time, and that frightened her.

She remembered leaving Dunmrogh with her maid Austra, a free-woman named Winna, and thirty-eight men whose company included her Vitellian friend Cazio and her guardian Sir Neil MeqVren. They’d just won a battle, and most were wounded, including Anne herself.

But there had been no time for leisurely recovery. Her father was dead, and her mother the prisoner of an usurper. She’d set out determined somehow to free her mother and reclaim her father’s throne. She remembered feeling very certain about the whole thing.

What she didn’t know, couldn’t remember, was where those friends were and why she wasn’t with them. Or, for that matter, who the dead man was, lying at her feet. His throat had been cut; that much was plain enough—it gaped like a second mouth. But how had it happened? Was he friend or foe?

Since she didn’t recognize him, she reckoned he was most likely the latter.

She sagged against a tree and closed her eyes, studying the dark pool in her mind, diving into it like a kingfisher.

She’d been riding beside Cazio, and he’d been practicing the king’s tongue…

“Esno es caldo,” Cazio said, catching a snowflake in his hand, eyes wide with wonder.

“Snow is cold,” Anne corrected, then saw the set of his lips and realized he’d mispronounced the sentence on purpose.

Cazio was tall and slim, with sharp, foxy features and dark eyes, and when his mouth quirked like that, he was all devil.

“What is esno in Vitellian?” she demanded.

“A metal the color of your hair,” he said in such a way that she suddenly wondered what his lips would taste like. Honey? Olive oil? He’d kissed her before, but she couldn’t remember…

What a stupid thought.

“Esno es caldo is Vitellian for ‘copper is hot,’ right?” she translated, trying to hide her annoyance. By the way Cazio was grinning now, she knew she certainly was missing something.

“Yes, that’s true,” Cazio drawled, “if taken literally. But it’s a sort of pun. If I were talking to my friend Acameno and said ‘fero es caldo,’ it would mean ‘iron is hot,’ but iron can also mean a sword, and a sword can mean a man’s very personal armament, you see, and would be a compliment to his manhood. He would assume I meant his iron. And so copper, the softer, prettier metal can also represent—”

“Yes, well,” Anne quickly cut in, “that will be enough Vitellian colloquialism for now. After all, you wanted to work on your king’s tongue, didn’t you?”

He nodded. “Yes, but it’s funny to me, that’s all, that your word for ‘cold’ is my word for ‘hot.’”

“Yes, and it’s even funnier that your word for ‘free’ is ‘lover,’” she countered sarcastically, “considering that one cannot have the second and be the first.”

As soon as she saw the look on his face, though, she wished she hadn’t spoken.

Cazio immediately raised an interested eyebrow. “Now we’re onto a topic I approve of,” he said. “But, eh—‘lover’? Ne comtnrenno. What is lover’ in the king’s tongue?”

“The same as Vitellian Carilo,” she replied reluctantly.

“No,” Austra said. Anne jumped guiltily, for she had almost forgotten that her maid was riding with them. She glanced over at the younger woman.

“No?”

Austra shook her head. “Carilo is what a father calls his daughter—a dear one, a little sweetheart. The word you’re looking for is erenterra.”

“Ah, I see,” Cazio said. He reached over and took Austra’s hand and kissed it. “Erenterra. Yes, I am approving of this conversation even more with each revelation.”

Austra blushed and took her hand back, brushing gilden curls back up into the black hood of her weather cloak.

Cazio turned back toward Anne.

“So, if ‘lover’ is erenterra,” he said, “I must disagree with you.”

“Perhaps a man can have a lover and remain free,” Anne said. “A woman may not.”

“Nonsense,” Cazio said. “So long as her—eh, lover—is not also her husband, she can be as free as she likes.” He smiled even more broadly. “Besides, not all servitude is unpleasant.”

“You’ve slipped back into Vitellian again,” Anne said, lacking entirely Cazio’s affection for the subject. She was sorry to have brought it up. “Let’s return to the topic of snow. Tell me more about it—in the king’s tongue.”

“New thing for me,” he said, his voice going instantly from glib near music to clumsy, lumbering prose as he switched languages. “Not have in Avella. Very, eh, fullovonder.”

“Wonderful,” she corrected as Austra giggled.

In fact, the snow didn’t seem wonderful to Anne at all—it seemed a nuisance. But Cazio sounded sincere, and despite herself, it made her smile to watch as he grinned at the white flakes. He was nineteen, two years older than she, but still more boy than man.

And yet she could see a man in him now and then, just on the verge of escaping.

Despite the uncomfortable turn of the conversation, for a moment Anne felt content. She was safe, with friends, and though the world had gone mad, she at least knew her footing now. Forty some men weren’t enough to free her mother and take back Crotheny, but soon they would reach the estates of her aunt Elyoner, who had some soldiers, and perhaps she would know where Anne could acquire more.

After that—well, she would build her army as she went. She knew nothing of what an army needed, and at times—especially at night—that gripped her heart too tightly for sleep. But at the moment she somehow felt as if it would all work out.

Suddenly something moved at the corner of her vision, but when she looked, it wasn’t there…

Leaning against the tree, Anne exhaled frost and noticed that the light was fading.

Where was Cazio? Where was everyone else?

Where was she?

The last she remembered. They’d just struck north from the Old King’s Road, through the forest of Chevroché toward Loiyes, a place where she’d once gone riding with her aunt Lesbeth many years ago.

Her bodyguard Neil MeqVren had been riding only a few paces away. Austra had dropped back to talk to Stephen, the young man from Virgenya. The holter, Aspar White, had been scouting ahead, and the thirty horsemen who had attached themselves to her at Dunmrogh had been ranged protectively about her.

Then Cazio’s expression had changed, and he had reached for his sword. The light had seemed to brighten to yellow.

Was this still Chevroché? Had hours passed?

Days?

She could not remember.

Should she wait to be found, or was there no one left to search for her? Could an enemy have snatched her away from her guardians without killing them all?

With a sinking heart, she realized how unlikely that was. Sir Neil certainly would die before allowing her to be taken, and the same was true of Cazio.

Trembling still, she realized that the only clue she had to her current situation was the dead man.

Reluctantly, she trudged back through the snow to the place where he lay. Gazing down on him through the dimming light, she searched for details she might have missed before.

He wasn’t a young man, but she couldn’t say how old he was, either—forty, perhaps. He wore dark gray wool breeches stained at the crotch with what had to be his own urine. His buskins were plain, black, worn nearly through. His shirt was wool, too, but beneath it bulked a steel breastplate. That was worn and dented, recently oiled. Besides the knife, he had a short, wide-bladed sword in an oiled leather sheath. It was affixed to a belt with a tarnished brass buckle. He wore no visible sign that proclaimed his allegiance.

Trying not to look at his face or bloody throat, she pushed and patted her hands through his clothes, searching for anything that might be hidden.

On his right wrist she noticed an odd marking, burned or dyed into the skin. It was black and depicted what appeared to be a crescent moon.

She gingerly touched the marking, and a mild vertigo reeled through her.

She tasted salt and smelled iron and felt as if she had plunged her hand up to the elbow into something wet and warm. With a shock she realized that though his heart no longer beat, there was still quick in the man, albeit leaking rapidly away. How long would it take for all of him to be dead? Had his soul left him yet?

They hadn’t taught her much about souls at the Coven Saint Cer, through she had learned something about the body. She had sat through and aided in several dissections and remembered—she thought—most of the organs and their primary humors. The soul had no single seat, but the organ that gave it communication was the one encased in the skull.

Remembering the coven, she felt inexplicably calmer, more reassuringly detached. Experimentally, she reached up and touched the corpse’s brow.

A tingle crept up her fingers, passing through her arm and across her chest. As it moved on up her neck to her head, she felt suddenly drowsy.

Her body became distant and pillowy, and she heard a soft gasp escape from her lips. The world hummed with music that would not quite resolve itself into melody.

Her head swayed back, then down again, and with what seemed great effort she parted her eyelids.

Things were different, but it was difficult to say just how. The light was strange, and all seemed unreal, but the trees and the snow remained as they had been.

As her gaze sharpened, she saw dark water bubbling forth from the dead man’s lips. It cascaded down his chest and meandered through the snow a few kingsyards until it met a larger stream.

Her vision suddenly lengthened, and she saw a hundred such streamlets. Then a thousand, tens of thousands of black rills, all melting into larger streams and rivers and finally merging with a water as wide and dark as a sea. As she watched, the last of that man flowed away, and like leaves on a stream there passed the image of a little girl with black hair…

The smell of beer…

The taste of bacon…

A woman’s face more demon than human, terrifying, but the terror itself was already nearly forgotten…

Then he was gone. The liquid from his lips slowed to a trickle and ended. But from the living world the dark waters continued to flow It was then that Anne noticed that something was watching her; she felt its gaze through the trees. Inchoate fear turned in her, and suddenly, more than anything, she didn’t want to see what it was. The image of the demon-woman in the dying man’s eyes freshened, the face so terrible that he hadn’t been able to really see it.

Was it Mefitis, saint of the dead, come for him? Come for Anne, too?

Or was it an estriga, one of the witches Vitellians believed devoured the souls of the damned? Or something beyond imagining?

Whatever it was, it grew nearer.

Gathering the courage in her core, Anne forced her head to turn—

—and swallowed a scream. There was no clear image, only a series of numbing impressions. Vast horns, stretching to scratch the sky, a body that spread out through the trees…

The black waters of a moment before were fastened to the thing like leeches, and though it tore at them with a hundred claws, each tendril that fell away was replaced by another, if not two.

She had seen this thing before, in a field of black roses, in a forest of thorns.

The Briar King.

He had no face, only dreams in motion. At first she saw nothing she recognized, a miasma of colors that had scent and taste and palpable feel. But now she could not look away, though her terror was only growing.

She felt as if a million poisoned needles quilled her flesh. She could not scream.

And Anne was suddenly very certain of two things…

She jerked awake and found her face pressed into the pool of blood on the man’s chest. His body was very cold now, and so was she.

She rose, gagging, and stumbled away from the corpse, but her limbs were numb. She shook her head, clearing the last of the Black Mary. She vaguely knew she ought to take the horse and follow the hoofprints that had brought her here back to their source, but it seemed like too much trouble. Anyway, it was snowing harder now, and soon the tracks would be filled.

She folded herself into a crevice in the roots of a huge tree and, as warmth slowly returned, gathered her strength for what needed to be done.

2 The Ogre’s Trail

An arrow skipped off Neil MeqVren’s helm as he churned his way over the snowbank, the hoarse battle cry of his fathers ringing through the trees. His shield turned aside another death-tipped shaft. And another.

Only a few kingsyards away, four archers continued to hold their ground behind the shields of six swordsmen. Together, the men formed a small fortress well situated to rain death on the only course Neil had any desire to follow—the track of the horsemen bearing Anne.

He decided to charge right at them, as suicidal as that might be. Anything else only delayed the inevitable.

Neil concentrated as he ran, feeling clumsy in his ill-fitting armor, longing for the beautiful set of lord’s plate Sir Fail had once given him, the armor that now rested at the bottom of the harbor of z’Espino, hundreds of leagues away.

The world seemed slow at times like this, and wondrous detailed. Geese trumpeted, distant and overhead. He smelled the resin of broken pine. One of the shieldmen had bright green eyes behind the burnished noseguard of his helm and a downy auburn mustache. His cheeks were red with the cold. His face was clenched in a determination that Neil had seen more than once behind the war board. On another day this young man might drink wine with his friends, dance with a girl, sing a song known only in the tiny hamlet of his birth.

On another day. But today he was ready to die if need be and take whoever he might with him to greet the ferry of Saint Jeroin.

And on the faces of his companions there was the same look.

Neil stumbled, saw a bow bend and the tip of an arrow come down, felt the line drawn through the air to his eye. He knew his shield had dropped too low, that he would never bring it back up in time.

Suddenly the archer dropped his weapon and reached awkwardly for the shaft that had appeared in his own forehead.

Neil couldn’t afford the time to turn and see who had saved his life. Instead, he crouched deeper behind his shield, measuring the last few yards, and then—howling again—flung himself at the shield wall, battering boss to boss with the green-eyed boy.

The fellow did what he ought to do and gave ground so that his fellow shieldmen could move up and put Neil inside the line, surrounding him.

But they didn’t know what Neil carried. The feysword he’d taken from the pieces of a man who could not die lashed through the air, leaving in its soughwake the faint scent of lightning. It cleaved the lifted shield that hovered before him, through the metal cap and skull beneath, through an emerald eye, exiting finally below the ear before twisting to shear through the ribs of the next closest man.

Along with his battle rage, Neil felt a sort of sick anger. There was nothing chivalrous about the use of such a weapon. To fight against overwhelming odds was one thing. To claim victory by shinecraft was another.

But duty and honor didn’t always go together, he had learned. And in this case, it was duty that swung the sword he had named Draug.

The simple fact was, feysword or not, this wasn’t a fight he was likely to win.

Someone grappled with him at his knees, coming at him from behind, and Neil cut down and back, only to find another armored body in the way. Draug bit deeply, but the pommel of a broadsword smacked hard into Neil’s helm, and he toppled into the snow Another man wrapped around his arm, and he couldn’t swing the sword anymore.

The world flared entirely red as he struggled, waiting for the dagger that would inevitably work around his gorget or through his visor. He was suddenly and strangely reminded of sinking into the waves back in z’Espino, dragged down by his armor, his helplessness mingled with relief that his trials were finally over.

Except that this time there was no relief. Anne was out there, in danger, and he would burn the last tinder of his strength to prevent her coming to harm. To more harm. If she wasn’t already dead.

So he struck with the only weapon he had left, his head, butting it into the nearest panting face, and was rewarded with the cartilage crunch of a breaking nose. That was the fellow pinning his left arm, which he brought up now with all the strength of his battle rage, punching into the fellow’s throat. That sent him back.

Then something slammed into his helm with all the weight of the world, and black snow fell from a white sky.

When his head cleared, Neil found someone kneeling over him. He levered himself up with a snarl, and the man leapt back, gabbling in a foreign tongue. To his surprise, Neil found that his limbs were free.

As the red haze parted, he realized that the man kneeling over him had been the Vitellian, Cazio. The swordsman was standing at a respectful distance now, his odd light weapon held in a relaxed ward.

“Hush, knight,” a nearby voice said. “You’re with friends now.”

Neil pushed himself up and turned to regard a man of early middle years with a sun-browned face and close-cropped dark hair plentiful with silver. Another shake of his head and he recognized Aspar White, the king’s holter. Just beyond were the younger Stephen Darige and the honey-haired Winna Rufoote, both crouching and alert in the bloodied snow.

“Best keep your head down,” Aspar said. “There’s another nest of archers out that way.” He gestured with his chin.

“I thought you were all dead,” Neil said.

“Yah,” Aspar said. “We thought you were, too.”

“Anne is where?” Cazio demanded in his heavy Vitellian accent.

“You didn’t see?” Neil asked accusingly. “You were riding right next to her.”

“Yes,” Cazio said, concentrating on trying to get his words right. “Austra riding a little behind, with Stephen. Arrows started, yes, and then, ah, eponiros come up road with, ah, long haso—”

“The lancers, yes,” Neil said. Archers had appeared all along their flanks, and then a wedge of horsemen, charging down the road. The cavalry from Dunmrogh hadn’t had time to form up well but had met them, anyway.

Neil had killed three of the riders personally but had found himself pushed farther and farther away from Anne. When he’d returned to the scene, he’d discovered nothing but the dead and no sign whatever of the heir to the throne of Crotheny.

“Was trick,” Cazio said. “Came, ah, aurseto, struck me here.” He indicated his head, which was sticky with blood.

“I don’t know that word,” Neil said.

“Aurseto,” Cazio repeated. “Like, ah, water, air—”

“Invisible,” Stephen interrupted. The novice priest turned to Cazio. “Uno viro aurseto?”

“Yes,” Cazio said, nodding vigorously. “Like cloud, color of snow, on epo, same—”

“A horse and rider the color of the snow?” Neil asked incredulously.

“Yes,” Cazio confirmed. “Guarding Anne, I hear noise behind me—”

“And he hit you in the back of the head.”

“Yes,” Cazio said, his face falling.

“I don’t believe you,” Neil snapped. He hadn’t entirely approved of this fellow since he had helped persuade Anne to leave Neil to his death back in Vitellio. True, Cazio had saved Anne’s life on several occasions, but his motives seemed to be mostly salacious. Neil knew for a fact that such motives were untrustworthy and subject to violent change. He was a braggart, too, and though he was an effective enough street brawler—phenomenal, in fact—he hadn’t the slightest sense of war discipline.

More than all that, Neil had learned to his chagrin that few people in the world were what they seemed.

Something dangerous glinted in Cazio’s eyes, and he stood straighter, then put his palm on the hilt of his sword. Neil took a deep breath and dropped his hand toward Draug.

“Believe him,” Aspar grunted.

“Asp? You?” Winna said.

“Werlic. There were three of ’em, at least. Why do you think I didn’t make it back to warn you about the ambush? They aren’t invisible, not exactly, but it’s as the lad said. They’re like smoke, and you can see through ’em. If you know where to look, you can tell they’re there, but if you don’t, they can give you quite a surprise.

“The other thing is, if you kill ’em, they come solid again, them and their mounts, even if the mounts aren’t scratched. Near as I can tell—their trick aside—they’re just men.”

Stephen frowned. “That reminds me of—I read about a faneway once…” He scratched his jaw, his brow furrowed in concentration.

“More churchmen,” Aspar grunted. “Just what we need.”

Cazio was still tense, focused on Neil, hand on the hilt of his weapon. “Apologies,” Neil told the swordsman. “Persnimo. I am overwrought and jumped to conclusions.”

Cazio relaxed a bit and nodded.

“Holter White,” Neil asked, “do these invisible men leave tracks?”

“Yah.”

“Then let’s kill those fellows over there and find our queen.”

Their attackers had left more than two groups of defenders in their path, that became clear.

Another few hundred pereci from where they found the knight, they ran into another bunch, though these were fewer in number. They didn’t last long, but Aspar warned them to expect more up ahead.

Cazio was reminded of the nursery tale about a boy, lost in the forest, who came upon a grand triva. The triva turned out to be the home of a three-headed ogre who caught the boy and planned to eat him. Instead, the ogre’s daughter took a liking to him and helped him escape.

Together they fled, pursued by the father, who was faster and soon caught up to them. The girl had her own tricks, though. She threw a comb behind them, and it became a hedge through which the ogre was forced to tear. She flung down a wineskin, which became a river…

“What are you thinking about?”

Cazio realized with a start that the priest was only a few paces away. Stephen spoke Vitellian, and though he sounded very old-fashioned, it was a relief to be able to talk without so much thinking.

“Combs and hedges, wineskins and rivers,” he said mysteriously.

Stephen quirked a smile. “So we’re the ogre?”

Cazio blinked. He’d thought he was being mysterious.

“You think too quickly,” he commented wryly.

“I walked the faneway of Saint Decmanus,” Stephen replied. “I can’t help it—the saint blessed me.” He stopped and smiled. “I’ll bet your version of the story is different from the one I know. Does the boy’s brother kill the ogre in the end?”

“No, he leads it to a church, and the attish sacritor slays it by ringing the clock three times.”

“Oh, now that’s very interesting,” Stephen said, and he seemed to mean it.

“If you insist,” Cazio granted. “In any event, yes, we’re all turned around. It’s the ogre we’re pursuing, and he’s the one leaving obstacles. But I wonder why.

“Up until now they’ve been trying to kill Anne. The knights who pursued us never made any effort to capture her alive. But if these melcheos had wanted to kill her, they could have done it easily, when they caught me napping.” He gingerly touched the wound on his head.

“At least you saw him for a second,” Stephen said. “I didn’t even catch a glimpse of the one who took Austra. Really, it’s not your fault.”

“Of course it is,” Cazio insisted, waving away the absolution. “I was with her—and I’ll get her back. And if they’ve harmed her, I’ll kill every last one of the purcapercators.

“But that still doesn’t answer my question. Why didn’t they just murder her?”

“There could be any number of reasons,” Stephen said. “The priests back in Dunmrogh wanted her blood for a ritual sacrifice—”

“Yes, but that was only because they needed a woman of noble birth, and the one they had was killed. Besides, we stopped that business.”

“It might not be the same business. We prevented the enemy once, but there are many more cursed faneways in this forest, and I’m willing to bet that there are more renegades trying to awaken them. Each faneway is particular, with its own gift—or curse. Maybe they need the blood of a princess again.”

“The men in Dunmrogh were mostly churchmen and knights from Hansa. I’ve seen neither in this group we’re facing now.”

Stephen shrugged. “But we’ve fought foes like this before, before we met you. There were monks involved then, too, and men without any identifiable standard or nation. Even Sefry.”

“Then the enemy isn’t the Church?”

“We don’t know who the enemy is, ultimately,” Stephen admitted. “The Hanzish knights and churchmen at Dunmrogh had the same dark goals as the men Aspar and Winna and I fought before—not far from here, in fact. We think they’re all taking their commands from the praifec in Crotheny, Marché Hespero. But for all we know, he’s taking his orders from someone else altogether.”

“What do they all want?”

Stephen chuckled bitterly. “As far as we can tell, to waken a very ancient and potent evil.”

“Why?”

“For power, I suppose. I can’t genuinely say. But these men attacking us now? I don’t know what they want. You’re right; they seem different. Maybe they’re in the employ of the usurper.”

“Anne’s uncle?” Cazio thought that was who Stephen meant. In truth, the whole situation was a bit confusing.

“Right,” Stephen confirmed. “He might still have reason to want her kept alive.”

“Well, I hope so,” Cazio said.

“You have feelings for her?” Stephen asked.

“I am her protector,” Cazio said, a little irritated by the question.

“No more than that?”

“No. No more.”

“Because it seems as if—”

“Nothing.” Cazio asserted. “I befriended her before I knew who she was. And besides, this is none of your business.”

“No, I suppose it isn’t,” Stephen said. “Look, I’m sure she and her maid—”

“Austra.”

Stephen’s eyebrow lifted, and he quirked an annoying little smile. “Austra,” he repeated. “We’ll find them, Cazio. You see that man up there?”

“Aspar? The woodsman?”

“Yes. He can follow any trail; I can personally guarantee it.”

Cazio noted that light flakes were falling from the sky again.

“Even in this?” he asked.

“In anything,” Stephen said.

Cazio nodded. “Good.”

They rode along in silence for a moment.

“How did you meet the princess?” Stephen asked.

Cazio felt a smile stretch his lips. “I am from Avella, you know? It’s a town in the Tero Mefio. My father was a nobleman, but he was killed in a duel and didn’t leave me much. Just a house in Avella and z’Acatto.”

“The old man we left in Dunmrogh?”

“Yes. My swordmaster.”

“You must miss him.”

“He’s a drunken, overbearing, arrogant—Yes, I miss him. I wish he were here now.” He shook his head. “But Anne—z’Acatto and I went to visit a friend in the country—the countess Orchaevia—to take some air. As it happened, her triva and estates were near the Coven Saint Cer.

“I was walking that way one day and found the princess, ah, in her bath.” He turned quickly to Stephen. “You must understand, I had no idea who she was.”

Stephens look sharpened abruptly. “Did you do anything?”

“Nothing, I swear.” His smile broadened as he remembered. “Well, I perhaps flirted a bit,” he admitted. “I mean, in a barren countryside to find an exotic girl, already unclothed—it certainly seemed like a sign from Lady Erenda.”

“Did you actually see her unclothed body?”

“Ah, well, just a bit of it.”

Stephen sighed heavily and shook his head. “And here I was beginning to like you, swordsman.”

“I told you, I had no idea.”

“I probably would have done the same thing. But the fact that you didn’t know who she was, well, it doesn’t matter. Cazio, you saw a princess of the blood in the flesh, a princess who, if we succeed in our quest, will become the queen of Crotheny. Don’t you understand what that means? Didn’t she tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“Any man who looks upon a princess of the blood—any man save her consecrated husband—must suffer blinding or death. The law is more than a thousand years old.”

“What? You’re joking.”

But Stephen was frowning. “My friend,” he said, “I have never been more serious.”

“But Anne never said anything.”

“I’m sure she wouldn’t. She probably imagines that she can beg leniency for you, but the law is very specific, and even as queen, the matter would be out of her hands; it would be enforced by the Comven.”

“But this is absurd,” Cazio protested. “I saw nothing but her shoulders, and perhaps the smallest glimpse of—

“I did not know!”

“No one else knows this,” Stephen said. “If you were to slip off…”

“Now you’re being even more ridiculous,” Cazio said, feeling his hackles rise. “I’ve braved death for Anne and Austra many times over. I’ve sworn to protect them, and no man of honor would back away from such a promise just because he feared some ridiculous punishment. Especially now, when she’s in the clutches of—”

He stopped and stared closely at Stephen.

“There is no such law, is there?” he demanded.

“Oh, there is,” Stephen said, controlling himself with obvious effort. “As I said, it’s a thousand years old. It hasn’t been enforced in more than five hundred, though. No, I think you’re safe, old fellow.”

Cazio glared at Stephen. “If you weren’t a priest…”

“But I’m not,” Stephen said. “I was a novice, and I did walk the faneway of Saint Decmanus. But I had a sort of falling-out with the Church.”

“With the Church itself? You think the entire Church is evil?”

Stephen clucked his tongue for a moment. “I don’t know. I’m starting to fear so.”

“But you mentioned this praifec…”

“Hespero. Yes, Aspar, Winna, and I were sent on a mission by Praifec Hespero, but not the mission we ended on. What we discovered is that the corruption runs very deep in the Church, perhaps all the way back to z’Irbina and the Fratrex Prismo.”

“That’s impossible,” Cazio asserted.

“Why impossible?” Stephen said. “The men and women of the Church are just that, men and women, as easily corrupted by power and wealth as anyone else.”

“But the lords and ladies—”

“In the king’s tongue we call them saints,” Stephen said.

“Whatever you call them, they would never allow so deep a stain on their Church.”

Stephen smiled, and Cazio found it a very unsettling smile.

“There are many saints,” he said. “And they are not all pure.” He suddenly looked distracted. “A moment,” he murmured.

“What?”

“I hear something,” he said. “More men up ahead. And something else.”

“Your saint-blessed ears, yes? Before, when they ambushed us, why didn’t you hear that?”

Stephen shrugged. “I really don’t know. Maybe whatever saint-gift or dwemor it was that made the kidnappers invisible dulled my hearing, but you’ll have to excuse me. I need to tell Aspar… and Neil.”

“Yes,” Cazio said. “I’ll keep my sword ready.”

“Yes. Please do.”

Cazio watched Stephen trot his horse, Angel, up toward the rest, and, feeling somewhat glum, drew Caspator and rubbed his thumb along the deep notch that marred the strong part of the blade, a notch made by the same glittering witch-sword now carried by Sir Neil.

That notch was Caspator’s death wound. There was no repairing such damage without reforging the entire blade, and with a new blade it wouldn’t really be Caspator anymore but a different weapon. But even having a new blade forged wasn’t so likely in these northern climes, where everyone favored overgrown butcher’s cleavers to the rapier, the soul of dessrata. Dessrata was impossible without the right weapon, and where was he to find another sword that would serve, short of going back to Vitellio?

He really did miss z’Acatto. Not for the first time, he wished he’d returned to Vitellio with his old swordmaster.

He’d begun the expedition in high hopes for adventure. Harrowing as it had been at times, he’d seen more wonders since leaving Vitellio than in all his life until that time. But it had been just the four of them: Anne, Austra, z’Acatto, and himself.

Now Anne had a knight with a magic sword, a woodsman who could drill an arrow through a pigeon at six miles, and a priest who could hear twelve leagues in every direction. Winna didn’t have any arcane abilities that he could see, but he wouldn’t be entirely surprised if she suddenly began calling the animals, imploring them to fight at their side.

And what was he? A fellow who’d let the queen and her maid be kidnapped from beneath his very nose, who couldn’t even speak the language of the kingdom, and who would be dead useless once his sword inevitably snapped.

The strangest thing was that that didn’t bother him so much. Well, it did, but not the way it would have a year before. He did feel inadequate, but that in itself wasn’t the problem. It wasn’t his pride that hurt; it was the fact that he couldn’t serve Anne the way he should.

It was that Austra was in the hands of someone evil.

He’d been trying to distract himself with selfish thoughts to keep himself from dwelling on the really soul-crushing possibility—that his friends were already dead.

Up ahead he noticed Stephen beckoning him with one hand and holding a finger to his lips with another. He spurred his horse forward, wondering what this fight would be like.

As it turned out, there was mixed news. The men Stephen had heard were allies—four of the knights from Dunmrogh—crouched behind a cairn of stones at the top of the nearest hill. They were hunkered there because the next ridge over was held by their enemies.

“This was very well planned,” Neil said to Aspar. “A main assault to distract us, sorcelled horsemen to take the girls, and a series of rear guards to slow us down while they escaped. But why not brave it all on a single assault?”

Aspar shrugged. “Maybe they’ve heard tell of us and think we’re stronger than we are. More likely you’re wrong. Could be their plans didn’t go as well as it seemed. I think they did mean to kill us all in a single assault, and if you think about it, they came pretty close. We had near forty men when we left Dunmrogh. Now there are nine of us left, but they don’t know that. What with the snow and us separating, they’re as confused as we are.

“For all we know, we outnumber them now. That could be the last three of em there, over on that ridge, and the girls might be with em. No way to tell, now that it’s getting dark.”

“There are six of them,” Stephen said, “and I do hear a girl, though I can’t swear she’s one of ours.”

“It must be,” Neil said.

“Werlic,” Aspar agreed. “So we’ll just have to go and get em.” His eyes traced lazily through the trees, down into the small valley, up to the opposing ridge.

“Aspar…” Stephen murmured.

“Yah?”

“There’s something—something else. But I can’t tell you what it is.”

“With the men?”

Stephen shook his head. “No. It might be very far away.”

“Then we’ll grab the first branch before reaching for the next,” Aspar said. “But if you make out anything more clearly—”

“I’ll let you know,” Stephen promised.

Neil was still studying the terrain. “They’ll have plenty of clear shots at us before we can get to them,” he noted.

“Yah,” Aspar said. “That would be a good reason not to charge them through the valley.”

“Is there another way?”

“Plenty of other ways. They’ve got the highest ground, but this ridge joins theirs up to our left.”

“You know this place?”

Aspar frowned. “No. But that brooh down there’s pretty small; see? And I can smell the springhead. And if you look at the light through the trees—well, its high ground up there, trust me. The only thing is, if we all go that way, they might bolt.

“If they follow the ridge down, it’ll take em to the marshes on the Warlock, and we’ll get them there. But if they go north, down the ridge, they’ll find themselves breaking out of the woods onto prairie, and there they’ll have a choice of crossing the river and taking the Mey Ghorn plain or heading east.

“Either way, we’ll have to catch them again, if we can. Right now we know where they are.”

“But why are they waiting there?” Neil asked.

“I reckon they’re lost,” Aspar said. “They can’t see the open ground from where they are. If they ride a hundred kingsyards, though, they will. Then we’ve got trouble.”

“What do you propose? Have someone sneak around on the high ground?”

“Yah,” Aspar said.

“And I suppose that person would be you.”

For answer, the holter suddenly bent his bow and let fly a shaft. A sharp cry of consternation echoed from across the dale.

“Ney,” the holter said. “I’m needed here to convince em that we’re still on this ridge. You and Cazio go. When Stephen hears you near, we’ll make our run down the valley and back up the other side. You just be sure and keep them busy.”

Neil thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “That’s worth trying,” he said.

“Can you keep it quiet?”

“In the forest? I’ll leave my armor. But still…”

“I’ve no sense that they’re woodsmen,” Aspar said. “We’ll try to keep things lively here.”

Neil glanced over at Cazio. “Stephen,” he said, “could you explain to Cazio what we just said?”

Stephen did, and when he was done, the swordsman grinned and nodded. Neil stripped down to his quilted gambeson, took up Draug, and a few moments later they were skirting the ridge east, wincing at the sound of each broken twig, hoping Aspar was right about everything.

They needn’t have worried. The ridge turned, just as the holter had predicted, forming a sort of cul-de-sac below. The hill dipped again as it curved, then began rising toward the high point where their enemies waited.

Now and then Neil heard shouted exchanges between Aspar, Winna, Stephen, and the men ahead of them. That was a relief, because it provided a further guide.

Neil found himself holding his breath. Annoyed, he forced himself to breathe evenly. He had attacked in stealth before; in the strands and high meadows of the isles he had fought many a night battle, positioning himself for surprise. But the islands were sand and stone, moss and heather. Moving with the easy silence of Aspar White through these treacherous hills and trees was well beyond his abilities.

He glanced at Cazio and found the Vitellian stepping with the same exaggerated care.

The shouting up ahead was growing nearer now. Crouching lower, Neil reached for his sword.

Aspar turned when he heard Stephen gasp.

“What?”

“All around us,” Stephen said. “Moving from every direction.”

“More of them? An ambush?”

“No, no,” Stephen said. “They’re quieter than they were before, much quieter, almost like wind in the trees. His power is growing, and theirs is, too.”

“Slinders,” Winna gasped.

“Slinders,” Stephen said.

“Sceat,” Aspar grunted.

Cazio stopped when he caught a glimpse of color through the autumn-shorn trees. The understory was thick and brambly with wild blueberry, harlot creeper, and cruxflower vine.

To his right he saw that Neil MeqVren also had paused.

The brush was both a boon and a problem. The archers among their enemies would have difficulty finding a target until they were nearly in the clearing. However, it would slow Cazio and the knight as they made their approach.

Wrong. Suddenly Sir Neil was charging, whirling that eerie butchering blade of his in front of him like a gardener’s bill, and the underbrush was no more resistant to it than was flesh or armor.

Wishing he could have known a little more about the plan, he fell in immediately behind Neil, excitement winding in him like the cord of a ballista arming.

The instant Neil burst into the clearing, Cazio dodged around him, neatly stepping into the path of a black-feathered shaft. It skinned along his belly, leaving a deep score of pain. He couldn’t tell if he’d been eviscerated or merely scratched, and he didn’t really have time to check, since a piggish brute with a broadsword came snuffling quickly toward him.

Cazio put Caspator out in a line; the rapier was easily twice the length of the hacking weapon his opponent carried. The fellow was bright enough to understand that and beat fiercely at the narrow blade to move it out of his path. He wasn’t smart enough to stop charging, though, apparently confident that his wild attack on the blade would succeed.

But with a deft flick of his wrist, Cazio avoided the searching weapon without withdrawing his line so that the man obligingly ran straight onto the tip of his weapon.

“Ca dola da,” Cazio began, customarily explaining to his foe what deftness of dessrata had just wounded him. He didn’t finish, though, because—impaled or not—the pig aimed a ferocious cut at Cazio’s head. He avoided it only by ducking, which sent a fresh sear of pain along his wounded belly.

The blade missed him, but the momentum of the swing carried the man’s sword arm into Cazio’s shoulder. Cazio caught the arm with his left hand and held it as he twisted Caspator free from the man’s lungs. For an instant sea-green eyes filled Cazio’s world, and with a shudder he understood that what he saw there wasn’t hatred, or anger, or even a seething battle rage but horror and desperation.

“Don’t…” the man gasped.

Cazio pushed him away, feeling sick. There was no ‘don’t.’ The man was already dead; he just wasn’t able to accept it yet.

What was he doing here? Cazio had been a duelist since he was twelve, but he had rarely fought to kill. It simply hadn’t been necessary.

But now it is, he thought grimly as he drew-cut a crouching archer’s string, thus preventing the man from shooting him in the face. He followed that with a violently swung boot that caught the fellow beneath the chin and lifted him toward a bed of briars and bushes.

He was just turning to meet another attacker when the forest exploded.

He had a sudden sense of darkness, the scent of unbathed bodies, and something else: a smell like the sweet alcohol perfume of grapes rotting on the vine, the odor of black dirt. Then it seemed a hundred limbs were clutching at him, clenching him, and he was borne down into chaos.

3 Country Known and Strange

Anne’s mount snuffled in fear as they approached yet another wall of black thorns wound so thickly through the trees as to deny entrance to anything larger than a vole.

“Hush,” Anne said, patting the beast’s neck. It flinched and shied from her touch.

“Be nice.” Anne sighed. “I’ll give you a name, all right? What’s a good name?”

Mercenjoy, a little voice in her seemed to titter, and for an instant she felt so dizzy, she feared she might fall off.

“No, then, not Mercenjoy,” she said, more to herself than to the horse. That was the name of the Dark Knight’s mount in the phay stories, she remembered, and it meant “Murder-Steed.”

“You belonged to a bad man,” she said as reassuringly as possible, “but you aren’t a bad horse. Let’s see, I think I’ll call you Prespine, for the saint of the labyrinth. She found her way out of her maze—now you’ll help me find our way out of this one.”

Even as she said it, Anne remembered a day that now seemed long ago, a day when her cares had been relatively simple ones and she’d been at her sister’s birthday party. There had been a labyrinth there, grown of flowers and vines, but in a moment she’d found herself in another maze, in a strange place with no shadows, and since then nothing had been simple.

Anne hadn’t wanted to get up, to catch the horse and ride. She’d wanted to stay huddled in the roots of the tree until someone came to help her or until it didn’t matter anymore.

But fear had driven her up—fear that if she stayed in one place for long, something worse than death would catch up with her.

She shuddered as a change in the wind brought a stench from the black briars, a smell that reminded her of spiders, though she couldn’t recall ever having actually smelled a spider. The strange growth was somehow like spiders, too. The vines and leaves glistened with the promise of venom.

She turned Prespine, following the thorns but keeping a respectable distance from them. Far off to her left, she thought she heard a sort of howling for a time, but as quickly as it began, it was gone.

The sun passed noon, then continued on toward its night home in the wood beyond the world. Anne imagined that the country where the sun slept couldn’t be any stranger or more terrible than this place. The thorns seemed almost to be guiding her, herding her toward some destination she almost certainly did not desire to visit.

As the sky darkened, she also began to feel something behind her, and she knew she had been right back at the tree. Something was coming for her. It began as small as an insect, but it grew, with its many eyes fastened greedily on her back.

When she turned, however, no matter how quickly, it was gone.

She’d played this game as a child, as most children do. She and Austra had pretended the dread Scaos was after them, a monster so terrible that they could not look at it without being turned to stone. Alone, she had imagined a ghost walking behind her, sometimes at the corner of her vision but never there when she turned to confront it. Sometimes it frightened her, sometimes it delighted her, and usually both. Fear that one had under control had a certain delicate flavor.

This fear was not under her control. It did not taste good at all.

And it only grew more substantial. The unseen fingers clutched ever closer to her shoulder, and when she spun about, there was something, like the stain the bright sun leaves beneath the eyelids. The air seemed to clot thickly around her, the trees to bend wearily earthward.

Something had followed her back. But back from where? Where was that place of dark waters?

She had journeyed beyond the world before, or at least beyond her part of it. Most often she had been to the place of the Faiths, which was sometimes a forest, sometimes a glen, sometimes a highland meadow. Once she had taken Austra there with her to escape some murderous knights.

The place she had gone with the dying man was different. Had it been the land of the dead or only the borderlands? She remembered that the land of the dead was supposed to have two rivers—though she couldn’t remember why—but here there had been more than two; there had been thousands.

And the Briar King. He had been shackled by those waters, or at least they were trying to bind him. What did that mean? And who was he?

He had communicated something to her, not with words, but his desire had been clear nonetheless. How did he even know who she was?

The face of the demon-woman flashed through her memory, and terror tremored freshly through her. Was that who followed her? She remembered the Faiths telling her that the law of death had been broken, whatever that meant. Had she committed some crime against the saints and brought death after her?

Red-gold sun suddenly spilled like a waterfall through the upper branches, and with terrible relief she suddenly realized that the briars had ended. Not much farther ahead the trees thinned to nothing as well, giving way to a sweeping, endless field of yellowed grass. With a mixed shout of fear and triumph, she spurred Prespine out into the open and felt the creeping presence behind her diminish, slinking back into the thorn shadows where it was comfortable.

Tears sprang in Anne’s eyes as her hood fell away and the wind raked through her breviated hair. The sun was just above the horizon, an orange eye half-lidded by clouds bruised upon a golden west. The glorious color faded into a vesperine heaven so dark blue, she almost imagined that it was water, that she could swim up into and hide in its depths with its odd bright fish and be safe far above the world.

The clouds were mostly gone, the snow had stopped, and everything seemed better. But until the forest was a thinning line behind her, Anne kept Prespine at a run. Then she brought her to a walk and patted the mare’s neck, feeling the great pulse beating there, nearly in time with her own.

It was still cold; indeed, it felt colder than when the snow had been falling.

Where was she? Anne swept her gaze about the unfamiliar landscape, trying to conjure up some sort of bearings. She never had paid much attention to the maps her tutors had shown her when she was younger. She’d been regretting that for several months now.

The sunset marked the west, of course. The plain sloped gradually down from the forest, so she could see for some distance. In the east, the dusk glimmered on a broad river across which, far away, she could see the black line of more trees. The river curved north and vanished into the horizon.

Nearer, she happily made out the spire of what must be a bell tower. The landscape in that direction seemed pimpled with tiny hills, which after a moment she realized must be haystacks.

She paused for a long moment, watching the distant signs of civilization, her feelings clouding a bit. A town meant people, and people meant food, shelter, warmth, companionship. It could also mean danger; the man who had attacked her—he must have attacked her—had come from somewhere. This was the first place she had seen that might explain him.

And where were Austra and the rest? Behind her, in front of her—or dead?

She took a deep breath, trying to release the tension in her shoulders.

She had been talking to Cazio, and everything had been fine. Then she had been alone with a dying man. The most logical assumption was that somehow he had abducted her, but why couldn’t she remember how it had happened?

Even trying to think about it brought a sudden panic that threatened to cloud all other thoughts from her mind.

She pushed that away and concentrated on the present. If her friends were alive, they were searching for her. If they were not, then she was alone.

Could she survive a night on the plain by herself? Maybe, maybe not. It depended on how cold it got. Prespine’s saddlebags contained a bit of bread and dried meat but nothing more. She had watched Cazio and z’Acatto start fires, but she hadn’t seen anything that resembled a tinder-box in the dead man’s possessions.

Reluctantly, she made her decision and prodded the mare toward the town. She needed to know where she was, at the very least. Had she made it to Loiyes? If so, the village ahead ought to be under the governance of her aunt. If she wasn’t in Loiyes, she needed to get there. She was more certain of that now than ever, for she had seen it in the face of the Briar King.

She realized that she knew something else.

Stephen Darige at least was alive. She knew this because the Briar King knew it. And there was something Stephen was supposed to do.

Not much farther along she came across a rutted clay road wide enough for wains; cut down into the landscape as it was, it had hidden itself from her earlier view. From where she met it the road wound off through cultivated fields. She noticed bits of green peeking through the snow, leading Anne to wonder what sorts of crops the farmers grew in winter or whether they were just weeds.

The haystacks she had seen as tiny at a distance were here prodigiously tall. Gaunt scarecrows in tattered rags stared empty-eyed from heads of gourd or shriveled black pumpkin.

The woodsmoke and its comforting aroma draped across the cold earth, and before long she came to a house, albeit a small one, with white clay walls and a steeply pitched thatch roof. A shed attached to the side seemed to serve as the barn; a cow watched her from beneath its eaves with dull curiosity. She could just make out a man in dirty tunic and leggings, pulling hay down from a loft with a wooden-tined pitchfork.

“Pardon me,” she called tentatively. “Can you tell me what that town ahead is named?”

The man glanced back at her, his tired eyes suddenly rounding a bit.

“Ah, edeu,” he said. “She ez anaméd Sevoyne, milady.”

Anne was taken aback by his accent, which was a bit difficult to decipher.

“Sevoyne?” she said. “That’s in Loiyes?”

“Edeu, milady. Loiyes ez here. Whereother should she beeth, to beg theen perdon?”

Anne let the question go as rhetorical. “And can you tell me where Glenchest is from here?” she pursued.

“Glenchest?” His brow furrowed. “She most to four leagues, creed I, ’long the road most to way. You are working for the duchess there, lady?”

“That’s where I’m going,” Anne said. “I’m just a little lost.”

“Never-I’ve been thet faer along,” the fellow said. “But they tell ez net s’hard to find to er.”

“Thanks, then,” Anne said. “Thanks for that.”

“Velhoman, and good road ahead, lady,” the man said.

As Anne rode on, she heard a woman’s voice behind her. The man answered, and this time the language was one she did not know, though it carried the same peculiar cadence as his very odd king’s tongue.

So this was Loiyes, in the heartland of Crotheny. How was it, then, that the peasants here didn’t speak the king’s tongue first?

And how was it that she hadn’t known as much? She had been to Loiyes before, to Glenchest. The people in the town in Glenchest spoke perfectly good king’s tongue. According to the man, this was less than a day’s ride from there.

She had spent so much time traveling in foreign lands. The thought of a homecoming—of reaching a place where people spoke the language she had grown up with and everything was familiar—was something she had been longing for for months.

Now here she was, only to discover that the country of her birth was stranger than she had ever known.

It made her feel a little sick.

By the time Anne reached Sevoyne, the appearing stars were vanishing behind a new ceiling of cloud rolling in from the east, bringing for Anne a return of the claustrophobia she’d experienced in the forest. Her silent pursuer was near again, emboldened by the deep shadows.

She passed the town horz, the one spot where things were allowed to grow absolutely wild, albeit caged by an ancient stone wall. For the first time Anne recognized that contradiction, and she felt it sharply, another familiar stone in her world that had turned over to reveal the crawling things festering beneath.

The horz represented wild, untamed nature. The saints of the horz were Selfan of the Pines, Rieyene of the Birds, Fessa of the Flowers, Flenz of the Vines: the wild saints. How must the wild saints feel about being bound when once the whole world must have been theirs? She remembered the horz back in Tero Galle, where she had entered the other world. She’d had a sense of diseased anger there, of frustration become madness.

For a moment the stone walls seemed to become a hedge of black thorns, and the image of the antlered figure returned to her.

He was wild, and, like everything truly wild, he was terrifying. The thorns were trying to bind him, weren’t they? The way the walls of the horz bound wildness. But who sent the thorns?

And had she thought of that herself, or had he left it in her head? How had she made that connection?

On the east she couldn’t remember what had happened to her. On the west her mind found strange conclusions. Had she lost control of her thoughts entirely? Was she mad?

“Detoi, meyez,” someone said, interrupting her ponderings. “Quey veretoi adeyre en se zevie?”

Anne tensed and tried to focus through the dark. To her surprise, what had seemed to be a mere shadow suddenly clarified as a man of middle years wearing livery she recognized: the sunspray, spear, and leaping fish of the dukes of Loiyes.

“Do you speak the king’s tongue, sir?” she asked.

“I do,” the man replied. “And I apologize for my impertinence. I could not see in the dark that you are a lady.”

Anne understood the peasants reaction now. Her king’s tongue and the accent she spoke it with gave her away immediately as a noble of Eslen, or one of the nobles’ close servants, at least. Her clothes, however dirty, surely confirmed it. That could be good or bad.

No, not good or bad. She was alone, without protectors. It was most probably bad.

“Whom do I have the honor of addressing, sir?”

“Mechoil MeLemved,” he replied. “Captain of the guard of Sevoyne. Are you lost, lady?”

“I’m on my way to Glenchest.”

“Alone? And in these times?”

“I had companions. We were separated.”

“Well, come in from the cold, lady. The coirmthez—I’m sorry, the inn—will have a room for you. Perhaps your companions are already waiting for you.”

Anne’s hopes slumped further. The captain seemed too unsurprised, too ready to accommodate her.

“I should warn you, Captain MeLemved,” she said, “that attempts have been made to deceive me into harm before, and my patience is very short with that sort of thing.”

“I don’t understand, Princess,” the captain said. “What harm could I mean you?”

She felt her face freeze.

“None, I’m sure,” she said.

She kicked Prespine into motion, wheeling to turn around. As she did so, she discovered there was someone behind her, and even as she perceived that, she noticed something in her peripheral vision just before it slapped her hard across the side of the head.

She gasped as everything spun in four or five directions, and then strong fingers pinched into her arms, dragging her from her mount. She squirmed, kicked, and screamed, but her cries were stifled quickly by something shoved into her mouth, followed immediately by a smell of grain as a sack was pulled over her head. Anger flared, and she reached to the place in her where sickness dwelled, sickness she could give to others.

What she found instead was a terror so vivid that her only escape from it was another retreat into darkness.

She woke sputtering, her nose burning, her throat closed. An acrid alcoholic stench suffused everything, but that seemed strangely distant.

Her eyes peeled open, and she saw through a glassy vertigo that she was in a small room lit by several candles. Someone was holding her hair back, and though she felt her roots pulling, it didn’t hurt that much.

“Awake now, eh?” a man’s voice growled. “Well, drink, then.”

The hard lip of a bottle was pressed against her lips, and something wet poured into her mouth. She spit it out, confused, recognizing how she felt, remembering that something had happened but not sure what. There had been a woman, a terrible woman, a demon, and she had fled her, just as she had before…

“Swallow it,” the man snarled.

That was when Anne realized she was drunk.

She had been drunk a few times before with Austra. Mostly it had been pleasant, but on a few occasions she had been very sick.

How much had they made her drink while she was asleep?

Enough. Horribly she almost giggled.

The man held her nose and poured more of the stuff down her throat. It was like wine but oceans harsher and stronger. It went down this time, fire snaking through her throat and arriving in a belly already warmed to burning. She felt a sudden nausea, but then that cleared away. Her head was pulsing pleasantly, and things around her seemed to be happening much too quickly.

The man stepped to where she could see him. He wasn’t very old, maybe a few years older than she. He had curly brown hair, lighter at the ends, and hazel eyes. He wasn’t handsome, but he wasn’t ugly, either.

“There,” he said. “Look, there’s no reason for you to make this hard.”

Anne felt her eyes bug, and tears suddenly stung them. “Going to kill me,” she said, her words slurring. She wanted to say something much more complicated, but it wouldn’t come out.

“No, I’m not,” he said.

“Yes, you are.”

He frowned at her without speaking for a few moments.

“Why—why am I drunk?” she asked.

“So you don’t try to escape. I know you’re a shinecrafter. They say brandy makes it harder for you to use your arts.”

“I’m not a shinecrafter,” she snapped. Then, all restraint gone, she began shouting. “What do you want with me?”

“Me? Nothing. I’m just waiting for the rest. How did you get away, anyway? What were you doing alone?”

“My friends are coming,” she said. “Believe me. And when they get here, you’ll be sorry.”

“I’m already sorry,” the man said. “They left me here just in case, but I never thought I would have to deal with you.”

“Well, I—” But as soon as she started the thought, she lost it.

It was getting harder to think at all, in fact, and her earlier fear that she was losing her mind resurfaced as something of a private joke. Her lips felt huge and rubbery, and her tongue the size of her head.

“You gave me a lot to shr—drink.”

“Yes, I did.”

“When I fall asleep, you’re going to kill me.” She felt a tear collect in the corner of her eye and start down her cheek.

“No, that’s stupid. I would have killed you already, wouldn’t I? No, you’re wanted alive.”

“Why?”

“How should I know? I just work for my reytoirs. The others—”

“Aren’t coming back,” Anne said.

“What?”

“They’re all dead. Don’t you see that? All of your friends are dead.” She laughed, not quite sure why.

“You saw them?” he asked uneasily.

Anne nodded the lie. It felt as is if she were wiggling a huge kettle at the top of a narrow pole. “She killed them,” she said.

“She who?”

“The one you see in your nightmares,” she said tauntingly. “The one who creeps on you in the dark. She’s coming for me. You’ll be here when she finds me, and you’ll be sorry.”

The light was dimming. The candles were still lit but seemed to have faded somehow. The darkness wrapped around her like a comforter. Everything was spinning, and it seemed far too much trouble to talk.

“Corning…” she murmured, trying to keep a sense of urgency.

She didn’t fall asleep exactly, but her eyes closed, and her head seemed full of strange trumpets and unnatural lights.

She drifted in and out of scenes. She was in z’Espino, dressed like a maid, scrubbing laundry, and two women with large heads were making fun of her in a language she didn’t recognize.

She was on her own horse, Faster, riding so hard that she felt like vomiting.

She was in the house of her dead ancestors, the house of marble in Eslen-of-Shadows with Roderick, and he was kissing her on the bare flesh of her knee, moving up her thigh. She reached down to stroke his hair, and when he looked up at her, his eyes were maggoty holes.

She shrieked, and her eyes fluttered open to watery, half-focused reality. She was still in the little room. Someone’s head was pressed against her chest, and she realized with dull outrage that her bodice was open and someone was licking her. She was still in the chair, but his body was between her legs, which she could see were bare of stockings. He had hiked her skirts up all the way to her hips.

“No…” she murmured, pushing at him. “No.”

“Be still,” he hissed. “I told you this wouldn’t be so bad.”

“No!” Anne managed to scream.

“No one can hear you,” he said. “Calm down. I know how to do this.”

“No!”

But he ignored her, not understanding that she wasn’t yelling at him anymore.

She was yelling at her as she rose up from the shadows, her terrible teeth showing in a malicious grin.

4 A New Music

Leoff clung to his Black Marys. No matter how terrible they were, he knew waking would be worse.

And sometimes, in the miasma of darkness and embodied pain, among the distorted faces mouthing threats made all the more terrible by their unintelligibility, amid the worm-dripping corpses and flight across plains that gripped up to his knees like congealed blood, something pleasant shone through, like a clear vein of sunlight in a dark cloud.

This time, as usual, it was music—the cool, sweet chiming of a hammarharp drifting through his agonized dreams like a saint’s breath.

Still he clenched; music had returned to him before, always beginning sweetly but then bending into dread modes that sent him plunging ever deeper into horror, until he put his hands to his ears and begged the holy saints to make it stop.

Yet it stayed sweet this time, if clumsy and amateurish.

Groaning, he pushed at the sticky womb of dream until he tore through to wakefulness.

He thought for a moment he had merely moved to another dream. He lay not on the cold, stinking stone he had become accustomed to but on a soft pallet, his head nested on a pillow. The stench of his own urine was replaced by the faint odor of juniper.

And most of all—most of all, the hammarharp was real, as was the man who sat on its bench, poking awkwardly at the keyboard.

“Prince Robert,” Leoff managed to croak. To his own ear his voice sounded stripped down, as if all the screaming he had done had shredded the cords of his throat.

The man on the stool turned and clapped his hands, apparently delighted, but the hard gems of his eyes reflected the candlelight and nothing more.

“Cavaor Leoff,” he said. “How nice of you to join me. Look, I’ve brought you a present.” He flourished his hands at the hammarharp. “It’s a good one, I’m told,” he went on. “From Virgenya.”

Leoff felt an odd, detached vibration in his limbs. He didn’t see any guards. He was alone with the prince, this man who had condemned him to the mercies of the praifec and his torturers.

He searched his surroundings further. He was in a room a good deal larger than the cell he had occupied when last sleep and delirium had claimed him. Besides the narrow wooden cot on which he lay and the hammarharp, there was another chair, a washbasin and pitcher of water, and—and here he had to rub his eyes—a bookshelf full of tomes and scrifti.

“Come, come,” the prince said. “You must try the instrument. Please, I insist.”

“Your Highness—”

“I insist,” Robert said firmly.

Painfully Leoff swung his legs down to the floor, feeling one or two of the blisters on his feet burst as he put weight on them. That was such a minor pain, he didn’t even really wince.

The prince—no, he had made himself king now, hadn’t he? The usurper was alone. Queen Muriele was dead; everyone he cared about was dead.

He was worse than dead.

He stepped toward Robert, feeling his knee jar oddly. He would never run again, would he? Never trot across the grass on a spring day, never play with his children—likely never have children, come to that.

He took another step. He was almost close enough now.

“Please,” Robert said wearily, rising from the stool and gripping Leoff’s shoulders with cold, hard fingers. “What do you suppose you will do? Throttle me? With these?” He grabbed Leoff’s fingers, and such a shock of pain exploded through Leoff that it tore a gasp from his aching lungs.

Once it would have been enough to make him scream. Now tears started in his eyes as he looked down to where the king’s hand gripped his.

He still didn’t recognize them, his hands. Once the fingers had been gently tapered, lean and supple, perfect for fingering the croth or tripping on keys. Now they were swollen and twisted in terribly unnatural ways; the praifec’s men had broken them methodically between all the joints.

They hadn’t stopped there, though; they had crushed the bones of each hand as well, and shattered the wrists that supported them. If they had cut his hands completely off, it would have been kinder. But they hadn’t. They had left them to hang there, a reminder of other things he would never, ever do again.

He looked again at the hammarharp, at its lovely red-and-black keys, and his shoulders began to tremble. The trickle of tears turned to a flood.

“There,” Robert said. “That’s right. Let it out. Let it out.”

“I-I did not think you could hurt me more,” Leoff managed, gritting his teeth, ashamed but almost, finally, beyond shame.

The king stroked the composer’s hair as if he were a child. “Listen, my friend,” he said. “I am at fault for this, but my crime was that of neglect. I did not supervise the praifec closely enough. I had no idea of the cruelty he was visiting upon you.”

Leoff almost laughed. “You will forgive me if I am skeptical,” he said.

The usurper’s fingers pinched his ear and twisted a bit. “And you will address me as ‘Your Majesty’” Robert said softly.

Leoff snorted. “What will you do if I don’t? Kill me? You have already taken all I have.”

“You think so?” Robert murmured. He released Leoff’s ear and withdrew. “I have not taken everything, I promise you. But let that pass. I regret what has happened to you. My personal physician will attend you from here on out.”

“No physician can heal this,” Leoff said, holding up his maimed hands.

“Perhaps not,” Robert conceded. “Perhaps you will never again play yourself. But as I understand it, the music you create—compose—is done within your head.”

“It cannot come out of my head without my fingers, however,” Leoff snarled.

“Or the fingers of another,” Robert said.

“What—”

But at that moment, the king gestured and the door opened, and there, in the lamplight, stood a soldier in dark armor. His hand rested on the shoulder of a little girl whose eyes were covered by a cloth.

“Mery?” he gasped.

“Cavaor Leoff ?” she squealed. She tried to start forward, but the soldier pulled her back, and the door closed.

“Mery,” Leoff repeated, lumbering toward the door, but Robert caught him by the shoulder again.

“You see?” Robert said softly.

“They told me she was dead!” Leoff gasped. “Executed!”

“The praifec was trying to break your heretic soul,” Robert said. “Much of what his men told you is untrue.”

“But—”

“Hush,” Robert said. “I have been charitable. I can be more so. But you must agree to help me.”

“Help you how?”

Robert smiled a ghastly little smile. “Shall we discuss it over a meal? You look half-starved.”

For what seemed an eternity, Leoff’s meals had consisted of either nothing or some nameless mush that under the best of circumstances was more or less without taste and under the worst reeked of putrefying offal.

Now he found himself staring at a trencher of black bread that had been heaped with roast pork, leeks braised in must, redbutter cheese, boiled eggs sliced and sprinkled with green sauce, and cream fritters. Each scent was a lovely melody, wafting together into a rhapsodic whole. His goblet was filled with a red wine so sharp and fruity, he could smell it without bending toward it.

He looked at his useless hands, then back at the meal. Did the king expect him to lower his face into the food like a hog?

Probably. And he knew that in a few more moments he would.

Instead, a girl in black-and-gray livery entered, knelt by his side, and began offering him morsels of the repast. He tried to take it with some measure of grace, but after the first explosion of flavor in his mouth, he gulped unashamedly.

Robert sat across the table from him and watched him without apparent amusement.

“That was clever,” he said after a time, “your lustspell, your singing play. The praifec greatly underestimated you and the power you wield through your music. I can’t tell you how angry I felt, sitting helplessly as the thing unfolded, unable to stand, speak, or bring it to a halt. You put a gag in the mouth of a king, Cavaor, and you tied his hands behind his back. I don’t suppose you expected to escape without some punishment.”

Leoff laughed bitterly. “I hardly think that now,” he said, then lifted his head defiantly. “But I do not accept you as king.”

Robert smiled. “Yes, I quite gathered that by the content of the play. I am not entirely a buffoon, you see.”

“I never took you for one,” Leoff replied. Vicious and murderous, yes, stupid, no, he finished silently.

The usurper nodded as if he had heard the unvoiced thought. Then he waved his hand. “Well, it is done, isn’t it? And I will be candid; your composition was not without effect. Your choice of subject matter, your casting of a landwaerden girl in the major role—well, it certainly won over the landwaerden, and not to me, as I had hoped.” He leaned forward. “You see, there are those who think of me as you do, as an usurper. I had hoped to unite my kingdom to stand against the evil that bears on us from all sides, and to do that I really needed the landwaerden and their militias. Your actions have rendered their allegiance more ambiguous than ever. You’ve even managed somehow to create sympathy for a queen no one liked.”

“It was my honor to do so.” Then he understood. “Queen Muriele is not dead, is she?”

Robert nodded affirmation, then pointed a finger at Leoff. “You still don’t understand,” he said. “You talk like a dead man, speaking with the bravery of the condemned. But you can live and compose. You can have your friends back. Wouldn’t you like to see little Mery grow up, oversee the progress of your protégé?

“And what about the lovely Areana? Surely she has a bright future ahead, perhaps even at your side…”

Leoff listed to his feet. “You dare not threaten them!”

“No? What would prevent me?”

“Areana is the daughter of a landwaerden. If you are trying to win their allegiance—”

“If I give up hope of doing so, if I cannot unite by conciliation, I will have to do so through force and fear,” Robert snapped. “Besides, I am sometimes prone to, shall we say, black humors. My humors were particularly black after the performance of your little farce.”

“What are you saying?”

“Areana was taken into custody soon after you were. I quickly realized the error in that, but as king I must be careful about admitting my mistakes, you see. I must work at things from where I am.”

Leoff’s head swirled.

At one point in his torture he had been told that the entire cast that had performed his singing play had been arrested and publicly hanged and that Mery had been quietly poisoned in the night. That was when he had broken and “confessed” that he had practiced “heretical shinecraft” most foul.

Now he found that they were alive, which brought joy beyond measure. But the threat to their lives was renewed.

“You’re most clever yourself,” he told the king. “You know I will not risk losing them again.”

“Why should you? Your allegiance to Muriele is senseless. She has no mandate to rule, and certainly not the talents. Despite my faults, I am the best the Dare family has to offer. Hansa will declare war on us any day unless I can appease them. Monsters threaten all of our borders and appear in the midst of our towns. Whatever you think of me, Crotheny is better united behind one leader, and that will be me or no one, because there is no one else.”

“What would you have me do?”

“Undo what you have done, of course. Write another lustspell to win them over for me. I have provided you with hammarharp and every book of music the kingdom has to offer. I will make Mery and Areana available to you as helpmates, to make up for the unfortunate state of your hands. I will, of course, have to supervise your work more carefully than did the praifec, and we will hire the musicians who will perform the work.”

“The praifec has branded me heretic before the world. How can any work of mine be performed now?”

“You will be offered as proof of divine forgiveness and intercession, my friend. Where before you took your inspiration from the darkness, now you will take it from the light.”

“But that is a lie,” Leoff said.

“No,” Robert replied drily. “That is politics.”

Leoff hesitated slightly. “And the praifec will go along with this?”

“The praifec has his hands full,” Robert told him. “The empire, it seems, is a veritable hornet’s nest of heretics. You are lucky, Cavaor Leovigild. The gallows make a constant music of their own these days.”

Leoff nodded. “I hardly need you to repeat your threat, Your Majesty. I quite understood it the first time.”

“So it’s ‘Your Majesty’ again. I take it, then, that we’re getting somewhere.”

“I am at your mercy,” Leoff said. “I wonder if you have a subject for your commission.”

The king shook his head. “No, I haven’t. But I’ve seen your library, and it is stocked with popular tales of the region. I trust you will find some inspiration there.”

Leoff gathered his strength of will.

“One thing,” he said. “I will need helpmates, I grant you. But please show mercy and send Mery back to her mother and Areana back to her family.”

Robert stifled a yawn. “You were told they were dead, and you believed it. I could tell you I had sent them home, but how could you know it was true? In any case, I would rather you not convince yourself that you have made them safe. It might inspire you to some new foolish behavior. No, I would prefer you had their company, to steady you in your purpose.”

With that he rose, and Leoff knew the conversation had ended.

Shivering suddenly, he started toward his cot, anxious to close his eyes and lose himself once more in dreams. Instead he remembered Mery when he’d first met her, hiding in his music room, listening to him play and afraid that if her presence were known, he would send her out.

Instead of retreating to sleep, he turned his path and trudged wearily to the books the king had provided him, then began to read their titles.

5 The Demon

The man screamed as the demon-woman plunged her clawed fingers into his chest, through the hard bone and tight skin to the soft, wet stuff beneath.

Anne tasted iron on her tongue as the spinning slowed, stilled, and centered. Her fear suddenly gone, she looked into the face of the monster.

“Do you know me?” the demon roared in a voice that burred through flesh and bone. “Do you know who I am?”

Light flashed behind Anne’s eyes. The earth seemed to tilt, and she was suddenly on horseback.

She was riding with Cazio once more. She remembered Austra gasping behind her and then a terrific stir.

Something struck her to the ground, and then a hard arm wrapped about her, lifting her forcefully into a saddle. She remembered the acrid smell of her abductor’s sweat, the gasp of his breath in her ear. The knife to her throat. She could only see his hand, which had a long white scar that ran from his wrist to the lowest knuckle of his little finger.

“Ride,” someone said. “We’ll deal with these.”

She remembered staring dully over the head of the horse, watching the rise and fall of the snowy forest floor, the trees blurring by like the columns of an endless hall.

“You sit still, Princess,” the man commanded. His voice was low and warm, not unpleasant at all. His accent was educated, slightly alien but unplaceable. “Sit still, give me no trouble, and things will go better for you.”

“You know who I am,” Anne said.

“Well, we knew it was one or the other of you. I reckon you just cleared it up, but we’ll be taking you to someone who knows your face to be sure. No matter, since we’ve got both.”

Austra, Anne thought. They’ve got you, too. That meant her friend might still be alive.

“My friends will come for me.”

“Your companions are probably dead by now,” the man said, his voice shaking with the galloping of the horse. “If they aren’t, they’ll find it difficult to follow us. But that needn’t concern you, Princess. I wasn’t sent to kill you, or you would be dead by now. Do you understand?”

“No,” Anne said.

“There are those who would kill you,” the man replied. “That you know, yes?”

“I most certainly know that.”

“Then believe me when I tell you that their masters are not mine. I am charged with your safety, not with your destruction.”

“I don’t feel safe,” Anne said. “Who sent you? My uncle, the usurper?”

“I doubt that Prince Robert cares much for your welfare. We suspect he is in league with those who murdered your sisters.”

“Who is ‘we’?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“I don’t understand. You say you don’t want me dead. You imply you wish to preserve me from harm, yet you’ve taken me from my most loyal protectors and my friends. So I know you can’t wish me well.”

The man didn’t reply, but he tightened his grip.

“I see,” Anne said. “You have some need of me, but not one that I would approve of. Perhaps you intend to sacrifice me to the dark saints.”

“No,” the man said. “That is not our aim at all.”

“Then enlighten me. I am at your mercy.”

“Indeed you are. Remember that. And believe me when I say that I will not kill you unless I have to.” The knife came away from her throat. “Please don’t struggle or try to escape. You might manage to fall off the horse; if you don’t break your neck, I’ll easily recapture you. Listen and you will know your friends aren’t following.”

“What’s your name?” Anne asked.

Again a pause. “You can call me Ernald.”

“But it isn’t your name.”

She felt him shrug behind her.

“Ernald, where are we going?”

“To meet someone. After that, I cannot say for certain.”

“I see.” She thought for a moment. “You say I won’t be killed. What of Austra, now that you’re certain she isn’t me?”

“She… she won’t be harmed.”

But Anne heard the lie in his voice.

Taking a deep breath, she snapped her head back and felt it crush into the man’s face. He yelped, and Anne flung herself from the mare.

She landed badly, and pain coursed up her leg, which already was aching from an unhealed arrow wound. Gasping, she struggled to her feet and tried to get her bearings. She made out their trail and began hobbling back along it, shouting.

“Cazio! Sir Neil! Help me!”

She glanced back over her shoulder, almost feeling him there…

… but saw no one, only the horse. Why would he be hiding?

She quickened her pace, but the pain nearly paralyzed her. She went down on one knee, then doggedly fought her way back up.

Something moved in front of her, but she couldn’t see just what. It was like a brief shadow across water.

“Help!” she shouted again.

A palm snapped against the side of her head then, and as she fell, she saw a snowy blur. Then her arm was twisted hard behind her, and she was being forced back toward the horse. She gasped, wondering where Ernald had come from. Behind her? But she had looked for him.

Wherever he had gone, he was here now.

“Do not try that again, Princess,” he said. “I have no desire to hurt you, but I will do it if I must.”

“Let me go,” Anne demanded.

The knife was suddenly pricking into her neck again.

“Mount back up.”

“Not until you promise not to kill Austra.”

“I told you, she won’t be harmed.”

“Yes, but you were lying.”

“Mount, or I’ll cut your ear off.”

“My leg is hurt. You’ll have to lift me up.”

He laughed harshly. The knife came away, and he grasped her suddenly by the waist and threw her over the saddle, then pushed her injured leg over. She screamed, and bright speckles gyred before her eyes. By the time she could think again, he was sitting behind her, the knife again at her throat.

“I see now that being nice will get me nowhere,” he said, kicking the horse into motion.

Anne gasped for breath. It felt as if the pain had broken something loose in her, and the entire world was rushing up like a whirlwind or a hurricane from the sea. She shivered and felt the hairs on her neck stand on end.

“Let me go,” she said, her heart thundering in her chest. “Let me go.”

“Hush.”

“Let me go.”

This time he cuffed her with the hilt of the knife.

“Let me go!”

The words ripped out of her, and the man screamed.

Anne felt the knife in her hand suddenly, gripped in white knuckles, and with terrible desperation she drove it into his throat. In the same instant she felt a strange pain in her own throat and the sensation of something sliding under her tongue. She saw his eyes go wide and black and in those dark mirrors there was the image of a demon coming up from beneath.

Screaming, she wrenched the knife through his windpipe, noticing even as she did so that her hands were empty, that it wasn’t she who was holding the knife at all. And she understood just enough to flee, to run into the gaping darkness where her rage came from, to close her eyes and stop her ears to his gurgling…

The light dimmed, and she found herself back in her chair, facing the other man, the one who had been trying to rape her. The demon was there, stooping over him just as she had come down upon Ernald.

“Oh, no,” she murmured, staring up into the terrible face. “Oh, saints, no.”

She woke on a small mattress, unbound, with her clothes returned to a reasonable state of propriety. Her head throbbed, and she recognized the beginnings of a hangover.

Her captor sat on the floor a few kingsyards away, weeping quietly. Of the demon there was no sign.

Anne started to rise, but a sudden wave of nausea forced her back down. That wasn’t enough, however, and she had to struggle to her hands and knees to vomit.

“I’ll get you some water,” she heard the man say.

“No,” she growled. “I won’t drink anything else you give me.”

“As you wish, Your Highness.”

She felt the surprise dimly through her sickness and confusion.

“I’m sorry,” he added, and began crying again.

Anne groaned. She was missing time again. The demon hadn’t killed this man as it had killed Ernald, but it had done something.

“Listen to me,” she said. “What’s your name?”

He looked confused.

“Your name?”

“Wist,” he murmured. “Wist. They call me Wist.”

“You saw her, didn’t you, Wist? She was here?”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

“What did she look like?”

His eyes tried to bug from his head, and he gasped, clutching at his chest.

“I can’t remember,” he said. “It was the worst thing I ever saw. I can’t—I can’t see that again.”

“Did she untie me?”

“No, I did.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m supposed to,” he whimpered. “I’m supposed to help you.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“She didn’t say anything,” he said. “Not that I can remember. That is, there were words, but I couldn’t make them out, except that they hurt, and they still hurt unless I do what I’m supposed to do.”

“And what else are you supposed to do?” she asked suspiciously.

“Help you,” he said again.

“Help me what?”

He raised his hands helplessly. “Whatever you want.”

“Really,” she said. “Give me your knife, then.”

He clambered to his feet and presented her the weapon, hilt first. She reached for it, expecting him to withdraw it, but instead she grasped the smooth wooden handle.

She gagged, bent double, and began to vomit again.

When she was done, her head hurt as if struck from the inside by a hammer. Her chest felt ripped in two, and her vision was blurry. Her erstwhile captor was still whimpering before her, holding out the knife.

She arranged her clothes again and stood, finding the pain in her leg only slightly dulled.

“I’ll take that water now,” she said.

He brought her water and bread, and she had a bit of both. After that she felt better, calmer.

“Wist, where are we?” she asked.

“In the cellar of the beer hall,” he said.

“In Sevoyne?”

“Yes, in Sevoyne.”

“And who knows I’m here?”

“Myself and the captain of the guard. No one else.”

“But others are coming, and they will know where to find us,” she pushed on.

“Yes,” he admitted.

“Yes, Majesty,” she corrected gently. That simple act helped her find her center.

“Yes, Majesty.”

“There. And who is coming?”

“Penby and his lot were supposed to waylay you in the woods. They should be back by now, but I don’t—I don’t know where they are. Did you kill them?”

“Yes,” she lied. One of them is dead, at least. “Is anyone else meeting them here?”

He cowered a bit more. “I shouldn’t.”

“Answer me.”

“Someone is supposed to meet them, yes. I don’t know a name.”

“When?”

“Soon. I don’t know, but soon. Penby said by this afternoon.”

“Well, then we had better go now,” Anne said, picking up the knife.

His features contorted. “I… Yes. I’m supposed to do that.”

Anne looked him in the eye as hard as she could. She didn’t understand what was going on here. Was the demon, terrible as she was, an ally? Certainly she had killed one of Anne’s enemies and seemed to have… done something to this one. But if whatever had followed her back from the land of the dead was friendly, why did she fear it so?

And there was still the possibility that this was some sort of a trick Wist was playing on her, though she couldn’t see the point of such a ruse.

“They didn’t tell me who you were,” he began, but stopped.

“If you had known who I was, would you have tried to rape me?” she asked, anger flaring suddenly.

“No, saints no,” he said.

“That doesn’t make it better, you know,” she said. “It still makes you a worm.”

He just nodded at that.

For a moment she wanted to reach into him with her power, the way she had reached into Roderick back in Dunmrogh, the way she had reached into the men at Khrwbh Khrwkh. To hurt him, maybe kill him.

But she rejected that. She needed him right now. But if it turned out to be some strange trick, she wouldn’t have any mercy.

“Very well,” she said. “Help me, Wist, and you may earn my protection. Go against me again and not even the saints can preserve you.”

“How can I serve you, Princess?”

“How do you think? I want to leave here. If the captain of the guard sees us, tell him the plans have changed and you’re supposed to take me someplace else.”

“And where will we go?”

“I’ll tell you that once we’re out of town. Now, bring me my weather cloak.”

“It’s upstairs. I’ll go fetch it.”

“No. We’ll go get it together.”

Nodding, Wist produced a brass key and fitted it into the lock on the door. It creaked open, revealing a narrow stair. He took a candle and started up. Anne followed to where the last stair ran apparently into the ceiling. Wist pushed, and the ceiling lifted into another dark room.

“It’s a storehouse,” he whispered. “Hang on.”

He went over to a wooden crate and reached in. Anne tensed, but what he came out with was nothing other than her cloak. Never taking her eyes off him, she settled it on her shoulders.

“I have to blow out the candle now,” he said, “else someone will see the light when I open the outer door.”

“Do it, then,” Anne said, tensing again.

He brought the candle near his face. In the yellow glow his features looked young and innocent, not the way the face of a rapist ought to look at all. He pursed his lips and blew, and darkness fell. It crawled on Anne’s skin like centipedes as she strained her eyes and ears, her hand on the hilt of Wist’s knife.

She heard a faint creak, then saw a widening sliver of not so black.

“This way,” Wist whispered.

She perceived his silhouette now.

“You go first,” she said, feeling for the door and catching its edge.

“Mind the step,” he whispered. She saw the shadow of his head drop a bit.

She felt for the ground with her foot and found it. Then she stepped into the street.

It was bitterly cold outside. No moon or stars looked down; the only lights were lamps and candles still burning here or there. What time was it? She certainly didn’t know. She didn’t even know how long she had been in this place.

The alcohol was still in her. Rage and panic had cut through it, and now she was starting to feel achy and sick, though the stupid feeling remained. The boldness it had brought was starting to fade, leaving a dull fear.

The shadow that was Wist moved suddenly, and she felt his hand close on her arm. Her other hand tightened on the knife.

“Quiet, Majesty,” he said. “Someone is coming.”

She heard what he meant: the clopping of horses’ hooves.

Wist pulled her against the side of another building, and then slowly they backed along it as the sound grew nearer.

Anne couldn’t see anything, but she felt suddenly as if something were being pressed against her eyes. It wasn’t light but a presence, a weight that seemed to draw everything toward it.

Wist’s grip on her arm was now the most comforting thing in the world.

She heard someone dismount and felt feet strike the earth like sledgehammers. She heard a brief whispering she couldn’t make out, and then the door creaked, sounding very near.

She backed away more quickly, aching to simply turn her back and run. But Wist wouldn’t let her. He was trembling, and his breath seemed incredibly loud, as did her own.

The door clapped shut, and she felt the presence fade.

Now Wist tugged more urgently on her arm, and they did turn their backs. Her eyes began to adjust to the darkness, and she began to discern vague shapes. They made their way into what looked to be the village center, a broad square surrounded by the looming shadows of multi-storied buildings.

“We have to hurry,” he said. “It won’t be long till they find us gone.”

“Who was that?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I would tell you if I knew. Someone important, the one who hired us, I think. I’ve never met him.”

“Then how do you know—”

“I don’t know!” he hissed desperately. “They said he would come. They didn’t know what he would look like, but they said he would feel, ah, heavy. I didn’t know what that meant until now. But you see?”

“Yes, I know what you mean,” she said. “I felt it, too.” She gripped his arm. “You could have called out to him. Why didn’t you?”

“No, I couldn’t,” he said miserably. “I wanted to, but I couldn’t. Now, where are we going?”

“Can you find Glenchest?”

“Glenchest? Auy, that’s just down the road.”

“How far on foot?”

“We could be there by midday.”

“Let’s go, then.”

“He’s likely to search that way.”

“Nevertheless.”

In the gray of dawn Wist looked tired, worn beyond his years. His clothes were dirty, and so was he, and it was a pervasive sort of filth. She believed he could be scrubbed for a year and somehow still be unclean.

He seemed dangerous again, too, though in a subdued way, like a vicious dog that had been beaten into lying still for a time. He kept glancing at her in a manner that suggested he was wondering exactly what he was doing and why.

She wondered the same thing.

The landscape was rather drab. Farmsteads and fields crowded to the road, but beyond them were flat plains with little relief or sights of interest.

She wondered again if any of her friends were alive, if the road to Glenchest was the right course, whether she ought to go back toward where she had been abducted. But if they were dead, there was nothing she could do. If they were fighting for their lives, she couldn’t do much about that, either, not with only one very untrustworthy companion.

No, she needed to reach Aunt Elyoner and the knights she commanded.

Assuming they still existed or were at Glenchest. What if they already had gone to Eslen to fight the usurper? Or worse, what if Elyoner had thrown in with Robert? Anne didn’t think that was likely, but then, she didn’t really know what was going on.

In truth, she had always rather liked her uncle Robert. It seemed strange that he had taken the throne while her mother and brother yet lived, but that was the news that had come to Dunmrogh.

Perhaps Robert knew something she didn’t. .

She sighed and tried to push that thought away.

“Keep still,” Wist said suddenly. Anne noticed that he had a knife in his hand now and that he was near enough to use it on her without any trouble. He was glancing around. They had passed into a small grove of trees full of lowing cattle, and visibility wasn’t good.

But Anne felt and heard the horses coming. A lot of them.

6 The Slinders

“Slinders,” Stephen said.

Aspar had his gaze fixed across the valley, watching for one of their newly arrived opponents to show themselves.

“Coming from the east,” Stephen clarified. “Moving quickly—and, for them, quietly.”

Aspar strained his hearing to catch what Stephens ears had heard. After a moment he had it, a sound like a low, hard wind sweeping through the forest, the sound of so many feet that he couldn’t discriminate the individual steps, and with it, a faint humming in the ground.

“Sceat.”

“Slinder” was the name the Oostish had given the servants of the Briar King. Once they had been human, but the ones Aspar had seen did not seem to have retained much Mannish about them.

They wore little or no clothing and ran howling like beasts. He had seen them tear men limb from limb and eat the raw, bloody flesh, watched them throw themselves on spears and pull their dying bodies up the shafts to reach their enemies. They couldn’t be talked to, much less reasoned with.

And they were close already. How could he not have heard them? How had Stephen not, with his saint-sharpened senses? The boy seemed to be losing his knack.

He glanced quickly around. The nearest trees were mostly slender and straight-boled, but some fifty kingsyards away he saw a broad-shouldered ironoak reaching toward the sky.

“To that tree,” he commanded. “Now.”

“But Neil and Cazio—”

“There’s nothing we can do for them,” Aspar snapped. “We can’t reach them in time.”

“We can warn them,” Winna said.

“They’re already over there,” Stephen said. “See?”

He pointed. Across the narrow valley, bodies were pouring over the rim and down the steep slope. It looked as if a flood were carrying an entire village of people down a gorge, except that there was no water.

“Mother of Saint Tarn,” one of the Dunmrogh soldiers gasped. “What—”

“Run!” Aspar barked.

They ran. Aspar’s muscles ached to bolt him ahead, but he had to let Winna and Stephen start climbing first. He heard the forest floor churning behind him and was reminded of a cloud of locusts that once had whirred through the northern uplands for days, chewing away every green thing.

They were halfway to the oak when Aspar caught a motion in the corner of his eye. He shifted his head to look.

At first glance the thing was all limbs, like a huge spider, but familiarity quickly brought it into focus. The monster had only four long limbs, not eight, and they ended in what resembled clawed human hands. The torso was thick, muscular, and short compared to its legs but more or less human in its cut if one ignored the scales and the thick black hairs.

The face had little of humanity about it; its yellow carbuncle eyes were set above two slits where a nose might be, and its cavernous, black-toothed mouth owed more to the frog or snake than to man. It was loping toward them on all fours.

“Utin,” Aspar gasped under his breath. He’d met one before and killed it, but it had taken a miracle.

He had one miracle left, but looking past the shoulder of the thing, he saw that he needed two, for another identical creature was running scarcely thirty kingsyards behind it.

Aspar raised his bow, fired, and made one of the luckiest shots in his life; he hit the foremost monster in its right eye, sending it tumbling to the ground. Even as Aspar continued his flight to the tree, however, the thing rolled back to its feet and came on. The other, almost caught up now, seemed to grin at Aspar.

Then the slinders were there, pouring from between the trees. The utins wailed their peculiar high-pitched screams as wild-eyed men and women leapt upon them, first in twos, then in threes, then by the dozens.

The slinders and utins were not friendly, it seemed. Or perhaps they disagreed on who should eat Aspar White.

They finally reached the oak, and Aspar made a cradle of his hands to vault Winna to the lowest branches.

“Climb,” he shouted. “Keep going until you can’t climb anymore.”

Stephen went up next, but before he had a firm foothold, Aspar was forced to meet the fastest of their attackers.

The slinder was a big man with lean muscles and bristling black hair. His face was so feral, Aspar was reminded of the legends of the wairwulf and wondered if this was where they had come from. Every other silly phay story seemed to be coming true. If ever there was a man who had become a wolf, this was it.

Like all of its kind, the slinder attacked without regard for its own life, snarling and reaching bloody, broken nails toward Aspar. The holter cut with the ax in his left hand as a feint. The slinder ignored the false attack and came on, allowing the ax to slice through its cheek. Aspar rammed his dirk in just below the lowest rib and quickly pumped the blade, shearing into the lung and up toward the heart even as the man-beast rammed into him, smashing him into the tree.

That hurt, but it saved him from being knocked to the ground. He shoved the dying slinder away from him just in time to meet the next two. They hit him together, and as he lifted his ax arm to fend them off, one sank its teeth into his forearm. Bellowing, Aspar stabbed into its groin and felt hot blood spurt on his hand. He cut again, opening the belly. The slinder let go of his arm, and he buried his ax in the throat of the second.

Hundreds more were only steps away.

The ax was stuck, so he left it, leaping for the lowest branch and catching it with blood-slicked fingers. He fought to keep the dirk, but when one of the slinders grasped his ankle, he let it drop to secure his tenuous hold, trying to wrap both arms around the huge bough.

An arrow whirred down from above, and then another, and his antagonist’s grip loosened. Aspar swung his legs up, then levered himself quickly onto the limb.

A quick glance down showed the slinders crashing into the tree trunk like waves breaking against a rock. Their bodies began to form a pile, enabling the newer arrivals to drag themselves up.

“Sceat,” Aspar breathed. He wanted to vomit.

He fought it down and looked above him. Winna was about five kingsyards higher than the rest, with her bow out, shooting into the press. Stephen and the two soldiers were at about the same height.

“Keep climbing!” Aspar shouted. “Up that way. The narrower the branches, the fewer can come after us at a time.”

He kicked at the head of the nearest slinder, a rangy woman with matted red hair. She snarled and slipped from the branch, landing amid her squirming comrades.

The utins, he noticed, were still alive. There were three of them now that he could see, thrashing in the slinder horde. Aspar was reminded of a pack of dogs taking down a lion. Blood sprayed all around the slinders as they fell, dismembered and opened from sternum to crotch by the vicious claws and teeth of the monsters, but they were winning by sheer numbers. Even as he watched, one of the utins went down, hamstrung, and within seconds the slinders were dark crimson with its oily blood.

There would be plenty of slinders left when the utins were dead. Aspar gave up the vague hope that their enemies might cancel one another out.

Winna, Stephen, and the two Hornladhers had done as Aspar directed, and now he followed them until at last they reached a perch above a long, nearly vertical ascent. Aspar took his bow back off his shoulder and waited for the creatures to follow.

“They’re different,” he muttered under his breath, sighting down a shaft and impaling the first one to reach the base of the branch.

“Different how?” Stephen shouted down from above.

Aspar’s neck hairs pricked up—now Stephen’s uncanny senses seemed to be fine.

“They’re leaner, stronger,” he said. “The old ones are gone.”

“I only saw the dead ones at the fane by the naubagm,” Winna said, “but I don’t remember them being tattooed like that, either.”

Aspar nodded. “Yah. That’s what I couldn’t put my finger on. That’s new, too.”

“The mountain tribes tattoo,” Ehawk said.

“Yah,” Aspar agreed. “But the slinders we saw before came from a mixture of tribes and villages.” He shot the next climber in the eye. “These all have the same tattoos.”

They did. Each had a ram-headed snake wound around one forearm and a greffyn on the biceps of the same arm.

“Maybe they’re all from the same tribe,” Ehawk offered.

“Do you know any tribe with that tattoo?”

“No.”

“Neither do I.”

“The ram-headed serpent and the greffyn are both symbols associated with the Briar King,” Stephen said. “We’ve been assuming that the Briar King drove these people mad somehow, took away their human intelligence. But what if…”

“What?” Winna said. “You think they chose this? They can’t even speak!”

“I’ll need you to start passing down arrows soon,” Aspar said, shooting again. “I’ve only six left. The rest are on Ogre.”

“The horses!” Winna exclaimed.

“They can take care of themselves,” Aspar said. “Or they can’t. Nothing we can do about it.”

“But Ogre—”

“Yah.” He thrust away the pain. Ogre and Angel had been with him a long time.

But everything died eventually.

Slinders continued to arrive from the forest, with no end of them in sight. So many teemed below, he couldn’t see the forest floor for a hundred kingsyards.

“What do we do when we run out of arrows?” Winna asked.

“I’ll kick ’em down,” Aspar said.

“I thought you were on friendly terms with the Briar King and his friends,” Stephen said. “Last time they let you live.”

“Last time I had the king at the tip of an arrow,” Aspar said. “The one the Church gave us.”

“You still have it?”

“Yah. But unless the king himself shows his face, I don’t reckon to use it until it’s the only one I have left.”

It also occurred to him that the Sefry woman Leshya had been with him then. Maybe that had been the difference; Leshya’s true allegiance was—had always been—something of a mystery.

“That won’t be too long,” Winna said.

Aspar nodded and cast his gaze about. Maybe they could get to another tree, one with a straighter, higher bole, then cut the branch that got them there.

He was looking for such an escape route when he heard the singing. It was a weird rising and falling melody that caught at something in his bones. He was sure he had heard the song before, could almost imagine its singer, but the true memory eluded him.

The source of this song was visible, however.

“Saints,” Stephen said, for he had seen it, too.

The singing came from a short, bandy-legged man and a slender, pale-skinned girl whose green eyes blazed even at this distance, which was about fifty kingsyards. The girl looked to be only about ten or eleven, the youngest slinder Aspar had ever seen. She held a snake in each hand—from this distance they looked to be rattling vipers—and the man held a crooked staff with a single drooping pinecone attached to it.

Both had the tattoos. Otherwise, they were as naked as the day they were born. They directed their song upward, but it took only an instant to understand that they weren’t singing to the sky.

Ironoaks, the very ancient ones, had boughs so huge and heavy that they often sagged to the ground. The one Aspar and his companions were perched in wasn’t that old; only two branches were low enough even to jump up and grab. But as the holter watched, the tips of the farthest branches quivered earthward, then began to bend, as if they were the fingers of a giant reaching down to pick something from the ground.

“Raver,” Aspar swore.

Ignoring the next slinder clambering up the tree, he took aim at the singing man and sent his shaft flying. His aim was true, but another slinder somehow danced in the way of the arrow, taking the point in the shoulder. The same happened with his next shot.

“This is bad,” Stephen said.

The whole tree shuddered now as the thicker boughs began straining toward the pair. The slinders around them were beginning to leap at the descending branches, and though the branches weren’t low enough to catch yet, they soon would be. Then the entire tree would swarm with them.

Aspar looked up at the men-at-arms. “You two,” he said. “Start cutting branches. Anything that leads here. Move out to where they’re thinner so they’ll be easier to cut.”

“This is our doom,” one of the men said. “Our lord was evil, and now we pay the price of serving him.”

“You don’t serve him now,” Winna snapped. “You serve Anne, the rightful queen of Crotheny. Gather your manhood and do as Aspar says. Or give me your sword and let me do it.”

“I heard what she did,” the man replied, tracing the sign against evil on his forehead. “This woman you call queen. Killed men without touching them, using shinecraft. It’s all done. The world is ending.”

Stephen, who was nearest the man, reached his hand out. “Give me your sword,” he said. “Give it to me now.”

“Give it, Ional,” the other solider snapped. He looked at Stephen. “I’m not ready to die. I’ll go up this way. You’ll take the other?”

“Yes,” Stephen agreed.

Aspar gave Stephen and the Hornladher a quick glance as they moved out farther. If they could isolate the main branch they were on, they might have a chance.

Winna was looking at him, though, and he felt something sink down through his guts. Winna was the best and the most unexpected thing that had come into his life in a long time. She was young, yes, so young that sometimes she seemed as if she might be from a different country across some distant sea. But most of the time she seemed to know him, know him in a way that was unlikely—and sometimes was more unsettling than comfortable. He’d been alone for a long time.

The past few days she hadn’t talked to him much, not since she’d found him keeping watch by the wounded Leshya. In that, at least, she didn’t know him as well as she might. What he felt for Leshya wasn’t love or even lust. It was something else, something even he had a hard time naming. But it resembled, he imagined, kinship. The Sefry woman was like him in a way that Winna could never be.

But maybe Winna did understand that. Maybe that was the problem.

It’s all moot if the slinders get us, he reckoned, and he nearly chuckled. It sounded like one of those sayings. As well stretch your neck for the Raver as marry. A good day is the one you live through. It’s all moot if the slinders come…

Sceat, he was starting to think like Stephen.

He shot another slinder.

Three arrows left.

It wasn’t as easy cutting through branches as Stephen might have wished or imagined. The sword had an edge, but it wasn’t that sharp, and he’d never really done much wood chopping, so he wasn’t certain about the best way to go about the task.

A glance showed him that the outer branches were nearly low enough for the slinders to reach; that meant he had to hurry.

He reared back for a more powerful swing and nearly fell. He was straddling a limb, clutching it with his inner thighs the way one did a horse. But like a horse, the branch refused to be still, and it seemed a dizzying long way to the ground.

He renewed his balance and made a more modest cut, feeling the living wood shiver under the blow and watching a smallish chip fly. Maybe if he cut straight, then at an angle…

He did, and that worked better.

He couldn’t stop paying attention to the slinder song. There was a language there; he felt the cadence, the flow of meaning. But he couldn’t understand it, not a single word, and given his saint-blessed memory and knowledge of languages, that was astonishing. In his mind he compared it to everything from Old Vadhiian to what little he knew of the language of Hadam, but nothing fit. Nevertheless, he felt as if the meaning was incredibly close, resting on his nose, too near to his eyes to quite see.

Aspar thought the slinders had changed. What did that mean?

“Slinder” was an Oostish word that just meant “eater” or “devouring one.” But what were they really? The short answer was that they had once been people who lived near or in the King’s Forest, before the Briar King awoke. Since his awakening, entire tribes had abandoned their villages to follow the king, whatever he was.

There were legends of such things, of course. There was a detail in the Tale of Galas, the only remaining text from the ancient vanished kingdom of Tirz Eqqon. The great bull of the Ferigolz had been stolen by Vhomar giants, and Galas had been sent to retrieve it. In his quest he had met a giant named Koerwidz who had a magic cauldron, a drink from which transformed men into beasts of various kinds.

Saint Fufluns was said to possess a pipe whose music filled men with madness and turned them cannibal. Grim, the Raver—the dark and terrible Ingorn spirit that Aspar swore by—also was said to inspire battle madness in his worshippers, making birsirks of them.

The limb gave way with a snap, hung for a moment by its bark, then fell. The portion Stephen was on sprang up like the arm of a catapult, and he suddenly found himself airborne and feeling stupid.

On the Sundry Follies of the Thinks-Too-Much, he began, a new essay he’d just decided to write in his head. He reckoned he had time for another line or so as he flailed wildly for purchase. His thigh hit a branch, and he scrabbled for it, losing the sword, of course, in the process and not securing a hold, either.

Looking up, he saw Winna’s face far above, tiny but beautiful. Did she know he loved her? He was sorry he hadn’t told her even though it might mean the end of their friendship—and of his friendship with Aspar.

His hand caught a branch, and fire seemed to shoot up his arm, but he held it, nevertheless. Gasping, he glanced down. The slinders were there, leaping for him, missing his dangling feet by a yard or so.

The chief virtue of the Thinks-Too-Much is that it isn’t likely to reproduce its kind, for its lack of attention to matters at hand oft leads to an untimely demise. Its only virtue is its love of friends and sorrow that it could not help them more.

He saw that the sorcelled tree limbs had reached the ground, and the man-beasts were swarming up into the branches. He looked up in time to see a leering face just before another body grappled his and pulled him into the salivating mob below.

“I’m sorry, Aspar!” he managed to shout before he was smothered in greedy hands.

7 Vengeance

Leoff gagged at the pain as his fingers were stretched toward what had once been a natural angle for them. “The device is my own invention,” the leic explained proudly. “I’ve had great success with it.”

Leoff blinked through his tears and peered at the thing. It was essentially a gauntlet of supple leather with small metal hooks at the end of each finger. His hand had been inserted into the glove and placed on a metal plate with various holes drilled for the hooks to catch in. The doctor had stretched his fingers out in the directions they ought to lie and fixed them there with the hooks.

Then—the most painful part—a second plate was fitted above his hand and tightened down with screws. The tendons of his arm ran with fire, and he wondered if this was just a more subtle form of torture devised by the usurper and his physicians.

“Let’s go back to the heat and the herbs.” Leoff winced. “That part felt good.”

“That was just to loosen things up,” the leic explained, “and to invoke the healing humors. This is the important part. Your hands were mending all wrong, but fortunately they had not been allowed to progress for too long. We must now guide them into the proper shape; after that, I can build rigid splints that will hold them in place until the true healing can occur.”

“This comes up often, then?” Leoff gasped as the fellow further tightened the screws. His palm was still far from flat, but already he could feel multiplied tiny snaps within his bruised flesh. “Hands done up like this.”

“Not like this,” the leic admitted. “I’ve never worked on hands damaged quite in this way. But hands crushed by blow from mace or sword are common enough. Before I was leic to His Majesty, I was physician to the court of the Greft of Ofthen. He held tournaments every month, you see, and he had five sons and thirteen nephews of jousting age.”

“So you’ve only recently come to Eslen?” Leoff asked, glad for the distraction.

“I came about a year ago, though at the time I was attendant to the leic who served His Majesty King William. After the king’s death, I served Her Majesty the queen briefly before becoming attendant to King Robert’s physician.”

“I am recently come here as well,” Leoff said.

The physician tightened the screws.

“I know who you are, of course. You gained a reputation rather quickly, I should say.” He smiled thinly. “You might have exercised a bit more prudence.”

“I might have,” Leoff assented. “But then we wouldn’t have the fun of seeing exactly how effective your device will be.”

“I will not deceive you,” the leic said. “Your hands can be made better, but they cannot be made as new.”

“I never imagined they could be.” Leoff sighed, blinking away tears of pain as another half-healed bone snapped and went groaning into a new position.

The next day he clumsily pawed through one of the books the usurper had supplied him, using hands encased in rigid gloves of iron and heavy leather, as the physician had promised. They were splayed out, fully stretched, and looked altogether too much like the comically exaggerated hands of a puppet. He couldn’t decide whether he appeared droll or horrible as he tried to turn the pages with his cumbersome mittens.

He soon forgot that, however, as he was lost in puzzlement.

The book was an older one, printed in antique Almannish characters. It was entitled Luthes sa Felthan ya sa Birmen—“Songs of Field and Birm”—and those were the only intelligible words in the book. The rest of it was inked in characters Leoff had never seen before. They resembled the alphabet he knew in some regards, but he couldn’t be certain of any single letter.

There were some pages with odd poetic-looking configurations that also seemed somewhat familiar, but all in all it appeared that the book’s cover and its contents did not go together. Even the paper inside didn’t seem to match; it looked much older than the binding.

He’d found an intriguing page of diagrams that didn’t make any more sense than the text, when he heard someone rattling at the door again. He sighed, steeling himself for yet another round with the prince or his doctor.

But it was neither, and Leoff felt a rush of pure joy as a young girl walked in through the portal, which promptly slammed and locked behind her.

“Mery!” he cried.

She hesitated a moment, then rushed into his arms. He lifted her, his ridiculous hands crossing behind her back.

“Urf!” Mery grunted as he squeezed.

“It’s so good to see you,” he said as he set her down.

“Mother said you were probably awfully dead,” Mery said, looking terribly serious. “I so hoped she was wrong.”

He reached to tousle her hair, but her eyes grew wide at the sight of his claws.

“Ah,” he said, clapping them together. “This is nothing. Something to make my hands feel better. How is your mother, then, the lady Gramme?” he asked.

“I don’t know, really,” Mery replied. “I haven’t seen her for days.”

He knelt, feeling things pop and pull in his legs.

“Where are they keeping you, Mery?”

She shrugged, staring at his hands but never directly into his face. “They put a blindfold on me.” She brightened a bit. “But it’s seventy-eight steps. My steps, anyway.”

He smiled at her cleverness. “I hope your room is nicer than this.”

She looked around. “It is. I have a window, at least.”

A window. Were they no longer in the dungeons?

“Did you go up or down stairs to get here?” he asked.

“Yes, down, twenty.” She had never stopped staring at his hands. “What happened to them?” she asked, pointing.

“I hurt them,” he said softly.

“I’m sorry,” Mery said. “I wish I could make them better.” Her frown deepened. “You can’t play the hammarharp like that, can you?”

He felt a sudden clotting in his throat. “No,” he said, “I can’t. But you can play for me. Would you mind doing that?”

“No,” she said. “Though you know I’m not very good.”

He peered into her eyes and placed his hands gently on her shoulders. “I never told you this before,” he said, “not in so many words. But you have it in you to be a great musician. Perhaps the best.”

Mery blinked. “Me?”

“Don’t let it go to your head.”

“My head is too large for my shoulders, anyhow, Mother says.” She frowned. “Do you suppose I could ever compose, as you do? That would be the very best thing.”

Leoff rose, blinking a bit in surprise. “A female composer? I’ve never heard of that. But I see no reason…” He trailed off.

How would such a creature be treated, a woman composer? Would she reap commissions? Would it bring gold to her pocket?

Probably not. Nor would it increase her chances of a good marriage; in fact, it probably would decrease them.

“Well, let’s talk about that when the time comes, eh? For now, why don’t you play me something—anything you want, something for fun—and then we’ll have a lesson, yes?”

She nodded happily and took her seat at the instrument, placing her tiny fingers on the yellow-and-red keys. She hit one experimentally and held it down, giving it a delicate tremble with her finger. The note sang so sweetly in the stone room that Leoff thought his heart would flow like warm wax.

Mery gave a little cough and began to play.

She began plainly enough with what he recognized as a Lierish nursery tune, a simple melody played quite naturally in etrama, the mode known also as the Lamp of Night, lilting, plaintive, soothing. Mery fingered the melody with the right hand, and with the left she added a very simple accompaniment of sustained triads. It was altogether charming, and his astonishment grew as he realized that he hadn’t taught her this—it had to be her own arrangement. He waited to see how it would continue.

As he suspected, the last chord hung unsustained, drawing him into the next phrase, and now the humming chords became a moving set of counterpoints. The harmonies were flawless, sentimental but not overly so. It was a mother, holding her infant close, singing a song she’d sung a hundred times before. Leoff could almost feel the blanket against his skin, the hand stroking his head, the slight breeze blowing into the nursery from the night meadow beyond.

The final chord was again unsustained, and very odd. The harmonies suddenly loosened, opened up, as if the melody had flown out the window, leaving infant and mother behind. Leoff realized that the mode had changed from the gentle second mode to the haunting seventh, sefta, but even for that mode the accompaniment was strange. And it got stranger, as Leoff realized that Mery had moved from lullaby to dream and now—quite quickly—to nightmare.

The base line was a Black Mary crawling under his bed, the tune had shifted to some nearly forgotten middle line, and the high notes were all spiders and the scent of burning hair. Mery’s face was perfectly blank with concentration, white and smooth as only a child’s could be, unmarred by the march of years, the stamp of terror and worry, disappointment and hatred. But it wasn’t her face he was hearing now but rather something that had come out of her soul and that clearly was not unmarred.

Before he knew it, the melody had suddenly broken: fragmented, searching to put itself back together but unable to, as if it had forgotten itself. The hush-a-bye had become a whervel in three-time, calling up images of a mad masked ball in which the faces beneath were more terrible than the masks—monsters disguised as people disguised as monsters.

Then, slowly, beneath the madness, the melody came back together and strengthened, but now it was in the low end of the scale, played with the left hand. It gathered the rest of the notes to itself and calmed them down until the counterpoint was nearly hymnlike, then simple triads again. Mery had brought them back to the nursery, back to where it was safe, but the voice had changed. It was no longer a mother singing but a father, and this time, at last, the final chord resolved.

Leoff found himself blinking tears when it was over. Technically, it would be surprising from a student of many years, but Mery had studied with him only for a couple of months. Yet the sheer intuitive power of it—the soul it hinted at—was nothing short of astonishing.

“The saints are working here,” he murmured.

During his torture, he’d almost stopped believing in the saints, or at least stopped believing that they cared about him at all. With a few strokes of her hands, Mery had changed all that.

“You didn’t like it?” she asked timidly.

“I loved it, Mery,” he breathed. He fought to keep his voice from trembling. “It’s—can you play it like that again? Just like that?”

She frowned. “I think so. That’s the first time I’ve played it. But it’s in my head.”

“Yes,” Leoff said. “I know what you mean. That’s how it is with me. But I’ve never met—Can you start again, Mery?”

She nodded, put her hands to the keyboard, and played it again note for note.

“You must learn to write your music down,” he said. “Would you like to learn that?”

“Yes,” the girl said.

“Very good. You’ll have to do it yourself. My hands are…” He held them up helplessly.

“What happened to them?” Mery asked again.

“Some bad men did it,” he admitted. “But they aren’t here anymore.”

“I should like to see the men who did that,” Mery said. “I should like to see them die.”

“Don’t talk like that,” he said softly. “There’s no sense in hatred, Mery. There’s no sense in it all, and it only hurts you.”

“I wouldn’t mind being hurt if I could hurt them,” Mery insisted.

“Perhaps,” Leoff told her. “But I would mind. Now, let’s learn to write, shall we? What’s the name of this song?”

She looked suddenly shy.

“It’s for you,” she said. “ ‘Leoff’s Song.’”

Leoff stirred from sleep, thinking he had heard something but not certain what it was. He sat up and rubbed at his eyes, then winced as he was reminded that even so simple a task had become complicated and somewhat dangerous.

Still, he felt better than he had for some time. The visit from Mery had helped him more than he cared to admit to himself, certainly more than he would ever admit to his captors. If this was some new form of torture—to show him Mery again and then take her away—his tormentors would fail. Whatever the usurper had said to him, whatever he had said back, he knew his days were numbered.

Even if he never saw the girl again, his life was already better than it would have been.

“You’re wrong, you know,” a voice whispered.

Leoff had begun to lie back down on his simple bed. Now he froze in the act, uncertain whether he had really heard the voice. It had been very faint and raspy. Could it be his ears, turning the movement of a guard in the corridor beyond into an indictment of his thoughts?

“Who’s there?” he asked quietly.

“Hatred is well worth the effort,” the voice continued, much more clearly this time. “In fact, hatred is the only wood some furnaces will burn.”

Leoff couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from. Not from inside the room and not from the door. Then where?

He got up, clumsily lighting a candle and searching the walls as he stumbled about.

“Who speaks to me?” he asked.

“Hatred,” the reply came. “Lo Husuro. I have become eternal, I think.”

“Where are you?”

“It is always night,” the voice replied. “And once it was quiet. But now I hear so much beauty. Tell me what the little girl looks like.”

Leoff’s eyes settled to one corner of the room. Finally he understood and felt stupid for not guessing earlier. There was only one opening in the room besides the door, and that was a small vent about the length of a kingsfoot on each side, too small for even an infant to crawl through—but not too small for a voice.

“You’re a prisoner, too?”

“Prisoner?” the voice murmured. “Yes, yes, that is one way to say it. I am prevented, that is, prevented from the thing that means the most to me.”

“And what is that?” Leoff asked.

“Revenge.” The voice was softer than ever, but now that Leoff was closer to the vent, it was very clear. “In my language we call it Lo Vide-icha. It is more than a word in my language—it is an entire philosophy. Tell me about the girl.”

“Her name is Mery. She is seven years of age. She has nut-brown hair and bright blue eyes. She was wearing a dark green gown today.”

“She is your daughter? Your niece?”

“No. She is my student.”

“But you love her,” the voice insisted.

“That is not your business,” Leoff said.

“Yes,” the man replied. “That would be a knife to give me, yes, if I were your enemy. But I think we are not enemies.”

“Who are you?”

“No, that is too familiar, don’t you see? Because it is a very long answer and is all in my heart.”

“How long have you been here?”

A harsh laugh followed, a small silence, then a confession. “I do not know,” he admitted. “Much of what I remember is suspect. So much pain, and without moon or sun or stars to keep the world below me. I have drifted very far, but the music brings me back. Do you have a lute, perhaps, or a chithara?”

“There is a lute in my cell, yes,” Leoff replied.

“Could you play something for me, then? Something to remind me of orange groves and water trickling from a clay pipe?”

“I can’t play anything,” Leoff said. “My hands have been destroyed.”

“Of course,” Hatred said. “That is your soul, your music, that is. So they struck at that. They missed, I think.”

“They missed,” Leoff agreed.

“They give you the instruments to taunt you. But why do they let the girl see you, do you think? Why do they give you a way to make music?”

“The prince wants me to do something,” Leoff replied. “He wants me to compose for him.”

“Will you?”

Leoff stepped back from the hole in the floor, suddenly suspicious. The voice could be anyone: Prince Robert, one of his agents, anyone. The usurper certainly knew how he had tricked Praifec Hespero. He wasn’t going to let such a thing happen again, was he?

“The wrongs done me were done by others,” he said finally. “The prince has commissioned music from me, and I will write it as best I can.”

There was a pause, then a dark chuckle from the other. “I see. You are a man of intelligence. Smart. I must think of a way to win your confidence, I think.”

“Why do you want my confidence?” Leoff asked.

“There is a song, a very old song from my country,” the fellow said. “I can try to make it into your language if you like.”

“If it pleases you.”

There was a bit of a pause, then the man began. The sound was jarring, and Leoff understood immediately what he was hearing: the voice of a man who had forgotten how to sing.

The words came haltingly but plain.

After the last line he chuckled. “We will speak again, Leffo,” he said. “For I am your malasono.”

“I don’t know that word,” Leoff said.

“I don’t know if your language has such a word,” the man said. “It is a conscience, the sort that leads you to do evil things to evil people. It is the spirit of Lo Videicha.”

“I have no word for that concept,” Leoff confirmed. “Nor do I wish one.”

But in the darkness, later, as his fingers longed for the hammarharp, he began to wonder.

Sighing, unable to sleep, he took up the strange book he’d been studying earlier and puzzled at it again. He fell asleep on it, and when he woke, something had fit together, and in a burst of epiphany he suddenly understood how he might be able to slay Prince Robert. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

But he would certainly do it, if he got the chance.

8 A Hard Choice

Aspar turned at Winna’s scream, just in time to watch as Stephen was pulled from the branch.

It seemed familiar somehow, and it happened slowly enough for Aspar to understand why. It was like a Sefry puppet play, a miniature of the world, unreal. At this distance Stephen’s face was no more expressive than that of a marionette carved of wood, and when he looked up at Aspar one last time, there was nothing there, only the dark spaces of his eyes, the round circle of his mouth.

Then he was gone.

Then another figure plunged through the frame, caricatured by distance as Stephen, a knife gleaming in his hand as he swung purposefully from the branch into the grove of raised arms and their five-petaled blooms.

Ehawk.

From somewhere near Aspar heard a raw scream of rage. Part of him wondered vaguely who it was, and it was only later, when he felt the soreness of his throat, that he realized it had been his own.

He started forward on his branch, but there was nothing he could do. Winna shrieked again, a sound that somewhat resembled the boy’s name. Aspar watched, his heart frozen, as Stephen’s face appeared once, streaked with blood, and then went back down in the mass.

Ehawk he didn’t see again. He aimed the bow, wondering what target to hit, what miracle shot could save his friends.

But the cold lump in his chest knew the truth: They were already dead.

Fury welled up in him. He shot, anyway, wanting to kill another of them, wishing he had enough arrows to slaughter them all. He didn’t care what they had been before the world went mad. Farmers, hunters, fathers, brothers, sisters—he didn’t care.

He looked at Winna, saw the tear-brimmed eyes, the utter helplessness that was mirror to his own. Her gaze pleaded for him to do something.

His survival instinct made him turn to use. his last few arrows on those slinders who still would be climbing up after them, but to his surprise he realized that they were gone. As he watched, the last of their attackers leapt from the tree, and like a wave retreating after it runs up a shingle, the mass of grotesque bodies flowed away into the twilight.

In but a few heartbeats, there was only the hushed sound of them retreating through the forest.

Aspar continued to crouch, staring after them. He felt incredibly tired, old, and lost.

“It’s snowing again,” Winna said sometime later.

Aspar acknowledged the truth of that with a little shrug.

“Aspar.”

“Yah.” He sighed. “Come on.”

He stood on his perch and helped her down. She wrapped her arms around him, and they clutched there for a few moments. He was aware of the two men-at-arms watching them, but for the moment he didn’t care. The warmth and the smell of her felt good. He remembered the first time she had kissed him, the confusion and the exhilaration, and he wanted to go back to that moment, back before things had become so confusing.

Before Stephen and Ehawk had died.

“Hello!” a voice called up from below.

Looking past Winna’s curling snow-damped locks, Aspar saw the knight Neil MeqVren. The Vitellian swordsman was standing with him and the girl Austra. An oblique black anger stirred. These three and the men-at-arms—they were almost strangers. Why should they be allowed to live when Stephen was torn limb from limb?

Sceat on it. There were things to be done.

“Let me go,” Aspar muttered gruffly, pulling at Winna’s arms. “I need to talk to them.”

“Aspar, that was Stephen and Ehawk.”

“Yah. I need to talk to these men.”

She let him go, and, avoiding her eyes, he helped her the rest of the way down the tree, jumping to avoid the bodies piled up on the spreading roots, wary that one or more of them might still be alive. But none moved.

“You’re all all right?” he asked Neil.

The knight nodded. “Only by the mercy of the saints. Those things had no interest in us.”

“What do you mean?” Winna demanded.

Neil lifted his hands. “We were just attacking Austra’s captors when they came pouring out from the woods. I cut three or four of them down before I realized they were just trying to run around us. We sheltered against a tree to keep from getting trampled. When they were passed, we fought Austra’s kidnappers. I’m afraid we had to kill them all.”

Austra nodded as if in agreement but seemed too shaken to speak, clinging tightly to Cazio.

“They ran past you,” Aspar repeated, trying to understand. “Then they were after us?”

“No,” Winna said thoughtfully. “Not us. They were after Stephen. And as soon as they got him, they left. Ehawk…” Her eyes widened with hope. “Aspar, what if they’re still alive? We didn’t actually see—”

“Yah,” he said, turning it this way and that in his head. After all, they had thought Stephen dead once before, and then they actually had had his body.

Winna was right.

“Well, we have to go after him, then,” Winna said.

“A moment, please,” Neil said, still studying the landscape of bodies. “There’s a lot here I don’t understand. These things that attacked us—these are the slinders you described to the queen on our first day of riding?”

“That they are,” Aspar admitted, impatience beginning to grow in him.

“And these serve the Briar King?”

“Same answer,” Aspar replied.

“And what is that?” Neil pointed to the half-chewed carcass of an utin.

Aspar looked at the thing, thinking that Stephen would probably like to see it dissected like this so he could study it.

Instead of skin, the utin was covered in horny plates, not unlike the scuts of a tortoise. From the joints of those plates, black hairs bristled. In Aspar’s experience, that natural armor was good enough to turn arrows, dirks, and axes, but somehow the slinders had pried some of the horn up and dug into the flesh, exposing the wet organs within the thickly boned rib cage. The creature’s eyes had been clawed out, the bottom jaw broken and half torn off. A human arm, severed at the shoulder, was jammed in its throat.

“We call it an utin,” Aspar said. “We fought one before.”

“But these were killed by the slinders.”

“Yah.”

“From what you’ve been saying, then, of all of us, the slinders only attacked the utins and Frète Stephen.”

“That’s what it looks like,” Aspar agreed brusquely. “That’s what we’ve been saying.”

“But you think they took Stephen alive?”

For answer, Aspar spun on his heel and paced to where he had last seen his friend, where the oak’s unnaturally twisted branches still touched the earth. The others followed him.

“I’ve seen the slinders kill,” he said. “They either eat the dead on the spot or leave them torn to pieces. There’s no sign of that here, so they took Stephen and Ehawk with them.”

“But why would they take just those two?” Neil persisted. “What would they want with them in particular?”

“Why does it matter?” Winna challenged angrily. “We have to go get them back.”

Neil blushed, but he lifted his shoulders higher and tilted his chin up.

“Because,” he said, “I understand what it’s like to lose comrades. I know right well the conflict of two loyalties. But you are pledged to serve Her Majesty. If your friends are dead, they are dead, and nothing can be done about it. If they are alive, then they were spared for some reason also beyond your control. I implore—”

“Neil MeqVren,” Winna said, her voice cold now with fury. “You were there, at Cal Azroth, when the Briar King appeared. We all fought together there, and we all fought again at Dunmrogh. If it weren’t for Stephen, we would all be dead, and Her Majesty, too. You cannot be so unfeeling.”

Neil sighed. “Meme Winna,” he said, “I’ve no wish to hurt or offend you. But without any other bond, all of us—besides Cazio, here—we all are subjects of the throne of Crotheny. Our first allegiance is there. And if that were not so, remember that we all took an oath before leaving Dunmrogh to serve Anne, the rightful heir to that throne, and see her on it or die.

“Stephen and Ehawk took that oath, too.” His voice raised a bit. “And we have lost her. Someone has taken her from us, and we—her supposed protectors—are much reduced in number. Now you propose to divide us further, meme. Please remember your promise and help me find Anne. For the saints, we don’t even know Stephen and Ehawk are alive.”

“We don’t know she is, either,” Aspar countered.

“You’re the royal holter,” Neil protested.

Aspar shook his head. “As a matter of fact, I’m not. I was removed from that position. I’m supposed to answer to the praifec, and he charged me to kill the Briar King. Them that just took Stephen are the Briar King’s servants, and I reckon they’ll lead me to him.”

“That same praifec was behind the murders and shinecraft at Dunmrogh and likely was in league with the assassins at Cal Azroth,” Neil pointed out. “He is the enemy of your rightful ruler, and thus you owe no allegiance to him at all.”

“Don’t know it for sure,” Aspar grunted. “Besides, if I’m the holter, like you say, well, this forest falls in my jurisdiction, and I ought to find out what all of this is about.

“Either way, it’s my choice to make.”

“I know it’s your choice to make,” Neil said. “But I’m the only one here who can speak for Anne, and I’m begging you to consider my argument.”

Aspar met the knight’s earnest gaze, then glanced at Winna. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say but was spared voicing it by the sound of something else coming through the forest.

“Hear that?” he asked Neil.

“I hear something,” the knight replied, hand straying to the hilt of his sword.

“Riders, a lot of ’em,” Aspar growled. “I’d say this matter can wait until we see what new insult has come looking for us.”

9 Rebirth

The dead whispered her awake.

Her first breath was agony, as if her lungs had been blown of glass and then shattered by the intake. Her muscles tried to crawl off her bones. She would have screamed, but her mouth and throat were cloyed with congealed bile and mucus.

Her head was hammering against stone, and there was nothing she could do about it but watch the sparks that formed in her eyes. Then her entire body bent backward as if she were a bow being pulled by a saint, and the arrows exploded wetly from her mouth, again, again, until finally everything unclenched and she lay quietly unhurried breaths rasping in and out of her as the pain gradually washed away from her, leaving exhaustion behind.

She felt as if she were sinking into something soft.

Saints, forgive me, she silently prayed. I did not want to. I had to.

That was only half-true, but she was too tired to explain it to them.

The saints didn’t seem to be listening, anyhow, though the dead were still whispering. She thought she had understood them not that long ago, comprehended the strange tenses of their verbs. Now they flitted at the edge of her understanding, all but one, and that one was trying to lick into her ear like a lovers tongue.

She didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to listen, for the very simple fear that if she did, her soul would return to oblivion.

But the voice wasn’t going to be denied by anything as simple as fear.

No, by the damned ones, it burred. You can hear me. You will hear me.

“Who are you?” She relented. “Please…”

“My name?” The voice gathered strength immediately, and she felt a hand press against the side of her face. It was very cold.

“It was Erren, I think. Erren. And who are you? You are familiar.”

She realized then that she had forgotten her own name.

“I don’t remember,” she said. “But I remember you. The queen’s assassin.”

“Yes,” the voice said triumphantly. “Yes, that’s me. And I know you now. Alis. Alis Berrye.” Something like a chuckle followed that. “By the saints. I missed you, didn’t know what you were. How did I miss you?”

Alis! I am Alis! she thought in desperate relief.

“I did not want to be found,” Alis said. “But I always feared that you would catch me. Indeed, I was terrified of you.”

The hand stroked against her neck.

“Coven-trained, yes.” The dead woman sighed. “But not by any proper coven of the Church, were you? Halaruni?”

“We call ourselves the Veren,” Alis answered.

“Ah, yes, of course,” Erren said. “Veren. The mark of the crescent moon. I know something of you. And now you are my queen’s protector.”

“I am, lady.”

“How did you accomplish this escape from death? Your heart was slowed to beating only once a day your breath stilled. Your blood stank of gallowswort, but now it is clean.”

“If he had not used gallowswort—if he had used lauvleth or mer-waurt or hemlock—I would be dead,” Alis replied.

“You might die, anyway,” Erren replied. “Even now you are very near. A thing as insubstantial as I cannot do much, but you are so very close to us, I think I might manage it…”

“Then she would have no one to aid her,” Alis said.

“Tell me quickly why you did not die. I know of no faneway, no shinecraft that will stop the work of gallowswort.”

“Our ways are different,” Alis said. “And the law of death has been broken. The markland between the quick and the dead is much wider than it was; the passage both ways less certain. Gallowswort is more sure than most poisons, because it acts not only on the body but also on the soul. There is a very old story in our order about a woman who let herself be taken by death and yet returned. It was the last time the law of death was broken, during the time of the Black Jester.

“I felt I might be able to accomplish the same thing, and knew the sacaums necessary to try. And I had no choice, really. The poison was already in me.” She paused. “You should not kill me, Sor Erren.”

“Does my queen understand the aim of your order?”

“My order is dead. All of them but me,” Alis replied. “I am no longer bound by their mission.”

“Then she doesn’t.”

“Of course not,” Alis said. “How could I tell her? She needs to trust me.”

“At this moment,” the shade of Erren murmured, “it is I who must trust you.”

“I might have killed her many times,” Alis said. “Yet I have not.”

“You wait for the daughter, perhaps.”

“No,” Alis said, desperately now. “You do not understand the Veren so well as you think if you suggest that we might harm Anne.”

“Perhaps you wish to control her, though,” Erren said. “Control the true queen.”

“That is nearer the truth, at least as far as the coven was concerned,” Alis admitted. “But I was not of the inner circle. I never fully understood the goals of the Veren, and now I do not care.”

“You say the sisters are all dead. What of the brothers?”

Alis felt her heart trip. “You know of them?”

“Not before now. I guessed. The Order of Saint Cer has its male counterpart. The Veren must as well. But do you understand how dangerous it is if only the males remain? If only their voices are raised in council?”

“No,” Alis said, “I don’t. I wish only to serve Muriele, to bring her to safety, to help her preserve her country.”

“Is this true?”

Alis felt something pinch someplace inside her. It didn’t hurt, but she felt suddenly very faint, and her pulse beat weirdly, as if trying to escape her body.

“I swear to you it is true,” she gasped. “I swear it on the saint we swear by.”

“Name her.”

“Virgenya.”

After a pause, the pressure eased a bit but did not vanish.

“It’s so hard to hang on,” Erren said. “We forget, the dead.”

“You seem to remember quite a lot,” Alis observed, recovering her composure.

“I cling to what I must. I do not remember my parents or being a little girl. I do not recall if I ever loved a man or a woman. I cannot imagine the shape of my living face. But I remember my duty.

“I remember that. And I remember her. Can you protect her? Will you?”

“Yes,” Alis said weakly. “I swear it.”

“And what if the men of the Veren remain and come to you? What then? What if they come to you and ask you to do harm to her or her daughter?”

“I am the queen’s now,” Alis insisted. “Hers, not theirs.”

“I find that difficult to believe.”

“You were coven-trained. If the Church had asked you to kill Muriele, would you have done it?”

Erren’s laughter was soft and without humor. “I was asked,” she said.

The hairs pricked up on Alis’ neck. “Who?” she asked. “Who gave you that order? Hespero?”

“Hespero?” Her voice seemed more distant. “I do not remember that name. Perhaps he is not important. No, I don’t remember who sent the word. But it must have been someone very highly placed, or I would never have considered it.”

“You considered it?” Alis asked, shocked.

“I think that I did.”

“Then there must have been a reason,” Alis said.

“Not reason enough to do it.”

“What is happening, Erren? The world is coming apart. The law of death is broken. Who is my enemy?”

“I died, Alis,” the shade said. “If I had known these things, if I had known what to watch for, do you imagine I would be dead?”

“Oh.”

“Your enemies are her enemies. That is all you need to know. It makes it simple.”

“Simple,” Alis agreed, though she knew it could not be simple.

“You will live,” Erren said. “Everyone thinks you are dead. What will you do?”

“Anne is alive,” Alis said.

“Anne?”

“Muriele’s youngest daughter.”

“Ah, yes. I told her that.”

“She lives, and so does Fail de Liery and many others loyal to the queen. Robert fears that an army will gather behind Anne, and not without reason.”

“An army,” Erren mused. “The daughter leading an army. I wonder how that will work out.”

“I think I can help,” Alis said. “The queen is watched too closely, and she is kept in the Wolfcoat Tower, far from any of the hidden passages. I think her only hope for freedom is if Anne prevails, but that must happen soon, before Hansa and the Church can become involved.”

“How will you help, then? By murdering Robert?”

“I’ve thought of that, of course,” Alis said. “But I’m not certain he can be killed. He has also returned from death, Lady Erren, but he was wholly dead. He does not bleed like a man. I know not how to kill what he has become.”

“I may have once known such things,” Erren said. “No longer. What, then?”

“There is a man the usurper has imprisoned. If I can free him in Anne’s name, I believe even the most reluctant landwaerden will rally to her cause. It should tip the balance.”

“The passages, then.”

“It will be a risk,” Alis said. “Prince Robert is alone among men in that he knows of the passages and can remember them. But—”

“But he thinks you are dead,” Erren said. “I understand. It is a weapon you can use only once, really.”

“Exactly,” Alis replied.

“Have a care,” Erren said. “There are things in the dungeons of Eslen that should have died a very long time ago. Do not think them impotent.”

“I will help her, Erren,” Alis said.

“You will,” Erren agreed.

“I cannot replace you, I know. But I will do my best.”

“My best wasn’t good enough. Be better.”

A chill passed through Alis, and the voice was gone.

Her head was suddenly filled with the stench of putrefying flesh, and as her senses returned, she could feel ribs digging into her back. The hand on her cheek was still there. She touched it; it was wet and slimy and mostly bone.

Robert had lied to Muriele. He’d put her in the Dare crypt, all right, but not in William’s tomb; she was in the same sarcophagus as Erren.

On top of her. His little joke or a coincidence?

Maybe his mistake.

She lay there a long moment, shivering, garnering her strength, and then pushed at the stone above her. It was heavy, too heavy, but she searched deep, found more resolve, and shoved enough to make it budge a bit. She rested, then pushed it again. This time a sliver appeared in the darkness.

She relaxed, letting fresh air flow in to strengthen her. Bracing hands and feet, she shoved with all the might her slight frame would allow.

The lid scraped another fingersbreadth open.

She heard a distant bell and realized it was ringing the noon hour. The world of the quick, of sunlight and sweet air, was suddenly real to her again. She redoubled her efforts, but she was very, very weak.

It was six bells later—Vespers—before she managed to unseat the lid and crawl off the rotting body of her predecessor.

A little light was coming through from the atrium, but Alis did not look back at her host, nor did she at present have the energy to replace the lid. She could only hope that no one had reason to come here before she had managed to regain it or find help.

Feeling as frail and light as a broomstraw, Alis Berrye made her way out of the crypt into Eslen-of-Shadows, the dark sister to the living city on the hill high above it. Looking up at Eslen’s spire and walls, for a moment she felt more daunted and alone than she ever had before. The task she had chosen—that she had promised a ghost she would carry out—seemed altogether beyond her.

Then, with a wry laugh, she remembered that not only had she survived one of the deadliest toxins in the world, but she had vanished from beneath the very eye of the usurper Robert Dare. Thinking himself careful, he had made himself careless.

She would make that mistake into a dagger with which she would strike at his heart and loose whatever strange blood rotted in it.