The Blood Knight

1 Among Them

Stephen wasn’t sure how long he fought against the slinders, but he knew he had no strength left in him. His muscles were limp bands wracked by occasional painful spasms. Even his bones seemed to ache.

Oddly, after he stopped struggling, the hands gripping him became strangely gentle, as if he were like the stray cat he once had removed from his fathers solar. When the cat struggled, it had to be held tightly, even a bit roughly, but once it calmed down, he could afford to loosen his hold, stroke it, let it know that he’d never intended it any harm.

“They haven’t eaten us,” he heard a voice observe.

It was only then that he realized that one of the hands clutching him belonged to Ehawk. He remembered the Watau boy’s face in the first moments of confusion, when he’d been dragged roughly across the forest floor. Now he was being carried faceup, cradled in interlocked arms and held at the wrists by eight of the slinders. Ehawk was being carried similarly, but his right hand had latched firmly onto Stephen’s.

“No, they haven’t,” Stephen agreed. He raised his voice. “Can’t any of you speak?”

None of his bearers answered.

“Maybe they’re going to cook us first,” Ehawk said.

“Maybe. If so, they’ve changed their habits since Aspar saw them last. He said they ate their prey alive and raw.”

“Yah. That’s what I saw when they killed Sir Oneu. This bunch, they’re different. This is all different.”

“Did you see what happened to Aspar and the rest?” Stephen asked.

“I think all the slinders attacking the tree came with us,” Ehawk said. “They didn’t keep after the others.”

“But why would they only want the two of us?” Stephen wondered.

“They didn’t,” Ehawk said. “They only wanted you. It was only after I grabbed on to you that they started carrying me along, as well.”

Then why would they want me? Stephen wondered. What could the Briar King want with me?

He tried to turn more toward Ehawk, but their conversation seemed to have upset the slinders, and one of them struck Ehawk’s wrist so hard that the boy gasped and let go. They began carrying the lad away from Stephen.

“Ehawk!” Stephen shouted, trying to summon the energy to fight again. “You leave him alone, you hear me? Or by the saints… Ehawk!”

But fighting just made his bearers tighten their grip again, and Ehawk didn’t answer. Eventually Stephen’s voice grew hoarse, and he sank glumly into his own thoughts.

He’d made many odd journeys in the past year, and though this wasn’t the strangest of them, it certainly earned a place in his Observations Quaint & Curious.

He’d never traveled anywhere looking mostly up, for instance. Without the occasional glance at the ground, lacking the feel of his feet against it or the mass of a horse between his thighs, he felt disconnected, like a zephyr wafting along. The passing branches and dark gray sky were his landscape, and when it began to snow, the entire universe constricted to a tunnel of gyring flakes. Then he was no longer wind but white smoke drifting through the wold.

Finally, when night took all sight from him, he felt like a wave borne along by the deep. He dozed, possibly, and when his perception sharpened again, there was a hollowness to the clatter of their passage, as if the sea that swept him along had poured down a crevice and become an underground river.

A faintly orange sky appeared. At first he thought it was already sunrise, but then he realized the clouds weren’t clouds at all but a ceiling of irregular stone, and the light born of a huge fire was punching great fists of flame toward the cavern roof. The cave itself was large enough that the light faded before striking any limits except the immediate roof and floor.

Crowded about the great hollow were countless slinders, stretched asleep or sitting awake, walking or standing, staring seemingly into nothing. So thick were their numbers that it hardly seemed as if there was a floor at all. Besides the omnipresent astringent smoke, the air was filthy with the stink of ammonia, the sour musk of sweat, and the sweet pungent rot of human feces. He’d believed the sewers of Ralegh stank as much of human waste as any place could, but he was here proved wrong. The damp, clammy air seemed to coat his skin with the stench so thoroughly, he reckoned it would take days of bathing to feel clean again.

Without warning, the slinders carrying Stephen suddenly set him unceremoniously on his feet. His weakened knees collapsed, and he fell where they dropped him.

Propping himself up, he looked around but saw no sign of Ehawk. Had they eaten the boy, after all? Had they killed him? Or merely ejected him from the procession, ignoring him as they had Aspar, Winna, and the knights?

The aroma of food suddenly broke through the smell of the slinders and struck him like a physical blow. He couldn’t quite identify the scent, but it was like meat. When he understood what it probably was, his stomach knotted, and if he had had a meal to vomit, he certainly would have. Had Ehawk been right? Had the slinders refined their culinary tastes? Was he to be braised, roasted, or boiled?

Whatever their ultimate intentions, at the moment the slinders appeared to be ignoring him, so he studied the scene around him, trying to arrange sense from it.

At first he had seen only the huge flame in the center of the chamber and an undifferentiated mass of bodies, but now he noticed dozens of smaller fires, with slinders grouped about them as if in clans or cadres. Most of the hearths bore kettles, the sort of copper or black iron kettles he might find at any farmstead or small village. A few of the slinders actually were tending the pots; that struck him somehow as the strangest thing he had seen yet. How could they be so senseless yet still be capable of domestic tasks?

Using his hands, he managed to climb unsteadily to his feet, and then he turned, trying to remember which way they had come from. He found himself looking squarely into a pair of vivid blue eyes.

Startled, he stepped back, and the face came into perspective. It belonged to a man, probably around thirty years of age. His face was streaked with red pigment and his body was as naked and tattooed as the others, but his eyes seemed—sane.

Stephen recognized him as the magician who had been calling down the branches.

He held a bowl in his hands, which he proffered to Stephen.

Stephen examined it; it was full of some sort of stew. It smelled good.

“No,” he said softly.

“It isn’t manflesh,” the man said in king’s tongue with an up-country Oostish burr. “It’s venison.”

“You can talk?” Stephen asked.

The man nodded. “Sometimes,” he said, “when the madness lifts. Eat. I’m sure you have questions for me.”

“What’s your name?”

The man’s brow knotted. “It seems like a long time since I had a name that mattered,” he said. “I’m a dreodh. Just call me Dreodh.”

“What is a dreodh?”

“Ah, a leader, a sort of priest. We were the ones who believed, who kept the old ways.”

“Oh,” Stephen said. “I understand now. Vadhiian dhravhydh meant a kind of spirit of the forest. Middle Lierish dreufied was a word for a sort of wild man who lived in the woods, a pagan creature.”

“I am not so learned in the ways our name has been misused,” Dreodh said, “but I know what I am. What we are. We keep the ways of the Briar King. For that, our name has been maligned by others.”

“The Briar King is your god?”

“God? Saint? These are words. They are of no value. But we waited for him, and we were proved right,” he said bitterly.

“You don’t sound glad of that,” Stephen noted.

Dreodh shrugged. “The world is what it is. We do what needs being done. Eat, and we can talk some more.”

“What happened to my friend?”

“I know of no friend. You were the object of their quest, no other.”

“He was with us.”

“If it will ease your mind, I will search for him. Now eat.”

Stephen poked at the stew. It smelled like venison, but then, how did human meat smell? He seemed to remember that it was supposed to be something like pork. And what if it was human?

If he ate it, would he become like the slinders?

He set the bowl down, trying to ignore the pain in his belly. It wasn’t worth the risk on any level he could think of. A man could go a long time without food. He was sure of it.

Dreodh returned, looked at the bowl, and shook his head. He left again, returned with a small leather purse, and tossed it to Stephen. Opening it, Stephen found some dried and slightly molded cheese and hard, stale bread.

“Will you trust that?” Dreodh asked.

“I don’t want to,” Stephen replied.

He did, though, scraping off the mold and devouring the ripe stuff in a few hard bolts.

“The ones that brought you, they don’t remember your friend,” Dreodh told him as he ate. “You must understand, when the calling is on us, we don’t perceive things the way you do. We don’t remember.”

“The calling?”

“The calling of the Briar King.”

“Do you think they killed him?”

Dreodh shook his head. “This calling was simply to locate you and bring you here, not to kill or feed.”

Stephen decided to let the particulars of that go for a moment. He had a more pressing question.

“You say that the slinders came after me. Why?”

Dreodh shrugged. “I am not certain. You have the stink of the sedhmhari about you, and so our instincts tell us that you should be destroyed. But the lord of the forest thinks otherwise, and we can but obey.”

“Sedhmhari—I know that word. The Sefry use it to refer to monsters like greffyns and utins.”

“Just so. You might add to your list the black briars that devour the forest. All the creatures of evil.”

“But the Briar King is not sedhmhari?”

To Stephen’s surprise, Dreodh looked shocked. “Of course not,” he said. “He is their greatest enemy.”

Stephen nodded. “And he speaks to you?”

“Not as you understand it,” Dreodh said. “He is the dream we all share. He feels things, we feel them. Needs. Desires. Hatreds. Pain. Like any living thing, if we feel a thirst, we try to quench it. He put a thirst for you in us, and so we found you. I do not know why, but I know where I am to take you.”

“Where?”

“Tomorrow,” he said, waving the question away with the back of his hand.

“May I walk, or must I be carried again?”

“You may walk. If you struggle, you will be carried.”

Stephen nodded. “Where are we?”

Dreodh gestured. “Under the earth, as you can see. An old rewn abandoned by the Halafolk.”

“Really?” That raised interest in him. Aspar had told him of the Halafolk rewns, the secret caverns where most of the strange race called Sefry dwelled.

The Sefry most people knew of were the traders, the entertainers, those who traveled about on the face of the earth. But those were the minority. The rest had lived in recondite caverns in the King’s Forest until just recently. Then they had left the homes they had lived in for countless millennia, fleeing the coming of the Briar King.

Aspar and Winna had entered one such abandoned rewn. Now, it seemed, he was in another.

“Where is their town?”

“Not far from here, what remains of it. We have begun to raze it.”

“Why?”

“All the works of man and Sefry, throughout the King’s Forest, will be destroyed.”

“Again, why?”

“Because they should not be here,” Dreodh said. “Because men and Sefry broke the sacred law.”

“The Briar King’s law.”

“Yes.”

Stephen shook his head. “I don’t understand. These people—you—you must have been villagers, tribesmen at one time. Living in the King’s Forest or near it.”

“Yes,” Dreodh said softly. “That was our sin. Now we pay for it.”

“By what sorcery does he compel you? Not everyone comes under his spell. I’ve seen the Briar King, and I didn’t become a slinder.”

“Of course not. You do not drink from the cauldron. You do not swear the oaths.”

Stephen felt his throat go dry as once again the world seemed to leave him, spin around a few times, and return distorted.

“Let me understand this,” he said, trying to keep his voice from revealing his outrage. “You chose this? All of these people serve the Briar King of their own volition?”

“I don’t know what choice is anymore,” Dreodh said.

“Well, let me be plain,” Stephen said. “By ‘chose,’ I mean the act of consciously making a decision. By ‘chose,’ I mean, did you scratch your chin one day and say, ‘By my beard! I believe I’ll run naked like a beast, eat the flesh of my neighbors, and live underground in caves’? By ‘chose,’ I mean could you have, let’s say, not done this?”

Dreodh lowered his head and nodded.

“Then why?” Stephen exploded. “Why, by the saints, would you choose to become base animals?”

“There is nothing base about the animals,” Dreodh said. “They are sacred. The trees are sacred. It is the saints who are corruption.”

Stephen started to protest, but Dreodh waved him off. “There were those of us who always kept to the old ways—his ways. We made the ancient sacrifices. But what we remembered, we did not remember truly. Our understanding wasn’t complete. We believed that because we honored him, we would be spared when he returned. But the Briar King knows nothing of honor, or truth, or deceit, or any human virtue. His understanding is the understanding of the hunter and the hunted, the earth and the rotting, the seed and springtime. Only one agreement was ever made with him by our race, and we broke it. And so now we must serve him.”

“Must you?” Stephen said. “But you just said you had a choice.”

“And this is what we have chosen. You would have done the same, had you been one of us.”

“No.” Stephen sneered. “I rather think not.”

Dreodh stood abruptly. “Follow me. I will show you a thing.”

Stephen followed, stepping gingerly around the slinders. In sleep, they seemed normal men and women save for their general state of undress. He reflected that until now he rarely had glimpsed the nakedness of a woman. Once, when he was twelve, he and some friends had watched through a crack in a wall while a girl changed her frock. More recently, he’d accidentally caught a glimpse of Winna as she was bathing. Both times the sight seemed to have seared through his eyes, straight through his belly to where his lust dwelled. Other times the act of merely imagining what a woman might look like beneath her clothes was a powerful distraction.

Now he saw scores of women, some quite beautiful, all as naked as the saints had made them, and he felt nothing but a general sort of revulsion.

They waded through a shallow stream and were soon out of the light.

“Keep your hand on my shoulder,” Dreodh instructed.

Stephen did so, following him through the darkness. Though the saints had blessed his senses, he could not see without any light. He could almost hear the shape of the cavern by the echo from their footfalls, however, and he made a conscious effort to remember the turnings and how many steps came before each.

Presently, a pale new light shone ahead, and they reached the stony shores of an underground lake where a small boat waited for them, tied at a polished limestone quay. Dreodh gestured him in, and in moments they had started across the obsidian waters.

The illumination came from dancing motes like fireflies, and in their tiny lamps the shadow of a city took shape, dreamlike and delicate. Here a spire suddenly glinted like a trace of rainbow; there the hollow eyes of windows gazed out like watchful giants.

“You’re going to destroy that?” Stephen breathed. “But it’s so beautiful.”

Dreodh didn’t reply. Stephen noticed that a few of the floating lights had begun drifting toward them.

“Witchlights,” Dreodh explained. “They are not dangerous.”

“Aspar told me about these,” Stephen said, reaching toward one of them. They were like little glowing wisps of smoke, flames with no substance or heat.

More arrived, escorting them to the farther shore.

Stephen already heard a hushed chatter beyond. Human voices or Sefry, he could not say, but they were high in pitch.

When he saw their low forms on the bank, illumined faintly by the ephemeral lights, Stephen suddenly understood. “Children,” he breathed.

“Our children,” Dreodh clarified.

They came ashore, and a few of the youngsters wandered up to them. Stephen recognized one as the other singer back at the tree, the girl. She leveled her gaze at Dreodh.

“Why have you brought him here?” she asked.

“He has been called. I am to take him to the Revesturi.”

“Still,” she said, sounding extraordinarily adult, “why bring him here?”

“I wanted him to see the jungen.”

“Well, here we are,” the girl said.

“Ehawk said he never saw any signs of children in the abandoned villages,” Stephen said. “Now I think I understand. He’s holding your children hostage, isn’t he? If you don’t serve the Briar King as slinders, your children are forfeit.”

“They serve the Briar King,” the girl said, “because we told them to.”

2 Conversation with the Duchess

The wet slog of hooves through snow grew nearer, accompanied by snatches of conversation. The language sounded like the king’s tongue, but sounds in the forest were deceptive.

For that and many other reasons, Neil was sick of this forest. The island of Skern, where he’d been born, was a place of mountains and sea, but one could walk the length and breadth of it, from the highest, rockiest asher to the lowest gleinn, and never see more than three scraggly bushes in any one place.

These trees blinded and deafened him; they made him misjudge distance.

More than that, Neil was convinced, forests were places of death where rot was always around and the oldest, sickest things in the world seemed to dwell. Give him the clean, open sea or wind-scrubbed heath, and thank Saint Loy.

But the forest is where I am, he thought, and by the sound of it, it’s where I’ll die.

He crouched a bit deeper in the brush. His company’s horses were scattered, if not eaten by the slinders, and on foot against horsemen none of them stood a chance, with the probable exception of Aspar White. But Neil couldn’t imagine the holter leaving Winna to her fate.

So if this was a new foe—or more of the old—they would stay concealed or die.

Then, as the frontriders of the company came into view, Neil saw a flash of short red hair and the face of Anne Dare. The riders with her bore a standard familiar to him: the crest of Loiyes.

Relief flooded through him. He was sheathing his sword and preparing to step out to greet them, when a thought occurred and held him back. What if their attackers had been sent from Loiyes? What if the fickle Elyoner had joined her brother, the usurper?

But Anne did not seem a captive; she sat confidently on her horse, the hood of her weather cloak thrown back, her expression searching but not fearful. When she and her new companions saw the carnage, they reined to a stop.

“What has happened here?” he heard Anne ask.

“I cannot say, Majesty,” a male voice replied. “But you should not look upon such unseemly butchery.”

That was followed by a feminine laugh that was not Anne’s but that Neil nevertheless recognized immediately.

Neil sighed and rose from concealment. His joy at finding Anne alive and apparently unharmed did not entirely put his new suspicion to rest, but there was no point he could see to hiding anymore.

“Your Majesty,” he called. “It’s myself, Neil MeqVren.”

All heads turned toward him, and he heard bows creak.

“No,” Anne said, her voice commanding. “This is my man. Sir Neil, you are well?”

“I am, Majesty.”

“And the rest?” She smiled uncertainly, then lifted a hand. “Tio video, Cazio.”

Neil followed her gaze and saw that Cazio also had stepped from cover. He shouted something at Anne in Vitellian that sounded as Neil felt: relieved and overjoyed.

“What about Austra?” Anne called then. “Have you seen Austra?”

But Austra was already running toward Anne, and forgetting all dignity, the heir to the throne of Crotheny leapt from her horse and met her friend in a fierce embrace. Instantly they were both weeping and talking very quickly, but Neil could not hear what they were saying, nor did he try.

“Sir Neil,” purred the voice that went with the familiar laugh. “What excellent fortune to see you again.”

Neil followed that throaty music to the lady who produced it. Indigo eyes teased him, and her small mouth bowed in a mischievous smile. For an instant he was taken to another day, a day when his soul hadn’t seemed quite so heavy and some of the boy in him was still alive.

“Duchess,” he said, bowing. “It’s a pleasure to see you, as well, and in good health.”

“My health is passing fair,” she sniffed. “I daresay this ride in the cold is doing nothing to improve it.” But her smile broadened. “So many heroes of Cal Azroth here,” she said. “Aspar White and Winna Rufoote, I believe.”

“Your ladyship,” the two chorused.

“Are we in danger here, Sir Neil?” Anne asked, looking up from Austra’s shoulder. Again, Neil was struck by the command in her, something he had not seen in the young woman just a few months before.

“I know of no immediate threat, milady, but I consider this forest unsafe,” he answered. “Most of the men who accompanied us from Dunmrogh have gone beyond the wood in the west. What you see here is all I know who remain alive.”

“Where is Frète Stephen?”

Neil glanced at Aspar.

“He was taken by the slinders,” the holter said stiffly. “He and Ehawk.”

Anne gazed off into the forest as if searching for the two men, then returned her gaze to the holter.

“Do you believe that they are dead?” she asked.

“No, I don’t.”

“Neither do I,” Anne said. “Holter White, a word with you in private, if you don’t mind.”

Neil watched in mild frustration as his charge and the holter stepped away from the rest. He found it difficult not to watch them, and so he turned his attention back to the duchess.

“Glenchest is well?” he asked.

“Glenchest is as beautiful as ever,” she replied.

“And untouched by the present conflict?”

“Untouched, no. Nothing is untouched by my brother’s rash actions. But I do not think he has ever considered me a threat.”

“Should he?” Neil asked.

The duchess smiled sweetly. “Some publish that I am a threat to virtue,” she replied. “And I do hope that I am the enemy of boredom and ennui, wherever I find them. But my brother knows I have not the faintest design on the throne and all the ridiculous tedium that goes with it. I am content merely to be left to my own amusements.”

“Then you don’t favor one claimant over another?”

The duchess put one hand up to stifle a yawn. “I had forgotten, Sir Neil, that being beautiful and young does not prevent you from being—at times—something of a bore.”

“My apologies, Highness,” Neil said, recognizing full well that she hadn’t answered his question. That might be a good sign; the duchess was very clearly in control of the situation. She could afford to let him know her intentions even if he wouldn’t like them.

Glancing over, he saw that Anne’s conversation with the holter had ended, and Aspar White was now approaching.

“Duchess,” Aspar said, affecting a rather crude bow.

“Holter. How are you and your young creature?”

“Well enough, y’r grace. And you?”

“I have a bit of an appetite,” she murmured, “for wild game. I don’t suppose there’s any convenient, is there?”

“Ah—” Aspar said.

“I generally prefer something tender and milk-fed,” she added, “or at least not long off the teat. But sometimes one wants something that’s been well seasoned, don’t you think?”

“I don’t—with the slinders and all, most game has—ah, your grace—”

“Aunt Elyoner,” Anne said, “leave the poor man be. There’s no use to torture him that way. He has to go now. He’s just trying to make his farewells.”

“Is that true?” Neil asked the holter. “Then you convinced her?”

Clearly relieved to take the conversation in a different direction, Aspar scratched his jaw and returned his regard to Neil.

“Well, no, not exactly,” he said. “Her Highness thinks it best if Winna and I go after Stephen.”

“I wish I’d had a word or two in that,” Neil said flatly.

The holter’s expression darkened, but Anne broke in before he could reply.

“He didn’t convince me of anything, Sir Neil,” Anne said. “I’ve my own reasons for sending him after Frète Stephen.” So saying, she went back to her mount.

Neil straightened, feeling suddenly out of his depth again. Queen Muriele had often put him at a disadvantage by not telling him enough. Now, it seemed, Anne was to be the same sort of mistress.

“I’m sorry,” he told Aspar. “I’ve not known you long, but I do know you better than that. I’m not fighting on the terrain I favor, Aspar White. It makes me edgy.”

“I understand,” Aspar said. “But you’re more suited to this sort of thing than I am. I know nothing of courts, or coups, or fighting with armies. I’m of no use to you when it comes to putting her on the throne. Grim, I don’t even understand everything that’s going on out here in the forest, but I do know that it’s my place. Her Majesty canns that, too, I reckon.”

Neil nodded and took his arm. “You’re a good man, holter. It was a pleasure to fight at your side. I hope to see you again.”

“Yah,” Aspar said.

“Nere deaf leyent teuf leme,” he told the holter in his native tongue. “May the saints not weaken your hand.”

“And you keep your eyes open,” Aspar returned.

The slinders’ lack of interest in eating them apparently extended to their mounts, as well, because while they were talking, Ogre quietly led the other horses to the gathering.

Aspar stroked Ogre’s muzzle while the duchess’s men resupplied them, an expression curiously akin to relief on his face. When that was done, he and Winna mounted up. Leading Stephen’s horse, Angel, they departed along the somewhat obvious trail, leaving Neil feeling more unprotected than ever.

As soon as the holter was on his way the balance of the party started toward Glenchest.

Neil listened in mounting horror as Anne explained what had happened to her: her abduction, her escape, and her second capture in Sevoyne.

“After Wist helped me escape,” she concluded, “we set off on the road to Glenchest, but we ran into Aunt Elyoner straightaway.”

“That certainly was fortunate,” Neil said. “The Faiths must have been watching over you.”

“Don’t give the Faiths more than their due.” Elyoner, who was riding well within earshot, joined the discussion. “Loiyes is my province, and I grew up in this country. There are few places where I have no eyes or ears.

“I had received reports of the men who attacked you. They rode in from the east, pretending to be a company of soldiers detached from service to my cousin Artwair. I also had a report of a girl with red hair and a highborn accent who entered Sevoyne and then mysteriously vanished. I decided that was worth my personal attention.”

She yawned.

“Besides, I’ve had a frightful time entertaining myself lately. No one interesting has come to see me in an age, and I’m not particularly taken with the present court in Eslen.” She tilted her head thoughtfully. “Although I’m told there was a rather interesting musical performance there during Yule.”

“You have current news from the court?” Neil asked eagerly, hoping she had more useful information, as well.

“Silly thing,” Elyoner replied. “Of course I do.”

Neil waited, but that seemed to be all the duchess was intending to offer.

“It’s a long ride to Glenchest, Aunt Elyoner,” Anne said finally. “You could fill him in.”

“But dear, I’ve just gone through all of that with you,” Elyoner complained. “You don’t want me to gain a reputation for repeating myself, do you?”

“I could stand to hear it again myself,” Anne replied. “I’m far more awake now.”

“More sober, you mean.”

“Yes, about that,” Neil said. “This Wist fellow. What became of him?”

“We beheaded him, of course,” the duchess said gaily.

“Oh,” Neil replied. “You questioned him first, I hope?”

“Why would I want to do that?” the duchess asked.

“She’s joking with you again, Sir Neil,” Anne said. “He’s just there, under guard—you see?”

Neil looked back and saw a sullen-looking fellow sitting on a dun mare, closely attended by soldiers.

“Ah,” Neil said.

“And now, shall I bore you with the state of the court?” Elyoner asked.

“Please do, metreine.”

She sighed.

“Well, black is the color, they say. Ostensibly because the court is in mourning, but it’s odd that it wasn’t actually observed until Prince Robert reappeared, and him being one of the ones they were mourning for! No, really, I think it’s because the prince wears black. Although I suppose I ought to call him the emperor now.”

“ ‘Usurper’ will do,” Anne said.

“And Queen Muriele?” Neil asked, trying to keep his voice from straining, afraid to know the answer. “How is my lady? Have you any news of the queen?”

“Muriele?” Elyoner said. “Why, she’s locked in a tower, like that onion girl in the phay story.”

Neil felt his heart slow. “But she lives?”

Elyoner patted his arm. “My reports are a few days old, but no execution has been carried out, nor has one been scheduled. That would be a bad move on Roberts part. No, I’m certain he has other intentions.”

“How did this happen, exactly? How did the queen lose her grip?”

“Well, how did she not?” Elyoner said. “With the emperor murdered, Muriele had few allies she could count on. Charles was on the throne, of course, but while Charles is a sweet lad, the entire kingdom knows that he is, well, saint-touched.”

Neil nodded. The true heir to the throne possessed the form of a man but the mind of a child.

“That left Muriele as the power behind the king. But there were plenty of others who wanted to fill that role: Praifec Hespero, any number of nobles from the Comven, princes from Hansa, Liery, and Virgenya. Then there was Lady Gramme, who has her own claimant to the crown.”

“My half brother,” Anne muttered.

“Illegitimate but nevertheless of Dare blood,” Elyoner replied. “In any event, Muriele might have kept Charles on the throne, but she made more than a few mistakes. She replaced her bodyguard with warriors from Liery, under the command of her uncle, who is a baron there.”

“I know Sir Fail,” Neil said. “He is my benefactor.”

“Almost a father, I’m told,” Elyoner said. “You’ll want to know that he, too, is alive—and safe.”

Neil felt more of his muscles loosen. “Thank you,” he said. He missed Sir Fail more than he could ever say. He had never felt the need for the old man’s advice as much as he had these last few months.

“Anyway,” Elyoner went on, “that was seen as a sign that she had decided to hand the throne over to her Lierish relatives across the sea. Then her men attacked a ball at the mansion of Lady Gramme. Those who had gathered there were mostly landwaerden, not nobles, but—”

“Landwaerden?” Neil asked.

The duchess blinked at him. “Yes? What about them?”

“I’ve, ah, no idea who they are.”

“Ah, my duckling,” Elyoner said. “Noble lines rule, you know: the king the country, the archgrefts the greffys, the dukes and duchesses the dukedoms, and so on. That’s how it is in most countries, and most places in Crotheny.

“But in the province of Newland, where Eslen is, things are a bit different. It’s below the level of the sea, you know. The malends that pump the water out must always be functioning; the dikes must be kept in good repair. For centuries the crown has granted land to those who showed themselves able to keep things running smoothly. Those people are the landwaerden. Many of them are wealthier than the nobility, they command troops, and they usually enjoy the loyalty of the people who live on and work their land. They are, in short, a power to be reckoned with, but they have been treated with indifference by the court for more than a century. Lady Gramme was courting them, trying to convince them to back her claim to the throne, so Muriele drew their anger when she attacked Gramme’s party.

“And then my poor dead brother Robert made his appearance—not so dead as was commonly thought. By that time Muriele had no clear friends save her Lierish guard; the nobles all supported Robert instead of Charles, and so did the Church. The only other living heir was Anne, and none of us knew where she was. Muriele was quite secretive about where she had sent her. I think Fastia knew.”

Her features softened, and Neil guessed that he had let something show in his face.

“I’m sorry, my dear,” Elyoner said, her sympathy sounding, for once, quite genuine. “I should not have mentioned her.”

“Why is that?” Anne asked abruptly.

Suddenly uncomfortable, Neil glanced away trying to sort out something to say from the chaos of his thoughts.

“I shouldn’t have brought it up,” Elyoner said. “No more talk of those who have passed for the moment.”

“No, never mind. I think I see,” Anne said. Her tone was flat, but whether she was angry, Neil couldn’t tell.

“In any event,” the duchess went on, “Muriele understood the situation well enough to send Charles away with Sir Fail and her Lierish guard, and the Craftsmen, too, who despite her treatment of them still appear to be loyal. Sir Fail took Charles to Liery, where he is for the moment safe.”

“And what of the Craftsmen?” Neil asked.

Elyoner’s right eyebrow went up. “Why, look around you, Sir Neil.”

Neil did so. He had noticed vaguely familiar faces among Elyoner’s men from the start but reckoned it was because he had met her guard. Now he realized that some of them, indeed, were men he had first seen in Eslen.

“They don’t wear their livery,” he remarked.

“They are outlawed,” Elyoner said. “It seemed premature for them to make themselves targets until they had something to fight and someone to lead them.”

Neil nodded. He had traveled without standard himself, in Vitellio.

“The queen left herself defenseless, then.”

“Exactly. She must have known she hadn’t a chance of successfully fighting the coup, so she sent her men away to where they would do the most good: outside the walls. Anyway that’s when Robert put her in the tower. He pulls her out and parades her around now and then to show that she is still alive.”

“If the queen is become so unpopular, why should he care whether the people know that?”

Elyoner smiled faintly. “Because a most peculiar thing occurred. The performance of some sort of musical stage-play—I mentioned it earlier.

“Somehow it swayed many of the landwaerden back toward Muriele and her children. In part because a daughter of one of the landwaerden families was involved and was arrested by Robert on the charge of treason. She was also condemned by the praifec, for heresy and shinecraft, along with the composer of the piece, a man who was already a popular hero of Newland. Robert is apt, I’m afraid, to act more from rage than from reason at times. Now he finds the landwaerden do not really care for him, after all.”

“Then we have a chance,” Neil said. “How many troops do these landwaerden control?”

“Their combined militias number near eight thousand, I’m told,” Elyoner said. “Robert can muster perhaps twelve thousand from the nobles who remain loyal to him. The nobles in the east and along the forest are too busy fighting slinders—and stranger things—to spare troops to help either Robert or those who oppose him.”

“What about Hornladh and the Midenlands?”

“I think Anne might be able to raise a host to match that which defends Eslen,” Elyoner said. “We shall hear more of that directly.”

“Well,” Neil mused. “Then we can make a fight of it.”

“Only if you do it very soon,” Elyoner replied.

“Why is that?”

“Because Muriele is to marry the heir of Hansa, Prince Berimund. It’s all been announced. Once that union takes place, Hansa will be able to send troops without courting the prejudice of the Church. Indeed, Robert has already agreed to let z’Irbina station fifty knights of the Church—and their guards—in Eslen to support any ruling that comes down from Fratrex Prismo. They are on the march as we speak. You cannot fight Robert, Hansa, and the Church.”

“And you, Duchess? What part will you play in all of this?” Neil asked. “You seem awfully keen on the small details of this conflict for someone who shan’t take sides.”

Elyoner chuckled. It was an odd sound, both childlike and world-weary.

“I never said I hadn’t taken sides, my dove,” she replied. “It’s just I find the question of my allegiance tedious, like the rest of this business. War does not suit me well. As I said earlier, I mostly want to be left alone, to do as I please. My brother assures me that this can be the case so long as I follow his instructions.”

Now, at last, Neil began to hear the warning bell ringing in his head.

“And those instructions were… ?” he asked.

“They were rather specific,” she said. “If Anne comes across my stoop, I am to make certain that she vanishes, immediately and permanently, along with anyone who accompanies her.”

3 Children of Madness

Stephen glanced at Dreodh, but the man didn’t challenge the girl’s assertion.

“You told your parents to become slinders?” Stephen asked, trying to find some way the pronouncement made sense. “Why would you do that?”

Stephen studied the girl for some sign that she was something else, perhaps an old soul transposed to a young body or a creature that resembled a human being only so much as a hummingbird resembled a bee.

All he saw, however, was that odd, long moment that suspended between child and woman. The children, unlike the adults, were not naked; the girl wore a simple yellow shift that hung on her like a narrow bell. A bit of faded embroidery at the cuffs showed that someone—mother, grandmother, sister, perhaps even the girl herself—had tried to pretty it up at some point.

She was slim, but her hands, head, and cowskin-slippered feet looked too large. Her nose was a small dipping slope—a girl’s nose still—but her cheekbones were beginning to lift her face into a woman’s. In the pale light, her eyes appeared hazel. Her brown hair was lighter on the crown and at the ends. And he could easily imagine her in a meadow, wearing a necklace of clover, playing Rickety Rock Rridge or Queen o’ the Grove. He could see her twirling so that the hem of her dress puffed out like a ball gown.

“The forest is ill,” the girl said. “The sickness is spreading. If the forest dies, so does the world. Our parents broke the ancient law and helped bring this sickness upon the trees. We’ve asked them to set things right.”

“When you blew the horn, you summoned the Briar King to his work in the world,” Dreodh explained. “But his way has been prepared for generations. Twelve years ago, we dreothen sang the elder rites and made the seven sacrifices. Twelve years—the heartbeat of an oak—that’s how long it has taken for the earth to give him up at last.

“And in that twelve years, every child born on the ground hallowed of the forest was born of wombs stroked by hemlock and oak, ash and mistletoe. Born his. When he awoke, they awoke.”

“We knew what we had to do, all of us at once,” the girl took up. “We left our homes, our towns and villages. Those who were too young to walk, we carried. And when our parents came after us, we told them how things would be. Some resisted; they wouldn’t drink the mead or eat the flesh. But most did as we asked. They are his army now, his host to sweep the forest clean of the corruption that invades it.”

“Mead?” Stephen asked. “Is that what’s in the cauldrons? It’s mead that robs them of their senses?”

“Mead is a convenient word,” Dreodh said, “but it’s not the get of honey. It is Oascef, the Water of Life, it is Oasciaodh, the Water of Poetry. And it does not rob us of our senses—it restores them. It returns us to the forest and to health.”

“My mistake,” Stephen said. “The slinders that brought me here seemed rather… insane. This Oascef isn’t made from a mushroom that resembles a man’s member, by any chance?”

“What you call madness is divine,” the girl replied, ignoring his question. “Him in us. There is no fear or doubt, no pain or desire. In such a state we can hear his words and know his will. And only he can save this world from the fever that crawls up from its roots.”

“I’m at a loss, then,” Stephen said. “You say you have chosen to become what you are, that the unspeakable acts you commit are justified because the world is ill. Very well, then: What is this illness? What are you fighting, exactly?”

Dreodh smiled. “Now you’ve begun to ask the right questions. Now you begin to understand why he called for you and commanded that you be brought to us.”

“No, I do not,” Stephen said. “I’m afraid I don’t understand at all.”

Dreodh paused, then nodded sympathetically. “Nor are we the ones to explain it to you. But we will take you to the one who will. Tomorrow.”

“And until then?”

Dreodh shrugged. “This is what remains of the Halafolk settlement. It will be destroyed in time, but if you wish to explore it, feel free. Sleep where you want; we will find you when the time comes.”

“May I have a torch or—”

“The witchlights will accompany you,” Dreodh said. “And the houses have their own illumination.”

Stephen walked through the dark, narrow streets, trying to sort out his priorities, but found himself captivated by the city itself. The street was bounded on both sides by buildings two, three, sometimes four stories tall. They were fantastically slender, many joined side to side, others separated by narrow alleys. Although built of stone, they had a gossamer quality, and where the witchlights drifted close, they gleamed like polished onyx.

The first few structures were occupied by more of the children. He could hear laughter, song, and the soft lisps of them sleeping. If he extended his senses, he could make out the murmur of at least a thousand of them, if not more. A few of the very young ones were crying, but other than that he heard nothing that he would characterize as fear, anguish, or despair.

He couldn’t be certain how much of what the girl and Dreodh had told him was true, but one thing seemed certain: These children were not captives, at least not captives of anything they feared.

He pushed farther into the ancient city, seeking solitude. He knew he should be looking for a way out, but it seemed unlikely that his captors would let him wander freely if there was any chance of escape. Besides, at the moment he was too curious to really want to escape.

If Dreodh was telling the truth, Aspar and Winna were safe enough, at least from the slinders. If he was lying, his friends were almost certainly dead already. He didn’t—wouldn’t—believe that or even think too much about it until he had some evidence of it. But the chance to find out more of what was going on, what the Briar King wanted—well, that was what they were all looking for, wasn’t it?

What good would he have been trying to help a princess regain her throne? He wasn’t a warrior or a strategist. He was, he mused, a scholar with an interest in the past and in languages common and obscure. Surety I can do more good here than marching to Eslen.

Following his curiosity, he tried one of the doors. It was wooden and not too old. The Halafolk, he reasoned, must have traded constantly with their aboveground neighbors. They had to eat, after all, and while subterranean lakes might produce some fish and some sort of crops might be grown without sunlight, surely most of their sustenance had come from the surface.

Stephen wondered briefly how that trade had been accomplished while keeping the location of the rewns secret, but the answer was so obvious, he felt stupid for the three heartbeats he had wondered at it.

The Sefry. Those who traveled above, in the caravans—they were the suppliers.

The door pushed easily inward, revealing an apartment of stone. The place smelled faintly peppery. The hard floor was softened by a carpet woven of what appeared to be wool. Could sheep live underground? He doubted it. The pattern was vaguely familiar, a little like the colorfully abstract swirls painted on Sefry tents and wagons. Four cushions formed a loose ring around a low round table. In one corner a loom waited patiently for a weaver. Had the carpet been woven on it? Nearby wicker baskets overflowed with skeins of yarn and wooden tools he didn’t recognize.

The room seemed rather lived in, as if the Halafolk hadn’t taken much with them when they left. Perhaps they hadn’t.

Where had they gone? Had they fled the Briar King or the mysterious illness of which the Dreodh spoke?

Not long after they had met, Aspar had said something about the forest “feeling sick” to him. Aspar had lived his whole life in the pulse of the woodlands, so he should know.

Then they had encountered the greffyn, a beast so poisonous that its mere footprint could kill, and soon afterward the black thorns that sprang up in the footprints of the Briar King and grew to smother every living thing they crept over. Then even more monsters from Black Marys had appeared: utins, the nicwer—sedhmhari, Dreodh had called them. The best translation Stephen could make of that was “sedos demon.”

Did the monsters, like human priests, walk the faneways and gain gifts from them?

Something about the utins in particular troubled him. He had almost been killed by one, but by now he had been almost killed by several things. No, there was something more…

Then he realized what was bothering him.

The utin that had attacked him was the only one he had ever encountered, yet for some reason he was thinking of them in the plural. There had been only one greffyn, though Aspar had seen another after slaying the first. But no one he knew had seen more than one of these new monsters at a time.

So why was he thinking “utins” instead of “utin”?

He closed his eyes, calling upon the memory Saint Decmanus had given him, thinking back to the moment when the slinders had first attacked. In the chaos, there had been something else…

There. He could see it clearly now, as if some meticulous artist had painted the scene for him. He was glancing over his shoulder as he pushed Winna up into the tree. There was Aspar, turning with his knife in hand. Beyond were the slinders, breaking from the forest. But what was Aspar looking at?

Not the slinders…

It had been at the corner of Stephen’s vision; he saw only its limbs and part of its head, but there was no mistaking it. There had been an utin back there, just ahead of the slinders. Perhaps more than one.

Then what had happened to them? Had the slinders killed them, or were they working with the slinders?

The latter didn’t seem likely. The greffyn, the first utin, the nicwer they had encountered in the river at Whitraff, the black thorns—

The black thorns grew in the Briar King’s footsteps, yet they clung to him viciously, as if they sought to cover him, drag him down into the earth. According to Aspar, he once had been imprisoned by them, in a valley hidden in the Mountains of the Hare.

Slinders had attacked and killed the men performing human sacrifices on the sedos mounds throughout the forest, and those men seemed allied to the greffyn; they were the only creatures who could stand to be near it without becoming deathly sick.

No, he silently corrected. The renegade monks weren’t the only ones immune to the greffyn’s poison. He himself had caught the greffyn’s gaze and had suffered no ill effect. Aspar, too, seemed to have at least a raised tolerance, since the Briar King had healed him from the monster’s touch. So what did that mean?

Was it because he had walked a faneway? Were all ordained priests immune to sedhmhari?

It is the saints who are corruption, Dreodh had claimed.

If the slinders were the army of the Briar King, the monsters they had met were a part of some army, too: the army of the Briar King’s foe. But who could that be?

The most natural answer was the Church. He knew that the corrupt monks had friends as high as the praifec of Crotheny, Marché Hespero. Their influence might well go higher.

But even if Fratrex Prismo himself was involved, did that mean he was the master of the greffyn? Or was he just another monster, serving an even greater power?

He thought back through all the lore he had read concerning the Briar King, trying to remember who his adversaries were supposed to be, but few sources had mentioned enemies of any sort. The king was from the time before the saints, before humanity, perhaps even before the Skasloi who had enslaved the Mannish and Sefry races in ancient times. He appeared as a harbinger of the end of times.

If the king had any enemies, it would have to be, as Dreodh had seemed to suggest, the saints themselves.

And that brought him back to the Church, didn’t it?

Well, he’d been promised answers tomorrow. He wasn’t naive enough to imagine that all his questions would be answered, but if he learned anything more than he knew, that would be something.

He pressed on through the Halafolk house and, finding nothing to hold his attention, left it and ambled farther into the doomed city, crossing slender stone arches over quiet canals, all sketched half-visible in the witchlight. The distant chatter of children had been augmented by an atonal chanting farther away probably coming from the first chamber he’d been brought to.

Were the slinders preparing for another sortie aboveground, drinking their mead and working up their bloodlust?

The street angled down, and he followed it, vaguely hoping to discover some sort of scriftorium, a cache of Sefry writings. Their race was ancient and had been among the first to be enslaved by the Skasloi. They might well have recorded things the other peoples had forgotten.

As he wondered just what a Sefry scriftorium might look like, it occurred to Stephen that he had never seen Sefry writing of any sort or ever heard of a separate Sefry language. They tended to speak the local tongue wherever they lived. They had a sort of cant of their own but rarely used it. Aspar once had spoken some for Stephen, and Stephen had discerned words from some fifteen different languages but not a single word that seemed uniquely Sefry.

The assumption was that they had been enslaved so far back in the past that they had lost whatever language they might once have had, speaking instead the pidgin that the Skasloi had devised for their slaves.

So hateful was that language that they had abandoned it as soon as the masters were all dead, adopting instead the tongues of their human companions.

It seemed entirely plausible. He’d read in several sources that the native language of the Skasloi could not be spoken by a human throat and tongue, so they had devised an idiom that could be used by both themselves and their slaves. Human slaves must have all spoken that language, but many had retained their own speech to use among themselves.

Yet almost no word of that slave tongue was retained in any modern dialect. Virginia Dare and her followers had put every Skasloi creation to the torch and forbade the speech of slavery. They never taught it to their children, and so it died.

“Skaslos” might be the only word of their language that remained, Stephen mused, and even that exhibited the singular form “-os” and the plural “-oi” inherent to elder Cavari, a human language.

Perhaps even the name of that demon race had been forgotten.

He paused, finding himself at a canal wider than those he had crossed before, and his skin prickled as he had an unholy thought.

What if the Skasloi hadn’t all died? What if they, like the greffyns, utins, and nicwers, had merely gone somewhere else for a very long nap? What if this illness, this enemy, was the most ancient enemy of all?

Hours later he took that unsettling thought to sleep with him, resting on a mattress spiced with the Sefry scent.

He awoke to a sharp poke in his ribs and found the girl staring down at him.

“What’s your name?” he murmured.

“Starqin,” she replied. “Starqin Walsdootr.”

“Starqin, do you understand that your parents are dying?”

“My parents are dead,” she said softly. “Killed in the east, fighting a greffyn.”

“Yet you feel no sorrow.”

Her lips pursed.

“You don’t understand,” she said at last. “They had no choice. I had no choice. Now, come along, please.”

He followed her back to the boat he’d arrived on. She motioned for him to get in.

“Just the two of us?” he asked. “Where’s Dreodh?”

“Preparing our people to fight,” she said.

“Fight what?”

She shrugged. “Something is coming,” she replied. “Something very bad.”

“Aren’t you afraid I might try to overpower you and escape?”

“Why would you do that?” Starqin asked. In the faint light her eyes seemed as black and liquid as tar. Her face and hair, in contrast, made her seem ghostlike.

“Maybe because I don’t like being held captive.”

Starqin settled next to the tiller. “Would you row?” she asked.

Stephen took his seat and placed his hands on the oars. They felt cool and light.

“You’ll want to talk to him, the one we’re going to see,” Starqin said. “And I don’t think you’ll murder me.”

Stephen pulled on the oars, and the boat glided almost soundlessly away from the stone quay.

“It’s interesting to hear you talk about murder,” Stephen said. “The slinders don’t just attack greffyns, you know. They kill people, too.”

“Yah,” Starqin said, almost absently. “So have you.”

“Evil people.”

She laughed at that, and Stephen felt suddenly stupid, as if he had been lecturing a sacritor on holy writ. But after a moment she grew more serious.

“Don’t call them slinders,” she said. “It demeans their sacrifice.”

“What do you call them?” he asked.

“Wothen,” she said. “We call ourselves the wothen.”

“That just means ‘mad,’ doesn’t it?”

“Divinely mad, actually, or inspired. We are a storm blowing the forest clean.”

“Will you really help the Briar King destroy the world?”

“If it’s the only way to save it.”

“Does that really make sense to you?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know he’s right, the Briar King? How do you know he isn’t lying to you?”

“He isn’t,” she said. “And you know it, too.”

She steered them along the dark waters, and soon they were in a tunnel so low-roofed that Stephen had to duck his head to keep from striking it. The sound of the oars chuckled off into the distance and back to them.

“Where were you from, Starqin?” Stephen wondered aloud. “What town?”

“Colbaely in the Greffy of Holtmarh.”

A little chill went up his spine. “I have a friend from there,” he said. “Winna Rufoote.”

Starqin nodded. “Winna was nice. She used to play the holly pole with us and give us the barley rusk after her father made beer. She was too old, though. Not one of us.”

“She had a father—”

“He owned the Sow’s Teat.”

“Is he a wothen?”

She shook her head. “He left when we started burning the town.”

“You burned your own town?”

She nodded. “It had to be done. It wasn’t supposed to be there.”

“Because the Briar King said so.”

“Because it wasn’t supposed to be. We children always knew that. We had to convince the adults. Some weren’t convinced, but they left. Fralet Rufoote was one of them.”

They continued on in silence; Stephen wasn’t sure what else to say, and in the absence of questions, Starqin didn’t seem inclined to pursue conversation.

The ceiling rose again until it vanished from the faint glow of the witchlights. After a time, another illumination arose, a distant, slanting shaft of radiance that turned out to be sunlight descending through a hole high up in the roof of the cavern.

Starqin brought the craft to rest at another stone quay.

“There are steps carved in the stone,” she said. “They lead up to the exit.”

“You’re not going with me?”

“I have other things to do.”

Stephen regarded the girl’s eyes, now jade in the sunfall from above.

“This can’t be right,” he told her. “All of this death, all of this killing—it can’t be right.”

Her features shifted briefly through something he didn’t understand, but it was a glimmer of a silvery fish in a deep pool. Then the water was again empty and calm.

“Life is always coming and going,” she said, “if you watch. Always something being born, always something dying. In the spring more is being born; in late autumn more is dying. Death is more natural than life. The bones of the world are death.”

Stephen’s throat tightened. “Children shouldn’t talk like that,” he said.

“Children know these things,” she said. “It’s only adults that teach us that a flower is more beautiful than a rotting dog. He just helped us keep what we were born knowing, what every beast that doesn’t know how to lie to itself understands in its marrow.”

Stephen’s sorrow and sympathy suddenly twisted, and for an instant he was so angry at the girl, he wanted to strangle her. In the midst of his doubts and uncertainty the sheer satisfaction of that absolute feeling was so wonderful and terrible that it left him gasping, and when it passed, as it did seconds later, he was actually shaking.

Starquin hadn’t missed it.

“Besides,” she said softly, “you have whole seasons of death in you.”

“What do you mean?”

But she just pushed off and did not answer, and soon the skiff was lost from view.

Stephen began to climb.

The stone steps switched their way back and forth up the stone wall until at last they brought him to a small landing. The cave opening was quite small, and beyond it he could see little more than a screen of cane. A narrow path led through the stiff vegetation, however, and he picked his way along it until suddenly the hillside opened up.

He found himself gazing down upon pasture, and beyond that the orderly rows of apple trees. Across the little valley, above the trees, a stone building rose. He gasped involuntarily as emotions rushed up to him like old acquaintances: anticipation, boyish excitement, pain, disillusionment, rank terror.

Anger.

It was the monastery d’Ef, where he first had learned how corrupt the Church of his childhood had become, where he had met and been tortured by Desmond Spendlove. Where he had been forced to decipher the scrifti that had perhaps doomed the world.

“Wilhuman, werliha. Wilhuman hemz,” a voice scratched behind him.

“Welcome, traitor. Welcome home.”

4 The Tale of Rose

“You’re supposed to kill me?” Anne asked, fixing Elyoner with her gaze.

The duchess of Loiyes smiled lazily back at her.

Anne could almost feel Neil MeqVren tightening next to her, like the string of a lute.

She waited until I sent Aspar away, she thought. Not that he and Winna would have made a difference against this many…

She lifted a hand to rub her forehead but let it drop. It would only make her look weak.

Too much had happened, and far too quickly. She’d still been blurry with alcohol when she’d met Elyoner and her men on the road. And then the relief of seeing a familiar face—the face of family, even—had been so intense that she hadn’t allowed herself to entertain the most obvious thoughts.

That Elyoner had sent her attackers.

Elyoner Dare had always been a mystery to Anne, albeit a pleasant one. She was Anne’s father’s sister, older than Lesbeth and Robert, but she had always seemed much younger than Anne’s father. Anne guessed her to be around thirty.

Family trips to Glenchest had always been a treat; there was even a sense among the children that the adults were having more fun than they were, though it wasn’t until much later that she had begun to understand what sort of fun it was.

That impression had grown as Anne got older. Elyoner always appeared to do pretty much as she pleased. Though she had a husband somewhere, he was never really in evidence, and Elyoner was well known for taking young and highly temporary lovers. Muriele—Anne’s mother—had always seemed to disapprove of Elyoner, which for Anne was another thing that recommended her aunt. Though a great gossip, she had never seemed in the least political, or even particularly aware of what went on beyond the who-was-sleeping-with-whom.

Now Anne was suddenly, acutely conscious that she did not really know her aunt at all.

“Kill you and bury the body where it will not be found,” Elyoner amplified. “Those were the instructions. In return, Robert tells me my life at Glenchest will go on much as it always has.” She sighed wistfully. “Such a comforting thought.”

“But you aren’t,” Anne said. “You aren’t going to have me killed… are you?”

Elyoner’s cerulean eyes focused sharply on her.

“No,” she said. “No, of course not. My brother doesn’t know me quite as well as he thinks he does, which is a bit disheartening.” Her face grew more serious, and she leveled an accusing finger at Anne. “But you should never have trusted me, for I might have,” she said. “Consider that if your dear uncle Robert has ordered your murder, no other relative of yours is trustworthy, with the likely exception of your mother. Taking your side makes my life very difficult and could in fact end it. That’s not an easy choice to make, even for you, my sweet.”

“But you made it.”

Elyoner nodded. “After what happened to Fastia and Elseny, practically in my very own parlor—no, not you, too. I loved William above all my siblings. I could never betray his last daughter that way.”

“Do you think Uncle Robert has gone mad?” Anne asked.

“I think he was born mad,” Elyoner said. “It happens with twins, you know. Lesbeth got everything that was good from their parents’ union, and Robert was left with the dregs.” Her gaze cut aside to Sir Neil.

“You may relax now, sweet knight,” she said. “To repeat myself in plain words, I’m here to help Anne, not to harm her. If I wanted her dead, I should have accomplished that long before finding you and then used your grief to make you my lover. Or some other wicked and delightful thing.”

“You always speak such comforting words,” Neil replied.

Anne thought that the familiar response seemed to confirm what Elyoner had implied earlier, that Sir Neil and her sister Fastia had had some sort of affair.

On the surface that seemed impossible. Fastia had been ludicrously dutiful, and so was Neil. One would think they would have reinforced those qualities in each other rather than abrogating them. But Anne was quickly learning that nothing about the heart was simple or, rather, that it was very simple, but the consequences were baroque.

In any event, she didn’t have time to consider what her sister had or hadn’t done with this young knight. She had other priorities.

“Now that you mention her, has there been any word at all from Lesbeth?” Anne asked.

“No,” Elyoner replied. “The rumor is that she was betrayed by her betrothed, Prince Cheiso of Safnia, that he gave her over to some ally of Hansa so they could blackmail William. That was the reason your father went to the headland of Aenah: to negotiate her release.

“I suppose only Robert knows what really happened there.”

“Then you think Uncle Robert had something to do with my father’s death?”

“Of course,” Elyoner said.

“And Lesbeth? What do you think really happened to her?”

“I do not—” Elyoner’s voice caught for an instant. “I would not imagine that she still lives.”

Anne took a few breaths to try to absorb that.

The snow had begun again, and she hated it. She felt as if a bone had broken in her someplace. A small one, but one that would never quite heal.

“You really think Uncle Robert would kill his own twin sister?” she finally posed. “He loved her more than he loved anyone. He doted on her. He was silly about it.”

“Nothing can bring down bloody murder more readily than true love,” Elyoner said. “As I said, Robert was never made of the finest stuff.”

Anne opened her mouth to reply but found she had nothing to say. The snow came a bit harder, numbing her nose with cold and wet.

Where have I been? she wondered. Where was all of this when I was growing up?

But she knew the answer to that. She’d been racing horses to spite the guards, stealing wine and drinking it in the west tower, sneaking off to play kiss-and-feel with Roderick in Eslen-of-Shadows.

Fastia had tried to tell her. And her mother. To prepare her for all of this.

Mother.

She suddenly remembered her mother’s face, sad and stern, the night she’d sent her off to the Coven Saint Cer. Anne had told her she hated her…

Her cheeks were wet now. Quite without knowing it, she had begun crying.

Realizing that only made matters worse, and great sobs began to choke up from her belly. She felt exposed, like the time all her hair had been shorn from her head, like the time as a little girl she’d been caught naked out in the hall.

How could she be queen? How could she even have imagined it? She didn’t understand anything, couldn’t control anything—not even her own tears. All she had learned in the last year was that the world was huge and cruel and beyond her comprehension. The rest of it—the illusion of destiny and power, the determination that had seemed real only a few days ago—now seemed stupid, a pose everyone could see through but she.

A hand fell on her thigh, and she started at the warmth of it.

It was Austra, her own eyes brimming. The other riders had cleared a bit of a space, probably so they could pretend they didn’t see her pain. Neil rode just behind her, but out of whispering earshot. Cazio was up with Elyoner.

“I’m so glad you’re alive,” Anne told her friend. “I tried not to think about it, to keep my mind on other things, but if you were dead…”

“You’d go on; that’s what you’d do,” Austra said. “Because you have to.”

“Do I?” Anne asked, hearing the rancor in her voice, knowing it was petty and not caring.

“Yes. If only you could have seen what I saw from the forest, back in Dunmrogh. When you stepped out, bold as a bull, and told those murderers who you were—if you had seen that, you would know what you were meant to do.”

“Have the saints touched you?” Anne asked softly. “Can you hear my thoughts?”

Austra shook her head. “I’ll never know anyone better than I know you, Anne. I never know exactly what you’re thinking, but usually I can see the general way the wind is blowing.”

“Did you know all this? About Robert?”

Austra hesitated.

“Please,” Anne said.

“There are things we never talked about,” Austra said reluctantly.

“You always pretended I was just like a sister, and that was nice, but I could never forget the truth, never allow myself to forget the truth.”

“That you are a servant,” Anne said.

“Yes.” Austra nodded. “I know you love me, but even you’ve come to face the facts of the matter.”

Anne nodded. “Yes,” she admitted.

“In Eslen, in the castle, servants have their own world. It’s right next to yours—below it, around it—but it’s separate. Servants know a lot about your world, Anne, because they have to survive in it, but you don’t know much about theirs.”

“Don’t forget, I’ve worked as a servant, too,” Anne said. “In the house of Filialofia.”

Austra smiled and tried not to appear condescending.

“For just under twice nineday,” her maid qualified. “But see here, did you learn anything in that time that the lady of the house did not know?”

Anne thought about that for a moment. “I learned that her husband philandered with the housemaids, but I think she knew that, almost expected it,” she said. “But what she didn’t know was that he was also involved with her friend dat Ospellina.”

“And you discovered that by observation.”

“Yes.”

“And the other servants—did they talk to you?”

“Not much.”

“Right. Because you were new, you were a foreigner. They didn’t trust you.”

“I’ll grant you that,” Anne said.

“And yet the lord and lady of the house didn’t make that distinction, I’ll wager. To them you were a servant, and when you were doing your job as you were supposed to, you were invisible, as much a part of the house as the banisters or the windows. They only noticed you—”

“When I did something wrong,” Anne said. She was starting to understand.

How many servants were there in Eslen. Hundreds? Thousands? Around all the time but scarcely existing so far as the nobles were concerned.

“Go on,” Anne said. “Tell me something about the servants in Eslen. Something small.”

Austra shrugged. “Did you know that the stablejack, the one we called Gimlet, was the son of Demile, the seamstress?”

“No.”

“Do you remember who I’m talking about?”

“Gimlet? Of course.” I just never wondered who his mother was.

“But he isn’t the son of Armier, Demile’s husband. His real father is Cullen, from the kitchen staff. And because Cullen’s wife, Helen, was so angry over that, Gimlet—his real name is Amleth, by the way—was never allowed a position within the castle, because Helen’s mother is the Boar, old lady Golskuft—”

“—the mistress of the household servants.”

Austra nodded. “Who in turn is the illegitimate daughter of the late Lord Baethvess and a landwaerd girl.”

“So you’re telling me that the servants do more sleeping about than they do work?”

“When a turtle takes a breath in a pond, you only see the tip of his nose. And all you know of the servants in Eslen is what they allow you to see. Most of their lives—their interests, passions, connections—are kept from you.”

“Yet you seem to know quite a lot.”

“Only enough to understand what I don’t know,” Austra said. “Because I was so close to you, because I was treated with the appearance of gentle birth, I was not well trusted—or well liked.”

“And what has all of this to do with my uncle Robert?”

“The servants have very dark rumors of him. The say that when he was a boy, he was exceedingly cruel, and unnatural.”

“Unnatural?”

“One of the housemaids, when she was a girl—she said Prince Robert made her wear Lesbeth’s gown and demanded that she answer to that name. And then he—”

“Stop,” Anne said. “I think I can imagine.”

“I think you can’t,” Austra said. “They did that, yes, but his desires were perverse in more than one way. And then there is the story of Rose.”

“Rose?”

“That one they are very quiet about. Rose was the daughter of Emme Starte, who was in the laundry. Robert and Lesbeth made a playmate out of her, dressed her in fine clothes, took her on walks, rides, and picnics. Treated her as if she were gentle.”

“As you were treated,” Anne said, feeling something twinge in her breast.

“Yes.”

“How old were they?”

“Ten years old. And here’s the thing, Anne—the thing they say, but it’s so hard to believe.”

“I think I would believe anything at this moment,” Anne said. She felt blunted, a knife used too often to cut bone.

Austra lowered her voice further. “They say that when they were young, Lesbeth was like Robert: cruel and jealous.”

“Lesbeth? Lesbeth is the sweetest, most gentle woman I have ever known.”

“And so she became, they say, after Rose vanished.”

“Vanished?”

“Never to be seen again. No one knows what happened. But Lesbeth cried for days on end, and Robert seemed more agitated than usual. And after that, Robert and Lesbeth were not seen together as much. Lesbeth was like a new person, seeking always to do good, to live like a saint.”

“I don’t understand. Are you saying that Robert and Lesbeth killed Rose?”

“As I said, no one knows. Her family prayed, and wept, and made petition. Soon after, her mother and closest relatives were lent to the household of the Greft of Brogswell, a hundred leagues away, and there they remain.”

“That’s horrible. I can’t—are you saying that my father never made any investigation of this?”

“I doubt very much it ever reached the ears of your father. It was settled within the world of the servants. If the rumor had gotten to your family, it might as easily have come to the attention of your father’s political enemies. In that case, any servant who knew anything might have vanished quite as suddenly—and without explanation—as Rose.

“So the Boar put it out that Rose had gone to work with her sister in Virgenya and made sure there was a record of her request to do so. Rose’s remaining family was quietly moved off lest in their grief they should begin talking to the wrong people.”

Anne closed her eyes and felt a face there, pushed against the shutters of her lids, a pretty face with green eyes and an upturned nose.

“I remember her,” she gasped. “They called her Cousin Rose. It was that time on Tom Woth, the Feilteme celebration. I couldn’t have been more than six winters.”

“I was five, so you were six,” Austra confirmed.

“You really think they killed her?” Anne murmured.

Austra nodded.

“I think she’s dead. It may have been an accident or a game that went too far. Robert has a lot of games, they say.”

“And now he’s on the throne. My father’s throne. And he has my mother locked up in a tower.”

“I-I’ve gathered that,” Austra said. “I’m sure he hasn’t hurt her.”

“He’s ordered my death,” Anne replied. “There’s no knowing what he’ll do to Mother. That’s what I must concentrate on, Austra. Not whether I can be a queen or not but on freeing my mother and putting Robert where he can do no more harm. Just that, for now.”

“That sounds sensible.”

Anne breathed deeply and felt a bit of weight lift from her shoulders.

They were back out of the forest now and coming down to the road. Anne could see Sevoyne in the distance, and she wondered if this time she would actually go past it.

“Anne!” Someone shouted from behind. “Casnara, ah, rediatura!”

She glanced back and saw Cazio, boxed closely on all sides by Craftsmen.

“What is it, Cazio?” she replied in Vitellian.

“Could you please instruct these men that I am one of your very valued companions? If indeed I am?”

“Of course,” Anne said. She switched to the king’s tongue. “This man is one of my bodyguards,” she told the Craftsmen. “He may approach me whenever he wishes.”

“You pardon, Highness,” one of the knights said, a pleasant-looking young man with auburn hair and something vaguely gooselike about him. “Rut we may take nothing for granted.”

She nodded. “What is your name, sir knight?”

“If it please you, Majesty, my name is Jemme Rishop.”

“A good Virgenyan name,” Anne said. “I thank you very much for your protection. Despite his demeanor, this man has my trust.”

“As you say, Majesty,” the fellow replied. The horses gave a little ground, allowing Cazio to ride up.

“We’ve a retinue again,” he said, glancing back at the knights. “I wonder if this one will survive longer than the last.”

“Let us hope so,” Anne said. “I’m sorry we haven’t spoken until now. Things are becoming more and more complicated, and I’m sure it must seem even more so to you.”

“My day improved considerably when I discovered that you were still alive,” Cazio said. He rubbed his head ruefully. “I was a poor guardian to you—to the both of you. I have apologized to Austra, and now I apologize to you.”

“You risked your life for us, Cazio,” Anne said.

“Anyone can risk his life,” Cazio replied. “A man with no skill and no wits could die for you. I had hoped I was better than that. If I had died preventing you from being taken, that would have been one thing. But to be left, humiliated, in the wake of your kidnap—”

“—is a matter of personal pride,” Anne finished. “Don’t be foolish, Cazio. I am alive, as you see. We were all caught sleeping: Aspar, Sir Neil, Frète Stephen, myself. You were in good company.”

“It won’t happen again,” Cazio said adamantly.

“If that pleases you,” Anne replied.

Cazio nodded. “This lady she is related to you?”

“Elyoner? Yes, she’s my aunt, my father’s sister.”

“And she is trustworthy?”

“I have chosen to trust her. If you see evidence that I should not, however, please bring it to my attention.”

Cazio nodded. “Where are we going?” he asked.

“Glenchest, her residence,” Anne replied.

“And what will we do there?”

“We will plan to go to war, I suppose,” Anne replied.

“Ah. Well, you will let me know when I can be of aid, then, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Anne!” Elyoners voice wafted forward. “Be a dear and send that Vitellian fellow back. I’ve begun to find this ride exceedingly boring.”

“His king’s tongue is rather poor,” Anne answered.

“Fatio Vitelliono,” she replied sweetly. “Benos, mi della.”

“She speaks my language,” Cazio said happily.

“Yes,” Anne replied. “So it seems. And I’m sure she wants to practice with you.”

He glanced back. “Should I?” he asked.

“Yes,” Anne replied. “But be cautious; my aunt can be dangerous to a man of virtue.”

Cazio smiled and replaced his broad-brimmed hat. “If I meet such a man, then,” he said, “I shall be sure to warn him.”

He turned and rode back.

Austra watched him go with a rather disconcerted look on her face.

“Austra,” Anne said. “The men who abducted you—did they say anything?”

“They thought I was you,” Austra said, “or thought I might be.”

Anne nodded. “I had the same impression, that their description of me wasn’t very good. Did they mention anyone by name?” Anne asked. “Anyone at all?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Did they touch you?”

“Of course. They tied me up, put me on horseback—”

“That’s not what I meant,” Anne said.

“Not—oh. No, nothing like that. I mean they talked about it, threatened me with it even, trying to get me to say whether I was you or not. But they didn’t actually do anything.” Her eyes suddenly widened. “Anne, did they—were you—?”

Anne jerked her head back toward Wist. “He tried. Something happened.”

“Let Sir Neil kill him,” Austra gritted. “Or tell Cazio and let him challenge him to a duel.”

“No. He failed, and I still may have use for him,” Anne said. She studied the reins in her hands. “Something happened, Austra. The man who kidnapped me, he died.”

“Did you—did you kill him, the way you killed those horrible men in the grove?”

“I killed the men in the grove by wishing them dead,” Anne said. “There was power there, beneath me, like a well of water I could drop my bucket into. I felt their insides, and I twisted them. It was the same as when I blinded the knight back in Vitellio or when I made Erieso sick—just, well, more.

“But this was different. The man who abducted me was killed by a demon. I saw her.”

“Her?”

Anne shrugged. “I went to some other place. I think she followed me back. She stopped Wist from raping me.”

“Maybe she isn’t a demon, then,” Austra said. “Maybe she’s more of a guardian angel.”

“You didn’t see her, Austra. She was terrible. I don’t even know who I can ask about these things.”

“Well, Frète Stephen seemed to know a lot,” Austra said, her voice sounding sorrowful. “But I suppose he’s—”

“He’s fine,” Anne said. “And needed elsewhere.”

“Really? How do you know that?”

Anne thought about the Briar King and the things she had seen in his eyes.

“I don’t want to talk anymore about this,” she said. “Later. Later.”

“Very well,” Austra said in a mollifying voice. “Later.”

Anne took a deep breath. “You just said you know me better than anyone. I think that’s true. And so I need you to watch me, Austra. Pay attention to me. And if ever you think I’ve lost my mind, you must tell me.”

Austra laughed a little nervously. “I’ll try,” she said.

“I’ve kept things from you before,” Anne said. “I need—I need someone to talk to again. Someone I can trust, who won’t tell my secrets to another living soul.”

“I would never betray your promise.”

“Even to Cazio?”

Austra was silent for a moment. “Does it show?” she asked.

“That you love him? Of course.”

“I’m sorry.”

Anne rolled her eyes. “Austra, I have friendly affections toward Cazio. He has saved our lives several times, which can be most endearing. But I do not love him.”

“Even if you did,” Austra said defensively, “he would be below your station.”

“That’s not at issue, Austra,” Anne said. “I do not love him. I do not care if you do so long as I can trust you not to tell him anything I ask you to hold in confidence.”

“My first allegiance is, has always been, and will always be to you, Anne,” Austra said.

“I believe that,” Anne said, gripping her friend’s hand. “I just needed to hear it again,”

In the westering light, they reached Glenchest.

It looked just as Anne remembered it, all spires, gardens, and glass, like a castle spun by the phay from spider silk. As a child she had thought it was a magical place. Now she wondered how, or if, it could be defended. It didn’t look like the sort of place that could stand a siege.

At the gate there were ten men on horseback, wearing black surcoats. The leader, a tall, gaunt man with hair cropped right to his skull and a narrow beard, rode up to meet them.

“Oh, dear,” Elyoner whispered. “Sooner than I would have hoped.”

“Duchess,” the man said, bowing in the saddle. “I was just about to ride out in search of you. My lord will not be pleased at your behavior. You were to await me in your mansion.”

“My brother has rarely been pleased with my behavior,” Elyoner said. “But in this case, he may not be so displeased. Duke Ernst, may I introduce my niece, Anne Dare? She seems to have been misplaced, and everyone has been scrambling about to find her, and look—I have.

“And as I understand it, she has come to take your master’s crown.”

5 In the Trees

“Are y’ going to tell me what that was all about?” Winna asked as their horses took them over a low ridge and out of sight of the princess—or queen, or whatever she was—and her newfound entourage of knights.

“Yah,” Aspar said.

After a few more minutes of silence Winna drew Tumble’s reins and brought the brindle mare to a halt.

“Well?”

“You mean now?”

“Yes, now. How did you convince Her Majesty to release you to follow Stephen?”

“Well, there was no need for convincing, as it happened. She wanted me to go after Stephen.”

“That was nice of her.”

He shook his head. “No, it was weird. She seemed to know he’d been taken. She said he’d need our help, that we had a task to perform, and that our going with Stephen was as important as her reclaimin’ the throne. Maybe more so.”

“Did she say why?”

“She didn’t know why, exactly. She said she’d had a vision of the Briar King, and he put it in her head that Stephen was important, somehow. And in danger.”

“That doesn’t make an ale cup of sense,” Winna said. “The slinders came and got him, and they’re the creatures of the Briar King. So why should he be in danger? And if His Mossy Majesty wanted us to come along, why didn’t he just have us kidnapped, too?”

“You’re asking the wrong fellow,” Aspar said. “I don’t even believe in visions. I’m just happy she let us go. Although…”

“What?”

“You saw the utins, yah?”

“Utins?” She paled. “Like that thing that—” She stumbled off.

“Yah. Three of em, at least. The slinders killed ’em. Maybe they were after Stephen, too. Maybe that’s why the king sent the slinders: to protect him.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in visions.”

“I’m just talking,” Aspar said. “I’m just happy to be on the trail.”

“What else did Her Majesty say?”

“That’s it—follow Stephen. Find him, protect him, help him. She said to let my own judgment be my guide. Said I was her deputy in the region, whatever that means.”

“Really? Her deputy?”

“You know what that means?”

“It’s Virgenyan. Means you carry the same authority she does—that she’ll vouch for you. I don’t suppose she gave you any way of proving your authority.”

Aspar laughed. “Like what? A sealed letter, a ring, or a scepter? The girl was chased halfway around the world, and from what I understand, most of that time she only had the clothes on her back. I reckon it’ll be sorted out later, if it needs sorting out.

“Anyway, at the moment, I maunt having her authority doesn’t mean too much, yah? They may be callin’ her a queen, but she’s not one yet.”

“Werlic,” Winna murmured under her breath. “There’s that way of looking at it.”

They rode on in silence for a few moments. Aspar wasn’t certain what to say; every time he glanced at her, Winna appeared more troubled.

“Stephen and Ehawk’ll be all right,” he assured her. “We’ll find em. We’ve come through worse than this, the four of us.”

“Yah,” she said despondently.

He scratched his face. “Yah. They’re fine.”

She nodded but didn’t reply.

“Meantime, it’s nice. I mean, we haven’t been alone together in a while.”

She looked up at him sharply.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she snapped.

“I… ah, don’t know.” He felt his tumble, all right, but didn’t know what he had tripped over.

She opened her mouth, closed it, then started again. “It’s not the time now. When we find Stephen.”

“Time for what?” Aspar asked.

“Nothing.”

“Winna—”

“You’ve been cold as a post for twice a nineday,” she erupted, “and all of a sudden you’re trying to sweeten up your talk?”

“It’s kind of hard to make luvrood when so many people are around,” Aspar grunted.

“It’s not like I was expecting posies and poesy,” Winna said. “Just a squeeze of the hand and a whisper in my ear now and then. We might have died, without…” She dipped her head and clamped her lips shut.

“I have to think you knew what you were getting into when you—” He stopped, unsure of what he was going to say next.

“Threw myself at you?” she finished. “Yah. I never meant to do that. When I saw you at the Taff, I thought you were dead. I thought you had died never knowing how I felt. And when you were alive again, and we were away from everything—from my father, from the Sow’s Teat, from Colbaely altogether—I just didn’t care anymore, about consequences, about the future, none of it.”

“And now?”

“And now I still don’t care, you damned oaf. But I’m starting to wonder about you. Back when we were alone, it was wonderful. I spent half of my time terrified out of my wits, but that aside, I’ve never been happier in my life. It was just what I’d always dreamed I’d have from you: adventure, love, and good squirming in the dark.

“But add a few people to the situation, and I’m suddenly like your bothersome little sister. She comes along, so much more like you than I can ever be—”

He interrupted her. “Winna, don’t you ever want the normal things? A house? Children?”

She snorted. “I think I’ll wait until the world isn’t ending before I start a family, thanks.”

“I’m serious.”

“And so am I.” Her green eyes were all challenge. “Are you saying I can’t have those things with you?”

“I guess I never really thought about it.”

“So this is you talking out loud, without thinking close about what you’re saying?”

“Ah, I guess.”

“Yah, werlic. You’ll want to stop doing that.”

An awkward silence descended over them.

“I don’t think of you like a sister.”

“No, of course not—less than a bell alone, and you’re all after hiking up my skirt again.”

“I was just saying that I was happy to be alone with you again, is all,” Aspar said. “Just away from the others. And it’s not what you think. I’m a holter; I’ve never been anything else. It’s what I know how to do. I work alone, at my own pace, the way I want to, and I get things done. I’m not a leader, Winna. I wasn’t cut out for that. Four of us was bad enough. Five was practically intolerable.”

“I didn’t think you minded it at all when Leshya joined us.”

“This isn’t about Leshya,” Aspar said desperately. “I’m trying to tell you something.”

“Go on.”

“So, then all of a sudden there are fifty of us, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I’m not a knight, not a soldier. I work alone.”

“So what does that say about me?”

He took a deep breath, feeling as if he were about to dive into a very deep pool. “Being with you—and just you—is like being alone, but better.”

She stared at him, blinking.

He saw dampness appear in her eyes, and his heart fell. He knew what he wanted to say, but clearly he didn’t have the right words.

“Winna—” he started again.

She held up a finger.

“Hush,” she said. “That’s the best thing you’ve said to me in a long time—maybe ever—so you probably want to shut up now.”

Relief took hold of Aspar. He followed her advice and settled into the ride.

Snow drifted fitfully, but he didn’t have much worry that the trail would get covered; the tracks of one or two slinders he might lose in a heavy snowfall, yes, but not the several hundred that had come this way. And it wasn’t just tracks they were finding but trails of blood and the occasional corpse. It might be that they didn’t feel pain or fear, but they died just like everything else.

Daylight surrendered without much of a fight a few bells later, lead tarnishing to black, with a wicked promise of hard cold. They lit torches. The snowfall thickened, and the flames hissed and fussed in it.

Though Aspar didn’t want to admit it, he was tired, so tired that his knees were quivering against Ogre’s flanks. And though she didn’t complain, Winna seemed on the verge of dropping, as well. It had been a very long day, a day lived almost entirely at the edge of death, and that could wear iron down to rust.

“How are you holding up over there?” Aspar asked.

“The snow will cover the tracks if we stop.” She sighed.

“Not so I can’t find the trail,” Aspar said. “Even if there aren’t any more bodies, they’ve scraped tree bark, broken branches—I can follow em.”

“What if we stop and they kill Stephen while we’re resting?”

“They won’t, not if we’re right.”

“But we might be wrong. They might cut his heart out at midnight, for all we know.”

“They might,” Aspar agreed. “But if we find him now, in the shape we’re in, do you really think we could do anything to help him?”

“No,” Winna admitted. “Is that really the point?”

“Yes,” Aspar said. “I’m not some kinderspell knight, ready to die because the story says I ought. We’ll save Stephen if I think we’ll survive it or at least have a decent chance. Right now, we need a little rest.”

Winna nodded. “Yah,” she said. “You’ve talked me into it. Do you want to camp here?”

“Nah, let me show you something. Just up ahead.”

“Feel the notches?” Aspar asked, searching up through the darkness and finding Winna’s rump.

“Yah. And watch your paws, you old bear. I’m not that forgiving, not with you making me climb another tree.”

“This should be an easier climb.”

“It is. Who cut the notches? They’re old; I can feel bark that’s grown back on em.”

“Yah. I cut ’em, back when I was a boy.”

“You’ve been planning this a long time.”

Aspar almost chuckled at that, but he was too exhausted.

“Just a little higher,” he promised. “You’ll feel a jut.”

“Got it,” Winna said.

A few moments later Aspar followed Winna onto a hard flat surface.

“Your winter castle?” she asked.

“Something like that,” he replied.

“It could do with some walls.”

“Well, I couldn’t see anything then, could I?” Aspar said.

“We can’t see anything as it is,” Winna pointed out.

“Yah. Anyway, it’s got a roof to keep the snow off, and there ought to be a piece of canvas we can raise to hold the worst of this noar’wis off of us. Just mind the edge. I only built this for one.”

“So I take it I’m the first woman you’ve brought home.”

“Ah—” He stopped, afraid to answer that.

“Oh,” she said. “Sorry, I was just joking. I didn’t mean to bring that up.”

“It was a long time ago,” Aspar said. “It doesn’t bother me. I just didn’t…” Now he was sure he shouldn’t say anything else.

But then he felt her mitten on his face. “I’m not jealous of her, Aspar,” she said. “That was before I was born, so how could I be?”

“Raiht.”

“Raiht. So where’s the hearth?”

“Ah, I reckon you’ve just laid your hand on it,” he said.

“Oh, well.” She sighed. “I guess it’ll be better than freezing.”

It was considerably better than freezing, Aspar reckoned when the morning gray woke him. Winna was nestled into the crook of his arm, her bare flesh still hot against his, and the both of them were cocooned in blankets and skins. They’d found some energy neither thought they had, enough that it was a miracle they hadn’t fallen off the platform during the night.

He kept his breathing slow and deep, not wanting to wake her yet. But he turned his gaze about, marveling still at what had struck him with wonder as a boy, all those years ago.

“There you are,” Winna murmured.

“You’re awake?”

“Before you were,” she said. “Just looking. I never knew there was anyplace like this.”

“I call ’em the tyrants,” Aspar said.

“Tyrants?”

He nodded, looking up at the spreading and interlocking branches of the huge tree they rested in and those all around it.

“Yah. It’s the biggest, oldest stand of ironoaks in the forest. No other trees can live here; the oaks shade em out. They’re the kings, the emperors of the forest. It’s a whole different world up here. There are things that live on these branches and never go down to the ground.”

Winna leaned to peer over the edge. “How far down is—eep!”

“Don’t fall,” he said, gripping her a little tighter.

“That’s farther than I thought,” she rasped. “A lot farther. And we almost, last night we nearly—”

“No, never,” Aspar lied. “I had us the whole time.”

She smiled wryly and kissed him.

“You know,” she said, “when I was a girl, I thought you were made of iron. Remember when you and Dovel brought in the bodies of the Black Wargh and his men? It was like you were Saint Michael made flesh. I thought that with you at their side, a person wouldn’t have to worry about anything.”

Her eyes were serious, as beautiful as he had ever seen them. Somewhere nearby a crow-woodpecker hammered at a tree, then vented a throaty warble.

“Now you know better,” he said. “Fend took you from me, right out from underneath my nose.”

“Yah,” she said softly. “And you got me back, but it was too late. I already knew that you could fail by then, that no matter how strong and determined you were, the bad things could still get me.”

“I’m sorry, Winna.”

She gripped his hand. “No, you don’t understand,” she said. “A girl falls in love with a hero. A woman falls in love with a man. I don’t love you because I think you can protect me; I love you because you’re a man, a good man. It’s not that you always succeed but that you’ll always try.”

She looked away, back down at the distant forest floor. It was a relief, because he couldn’t think of any reply to that.

He remembered Winna as a kindling, a bundle of legs, hands, and blond hair racing around the village, always bothering him for stories of the wider world. Just one of a hundred children he’d watched flicker through mayfly childhood to become mothers, fathers, grandparents.

Aspar wasn’t sure what love was. After his first wife, Qerla, was murdered, he’d spent twenty years avoiding women and the entanglements they brought. Winna had snuck up on him, masquerading as a little girl well after he ought to have known better. But in the end the surprise had been a pleasant one, and for a short time he’d surrendered to it as much as he ever had yielded to anything.

That was before Fend had captured her. Fend had killed his first love; he seemed destined to kill all of them.

In any event, Aspar had been more and more uneasy since then, less and less sure of his feelings. He knew they were there, but what it came down to was that as long as they were on the move, fighting, always in danger of death, it was easy not to think about the future, easy to imagine that when this was all over, Winna would go back to her life and he would go back to his. He would miss her and have pleasant memories, but it would be something of a relief.

But now he suddenly realized how deep the water was, and he wasn’t sure if he could swim in it.

Without meaning to, he recalled Leshya. The Sefry woman was tough and wise and kept what feelings she had close, very close. There wouldn’t be any confusion with her; with her it would be honest and simple—

He suddenly felt the tree tremble. Not from the wind; the cadence was all wrong, and it came up from the roots.

Winna must have seen him frown.

“What?”

He held a finger to his lips and shook his head, then returned his gaze to the ground. The vibration in the tree continued, but he couldn’t imagine what it was. It might be a few hundred horsemen, so many of them that the percussive thutter of hooves melted together. It might be slinders again, though it didn’t feel like that, either. There was a sustained quality to the vibration that was like nothing he’d ever experienced before, but it was getting stronger.

He shallowed his breathing, waiting for the sound.

A hundred heartbeats later he heard the start of a scraping, a grinding sort of noise. A few dead leaves gave up their desperate hold on their branches and drifted down. Aspar still couldn’t see anything, but he noticed that the woodpecker had stopped, as had all bird noises.

The sound was clearer now, and the shivering of the tree even more pronounced, so that at last he felt a heavy rhythm, a dull whump-whump-whump-whump almost below hearing. That said to Aspar that something very large and very heavy was running through the forest, faster than a horse could gallop.

And it was dragging something huge.

He noticed Winna’s breath quicken as he reached carefully for his bow and arrows, so he found her hand again and squeezed it. He glanced at the sky; it was still gray, but the clouds were high and on the bright side. It didn’t look like there would be more snow.

Whatever it was, it was coming from the same direction they had: north and west. The branches of the trees in that direction swayed visibly. He deepened and slowed his breath, trying to relax, focusing on the Old King’s Road below them and slightly to the north.

He caught only glimpses at first of something huge, black, and gray-green winding through the trees, but his senses couldn’t focus it into reality. He concentrated on two gigantic tyrants arching over a long clearing on the Old King’s Road, reckoning that that would be where he would get his first good look at it.

A mist poured through the trees, and then something dark and sinuous, moving so quickly that Aspar first thought he was seeing some strange flood, a river flowing above ground. But then it stopped as suddenly, as did the sound of its passage and the shaking in the tree.

The mist coiled, and something like a viridian lamp burned through it.

Instantly, Aspar felt his skin prickle and ache like the onset of a fever, and he clapped a hand over Winna’s face to stop her vision. For as the mist cleared, he saw that the green light was an eye, seen as just a sliver, above it as they were. But that might be enough.

Its head, he reckoned, was as long as a decent-sized man was tall. It had a long tapering snout with fleshy nostrils, something like that of a horse, but toward the neck its skull flared and thickened to resemble an adder’s. Two black horny ridges jutted up just behind the eyes, which bulged out of round, bony sockets. It had no ears that he could see, but it had a ruff of spikes that started at the bass of the skull and ran down its thorny spine.

It wasn’t a snake, for he could see that after four kingsyards or so of very broad neck it was drawn up on immensely thick legs terminating in what resembled a huge hoof cloven five times. However, like a snake, it dragged its belly, and its body twisted behind it, so long that he couldn’t tell whether it had rear legs, and he could see what he reckoned to be ten or twelve kingsyards of it.

The head lifted, and for an instant he feared it would turn its deadly eyes up toward them, but instead it lowered its nostrils to the ground and began to sniff at the trail. Its neck moved this way and that.

Was it following us or the slinders? he wondered. And who will it follow now?

It was then he noticed something he hadn’t before. The body widened above the legs to accommodate a massive bunching of shoulder muscles, and there, at its thickest place, was something strange, a flash of color that didn’t seem to belong, something sticking up.

Then he got it. It was a saddle, strapped around the girth of the thing, and there were two people sitting on it, one bareheaded and one wearing a broad-brimmed hat.

“Sceat,” Aspar murmured.

As if in response, a flash of pale appeared as the man with the hat looked up. And though the distance was great and the mist obscuring, Aspar knew by the eye patch and the shape of the nose exactly who it was.

Fend.

6 Haunted

Duke Ernst reached for his sword, but Neil’s already was flying from its scabbard, feylight lapping up the length of its blade. Ernst froze and stared, as did his men, and Neil backed his horse so that he was not pressed, so that he could face both Ernst and Elyoner.

“By my fathers and their fathers,” he snarled, “Anne Dare is under my protection, and I will slaughter any man who threatens to lay a hand on her.”

Another sword hissed from its sheath, and Cazio bounded down, placing himself between Anne and Ernst, but with his back to the Craftsmen. At this point Neil thought that might be a mistake.

“Shinecraft!” Ernst said, still staring at Draug. “Witchery. The praifec shall deal with you, whoever you are.”

“Much comfort that will be to your corpse,” Neil shot back. “In any event, I took this sword from a servant of the praifec, which I’m sure is as strange to you as it is to me.”

Ernst finished drawing his weapon. “I have no fear of your sorcery and no belly for your lies,” he said. “I will carry out my lord’s command.”

“My uncle is an usurper,” Anne said. “Your duty does not lie with him. It lies with me.”

Ernst spat.

“Your father my have badgered the Comven into legitimizing you as his heir, but do not become confused, Princess. There is only one Dare whose blood is thick enough to rule Crotheny, and that is King Robert. Whatever childish adventure you have embarked upon, I assure you that it ends now.”

“Oh, let the girl remain a child for a bit longer,” Elyoner broke in.

“Duchess?” Ernst said.

“Anne, dear,” Elyoner said, “you may want to close your eyes.”

Neil heard the sudden strum of bowstrings, and his flesh went cold and hot as he cursed his stupidity.

But it was Duke Ernst who showed the most surprise—one arrow went through his throat, and another vanished a fourth of its length into his right eye socket.

More darts followed, and in the space of but a few heartbeats, all of Ernst’s riders had fallen from their saddles. Only then did four men in yellow hose and orange surcoats appear from behind the wall. They began to slit the throats of the wounded with long wicked knives.

Anne gaped in astonishment.

“Oh, dear,” Elyoner said. “I thought I told you not to look.”

“It’s not my first time to see men die, Aunt Elyoner,” Anne replied. She looked pale and her eyes were watery, but she watched the murder with a steady gaze.

“Sadly, yes,” Elyoner said. “Despite a residue of naïveté, I can see that you have grown up, haven’t you? Well, enough of this unpleasantness,” she continued, pulling on the reins of her horse. “Let’s go see what my staff can find in the kitchens.”

As they started up the avenue toward the mansion, Neil trotted his horse up next to Elyoner.

“Duchess—”

“Yes, sir knight, I know it was boorish to think me a traitor and a liar, but there’s no need to apologize,” she said. “You see, I hadn’t expected the duke to arrive until tomorrow, and I had arranged for him to meet with an ill fate before even reaching here.”

“Robert will soon know that something has happened to them,” Neil said.

“Tsk, tsk.” Elyoner sighed. “These are evil times. Monsters and terrible people wander the roads. Even the king’s men aren’t safe.”

“You think Robert won’t see through that?”

“I think we have a little time, dove,” Elyoner assured him. “Time enough to eat and drink and rest. The morning is early enough for plans, I should think. No, we need to be fresh when we discuss what to do next. After all, you didn’t imagine that you were just going to ride up to Eslen and demand that they open the city gates, did you?”

Neil felt his mouth twist a bit.

“Well, that’s the problem,” he replied. “If I may be candid, Duchess…”

“You may be as candid with me as you like,” she said wryly. “Or you may deceive and taunt me. Either way, I will find my amusement.” Her lips bowed slightly.

“I’ve fought in many battles,” Neil said, ignoring her flirtation. “My father first gave me a spear when I was nine, to kill Weihand raiders who were in the employ of Hansa. After my fah died, Baron Fail de Liery took me into his household, and I battled for him.

“Now I’m a knight of Crotheny. But I’ve little knowledge of how to wage a war, you see. I’ve led raids and defended redoubts, but taking a city and a fortress, especially one like Eslen—that’s not something I know how to do. Nor, I fear, does Anne.”

“I know,” Elyoner agreed. “It’s all so precious, this campaign of yours. But you see, my dear, that’s all the more reason you should spend a little time with me. So I can introduce you to the right people.”

“What do you mean?”

“Please have a little patience, dove. Trust Elyoner. Have I ever given you poor advice?”

“I can think of one instance,” Neil said stiffly.

“No,” Elyoner said softly. “I don’t think so. That it didn’t turn out well was no fault of mine. Your tryst with Fastia wasn’t the cause of her death, Sir Neil. She was killed by evil men. Do you think a knight who did not love her could have saved her?”

“I was distracted,” Neil said.

“I don’t believe that. Muriele didn’t, and I’m sure Fastia would never blame you. Nor would she want you to weep overlong. I know you have mourned her, but she is gone, and you yet live. You should—oh, my.”

Neil felt his cheeks burn.

“Sir Neil?”

“Duchess?”

“You’re face is so charmingly transparent. You looked so guilty just now. Who has taken your fancy?”

“No one,” Neil replied quickly.

“Hah. You mean you wish no one had. You mean someone has, but you think it’s wrong, somehow. Guilt is your real lover, sir knight. Name to me one woman you have loved when you did not feel guilty for the affection.”

“Please, Duchess, I don’t wish to discuss this.”

“Perhaps you need more of my herbal concoction.”

Neil gazed desperately ahead, hoping for relief from the conversation. The mansion was so very far from the gates. It hadn’t seemed this far before.

Since finding Anne in Dunmrogh, he had managed to keep his heart silent, but Glenchest was waking it again. He remembered riding here the first time, on a much more carefree outing. He remembered Fastia, weaving him a chain of flowers to wear around his neck. And then later, after much drinking, she had come to his room…

The daughter of my queen, whom I was sworn to protect. A married woman.

She had died in his arms, and he had thought his heart was so shattered that it could never feel again.

Until he met Brinna, who saved his life and sacrificed her dream so he might pursue his duty. He did not love her, not as he had Fastia, but there was something there.

Where was she now? Dead also? Returned to the prison she had fled?

“Poor thing.” Elyoner sighed. “Poor thing. Your heart is made for tragedy, I fear.”

“That is why my one love must be my duty,” he replied, speaking stiffly again.

“And that would be the greatest tragedy of all,” Elyoner replied, “if I thought you could stick to that. But your heart is far too romantic to close all of its portals.”

And finally, too late, they reached the gates of the manse.

Cazio put his hand against the wall to hold it up, belched, and lifted the carafe of wine to his lips, swallowing deeply.

The vintage was unlike any he had ever had: dry and fruity, with an aftertaste like apricots. The duchess had claimed its origin was in a nearby valley, which made it the first Crothanic wine he’d ever tasted.

He glanced up at the moonless sky and raised the carafe.

“Z’Acatto!” he said. “You should have come! We could have argued about this wine. To you, old man!”

Z’Acatto had claimed there was no vintage north of Tero Galle worth drinking, but this one proved him wrong. Whether he was too stubborn to admit that was, of course, the issue. Cazio wondered how his mentor was doing. Surely he was still abed in Dunmrogh, considering his injuries.

He gazed around the garden he’d found. The meal had been excellent and exotic. The northern lands might be a bit barbaric, but the food was definitely interesting, and at the duchess’s there was plenty of it. But after a few glasses of wine, the gabble around him had lost all intelligibility.

The duchess was able to carry on a passable conversation in Vitellian, but though she had flirted with him a bit on the ride, she quite naturally was concentrating on catching up with Anne. He was too tired to try to muddle clumsily through in the king’s tongue, so after the meal he’d gone looking for a bit of solitude, and he had found it here.

Glenchest—such odd names they had in this part of the world—seemed to be more garden than anything else, rather like the grounds of the Mediccio in z’Irbina where he and z’Acatto had once pilfered a bottle of the fabled Echi’dacrumi de Sahto Rosa.

Of course, there hadn’t been frozen rain all over the place in z’Irbina, nor did Vitellian gardens favor evergreen hedges trimmed to resemble stone walls as this one did, but the results were still pleasing. There was even a statue of Lady Fiussa, whose image had also graced the square in his hometown of Avella. It made him feel a bit at home.

He doffed his hat to the nude slip of a saint who stood in the paved center of a small, clover-shaped courtyard and rested on a marble bench to finish his wine. His hands ached with the cold, but the rest of him was surprisingly warm, courtesy not only of the wine but also of the excellent doublet and hose the duchess had given him. The orange leggings were thick and woolen, and the black upper garment was of supple leather lined with fur. Over all that was thrown a wide-sleeved quilted coat, and his feet were snugged in buskins.

He sat in the warm pool of light cast by his lamp and was lifting the carafe again in toast to the duchess’s excellent taste in clothing, when a feminine voice interrupted his reverie.

“Cazio?”

He turned and found Austra regarding him.

Elyoner had given her presents, as well: an indigo gown over which she wore a robe of deep brown fur of some sort Cazio did not recognize, though he thought the hood was trimmed with white mink. Her face seemed ruddy, even for lamplight, probably from the cold.

“Hello, lovely,” he said. “Welcome to my little kingdom.”

Austra didn’t answer for a moment. Cazio wasn’t sure if it was a trick of the light that she seemed to be rocking back and forth on her heels, as if trying to keep balance on something narrow. He kept expecting her to put her arms out to steady herself.

“Do you really think I’m lovely?” she blurted, and Cazio realized that she’d had at least as much wine as he had.

That was something the duchess was good at, apparently: getting people to drink her wine.

“As the light of sunrise, as the petals of the violet,” he answered.

“No,” she said a bit angrily. “None of that. You say that sort of thing to every woman you meet. I want to know what you think of me, just me.”

“I—” he began, but she rushed on.

“I thought I was going to die,” she said. “I’ve never felt so completely alone. And I prayed you would find me, but I feared you were already dead. I saw you fall, Cazio.”

“And I did find you,” Cazio said.

“Yes, you did,” she said. “You did, and it was wonderful. Like that first time you saved me—saved us, back near the coven. You put yourself between us and harm without even asking why. I fell in love with you then. Did you know that?”

“I… No,” he said.

“But then I got to know you better, and I understood that you would have done that for anyone. Yes, you were pursuing Anne, but even if you had known neither of us, you would have done the same thing.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Cazio said.

“I would. You are like an actor on a stage, Cazio, only what you’re acting out is your own life. You contrive your speech and your mannerisms; you pose near constantly. But beneath all that, whether you know it or not, the thing you are pretending to be—you really are. And now that I understand that, I understand that I love you all the more. I also understand you don’t love me.”

Cazio’s belly tightened. “Austra—”

“No, hush. You don’t. You like me. You like kissing me. But you don’t love me. Maybe you love Anne. I’m not sure about that part, but you understand now, don’t you, that you can’t have her?”

She was crying, and Cazio suddenly wanted nothing more than to stop those tears, but he felt strangely paralyzed.

“I know you dallied with me to make her jealous. And knowing you, the fact that Anne is unattainable probably makes her all the more enticing. But I’m here, Cazio, and I love you, and even if you don’t feel the same, I want you, want whatever you can give me.” She pushed the tears away and defiantly took a step closer.

“I’ve nearly died a dozen times in the last year. I’ve been lucky, but things are only going to get worse. I don’t think I’ll see my next birthday, Cazio. I really don’t. And before I die, I want—I want to be with you. Do you understand? I won’t expect marriage, or love, or even flowers, but I want you, now, while there’s still time.”

“Austra, have you really thought about this?”

“They were talking about raping me, Cazio,” Austra said. “You think I want to lose my virginity like that? Am I so ugly that—”

“Stop,” he said, holding up his hand, and she did. Her eyes seemed larger than usual, gentle shadows on her face. “You know better than that.”

“I know better than nothing.”

“Really? You seem to know quite a lot about me,” he said. “What I feel, what I don’t feel. Well, let me tell you, Austra Eleistotara—”

“Laesdautar” she corrected.

“However you pronounce it,” he said. “My point is—”

“What is your point?”

“It—” He stopped, looked at her for a second, and the moment came back to him, just before the slinders attacked them, when he had seen her tied up, and the men who had taken her, saw that it was Austra and not Anne.

He took her by both shoulders and kissed her. Her lips were cold at first and unresponsive, but then they quivered against his, and her arms reached around him, and she sighed as her body butted against him.

“My point,” he said, pulling away after a long, long time, and he was reasonably sure of what he meant to say. “My point is that you do not understand me half so well as you think you do. Because I do love you.”

“Oh,” she said as he pulled her close again. “Oh.”

When the servant closed the door behind her, Anne collapsed onto the bed, listening to the faint wisp of buskins on stone until they vanished.

Dinner had been almost unbearable; it had been an age since she had eaten at a formal table, and though Elyoner’s board was rowdier than most, still she felt the need to sit with her spine straight and attempt to make witty conversation. She’d eschewed the wine that might have helped relax her, because the idea of alcohol still sickened her a bit. The meal had been delicious, judging by the reactions of her companions, but she scarcely had noticed the taste of anything.

Now, finally, she had what she’d wanted for, well, months.

She was alone.

She reached for the foot of the bed, where a wooden lion’s head kept sentinel at the top of the post. She rubbed the glass-smooth crown of it.

“Hello, Lew.” She sighed.

It was all so familiar and so strange at the same time. How many times had she stayed in this room? Once a year, nearly. The first time she remembered she’d been about six, and Austra five. Elseny, Anne’s middle sister, had been eight. It was the first time Fastia, the eldest, had been put in charge of the three girls, and she must have been about thirteen.

Anne could see her now; to her younger eyes, of course, Fastia had seemed all but grown, a woman. Looking at her now, in her cotton shift, she was still just a slip, her breasts the slightest of bumps. Her face already had their mother’s famous beauty, but still in girlish disguise. Her long dark hair was wavy from having been caught up in braids earlier that evening.

“Hello, Lew,” Fastia had said, rubbing the lions head for the first time.

Elseny had giggled. “You’re in love!” she had accused. “You’re in love with Leuhaert!”

Anne could barely remember who Leuhaert was. The son of some greft or duke who’d appeared at court during one Yule season, a handsome boy whose manners were well intended but never quite right.

“Maybe I am,” she said. “And you know what his name means? Lionheart. He’s my lion, and since he’s not here, old Lew here will have to do.”

Anne put her hand on the lion’s head. “Oh, Lew!” she said brightly. “Bring me a prince, too.”

“And me!” Austra giggled, slapping the wood.

They’d made a habit of that for the next ten years, always rubbing Lew’s head, even after Fastia married.

She’d closed her eyes in membrance, but as a hand brushed hers, they flew open and she gasped. A girl stood there, a girl with golden hair.

“Elseny?” Anne asked, drawing her hand back.

It was Elseny, looking the age Anne had last seen her.

“Hello, Lew,” Elseny said, ignoring Anne. “Hello, old fellow. I think Fastia is up to something naughty, but I won’t tell if you won’t. And I’m going to be married. Fancy that!”

Elseny patted the wooden head again and then walked back toward the door. Anne felt her breath rushing in her ears.

“Elseny!” she called, but her sister didn’t answer.

She glanced back up and found Fastia standing there.

“Hello, Lew,” Fastia said, giving the bedpost a brush with a hand that lingered. She looked almost the same as Anne had last seen her except that her face was relaxed, her public mask laid aside. It seemed soft, and sad, and young, not so different from the girl who had given Lew his name.

Anne felt her heart clutch. She’d said such angry things to Fastia the last time they’d spoken. How could she have known they would never speak again?

“What should I do?” Fastia murmured. “I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t…”

Anne suddenly recognized the glazed look in her sister’s eyes. She was drunk. She stood there swaying, and she suddenly teared up. She looked straight at Anne, and for an instant Anne was sure Fastia saw her.

“I’m sorry, Anne,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

Then Fastia closed her eyes and softly began to sing.

She finished her song, and Anne was seeing her through a blur of tears.

“Good-bye, Lew,” Fastia said. As she began to turn, Anne’s silent weeping became sobs. Fastia walked to the tapestry of a knight astride a hippocampus and lifted it. Behind it, she tapped the wall, and a panel slid open.

Fastia paused at the threshold into darkness. “There are many more such hidden places where we are from,” she said. “But that is for later. For now, you must survive this.”

And then came the smell of rotting flesh, and Fastia’s eyes were full of worms, and Anne screamed—

—and sat up screaming, her hand still on the bedpost, just in time to see the tapestry lifting.

7 The Revesturi

The man was so close, Stephen could feel breath on the back of his neck.

“I always thought that was just an expression,” he murmured.

“What’s an expression?” the man asked.

“Gozh dazh, brodar Ehan,” Stephen said.

“Eh, yah, that’s an expression: ‘Good day,’” Ehan replied. “But you know that.”

“May I turn around?”

“Oh, sure,” Ehan said. “I was just trying to scare you.”

“You did a fine job,” Stephen allowed, turning slowly.

He found an almost dwarfish little man with bright red hair beaming up at him, fists on his hips and elbows jutting in a dark green robe. He suddenly thrust one of his hands out, and Stephen flinched slightly, until he saw it was empty.

“Jumpy, aren’t you?” Ehan said as Stephen belatedly took the proffered hand.

“Well, it’s just that you began by calling me a traitor, Brother Ehan.”

“Well, it’s true,” Ehan replied. “There’s some in the Church would consider you a traitor, but I’m not one of em. Nor will you find anyone in d’Ef that thinks that way. Not at the moment, anyway.”

“How did you know I was going to be there?”

“Them below told me they was sending you up,” Ehan said.

“Then you’re allied with slinders?”

Ehan scratched his head. “The wothen? Yah, I reckon.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, I’m not to explain it to you,” Ehan replied, “for fear I’ll get it wrong. I’m just here to take you to the fellow who will explain it to you, and to assure you that you’re among friends—or at least not among enemies. No allies of the praifec here.”

“So you know about that?” Stephen said.

“Oh, sure,” Ehan replied. “Look, do you mind if we start walking? We’re likely to miss the praicersnu if we don’t hurry.”

Stephen took a deep breath. He and Ehan had been friends, or at least he once thought they were. They had helped each other against Desmond Spendlove and the other corrupt monks of the monastery d’Ef. But Stephen had since undertaken a series of studies whose lesson was essentially that no one was what he seemed, especially in the Church.

Ehan had never given Stephen any reason to distrust him. He could as easily have stabbed him in the back as said hello.

But maybe what he wanted was subtler than murder.

“Let’s go, then,” Stephen said.

“This way.”

Ehan motioned him along a trail that switched back through forest fringe and pasture, down across a little stream bridged by a log, out through the vast apple orchard, and up the next hill toward the sprawling monastery. Despite his bad memories of the place, he had to admit it was still a beautiful building. The high-steepled nave thrust up a double-arched clock tower of rose granite to catch the morning sun like pale fire, a prayer made architecture.

“What’s happened since I’ve been gone?” Stephen asked as they climbed the last, steepest part of the approach.

“Ah, well, I reckon I can tell you some of it. After you saved the holter from Brother Desmond and his bunch, they went out after you. We learned later how that turned out, of course. In the meantime, we got word that the praifec had sent a new fratrex to carry on here at the monastery. Now, we knew Desmond was mean, but we didn’t know he was working for the Hierovasi.”

“Hierovasi?”

“I—right, supposed to let him explain. Don’t worry about that just yet. The bad fellows, let’s say. In fact, like you, most of us didn’t even know about the Hierovasi until recently. But we did manage to work out that Hespero was one of em, which meant the fratrex he was sending would most likely be one, as well.

“He was, and we had a bit of a fight. We would have lost, but we had some allies.”

“The slinders?”

“The dreothen, and yah, the wothen through them. You don’t approve?”

“They eat people,” Stephen pointed out.

Ehan chuckled. “Yah, that’s a mark against ‘em. But in this case they ate the right people, so we weren’t complaining that much.

“Since then, our own numbers have grown as the word had gotten around. We’ve been attacked a few more times by the Hierovasi, but they’ve got other things on their table at the moment—the resacaratum, for instance.”

“I heard something about that in Dunmrogh, mostly rumors.”

“If only it were just rumors. But it’s not; it’s torture, burning, hanging, drowning, and all the rest. Anyone they don’t like, anyone they think might be dangerous—”

“By they, you mean these Hierovasi?”

“Yah, but it’s them that controls what most people think of as the Church, you understand.”

“No,” Stephen said. “I didn’t know any of this.”

But he felt a sudden spark of hope. Ehan was suggesting it was only a faction in the Church that was bad, albeit the most powerful faction. That meant there was a chance, after all, that he might find a side worth fighting on.

“Well, too few do,” Ehan replied. “Know about it, that is. Anyhow, that’s what we’ve been up to.”

“Wait. These ‘Hierovasi’—they control the Caillo Vaillamo in z’Irbina?”

“I should say so. Fratrex Prismo is one of em.”

“Niro Lucio?”

“Ah, no.” Ehan shook his head as they passed the high-arched doors of the front entrance and moved toward the yard of the sprawling west wing. “Lucio died of a peculiar and unexpected stomach disorder, if you catch my meaning. It’s Niro Fabulo now.”

“So d’Ef is no longer obedient to the holy of holies?”

“Nope.”

“Then who is in charge here?”

“Why, the fratrex is,” Ehan said.

“Fratrex Pell? But I saw him die.”

“No,” a familiar voice averred. “No, Brother Stephen, you saw me dying. You did not see me die.” Stephen’s gaze leapt directly to the source of the words.

Fratrex Pell, the highest authority at d’Ef, was the first brother of that monastery whom Stephen had met. The fratrex had been posing as an old man, trying to lift a burden of firewood. Stephen had carried the burden, but he’d taken the opportunity to try to impress this person he’d imagined to be a simpleton. In fact, looking back on things, it was a bit painful to remember the condescension with which he had treated the fellow.

But the fratrex had been the one having sport with him, and the fratrex soon had revealed Stephen’s foolishness.

He was there, now, seated at a wooden table in a rather peculiar-looking armchair, his violet eyes twinkling beneath bushy gray brows. He wore a simple umber robe with the hood thrown back.

“Fratrex,” Stephen breathed. “I don’t—I believed you dead. What I saw, and then the praifec’s investigations—”

“Yes,” the fratrex drawled casually. “Think carefully about that last one, won’t you?”

“Oh,” Stephen said. “Then you pretended to be dead to avoid the praifec.”

“You always were a quick one, Brother Stephen,” the fratrex said drily. “Though it very nearly wasn’t a pretense. Once Desmond Spendlove showed his true colors, I knew who he was working for. I wouldn’t have guessed it, either. I trusted Hespero—I thought he was one of us. But everyone makes mistakes.”

“Still,” Stephen said. “When you saved my life, you were stabbed, and then the wall collapsed.”

“I wasn’t exactly left unscathed,” Pell said.

That was when the details snapped into place: how sharp and thin the brother’s legs were as they pushed through his robes, how his upper body moved strangely.

And the chair, of course, was wheeled.

“I’m sorry,” Stephen said.

“Well, consider the alternative. And as I understand it, this is a particularly unpleasant time to be dead.”

“But you were helping me.”

“That is true,” the fratrex allowed, “though I did it from more than personal regard. We need you, Brother Stephen. We need you alive. In fact, more than we need me, ultimately.”

Somehow Stephen didn’t like the sound of that.

“You keep referring to ‘we,’” Stephen said. “I have a feeling you don’t mean the Order of Saint Decmanus. Or the Church itself, for that matter, given what Brother Ehan has let on.”

Fratrex Pell smiled indulgently. “Brother Ehan,” he said. “I wonder if you would bring us some of the green cider. And maybe some of that bread I smell baking.”

“It would be my honor, fratrex,” he said, and scurried off.

“Can I help?” Stephen asked.

“No, stay, have a seat. We have a lot to talk about, and I’m not of a mind to delay. Time has gotten too short to be mysterious. Just give me a moment to collect my thoughts. They seem rather scattered lately.”

Ehan brought the cider, a round of roglaef that smelled like black walnuts, and a hard white cheese. The fratrex took a little of each, bending with some difficulty; his right arm seemed particularly impaired.

The cider was cold, strong, and still a bit bubbly. The bread was warm and comforting, and the cheese sharp, with an aftertaste that reminded Stephen of oak.

The fratrex sat back, clumsily gripping a goblet of cider.

“How did our ancestors defeat the Skasloi, Brother Stephen?” the fratrex asked, sipping his cider.

That seemed an odd digression, but Stephen obliged.

“The Virgenyan captives started a revolt,” he answered.

“Yes, of course,” the fratrex said rather impatiently. “But even from our sparse records we know that there had been other revolts before that. How did the slaves led by Virgenya Dare succeed where the others failed?”

“The saints,” Stephen said. “The saints were on the side of the slaves.”

“Again,” the fratrex asked, “why then and not before?”

“Because those who rose before had not been sufficiently devout,” Stephen replied.

“Ah. Was that the answer you learned in the college at Ralegh?” the fratrex asked.

“Is there another?”

Fratrex Pell smiled benevolently. “Given what you’ve learned since leaving the college, what do you think?”

Stephen sighed and nodded. He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples, trying to think.

“I’ve never read anything that said it, but it seems obvious that Virgenya Dare and her followers walked faneways. Their powers, their weapons…”

“Yes,” the fratrex said. “But what’s beyond the obvious? The Skasloi had magery, as well—powerful magery. Did it come from the saints?”

“No,” Stephen replied. “Of course not.”

“You’re certain?”

“The Skasloi worshipped the elder gods, whom the saints defeated,” Stephen said. He brightened. “I suppose the saints didn’t help any of the earlier uprisings because they hadn’t yet defeated the elder gods.”

Fratrex Pell’s mouth widened a little farther. “Hasn’t it ever struck you as a little neat, a bit too tidy, that the elder gods and the Skasloi were defeated at the same time?”

“I suppose it just makes sense.”

“It might make even more sense if the Skasloi and the elder gods were one and the same,” the fratrex said.

Stephen gave that a moment, then nodded slowly.

“It’s not impossible,” he agreed. “I’ve never thought about it before because it’s sacrilege, and I still have a habit of avoiding that when I can, but it’s possible. The Skasloi had magicks that—” He frowned. “You aren’t saying that the Skasloi got their power from the saints?”

“No, you lumphead. I’m suggesting that neither the elder gods nor the saints are real.”

Stephen suddenly wondered if the fratrex might have gone mad. Pain, coma, loss of blood and air to the lungs, the shock of being crippled…

He called back his fleeing wits. “But the—I’ve walked the faneways myself. I’ve felt the power of the saints.”

“No,” the fratrex said more gently, “you’ve felt power. And that is the only thing you or I know is real. The rest of it—where the power comes from, why it affects us as it does, how it differs from the power the Skasloi wielded—we know none of that.”

“Again, when you say ‘we’—”

“The Revesturi,” Fratrex Pell said.

“Revesturi?” Stephen said. “I remember reading about them. A heretical movement within the Church, discredited a thousand years ago.”

“Eleven hundred years ago,” the fratrex corrected. “During the Sacaratum.”

“Right. It was one of many heresies.”

The fratrex shook his head. “It was more than that. History is often less about the past than it is about the present; history must be convenient to those who have power when it’s being told.

“I’ll tell you something about the Sacaratum I doubt very much you know. It was more than a holy war, more than a wave of conversion and consecration. At its very root it was a civil war, Brother Stephen. Two factions, equally powerful, fought for the soul of the Church: the Revesturi and the Hierovasi. The beginning of the argument was academic; the end of it was not. There are pits full of Revesturi bones.”

“A civil war within the Church?” Stephen said. “Surely I would have heard something about that.”

“There have been two such conflicts, actually,” the fratrex continued. “In the first Church, the most high was always a woman, following the example of Virgenya Dare. The first Fratrex Prismo wrested his place by violence, and women were split from the hierarchy and thrust into their own temporally powerless and carefully controlled covens.”

Again, the shift in perspective that changed the whole world. Why wasn’t there a word for that? Stephen wondered.

“Then is all—is everything I know a lie?” he asked.

“No,” the fratrex said. “It’s history. The question you have to ask about any version of history is, Who benefits from that version? Over the course of a thousand years—or two thousand—the interests of the powerful change often, and thus, so do the stories that hold up their thrones.”

“Then shouldn’t I be asking who benefits from your version of events?” Stephen asked, feeling a bit sharp but not caring.

“Absolutely,” the fratrex said. “But remember, there are absolute truths, things that actually happened. Genuine facts, actual bodies in the ground. Just because you’ve accepted some distortions, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing real in the world; it merely requires that you use some method to discover truth, wrestle it out of things.”

“I’ve never been so naive as to believe every opinion I hear,” Stephen said. “There are always debates within the Church, and I’ve been among those who argued them. It isn’t merely a matter of hearing and believing but of understanding how each proposition fits with the whole. And if I’m told that something doesn’t jibe with what I know, then I question it.”

“But don’t you see? That’s just using one questionable source—or, worse, a body of them—to evaluate another. I asked you about the revolt against the Skasloi, the central fact of our history, and what did you have of substance to tell me? What sources could you refer me to? How do you know that what you’ve been told is true other than that it confirms other things you’ve been told? And what about the events of the last year? You know they happened; you witnessed some of them. Can you fit those things into what you’ve been taught?”

“The original sources from the time of the revolt have been lost,” Stephen said, trying to wave aside the larger issue with the smaller one. “We trust the sources we have because that’s all we have.”

“I see. So if you lock three people in a room with a knife and a bag of gold, and when you open the door again, two of them are dead, do you accept the witness of the third merely because his is the only testimony available?”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“It’s exactly the same thing.”

“Not when the testimony is inspired by the saints.”

“And if there are no saints?”

“Now we come full circle,” Stephen said, becoming weary. “And you still leave me with the choice of supporting a faction that tortures and sacrifices children or one that cooperates with cannibals. Are you telling me there is no middle ground between the Hierovasi and the Revesturi?”

“Yes, of course there is. There’s the largest faction of all: the ignorant.”

“Which means me.”

“Yes, until now. But you would have been approached, eventually, by one or both of the factions.”

“First you tell me all the Revesturi were slaughtered in a civil war I’ve never heard of, and now you tell me they are a powerful cabal operating in the modern Church. Well, which is it?”

“Both, of course. Most of us were slain or banished during the Sacaratum. But while you can slay men and women, it is much more difficult to slay an idea, Brother Stephen.”

“And what idea is that?” Stephen countered.

“Do you understand that name, Revesturi?”

“I presume it comes from the verb revestum, ‘to inspect.’”

“Just so. Our very simple belief is that our history, our notions, the very world around us are properly subject to our own observation. All accounts must be considered and weighed; all facts must be included in any debate.”

“That’s a rather vague mandate to die for.”

“Not when you consider the particular debates it inspires,” the fratrex said. “To debate, for instance, whether there are actually saints isn’t acceptable, is it?”

“Was that the debate that led to the civil war?”

“Not exactly. The simple fact is that that particular debate was so well suppressed that we actually don’t know what it was about. But we do know the cause of it.”

“And what might that be?”

“The journal of Virgenya Dare.”

For several seconds Stephen couldn’t think of anything to say at all. Virgenya Dare, the liberator, the savior of the human race, the woman who discovered the sedoi, the faneways, the paths to the saints. Her journal.

He shook his head and tried to focus on the moment.

“It would have been written in Old Virgenyan,” he murmured. “Or perhaps elder Cavari. Hex journal?”

The fratrex smiled.

Stephen rubbed his chin. “Then they actually had it,” he mused in wonder, “her journal, as recently as the Sacaratum? Incredible. And yet they made no copies—oh. There’s something in the journal, something the Hierovasi didn’t like. Is that what you’re going to tell me?”

“Indeed,” Fratrex Pell confirmed. “Actually, there were several copies. All were destroyed. The original, however, was not.”

“What? It still exists?”

“Indeed it does. One of our order fled with it and secreted it in a safe place. Unfortunately, the record of exactly where it was hidden was lost. That’s a shame, because I believe the only thing that can save us—save the world—is what is contained in that journal.”

“Wait. What? How does that follow?”

“Dreodh explained the doctrine of the wothen to you?”

“You mean their belief that the world itself has become ill?”

“Yes.”

“He did.”

“Did it make any sense to you?”

Stephen nodded reluctantly. “Somewhat. The forest, at least, seems to be dying. The monsters that now stalk the earth seem almost incarnations of sickness and death.”

“Exactly. And you will not be surprised, I think, when I tell you that this has happened before, that such beasts have existed before.”

“Legend suggests it. But…”

The fratrex raised a quieting hand. “There are no copies of Virgenya Dare’s journal, but there are a very few, very sacred scrifti that reference it. I will show you those, of course, but let me summarize them now. This sickness comes to the world periodically. If it is not stopped, it will destroy all life. Virgenya Dare found a way to halt it once, but how she did so we do not know. If the secret exists anywhere, it will be in her journal.”

“According to your own doctrine, however, lacking the journal, this story is just so much noise.”

“Lacking the journal, yes,” the fratrex said. “But we haven’t been completely complacent. We have unearthed two clues as to its whereabouts; one is a very old reference to a mountain named Vhelnoryganuz, which we believe to be somewhere in the Bairghs. The other is this.”

From his lap the fratrex produced a slender cedar box and pushed it toward Stephen. He reached for it gingerly and lifted off the top. Inside was a worn roll of lead foil.

“We can’t read it,” the fratrex said. “We’re hoping you can.”

“Why?”

“Because we need you to find the journal of Virgenya Dare,” the fratrex said. “I repeat: Without it, I fear we are all of us doomed.”

8 A Change of Scene

Leoff woke to a faint rasping at his door.

He did not move but instead opened his eyes a slit, trying to think his way through the mind-mist that had followed him back from sleep.

His jailors never took so long at the door. They put their keys in, the keys turned, the door opened. And he had come to recognize the sound of a key in the lock. No, this was higher in pitch, a smaller piece of metal.

Before he could decide exactly what that meant, the scratching stopped, the door swung open, and in the low-guttering light of his oil lamp, he saw a shadow pass through it.

Leoff couldn’t think of any reason to continue with the pretense that he was asleep. Instead, he swung his legs down from the bed and placed his feet on the floor.

“Have you come to kill me?” he asked the shadow softly It really was a shadow, or at least something his eye had difficulty penetrating. It resisted even being categorized as a particular shape. More than anything, it felt like the blind spot in the corner of his eye—except that this spot stood directly in front of him.

As he continued to stare, the umbra softened somehow, gaining definition, and figured into a human form clad in loose black breeches and a jerkin. Gloved hands reached up and brought down the hood.

Reality, Leoff had discovered, was the sum of a series of more or less consistent self-deceptions. His had been shattered by torture, privation, and loss, and he hadn’t had time to deceive himself again.

Consequently, he wouldn’t have been surprised if the face revealed had been the chimera mask of the queen of the phay, the pitying features of Saint Anemlen, or the fanged visage of an ogre come to devour him. The moment seemed absolutely pregnant with the impossible.

That the dropped cowl revealed the face of a young woman with sky-jewel eyes was thus unexpected but not surprising.

It did shift his perspective, however. She was slight and shorter than Leoff by more than a head. Her chestnut hair was pulled back, the line of her jaw soft. He doubted if she was yet twenty years old. She also looked familiar; he was certain he had seen her at court.

“I haven’t come to kill you,” she said. “In the name of Queen Muriele, I’ve come to set you free.”

“To free me,” he said slowly. Suddenly her face refocused, as if seen at twenty kingsyards, just next to the face of Muriele, the queen. That was where he had seen her; at the performance of his singspell.

“How did you do that? Make yourself invisible?”

“I am saint-blessed,” she replied. “It’s a coven secret. That’s all I can tell you. Now, if you’ll just follow me—”

“Wait,” Leoff said. “How did you get in here?”

“With great difficulty and at considerable risk to myself,” she said. “Now please, stop asking questions.”

“But who are you?”

“My name is Alis, Alis Berrye, and I have the queen’s confidence. She sent me. You understand? Now, please…”

“Lady Berrye, I am Leovigild Ackenzal. How is the queen?”

Alis blinked in what seemed to be incomprehension.

“She is passing well,” she said, “for the moment.”

“Why did she send you to free me?”

“That explanation would be lengthy, and we do not have much time. So please—”

“Humor me, my lady.”

She sighed. “Very well. In brief, the queen is imprisoned in the Wolfcoat Tower. She has learned of your imprisonment, and also of the great affection in which the people of this city and Newland hold you. She believes that if you are free, it may improve her situation.”

“How?”

“She believes the usurper might be overthrown.”

“Really. All because of me. How very strange. And how did you get in here?”

“There are ways, secret ways that my—” She stopped, then started again. “That I know of. You will have to trust me. Trust also that if we do not move very soon, we will not leave this place alive.”

Leoff nodded and closed his eyes. He thought about blue skies and warm winds from the south, the touch of rain on his face.

“I can’t go.” He sighed.

“What?”

“There are others held captive here: Mery Gramme and Areana Wistbirm. If I escape, they will suffer, and I can’t have that. Free them, and prove to me they are free, and I will go with you.”

“I don’t know where the Gramme girl is being held. The young Wistbirm woman is beyond my reach, I fear, else I would certainly liberate her as well.”

“Then I cannot go with you,” Leoff said.

“Listen to me, Cavaor Ackenzal,” Alis said urgently. “You need to understand your worth. There are people who will die—and see others die—to free you. What you did at Broogh is not forgotten, but your music at the Candlegrove unleashed a spirit that has not diminished. In fact, it has only continued to grow.

“Songs from your lustspell are sung throughout the country. The people are ready to come for the villain, the usurper, but they fear what he would do to you. If you were free, nothing would encumber them.” Her voice dropped lower. “They say that a proper heir has returned to the kingdom: Princess Anne, daughter of William and Muriele. They will put her on the throne, but they fight for you. You are the most important man in the kingdom, Cavaor.”

Leoff laughed at that. He couldn’t help it; it seemed too ridiculous.

“I won’t go with you,” he said. “Not until Mery and Areana are safe.”

“No, no, no, no, no,” Alis said. “Do you understand what I went through to reach you? It was nearly impossible—a miracle sufficient to qualify me for sainthood. Now you say that you won’t go?

“Do not do this to me. Do not fail your queen.”

“If you can work one miracle, then you can work another. Free Mery. Free Areana. Than I will happily go with you—so long as you have proof they are safe and well.”

“Think, at least, of your music,” Alis urged. “I told you your songs were famous. Did I also tell you that performing them is considered shinecraft? An attempt was made to do the entire play in the town of Wistbirm. The stage was put to the torch by the praifec’s guards. But the performance was already a failure, because the subtler harmonies of your work eluded even the most gifted minstrel. If you were free, you could write it again, correct their performances.”

“And doom more unfortunates to my fate?” he asked, lifting his useless hands.

“That’s very odd,” Alis said, seeming to notice his traction for the first time. She shook her head as if to clear it. “Look, it’s a doom they choose.”

Leoff felt himself suddenly balanced very precariously. The woman—and why a woman? The woman’s story was implausible at best.

Most likely this was Robert, having another go at him. So far he hadn’t done anything that would make matters worse; Robert knew that Leoff would never lift a finger for him unless Mery and Areana were in danger.

And if Alis was honest, his decision to stay was still consistent.

But here was a problem. What he might reveal here could give something to Robert that the usurper didn’t already have, something that appeared to be of great value.

Yet the risk might be worth it. It probably was.

“In the Candlegrove,” he said, breaking the silence.

“What in the Candlegrove?”

“Beneath the stage, on the far right, there is a space above the support. I knew they would burn my music, and I knew they would search my apartments for copies. But I hid one there; Robert’s men might have missed it.”

Alis frowned. “I’ll find it if I get out. But I’d rather have you.”

“You know my conditions,” he said.

Alis hesitated. “It was an honor to meet you,” she said. “I hope to meet you again.”

“That would be nice,” Leoff replied.

Alis sighed and closed her eyes. She drew the hood down. He thought she might have murmured something, and then she was again an absence, a shadow.

The door opened and then closed. He heard the lock being worked clumsily, then nothing for a long time.

Eventually he went back to sleep.

When the door rattled open the next day, it was in the usual way. Leoff had no way of knowing what time it really was, but he had been awake long enough that he reckoned it midday, in his sunless world.

Two men entered. Both wore black tabards over breastplates that had been enameled black, and each had a broadsword slung at his hip. They didn’t resemble any of dungeon wards Leoff had seen before, but they did look a great deal like Robert’s personal guard.

“Hold still,” one of them said.

Leoff didn’t answer as one of them produced a dark cloth and wrapped it around his temples and eyes, tightening it until he couldn’t see. Then they lifted him to his feet. Leoff’s skin felt like cold wax as they began walking him down the corridor. He tried to concentrate on distance and direction, as Mery had, counting twelve steps up, then twenty-three strides through a corridor, twenty-eight up a passageway so narrow that occasionally both shoulders brushed the walls at the same time. After that it was as if they suddenly had stepped into the sky; Leoff felt space expand away from him, and currents of moving air. The reports of their footsteps stopped reverberating, and he guessed that they were outside.

Next they led him to a carriage and hoisted him up, and he felt a certain despair creep up on him. He kept suppressing the urge to ask where they were going, because obviously they had covered his eyes so he would not find out.

The carriage began rolling, first on stone, then on gravel. Leoff began to wonder suddenly if he hadn’t been kidnapped by allies of the woman who had come to “rescue” him the day before. Adopting the livery of Robert’s guard could be accomplished easily enough. His heart sank further as he began to contemplate what would happen when Robert discovered that he was missing.

It must have been dark when they’d left, but now light began to filter through the cloth. It grew colder, as well, and the air ripened with the scent of salt.

After an interminable period, the carriage ground to a halt. He was cold and very stiff now. He felt as if steel screws had been tightening into his kneecaps, in his elbows, and along his spine. His hands ached terribly.

They tried to carry him, but he fought to keep his feet on the ground, to count the steps on gravel, then stone, then wood, then stone again, and finally steps. He cringed as heat suddenly billowed against him, and the blindfold was removed.

He blinked in a cloud of smoke issued by a huge fire blazing in an extraordinarily large fireplace. A spitted side of venison sizzled merrily above it, filling the air with the scent of charred meat.

The room was round, perhaps fifteen kingsyards in diameter, and the walls were draped in tapestries whose subjects were not immediately obvious to him but that glowed in the firelight: umber, gold, rust, and forest green. A gigantic carpet covered the floor.

Two girls had just swung a huge wooden beam away from the fire. There was an iron kettle suspended on it from which they poured steaming water into a bathing basin that had been sunk into the floor.

A few yards away Robert, the usurper, reclined in an armchair, looking comfortable in a floral black-and-gold dressing robe.

“Ah,” Robert said. “My composer. Your bath is just prepared.”

Leoff glanced around. Besides Robert and the serving girls, there were the men who had fetched Leoff, two more similarly dressed soldiers, a Sefry on a stool plucking a large Safnian-style theorbo, a prim youngish fellow in red robes and a black cap, and finally, the physician who had been tending Leoff in the dungeon.

“No, thank you, Majesty,” Leoff managed.

“No,” Robert said, “I altogether insist. It’s not just for your convenience, you know. We all have noses.”

A general murmur of laughter followed that, but the joviality did nothing to relax Leoff; after all, these were Robert’s friends, who might be even more amused by, say, the evisceration of a small child.

He signed, and the soldiers began stripping off his clothes. His ears burned, for the serving girls were of age, and he found it extremely inappropriate that they should have to look upon him. They seemed not to notice, however. He might just as well have been another object of furniture. Still, he felt exposed and uncomfortable.

He felt better in the water, though. R was so hot that it stung, but once he was immersed in it, he no longer felt naked, and the heat of it began to settle pleasantly toward his bones, ameliorating the aches that the cold had insinuated into them.

“There,” the usurper said. “Isn’t that better?”

Leoff had to reluctantly admit that it was. It was better yet when one of the girls brought him a cup of mulled mead and the other cut a great dripping slice of the venison and fed it to him in small bites.

“Now that you are settled,” Robert said, “I would like you to meet our host, Lord Respell. He has graciously agreed to be your guardian while you work on the compositions I have requested of you, to offer whatever aid you might require, and to see to your comfort.”

“That’s very kind,” Leoff said, “but I thought I was to work in my old room.”

“That dank place? No, it has proved inconvenient in a number of ways.” At that, his gaze became a bit more hawklike. “You did not, by chance, have a visitor yesterday?” he asked.

Ah, Leoff thought. Here it is. It was a ruse, and this is my reward for not falling into the trap.

“No, Majesty,” he said just to see what result that would get.

It wasn’t what he expected. Robert frowned and placed his arms on the rests of the chair.

“The dungeons are not as secure as my predecessors believed,” he said. “They were invaded yesterday by a sneak, thief. The thief was caught, questioned, and garroted, but where one can come, others may follow.

“There are secret passageways, you see, that riddle the stone below Eslen castle, and many come—naturally, I suppose—through the dungeons. I have begun having them filled in.”

“Is that true, Sire?” Lord Respell asked, sounding surprised. “Hidden passageways into the castle?”

“Yes, Respell,” Robert said, waving him off impatiently. “I’ve told you before.”

“Have you?”

“Yes. Composer, are you still with me?”

Leoff shook his head. Had he dozed off? He felt as if he had missed something.

“I-I’ve forgotten what you were saying,” Leoff said.

“Of course. And you will forget again, I suppose, like Respell here.”

“Forget what, Sire?” Respell asked.

Robert sighed and put a hand to his forehead.

“The secret passages in the dungeons. There are too many to locate and obstruct. Well, I needn’t go into detail. In sum, Cavaor Leoff, I feel you will be more comfortable here, and safe from any further… incursions. Isn’t that so, Lord Respell?”

The young man shook off his look of puzzlement and nodded. “Many have tried to invade this keep,” he said proudly. “None has ever succeeded. You shall be quite safe here.”

“And my friends?” Leoff asked.

“Well, that was to be a surprise,” Robert replied. He motioned to the girls, who vanished for a moment, then returned with Mery Gramme and Areana Wistbirm.

Leoff’s first reaction at seeing the two was one of pure joy, followed rapidly by mortification. Areana was a lovely lady, seventeen years in age, and it was hardly meet that she should see him in this situation.

Or in this shape. He was peculiarly aware of his hands and their terrible traction. He lowered them deeper beneath the water.

“Leoff!” Areana gasped, rushing forward to kneel by the tub. “Mery said she had seen you, but—”

“You are well, Areana?” he asked stiffly. “They have not harmed you?”

Areana looked up at Robert, and her face clouded. “I have been privated and locked in conditions most unpleasant,” she said, “but no real harm has come to me.” Her eyes suddenly filled with dismay. “Mery said your hands—”

“Areana,” Leoff whispered desperately. “I am uncomfortable with this. They did not tell me you would be here.”

“It’s because he’s naked,” Mery put in helpfully. “Mother says men aren’t used to being naked and do not take to it very well. She says they aren’t very smart without their clothes on.”

“Oh,” Areana said. “Of course.” Again she glanced up at Robert. “Pay no mind,” she said to Leoff. “He thinks by putting us in foolish situations he will make us smaller and weaken us.”

“I knew by your singing you had quite the tongue, my lady,” Robert said. “Cavaor Leovigild, I compliment you on your choice of vocalists.”

Robert’s voice sounded odder than usual now. Leoff had noticed its strangeness the first time he heard it. It was as if it strained to produce the notes natural to human speech, and yet there were very unnatural—even chilling—undertones the like of which his ear had never before experienced. He thought sometimes he heard whole other sentences in what the man said, not separate from his obvious speech but side by side with it, like a line of counterpoint.

At the moment it seemed to him that Robert was threatening to cut out Areana’s tongue.

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” he said, trying to sound cooperative. “I think you will be very pleased with the part I have written her for my new work.”

“Yes, your new—what shall we call it? It isn’t a lustpell, not really, is it? Nor is it a simple theatrical play. We need a name for it, I think. Do you have one?”

“Not yet, Majesty.”

“Well, think on it. And so shall I. Perhaps that will be my contribution to this enterprise, discovering a name for it.”

“What is he talking about, Leoff ?” Areana asked.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Robert answered. “Cavaor Leoff has agreed to write us another of his singing plays. I was so taken with the last, I just had to have another.” He switched his regard to Leoff. “Tell me, have you found a subject?”

“I believe I have, Majesty.”

“You can’t be serious,” Areana said, stepping back a bit. “That would betray everything you’ve done. Everything we’ve done.”

“We are all very serious here,” Robert said. “Now, tell us, my friend.”

Hardening himself to Areana’s distress, Leoff cleared his throat. “You are familiar with the story of Maersca?” he asked.

Robert thought for a moment. “I am perhaps not so familiar with it.”

No, the counterpoint said, and you had better not be trying to make me seem ignorant.

“Neither was I, until I read the books you gave me,” he said quickly. “It happened, as I understand it, in Newland, long ago—before that region was actually named Newland, when the first canals were being built and the poelen drained.”

“Ah,” Robert exclaimed. “A subject near to the hearts of the land-waerden, I shouldn’t doubt. Isn’t it so, Areana?”

“It is a popular story among us,” Areana agreed stiffly. “I don’t find it surprising, then, that you do not know it,”

Robert shrugged diffidently. “Neither did your friend Leoff. He just said so.”

“But he didn’t grow up in the heart of Newland,” Areana retorted. “Your Majesty did.”

“Yes,” Robert said a bit crossly, “and I did what I could for your kind, even fathering the occasional child to lighten your thick blood. Now please, young lady, tell us the story.”

Areana glanced at Leoff, who nodded. He was starting to feel rather wrinkled but had no intention of asking to get out while the girls were still present.

“It happened when they were building the great northern canal,” she said. “They did not know it, but when they diverted the channel of the river, they destroyed a kingdom, a kingdom of the Saethiod.”

“Saethiod? A kingdom of Meremen? How delightful.”

“Only one survived. Maersca, the daughter of the king, the granddaughter of Saint Lir. She swore vengeance, and so she put on human form to wreak it. When the canal was done, she went to the great sluice with the intention of flooding the newly drained land. But she saw Brandel Aethelson on the birm. She spoke to him, feigning womanly interest, asking how it was that the water was held back and how it might be loosed. She was clever, and he did not suspect her designs. In fact, he began to fall in love with her.

“Thinking that she could do more damage if she learned more, Maersca pretended to love him, as well, and soon they were married. She hid her sea-skin in a coffer in the roof beams of the house, and she gave him this condition: that each year on the day of Saint Lir she must bathe alone, and he could not watch her.”

“And so for months she nursed her vengeance, and the months became years, and in that time a boy was born to them, and then a girl, and after a fashion she began to love her husband and to love Newland, and her thirst for vengeance faded.”

“Oh, dear,” Robert said.

“But the husbands friends chided him,” Areana continued. “ ‘Where does your wife go on the day of Saint Lir?’ They filled his head with the notion that she had a secret lover and that his own children were not indeed his. And so, over the years he became uncertain, and finally, one Saint Lirsdagh, he followed her. She went to the birm and cast off her clothes, then slipped on her fish skin, and he saw her for what she was—and she knew it.”

“ ‘You’ve broken your vow,’ she said. “ ‘Now I must return to the waters. And if ever I come out into the air again, I shall die, for this changing can only happen once.’

“In despair, he begged her not to go, but go she did, leaving him with her children and his tears.

“Many years passed, and he searched for her in all the rivers and canals he knew. Once or twice he thought he heard her song. He became old, and his children grew up and married.

“Then the army of the Skellander swept down from the North Country, putting all before them to the torch, and next was Newland. The people gathered on the birmsteads and prepared to loose the waters and flood their country, for that was their only protection against the invader. But the capstone would not break; it had been built too well.

“And now the army was near.

“It was then the old man saw his wife again, as lovely as the day they’d met. She emerged from the waters, put her hand on the capstone, and it broke in half, and waters swept the invading army away. But the damage was done, for Maersca had been forced to take off her skin to leave the water, and in so doing took the curse of her ancestors on herself. She died in the old man’s arms. And he died shortly after.”

Her eyes cut over to Robert. “Their children were among the first of the landwaerden. Many of us claim our descent from Maersca.”

Robert scratched his head and looked perplexed.

“This is a complicated story,” he said. “I wonder if you might not be planning to hide some unflattering commentary about me in it, as you did before.”

“I will not,” Leoff promised. “I intend only to use a story beloved of the landwaerden, as I did the last time. It was a king of Eslen who rewarded the children of Maersca with their positions. He was the youngest son of the king before, and it is said he worked with the people on the dikes when he was young. In him, we could suggest you: a monarch whose heart lies with Newland and its guardians.”

“And who is the villain of the piece?”

“Ah,” Leoff said. “The Skellander was led into Newland by none other than the daughter of the old king, the sister of Thiodric, a shinecrafter most foul who poisoned her father and slew all her brothers save the youngest, who—as we shall see—was saved from drowning by none other than Maersca.”

“And you could make this sister a redhead,” Robert mused. “Very well, I like this.

“As I told you before, I’ve no doubt that you are clever enough to somehow betray me, even if I were to assign you a story. So know this: If you disgrace me further, I will hardly have anything to lose, and I will cut the throats of these young ladies myself, in your presence.

“Indeed, let me be even more candid. Even if your work appears to have been composed in good faith, if your play fails to turn the landwaerden back to favoring me, their fate will be the one I’ve just described.” He patted Leoff on the back.

“Enjoy your stay here. I think you will find it more than comfortable.”

9 The Woorm

A spar’s fingers felt as papery as birch bark as he set an arrow to the string.

Fend, who had killed his first love. Fend, who had tried to do the same to Winna.

Fend, who now rode the back of a monstrous woorm.

He measured the distance down the shaft. It seemed enormous, the arrow, and he was aware of every detail of it: the hawk-feather fletching wound on with waxed red thread, the almost imperceptible curve in the wood that had to be corrected for, a dull glint of sun from the slightly rusted iron head, the smell of the oil from the sheath.

The air ebbed and flowed around him, and dead leaves, like the signal flags of an army, showed him the way to Fends flesh and blood and bone.

Yet he couldn’t quite feel it. At this range, from this angle, it was an uncertain shot. And even if the shaft flew true, there was the improbable but terribly possible presence of the woorm. No arrow—or any number of arrows—could slay that thing.

But no, that wasn’t entirely true. There was the black arrow of the Church given him by Praifec Hespero, the one he had used to slay the utin. It was supposed to be able to kill even the Briar King; it ought to be able to slay a woorm.

Not that he knew the slightest thing about woorms.

Winna was trembling, but she didn’t say anything. The woorm and Fend both dropped their heads, and the creature began moving again. Aspar relaxed a little, rolling completely out of sight, and held Winna tightly until the sound of the thing’s passage had faded.

“Oh, saints,” Winna finally breathed.

“Yah,” Aspar agreed.

“Just when I think I’ve seen every nightbale from all the kinder-spells.” She shuddered.

“How do you feel?” he asked. Her skin felt clammy.

“Like I’ve been alvshot,” she said. “A little feverish.” She looked up at him. “It must be poison, like the greffyn gave off.”

Aspar had first found the greffyn by its trail of dead and dying plants and animals. Greffyns weren’t much bigger than horses, though. This thing—

“Sceat,” he muttered.

“What?”

He placed his hand against the trunk of the tree, wishing it had a pulse like a human being but feeling the truth somehow in his bones.

“It’s killed this tree,” he whispered. “All of these trees.”

“And us?”

“I don’t think so. The touch of it, the fog that it breaths—that’s down there. The roots are dead.”

Just like that. Alive for three thousand years . . .

“What was it?” Winna wanted to know.

Aspar lifted his hands futilely. “Don’t matter what we call it, does it? But I reckon it’s a woorm.”

“Or a dragon, maybe?”

“Dragons are supposed to have wings, as I remember it.”

“So are greffyns.”

“Yah. True. So like I said, it doesn’t matter what we call it. Only what it is, what it does. And Fend—”

“Fend?”

Raiht, he’d had her eyes covered.

“Yah, Fend was riding the damned thing.”

She frowned a little, as if he’d just told her a riddle and she was trying to reckon it out.

“Fend is riding the woorm,” she said at last. “That’s just, just so…” Her hands grasped at her sides, as if whatever word she was looking for might be caught there.

“Where did Fend find a woorm?” she finally settled on.

Aspar considered what he regarded as an essentially insane question.

For most of his forty-two years he had lived and breathed in the King’s Forest, seen the darkest, most tangled corners of it, from the Mountains of the Hare to the wild cliffs and weevlwood swamps of the eastern coast. He knew the habits and sign of every living thing in all of that vast territory, and never—until a few months ago, anyway—had he ever seen so much as the droppings of a greffyn, or an utin, or a woorm.

Where had Fend found a woorm? Where had the woorm found itself? Sleeping in some deep cave, waiting in the depths of the sea?

Grim knew.

And Fend seemed to know. He’d found a greffyn; now he’d found something worse. But why? Fends motives were usually simple, profit and revenge being chief among them. Was the Church paying him now?

“I don’t know,” he said at last. Then he peered over the edge. The mist the woorm had left seemed to have dissipated.

“Should we get down?” Winna asked.

“I think we ought to wait. And when we do go, we’ll go down over there, farther from its path, to avoid the poison.”

“What then?”

“It’s following the slinders, I think, and the slinders have Stephen. So now I guess we’re following the woorm.”

What seemed like a safe amount of time passed, and Aspar was ready to suggest that they start climbing down, when he heard the muffled chatter of voices. He put a finger to his lips, but Winna already had heard them, too. She nodded to let him know she understood.

A few moments later six horsemen came riding along in the very furrow created by the woorm.

Three of them were narrow of shoulder and slim of body and wore the characteristic broad-brimmed hats that protected Sefry from the light of the sun. The other three were larger and uncapped, probably human. The horses were all smallish and had the scruffy look of northern breeds.

Aspar wondered where his own horses were. They might all three be dead if they had been near the woorm’s exhalations, but horses, and Ogre especially, seemed to have good sense about things like that.

Anyway, the riders below weren’t dead. Nor was Fend, and he was riding the thing. Maybe the woorm wasn’t as poisonous as the greffyn. The utin, after all, hadn’t been. On the other hand, the monks at the hill of the naubagm had seemed immune to the greffyn’s influence, and a Sefry witch who called herself Mother Gastya had once provided Aspar with a medicine that neutralized the effect of the poison.

Aspar patted the branch and mouthed the words “wait here.” Winna looked concerned but nodded.

He padded across the broad branch carefully. It was so thick here it wouldn’t rattle smaller branches and give him away, like some gigantic squirrel. Working to a lower branch, he continued until he was just behind the riders and still comfortably above them. They had stopped talking now, and that presented him with something of a dilemma.

He’d been hoping they would say something to give away their purpose, something like “Don’t forget, fellows, that we work for Fend,” but that didn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon. There were three reasons he could think of that might have sent these men chasing the woorm that was tracking the slinders. One, they were with Fend, following in his path—about the same wicked work but slower. Two, they were enemies of Fend, following him for the same reason as Aspar: to kill him. Third, they were a group of travelers following the trail out of stupid curiosity.

If the trail of the beast was poisonous, the last possibility could be left right out. Random wayfarers weren’t likely to be carrying the antidote for woorm venom with them and would be pretty ill right now.

That left them with Fend or against him.

Well, he didn’t have much longer to consider it, and the worst thing a man could do was dither. There were far too many of them for him to ask politely.

He sighted down his first shaft, aiming for the neck of the man in back: a human. If he could drop one or two of them before the others caught on, it would increase his chance of survival a good deal.

But…

With a sigh he shifted his aim and sent it into the fellow’s right biceps instead. Predictably, the man screamed and fell off his horse, thrashing wildly. Most of the others just looked at him, puzzled, trying to work out what was wrong, but one—and now Aspar could see it was a Sefry—leapt from his horse and began stringing a bow, eyes scanning the trees.

Aspar shot him through the shoulder.

This fellow didn’t scream, but his intake of breath was audible even at Aspar’s distance, and his gaze immediately found the source of his wounding.

“Holter!” He bellowed. “It’s the holter, you fools, in the trees! The one Fend warned us of!”

There, Aspar thought. I could have hoped for that before they knew I was here, but…

Another of the men had strung his bow, Aspar saw. He fired at the fellow, but the man was in motion, and the arrow only whittled a bit of ear. The man returned a shaft, a damned good shot, considering, but Aspar was already dropping to the next branch down.

He landed on slightly flexed legs, wincing at pain in his knees that wouldn’t have been there five years ago, and loosed his third dart at the other archer. The man was cupping his wounded ear and just starting to scream when the arrow went through his larynx, effectively silencing him.

Aspar fitted another shaft and carefully shot another Sefry who was just putting arrow to string. He hit him in the inside of the thigh, dropping him like a sack of meal.

A red-fletched missile spanged against Aspar’s boiled leather cuirass, just above his lowest rib, knocking most of the breath out of him. The world went all black spots and whirling, and he realized his feet weren’t on the branch anymore, though they were still roughly beneath him.

His left foot caught the ground first, but his body had fallen too far back for him to land with balance or for his knees to absorb the shock. He did manage to twist and take part of the fall with his shoulder, but that caused more pain, this time with white sparks.

Grunting, he rolled out of it and noticed he no longer had his bow. He reached for his hand-ax and, as he came up, found himself looking down the shaft of the third Sefry. He threw the ax and spun to his left.

The ax missed by a hairsbreadth, but only because the Sefry flinched, throwing his aim wide. Snarling, Aspar hurled himself at his assailant, unsheathing his dirk. Ten kingsyards should have provided plenty of time for the Sefry to fit another arrow and take a close shot, but he apparently didn’t know that, instead seeming to poise among shooting, drawing his blade, and running.

He finally settled on the blade, but by that time Aspar was there; he came in close, grabbing the Sefry’s shoulder with his free hand and turning him to expose his left kidney. His first stab met mail, so he changed elevation and slashed the carotid, blinking his eyes against the spray of blood and running on past as his foe became a corpse.

He felt suddenly blind, because he knew there was one uninjured man he had lost track of. The first two he had shot might also be problems, but it was unlikely that either could wield a bow.

The fourth man announced himself in a huff of breath; Aspar spun to find him charging, wielding a broadsword. Aspar’s knees went wobbly, and he felt as if there were nettles in his lungs. The feeling was familiar, like when the greffyn had looked at him the first time.

Answers that, he thought. Poison.

A smart man with a sword ought to be able to kill a man with a dirk. This one, fortunately, didn’t seem too smart. He had his weapon lifted for an overhead cut; Aspar feinted as if he were desperately leaping inside—an impossibility given the distance—and the fellow obliged by slashing hard and fast.

Aspar checked back, however, not actually coming into range, and as the whirling sword swept past on its way to the ground with too much momentum to reverse, he did leap in, catching the wielding arm with his left hand and driving his dirk deep into the man’s groin, just to the left of his iron codpiece. The man gagged and stumbled backward, rowing the air with his arms to keep from falling, color draining from his face.

Aspar heard a choking sound at his back and spun unsteadily, only to find the first Sefry who had taken a shot at him staring in surprise. He had a short sword, but even as Aspar watched, it dropped from his fingers and he sank to his knees.

About ten kingsyards behind him, Winna grimly lowered her bow. She was looking pale, whether from poison or from nerves he wasn’t sure.

Wonderful.

He could feel the fever burning in him now. Already he was nearly too weak to hold the dirk.

He forced himself to walk the round, though, making sure his foes were dead—all but one, the first one he had shot. The man was crawling across the ground, holding his arm and whimpering. When he saw Aspar coming, he tried to crawl faster. He already was weeping, and now his tears began to flow more freely.

“Please,” he gasped, “please.”

“Winna,” Aspar called. “Search the other bodies for anything unusual. Remember the stuff Mother Gastya gave me? Anything like that.”

He put his boot on the man’s neck.

“Good morning,” he said, trying to sound steadier than he was.

“I don’t want to die,” the man whimpered.

“Raiht,” Aspar said. “Neither do I, yah? An’ more, I don’t want my lovely lass here to die. But we’re going to, aren’t we, because we’ve stepped in the path of this damned thing Fend conjured up. Now, all of your friends, I’ve sent them to Grim for his morning meal, and they’re callin’ for you, across the river. I can pitch you over there good and quick just by pushing this knife up into the bottom of your head.” He knelt and thrust his fingers into the place where spine met skull. The man screamed, and Aspar smelled something foul.

“Feel that?” he said. “There’s a hole there. Knife goes in as easy as into butter. But I don’t have to do that. That wound in your arm isn’t serious, and you could crawl off to the Midenlands, find a nice woman, and churn butter for the rest of your life. But first you have to make sure I don’t die and my friend doesn’t die.”

“Fend will kill me.”

Aspar laughed. “Now that’s just silly. You don’t help me, and you’ll be mostly maggots before Fend even knows what happened to you.”

“Yah,” the man said miserably. “There is some medicine. Raff has it on him, in a blue bottle. One drink a day, as much as would go in a little spoon. But you have to leave me some.”

“Do I?”

“Because I’ll die, anyway,” the man explained. “The medicine doesn’t stop the poison; it just slows it down. Stop taking it for a few days and you’re just as dead as you would have been.”

“Really. And what kind of fool—hah. I see it now. Fend didn’t tell you that until it was too late, did he?”

“No. But he has the antidote. When we’re finished, he was going to give it to us.”

“I see.” He lifted his head with great difficulty. “Winna? It’s in a blue bottle.”

“I’ve got that,” she called back.

“Bring it here.”

He set the point of his knife against the man’s head.

A moment later Winna fell to her knees beside him. Her eyes were red, and her skin a wormy white.

“Drink some,” he told Winna. He pushed a bit with the knife. “If it kills her, you go next,” he said.

“Give me some first,” the man said. “I’ll prove it’s not poison.”

Winna lifted the blue bottle, took a swallow, and made a face. For a long moment nothing happened.

“That feels better,” Winna said. “Everything isn’t spinning anymore.”

Aspar nodded, took the bottle, and drank some himself. It was foul, like boiled centipedes and wormwood, but he felt almost instantly better. He stoppered the bottle carefully and put it in his haversack.

“What are you helping Fend with, anyhow?” Aspar asked. “What are you supposed to finish before he gives you the antidote?”

“We’re just supposed to follow him and kill anything the woorm doesn’t.”

“Yah. Why?”

“He’s after killing the slinders, is part of it,” he said. “But there’s also some fellow he’s supposed to find; I don’t know the name. Supposed to be with you, I think.”

“Fend sent the utins after him?” Aspar asked.

“Yah. They went ahead and didn’t come back.”

“Where does Fend get these monsters?”

“He got the woorm from the Sarnwood witch, or so ’e said. But the monsters, they don’t serve Fend. He and the monsters serve the same master.”

“And who would that be?”

“None of us know. There’s a priest, from Hansa, name of Ashern. I think he knows, but he’s with Fend on the woorm. The Sefry just hired us for the loot. Said we could have anything that turned up in the woorm’s trail. Then he told us we were poisoned and let Galus die to prove him werlic.

“Please, holter, I’m begging you.”

“That’s all you know?”

“That’s all.”

Aspar flipped him over on his back. He winced and shut his eyes. Aspar shook the bottle; it was more than half-full.

“Open your mouth.”

The man did so, and Aspar dribbled in a few drops.

“Tell me something new,” Aspar said, “and I’ll give you a little more. If you last long enough, the woorm’s venom might work out of your system on its own, yah? Or you could find a shinecrafter to help you. A chance for you to live to see another full moon, anyway. Better than you have now.”

“Yah. What do you want to know?”

“Why did Fend have the girls kidnapped?”

“Girls?”

“On the border with Loiyes. Where he sent the utins.”

The man shook his head. “Those men? We had nothing to do with them. The woorm and the utins found your man; they scented him somehow. Those other fellows—we killed some of them when we happened upon them. Fend told us if we saw a couple of girls to just kill them, too, but not to go out of our way. ‘It’s not our job, that,’ he said. ‘Let the others worry about that.’”

Aspar dribbled a few more drops onto the man’s tongue.

“What else?”

“I don’t know anything else. I didn’t understand what I was getting into. I’m just a thief. I’ve never even killed anyone before. I never believed these things existed, but now I’ve seen em, I just want to go away. I just want to live.”

“Yah,” Aspar said. “Go, then.”

“But the poison…”

“I’ve given you all I can. I’ll need the rest to find Fend, kill ’im, and take his antidote. Do you know what it looks like?”

“No.”

“I could still just kill you…”

“I really don’t know.”

Which means it might well not exist at all, Aspar thought grimly.

“Come on, Winna,” he said. “I’ve a feeling we’d better get started.”

10 Blade Music

Paralyzed by terror, Anne watched the tapestry lift and darkness appear behind it.

The candles had all gone out, and though the only light was that of the moon, she could see every detail of the room clearly. The pulse in her head was so strong, she feared she would faint, and she wanted to look away from what was coming.

She had dreamed of Fastia with worms in her eyes, going behind that tapestry, opening a secret door. Now she saw that the door was really there and something was coming out of it. Here, in the waking world.

Or was she awake?

The figure that stepped into the room, however, wasn’t Fastia. At first it seemed a shadow, but then the moonlight resolved someone dressed all in black, masked and hooded. A slight figure, a woman or perhaps a child, carrying something long, dark, and pointed in one hand.

Assassin, she thought, suddenly feeling numb and very slow.

Then the person’s eyes appeared, and Anne knew she had been seen.

“Help!” she shouted quite deliberately. “Help, murder!”

Without a sound, the figure flung toward her. Anne’s paralysis ended instantly; she rolled off the bed and onto her feet, lurching toward the door.

Something cold and hard hit her in her upper arm, and she couldn’t move that limb anymore. It seemed frozen in the act of lifting; she could neither lower nor raise it. She looked and saw that something dark and thin had stabbed through the flesh below the bone. It went straight through and out the other side, where it was stuck in Lew.

Anne raised her eyes and found a violet gaze fixed on her from only a handspan away. She looked back down and understood that the thin thing in her arm was the blade of a sword, held by the man. Somehow she knew it was a man, however slight in build.

Sefry, she realized.

He yanked at the sword, which was stuck solidly in the bedpost. Seeming to think better of that, he let his other hand drop to his waist. The pain of the sword in her arm suddenly hit her, but the fear proved stronger, because she knew he had to be reaching for a knife.

She put her head in the moon, buried her feet in the dark tangled roots of the earth, grabbed his hair with her free hand, and kissed him.

His lips were warm, hot even, and as she touched them, lightning seemed to strike down her spine and the taste of serpent musk and charring juniper burned in her throat. Inside, he was wet and damp, like all men, but terribly wrong, cold where he ought to be hot, hot where he ought to be cold, and nothing familiar. He seemed broken and reformed, each curve in his bone like a healed shattering, every tissue a scar.

He screamed, and she felt a sudden hard yank at her arm as he pushed away. The sword pulled clean, and she slid to the floor, landing on her behind with her legs spraddled in front of her.

The Sefry stepped back and shook his head like a dog with water in its ear.

She tried to scream again but found she had no breath. She gripped her arm, and everything was sticky-wet with blood, which she understood was her own.

The door chose that moment to burst open, however, and two of Elyoner’s guards charged in, carrying torches that seemed to burn so brightly that Anne was nearly blinded.

Her attacker, reduced to a dark stick figure by the brilliance, appeared to recover. His long sword darted out and hit one of the guards in the throat. The poor young man fell to his knees, dropping his torch and grasping at the wound, trying to hold his life in with his hands. Anne sympathized as blood squirted between her fingers.

The other fellow, bellowing for help, was a little warier. He wore half-plate armor and carried a heavy sword, which he thrust at the assassin rather than pulling back for a cut. The Sefry made a few experimental attacks, which the guard beat away.

“Run, Princess,” the guard said.

Anne noticed that there was a gap between him and the door; she could run if she could make her legs work. She tried to get to her knees but slipped in the blood, wondering how close she was to bleeding to death.

The Sefry attacked and stumbled. With a roar, the guard cut hard; Anne couldn’t follow what happened then, but steel rang on steel, and Elyoner’s man went staggering past the Sefry and slammed into the wall. He collapsed there, unmoving.

The assassin was turning back toward her when another figure exploded through the open door.

It was Cazio. He looked odd, very odd, and for a moment Anne couldn’t place why. Then she appreciated that he was as naked as the day he was born.

But he had Caspator in one hand. With only the slight hesitation it took for him to take in the situation, he flung himself at her attacker.

Cazio plunged Caspator toward the dark figure, but the blade was met with the quick, familiar parry of perto, followed by a strong bind in uhtave.

Without having to think, Cazio took the attack into a receding parry and replied with a thrust to the throat. His opponent avoided by withdrawing, and for a moment neither of them moved. Cazio had a distant moment of faint embarrassment that he was naked, yet he and Austra both had been in that state, a chamber away, when he had heard Anne’s scream. If he’d stopped to dress, she might be dead now.

Truly, she was already wounded, and fear for her wiped away the embarrassment over his lack of clothing, that and the sudden realization that finally, after all these months, he was facing another student of dessrata.

“Come on,” Cazio said, “Let’s finish this before anyone shows up to interfere.”

He could already hear more guards coming.

The man cocked his head to the side, then thrust. Cazio took a retreat, not trusting the verity of the move, and was taken aback when the fellow suddenly darted toward the wall, lifting a tapestry and vanishing into a dark opening beyond.

Cursing, Cazio leapt after him, brushing the tapestry back with his left hand. A blade snaked out of the darkness, and he just managed to deflect it. He stepped inside the point and pressed the weapon into the wall with his off hand—then ran straight into a fist. It hit him in the jaw; the blow wasn’t so much strong as it was surprising. He released the blade.

Cazio stumbled back, weaving Caspator through the parries, hoping to catch a thrust he couldn’t see. But receding footsteps told him that the fellow was running now, without renewing the attack.

Cursing, Cazio ran after him.

After a few seconds, reason reasserted itself and he slowed to a walk. After all, he couldn’t see anything. He considered going back for a torch, but he still could hear soft footfalls ahead, and he didn’t want to lose the trail. Keeping his left hand on the wall, he pressed forth quickly, Caspator held out before him like a blind man’s cane.

He almost stumbled when the passageway became stairs, descending in a narrow series of turns. Ahead he heard a click and saw a brief moment of moonlight casting a human shadow on a landing below.

Then the light was gone.

He reached the landing and, after a brief search, discovered the door and pushed it open. The passage issued from a garden wall hidden by a hedge. A short path led to an open, grassy glade suffused in moonlight. He didn’t see Anne’s assailant anywhere.

He couldn’t imagine that the man had had time to cross the open grass, so instead of walking out of the hedge, he rolled and found his deduction satisfied by the sough of steel where his head ought to have been.

He came back to his feet with a guard in prismo.

“This is disappointing,” he said. “I’ve come across land and sea and land again and never met another dessrator. I am so sick of the meat cleaving that passes for swordplay in these barbarian lands. Now I finally find someone who might give me some entertainment, and I discover that he’s a coward, unwilling to stand and fight.”

“Sorry,” the fellow replied in a muffled voice. “But you must understand that while I’ve no trouble fighting you, I can’t be bothered to engage with the whole castle. And if I allow you to delay me, that will be my position.”

That was right; they had been in Anne’s room.

Cazio had heard the guards approaching behind him, and then—

They were outside. How had that happened?

He hazily remembered chasing the fellow, but if he had followed him out of Anne’s room and down the stairs, shouldn’t they have gone past the approaching soldiers? Had they leapt out of a window?

The man cut short Cazio’s wondering by attacking. He was small and nimble, a Sefry, perhaps? Cazio had never fought a Sefry dessrator. His blade was lampblacked and difficult to see.

Cazio parried, but the attack turned out to be a feint, the real attack slipping in from a low line. Cazio took a step back to give him time to find the blade, which he did, catching it in the parry of seft, then twisting to one side to avoid the rapid renewal of the attack in the high line. The blade whispered through the air near his throat and he straightened his arm.

His enemy deflected it with the flat of his palm, and suddenly they were at close quarters again. Cazio stepped in fast and hit the man with his shoulder, then followed with a short lunge that nicked an arm. He recovered, ready to press, when he became cognizant that the assassin once again was fleeing.

“Mamres curse you, stand and fight!” Cazio bellowed. He was getting cold now. His bare feet crunched on snow.

Once again he chased after the elusive swordsman, panting dragon breath. His fingers, nose, and other extremities were numbing with cold such as he had never known, and he began to remember stories he had heard of body parts freezing off. Could such a thing really happen? It had always seemed absurd.

They burst from the maze and sprinted through a garden where a thinly clothed statue of Lady Erenda presided over a pair of marble lovers in a frozen basin. Ahead, Cazio could see a canal and the swordsman’s destination: a horse tethered in a small grove of trees.

He tried to redouble his speed, with limited success. The snow and his numb toes made it difficult to keep his balance.

The swordsman was trying to untie his beast when Cazio launched his attack. Giving up the task, the man turned to meet him. Cazio saw with surprise that he had pulled his mask down, probably to breathe better. The face was indeed Sefry, delicate and almost blue in the moonlight, with hair so fair that it looked as if he had no eyebrows or lashes, as if he were carved of alabaster.

He avoided Cazio’s rush, turning his body aside and leaving his point for Cazio to impale himself on. Cazio checked his headlong rush, however, and picked up the extended blade in a bind. He was unable to riposte, but pushed past instead, and they both turned to face each other again.

“I’m really going to have to kill you,” the Sefry remarked.

“Your Vitellian is odd, almost more Safnian,” Cazio said. “Tell me your name, or if not that, at least where you hail from.”

“Sefry hail from nowhere, as you must know,” the assassin replied. “But my clan plied the routes from Abrinia to Virgenya.”

“Yes, but you did not learn your dessrata in Abrinia or Virgenya. Then where?”

“In Toto da’Curnas,” he replied, “in the Alixanath Mountains. My mestro was named Espedio Raes da Loviada.”

“Mestro Espedio?” Z’Acatto had studied with Espedio. “Mestro Espedio has been dead for a long time,” Cazio said.

“And Sefry live a long time,” the fellow replied.

“Give me something to call you.”

“Call me Acredo,” he replied. “It is the name of my rapier.”

“Acredo, I no more believe you studied with Mestro Espedio than that you’ve hunted rabbits on the moon, but let me see. I attack with the caspo dolo didieto dachi pere—” He launched an attack to the foot.

Acredo responded by instantly countering to Cazio’s face, but that was anticipated, and Cazio changed his attack to countertime along the blade. Acredo receded into prisma, then cut over Cazio’s blade for a caspo en perto.

Cazio voided to his right and counterthrust to Acredo’s eyes. Acredo ducked and lunged to Cazio’s foot, ending the attack as it had begun, except that Acredo’s blade plunged through Cazio’s numbed foot and into the chill soil below.

“The correct response?” Acredo asked, withdrawing his blooded blade and returning to guard.

Cazio winced. “Nicely done,” he allowed.

“My turn,” Acredo said, and commenced a flurry of feints and attacks.

“The cuckold’s walk home,” Cazio said, recognizing the technique. He replied with the appropriate counter, but again Acredo seemed to know one more move than he, and this time the exchange nearly ended with Acredo’s blade in Cazio’s throat.

Z’Acatto, you old fox, he thought. The old man had left out the final countermoves of Espedios set pieces. That had never mattered before, because until now Cazio had never met anyone else who had mastered the old master’s style; he had always managed to make his touch halfway through them. That wouldn’t work here; in fact, it was an almost certain route to failure. Cazio would have to use his own tricks.

But for the first time in a very long time, he reckoned this was a duel he might lose. Dying was a thought he had become used to, fighting supernatural knights in heavy armor with magic swords. But in a duel of dessrata, only z’Acatto had been his match since he was fifteen.

He felt a bit of fear but even more exhilaration. At last, a duel worth fighting.

He feinted low and finished high, but Acredo retreated a step, put Caspator in a bind, and lunged. Cazio felt the tension run up his blade, and then, with a sudden dismaying ring of steel, Caspator finally snapped.

Acredo paused, then came on. Cursing, Cazio retreated, holding the stub of his old friend.

He was steeling himself for a last, desperate leap inside Acredo’s sword point in hopes of grappling him, when the Sefry suddenly gasped and fell to one knee. Cazio’s first thought was that it might be some odd gambit like the three-legged dog, but then he saw the arrow sprouting from the man’s thigh.

“No!” Cazio shouted.

But men-at-arms were swarming along the canal now. Acredo defiantly lifted his weapon again, but an archer shot him from five kingsyards, hitting him in the shoulder, and in the very next instant a third shaft struck through his throat.

He clapped his hand to the wound and looked straight at Cazio. He tried to say something, but blood bubbled from his lips instead, and he fell face forward in the snow.

Cazio looked up in anger and saw Sir Neil. The knight was without armor, though he was a bit better dressed than Cazio, still wearing a white shirt, breeches, and, most enviable of all, buskins.

“Sir Neil!” Cazio cried. “We were dueling! He should not have died like that!”

“This rubbish stabbed Her Majesty,” Neil replied, “in a cold-blooded assassination attempt. He does not deserve the honor of a duel or any sort of honorable death.”

He glanced down at Acredo.

“I did wish to take him alive, however, to discover who sent him.” He gave Cazio a hard glance. “This isn’t sport,” he said. “If you believe that it is—if your love of the duel is more important than Anne’s safety—then I wonder if you belong in her company.”

“If I had not been here, she would be dead,” Cazio replied.

“Fair enough,” Neil said. “But my point still stands, I think.”

Cazio acknowledged that with a curt nod.

Cazio picked up the Sefry’s fallen blade. It had a beautiful balance but was a bit lighter than Caspator.

“I will take care of your weapon, dessrator,” he told the fallen man. “I only wish I had earned it fairly.”

Someone placed a cloak over Cazio’s shoulders, and he realized he was shivering almost uncontrollably. It also occurred to him that he was being stupid, that Sir Neil was right.

But he could not shake the feeling that no matter what a villain he had been, any dessrator deserved to die by the point of a rapier.

“Sit me up,” Anne commanded.

Just saying the words was almost enough to cause her to faint.

“You should lie back,” Elyoner’s leic said. He was a young man, handsome in a feminine way. Anne wondered just how much medicine he knew that didn’t have anything to do with sex. He had stopped her bleeding and put something on her arm that caused it to throb a little less violently, but that was no guarantee she wasn’t going to die of sepsis in a few days.

“I will sit up, against the pillows,” she said.

“As Her Majesty wishes.”

He helped her to that position.

“I need something to drink,” Anne said.

“You heard her,” Elyoner said. Her aunt was in a violet dressing gown of a complex weave whose name Anne didn’t know. She looked drunk and worried.

More interesting was Austra, who was wearing nothing more than a bedcover pulled tightly around her shoulders. She had appeared only instants after Cazio had left; that was suggestive, since Cazio had been entirely naked.

“Austra, put something on,” she said gently.

Austra nodded gratefully and vanished into the adjoining wardrobe.

A moment later, a young girl with hair in yellow ringlets wearing an umber skirt and a red apron appeared with a cup of what turned out to be watered wine. Anne quaffed it thirstily, her distaste for alcohol a thing of the past.

The girl went to Elyoner and whispered something in her ear. Elyoner sighed in apparent relief.

“The assassin is dead,” she said.

“And Cazio?”

Elyoner looked at the girl, who blushed and said something too low for Anne to hear. Elyoner tittered.

“He’s well, more or less, albeit perhaps in danger of losing bits to the frost.”

“When he’s clothed, I want to see him. And Sir Neil.” Anne turned to watch Elyoner’s men carrying off the corpses of the guards.

Austra emerged a few moments later, having hastily thrown on an underskirt and an ample dressing gown of Nahzgavian felt. Anne recognized it as one Fastia once had favored.

That had been Fastia, hadn’t it? Her spirit or ghost, come in a dream. If she hadn’t waked her, the Sefry would have completed his job without hindrance; she would have died in her sleep with no protest.

“Aunt Elyoner,” Anne said. “You knew that passage existed?”

“Of course, dear,” she said. “But few others do. I thought it secure.”

“I wish you had told me of it.”

“I wish I had, too, dove,” she replied.

“Uncle Robert would have known about it, yes?”

Elyoner shook her head with great certainty. “No, my dear. That is an impossibility. I would not have thought… but then, I do not know as much about the Sefry as perhaps I believed.”

“What do you mean?”

Cazio chose that moment to arrive. He hobbled into the room making a desperate show of not hobbling, but the bandage on his foot was plain proof that he had received some sort of injury.

“Anne!” he said, coming quickly to kneel by the bed. “How bad is it?” He took her good hand, and she was surprised to feel how cold it was.

“His blade went through the meat of my arm,” Anne replied in Vitellian for his benefit. “The bleeding is stanched. There was no poison, fortunately. And you?”

“Nothing of consequence.” His gaze flicked up and away, to where Austra stood behind her. “Austra?”

“I was never in danger, of course,” Austra said, sounding a bit breathless.

Cazio released Anne’s hand—a little too quickly, she thought.

“He stabbed you?” Anne asked.

“A small wound, in the foot.”

“Cazio,” Elyoner said. “They found the two of you down by the canal. How did you get there?”

“I followed him there from the hedge maze, Duchess,” the swordsman replied.

“That’s where the passage comes out?” Anne asked. “That wall in the grotto?”

“Passage?” Cazio asked. His brow furrowed.

“Yes,” Anne said. “The passage there, in the wall. Behind the tapestry.”

Cazio glanced at the tapestry. “There’s a passage hidden behind there? Is that how he got in?”

“Yes,” Anne said, beginning to be irritated. “And it’s how he got out. You followed him, Cazio.”

“I’m sorry, I did no such thing.”

“I watched you.”

Cazio blinked, and for perhaps the second or third time in the months she had known him, he actually seemed to have lost his tongue.

“Cazio,” Elyoner said gently, “how did you get outside, do you suppose? To the grotto in the hedge maze?”

Cazio placed his hands on his hips. “Well, I—” he began confidently, then stopped, frowning again. “I…”

“Have you gone mad?” Anne said. “How drunk are you?”

“He can’t remember, dove,” Elyoner said. “No man can. It’s a sort of glamour. Women can recall the passages in these walls. Women can use them. A man can be led through one, but it never impresses his memory. A few moments from now poor Cazio won’t even remember what we were talking about, nor will any man here.”

“That’s absurd,” Cazio said.

“What’s absurd, dear?” Elyoner asked.

Cazio blinked, then looked a bit frightened.

“You see?”

“But the Sefry was male. I’m pretty sure of that.”

“We will determine that for certain,” Elyoner said. “There are ways of telling, you know. But I suppose the glamour was meant for humans. Perhaps it doesn’t work on Sefry.”

“This is all very strange.”

“Then your mother never showed you the passages in Eslen castle?”

“Secret ones, you mean?”

“Yes. Austra?”

Anne turned to where Austra stood, looking mostly at the floor. “I’ve heard tell,” she said softly. “I’ve only ever been in one of them.”

“And you didn’t tell me?” Anne said.

“I was asked not to,” she said.

“So Eslen castle has passages like these?”

“Indeed,” Elyoner said. “It’s riddled with them.”

“And Uncle Robert doesn’t know about them,” Anne mused. “An army could take the castle from inside.”

Elyoner smiled wanly. “You would have difficulty if the army were made up of men, I should think,” she said.

“I could lead them!” Anne said.

“Perhaps,” Elyoner said. “I’ll tell you what I know of them, of course.”

“Do any of them open outside the city?”

“Yes,” Elyoner replied. “There is one that I know of. And several emerge within the city, at various locations. I can tell you where they are, perhaps make a little map if my memory serves me.”

“Good,” Anne replied. “That’s good.”

Anne understood then that she was ready. Not because she knew what she was doing but because she had no choice.

Ten years of studying warcraft and building an army might make her better suited to the task, but in a few ninedays her mother would be married and she would have to fight not only what troops Robert could muster but Hansa and the Church, as well.

No, she was ready—because there was no other choice but to be.

11 The Epistle

Though it was made of lead, Stephen handled the manuscrift gently, as if it were the tiniest of babies, the sort born too early.

“It’s been cleaned,” he noted.

“Yes. Do you recognize the letters?”

Stephen nodded. “I’ve only seen them on a few tombstones, in Virgenya. Very, very old tombstones.”

“Exactly,” the fratrex said. “This is the ancient Virgenyan script.”

“Some of it,” Stephen cautioned, “but not entirely. This letter and this one here—both are from the Thiuda script, as adapted by the Cavari.” He tapped a square with a dot pressed into the center. “And this is a very primitive variant form from Vitellian, where it was sounded as ‘th’ or ‘dh,’ as in thaum, or, ah, dreodh.”

“It’s a mixture of scripts, then.”

“Yes,” Stephen nodded. “It’s…” He trailed off, feeling the blood rush to his scalp and his heart clout like a marching drum.

“Brother Stephen, are you well?” Ehan asked, staring at him with concern.

“Where did you get this?” Stephen asked weakly.

“It was stolen, actually,” the fratrex said. “It was found in a crypt in Kaithbaurg-of-Shadows. A coven-trained recovered it for us.”

“Well, don’t keep the bag on my head,” Ehan said in an attempt to lighten the mood. “What do we have here, Brother Stephen?”

“It’s an epistle,” he answered, still not believing it himself.

The fratrex’s mouth formed a small “o.” Ehan merely lifted his shoulders in puzzlement.

“It’s a very old word in Virgenyan, no longer used in the king’s tongue,” Stephen explained. “It means a sort of letter. When they were planning their revolt, the Skasloi slaves passed these to one another. They were written in cipher so that if the epistles were intercepted by their enemies, the information, at least, remained safe.”

“If it’s in cipher, though, how can you read it?” Ehan wondered aloud.

“A cipher can be broken,” Stephen said, excitedly now. “But if I’m to do so, I’ll need some books from the scriftorium.”

“Whatever we have is at your disposal,” the fratrex said. “Which ones do you have in mind?”

“Yes, well,” Stephen mused, “the Tafliucum Eingadeicum, of course —the Caidex Comparakinum Prismum, the Deifteris Vetis, and the Run-ahoka Siniste, for a start.”

“I had guessed those already,” the fratrex responded. “They are packed and ready to go.”

“Packed?”

“Yes. Time is short, and you cannot remain here,” the fratrex said. “We’ve repelled one attack by the Hierovasi, but there will be more—either from them or from our other enemies. We remained here only to await you.”

“To await me?”

“Indeed. We knew you would need the resources of the library, but we can carry no more than a fraction. So we had to keep it safe until you returned, because I didn’t know everything you would need.”

“Yet surely I’m not the only scholar of languages—”

“You are our foremost surviving expert,” the fratrex said, “and the only one to have walked the faneway of Saint Decmanus.

“But there’s more to it than that, I’m afraid. I don’t want to burden you, but all auspex point to your personal importance in the coming crisis. I believe it has to do with you being the one to wend the horn and wake the king, though it’s unclear whether you are important because you blew the horn or you sounded the horn because you were important. You see? The spetural world will always grip some secrets.”

“But what am I to do, exactly?”

“Gather the books and scrolls you know you will need, though no more than can be packed on one mule and one horse. Be prepared to leave by morning.”

“Tomorrow? But that’s not enough time. I have to think! Don’t you understand? If this is an epistle, it’s likely the only one that has survived.”

Ehan coughed. “Begging both of your pardons, but that’s not right. My studies weren’t thorough, I know—the virtues of minerals has always been my subject—but in the ahvashez in Skefhavnz, I studied John Wotten’s letter to Sigthors. I didn’t know the word ‘epistle,’ but that’s what it would be, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Stephen said, “if what you studied was really a letter from Wotten to Sigthors—but it wasn’t. What you learned was a reconstruction of that text by Wislan Fethmann four centuries ago. He based it on a short summary of its content written by one of Sigthors grandnephews sixty years after the victory over the Skasloi.

“Sigthors was killed in the battle. The grandnephew got his information interviewing the surviving son, Wigngaft, who was seven when his father read the letter aloud to his followers and sixty-seven when asked to recall what it said. There was also a single line recorded supposedly by Thaniel Farre, the courier who delivered the letter. But we don’t have the original by Farre, only a thirdhand copy of a quotation of Farre in the Tafles Vincum Maimum, written a full thousand years after his death. ‘Come what may, no grandchild of mine shall see a single sunrise under slavery. If we do not succeed, with my own hands I will end my line.’”

Ehan blinked. “So that’s not really what was written?”

“In truth, we have no way of knowing,” Stephen said.

“But surely Fethmann must have been inspired by the saints to create an accurate reconstruction.”

“Well, that’s one school of thought,” Stephen said drily. “In any event, he wrote in Middle Hanzish, not in the original encrypted form, so whether it was divinely inspired or not, that ‘epistle’ is of no help in translating this one. There are, by the by, a few other epistles with the same dubious provenance as the one you bring up. In fact, it’s not uncommon to find them for sale in Sefry caravans, both as ‘originals,’ written in gibberish, and as translations.”

“Fine, then,” Ehan said brusquely. “So our epistle was a fraud, a local tradition not approved by the Church. So what? Are there no authenticated epistles?”

“There are two fragments, neither with more than three complete lines. Those seem to be originals, though neither is here. But they are supposedly faithfully reproduced in the Casti Noibhi.”

“We have the Dhuvien copy of that volume,” Pell said.

“I could hope for a better edition,” Stephen said. “But if it’s the best you’ve got, it will have to do.”

A thought occurred, and he met the gaze of the fratrex.

“Wait a moment,” he said. “You said this epistle—if that is what it is—is a clue to the location of Virgenya Dare’s journal. How can that be, when her journal was hidden centuries after the revolt was over?”

“Ah,” the fratrex said. “Yes, that.” He signed to Ehan, who lifted a leather-bound tome from behind his bench.

“This is the life of Saint Anemlen,” the fratrex said. “While at the court of the Black Jester, Anemlen heard a rumor of Brother Choron, in whose hands the journal had been entrusted. Choron was supposed to have stopped in the kingdom ten years before the Jester won his bloody throne, serving as an adviser to the monarch who was reigning at the time.

“The book rested there for a while. In one passage, Anemlen records that Choron discovered—in a reliquary—the scroll you now hold. Without saying what it was, he stated that it spoke of a ‘fastness’ in a mountain some eighteen days’ ride to the north and that this mountain was known as Vhelnoryganuz.

“He set out to find it, ostensibly because he felt that most sacred of documents would be safer there. He left for Vhelnoryganuz but never returned. As you know, the Black Jester had his court where the city of Wherthen now stands, though little remains of the original fortress. But when the Church liberated and consecrated the area, they gathered all the scrifti they found. The evil ones were destroyed, for the most part. Those which were not evil were collected and copied.

“And then there were a few that were kept in the scriftorium because no one was certain what they were. This was one such scroll. Brother Desmond acquired it for me; thank the saints he did not discern its nature. We received it just before your flight from this place. If things had proceeded as we hoped, you would have studied it months ago, and at a more leisurely pace. Unfortunately, things have not proceeded as we hoped.”

“Most unfortunately,” Stephen agreed. He straightened and put his hands his knees. “Brothers, if my time is really so limited, I should go to the scriftorium now.”

“By all means,” the fratrex said. “Meanwhile, we’ll see to other preparations.”

Death was following close behind the woorm.

The Oostish called the cold season winter, but the thing about winter was that it gave farmers and villagers plenty of time to think, shut up in their houses, waiting for the soil to grow food again. When people had too much time to think, Aspar noted, it usually resulted in too many words, Stephen being the perfect case in point.

So the Oostish called winter winter, but they also called it Bearnight and Sundim and Death’s Three Moons. Aspar had never found any reason to give it more than one name, but the last had seemed particularly uninformed. The forest wasn’t dead in winter; it was just licking its wounds. Healing. Gathering its strength to survive the battle known as spring.

Some of the ironoaks the woorm had brushed against had been seedlings when the Skasloi still ruled the world. They had watched in their sturdy, slow way as uncounted tribes of Mannish and Sefry folk passed beneath their boughs and vanished into the distance of years.

They would not see another leaf-bringing. Foul-smelling sap already had begun to seep from cracks in their ancient bark, like pus from a gangrenous wound. The woorm’s venin worked even faster in wood, it seemed, than it did in flesh. The lichens, moss, and ferns that fleeced the trees were already black.

His hand dropped to touch the arrow case at his belt. The weapon inside had come from Caillo Vallaimo, the temple that was the very heart, center, and soul of the Church. He’d been told it could be used only twice, and he had used it once to slay an utin. He’s been ordered to kill the Briar King with it.

But the Briar King wasn’t killing the forest Aspar loved. If anything, the lord of the slinders was fighting to save it. Yes, he was slaughtering men and women, but place their lives against the ironoaks…

Aspar glanced at Winna, but she was staring ahead, intent on the path. Winna understood a lot about him, but these feelings he could never share. Though more comfortable than most in the wild, she still came from the world of hearth and home, the world inside the fences of men. Her heart was tender when it came to other people. But though Aspar loved a few people well, most made little impression on him. Most folk were shadows to him, but the forest was real.

And if the life of the forest could be bought only by the extinction of Mannish kind…

And if he, Aspar, held that choice in his hands…

Well, he’d already had his shot not so long ago, hadn’t he? It was Leshya who had convinced him not to do it, Leshya and the Briar King himself. How many villagers had died since he’d made that decision?

Would the woorm be here now if the Briar King had already perished by his hand?

He didn’t know, of course, and he had no way of knowing. So when he saw the woorm again, should he use the arrow on it or not?

Grim, yes. The monster was killing everything it touched. And if that wasn’t enough, Fend was riding it. If he’d had time to think a little more, he’d have killed it when he first saw it.

The horses slowed as they grew too weak to. carry them, so Aspar and Winna dismounted and led them, trying to stay off the poisoned ground. Ogre’s eyes were rheumy, and Aspar was afraid for him, but he knew he couldn’t spare any of the potion, not with Winna at risk. He could only hope that the beasts hadn’t been exposed directly to the woorm’s breath, that they were suffering from a lesser, perhaps survivable, poisoning.

The trail ended at a hole in a hillside. With a faint shock, Aspar recognized the place.

“This used to be Rewn Rhoidhal,” he told Winna.

“I wondered,” Winna replied. She was familiar with the Halafolk dwellings, having been with Aspar in another such place: Rewn Aluth. That one had been abandoned. All of them had.

“Is this—is this where Fend was from?”

Aspar shook his head. “So far as I know, Fend never lived in a rewn. He was one of the wanderers.”

“Like them that raised you.”

“Yah,” Aspar said.

Winna pointed at the gaping entrance. “I thought the Halafolk concealed their dwellings a little better than this.”

“They do. This one used to be pretty small, but it looks like the woorm has burrowed a hole big enough for itself.”

“Burrowed through rock?” Winna asked.

Aspar reached and snapped off a chunk of the reddish stone.

“Claystone,” he said. “Not very hard. Still, it would take a lot of men a long time with picks and shovels to widen the hole this much.”

Winna nodded. “What now?”

“I reckon the only way to follow it is to go in,” Aspar said, dismounting and starting to work the saddle off Ogre.

“Have we any oil left?”

They left the horses again and picked their way down a talus slope. The debris was recent, most likely from the woorm’s entry.

Their torchlight billowed as uncertain air wagged its flame, and Aspar was able to make out that they were descending into a large cyst in the earth. Even underground, the woorm’s trail wasn’t difficult to follow. They soon moved from the claystone antechamber down a sloping hall to ancient, sturdier rock, and even there the drag of the beast’s belly had snapped stalagmites at their bases. In one place where the damp ceiling stooped low, the creature’s back had shattered the downward-seeking stalactites, as well.

The rewn was silent except for the crunch of rock as they descended and the sound of their breath. Aspar stopped to look for any sign that Fend had dismounted there—he must have, after all—but what sign hadn’t been obliterated by the woorm was confused by evidence of the passage of hundreds of slinders.

They pressed on and soon heard a stir of voices, muffled by the enclosing stone. Ahead, Aspar could see that the passage was opening into something much larger.

“Carefully,” he whispered.

“That noise,” Winna said. “It must be the slinders.”

“Yah.”

“What if they’re allies with the woorm?”

“They aren’t,” Aspar said, his foot slipping a bit on something slick.

“Can you be certain?”

“Pretty certain,” he replied gently. “Mind your feet.”

But it was a useless comment. The last few yards of the tunnel were smeared with blood and offal. It looked as if fifty bodies had been pounded fine in a mortar and then spread on the cave floor like butter on bread. Here and there he could make out an eye, a hand, a foot.

It smelled utterly foul.

“Oh, saints,” Winna gasped when she realized what it was. She went double and began gagging. Aspar didn’t blame her; his own stomach was heaving, and he had seen a lot in his day. He knelt by her and put his hand on her back.

“Careful, lubulih,” he said. “You’ll make me sick doing that.”

She chuckled ruefully and shot him a look, then went back to it for a while.

“I’m sorry,” she managed when she was done. “The whole cave knows we’re here now, I guess.”

“I don’t think anyone cares,” Aspar said.

The scriftorium had to be entered through a door so low that it forced him to crawl, to “come to knowledge on his knees.” But it was in rising that Stephen felt humbled as he confronted the wonder of the scriftorium.

Stephen hadn’t been born a poor man. His family, as he had once been wont to proclaim, were the Cape Chavel Dariges. His father’s estate was an old one, situated on rambling sea-chewed bluffs above the Bay of Ringmere and built of the same tawny stone. The oldest rooms had been part of a keep, though only a few of the original curving walls remained. The main house boasted fifteen rooms, with several attached cottages, barns, and outbuildings. The family raised horses, but most of the income came from owning farmland, waterfront, and boats.

His father’s scriftorium was considered a good one for a private collection. He had nine books; Stephen knew them all by heart. Morris Top, a league away and the most sizable town in the attish, had a scriftorium with fifteen books, and that was held by the Church.

The college at Ralegh, by far the largest university in Virgenya, possessed a grand total of fifty-eight scrolls, tablets, and bound books.

Here, Stephen stood inside a round tower containing thousands of books. It rose in four levels, with only the narrowest walkspaces at each story. Ladders bridged the vertical distances; books were moved up and down by means of baskets, rope, and winches.

Things had changed since the last time he’d been there. Before, it had bustled with monks copying, reading, annotating, studying. Now, besides himself, there was one lone monk who was frantically packing scrolls into oiled leather cases. The fellow waved but went quickly back to his work.

Stephen didn’t recognize him, anyway.

His natural awe faded as the situation reasserted itself. Where to start? He felt overwhelmed.

Well, the Casti Noibhi was an obvious choice. He found it on the second tier and, leaning against the rail, thumbed through its pressed linen pages. He quickly found the epistle fragments written in what was supposed to be the original encrypted form. He saw right away that the symbols, as he had suspected, were mostly from the old Virgenyan script with admixtures of Thiuda and early Vitellian. That was more by way of confirming his guess than anything else.

Nodding, he made his way to another section and selected a scroll of funeral inscriptions and elegiac formulae from Virgenya. The scroll itself was quite new, but the inscriptions had been copied from carved stones up to two thousand years old.

The epistle’s cipher likely was built around one of the languages from the time of the insurrection. The major ones were ancient Vitellian, Thiuda, Old Cavari, and Old Virgenyan. From those four languages were descended most of the tongues spoken in the world Stephen knew.

But there were other languages with different lineages. Most were far away; the Skasloi had ruled lands beyond the seas, and their slaves had spoken languages very different from those in Crotheny. Those wouldn’t have figured into the revolt here. There was also the slave cant, of which later scholarship knew almost nothing. Stephen rather doubted that his ancestors would have used that as their secret language, since the Skasloi themselves had had a hand in inventing it.

There were also Yeszik, Vhilatautan, and Yaohan. Yeszik and Vhi-latautan had descendants spoken in Vestrana and the lutin and Bairgh mountains, and a few tribes, like that of Ehawk, spoke Yaohan languages.

He stopped. Ehawk.

Stephen realized with a flash of guilt that he had forgotten him. What had happened to the boy? One moment he had been there, gripping his arm, and the next…

He would ask the fratrex to inquire with the slinders. It was all he could do. He should have done it already, but there was so much to do, so little time.

Right.

The more obscure the language, the better code it made, all on its own. So he needed what lexicons he could find concerning all the mother tongues. Indeed, his intended destination was supposed to be in the Bairghs; that meant some knowledge of the Vhilatautan daughter languages might also be useful.

Immediately he set about finding those tomes. When he had lowered them by basket to the floor, he had another, much more interesting thought and rushed to the geographies and maps. The Bairgh Mountains were very large indeed. Even after he had translated the epistle—if he translated it—he would need to plot the quickest route to Vhelnoryganuz Mountain or all his efforts would be moot.

Stephen wasn’t certain how many hours had passed when Ehan found him, but the glass dome above had long since gone dark, and he was working by lamplight at one of the large wooden tables on the lowest floor.

“The new day is upon us,” Ehan said. “Have you no need of sleep?”

“I’ve no time for it,” Stephen said. “If I really must be away from here by sunrise—”

“It might be sooner,” Ehan said. “Something’s happening down in the rewn. We’ve got a watch, but we’re not certain what it is. What are you about?”

“Trying to find our mountain,” Stephen said.

“I don’t suppose it’s simple enough as to be on die map?” Ehan asked.

Stephen shook his head wearily and smiled. He realized that despite everything, this was the happiest he had been in a long time. He wished it didn’t have to end.

“No,” he said. He put his finger on a large-scale modern map that showed the Midenlands and the Bairghs. “I’ve made a guess how far someone could ride in eighteen days from Wherthen,” he said. “The fratrex is right; the Bairghs are the only mountains that our ‘fastness’ could be in. But as you said, if there’s such a mountain as Vhelnoryganuz, it’s not marked here.”

“Maybe the name has changed over time,” Ehan suggested.

“Of course it has,” Stephen said, then realized he’d sounded a bit pompous.

“What I mean, is,” he explained, “that Vhelnoryganuz is old Vadhiian, the language of the Black Jester’s kingdom. It means ‘Traitorous Queen.’ Vadhiian isn’t spoken anymore, so the name would have been corrupted.”

“But it’s just a name; you don’t have to know what it means to keep repeating it or teach it to your children. Why would it change? I mean, I can understand if it was renamed …”

“I’ll give you a for instance,” Stephen said. “The Hegemony built a bridge across a river in the King’s Forest and called it the Pontro Oltiumo, which means ‘the farthest bridge’ because at the time it was on the frontier, the bridge most distant from z’Irbina. After a while, the name got transferred to the river itself but was shortened to Oltiumo. When new people settled there, speaking Old Oostish, they started calling it the Aid Thiub, ‘old thief—because oltiumo sounded sort of like that the way they pronounced it—which the Virgenyan settlers in turn corrupted into Owl Tomb, which is what it’s called to this day.

“So a mouthful like Vhelnoryganuz easily could have ended up as, I don’t know, Fell Norrick, or something like that. But I can’t find anything on the map that looks like a simple corruption.”

“I see,” Ehan said. But he seemed distracted.

“So the next thing I thought of is that maybe the mountain is still called ‘Traitorous Queen,’ but in the current language of the area; that happens sometimes, though that’s a weird name for a mountain.”

“Not really,” Ehan said. “In the north we often refer to mountains as kings or queens, and one that claimed the lives of many travelers might be referred to as traitorous. What’s spoken in the Bairghs?”

“Dialects related to Hanzish, Almannish, and Vhilatautan. But to make matters more difficult, this map is based on one made during the Lierish regency.”

“So you’re stuck.”

Stephen smiled wickedly.

“Oh, then you’ve figured it out,” Ehan amended, starting to sound impatient.

“Well,” Stephen said, “it occurred to me that Vadhiian was never spoken in the Bairghs, so the name we have for the mountain is already a Vadhiian interpretation of a probably Vhilatautan name. Once I started thinking that way, I pulled out the lexicon of Tautish and started comparing.

“Vhelnoryganuz in this case might be a mistranslation of Velnoira-ganas, which in old Vhilatautish would mean something like ‘Witchhorn.’”

“And is there a Witchhorn in the Bairghs?”

Stephen put his finger on the map next to the drawing of a mountain with an odd shape, a bit like that of a cow’s horn. Next to it, in a tiny Lierish hand, was lettered ‘esliefvendve. ’

“Witch’s Mountain,” he translated for Ehan’s sake.

“Well,” Ehan considered, “that was easy.”

“And probably still wrong,” Stephen said. “But it’s the best guess I have until I’ve translated the epistle. I think I may have a start on that.”

Off in the distance a clarion note soared.

“You’ll have to finish it on horseback,” Ehan said hurriedly. “That’s the alarm. Come on, quickly now.”

He gestured, and two other monks hurried over, packed the scrifti and scrolls Stephen had selected into weather-sound bags, and stooped their way out of the scriftorium. Stephen followed, grabbing a few stray items. He didn’t even have time for one last glance.

Outside, three horses stood stamping, their eyes rolling as the monks loaded them with the precious books. Stephen strained to hear what was upsetting them, but at first even his blessed senses found nothing.

The valley seemed quiet, in fact, beneath a cold, clear sky. The stars shone so large and bright that they seemed unreal, like those seen in a dream, and for a moment Stephen wondered if he was dreaming—or dead. There were some who said that ghosts were deluded spirits who did not understand their fate and tried desperately to continue in the world they knew.

Perhaps all his companions were dead. Anne and her army of shades would batter insubstantially at the walls of Eslen, while its defenders felt little more than a vague chill at their presence. Aspar would slip off to fight for the forest he loved, a specter more terrifying than even Grim the Raver. And Stephen—he would continue to quest after mysteries at the behest of the dead fratrex and the dead Ehan.

When had he died, then? At Cal Azroth? At Khrwbh Khrwkh? Either seemed likely.

He heard it then, the rush of a breath through lungs so long that it sounded a note far below the lowest that could be stroked from a bass croth. It groaned just above the pitch sung by rocks and stones and had at first been hidden in those sounds. Now he felt, more than heard, sand rubbing from stone, limbs snapping, and a vast weight in motion.

The horn stopped blowing.

“What is that?” Stephen whispered.

Ehan stood a few feet away, whispering hastily with another monk, a gray-haired fellow Stephen had never seen before. The two briefly embraced, and the gray-hair hurried off.

“Just come on,” Ehan said. “If it’s what we think it is, we don’t have time to spare. We’ve a few men waiting for us at the lower end of the valley, making sure nothing’s coming that way.”

“What about the fratrex?”

“Someone has to bait it to stay here for a while.”

“What are you talking about?”

His mind raced back to recall the whispered conversation between Ehan and the other man; he hadn’t been paying attention, but his ears ought to have heard it anyway.

He had it now. “A woorm?” he gasped.

Images crowded into his mind, all from tapestries, illustrations, children’s tales, and ancient legends. He stared up at the hillside.

In the faint starlight he saw the motion of trees, a long, snaky line of them. How long was it? A hundred kingsyards?

“The fratrex can’t stay and fight that,” Stephen said.

“He won’t be alone,” Ehan said. “Someone has to delay it here, make it believe its prize is still in d’Ef.”

“Its prize?”

“What it’s after,” Ehan said, the exasperation becoming plain in his voice. “You.”

12 Hearts and Swords

“Fire is a wonderful thing,” Cazio said happily. He used his native tongue so he would understand himself. “A woman is a wonderful thing. A sword is a wonderful thing.”

He reclined on a velvet couch next to the great hearth in the grand salon of Glenchest, one half of him baking and the other pleasantly warm and cushioned. If the fireplace was not lit, a man easily could walk in and stand up; that was how big it was, a giant slice of orange, a half-moon on the horizon, Austra’s smile inverted.

He reached lazily for the bottle of wine the duchess had given him. It wasn’t wine, actually, but a bitter greenish tonic that had far more bite than the blood of Saint Pacho. He hadn’t liked it at first, but between it and the fire, he felt as if his body were made of fur, and his mind was pleasantly reflective.

Esverinna Taurochi dachi Calavai. She’d been tall, as tall as Cazio, with limbs that seemed a bit long and awkward. Eyes like honey and hazelnut mixed together and long, long hair that sprouted almost black but paled to the color of her eyes toward the ends. He remembered that she always hunched just a little, as if ashamed of her regal height. In his arms, her length had felt luxurious, something he could stretch against infinitely.

She was beautiful but unaware of her beauty. Passionate but innocent of her desires. They both had been thirteen; she was already promised to marry a far older man from Esquavin. He had thought to duel the man, he remembered, but Esverinna had stopped him with these words: You will never truly love me. He does not love me, hut he might.

Maio Dechiochi d’Avella had been a distant cousin of the Mediccio of Avella, the town of Cazio’s birth. Like most young men of means in that place, he studied fencing with Mestro Estenio. Cazio had quarreled with him about the result of a game of dice. Swords had been drawn. Cazio remembered how surprised he had been to see fear in Maio’s eyes. He himself had felt only exhilaration.

The duel had consisted of exactly three passes: an unconvincing feint by Maio, becoming an attack in seft to Cazio’s thigh, and his parry of the attack and riposte in prisma, resulting in Maio’s mad scramble out of distance. Cazio had renewed the attack; Maio parried violently but did not riposte. Cazio repeated the attack, exactly the same as before; again Maio blocked without responding, apparently happy just to have stopped the thrust. Cazio quickly redoubled and hit him in the upper arm.

He had been twelve, and Maio thirteen. It was the first time he had ever felt flesh give beneath his steel.

Marisola Serechii da Ceresa. Fine obsidian hair, the face of a child, the heart of a wolf. She knew what she wanted, and what she wanted was to watch Cazio fight for her and then exhaust what remained of his energy in the silk sheets of her bed. She was a licker, a biter, a screamer, and she treated his body as if it were a rare treat she would never have enough of. She had stood hardly to his chest, but with three touches she could rob him off his will. She had been eighteen, and he had been sixteen. He often wondered if she was a witch and thought for certain she was when she dismissed him. He couldn’t believe that she didn’t love him, and years later one of his friends told him her father had threatened to hire assassins if she did not break with Cazio and marry the man he had chosen. Cazio never got to question her about it; she died in childbirth a year after her marriage.

St. Ahulo Serechii da Ceresa, Marisola’s older brother, had spent time in the their hometown of Ceresa, studying writing and swordplay with his grand-uncle’s mestro. Aware of the relationship with his sister, St. Abulo had let drop a casually insulting remark regarding Cazio in the Tauro et Purca tavern, knowing it would get back to him. They had arranged to meet in the apple grove outside of town, each with a second and a crowd of admirers. St. Abulo was small, like his sister, but devastatingly quick, and he affected the somewhat antiquated tradition of using a mano nertro, a dagger for the left hand. The fight had ended when St. Abulo mistimed a counterthrust; he hit Cazio in the thigh, but Cazio skewered him in the ear. It was clear to both men that Cazio could as easily have stabbed him in the eye. St. Abulo conceded the point, but his second would not agree, and so he and Cazio’s second had taken up the duel. Before long, the bystanders took to one another, as well. Cazio and St. Abulo retired to watch the brawl, bind their wounds, and drink several bottles of wine.

St. Abulo admitted that he wasn’t really much concerned with his sister’s virtue but that his father had put him up to it. He and Cazio shook hands and parted friends, which they remained until St. Abulo died of the wounds he received killing the man whose child had killed his sister.

Naiva dazo trivo Abrinasso. The daughter of Duke Salalfo of Abrinia and a courtesan from distant Khorsu. Naiva had had her mother’s black almond eyes. She had tasted like almonds, too, and honey, and oranges. Her mother had fallen out of favor with the duke’s court when he died, but he had provided a triva for her near Avella. Cazio had met Naiva in the vineyards, squishing fallen grapes with her bare feet. She was sophisticated and jaded. She believed she had been exiled to the farthest reaches of the earth, and he’d always believed that with him she was settling for something less than she imagined. He remembered her thighs in the sunlight, hot to the touch, the sigh that was nearly a giggle. She had simply vanished one day without a word. There was a rumor that she had returned to Abrinia and become a courtesan like her mother.

Larche Peicassa dachi Sallatotti. The first man who suggested in as many words that Naiva had been little more than a well-bred whore. Cazio had bound his blade and struck him through his left lung with such force that Caspator broke through his back. Larche was the first man Cazio had fully intended to kill. He had failed, but the man had been forever crippled by the fight, left to hobble on a crutch.

Austra. Skin so pale that it was white even by firelight. Amber hair that tousled pleasingly, cheeks that flushed as pink as a dawn-lily. She was more fearful of twining fingers than of kissing, as if the touch of two hands was somehow an embrace much riskier to the heart.

She had been clumsy, enthusiastic, fearful, and guilty. Happy but, as always, with an eye toward the end of happiness.

Love was strange and terrible. Cazio had thought he could avoid it after Naiva. Courting was fun, sex a lot of fun indeed, and love—well, that was a pointless illusion.

Maybe he still believed that, or part of him did. But if so, why did he want to twine his fingers with Austra’s until she believed him, until she relinquished her fear, skepticism, and self-doubt and understood that he actually did care for her?

Acredo. Not really his name, of course; it just meant “sharp.” The first swordsman in so long, so very long, to really test his point.

The duchess and some others were playing cards on the other side of the room, but he found that their voices had become like the piping of birds, melodic but incomprehensible. Thus, it took him a moment to realize that someone stood very near him and that the musical noises that were the loudest were intended for speech.

He lifted his head and saw that it was Sir Neil. Cazio grinned and raised the bottle.

“How is your foot?” Neil asked.

“I can’t say it hurts at the moment,” Cazio replied happily.

“I suppose not.”

“The duchess told me not to, you see,” Cazio finished by way of explanation, then laughed for a few moments at his own joke.

Oddly, Neil did not seem amused.

“What is it?” Cazio asked.

“I have the greatest regard for your bravery and swordsmanship,” Neil started.

“As well you should,” Cazio informed him.

Neil paused, then nodded, more to himself than to Cazio, and continued. “My duty is to protect Anne,” he said. “Protect her from all things.”

“Well, then, it should have been you fighting Acredo, eh, and not me. Is that it?”

“It should have been me,” Neil agreed evenly, “but I had to confer with the duchess concerning what troops she has and what we can expect, and unfortunately I was not able to be in two places at once. Nor would it have been proper for me to have been in the room with her when she was attacked.”

“No one was in the room with her,” Cazio said. “That’s how she came to nearly be killed. Maybe someone should be in the room with her, ‘proper’ or not.”

“You weren’t with her?”

“Of course not. Why do you think I was naked?”

“My question exactly. You were lodged in a different part of the mansion.”

“I was,” Cazio said. “But I was with Aus—” He stopped. “That’s really not your business.”

“Austra?” Neil hissed, lowering his voice. “But she was the one supposed to be in the room with Anne.”

Cazio pushed himself up on one arm and leveled his gaze at the knight. “What are you saying? That you would rather they had both died? Acredo killed the guards. If I hadn’t been nearby, how do you imagine it would have ended?”

“I know,” Neil said, rubbing his forehead. “I didn’t intend to insult you, only to understand why… what happened.”

“And now you know.”

“Now I know.” The knight paused, and his face grew almost comically long. “Cazio, it is very difficult to protect someone you love. Do you understand that?”

Cazio suddenly felt like taking a sword to the knight.

“I know that very well,” he said evenly. He meant to say more, but something in Neil’s eyes told him he didn’t have to. So rather than pushing it further, he just said, “Join me for a drink.”

Neill shook his head. “No. I have too much to do. But thank you.”

He left Cazio to increasingly more colorful memories, imaginings, and, soon enough, dreams.

When Neill left Cazio, he felt vaguely unclean. He had suspected from their first meeting that the Vitellian and Anne might have developed some sort of relationship; he remembered Anne’s reputation. Her mother had sent her away to a coven in Vitellia precisely because she had been caught in a delicate position with Roderick of Dunmrogh.

Thus, it would be no surprise if, traveling together all this time, something had happened between the princess and the swordsman. Nor could Neil condemn Cazio for that; he himself had engaged in improper relations with a princess of the realm, and he was less well born than the Vitellian.

But he’d had to ask, hadn’t he?

Still, he didn’t like it, this role. It did not suit him to question grown men about their intentions, to worry about who was naked in bed with whom. These weren’t the things he wanted to be interested in. It made him feel old, like someone’s father. In fact, he and Cazio were about the same age, and Anne wasn’t much younger.

He remembered Erren, the queen’s bodyguard, warning him not to love Muriele, saying that loving her would get her killed. Erren had been right, of course, but had misplaced the person. It had been Fastia he loved, Fastia who died.

He suddenly missed Erren powerfully; he hadn’t known her well, and when they had spoken, it had been mostly her putting him in his place. But Anne needed someone like Erren, someone deadly, competent, and female. Someone who could protect her with a knife and with wise words.

But Erren had died defending her queen, and there was no one to take her place.

He looked in on Anne. The duchess had moved her to another room, and though Neil couldn’t remember the reasoning behind the change, he felt certain that it was to make her safer.

He found Anne apparently asleep, and Austra was sitting with her. The girl looked as if she had been crying, and her cheeks flushed brilliantly when she saw him.

Neil entered the bedchamber and walked as softly as he could to the far side of the room. Austra got up and followed him.

“She is sleeping?”

“Yes. The draft the duchess gave her seems to have worked.”

“Good.”

Austra bit her lip. “Sir Neil, I would talk with you for a moment, if I may. I have something I must confess. Will you listen to me?”

“I’m not a sacritor, Lady Austra,” he said.

“I know that, of course. You are our guardian. And I fear I abandoned my lady when she most needed me.”

“Really? You think you might have stopped the killer? Do you have resources that I don’t know about?”

“I have a knife.”

“The assassin killed two men who had swords. I can’t imagine that you would have fared better than they.”

“Yet I might have tried.”

“Fortunately, that was not tested. I wasn’t here, either, Austra. We are all very fortunate that Cazio happened by.”

Austra hesitated. “He did not just… happen… by.”

“Doubtless the saints guided him,” Neil said, gently. “That is all I need to know.”

A small tear began in the corner of Austra’s eye. “It is too much,” she said. “It is all too much.”

Neil thought she would collapse into weeping, but instead the girl dried her eyes with her sleeve.

“But it can’t be, can it?” she said. “I shall be with her, sir knight, from here on, I assure you. I will not be distracted. Nor will I sleep when she sleeps. If the only thing I can do is to scream once before I die, at least I will not die thinking myself an utter failure.”

Neil smiled. “That’s a fierce thing to say.”

“I am not fierce,” Austra said. “I am not much of anything, really—just a maidservant. I have no gentle birth, no parents, nothing to recommend me but her affection. I have forgotten myself and my station. I will not do it again.”

Neil put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t speak with shame of your birth,” he said. “My mother and father were steadholders, nothing more. There is no gentle blood in me, either, but I was born to good people, honorable people. No one can ask for better than that. And no one, no matter their birth, can ask for anything better than a loyal friend who loves them. You are fierce; I can see it in you. And you are a person of note, Austra. Hard wind and rain can wear down even a stone, and you have been in storm after storm. Yet here you are, still with us, worn but still ready to fight for what you love.

“Do not barter yourself away for nothing. The only shame comes in surrendering to despair. That’s something I know all too well.”

Austra smiled faintly. She had begun to cry again, but her face was steady. “I believe you do, Sir Neil,” she said. “Thank you for your kind words.”

He squeezed her shoulder and let his hand drop. He felt older again.

“I’ll be outside the door,” he said. “If you call, I’ll be here.”

“Thank you, Sir Neil.”

“And you, milady. And despite your vow, I urge you to sleep now. I will not, I promise you.”

Anne woke from a dream so incomprehensible as to be terrifying. She lay gasping, staring at the ceiling, trying to assure herself that the Black Marys she could not remember were the best kind.

As the nightbale faded, she gathered her surroundings. She was in the room she and her sisters had called “the cave” because it had no windows. It was also rather large and oddly shaped. She had never stayed in the room before, but they all had played in it when she was very young, pretending it was the lair of a Scaos where they might discover treasure, though only at great peril, of course.

Aunt Elyoner had moved her here, presumably, because she would be safer from another attempt at murder. She assumed that meant that there were no hidden passages to let her death in.

Austra lay back on a nearby couch, head turned up, mouth open, her scratchy almost snore a comfortingly normal sound. A few candles burned here and there, and a very low flame burned in the hearth.

Anne wondered for the first time why the room had so many couches and beds. Upon further reflection, she decided she did not really want to know what entertainment Elyoner would plan in a room with no windows.

“How do you feel, plum?” a faint voice asked.

Anne jumped slightly, turned her head, and sat up. She regarded Elyoner, who sat on a stool studying some cards that lay on a small table.

“My arm hurts,” Anne said. It did; it throbbed in time with her heartbeat beneath the tight bandages.

“I’ll have Elcien examine you in a little while. He assures me that when it heals, you will scarcely know it happened. Not like that nasty place on your leg. How did you get that?”

“An arrow,” Anne replied. “In Dunmrogh.”

“You’ve had quite the adventure, haven’t you?”

Anne coughed a weak laugh. “Enough to know that there’s no such thing as adventure.”

Elyoner smiled her mysterious little smile and dealt herself another card. “Of course there is, dove. Just as there is such a thing as a poem, an epic, a tragedy. It’s just that it doesn’t exist in real life. In real life we have terror, and problems, and sex. It’s when it gets told as a story that it becomes adventure.”

“That’s exactly what I meant,” Anne said. “I don’t think I will ever be able to read such stories again.”

“Perhaps not,” Elyoner replied. “But however things go, it shall be some time before you are even afforded the chance. Though I hope for your sake, my dear, that you are eventually gifted with enough boredom to consider it.”

Anne smiled. “Yes, I hope that, too, Aunt Elyoner. So tell me, has anything terrible happened while I slept?”

“Terrible? No. Your young knight had some questions for your young swordsman concerning his dueling apparel.”

“I suppose he was next door with Austra,” Anne murmured. She glanced warily at her friend, but her steady breathing continued.

“I suppose he was,” Elyoner replied. “Does that trouble you?”

Anne considered that for a moment, her head cocked to one side. “Not at all,” she replied. “She’s welcome to him.”

“Is she really?” Elyoner said, an odd lilt to her voice. “How liberal of you.”

Anne gave her aunt a look that she hoped would bring an end to the subject. In point of fact, she wasn’t that happy about it. That Austra and Cazio had been naked, almost certainly doing that, just a wall away from her, felt—well, disrespectful.

Still, Cazio’s presence had been fortunate. Again. It was good to know she had someone who would throw himself naked at an enemy to defend her, especially when his heart seemed to be occupied elsewhere. She had profoundly misjudged Cazio when first they had met; she had thought him a braggart, a blowhard, and an incorrigible flirt. The latter was still true, and her chief concern for Austra was that he might prove himself fickle, as well.

But he had been so constant as their protector, so steadfast, that she was starting to believe that he might be less feckless in matters of the heart than he at first appeared. If she had suspected that when first they met…

She realized Elyoner was studying her now, and not the cards. Her aunt’s grin had broadened.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing, dove.” She looked back at her cards. “In any event, Austra is distraught. She stayed awake all night watching you; she only agreed to sleep when I arrived. Sir Neil is outside.”

“Will you tell me what happened between him and Fastia?” Anne asked.

Elyoner shook her head slightly. “Nothing unnatural. Nothing so bad, and not nearly as much as either deserved. Let it stay at that, won’t you? It would be far better that way.”

“I saw her,” Anne said.

“Saw who?”

“Fastia. In my dream. She warned me of the assassin.”

“She would,” Elyoner said without a trace of skepticism. “She always loved you.”

“I know. I wish I had been nicer to her the last time I saw her.”

“The only way to never have that regret is to be unfailingly nice all the time,” Elyoner said. “I cannot imagine how terrible life would be if I had to live it like that.”

“But you are nice all the time, Aunt Elyoner.”

“Pish,” she said. Then her eyes widened. “Why, look at that! The cards are predicting good news today.”

Anne heard boots in the hall, and the hair on her arms suddenly prickled.

“How’s that?” she asked.

“A beloved relation is coming and bringing gifts.”

A rap sounded at the door.

“Are we ready to receive visitors?” Elyoner asked.

“Who is it?” Anne asked, hesitation in her voice.

Elyoner clucked and switched her finger about. “The cards aren’t that specific, I’m afraid,” she said.

Anne pulled the folds of her dressing gown tighter.

“Come in,” she called.

The door creaked, and a tall male form stood there. It was several heartbeats before Anne recognized him.

“Cousin Artwair!” she cried.

“Hello, little saddle burr,” Artwair replied, stepping to her bedside and reaching down for her hand. His gray eyes were stern, as they usually were, but she could tell he was happy enough to see her.

She hadn’t been called “saddle burr” in a long time, and she remembered that it was Artwair who had coined that nickname for her. He’d found her in the stables hidden behind a heap of saddles when she was eight. She couldn’t remember what she had been avoiding at the time, only Cousin Artwair lifting her up with his strong hands…

Something snapped into focus then, and she gasped.

Artwair had only one hand now. Where his right hand ought to be, there was only a bandaged stump.

“What happened to your—Oh, Artwair, I’m so sorry.”

He lifted the stump, looked at it, and shrugged. “Don’t be. That’s the life of a warrior. I’m lucky that’s all I lost. How can I complain when I still have another, and eyes to see you with? So many of my men lost everything.”

“I-I don’t even know where to begin,” Anne said. “So much has happened…”

“I know a lot of it,” Artwair said. “I know about your father and your sisters. Elyoner has been catching me up on the rest.”

“But what about you? Where have you been?”

“On the eastern marches of the King’s Forest, lighting—” He paused. “Things. It seemed important at first, but then we realized they never really come out of the forest. Then I got word of what Robert’s been up to in Eslen, and I thought I ought to check into it.”

“My uncle Robert’s gone mad, I think,” Anne said. “He’s imprisoned my mother. Did you know that?”

“Auy.”

“I’ve determined to do what I can to free her and take back the throne.”

“Well,” Artwair said, “I might be of some help there.”

“Yes,” Anne said. “I hoped you would say that. I don’t know much about waging war, really, nor do any of my companions. I need a general, Cousin.”

“I would be honored to serve you in that regard,” Artwair replied. “Even one man can make a difference.”

Then he smiled a little more broadly and fondly mussed her hair.

“Of course, I’ve also brought my army.”

13 Sonitum

Gray dawn spilled into the valley as Stephen and Ehan raced toward the river. The horses proved unrideable, bucking and rearing uncontrollably, so they had to lead them.

The earth shivered beneath Stephens boots, and sick unreasoning fear threatened to overwhelm him. It felt as if everything was too loud and too bright, and he wanted to tell everyone he just needed a rest, a day or so to himself.

Ehan, too, was flushed and wide-eyed. Stephen wondered if this was how field mice felt when they heard the screech of a hawk, knowing the terror in their bones even when they hadn’t seen the predator itself.

He kept turning back, and just as they reached the base of the orchard, he saw it.

The monastery was raised up on a hill, its graceful, exuberant line etched against a lead sky faintly patinaed with amber. A peculiar violet light flickered in one of the highest windows of the bell tower; Stephen felt his face warming, as if he were looking at the sun.

An eldritch fog rose around the base of the structure, and at first Stephen thought what he saw was smoke rising up, until his saint-sharpened eyes picked out the details: the beetle-green lamps of its eyes, the teeth it showed as it opened its mouth, the long sinew of its body twining up the tower.

Everything else faded away: Ehan urging him on, the men at the bottom of the hill calling frantically, the distant tolling of the clock. Only the monster existed.

But “monster” wasn’t nearly the right word. The greffyn was a monster. The utin, the nicwer—those were monsters, creatures from an elder time somehow restored to a world that had believed itself sane. But everything in Stephen screamed that this—this was a difference not only of degree but of kind. Not a monster but a god, a Damned Saint.

His knees trembled, and he dropped onto them, and as he did so, its eyes turned toward him. Across the distance of a quarter of a league their gazes met, and Stephen felt something so far beyond human emotion that his body could not contain it much less understand it.

“Saints,” Ehan said. “Saints, it sees us. Stephen—”

Whatever Ehan meant to say was cut short as the violet light flared again. This time it didn’t confine itself to the single window. Instead, it spewed from every part of the great monastery. It brightened unbearably, and d’Ef suddenly was gone, replaced by a sphere of intolerable radiance.

“Fratrex Pell!” Stephen heard Ehan gasp.

The first crest of sound brought tears of pain and horror to his eyes. Then he didn’t hear anything at all, though he felt the blast against his face. When his other senses returned, Stephen grabbed Ehan and pushed him to the ground just as the second shock swept past, a horizontal sleet of stone and heat that sheared the upper branches of the trees and sent cascades of burning twigs down upon them.

Ehan’s mouth was moving, but there was no sound except a long drawn-out tolling like the largest bell in the world.

Stephen lifted himself gingerly, his gaze drawing toward where he had last seen the monastery. Now he saw only a cloud of dark smoke.

His first grief was for the books, the precious, irreplaceable books. Then he thought about the men who had sacrificed themselves, and a shiver of guilt ran through him.

He reached up to touch his ears, wondering if the drums had been burst, if his loss of hearing would be temporary or permanent. The ringing in his head was so loud, it made him dizzy, and the world his eyes saw seemed unreal. He was reminded of when he walked the faneway of Saint Decmanus; his senses had been stripped from him one by one, until he had been nothing more than a presence moving though space. Another time he apparently had been dead, and though he could see nothing of the quick world, he could feel and hear it. Here he was again, pushed a little beyond the bounds of the world, as if that was where he belonged.

He frowned, then remembered the time when his friends had thought him dead. There had been a face, a woman’s face, with red hair but with features too terrible to gaze upon.

How could he have forgotten that?

Why did he remember it now?

Dizziness overwhelmed him, and he fell to his knees again and began to vomit. He felt Ehan’s hand on his back and was ashamed at being down on all fours like a beast, but there was nothing he could do about it.

As his breath slowed and he felt a little better, he noticed that the vibration had returned, a quivering of the earth beneath his palms and knees. His mind, usually so quick, took a moment to grasp what his body was trying to tell him.

He came shakily back to standing and looked again toward d’Ef.

He still couldn’t see anything but smoke, but it didn’t matter. He could feel it coming. Whatever dread force the fratrex had released, it hadn’t been enough to slay the woorm.

Shakily, he grasped Ehan by the arm and pulled him toward the horses. There were two other men there. One was a young fellow in burnt orange clerical robes. He had a large bulbous nose, green eyes, and ears that might have looked better on a larger head. The other man, Stephen recognized, a huntsman named Henne. He was a little older, maybe thirty, with a sun-browned face and broken teeth. Stephen remembered him as competent, uncomplicated, and friendly in a rough fashion.

At the moment they were all distracted by the discovery that they couldn’t hear.

Stephen got their attention by waving his hands. Then he mimed feeling the ground, pointing back toward where d’Ef had stood; he shook his head no, then pointed to the horses. The other monk already understood; Henne suddenly nodded and mounted up, gesturing for them all to follow.

Probably also bereft of hearing, the horses actually seemed less skittish than before, though much inclined to depart. Mounted, Stephen couldn’t feel the woorm through the earth anymore, but he had no doubt it was coming. It must follow scent, he mused, like a hound, or perhaps it uses some faculty that has never been documented. He wished he’d had a better look at it.

As they rode through a forest rendered eerily silent, he thought through what legend said of such creatures, but what he mostly remembered were tales of knights who fought and defeated them with sword or lance. Now that he had seen the woorm at a distance, that seemed so impossible that Stephen had to assume that if there was any reality at all in such tales, they spoke of some smaller cousin of the thing he had just seen.

What else could he recall?

They lived in caverns or deep water; they hoarded gold; their blood was venom but paradoxically could convey supernatural power under the right circumstances. They were much like dragons, but dragons were supposed to have wings.

And woorms weren’t dumb beasts. Woorms were supposed to have the power of speech and terrible, crafty minds always devising evil. They were said to be sorcerers, and the very oldest texts he could remember suggested that they had enjoyed some special relationship with the Skasloi.

He also remembered an engraving of the Briar King gripping a horned serpent. The caption had read—

Had read—

He closed his eyes and saw the page.

Vincatur Ambiom. “Subduer of woorms.”

So all he had to do was find the Briar King, and he would save them.

Stephen laughed at that, but no one heard him. Ehan might have thought he was in pain, though, for he looked more concerned than ever; at the moment that was quite a feat.

A bell later they descended into a lowland of white birches and crossed the worn track of the King’s Road. The day had dawned crisp and clear. Away from the woorm, the horses had calmed enough to be ridden.

Stephen reckoned they were riding north more or less, paralleling the Ef River, which ought to be off to their right. The land got lower and wetter until the horses were slogging through standing water. The trees thinned, but fern and cattail rose head-high, obscuring vision beyond the narrow path they followed, which to Stephens eye looked like no more than an animal path of some sort.

Finally Henne led them to slightly higher ground and a trail that had a well-traveled look. He took the horses to a trot, and they varied between that pace and a fast walk for perhaps two bells before they came quite suddenly upon a small cluster of houses.

Stephen didn’t imagine it was a village, more likely a sort of extended family steading. It also was clearly abandoned. The pigpen had fallen into a ruin of rough wooden fence poles; the largest house had holes in its cedar-shake roof. Dead weeds had poked up through hard dirt, and there were hints of snow around the yard.

Henne rode past all of that, down a slight rise to a flowing stream that seemed too small to be the Ef. He dismounted and went over to something suspended between two trees, covered with a tarp. For a moment Stephen feared that he would reveal a corpse when he drew away the cloth, that it was a burial such as he had heard some of the mountain tribes performed.

In fact he had gotten the scale wrong; it was a boat hung by rope above the highest watermark on the witaecs. It looked in fair shape and was large enough to accommodate them.

But not their horses.

Henne set them to the task of removing the harnesses and saddles, and those they placed in the boat. That made sense: the Ef flowed north, which was the direction they wanted to go, but at the city of Wherthen it would join the White Warlock and turn west toward Eslen. They might go upriver from Wherthen if they could find the right sort of vessel, but at some point they would have to find new horses and continue north and east to reach the Bairghs. Better that they didn’t have to buy new tack, as well.

Their task completed, they climbed into the craft. Henne went to the tiller, and Ehan and the other monk took the oars. Stephen watched the horses, which regarded them curiously as they started downstream. He hoped they had enough sense to scatter before the woorm reached them.

He tapped Ehan and made a rowing motion, but the little man shook his head, pointing instead to the packages of scrifti and books. Stephen nodded and set about securing them with twine in case the boat should capsize. When he was done with that, he dipped his hand in the icy-cold water, not long from the mountains.

He thought he felt the faint vibration of the woorm, but he couldn’t be certain. As he watched the prow of the boat cut the river, a few flakes of snow began to fall, vanishing without a ripple as they struck the quicksilver surface.

There seemed a world of meaning in that, but he was too tired, far too tired to search for it.

He wondered how Winna was. And Aspar, and poor Ehawk.

His limbs were made of stone; he couldn’t move and was able to open his eyes only with terrific effort.

He was in his own bed, at home in Cape Chavel, but the familiar mattress was draped in soft black sheets, and the curtains hung about it were also black, though diaphanous enough for him to make out the suffused glow of candlelight in the room beyond.

He felt as if he were sinking into himself, growing heavier. He knew he must be dreaming, but he couldn’t make it stop any more than he could move his limbs or scream.

Beyond the curtain but between his eyes and the light, something moved: a darkness cast upon the cloth, walking around his bed, a shape sometimes human and sometimes something else. Something no more large than small, something that was whatever it wanted to be. His eyes—the only things he could move—followed it until it was behind him.

He couldn’t shift his head to follow it there, but he could hear its heavy step, smell the air thickening as the curtains rustled ever so softly and the shadow fell across his face.

He was suddenly, acutely aware of his manhood, of a warmth and tingling that grew along with his terror. It was as if something were touching him, something soft.

He lifted his eyes and saw her. His heart expanded like his lungs, and it was exquisitely painful.

Her hair was effulgent copper, so bright that it burned through his lids when he closed them. Her smile was wicked and erotic and beautiful, and her eyes were like jewels of a bright but unknown color. Taken together, her face was so terrifying and so glorious that he could bear it for only an instant.

His entire body shook with unfamiliar sensations as she pressed down upon him, her flesh melting on him like butter and honey, and still he couldn’t move.

My child, my man, my lover, she crooned in a voice that was no more a voice than her features formed a face.

You will know me.

He awoke gasping or, rather, with the sensation of gasping. There was no sound.

Ehan’s face resolved, as did Henne’s. He was back in the boat, and he could move again.

And he remembered something, something important.

“What river is this?” he asked, feeling the words but not hearing them. Ehan saw his lips move and looked angry, touching his ears.

Stephen pointed to the river. The stream they had started on was probably a tributary, but they were on a river of some size now, bounded by substantial banks.

“Is this the Ef River or some tributary?”

Ehan frowned, then mouthed a word that looked like Ef.

Stephen sat up. How long had he been asleep?

“Are we near Whitraff ?” he asked. “How far are we from Whitraff ?” He exaggerated the shape of the words, but Ehan’s puzzled expression wasn’t replaced by anything else.

Exasperated, Stephen started working at the cords of one of the oiled leather bags, digging around for parchment and ink. It was stupid to have to waste parchment like this, but he couldn’t think of any other way.

The ink wasn’t where he thought it was, and by the time he found it, houses were becoming suspiciously common along the banks of the river. Desperately, working on his knees, he scribbled out the message.

There is a monster near Whitraff village, a nicwer. It lives in the water. It is very dangerous.

He passed the note to Ehan. The little man blinked, nodded, and gestured for Stephen to take his oar. Then he went back to the tiller to talk to Henne.

Or gesture at him, rather. When he showed Henne Stephen’s note, Henne merely shrugged. Ehan pointed toward the bank.

Around the bend, Stephen saw the familiar buildings of Whitraff coming into view. Aspar, Winna, Ehawk, Leshya, and he had been there less than two months before and had barely survived the nicwer’s attentions.

Henne steered them over to one of the ruined docks, where Ehan began trying to explain to him by signs what was the matter. Stephen searched the waters for any indication of the beast but couldn’t make anything out.

It was difficult to argue without words, but Henne pointed to the river and then held his hands about a handspan apart. Then he pointed in the direction they had come and stetched his hand as far apart as he could. After a bit more pantomime, Stephen gathered that the gist of Henne’s sentiment was that whatever might be lurking in the waters around Whitraff, it couldn’t possibly be as bad as the woorm, and their best chance of outrunning the woorm was on the river. So despite Stephen’s warning, a few moments later they were back on the water.

They passed the ruins of Whitraff without incident, however.

Stephen wondered once again where Aspar and Winna were. Had they come looking for him? Winna would want to. Aspar might, although if he was beginning to sense Stephen’s feelings for Winna, he might not. In any event, both were bound to do whatever Anne Dare commanded, and she needed every knife, sword, and bow she could get if she meant to retake her throne.

Maybe Winna had come after him alone. After all, she had set out alone to find Aspar. But then again, she loved Aspar, or thought she did.

To Stephen it seemed a bit ridiculous. Aspar was two decades Winna’s senior. She would spend her middle years wiping the drool from his face. Would he give her children? Stephen couldn’t imagine that, either. The holter was admirable in most ways, but not in the ways that make for a good husband.

Then again, Stephen wasn’t really any better, was he? If he really loved Winna, he would be searching for her right now, eager to be at her side. And he wanted to be, he really did. But he wanted this more: to unravel the mysteries of language and time.

That was why he was doing this; not because the fratrex had asked him to, not because he feared the woorm, not even because he believed he could prevent whatever new horror was to be released upon the world, but because he had to know.

They never saw the nicwer. Perhaps it had died of its wounds; perhaps it simply had become wary of men. Maybe it could sense that its prey couldn’t hear its deadly song.

But the next day, when fish began floating to the surface of the river, Stephen reckoned that maybe the nicwer knew when to make way for its better.

14 War Council

Anne had seen the great hall of Glenchest many times. Sometimes it had been empty when she and her sisters had sneaked into it to enjoy the echos that boomed in the dark and the cavernous reaches of its high-arched roof. On other occasions she had witnessed it full of light, glittering with decorations, packed with lords in elegant suits and ladies in dazzling gowns.

She had never seen it full of warriors before.

Elyoner had ordered a huge, long table brought in, and a large armchair placed at the head of it.

That was where Anne sat now, feeling uncomfortable, staring around at the faces, trying to fit names even to the familiar ones. She wished she had paid more attention at her father’s court, but there was nothing to do about it now.

The men—and they were all men, all thirty-two of them—looked back at her, some staring frankly, others averting their gaze when they thought she was looking. But she knew that all of them were studying her, probing her, trying to figure her out.

She was wondering what to say when Artwair stood up and bowed.

“May I, Your Majesty?” he asked, gesturing at the assembly.

“Please,” she said.

He nodded, then raised his voice.

“Welcome, all of you,” he said, and the murmur of voices receded.

“You all know me. I’m a plain man, not given to long speeches, especially at times like this. This is a time for spears, not words, but I reckon a few words have to be spoken to gather the spears together.

“Here’s what it comes down to, as I see it. Not a year ago, our liege, king, and emperor was murdered, and so were two of his daughters. Now, whether that was Black Robert’s work I don’t know, but I do know that Crotheny had a king, a perfectly legitimate one, and now an usurper sits the throne. I might be still for that, but he’s invited Hansa in for a visit and offered them our former queen, Muriele. You all know what that means.”

“Maybe we do and maybe we don’t,” one fellow shouted back. He was of medium build, with a hairline crept halfway back to the crown of his skull and startling blue eyes. “Maybe peace with Hansa is all it means.”

“And maybe the crows only perch on the dead to give em blessings and pay respects, auy, Lord Kenwulf? I know you’re not so foolish as that, my lord.”

Kenwulf shrugged reluctantly. “Who knows what Robert has planned? The praifec endorses him. It might be we know too little about his designs. Maybe they only seem sinister from afar. And you have to admit—no offense to Archgreffess Anne—that we might ask for a better sovereign than Charles.”

“I think we all understand your point about Charles,” Artwair agreed. “The saints chose to touch him, and I’m sure even his mother would allow that the throne does not suit him. But there is another legitimate heir to the throne, and she sits right here.”

Most of the gazes had gone to Artwair, but now they returned to Anne, sharper and hungrier than ever.

A portly man with shockingly red hair and black eyes heaved himself to his feet.

“May I speak on that, my lord?”

“By all means, Lord Bishop,” Artwair replied.

“King William did manage to persuade the Comven to legislate the article that would allow a woman to take the throne. But this is something that has never actually been done before. It has never been tested. The only reason such a thing was ever considered was, in fact, young Charles’ condition.

“By the older, more established rule, if the son proved unfit to be king, the crown would pass to his son, which, of course, Charles does not have. Failing that, the crown quite legitimately goes to Robert as the only remaining male heir.”

“Yes, yes,” a sallow-faced man interrupted testily. Anne remembered him as the Greft of Dealward. “But Lord Bishop, you leave out the fact that we had our doubts not only about Charles but about Robert, as well. That was why we voted as we did.”

“Yes,” Bishop acknowledged, “but some would argue it were better to have a devil on the throne than an untested girl, especially in times like these.”

“When devils roam freely, you mean?” Artwair asked drily. “You would have evil inside and outside the walls?”

The man shrugged. “The rumors about Robert grow darker. I’ve even heard that he doesn’t bleed as other men. But we have heard things about Anne, as well. The praifec himself has condemned her as a shinecrafter, the product of education in a coven turned wholly to evil.

“And the stories we hear of her actions at Dunmrogh are… disturbing,” he added.

Anne felt an odd dislocation then, as if she were watching the proceedings from far, far away. Could they be talking about her? Could things have become so twisted?

Or were they twisted? She’d been to only one coven, the Coven Saint Cer. It was true that her education had been in such subjects as poison and murder. Wasn’t that evil? And the things she could do—had done—wouldn’t they qualify as shinecraft?

What if the praifec was right, and…

No.

“If you wish to accuse me of something, Lord Bishop, please have the decency to address me directly,” Anne heard herself say. She suddenly felt distilled back into her body, and she leaned forward from the makeshift throne.

“Was Virgenya Dare a shinecrafter because she wielded the power of the saints?” she continued. “The man who accuses me, Praifec Hespero—I have evidence, a letter, in fact, that proves he was in league with churchmen who participated in a pagan abomination and performed cruel murder in the process. If you have heard anything of Dunmrogh, you know it was not I who nailed men, women, and children to wooden posts and disemboweled them.

“It was not I who chanted over that innocent blood to awaken some horrible demon. But my companions and I stopped them and their hideous rite. So perhaps, Lord Bishop—and all of you—well, perhaps I am a shinecrafter. Perhaps I am evil. But if that is the case, then there is no good here at all, for certainly the praifec and those churchmen who attend him do not serve the holy saints.

“Nor does my uncle Robert. He will give our country over to the darkest forces you can imagine, and you all know it. That’s why you’re here.”

She sat back and, in the momentary silence that followed, felt her sudden burst of confidence waver. But then another of the men she recognized—Sighbrand Haergild, the Marhgreft of Dhaerath—chuckled loudly.

“The lady has a tongue in her,” he said to the assemblage. He stood, a lean old man who somehow reminded her of the trees on the coast cliffs, an oak shaped by wind and spray, with wood as hard as iron.

“I’ll admit that I’m the first to wonder if a woman ought to be sovereign,” he said. “I opposed William’s campaign and the Comven’s decision. And yet here we are, and it is done. I don’t understand all this talk of shinecraft and saints. The only saint I’ve ever trusted is the one who lives in my sword.

“But I have spent my whole life staring across the Dew River at Hansa. I’ve borne the brunt of the marchland plotting, and I would not see William’s wife wed to a Hansan, would not see one of them sit on even a chamber pot in Eslen. Robert has certainly gone mad to make any deal with the Reiksbaurgs, and that’s proof enough to me that William was right, that the only hope for Crotheny lies in this girl.

“I think it no coincidence that her sisters were murdered on the same day as William, do you?” He stared around the room, and none responded to his challenge. “No, Black Robert was clearing his path to the throne.”

“We don’t know that,” Kenwulf cautioned. “It might as easily have been she who arranged all that.” He pointed at Anne.

That struck through her like a bolt.

“What… did… you say?” she managed to choke out.

“I’m not—I’m just saying, lady, for all we know—I’m not actually accusing…”

Anne pushed herself to her feet, acutely aware of the sudden throbbing in her arms and legs.

“Here I look you in the eye, Lord Kenwulf, and I tell you that I had nothing to do with the death of my family. The very idea is obscene. I have been hounded by the same murderers over half this world. But you look in my eye. Then you do the same with my uncle and see who holds your gaze and does not blink.”

She felt a sort of rushing in her ears and heard the cackle of demonic laughter somewhere behind her.

No, she thought. Would even so many men be enough to protect her? Probably not…

She suddenly realized that she was sitting again, and Austra was offering her water. She also felt as if she had missed something. Everyone was staring at her with concerned expressions.

“—injuries sustained both at Dunmrogh and in an assassination attempt here in Glenchest three nights ago,” Artwair was saying. “She is weak yet, and vile slanders such as Lord Kenwulf conceives do her no good, I assure you.”

“I never meant—” Kenwulf sighed. “I apologize, Your Highness.”

“Accepted,” Anne said frostily.

“Now that that’s done,” Artwair said, “let’s get back to the point, shall we? Lords, Marhgreft Sighbrand speaks the truth, doesn’t he?

“Most of you are here because you are already convinced of what we must do. I am most familiar with this sort of bickering, and I know its root. I also know we do not have time for it. Here is my suggestion, my lords. Each of you speak—in plain king’s tongue—what advantage you desire from Her Majesty once she has been placed on the throne. I think you will find her fair and generous in her treatment of her allies. We will begin with you, Lord Bishop, if you please.”

The rest of the day was a Black Mary for Anne. She hardly understood most of the requests; well, she understood them, but not their importance. The Greft of Roghvael, for instance, asked for a reduction on the tax on the trade of rye, which Artwair advised her to deny him, giving him instead a seat on the Comven. Lord Bishop’s desire was for a position and title in the emperor’s household, an hereditary one. This—again at Artwair’s behest—she granted.

And so it went. That brief moment when she had felt something like a queen had vanished, and she was once again a little girl who hadn’t done her lessons. For all she knew, she was making Artwair the king, and given what her aunt had said about trusting relatives, that was no idle worry.

But she also knew that by herself she could never organize something so complicated as a war.

The proceedings ended only because Artwair declared a break for the night. Elyoner had prepared an entertainment for the guests, but Anne avoided that, sending Austra to the kitchen for some soup and wine and retiring to her quarters.

Neil MeqVren went with her.

“Did you understand any of that?” she asked him once they were seated.

“Not a lot, I’m afraid,” he admitted. “War was much simpler where I come from.”

“What do you mean?”

“My family served Baron Fail. If he told us to go and fight someplace, we did, because that’s what we did. There wasn’t much more to it, thank goodness.”

“I suppose I imagined I would make some sort of speech about right and wrong and the honor of fighting for the throne, and men would just fall in line.” She sighed.

Neil smiled. “That might work for a battle. Not for a war, I think. Then again, I mostly know battles. And I thought you did quite well, you know.”

“But not well enough.”

“No, at least not yet. It’s one thing, I suppose, to ask men to risk their lives. It’s quite another to ask them to risk their families, their lands, their aspirations, their dreams…”

“Most of them are just greedy, I think.”

“There’s that, too,” Neil granted. “But the fact is, there’s a very good chance we’re going to lose this war, and they all know it. I wish that loyalty to Your Majesty could be enough to make them accept that risk, but—”

“But it isn’t. I’m really just a symbol for them, aren’t I?”

“Maybe,” Neil conceded. “For some of them. Maybe even for most of them. But if you win, you’ll be queen in fact as well as in name. In that case, you can even let Artwair or whoever advises you make all the important decisions. But I don’t think that’s how things will go. I think you will lean only until you can stand.”

Anne stared down at her lap.

“I never wanted this at all, you know,” she said faintly. “I only wanted to be left alone.”

“That’s not really your choice,” Neil said. “Not anymore. I’m not sure it ever was.”

“I know that,” Anne said. “Mother tried to explain it to me. I didn’t understand then. Maybe I don’t now, but I’m starting to.”

Neil nodded. “You are,” he agreed. “And for that I’m sorry.”

15 An Ambush

Winna lost her mind within a bell of entering the Halafolk rewn.

Aspar had noticed her breath coming quicker and quicker, but suddenly she began choking, trying to talk but not getting any words out. She sat heavily on an upjut of stone and rested there, quaking, rubbing her shoulders, trying to find her breath.

He couldn’t blame her. The cavern had become a charnel house, a place of death on a scale that paled anything Aspar had ever seen. The dead lay embanked on either side of a river of blood, and it was easy to imagine what had happened: the woorm crawling along, the slinders throwing themselves at it from either side, tearing at its armor with bare fingers and teeth. Those who weren’t crushed by its passage had succumbed to its poison.

Of course, they weren’t all dead yet; a few still were moving. He and Winna had tried to help the first few, but they were so clearly beyond all hope that they now just avoided them. Most didn’t even seem to see them, and blood ran freely from their mouths and nostrils. He could tell from the way they breathed that something was wrong inside, in their lungs. Surely it was too late for the Sefry medicine to have any effect. Anyway, he and Winna needed what was left.

If they came across Stephen or Ehawk…

“Stephen!” Aspar shouted into the hollowness. “Ehawk!”

The two of them might be anywhere. It could take months to find them if they were among the dead.

Aspar put his hand on Winna’s shoulder. She was trembling, mumbling.

“We’re… we’re not…”

Over and over again.

“Come on,” he told her. “Come on, Winn; let’s get out of this place.”

She looked up at him, her eyes filled with greater despair than he had imagined her capable of.

“We can’t get out,” she said softly. Then something seemed to explode in her. “We can’t get out!” she shrieked. “Don’t you understand? We can’t get out! We’ve been here! We’ve already been here, and it just gets worse and worse, everything, we’re… we’re not…” Her words tapered off into an incoherent wail.

He held her shoulders, knowing all he could really do was wait until it passed.

If it passed.

With a sigh he sat next to her.

“I’ve been in this rewn before,” he said, not sure if she was listening. “It’s not much farther to the city. We could—it should be cleaner there. You could rest.”

She didn’t answer. Her teeth were gritted and her eyes squeezed shut, and her breath was still racing with her heartbeat.

“That’s it,” Aspar said. He picked her up. She didn’t resist but buried her head in the crook of her arm and wept.

He dithered briefly, torn between continuing on and going back, but then it struck him how utterly stupid it would be to go after Fend and a woorm, carrying Winna all the while. True, he might hide her in the Sefry city, but that might be exactly where Fend and his pet had come to a stop. With his luck, the instant he left to look for them, Fend would sneak in from behind and make off with Winna again.

So he started back the way they had come.

The woorm had gone into the rewn; it had to come out. Aspar knew of only three entrances to the rewn: this one, another many leagues north, and a third just over the next ridge.

And suddenly he had a plan that made sense.

The horses were still outside—and alive—when he exited the cave. He got Winna up onto Tumble, made sure she had enough awareness to stay on, then took the horses’ reins to lead them. They started winding their way up the hillside.

Half a league up, he felt his breath coming easier and he started to sweat, even though it was bitterly cold. His step strengthened, and at first he thought it was just that he had removed himself from the woorm’s venomed trail.

Then he realized it was more than that. He was surrounded by life again, by sap that was slow but not dead. Squirrels scampered through the branches above, and a flight of fluting geese sang by high overhead. He watched them, smiling in spite of himself, but felt a slight chill as they suddenly changed course.

“There we are,” he said, urging Ogre up the slope in the direction the geese had avoided. “It’s there, just as I thought.”

Two bells later, about a bell before sunfall, they reached the top of the ridge. Winna had calmed, and Aspar got her down, then situated her in the roots of a big tree. Reluctantly, he left the horses saddled, because for all he knew they might have to bolt at any moment. Could a horse outrun a woorm? Maybe for a little while.

“Winna?” He knelt and tucked another blanket around her.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. It was faint and she didn’t sound good, but it lifted the strongest fear off his heart: that her spirit had gone away. He had known such things to happen; he’d rescued a boy whose family had been slaughtered by the Black Wargh. He’d left the lad in the care of a widow in Walker’s Bailey. She’d tried to take care of him, but he never spoke, not for two years, and then he drowned himself in the mill creek.

“These are mirk and horrible things,” Aspar said. “I would be more worried if they didn’t upset you.”

“I was more than upset,” she said. “I was—useless.”

“Hush. Listen, I’m going to climb up for a better view. You stay here, watch Ogre. If something’s coming, he’ll know before you do. Can you do that?”

“Yah,” Winna said. “I can do that.”

He kissed her, and she answered with a sort of desperate hunger. He knew he ought to say something, but nothing seemed right.

“I won’t go far” was what he settled on.

He’d taken them up to a section of the ridge too rocky to support many trees. For his watchtower he chose a honey locust perched on the edge of a broken stone shelf. From there he’d be able to see down to this new entrance to the rewn. Though he couldn’t make out the opening itself, he was close enough that he would be able to see the monstrous serpent-thing should it appear.

Looking the other way, he had an even better view. The River Ef wound through a pleasant valley checkered with pastures and orchards. On a rise about a league away he made out the bell tower of the monastery where Stephen had been headed when first they had met. The last time Aspar had been here, he’d been wounded and half out of his mind, and if it hadn’t been for Stephen, he would have died.

At the moment the valley looked peaceful in the twilight, cloaked in a slight mist drifting through the neat rows of apple trees where they waited for spring’s kiss to bud them.

Where was Stephen now? Dead, probably, since he had been with the slinders. Ehawk was probably dead, too.

He ought to feel something, had felt something back when he saw the boys fall. But his heart had tightened up inside him, and the only emotion he recognized was anger.

That was a good thing, he reckoned.

Night seeped down through the clouds, and as the world his eyes knew faded, the deeper domain of scent and sound intensified. Winter sounds were spare: the chilling shrill of a screech owl, the wind catching its belly on bony branches, the scuff of small claws on bark.

Smell was the more palpable sense: leaves steeping in cold pools, the smell of rot kept slow by cold, the grassy scent of cow dung from the pastures below, and smoke—hickory and old apple burning down in the valley, wormy witaec when the wind shifted from the Midenlands, and something nearer—oak, yes, but he also made out the minty scent of sassafras, sumac, and huckleberry: understory plants.

And pine kindling.

He strained his ears and heard the faint ticking and popping of a fire. It was downslope, not too far away.

He eased out of the tree, afraid to breathe. If there was a monk down there who had walked the same faneway as Stephen…

Then they already would have heard him, probably. The Order of Mamres—from which most of their churchish enemies had come—fought like mad lions but did not have senses any sharper than his. It was they who had walked the faneways of both Decmanus and Mamres who presented the greatest danger.

He found Winna sleeping and again had a moment’s indecision, but the fear of leaving her unguarded was overridden by the need to know who was just down the hill. Besides, Ogre was still there; he would at least create a fuss, even in his weakened state, if someone came around.

He began his slow creep down the slope, going hand to hand and foot to foot with shrubs and small trees that clung to stone and shallow earth. He wasn’t in a hurry; he reckoned he had all night. That was good, since he had to move by feel and instinct.

He reckoned it was two or three bells past midnight when he finally saw the touch of orange glow on a tree trunk below. He couldn’t make out the fire itself, but he could guess where it was. He knew he’d come down too far east, with a sheer drop keeping him from getting the position he wanted.

So he worked his way back uphill and west. The glimpse of light vanished, but he knew where he was going now, and shortly before sunup he found it.

By then the fire was mostly embers, with just a few licks of flame. Aspar could make out someone sitting and someone lying flat but not much more. The campsite was about twelve kingsyards below him, beneath a long, shallow rock shelter.

Would he be able to get a clear shot at them? The angle was bad.

The clouds were gone, but there was no moon, only the distant, unhelpful lamps of the stars. Maybe when the sun cracked his eye, Aspar would be able to find a better position. He settled in to wait, hoping Winna didn’t wake and panic. He didn’t think she would, but after today…

The earth below him was rumbling.

He heard a stone crack and then the sudden rush of rocks sliding down a slope. It wasn’t close, but it wasn’t far, either.

Quickly he heard the rush and roar of breathing and smelled the faint, sickening scent of its breath.

As he’d thought, the woorm had gone through the rewn and was now exiting on the Ef side of the hill. That meant it was about a quarter of a league to his left.

He still couldn’t see it, though he could easily hear it moving down the slope and toward the valley floor.

“There she is,” an unfamiliar male voice said. He had a funny northern-sounding accent.

“I told you,” a second man answered.

That voice wasn’t unfamiliar at all. It was Fend, which was what Aspar had more than half expected. After all, it was all well and good to ride a woorm when it was traveling over open ground, but when your mount burrowed into a cave, you didn’t really want to be on it. Nor would it have been safe riding through a sea of hostile slinders. No, Fend was smarter than that.

The woorm was moving away from him now. Fend was just below.

First things first.

Aspar felt about for a ledge, a branch, anything to allow him the perspective for a clear shot. To his delight, he found a jut of stone he hadn’t known was there. Carefully—very carefully—he let himself onto it belly first, then put an arrow to the string.

“Should we follow it down?” the unknown voice said.

Fend laughed shortly. “The Revesturi won’t all flee. Some of them will fight.”

“Against the waurm?”

“Remember who they are. The Revesturi know some very old faneways and some very potent sacaums. R’s true that none of them is likely to be able to slay our little lovely, but imagine what sort of sacaum they might attempt in the effort.”

“Ah. So once again its better for us to stay out of the way.”

“Precisely. If all goes well, the creature will slay the Revesturi, and if the Darige boy is there, it will bring him to us. But if the priests have some surprise in store…”

Aspar froze at the mention of Stephen.

“What if Darige is slain in the process?”

“They no more wish him dead than we do,” Fend replied. “But if it happens, it happens.”

“He won’t like it.”

“No, he won’t—it would certainly be a serious setback. But only a setback.”

Aspar listened carefully, anxious to catch their every word. Why would Fend be after Stephen? How could a monster like the woorm “bring him”? In its mouth? Who in Grim’s name were the Revesturi, and who did Fend work for?

One of the two figures poked at the fire, and it suddenly flared brighter, providing enough light for him to locate Fends face. Aspar sighted down the arrow, his breathing slow and controlled. This was a shot he could make—of that he had no doubt. And Fend, finally, would be dead.

There was a chance that Fends death might leave some unanswered questions, but he’d just have to take that chance. Whoever the fellow with him was, he seemed to know who their master was. A second shaft would wound him but leave him alive to provide the answers.

Then Aspar would take the antidote and cure himself, Winna, and the horses. When the woorm returned, he’d have the Church’s arrow for that. And maybe Stephen would be with it.

He drew back the string.

Something flashed in his peripheral vision, a purple light.

Fend saw it, too, and straightened.

Everything went white as Aspar released the string. His eyes closed reflexively, and he heard Fend cry out in pain. He tried to open his eyes, to see…

Something struck the mountain like a fist. His belly went queer, and he suddenly realized that the rock he was lying on was sliding out from under him. He was falling.

He flailed, trying to find something to grab, but there was nothing, and he fell for the space of a whole breath before he hit something that bent, broke, and let him keep falling until he fetched hard against a boulder.

He opened his eyes without knowing how long they had been closed. His mouth tasted like dust, and his eyes were full of grit. His ears were ringing as if thunder had just clapped a tree a yard away. He was looking at his hand, which was illuminated by a pale gray light.

Someone nearby was screaming. That was what had wakened him.

He raised his head, but all he saw was a confusion of crumpled vegetation. He hurt everywhere, but he couldn’t tell if anything was broken.

The screaming dropped off to harsh panting.

“That’s got it,” he heard the strange voice say. “The bleeding’s bad.”

“Keep an eye out for him,” Fend’s voice instructed tersely.

“That was Aspar. I know bloody well it was, and you’ll never hear him coming, not after that.”

Aspar allowed himself a tight grin. He’d lost the bow in the fall, but he still had his dirk and ax. Grimacing, he pulled himself to his feet.

That sent a dizziness through him that nearly sat him back down, but he waited through it, breathing as deeply as he could. Fend was right; he could hear their voices—barely—but the belling in his ears would hush over the small sounds of someone creeping up on him.

Now, where exactly were they? He took a step in what he thought was the right direction and for an instant thought he had caught a glimpse of someone ahead, but the light was still dim.

He was starting to move closer when someone grabbed him from behind and wrapped a forearm across his face. He grunted and tried to throw him off, but he was already off balance and he fell rather heavily with his face pressed against the earth. He twisted and kicked, vaguely aware that the ground was shuddering, and a face came into view. It was a familiar face, but not Fend’s.

Ehawk.

The boy pressed a finger to his lips and pointed.

Four kingsyards away a massive wall of scale was sliding though the trees.