The Blood Knight

1 Labyrinth

Alis meant to cut the man’s spine just below his skull, but her fatigue-numbed feet slipped on the slick stone, and the point of her dagger plunged into his collarbone instead.

He screamed and whirled around. She had just enough presence of mind to duck his flailing arms, but his booted foot caught her in the shins, and she gasped as pain shot jagged lines across her vision and she stumbled back into the wall.

He hadn’t dropped his lantern, and they peered at each other in its sanguinary light.

He was a large man—over six feet—all in black, one of the usurper’s Nightstriders. His face was surprisingly feminine for such a big fellow, with a gently tapered chin and round cheeks.

“Bitch,” he snarled, drawing his knife.

Behind him a girl—she might have been eleven—cowered against the wall.

Alis tried to summon the shadow; sometimes it was easy, like snapping a finger inside her head, and sometimes it was very hard, especially when someone had already seen her.

It didn’t come immediately, and she didn’t have time to work at it. So she blew out her breath and let her shoulders sag, let her knife hand drop to her side.

He in turn relaxed for an instant, and with what remained of her strength she struck, launching from the wall, her empty left hand snapping toward his face. She felt a liquid, parting sensation as she plunged her knife into his left side and worked it in and out.

He shrieked again, and a fist clubbed against her head, but she kept pumping the blade until her hand was so slick with blood that she couldn’t keep her grip on the weapon. Then she pushed herself away, gasping, and felt a weird wrenching in her arm. She realized that her arm hurt, that she had been cut, too. She backed into the shadows.

Despite his wounds, the man didn’t stop, either. He lumbered after her, and she ran, feeling her way through the .dark, until she reached the mouth of the tunnel. She ducked into it, hearing only the whine of her breath, then tugged at her breeches, trying to tear a piece to tie on her arm. She couldn’t get it to rip, so she just clamped her hand over the wound and waited.

She could still make out the glow of firelight around the corner; he was there, waiting.

She needed that knife to cut a strip of cloth. She couldn’t wait much longer, either, or she would lose so much blood that she wouldn’t be able to do anything at all.

Cursing under her breath, she rose unsteadily and minced back toward the light.

He was lying facedown, and something about his position suggested to her that he wasn’t faking. The lamp had fallen but hadn’t shattered; it lay on its side guttering, nearly out. She propped it up. He’d dropped his knife, too, and hers was still poking out from between his ribs.

Trying not to faint, Alis took his knife and carefully drove it into his spine, as she had intended to do earlier.

That drew a gasp from beside the stairs. Then a whimper.

The girl. She had forgotten the girl.

“Stay there,” Alis said tersely. “Stay just where you are or I’ll kill you like I killed him.”

The girl didn’t answer; she just continued whimpering.

Alis righted the lantern, cut a piece of her breeches, tied a tourniquet, then sat down to catch her breath and listen. Had anyone heard the Nightstrider scream? If they had, would they be able to determine where it came from?

Eventually, yes. That meant she needed to get back into the tunnels, the ones men couldn’t remember. They would have a hard time following her there.

“Girl, listen to me,” she said.

A face peered up from the bundle of gray cloth.

“I don’t want to die,” she said softly.

“Do what I ask, and I promise you that you will live,” Alis told her.

“But you killed him.”

“Yes, I did. Will you listen to me?”

A small pause.

“Yes.”

“Good. Do you have food? Water? Wine?”

“Reck has some food, I think. He had some bread earlier. And wine, I think.”

“Then get it for me. And anything else he has on him. But don’t try to run. You’ve heard how knives can be thrown?”

“I saw a man on the street do it once. He split an apple.”

“I can do better than that. If you try to run, I’ll put this right in your back. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your name?”

“Ellen.”

“Ellen, do what I asked you. Get his things and bring them here.”

She watched the girl approach the body. When she touched him, she began to cry.

“Did you like him?” Alis asked.

“No. He was mean. But I’ve never seen someone dead.”

And I’ve never killed anyone before, Alis thought. Despite her training, it still didn’t seem real.

“Ellen,” Alis asked, “do all the guards have girls with them?”

“No, lady. Only the Nightstriders.”

“And what are you doing with them, exactly?”

The girl hesitated.

“Ellen?”

“The king says there are secret tunnels down here, tunnels that only girls can see. We’re supposed to find them for him. The men are to protect us.”

“Protect you from me?” Alis asked, feigning a little smile.

Ellen’s eyes gleamed with terror. “N-no,” she stuttered. “The king said a murderer was loose in the dungeons. A man. A big man.”

Ellen had worked as she spoke and had assembled a little pile of things. She picked them up but seemed more reluctant to approach Alis than she had the dead man, which made good sense.

“There,” Alis said. “Good girl.”

“Please,” Ellen whispered. “I won’t tell.”

Alis hardened her heart. The only advantage she had was Robert’s belief that she was dead. If the girl described her—or, worse, knew who she was—that advantage would be lost. She tightened her grip on the knife.

“Just come here,” Alis told her.

Blinking away tears, the girl approached.

“Do it quick, please,” Ellen said, so low that Alis almost couldn’t hear.

Alis looked into the young woman’s eyes, imagined the life going out of them, and sighed. She gripped her shoulder and felt it trembling.

“Keep your word, Ellen,” she said. “Don’t tell anyone you saw me. Just say he excused himself to answer nature’s demands, and then you found him dead. I swear by all the saints it is the right thing to do.”

Ellen’s face shone with wary hope.

“You won’t throw the knife at me?”

“No. Just tell me how you came into the dungeons.”

“Through the Arn Tower stair.”

“Right,” Alis muttered. “Is it still guarded?”

“By ten men,” Ellen confirmed.

“Is there anything else you know that might help me?”

The girl thought for a moment. “They’re filling the dungeons in,” she said.

Alis nodded wearily. She already knew that, too.

“Go on,” Alis told her. “Find your way out.”

Ellen stood and took a few trembling steps, then ran. Alis listened to her skittering footfalls recede, knowing she should have killed the girl—and glad she hadn’t.

Then she turned her attention to the Nightstrider’s things.

He didn’t have much; after all, he hadn’t come down there to stay. It was more luck than anything else that he’d had a kerchief with a piece of hard bread and cheese wrapped in it and greater luck still that he’d brought a wineskin. She took those items, his knife, a leather strap from his baldric, the lamp, and his tinderbox.

Alis had a little bread and wine, then hauled herself up and returned to the relative safety of the ancient passageway.

When she felt she was far enough away, she stopped and dressed her arm again. The wound wasn’t as bad as she feared; the knife had been forced into the two bones of her forearm and had lodged there until she tore free. That was why he hadn’t been able to stab her again and again, as she had him, or turn the knife in the wound.

Yes, this had been, all things considered, a lucky day. Or night. She no longer had the faintest sense of when it was.

She reckoned it had been more than a nineday that she’d been trapped down there. But it might be more than twice that, since she had gone there to free Leovigild Ackenzal.

It was probably best that he had refused to accompany her. On her way back out of the dungeons she’d found that the passage was heavily guarded. That wasn’t good, because it meant her presence had been detected, and it was the only sure way she knew to get out.

Even so, the labyrinth of passages obvious and obscure was so baroque that there had to be another point of egress. She wondered how they knew she had entered the dungeons, but Prince Robert wasn’t stupid. And due to his… condition… he was able to remember the hidden ways. He must have posted guards or set up some sort of alarm. Possibly Hespero or some other churchman had helped with that, but it may have been as simple as flour on the floor to record her tracks. She had been moving in darkness, after all, and wouldn’t have seen it.

For the last nine days the usurper had been finding the passages and blocking them up. The dungeons shuddered with the work of royal engineers, mining and sapping.

There were plenty of passages that he hadn’t found, but none of them seemed to go anywhere except back to the dungeon. And the dungeon was being systematically filled in and closed off, at least those sections which might allow her access to the castle. One whole section—complete with prisoners—had been sealed off already. Those trapped there weren’t dead yet; sometimes she could still hear them pleading for food and water. Their cries were getting weaker, though. She wondered what they had done to end up in the dungeon in the first place and whether they deserved their fate.

Feeling a little better as the food dissolved in her belly, she headed back into the depths. There was one area of the dungeons she had avoided, hoping against hope that she wouldn’t have to brave it, even though it was one place Robert dare not cut off entirely. But she could no longer bow to that fear; the food she’d just taken was probably the last she would get. Whether Ellen said anything or not, a Nightstrider was dead, and Robert doubtless would increase the size of his patrols.

She had lived until now by taking scraps from prisoners, and she’d had a fresh source of water up until two days before, when the walls had blocked it off. Now the only water she had access to was dirty and diseased. She knew that mixing the wine with it would allow her to drink it for a while, but the wine would last only for a few days at best.

From here on out, she would only get weaker.

So she turned toward the whispering.

It wasn’t like the voices of the prisoners. At first she’d thought it was her own thoughts, talking to her, a sign that she was going mad. The voice didn’t make much sense, at least not in words, but what words it spoke were freighted with images and sensations that did not belong in a human head.

But then she remembered a trip to the dungeons with Muriele and knew that the voice she heard was that of the Kept.

The Kept was called that to avoid naming what it really was: the last of the demon race that had enslaved both Men and Sefry—the last of the Skasloi.

As she drew nearer to his domain, the whispering grew louder, and images brightened, scents sharpened. Her fingers felt like claws, and when she put her hand against the wall, she felt a rough scraping, as if her hands were made of stone or metal. She smelled something like rotting pears and sulphur, saw in bright flashes a landscape of scaly trees without leaves, a strange and huge sun, a black fortress by the sea so ancient that its walls and spires were weathered like a mountain. Her body felt at turns small and enormous.

I am me, she insisted soundlessly. Alls Berrye. My father was Walls Berrye; my mother was born Wenefred Vicars…

But her childhood seemed impossibly far away. With effort she remembered the house, a rambling mansion so poorly kept that some rooms had floors that had rotted through. When she tried to picture it, however, she envisioned a stone labyrinth instead.

Her mother’s face was a blur surrounded by flaxen hair. Her father was even dimmer, though she had seen him only a year ago. Her elder sister, Rowyne, had blue eyes, like her, and rough hands that stroked her hair.

She’d been five when the lady in the dark dress came and took her away, and after that it was ten years before she saw her parents again, and then they had just been bringing her to Eslen.

Even then they hadn’t known the truth of the matter, that the reason she had been returned to them was so that the king would notice her and take her for his mistress.

Her mother died the next year, and her father came to visit two years later, hoping Alis could persuade the king to grant him funds to drain the festering swamp that had crept over most of the canton’s once-arable land. William had given him the money and an engineer, and that was the last she had seen of anyone in her family.

Sister Margery with her crooked smile and curly red hair; Sister Grene with her big nose and wide eyes; Elder Mestra Cathmay, iron-haired and whip-thin, with eyes that saw into everything—they had been her family.

All now dead, the voice taunted. So very dead. And yet death is no longer very distant…

Suddenly there was a sense of floating, and it took Alis a moment to understand that she was falling, so many and strange were the sensations that came with the voice.

She put out her arms and legs in a flailing attempt to find something to grab. Incredibly, she succeeded as her palms struck flat against walls before they were half-extended. Pain shot up her arms as if they were trying to yank from her shoulders, and the agony of her wound wrenched a scream out of her. Then she fell again, her knees and elbows scraping against the walls of the shaft until white light blossomed in the soles of her feet and struck up through her, knocking her cleanly out of her body and into the black winds high above.

Singing brought her back, a rough, raspy canting in a language she did not know. Her face was pressed against a damp, tacky floor. When she lifted it, pain shot across her skull and down her spine.

“Oh!” she gasped.

The singing stopped.

“Alis?” A voice asked.

“Who is that?” she answered, feeling her head. It was sticky, and she found a cut at the hairline. None of her bones seemed to be broken.

“It is I, Lo Videicho,” the voice replied.

The darkness was absolute, and the walls made strange the sound, but Alis guessed the speaker was no more than four or five kingsyards away. She reached down to her girdle and the dagger she kept there.

“That sounds Vitellian,” she said, trying to keep him talking so she would know where he was.

“Ah, no, my dulcha,” he said. “Vitellian is vinegar, lemon juice, salt. I speak honey, wine, figs. Safnian, midulcha.”

“Safnian.” She had the knife now, and securing her grip on it, she sat up. “You’re a prisoner?”

“I was,” Lo Videicho said. “Now, I do not know. They bricked in the way out. I told them they should kill me, but they did not.”

“How do you know my name?”

“You told it to my friend the music man, before they took him away.”

Leojf.

“They took him away?”

“Oh, yes. Your visit was quite upsetting, I think. They took him off.”

“Where to?”

“Oh, I know. You think I did not know? I know.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Alis said. “But I would like to know, as well.”

“I have lost my mind, you understand,” Lo Videicho confided.

“You sound fine to me,” Alis lied.

“No, no, it’s quite true. I am mad. But I think I should wait until we are out of these dungeons before I tell you where our friend was taken.”

Alis began feeling around for a wall. She found one and put her back to it.

“I don’t know the way out,” she said.

“No, but you know the way in.”

“The way in is—you mean the way into here, don’t you?”

“Yes, sly one,” Lo Videicho said. “You fell down it.”

“Then if you know that, why don’t you just leave? Why do you need me?”

“I would never leave a lady,” the man said. “But more than that…” She heard a metallic rattling.

“Oh. You can’t leave. You’re in a cell.” She must have fallen into an anteroom rather than the cell itself.

“It’s a palace, my palace,” Lo Videicho said. “But the doors are all locked. Do you have a key?”

“I might be able to get you out. We might come to some agreement. But first you must tell me why you are here.”

“Why am I here? Because the saints are filthy bastards, every one. Because they favor the wicked and bring grief to the kind.”

“That’s probably true,” Alis acknowledged, “but I’d still like a more specific answer.”

“I am here because I loved a woman,” he said. “I am here because my heart was torn out, and this is the grave they put me in.”

“What woman?”

His voice changed. “Beautiful, gentle, kind. She is dead. I saw her finger.”

A little chill went up Alis’ spine.

Safnian. There had been a Safnian engaged to the princess Lesbeth. She had gone missing, and word was that she had been betrayed by her fiancé. She remembered William mumbling his name in his sleep; it almost seemed he had been apologizing to him.

“Are you… are you Prince Cheiso?”

“Ah!” the man gasped. There was a pause, and then she heard a quiet sound she thought might be weeping.

“You are Cheiso, who was betrothed to Lesbeth Dare.”

The snuffling grew louder, but now it sounded more like laughter. “That was my name,” he said. “Before, before. Yes, how clever. Clever.”

“I heard you had been tortured to death.”

“He wanted me alive,” Cheiso said. “I don’t know why. I don’t know why. Or maybe he forgot, that’s all.”

Alis closed her eyes, trying to adjust her thinking, add the Safnian prince to her plans. Did he command troops? But they would have to sail here, wouldn’t they? A long way.

But he would surely be useful.

Cheiso shrieked suddenly, a throat-tearing howl of rage that hardly sounded human. She heard a meaty thud and guessed that he was throwing himself against the walls even as he continued to scream in his own language. She realized she was gripping the knife so hard that her fingers were numb.

After a time his shrieks subsided into full-belly sobbing. On impulse, Alis took her hand from the knife and felt her way through the darkness until she encountered the iron bars of his cell.

“Come here,” she said. “Come here.”

He might kill her, but death was so near, she had begun to lose respect for it. If a moment’s kindness was what sent her from the lands of fate, then so be it.

She could feel him hesitate, but then she heard a sliding sound, and a moment later a hand brushed hers. She gripped it, and tears started in her eyes at the contact. It felt like years since anyone had held her. She felt his hand tremble; the palm was smooth and soft, the palm of a prince.

“I am less than a man,” he gasped. “I am much less.”

Alis’ heart gripped; she tried to disengage her hand, but he held it all the tighter.

“It’s all right,” Alis said. “I only want to touch your face.”

“I no longer have a face,” he replied, but nevertheless he let her hand go. Tentatively, she reached up until she felt the beard on his cheek, then traced higher, where she found a mass of scars.

So much pain. She reached for her knife again. A single motion into the bowl of his eye and he would forget what they had done to him, forget his lost love. She could hear in his voice and feel in his grip that he was broken. Despite his bravado and talk of revenge, there wasn’t much left of him.

But her duty wasn’t to him. It was to Muriele and her children—and in a way to poor dead William. She had loved him in her fashion; he had been a decent man in a position no decent man ought to hold.

Like this Safnian prince.

“Prince Cheiso,” she whispered.

“I was,” he replied.

“You are,” she insisted. “Listen to me. I will free you from your cage, and together we will find a way out of here.”

“And kill him,” Cheiso said. “Kill the king.”

With a faint prickling she realized he meant William.

“King William is already dead,” Alis said. “He is not your enemy. Your enemy is Robert. Do you understand? Prince Robert’s word put you here. Then he killed his brother, the king, and left you to rot. He probably doesn’t even remember that you exist. But you will remind him, won’t you?”

There was a long pause, and when Cheiso finally spoke again, it was in a surprisingly passionless and even voice.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I will.”

Alis drew out her lock-picking tools and set to work.

2 The Poel

Anne took a few deep breaths, closing her eyes against her tent and its spare furnishings. She’d sent Austra away, and the girl had gone with what had seemed to Anne a sense of relief.

Did the little tart just want to get away from her, or did she want to get to Cazio?

Hush, she told herself. Hush. You’re just getting angry with yourself. Small wonder Austra would rather spend time with someone else.

Anne settled into the darkness and then looked deeper, trying to find her way to the place of the Faiths so she could ask their counsel. In the past she had been wary of their advice, but she felt she needed something—some guidance from someone who knew more about the recondite world than she.

Faint light appeared, and she focused on it, trying to draw it nearer, but it slipped to the edge of her vision, tantalizingly out of reach.

She tried to relax, to coax it back, but the more she tried, the farther off the light drew, until in a sudden rage she reached out for it, yanking it toward her, and the darkness in turn squeezed, tightened until she couldn’t breathe.

Something rough seemed to press about her body, and her fingers and toes went numb with cold. The chill crept up her, stealing all sensation until only the pulse of her heart was left, beating dangerously hard. She couldn’t draw breath or utter a sound, but she heard laughter and felt lips against her ear, murmuring warm words that she couldn’t understand.

Light flared, and suddenly she saw the sea rolling out before her. On the broad waves rode ships by the dozens, flying the black-and-white swan banner of Liery. Her view shifted, and she saw that they were approaching Thornrath, the great seawall fortress that guarded the approach to Eslen. It loomed large enough to make even so vast a fleet seem tiny.

Then, suddenly, the light was gone and she was on her knees, with her hands pressed against stone, the smell of decay and earth in her nostrils. Gradually a faint light sifted down from above, and slowly, as if waking from a dream, she began to understand where she was.

She was in Eslen-of-Shadows, in the sacred grove behind the tombs of her ancestors, and her fingers were pressed against a stone sarcophagus. And she knew, was certain that she had always known, and she screamed in the most utter despair she had ever experienced.

Hush, child, a small voice said. Hush and listen.

The voice calmed her terror, if only a little.

“Who are you?” she asked.

I am your friend. And you are right; she is coming more for you. I can help, hut you must seek me out. You must help me first.

“Who is she? How can you help?”

Too many questions, and the distance is too great. Find me, and I will help you.

“Find you where?”

Here.

She saw Castle Eslen, watched it ripped open like a cadaver to expose its hidden organs and humors, nests of disease and thrones of health, and after a moment she understood.

She awoke screaming, with Neil and Cazio staring down at her. Austra was next to her, holding her hand.

“Majesty?” Neil asked. “Is something wrong?”

For several long heartbeats she wanted to tell him, to reverse what was to come.

But she couldn’t, could she?

“It was a dream, Sir Neil,” she said. “A Black Mary, nothing more.”

The knight looked skeptical, but after a moment he accepted her explanation with a nod.

“Well, then, I hope the rest of your sleep is dreamless,” he said.

“How long until we break camp?”

“Four bells.”

“And today we shall reach Eslen?”

“If the saints will it, Your Majesty,” Neil replied.

“Good,” Anne said. Images of ships—and more terrible things—still burned behind her eyes. Eslen would be the start of it.

The men left, but Austra remained, stroking her forehead until she fell asleep.

Anne had made the trip from Glenchest to Eslen many times. She had ridden there on her horse Faster when she was fourteen, accompanied by a guard of Craftsmen. That had taken her two days, with a stop in the Poel of Wife at her cousin Nod’s estate. By carriage or canal, it might take a day longer.

But it had taken her army a full month, even though most of their supplies were floated downstream on barges.

And a bloody month it had been.

Anne had seen tournaments: jousting, men battering about with swords, that sort of thing. She had seen real combat, too, and slaughter aplenty. But until the day they marched from Glenchest, everything she knew about armies and war she’d had from minstrels, books, and theater. Those had led her to imagine that they would march straightaway to Eslen, blow the horns of battle, and fight it out on the King’s Poel.

The minstrels had left out a thing or two, and Castle Gable had been her first lesson in that.

Armies in songs didn’t have to keep their supply lines open so they didn’t have to stop and “reduce” every unfriendly fortress within five days’ ride of their march. Most of them were unfriendly, it turned out, because Robert had either coerced or cajoled the castle owners to fight for him or had simply occupied them with his own handpicked troops.

Anne had never heard the word “reduce” used to describe the conquering of a castle and the slaughter of its defenders, but she quickly came to the opinion that a better word was needed. The siege of Gable cost them more than a hundred men and almost a week, and when they left it, they had to leave another hundred men behind to garrison it.

Then came Langraeth, Tulg, Fearath…

The old songs also didn’t talk much about women throwing their children over the walls in an insane attempt to save them from the flames or about the smell of a hundred dead men as the morning frost began to thaw. Or how a man could have a spear all the way through him and appear not to feel it, keep talking as if nothing were wrong, right up until the moment his eyes lost sight and his lips went lazy.

She had seen horrible things before, and these were differences in scale rather than in kind.

But scale made a difference. A hundred dead men were more horrific than a single dead man, as unfair as that might seem to the single fellow.

In ballads, women keened in grief over the loss of their beloved ones. In the march to Eslen, no one close to Anne had died. She didn’t keen in grief; instead she lay awake at night, trying to stop the cries of the wounded from her ears, trying not to remember the images of the day. She found that the brandy Aunt Elyoner had sent with her was helpful in that regard.

The minstrels also tended to leave out the drearier aspects of politics: four hours listening to the aithel of Wife drone on about the comparative virtues of dun-colored cows; an entire day spent in the company of the spouse of the Gravwaerd of Langbrim and her not-so-subtle attempts to present her hopelessly dull son as a possible suitor for “someone—not Your Majesty of course, but someone of note”; two hours in Penbale watching a production of the musical theater that had “opened the eyes” of the landwaerden to the evils of Robert.

Only the fact that most of the singers were so terribly off-key kept her eyes open, though it did leave her wondering what the original could have been like. The only thing amusing in it was the physical portrayal of Robert, which involved a mask made of some sort of gourd and a nose that was noticeably, inappropriately made to resemble another, netherer, body part.

All because occupying the castles wasn’t enough; the countryside had to be wooed. Besides drumming up more troops, she had to make sure her canal boats could come and go to Loiyes, which was where her provisions came from. While Artwair and his knights reduced castles, she spent her time visiting the neighboring towns and villages, meeting with the landwaerden, garnering their support, and asking permission to leave behind even more soldiers to watch the dikes and malends that kept them drained. That turned out to be almost as grueling as her flight from Vitellia, although in an entirely different way, a daily march of audiences and dinners with town aithels and gravwaerds, flattering them or frightening them, whichever seemed more likely to work.

In the end most of them were willing to give her passive support—they wouldn’t hinder her progress, they would let her leave troops to occupy the birms so the canals couldn’t be flooded or chained—but few were willing to relinquish manpower. Over the course of the month only about two hundred joined their forces; that came nowhere near offsetting their losses.

Despite all of that, she somehow had it in the back of her mind that when they reached Eslen, they would still stage the final battle on the poel. What she found instead was what she was looking at now from the birm of the north dike. Artwair, Neil, and Cazio stood beside her.

“Saints,” she breathed, not certain what exactly she felt.

There was home: the island of Ynis, her stony skirts draped in fog, her high-peaked hills overlooking Newland, the city of Eslen rising on the greatest of those hills. Within the concentric circles of her walls were the great fortress and palace whose spires seemed to thrust into the lower provinces of heaven. It looked both impossibly huge yet ridiculously tiny from this strange vantage point.

“That’s your home?” Cazio asked.

“It is,” Anne said.

“I never saw such a place,” Cazio said, his voice timbred with awe, something Anne wasn’t sure she had ever heard before. Thanks to Elyoner’s tutors and Cazio’s quick mind, he did so in the king’s tongue.

“There is no other place like Eslen,” Neil said. Anne smiled, realizing that Neil himself had seen Eslen for the first time less than a year ago.

“But how do we get there?” Cazio asked.

“That will be the problem,” Artwair said, scratching his chin absently. “It’s the same problem we were always going to face, only multiplied. I had hoped he wouldn’t do this.”

“I don’t understand,” Cazio said.

“Well,” Anne said, “Ynis is an island in the confluence of two rivers: the Warlock and the Dew. So there is always water around it. The only way to reach Eslen is by boat.”

“But we have boats,” Cazio asserted.

That was true enough; they still had, in fact, every one of the fifteen barges and seven canal wolves they’d had at the beginning of the journey. There had been no river battle.

“Yes,” Anne said. “But normally we’d just be crossing a river, you see. This lake you’re looking at now used to be dry land.” With a wave of her hand, she indicated the vast body of water that now lay before them.

Cazio frowned. “Maybe I didn’t understand you,” he said. “Did you say dry land? Tew arido?”

“Yes,” Anne replied. “Eslen is surrounded by poelen. That’s what we call land we’ve claimed from the water. You’ve noticed that our rivers and canals all flow above the land, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” Cazio said. “It seems very unnatural.”

“It is. And so when a dike is broken or opened up, it all floods again. But why didn’t they wait until we were here, marching across the poel, before they opened it? That way we might have been drowned.”

“That would have been too risky,” Artwair explained. “If the wind is blowing the wrong way, it can take a long time for the poel to fill, and we might have made it across. This way Robert has made our task very, very difficult.”

“Yet we still have our boats,” Cazio pointed out.

“Auy,” Artwair replied. “But look there, though the mist.”

He pointed at the base of the great hill. Anne recognized the shadowy shapes, but Cazio didn’t know where to look.

“Are those ships?” he finally asked.

“Ships,” Artwair confirmed. “I’ll wager that when the fog lifts, we’ll see nearly the whole fleet. Warships, Cazio. They couldn’t have maneuvered very well in the river channel, but now they’ve got a lake. We might have slipped across the Dew and set up a beachhead, but now we have to cross all of that, in full view of the imperial fleet.”

“Can we?” Cazio asked.

“No,” Artwair said.

“There’s more than one approach to Eslen, though,” Neil said. “What about the south side, the Warlock side? Have they flooded the poelen there, as well?”

“That we don’t know, not yet,” Artwair admitted. “But even if that side hasn’t been flooded, it’s a very hard approach. The rinns are difficult to march through and easily defended by a few archers on the heights. And then there are the hills: difficult to take but easy to defend.

“But you’re exactly right. We need to send someone around the island. A small group, I think, one that can move quickly, quietly, unseen.”

“That sounds like the sort of thing I might be able to do,” Cazio volunteered.

“No,” Anne, Neil, and Austra said at the same time.

“What good am I otherwise?” the swordsman asked irritably.

“You’re an excellent bodyguard,” Neil said. “Her Majesty needs you here.”

“Besides,” Anne said, “you don’t know the terrain. I’m sure the duke will have good men chosen for the task.”

“Yes,” Artwair said. “I’ll pick a few parties. But you know Eslen as well as anyone here, Anne. What do you think? Have you any ideas?”

“You’ve sent word to our kin in Virgenya?”

“Yes,” Artwair said. “But the well has been poisoned, you know. Robert’s cuveiturs went ahead of us with stories of how your mother was in the process of handing the throne to Liery.”

“And yet my uncle would give the country to Hansa. Which would they prefer?”

“Neither, let us hope,” Artwair replied. “I’ve told them that if they fight with you, we can keep a Dare on the throne, one who will lean toward Virgenya. But it’s complicated. Many in Virgenya would prefer to see a high king back on their own throne, with no emperor in Eslen to lord over them. Even if he—or she—is one of their own.

“That group reckons that Hansa would be content with Crotheny and let Virgenya go its own way.”

“Oh,” Anne said.

“Auy. And even if they started today, it would be months before Virgenyan troops could arrive over land, and almost as long by sea, considering that they’d have to sail the Straits of Rusimmi to get here. No, I think we must plan this without counting on Virgenya.”

Cazio pointed. “What’s that?” he asked.

Anne followed the direction of the Vitellian’s finger. A small craft was approaching, a canal boat flying the colors of Eslen.

“That will be Roberts emissary,” Artwair said. “Probably come to arrange a meeting. We might as well see what my cousin has to say before we make too many plans.”

As the boat approached, Anne realized with a tightening of her gut that the emissary was none other than Robert himself.

His familiar face peered at her from underneath a black cap and the golden circlet her father used to wear for less formal state occasions. He was seated in the center of the boat, in an armchair, attended by figures in black. She couldn’t see any archers or, in fact, any weapons at all.

She had the sudden profound feeling that some mistake had been made. Robert was only four years older than she; he had played with her when she was little. She’d always thought of him as a friend. It was impossible that he had done the things they said, and she was suddenly sure that he was about to clear things up. There wouldn’t be any need for a war at all.

As the boat arrived, a slender figure in black hose and surcoat leapt off to secure the moorings; it took an instant for Anne to realize that the figure was female, a girl of perhaps thirteen. In the next blink she understood that all but one of Robert’s retainers were unarmed young women. The single man wore a gold filigree brooch on his mantle that identified him as a knight, but he was likewise weaponless.

Robert certainly didn’t seem very worried.

When the craft was secure, he rose from his makeshift throne, grinning.

“My dear Anne,” he said. “Let me look at you.”

He stepped out upon the stone, and Anne felt a shock run through her feet. The rock beneath her went suddenly soft, like warm butter, and everything blurred. It was as if the world around her were melting.

And then, just as suddenly, all was firm again, re-formed.

But different. Robert was still there, handsome in a black sealskin doublet sequined with small diamonds. But he stank like rotting meat, and his skin was translucent, revealing the dark riverine network of vessels beneath. Even more peculiar, his veins did not end at his flesh but trailed off into the earth and air, joining the otherworldly waters of her vision.

But unlike the man she had seen dying, leaking the last of his life into the headwaters of death, everything was flowing into Robert, filling him, propping him up like a hand thrust into a stocking puppet.

She realized she had stepped back, and her breath was coming fast.

“That is near enough,” Artwair said.

“I only want to give my niece a kiss,” Robert said. “That is not so much, is it?”

“Under the circumstances,” Artwair replied, “I think it is.”

“None of you see it, do you?” Anne asked. “You can’t see what he is.”

The puzzled gazes that brought confirmed her guess, and even in her own vision the dark rivulets were fading, though not entirely vanished.

Robert met her gaze squarely, and she saw something weird there, a sort of recognition or surprise.

“What am I, my dear? I am your beloved uncle. I am your dear friend.”

“I don’t know what you are,” Anne said, “but you are not my friend.”

Robert sighed dramatically.

“You are distraught, I can see that. But I can assure you I am your friend. Why else would I protect your throne as I have?”

“My throne?” Anne said.

“Of course, Anne. Liery has kidnapped Charles, and in his absence I have acted as regent. But you are the heir to the throne, my dear.”

“You admit this?” Artwair said.

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I? I have no reason to go against the Comven’s decision. I have only been awaiting her return.”

“And now you plan to give me the crown?” Anne asked, staring in disbelief.

“Indeed I shall,” Robert agreed. “Under certain conditions.”

“Ah, now we’re to the viper’s bargain,” Artwair said.

Robert looked annoyed for the first time since his arrival.

“I’m surprised by the company you keep, Anne,” he said. “Duke Artwair was commanded to protect our borders. He has abandoned that duty in order to march upon Eslen.”

“To return the throne to its rightful owner,” Artwair said.

“Oh, really?” Robert replied. “When you began your march west, you knew that Anne was alive, well, and ready to take her place in Eslen? But that was before you had seen her, or spoken with her. In fact, how could you have known that?” He switched his gaze to Anne.

“How do you imagine he knew you were alive, my dear? Have you ever asked yourself exactly what our dear duke might want from this bargain?”

Anne had, in fact, wondered just that, but she withheld her confirmation.

“What are your terms?” she asked.

Robert nodded appraisingly. “You’ve grown up, haven’t you? Though I have to say, I’m not sure I like your hair cut short. It seems mannish. When it is long, you look almost like—” He stopped abruptly, and what little color there had been in his face suddenly drained.

He looked away, first at the western sky, then at the distant rise of the Breu-en-Trey. Finally he cleared his throat.

“In any event,” he said, his tone more subdued, “you’ll understand if I’m a bit concerned, given the manner of your coming.”

“I can see that,” Anne said. “Your men resisted our march here, and you’ve flooded the poelen. Clearly, you are prepared for war. So why would you suddenly capitulate?”

“I had no idea this army was led by you, my dear. I assumed it was more or less what it appeared to be: a revolt by greedy and disaffected noblemen of the provinces. People who would use this time of troubles as an excuse to place an usurper on the throne. Now that I see they have chosen you as their poppet, it changes things substantially.”

“Poppet?”

“You don’t really think they will let you be queen, do you?” Robert said. “I think you are brighter than that, Anne. All of them had to be promised something, didn’t they? After they have lost blood, men, and horses, do you think their appetites will lessen?

“You have an army here you cannot trust, Anne. What’s more, even if you could trust it, you can’t take Eslen easily—if at all.”

“I’ve yet to hear what you propose.”

He held up his hands. “It isn’t complicated. You come into the city, and we arrange a coronation. I shall function as your chief adviser.”

“And how long, I wonder, would I survive that honor?” Anne asked. “How long before some poison or dagger of your design finds my heart?”

“You may bring a retinue of reasonable size, of course.”

“My army is of reasonable size,” Anne replied.

“It would be foolish to bring all of them in,” Robert said. “In fact, I cannot allow it. I do not trust them, nor, as I’ve mentioned, should you. Bring in a strong bodyguard. Leave the rest of them out here. When the adjudicator from the Church arrives, he will sort this out, and we will abide by his decision.”

“That’s an easy promise for you to make!” Artwair exploded. “It’s well known that you and the praifec are villains together in all of this.”

“The adjudicator comes directly from z’Irbina,” Robert said. “If you cannot trust our most holy fathers, I cannot imagine who you would trust.”

“I’ll begin by not trusting you and work my way out from there.”

Robert sighed. “You aren’t really going to insist on fighting this silly war, are you?”

“Why is my mother imprisoned?” Anne asked.

Robert’s gaze dropped down.

“For her own protection,” he said. “After the deaths of your sisters, she became first melancholy, then inconsolable. She was unbalanced, and it showed to her detriment in governing. You have heard of the slaughter of innocents at Lady Gramme’s, I presume. Still, it wasn’t until she attempted the unthinkable that I felt I had to step in.”

“The unthinkable?”

His voice lowered. “It is a most closely guarded secret,” he said. “We kept it quiet to prevent embarrassment and, frankly, despair. Your mother tried to kill herself, Anne.”

“Did she?” Anne meant to sound skeptical, but something caught at the back of her throat. Could it possibly be true?

“As I say, she was inconsolable. She remains so, but under my protection she is at least safe from herself.”

Anne had been considering Robert’s offer.

She didn’t trust him, but once in the castle she would be able to find the passages. She would be safe from Robert and his men there, and she could open the tunnel that led into the rinns and move men into the city, if not the castle itself.

There was an opportunity here, and she wasn’t going to let it pass.

“I should like to see her,” she said.

“That is easily arranged,” Robert assured her.

“I should like to see her now.”

“Shall I send for her?” Robert asked.

Anne took a deep breath, then let it out. “I rather think I should like to go to her.”

“I’ve already said that you could bring a retinue into the castle. We can see your mother first thing.”

“I would rather that you stayed here,” Anne replied.

Robert’s eyebrows arched up. “I’ve come here under a flag of truce, unarmed and unguarded. I never imagined you would be so dishonorable as to take me captive. If you do, I warn you, you will never enter Eslen. My men will burn it first, if anything happens to me.”

“I’m asking this as a favor,” Anne replied. “I’m asking you to agree to stay here while I speak to my mother. I will take only fifty men. In turn, you will send word to your men to allow me free access to the castle so I can verify the truth of these things you say. Then—and only then—might you and I come to some sort of agreement.”

“Even if I trust you,” Robert said, “I have already made it plain I don’t trust your followers. How can you be sure they won’t murder me while you’re gone?” He glanced significantly at Artwair.

“Because my personal bodyguard, Neil MeqVren, will defend you. You may trust him absolutely.”

“He is only one man,” Robert pointed out.

“If anything happens to Sir Neil, I will know I have been betrayed,” Anne said.

“That would be a small comfort to my corpse.”

“Robert, if you are serious about your good intentions, here is your chance to prove it. Otherwise, I will not trust you, and this war will begin in earnest. Most of the landwaerden are on my side. And Sir Fail will arrive soon with a fleet, do not doubt it.”

Robert stroked his beard for a moment.

“One day,” he said at last. “You return to Eslen with my word, on my boat, and I will stay here under the care of Sir Neil, whom even I do not doubt. You will speak to your mother and determine her condition. You will assure yourself that I am honest in my intention to give you the throne. Then you will return, and we will discuss the way in which you will take your place.

“One day. Agreed?”

Anne closed her eyes for a moment, trying to see if she had missed something.

“Your Majesty,” Artwair advised, “this is most unwise.”

“I agree,” Sir Neil said.

“Nevertheless,” Anne said, “I am to be queen, or so you all say. It is my decision to make. Robert, I agree to your terms.”

“My life is in your hands, Majesty,” Robert said.

3 In the Bairghs

Danger tingling at his back, Stephen paused to catch his breath.

Behind him Ehan said something, but although his ears had begun to heal, it was still too muddled to make out, as if he had water in his ears. He tapped the side of his head to indicate as much, something they had all gotten used to in the past two ninedays.

“Rest?” the little man repeated a little louder.

Stephen nodded reluctantly. During his time with the holter he’d thought his body had hardened to travel, but the trail was too steep to ride the horses, so they had to lead them. His legs, it seemed, had not been strengthened by months on horseback.

He settled onto a boulder as Ehan produced a waterskin and some of the bread they’d bought in the last village they’d passed through, a gathering of a dozen huts named Crothaem. That lay someplace far below them now, beyond the unnamed valley below and the folds of the Hauland foothills that ran along it.

“How far up do y’ think we are?” Ehan asked. Now they were facing each other, and it was easier to communicate.

“It’s hard to tell,” Stephen replied, because it was, even in the most visceral sense. “We must be in the mountains themselves by now.”

“The trouble is there aren’t any trees,” Ehan offered.

Stephen nodded. That was the problem, or at least one of them. It was as if some ancient saint or god had ripped up a monstrous expanse of pasture from the Midenlands and settled them over the Bairghs like a sheet. Stephen reckoned that what he saw was the result of two thousand years of Mannish activity: cutting trees for house timbers and firewood and to clear pasture for the sheep, goats, and hairy cows that seemed to be everywhere.

The effect, though, was a disorienting loss of perspective. The grass soothed over the steepness of the slopes and tricked the eye about distance. Only when he focused on something specific—a herd of goats or one of the occasional sod-roofed steadings—did he have some appreciation of the vastness of it all.

And of the danger. Inclines that appeared gentle and friendly—which he imagined he could roll down like a child on a small hill—actually hid fatal drops.

Fortunately, the same millennia and the same men that had produced the treeless landscape had also created well-worn tracks to tell them where it was safe to walk—and where it wasn’t.

“You still reckon the woorm is following us?” Ehan said.

Stephen nodded. “It’s not following us exactly,” he said. “It didn’t follow us across the Brogh y Stradh uplands; it swam up the Then River to meet us.”

“Makes sense that it would prefer traveling in rivers, a thing that size.”

“That’s not the point, though,” Stephen said. “While we followed the Ef down to the Gray Warlock, it was actually getting ahead of us, as we discovered in Ever.”

“Yah,” Ehan said, his brow furrowing at the memory. Ever had been a village of the dead. The few survivors had told them of the woorm’s passage just a few days before.

“From there we could have gone anywhere. And even if it was determined to dog us using the rivers, it might have gone up the Warlock, down to the confluence at Wherthen. It might have gone to Eslen. But it didn’t. It went upstream on the Then to cut off our overland flight, and it very nearly got us.”

He shuddered at the memory of the monster’s head breaking the iced surface of the stream like a boat made of iron. The impression was enhanced by the pair of passengers, bundled in furs, who rode on its back. He’d been wondering what those two would do if the woorm ever dove below the surface when its gaze—its terrible gaze—had found him, and he’d known in his heart that it was the end.

But they’d turned away and nearly killed their horses riding that night. And they hadn’t seen it since.

“But we know it came through Ever on its way to the monastery,” Ehan said. “Maybe it was just going back the way it came, and we were unlucky enough to have chosen the same path.”

“I wish I could believe that, but I can’t,” Stephen said. “The coincidence would be far too great.”

“Then maybe it’s not coincidence,” Ehan pressed. “Maybe it’s all part of some larger design.”

“I wouldn’t put too much weight on that leg,” Henne interjected, peering intently at them both. “It’s got two fellows riding it, don’t it? If either of ’em knew the lay of the land and a thing about tracking, they could’ve reckoned which way we were headed. Saints, they could have stopped to question them poor folk near Whitraff, the ones we talked to. They’d remember us, since we were near deaf at the time, and I don’t think they’d hold out on a woormrider.

“Once they knew what road we were on, they could figure out where we’d have to cross the Then; there’re only a couple of fords and no bridges.”

“That’s possible,” Stephen acknowledged. “It didn’t meet us at the ferry on the White Warlock. If it’s following us now, it’s coming overland again.”

“Unless you’re right,” Henne said, “and it canns where we’re going. In that case, it would have gone on up the Welph, and it’ll be waiting for us two valleys over.”

“What a wonderful thought,” Ehan muttered.

Midafternoon they reached the snow line, and soon the wet, muddy trail froze as hard as stone.

At Henne’s suggestion, they’d found a tailor in Crothaem and bought four paiden, a sort of local quilted felt coat lined with sheepskin. The paiden cost them more than half of what remained of the funds the fratrex had sent with them, and to Stephen the price seemed exorbitant.

His mind was firmly changed now as they walked up into low-lying clouds and found them to be a freezing mist. The horses slipped too often for them to ride, and walking became more difficult both because the path steepened and because the air seemed somehow less substantial.

Stephen had read about the bad air at the tops of mountains. In the Mountains of the Hare, the highest peaks—those known as Sa’ Ceth ag Sa’Nem—the atmosphere was said to be completely unbreathable. Up to now, he had doubted the veracity of those accounts, but this part of the Bairghs wasn’t very high as mountains went, yet he already was becoming a believer.

It was growing dark when they chanced across a goatherd driving his flock along the trail back the way they had come. Stephen greeted him in his best Northern Almannish. The herdsman—really a lad of perhaps thirteen with raven-dark hair and pale blue eyes—smiled and answered in something akin to the same language, albeit with such odd pronunciation that Stephen had to take his time to understand it.

“Dere be a vel downtrail, het Demsted,” the boy informed them, “’boot one league. Du’t be-gitting one room-hoos dere. Mine fader-bruder Ansgif’l git du’alla one room,” he added cheerfully.

“Danx,” Stephen replied, guessing at the local expression of gratitude. “I wonder—have you ever heard of a mountain named eslief vendve?”

The boy scratched his head for a moment.

“Slivendy?” he asked at last.

“Maybe,” Stephen said cautiously. “It’s farther north and east.”

“Je, very far,” the boy replied. “Has ’nother namen—eh, net gemoonu—not ’member? Du ask mine fader-bruder, je? He is talking better Almannish.”

“And his name is Ansgif?”

“Je, at room-hoos, named svartboch. Mine namen is Ven. Du spill ’im du seen me.”

“Mekle danx, Ven,” Stephen said.

The boy smiled and waved, then continued on his way, vanishing into the fog, though they continued to hear the sound of the bells on his goats for some time.

“What was all that?” Ehan gruffed after the boy was out of earshot. “I started off understanding you, but then you started talking like the boy, and it all turned to gibberish.”

“Really?” Stephen thought back. He’d only been adjusting his Almannish based on the boy’s dialect, guessing at how the words ought to sound in his version of the tongue.

“Didn’t understand a word after you said hello and asked him if there was anyplace to spend the night.”

“Well, there is, a town called Demsted in the glen up ahead. We’re to look for an inn called the svartboch—‘Black Goat’—and his uncle Ansgif will rent us a room. He’d heard of our mountain, as well, and he said it had another name, one he couldn’t remember. He said to ask his uncle about that, too.”

“Is it going to be like this from here on out, people gabbling near nonsense?”

“No,” Stephen said. “More likely, it’ll get worse.”

Their day did get worse, if not in the way Stephen had predicted. A bit after the pass dropped back below the snow line and began its slow downward snaking, Stephen was drawn from reviewing his reasoning on the location of the mountain he sought by a strangled cry from Ehan that immediately brought his wits back to his feet and sent a jolt through his heart and lungs.

Peering in the direction Ehan was pointing, he at first found it impossible to sort out what he saw. It was a tree, especially noticeable because it was one of the few he had seen in many leagues. He didn’t know the variety, but it was leafless, and the branches gnarled and twisted by the mountain winds. But there was a large flock of birds perched in its branches.

Birds, and people, climbing…

No, not climbing. Hanging. Eight corpses with blackened faces depended from thick ropes tied to the boughs. Their eyes were gone, presumably eaten by the crows that now cawed and muttered at Stephen and his companions.

“Ansuz af se friz ya s’uvil,” Ehan swore.

Stephen swept his gaze around the narrow pass. He didn’t see or hear anyone, but his hearing was still damaged, so that was no surprise.

“Keep watch,” he said. “Whoever did this may still be nearby.”

“Yah,” Ehan said.

Stephen approached the corpses for a better look.

Five were men, and three women, of various ages. The youngest was a girl who could hardly have been more than sixteen, the oldest a man of perhaps sixty winters. They were all naked, and each seemed to have died by strangulation. But they all had other wounds: backs flayed nearly to the bone, burns and abrasions.

“More sacrifices?” Brother Themes offered.

“If so, they aren’t like the ones I saw before, at the fanes,” Stephen said. “Those had been eviscerated and nailed to posts around the sedos. I don’t see a sedos fane here, and these people look as if they were simply tortured, then hanged.”

He thought he ought to feel sick, but instead he felt oddly giddy. It was an irrational reaction, he supposed, brought on by the horrible sight.

“There are certain old gods and even saints who take their sacrifices hung on trees,” he continued. “And it was common even in Church lands to hang criminals like this, at least up until a few years ago.”

“Maybe that’s why the boy didn’t mention it,” Themes suggested. “Maybe this is just where his town brings its criminals.”

“Probably,” Stephen agreed. “That makes sense.”

But despite the logic, the creak of the ropes swaying in the wind and the eyeless faces were still very much with Stephen a few bells later, when Demsted came into view.

To Stephen’s eye, most of the towns he had seen since leaving the ruins of Ever hadn’t been what he considered proper towns, and he didn’t expect much out of Demsted. He was, however, pleasantly surprised when they came down through the fog and were greeted by a myriad of lights in the glen below. In the twilight he could make out the outline of a clock tower, the peaked roofs of at least a few houses that boasted more than one story, and a squat cylinder that might be an old keep.

The entire town was encircled by a stout stone wall. It was no Ralegh or Eslen, but considering where they were, Stephen was nothing short of amazed. How could a handful of sheep herders support a town of this size?

The mountain way joined an older, embanked road shortly before they reached the town. Another surprise: It resembled the sort of road the Hegemony had built, though as far as Stephen knew, the Hegemony hadn’t expanded all the way into the Bairghs.

They soon found themselves at the city gate, a pair of iron-bound wooden portals about four kingsyards high. They weren’t closed yet, but a hoarse shout from above warned them to halt. Or at least Stephen supposed it was a warning.

“We’re travelers,” Stephen shouted up. “Do you speak the king’s tongue or Almannish?”

“I can speak the king’s tongue,” the man shouted back down. “You’re out awfully late. We were about to close the gates.”

“We might have camped in the mountains, but we met a boy who told us we could find lodging here.”

“What was the boy’s name?”

“Ven, he called himself.”

“Je,” the man said reflectively. “Do you swear you’re not warlocks, wirjawalvs, or other creatures of mischief or evil?”

“We’re monks of Saint Decmanus,” Ehan called up, “or three of us are. The fourth is our friend and a huntsman.”

“If you’ll allow the test, you can come in, then.”

“Test?”

“Step on through the gate.”

The gate didn’t open directly into the town but into a walled-in yard. Even as they entered it, Stephen watched the opposite gates close. He waited for those they had just passed through to shut as well, but apparently if Stephen and his companions were warlocks or wirjawalvs, the townsfolk would just as soon leave one door open for them to exit through.

A door opened to their left, at the base of the wall, and the hairs on Stephen’s neck pricked up as two large four-legged shapes stepped out, their eyes glinting red in the torchlight. He couldn’t tell if they were dogs or wolves, but they were something from that clan and big.

It was a moment before he noticed that there was someone with the beasts. Whoever it was wore a weather cloak and a paida like his, and his face was in shadow.

The beasts were coming closer now, growling, and Stephen reckoned they were some sort of mastiff, albeit the size of a pony.

“This don’t make me feel easy,” Henne said.

“Just hold still,” said the person with the dogs. Stephen thought it sounded like a woman, though the voice was a bit husky. “Make no sudden move.”

Stephen tried to obey, but it wasn’t easy when the huge, wet toothy muzzles of the animals were snuffling against him.

“This is the test?” he asked to try to curb his nervousness.

“Any dog can scent what isn’t natural,” the woman said. “But these have been bred for it.”

The dog sniffing Stephen suddenly bellowed out a bark, bared its teeth, and backed away, the hair on its back standing visibly.

“You’re tainted,” she said.

“Yes,” Stephen said. “We ran across something back in the Midenlands. A woorm. We may have its scent on us still.”

His hearing was only now approaching normal; he had yet to recover—if he ever would—the saint-touched ability to hear a whisper a hundred Idngsyards away. But he didn’t need to have such hearing to imagine the creak of bows bending all around them. As the woman backed away, though, the dogs quickly quieted down, and she seemed to relax a bit. He heard her whisper something to them, and the beasts came back for a second smell. This time they seemed content.

Clearly these people made a habit of testing strangers to make certain they weren’t monsters; that meant either that they had good practical reasons for doing so or that they were hopelessly mired in primitive superstition.

Stephen wasn’t sure which he preferred.

“They’re tainted,” the woman said loudly, “but they’re Mannish, not monsters.”

“Good enough,” the voice from the wall responded.

Stephen imagined the wood of bows relaxing, and he felt his shoulders loosen a bit.

“My name is Stephen Darige,” he said to the woman. “Whom do I have the honor of addressing?”

The hood lifted a bit, but Stephen still couldn’t make out any features.

“A humble servant of the saints,” she said. “I am called Pale.”

“Sor Pales?”

She chuckled. “Pro suveiss nomniss …”

“… sverruns patenest,” he finished. “What coven did you attend?”

“The Coven Saint Cer of Tero Galle,” she replied. “And you made your studies at d’Ef?”

“Indeed,” Stephen replied cautiously.

“May I ask if you are on the business of the Church? Were you sent to aid the sacritor?”

Stephen didn’t know how to answer that except with the truth.

“We’re on a mission for our fratrex,” he admitted, “but we’re just passing through your town. I don’t know your sacritor.”

His words were followed by a long, odd silence.

“You mentioned Ven,” the woman said at last.

“Yes. He said his uncle would give us a room at, ah, svarthoch.”

“You would rather stay at an inn than at the church, where you would be lodged without fee?”

“I’ve no wish to impose on the sacritor,” Stephen replied. “And we’ll leave with the dawn. Our fratrex has provided us with funds sufficient for the journey.”

“Nonsense,” a male voice interrupted. “We have room for you in plenty.”

Stephen glanced toward the new voice and found himself regarding a knight in brass-chased armor. His helm was off, and in the wan torchlight his face was mostly beard.

“Sister Pale, you really should know better. You should have insisted.”

“It was my intention to, Sir Elden,” Sister Pale replied.

Sir Elden made a small bow. “Welcome, good brothers, to the attish of Ing Fear and the town of Demsted. I am Sir Elden of Saint Nod, and it would be my great honor to escort you to your secure beds.”

Though he desperately wanted to, Stephen could think of no possible way to refuse.

“That’s very kind,” he said.

The streets of Demsted were narrow, dark, cluttered, and mostly empty. Stephen caught a few curious souls peering at them from darkened windows, but for the most part the town was eerily still.

The single exception was a sprawling building from which the sound of pipes and harp skirled, along with clapping and singing. A lantern hung on a peg outside the door identified it—as Stephen imagined—as the svartboch.

“You’d not want to stay there,” Sir Elden offered, contradicting Stephen’s tacit wish. “It’s no place for men of the saints.”

“I’m happy to take your word for it,” Stephen lied.

“Very sensible,” Sir Elden said. “You’ll find the temple much more to your taste. Demsted itself can be quite a trial.”

“I was surprised to find a town of this size in such a remote place,” Stephen said.

“I don’t find this to be a town of much size,” the knight said, “but I suppose I know what you mean. They mine silver in the hills north of here, and Demsted is the market where merchants buy the ore. The Kae River starts here, as well, and flows into the lower reaches of the Welph, and thence to the Warlock. If you came from the south, over the pass, it’s easy to understand your surprise at finding anything at all.”

“Ah. And how long have you been here, Sir Elden?”

“The space of a month, not more. I came with the sacritor to do the work of the resacaratum.”

“In this remote place?”

“The worst infections fester in the places most difficult to reach,” the knight replied. “We have discovered heretics and shinecrafters in plenty. You may have seen some of them on the tree in the pass.”

For an instant Stephen was so startled that he couldn’t reply.

“I did,” he said finally. “I thought them criminals.”

It was too dark to make out Sir Elden’s face, but his tone suggested that he had heard something in Stephen’s comment he didn’t care for.

“They were criminals, Brother, of the very worst sort.”

“Of course,” Stephen said carefully.

“These mountains are fairly crawling with the get of shinecraft,” the knight went on. “Foul beasts conjured from beneath the earth. I myself witnessed a woman give birth to a most hideous utin, proving that she had had intercourse with unclean demons.”

“You saw this?”

“Oh, yes. Well, the birth, not the intercourse, but the one is reasoned from the other. These lands are under siege by the armies of evil. What, did you think Sister Pale’s inspection of you was spurious? The first nine-day I was here, a wirjawalv entered the town, murdered four citizens, and injured three more.” He paused. “Ah, here we are.”

“I should like to hear more of these things,” Stephen said. “We must travel farther into the mountains. If there are dangers we may encounter there…”

“There are dangers in plenty,” the knight assured him. “What business takes you into this heathen land? What fratrex sent you hence?”

“My mission must remain confidential, I fear,” Stephen replied. “But I wonder, is there a collection of scrifti and maps to be found in Demsted?”

“There are some,” the knight replied. “I myself have not examined them, but I’m certain the sacritor will allow you to see them once you’ve satisfied him as to your need and the authenticity of your claim. Meanwhile, come, let us stable your horses and see you to your lodging. I’ll fetch the sacritor, and you can become acquainted.”

It was too dark to make out much of the temple from the outside; it was bigger than Stephen thought it might be, with a domed nave in the style of the Hegemony. He wondered briefly if it might actually be that old, if some forgotten mission had pushed farther into the mountains than the histories knew.

But as Sir Elden had pointed out, though Demsted was remote, it wasn’t isolated. And if its church was really that ancient, one of the many sacritors or monks who had lived there would have noticed and made note of the fact.

The knight opened the door, and they entered. The marble floor was worn to polished, and the paths where feet were used to tread actually were slightly channeled, heightening Stephen’s impression of great age.

But the architecture wasn’t that of the Hegemony, at least no temple of the Hegemony he had ever seen, whether depicted or manifest. The doorways were high, arched, and narrow, and the columns that held the high ceilings oddly delicate. Instead of the usual hemispheric dome, the central nave seemed to have a steep cone, though the flickering candles and torches that lit the altar and the prayer niches weren’t sufficient to illuminate the upper reaches of it.

More than anything, he realized, the building reminded him of the few sketches he had seen of the audacious construction from the era of the Warlock Wars.

They went beyond the nave into a quiet corridor lit by only a few candles, though the stone still was so polished that it shone like glass, making the most of the light. Then they passed through a door into a comfortable room that Stephen quickly recognized as a scriftorium. Behind a heavy table, a man sat hunched over an open book, an Aenan lamp brightening the pages but not his face.

“Sacritor?” Sir Elden ventured.

The man glanced up, and the focused light of the lamp grazed his face, revealing middle-aged features lengthened by a small beard. Stephen’s heart suddenly picked up a few beats, and he had the sudden understanding of what the wolf feels when the trap closes on its foot.

“Ah,” the man said. “How good to see you, Brother Stephen.”

For an instant he’d hoped to be wrong, hoped the face was a trick of light and memory. But the voice was unmistakable.

“Praifec Hespero,” Stephen said. “What a surprise.”

4 A New Mode

Leoff remembered blood spattering on the stone floor, each drop like a garnet until it struck the slightly porous rock, where it soaked and spread, jewels transformed into stains.

He remembered wondering how long his blood would be part of the stone, if he had in some sense become immortal by spilling his life there. If so, it was a humble sort of immortality, a common one, judging by the quantity of stains already there.

He blinked and rubbed his eyes with the knobbed backs of his wrists, torn oddly between a fit of rage and utter exhaustion as he watched splashes of ink soak into the parchment, so like blood on stone. He seemed to vibrate between the two moments: then, the lash across his back, the exotic pain so total that it was difficult to recognize, and now, ink spraying from his shivering quill.

For a long instant the difference between then and now collapsed, and he wondered if he was still there, in the dungeon. Perhaps the now was just a pretty illusion his mind had created to help him die more easily.

If so, his illusions were of poor quality. He couldn’t actually hold a quill, but he’d had Mery tie one to his hand. At first his arm had cramped quickly and agonizingly, but that was only a fraction of the pain he was enduring.

To write music, he had to hear it, and doing that in his mind had always been his great gift. He could close his eyes and imagine each note of fifty instruments, weaving counterpoint, insinuating harmony. Everything he wrote he heard first, and that had never been anything but a joy to him—until now.

A wave of nausea swept through him. He rose jerkily from his stool and stumbled to the narrow casement of the window. His belly crawled as if it were full of maggots, and his bones felt as rotten as termite-infested branches.

Could it kill him merely to imagine these chords? But if that was the case…

Speculation was swept aside as he leaned out of the window to retch. He had eaten hardly any supper, but his body didn’t care. When his belly was empty, it reached deeper, convulsing him until his legs and arms gave way, and he crumpled until his face was against stone.

He imagined himself as a drop of blood, a garnet becoming a stain…

He wasn’t sure how long it was before he found the strength to stand again. He pulled himself back up to the window, heaving in great gulps of the salty air. The moon had risen, cold and round, and the freezing air numbed his face. Far below, silver lapped against ebony in little wavelets, and Leoff suddenly yearned to join them, to free himself through the window, break his ruined skeleton on the rocks, and leave the lands of fate to those who were stronger and braver. To those who were well.

He closed his eyes, wondering if he was mad. Certainly, if he had never been tortured, broken, humiliated as he had been, he would never in his wildest dreams be able to imagine the music that so sickened him now. He knew that viscerally.

The obscure notation in the book he’d found would have remained as incomprehensible as the script in which it was written. It was related to no system of music he knew, but once he’d seen that first chord, he’d somehow heard it in his head, and the rest of it fell into place. But a sane man—a man who had not experienced the horror he had—could never have heard that chord. He certainly could never have gone on, never purposefully hurt himself the way he was doing now. Anyone who loved his life, who imagined a future, could never write this music.

His dreams for his music had been grandiose; his dreams for himself had never been particularly ambitious. A wife to love him, children, evenings singing together, grandchildren in a comfortable house, and old age coming on kindly, a long, pleasant, comfortable reflection before life’s end. That was all he’d asked.

And he would have none of it.

No, any such hopes for himself were dead, but there was his music. Yes, he might still accomplish something if he was willing to destroy himself. And there was so little left to destroy, it was almost a pleasure.

No fall to the rocks for him. Back to the paper and ink.

He’d just begun the next progression when he heard a light knock at his door. He stared at it blankly for a moment, struggling to remember the significance of the sound. He was sure he should know; it was like a word almost remembered, stuck at the bottom of the throat.

It happened again, slightly louder this time, .and he got it.

“Come in if you wish,” he said finally.

The door creaked open slowly, revealing Areana, and for a long moment he couldn’t speak. The pain in him fled as shadows flee light, and he had a sudden happy memory of his first meeting with her at the ball in Lady Gramme’s mansion. They’d danced; he could remember the music, a country dance known as a whervel. He hadn’t known the steps, but she had shown him easily enough.

She stood framed in the doorway like a painting by a master of the brush, her blue kirtle glowing in the moonlight, the darkness of the hall behind her. Her red-gold hair seemed molten, dark, sensuous.

“Leoff,” she said tentatively. “Have I come at a bad time?”

“Areana,” he managed to croak. “No, please. Come in. Find yourself a seat.” He tried to push back his disheveled hair and nearly stabbed himself in the eye with the pen. Sighing, he let his hands drop to his sides.

“It’s just—you haven’t been coming out,” she said, walking across the room to stand beside him. “I’m worried about you. Are they keeping you confined?”

“No, I have freedom to roam the castle,” Leoff said. “Or so I’m told. I haven’t tested it.”

“Well, you should,” she said. “You can’t spend all your time up here.”

“Well,” he said, “I’ve a lot of work to do.”

“Yes, I know,” she said, smiling. “Your singspell about Maersca.” She stepped closer and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial level. “And what will you do this time? Really?”

“Exactly what he asked.”

He dark eyes widened. “Do you think I would betray you?”

“No,” he said. “You’ve been very brave about all this. I never got a chance to tell you how perfect your singing was that night. It was a miracle.”

“The miracle was the music,” Areana said. “I felt—I thought I was her, Leoff. I really did. My heart was breaking, and when I leapt from the window, I felt I would die. There is so much magic in you…”

She reached to stroke his face. He was too stunned to react until she touched him, and then he jerked away.

“What they did to you…” She sighed.

“Yes, well, I knew it could happen,” he said. “But I promised you better. I’m so sorry.”

“No, you warned me,” she said. “You warned us all, and we were all with you. We believed in you.” She moved nearer, and her breath was sweet. “I still believe in you. I want to help with whatever it is you’re really doing.”

“I told you,” he murmured. Her hand was warm, and if he moved his face a fraction, he could kiss it. A small movement more and he could reach her lips.

But he couldn’t put his hand against hers. Not like this. So he turned away slightly.

“I’m doing what he asked,” he said. “Nothing more.”

She withdrew her hand and stepped back. “You can’t,” she said. “Don’t fool with me.”

“I must. He’ll kill you and Mery,” he replied. “Don’t you understand?”

“You can’t give in because of me,” she said.

“Oh,” he replied. “Oh, yes—yes I can. And I will.”

“Don’t you think he’ll kill us, anyway?”

“No,” Leoff said, “I don’t think he will. That would undo everything. He’s trying to win your family—and the other landwaerden—back to him.”

“Yes, but the truth is that you were tortured, then forced to do this. Prince Robert can’t allow that fact to get out. And yet there are three of us who know. Not to mention what they did to—well, never mind. Do you really think we can be allowed to survive, knowing what we know?”

“We’ve a better chance than if I go against him,” Leoff argued. “You know that. If I defy him, he’ll torture you to death right in front of my eyes; then he’ll start with Mery. Or maybe he’ll go the other way around, I don’t know, but I can’t bear—”

“I can’t bear to see you doing his bidding,” Areana exploded, and he saw sudden real fury in her eyes. “It’s obscene, a perversion of your talent.”

He stared at her for a moment, unblinking, as he registered something she hadn’t quite said.

“What did they do to you?” he asked at last.

She blushed and took a further step back. “They did not hurt me, not as they did you,” she said quietly.

“I can see that,” he said, growing angry. “But what did they do to you?”

She flinched at his tone.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing I want to talk about.”

“Tell me,” he said more softly.

Her eyes teared up. “Please, Leoff. Please leave it be. If I don’t tell you—”

“Don’t tell me what?”

Her mouth parted. “I’ve never seen you like this,” she said.

“You’ve barely seen me at all,” Leoff hissed. “You think you know me?”

“Leoff, please don’t be angry with me.”

He took a deep breath, “Were you raped?”

She looked away, and when she turned back, her face had a grimmer cast. “Would that make a difference to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, could you still love me if I had been raped?”

Now he was aware that his jaw was hanging completely open. “Love you? When did I ever say I loved you?”

“Well, you didn’t, did you? You’re too shy and too preoccupied. I don’t know; maybe you aren’t even aware you love me. But you do.”

“I do?”

“Of course. And it’s not that I think everyone loves me, you know. But sometimes a girl knows, and with you I know. Or did.”

Leoff felt tears streaming down his face. He held his hands up. She shook her head.

“That doesn’t matter to me,” she said softly.

“It matters to me,” he replied. “What did they do to you?”

She lowered her head. “What you said,” she admitted.

“How many times?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

“I’m so sorry, Areana.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she said, looking back up. Her eyes were smoldering now. “Make them pay.”

For a precious moment he wanted to tell her his plan, to take her in what remained of his arms. But that would only weaken him, and now, more urgently than ever, he needed the worst he had in him.

“Robert doesn’t pay,” Leoff said. “Robert gets away with it, and we pay. Now, please go. I have work to do.”

“Leoff—”

“Go. Please.”

He turned away, and a few heartbeats later he heard footsteps retreating slowly and then picking up speed.

When he looked again, she was gone, and his feeling of sickness returned, stronger than before.

He settled back in front of the score and began again.

5 Return to Eslen

Anne surveyed herself dubiously in the looking glass.

“You look every inch a queen,” Austra assured her.

To that Anne could only answer with a dour chuckle, thinking of her mother with her alabaster skin, flawless hands, and long, silky hair. What she gleaned from the flecked mirror Artwair had found somewhere was a very different image.

Weather had chapped and reddened her face, and her freckles—always ubiquitous—were fatted on Vitellian sunlight. Her shorn hair was tucked underneath a wimple of the sort that hadn’t been popular outside of covens since before she was born. The gown was nice, though, a red-and-gold brocade, not too fancy, not too simple.

Even so, she felt like a toad in a silk slip.

“You have the bearing,” Austra amplified, clearly understanding her doubts.

“Thank you,” Anne replied, having nothing else to say. Would anyone in Eslen agree? She supposed she would find out.

“Now, what should I wear?” Austra mused.

Anne raised an eyebrow. “It shouldn’t matter, I think. You aren’t going.”

“Of course I’m going,” Austra said firmly.

“I thought I asked you never to question me again,” Anne said.

“You never said that,” Austra protested. “You said I might argue with you, try to persuade you, but in the end your word would be my law. That is still the case. But it would be foolish not to take me.”

“And how is that?”

“How will it look, a queen with no servants?”

“It will look as if I do not feel the need for them,” Anne replied.

“I don’t think so,” Austra countered. “It will be a sign of your weakness. You must take an entourage. You must have a maidservant, or else no one will take you seriously.”

“I’m taking Cazio. Or is that what this is about?”

Austra pinkened, and her brows lowered in anger.

“I won’t pretend I don’t want to stay near him,” Austra said, “but I want to be near you, too. And I stand by my reasoning. You claim to be queen, you’ve come to take the throne—you must act the part. Anyway, are you really so afraid?”

“I’m terrified,” Anne admitted. “Robert agreed so readily, so confidently I don’t know what it means.”

“That, at least, is a wise assessment,” Artwair’s voice came from outside the tent. “May I enter?”

“You may.”

The flap brushed open, and her cousin ducked in, accompanied by a man-at-arms.

“You have reservations, then?” Anne asked.

“Holy saints, yes. You have no idea what Robert is playing at, Anne. You might be slain the moment you leave our sight.”

“Then Sir Neil will chop off Robert’s head,” Anne said reasonably. “How will that benefit him?”

“Perhaps instead you will be taken prisoner and tortured until you give the order for his release. Or merely held until Hansan troops arrive.”

“I’ve made it clear to my uncle that if I am accosted in any way, his head will roll. Besides, I’m taking fifty men with me.”

“Robert has thousands in Eslen. Fifty is a only gesture, nothing more.

“Think, Anne! Why would Robert allow you to place him in this position? He could easily have held Eslen against us until his support came.”

“Then maybe he isn’t so certain that his support will come in time,” Anne suggested. “Or maybe he’s not so confident that his allies will support him at all. What if the Church should claim a Hansan as regent and send my uncle to the gallows?”

“That’s possible,” Artwair said, then he sighed. “But if that’s the case, why not open the gates and let all of us in? I believe he must have some dark design. Or perhaps it’s worse than that; perhaps Robert isn’t actually the master here, and he’s being sacrificed to lure you into the grip of whoever is in control.”

“And who would that be? Praifec Hespero?”

“Possibly.”

“Possibly,” Anne echoed.

She held her cousin’s gaze, wishing she could explain her visions to him, how she had seen the secret ways that lay within the walls of Eslen. Whatever her enemies had planned, they were men, and men could not know about the hidden passages.

Unfortunately, the same glamour made it impossible to explain that to Artwair.

“Perhaps to any and all of that,” she admitted. “But what alternative do you see? You’ve just admitted that we cannot easily take Eslen by brute force. Besides, whatever Robert’s plan may be, I have an advantage he cannot know about.”

“What advantage?”

“I could tell you,” Anne said, “but you would not remember.”

“What does that mean?” Artwair asked irritably.

Anne bit her lip. “I have a way of getting troops into the city.”

“That cannot be. I would know of such a thing, were it true.”

“But you are wrong,” Anne told him. “Only a very few know of this way.”

He rubbed at the stump of his hand for a moment.

“If this is true, so…” He shook his head. “You have to be more specific.”

“I can’t,” Anne replied. “I’ve sworn an oath.”

“That’s not good enough,” Artwair said. “I can’t allow it.”

Anne felt suddenly light. “What are you saying, Cousin?”

“If I must protect you from yourself, I will.”

Anne drew a long breath, surveying the guards. How many more did he have outside?

Well, there it was.

“How do you intend to protect me, Artwair? What do you imagine you will do?”

Artwair’s face twisted with some emotion, but Anne couldn’t see what it was.

“We need you, Anne. Without you this army has no cause.”

“What you mean is that without me, you have no army.”

He stood silent for a long moment.

“If you must put it that way, Anne, then yes. What do you know of these things? I’ve always liked you, Anne, but you’re just a girl. A few months ago you hadn’t the least care for this kingdom or anyone in it besides yourself. I don’t know what naïve notion you have—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Neil MeqVren interrupted, shouldering into the tent. Cazio came in just behind him, and beyond them Anne could see a dozen or more of Artwair’s guard, watching intently. “Anne is your queen.”

“You’re supposed to be watching Prince Robert,” Artwair said.

“He is in safe hands. I came, like you, to try to talk her away from this dangerous course of action.”

“Then I urge you not to involve yourself.”

“You have involved me already,” Neil replied. “She will not be convinced, and you must not attempt to force her.”

“I hardly think you can enforce that,” Artwair said drily.

“He’ll have my help,” Cazio said. The two brushed past Artwair’s men to stand at Anne’s side. She knew that even with Neil’s strange weapon, he and Cazio hadn’t a chance against her cousin’s men. But it felt good to have them there.

Artwair grimaced. “Anne—”

“What is your plan, Duke Artwair?” Anne interrupted. “How do you plan to claim your throne?”

“I want no throne for myself,” Artwair said, hotly now. “All I want is what’s best for Crotheny.”

“And you think I don’t?”

“I’ve no idea what you want, Anne, but I believe your desire to rescue your mother has clouded your judgment.”

Anne walked over to the tent flap, threw it open, and speared her finger toward the mist-covered island. The men outside stepped back.

“There is the throne, across that water, on that island. That’s what we’ve come here for. I’ve a chance to—”

“You’ve no chance at all. Robert is too devious. Better we withdraw, build our strength, join with Liery.”

“Liery,” Anne said, “is already out there. Do you honestly believe Sir Fail does not have a fleet in the water, even now?”

“Then where are they?”

“On the way.”

“They will never reach us,” Artwair said. “What fleet can survive—much less take—Thornrath?”

“No fleet,” Anne replied. “But you could.”

Artwair opened his mouth, then closed it.

“It’s possible,” he said, “but not bloody likely. Yet if there is a Lierish fleet…” He looked thoughtfully into the distance.

“There is,” Anne said. “I’ve seen it. Two days from now they arrive. If we do not control Thornrath, they will be destroyed, crushed between the wall and a Hanzish fleet.”

“Seen it?”

“In a vision, Cousin.”

Artwair barked a little laugh. “Visions are of no use to me,” he said.

Anne gripped his arm and stared up into his eyes. “What you said about me was true,” she admitted. “But I have changed. I am not the girl you knew. And I know more than you, Cousin Artwair. Not about tactics and strategy, I grant you, but about other things of perhaps greater importance. I know how to get troops into Eslen. I know Fail is coming. You do need me, but not as the figurehead you imagine.

“I will not be, as Robert put it, your poppet. We will do this the way I want it done, or we will not do it at all. Unless you think this army will follow my corpse. Or yours.”

Her anger was grown now, a kernel of rot in her belly. Once again she felt the waters of life and death pulsing around her and followed them through the seams of Artwairs armor, past the scratchy surface of his skin, into the tangle of bloody tissue and the flexing muscle of his heart. She felt it beat for a moment, then, gently, she caressed it.

The result was immediate. Artwair’s eyes bulged out, and his knees started to buckle. His man caught him as he clutched at his chest.

“No,” he gasped. “No.”

As if she were still watching herself through the looking glass, Anne heard herself talking.

“You say I am your queen, Artwair,” she murmured. “Say it now. Say it. Say it again.”

His face was bright red, but his lips were going blue.

“What…”

“Say it.”

“Not… like… this.”

She felt his heart spasm and realized he would die soon if she did not stop. How marvelously delicate the heart was.

But she didn’t want Artwair dead, so with a sigh she released him. He gasped and sagged, then tried to straighten, his eyes brimming with shock and fear.

“I am not what you think I am,” she said, releasing her grip on his arm.

“No,” he managed weakly, eyes still bulging. “You aren’t.”

“The fleet is coming—I know that. You know how to fight wars. Can we work together?”

Artwair held her gaze for a long moment, then nodded.

“Good,” she said. “Let’s discuss this, but quickly. In one bell I’m going to Eslen.”

A bell later, as she approached Robert’s boat, Anne felt a sudden jolt. It was like waking from one of the dreams she’d had as a child, a dream of falling. What made those dreams so disconcerting was the fact that they often happened when she didn’t know she was asleep.

She felt a bit of that now. She remembered her confrontation with Artwair well enough, and the conversation that followed, but the memory possessed an unreal quality, suddenly thrown into focus as the sights, smells, and sounds around her returned with such acuity that they were distracting. The iron-and-iodine scent of water was overpowering, and falls of liquid gold seemed to drop through the clouds. She noticed the fine wrinkles in the corners of Artwair’s eyes and the soft crush of her feet on yellowed grass, followed by the hushed friction of stone and leather.

And Eslen. Above all Eslen, her white towers burning here in sunlight and ghostly pale there in shadow beneath the broken clouds, her pennants fluttering like dragon tails in the sky. Off to the right the lesser twin mounds of Tom Cast and Tom Woth showed fawn crowns above shoulders of evergreen. She felt lifted and at the same time disoriented.

She had not feared Artwair at all, but now her terror was back.

What was she doing?

She wanted to run back to her cousin, place herself in his care, let him take the responsibility and power he so clearly desired. But even that wouldn’t save her, and for the moment that was what kept her going. She had seen the arrival of the Lierish ships, just as she had told Artwair. She had seen the passages only women could see.

But she had seen something else, as well: the monstrous woman of her Black Marys, crouching beneath the cold stone in the city of the dead.

She’d been eight when she and Austra first had found that crypt, and like the little girls they were, they had imagined it to be the tomb of Virgenya Dare, though no one really knew where the Born Queen had been buried. They had scratched prayers and curses on lead tissue and pushed them through the crack in the sarcophagus, and they more than half believed their pleas were effective.

As it had turned out, they had been right. Anne had asked for Roderick of Dunmrogh to love her, and he had been driven completely mad by love. She had asked for her sister Fastia to be nicer, and she had been—most apparently to Neil MeqVren, if Aunt Elyoner was to be believed.

What they had been wrong about was who lay in the crypt, who was answering their prayers.

She came out of her reverie and realized that Robert was leaning against the stone retaining wall of the dike, watching her.

“Well, dear niece,” he said, “are you ready to return home?”

Something about the way he said it seemed odd, and she wondered again if this had somehow been all his idea.

“Pray that I find my mother well,” she answered.

“She is in the Wolfcoat Tower,” Robert offered helpfully. He nodded toward his only male companion, a short man with wide shoulders and blunt features garnished by the same prim mustache and beard Robert wore. “This is my trusted friend Sir Clement Martyne. He carries my keys and my authority.”

“I am your humble servant,” the man said.

“If harm comes to her, Sir Clement,” Neil said, “you shall know me better, I promise you.”

“I am a man of my word,” Sir Clement said, “but I should be happy to become further acquainted with you, Sir Neil, under whatever conditions you might care to set.”

“Boys,” Robert said, “be nice.” He reached for Anne’s hand. She was so startled, she let him take it. As he raised it to his lips, she had to choke back the urge to vomit.

“A good journey to you,” he said. “We shall all meet back here in a day, yes?”

“Yes,” Anne replied.

“And discuss our future.”

“And discuss the future.”

A few moments later she was on a canal barge with her men and their mounts, moving across the water toward Eslen. She felt in her bones as if it were a place she had never been.

When they reached the docks, they mounted and that impression grew.

The castle of Eslen was built upon a high hill, protected by three concentric walls. The Fastness, its outmost wall, was the most impressive, twelve kingsyards high and watched by eight towers. Outside of it, on the broad lower ground between the first gate and the docks, a town had grown up over the years: Docktown, a collection of inns, brothels, warehouses, alehouses—everything a wandering seafarer might want, whether he arrived when the city gates were open or closed. It was usually a bustling, rowdy place, considered dangerous enough that the few times Anne had seen it had been when she had sneaked out of the castle incognito and against her parents’ wishes.

Today it was quiet, and the only seafarers she saw were those wearing the royal insignia. There weren’t many, though; most were on the fleet her boat had passed through on their way in.

Through open doorways and windows, Anne caught glimpses of men, women, and children—the people who actually lived there—and wondered what would happen to them if and when the fighting started. She remembered the little villages around the castles her army had reduced. They had not fared well.

After some explaining by Sir Clement and the presentation of a letter in Robert’s hand, the gates were opened, and they proceeded in to Eslen itself.

The city was a bit livelier than Docktown. Anne imagined it had to be. Even if war threatened, bread still had to be baked and bought, clothes had to be washed, beer brewed. Despite the bustle, though, her party drew a lot of curious stares.

“They don’t know me,” Anne noticed. “Do I look so different?”

Cazio chuckled at that.

“What?” she asked.

“Why should they know you?” the Vitellian asked.

“Even if they don’t know me as their queen, I have been their princess for seventeen years. Everyone knows me.”

“No,” Austra corrected. “Everyone in the castle knows you. The nobility, the knights, the servants. Most of those would recognize you. But how would the people in the street identify you unless you actually wore a symbol of office?”

Anne blinked. “That’s incredible,” she said.

“Not really,” Cazio replied. “How many of them have had the opportunity to meet you face to face?”

“I mean it’s incredible that I never thought of that.” Anne turned to Austra. “When we used to come into the city, I always wore disguises. Why didn’t you say anything then?”

“I didn’t want to spoil your fun,” Austra admitted. “Anyway, there are people who would have known you, and some of them might have been the wrong people.”

Watching her companions grin, Anne felt unaccountably conspired against, as if Austra and Cazio had somehow planned for this bit of stupidity on her part. She quashed the irritation, however.

The winding way steepened before they reached the second gate. The city of Eslen was laid out somewhat like a spider’s web draped over an anthill, with the avenues paralleling the broad circles of the ancient walls and streets running down the hills like streams. The largest thoroughfares, however, the ones used by armies and merchants, wound up the hill to prevent them being too steep for wagons and armored horses.

They followed just such a route—the Rixplaf—and so their path carried them through most of the Westhill neighborhoods. Each was distinctive, or so she was told. With some it was obvious; the houses in the old Firoy ward had the steepest roofs in town, all of black slate, so as the road wended above them, it was like looking down on stony waves. The people were pale, with lilting accents. The men wore two-color plaid jerkins, and the women’s skirts rarely had fewer than three bright shades.

The ward of Saint Neth, on the other hand, felt distinctive, but there was nothing Anne could actually point to to explain why. Still, of most of the city’s eighteen wards, Anne had seen only the houses fronting them to the streets, with tantalizing glimpses down the narrow alleys. Once she and Austra had slipped into Gobelin Court, the Sefry quarter, which she believed to be the most exotic part of the city with its vibrant colors, alien music, and odd, spicy smells. Now, after her experiences in the countryside of Crotheny, Anne wondered if the Mannish neighborhoods were not perhaps as strange and distinct.

In short, who were the people of Eslen?

She realized she didn’t know and wondered if her father had. If any king or emperor of the Crothanic empire ever had, and if in fact such a thing were really knowable at all.

At the moment they were in the Onderwaed district, where the sign of the ridge-backed swine was everywhere in evidence: in door knockers, on small paintings above the doors, as wind vanes on the roof. The plastered houses tended all to be the same umber hue, and the men wore brimmed hats pinned up on one side. Many of them were butchers, and in fact, Mimhus Square was dominated by the impressive facade of the butcher’s guild, a two-story building of yellow stone with black casements and roof.

As they entered the square, Anne’s attention was drawn more to the spectacle than to the buildings around it. A large crowd was gathered around a raised podium in the center of the plaza, where many oddly clothed persons seemed to be under guard by soldiers. The soldiers wore square caps and black surcoats with the sigil of the church on them.

Above them—quite literally, perched on a precarious-looking stilt-legged wooden chair—a man dressed as a patir seemed to be presiding over some sort of trial. A gallows loomed behind him.

Anne had never seen anything like it.

“What’s going on here?” she asked Sir Clement.

“The Church is using the city squares for public courts,” the knight replied. “Heretics are common in the city, and it looks as if the resacaratum has discovered more.”

“They look like actors,” Austra noted. “Street performers.”

Sir Clement nodded. “We’ve found that actors are most particularly susceptible to the lures of certain heresies and shinecrafting.”

“Are they?” Anne asked. She spurred her horse toward the attish.

“One moment!” Sir Clement cried in alarm.

“I heard my uncle state that you were at my command,” she responded over her shoulder. “I wonder if you heard the same thing.”

“Yes, of course, but—”

“Yes, Highness,” Anne said icily. She noticed Cazio placing himself so he could come between her and Robert’s knight should the need arise.

“Yes… Highness,” Sir Clement gritted.

The patir was watching them now.

“What’s going on here?” he called.

Anne drew herself up. “Do you know me, patir?” she asked.

His eyes narrowed, then widened.

“Princess Anne,” he replied.

“And, by law of the Comven, sovereign of this city,” Anne added. “At least in my brother’s absence.”

“That is debatable, Highness,” the patir said, his gaze flickering nervously to Clement.

“My uncle gave me passage into the city,” Anne informed him. “Thus, it would seem he has some belief in my claim.”

“Is this so?” the patir asked Clement.

Clement shrugged. “So it would seem.”

“In any case,” the churchman said, “I’m engaged in the business of the Church, not that of the crown. It is immaterial who sits on the throne so far as these proceedings are concerned.

“Oh, I assure you that isn’t the case,” Anne replied. “Now, please tell me of what these people are accused.”

“Heresy and shinecraft.”

Anne looked the company over.

“Who is your leader?” she asked them.

A balding man of middle years bowed to her. “I am, Your Majesty. Pendun MaypValclam.”

“What did you do to come before this court?”

“We performed a play, Majesty, nothing more—a sort of singspell.”

“The play by my mother’s court composer, Leovigild Ackenzal?”

“Yes, that one, Majesty, as best we could.”

“The play has been judged to be shinecraft most foul,” the patir erupted. “That confession alone consigns them to the necklace of Saint Woth.”

Anne arched her eyebrows at the patir, then turned and gazed around the square at the faces of the assembled onlookers.

“I’ve heard of this play,” she said, raising her voice. “I hear it is very popular.” She sat straighter in the saddle. “I am Anne, daughter of William and Muriele. I have come to take my father’s throne. I’ve a mind to let my first act be the pardoning of these poor actors, for my father would never have tolerated this sort of injustice. What do you say to that, people of Eslen?”

She was met by a moment of stunned silence.

“It is er, you know,” she heard someone call out from the crowd. “I’ve seen er before.”

“Free em!” someone else yelled, and in a moment everyone but the soldiers and churchmen had taken to shouting for the troupe to be let go.

“You are free to go,” Anne told the players. “My men will escort you from this court.”

“Enough,” Sir Clement shouted. “Enough of this nonsense!”

“Anne!” Cazio said.

But she saw them, as she had half expected: footmen in Bobert’s colors, entering the square from every direction, pushing through the indignant crowd.

Anne nodded. “Well,” she said. “Better to know this now than inside the Wolfcoat Tower, don’t you think?”

“What shall we do?” Cazio asked.

“Why, fight of course,” she replied.

6 Crossroads

“Winna’s not doing well,” Ehawk murmured.

Aspar sighed, tracking his gaze across the distant hillside.

“I know,” he said. “She’s been coughing blood. So have you.” He pointed at a line of blackened vegetation. “See, there?”

“Yes,” Ehawk replied. “It came out of the water over there.”

Something that left a trail like that ought not to be hard to track, but the woorm used rivers for a lot of its traveling, and that was a problem, especially when the river branched. They might have lost it when it turned up the Then River, but for the dead fish flowing from its mouth into the Warlock.

They followed the trail at the greatest distance possible, never actually stepping on it or taking water downstream of it, and Aspar had hoped that the poison already in them would work its way out.

It hadn’t.

The medicine they’d gotten from Fends men sustained them, but they were forced to take less and less of it each day to stretch it out. The horses seemed better, but then, none of the beasts had actually stood on poisoned ground or breathed the monster’s breath.

Not far away, Winna coughed. Ehawk knelt and searched through the remains of the campfire.

“You think this is Stephen’s trail?”

Aspar glance around. “Four of em, and they didn’t come from the river. They came down from the Brog y Stradh. If it’s Stephen, the woorm isn’t following him, but their paths keep crossing.”

“Maybe it knows where he’s going.”

“Maybe. But at this point I’m more concerned with finding Fend.”

“Maybe he died.”

Aspar barked a sharp laugh that became a cough. “I doubt it. I should have finished him.”

“I don’t see how. By the time we found your arrow, the woorm was gone. You can’t imagine you were going to kill it with your dirk.”

“No, but I could have killed Fend.”

“The woorm is his ally. We were lucky to escape.”

“So now we die slow.”

“No,” Ehawk said. “We’ll catch it. It’s on land now, so it won’t be as fast.”

“Yah,” Aspar said, a bit doubtfully. Ehawk was probably right, but they, too, were slower every day.

“See to the horses and the camp,” Aspar said. “I’ll find us something to eat.”

“Yah,” Ehawk said.

Aspar found a game trail and a convenient perch in a sycamore. He settled there and let weariness have his body while trying to keep his eyes and wits sharp.

It had been ten years since Aspar had been in the low marshes around the Then, on one of his rare ventures outside the boundaries of the King’s Forest. He’d gone to deliver some bandits to the magistrate of Ofthen town, and while there he had heard interesting tales about the Sarnwood and the witch who was supposed to live there. He’d been at his most footloose back then and reckoned he’d see what the ancient, supposedly haunted forest was really like. He’d made it only about halfway before news about the Black Wargh turned him back south, and he hadn’t ever taken up the trip again.

But he’d stopped there for a few days to hunt. That had been in the summer, with everything lush and green. Now it all appeared thin, a landscape of rushes and broken cattails, brittle sheens of ice in the standing places that clutched any color the sky might give them. To his right he made out the black stone remains of a wall, and farther up a mound that looked suspiciously regular. He’d heard there had been a mighty kingdom there long ago. Stephen probably could go on about it at distracting length, but all Aspar knew was that it was long gone, and once you got a few leagues from Ofthen, this was one of the most desolate parts of the Midenlands.

The soil was poor even when the land was drained, and what few people lived in the area were mostly river fishers or goat herders, but there wasn’t much sign even of them. He vaguely remembered hearing something about the land having been cursed during the Warlock Wars, too, but he’d never paid much attention to that sort of thing, though in hindsight maybe he should have.

Something caught his eye: not movement but something weird, something that ought not be there…

A sick prickling crept up his shoulders as he realized what it was. Black thorns had sprouted from a dead cypress and had clawed their way into nearby trees. He’d seen such thorns before, of course, first in the valley where the Briar King slept and later as infestations in the King’s Forest. And here they were, too.

Did that mean that the Briar King had come this way? Or that the briars were now spreading everywhere?

He shuddered, then went dizzy and nearly fell from his roost. He clung desperately to the branches, his breath coming in fits. Spots danced before his eyes. He’d only pretended to drink his fraction of the medicine for the last few days, and that was starting to take its toll.

He had to catch Fend. Where was the sceathaoveth going?

Something had been nagging at him, and he suddenly realized what it was.

Before he could think much about it, movement caught his eye. Barely breathing, he waited until it resolved itself into a doe. Calming his shaking hand, he took aim and put an arrow through her neck. She bolted, and with a sigh he climbed down from the tree. Now he would have to follow her for a while.

“I’ve got a new plan,” he told Winna and Ehawk, as they roasted the venison. Winna looked even worse than she had earlier in the day, and she clearly was having trouble eating. “But seeing as how it concerns all of us, I’ll want you two to mull it over.”

“What?” Winna asked.

“It’s something Leshya said, when we first met her. She said she’d heard that Fend had gone to see the S am wood witch.”

“Yah,” Winna said. “I remember that.”

“And the fellow we captured—he said that’s where Fend got the woorm. She’s supposed to be the mother of monsters, so I guess that makes sense.”

“You think Fend’s going back there?” Winna asked.

“Maybe. Maybe not. That’s not my point, though. If he got the woorm from the witch, he probably got the antidote there, too.”

“Oh,” Winna said, looking up.

“Ha,” Ehawk said.

“Yah. Maunt you both, we’re not catching this woorm. Not before we die. It’s days ahead of us, and yah, it may go slower on land, but I’ve seen it move, and it’s still as fast as a horse. And if it takes to another river…”

“So instead you want to go find the mother of monsters and ask her for the remedy for her child’s poison?” Winna said.

“I wasn’t planning on asking Fend for it,” Aspar replied. “I won’t ask her, either.”

“But we know Fend has it.”

“Not really. Or, rather, if I know Fend, he’s just got enough for himself.”

“Or maybe there is no antidote,” Winna went on. “Maybe Fend is like Stephen, and the venom doesn’t eat at him at all.”

“That’s possible,” Aspar admitted. “But Mother Gastya had a real remedy. Mother Gastya was a witch, so maybe this Sarnwood woman…” He trailed off and shrugged.

Winna considered that for a moment, then smiled weakly.

“It’s worth going just to see you chase a kinderspell,” she finally said. “I’m for it.”

Ehawk didn’t answer for a long time.

“She eats children,” he finally said.

“Well,” Aspar replied, “I’m not a child.”

They forded the Then upstream of the woorm’s path just at dawn, with Ogre breaking the way through the thin sheen of ice. The ground was firmer beyond and quickly rose in low terraced hills thick in willow and sassafras. By the time the sun was far up, they were on rolling prairie broken up by pasture and fields, brilliant green in calf-high winter wheat. Trees were few and far between, and stands greater than half a dozen were rare indeed. Aspar didn’t like so much openness; it felt as if something might swoop up on him from the sky. Who knew, maybe it could happen? If there could be a snake half a league long, maybe there were eagles that big, too.

There were also too many people in the Midenlands, at least there had been. They didn’t build huge towns as they did toward either coast, but farmsteads were common—a house, a barn, a few smaller buildings—and every few leagues or so there was a market square with half a dozen buildings. Almost anything that looked like a hill had a castle on it, some in ruins, some puffing smoke to show they were still inhabited. That day they saw three from sunup to sundown. That seemed like a lot, seeing as how there weren’t many rises in the land that imagination might make a hill of.

But they didn’t actually see anyone, not that first day, because they were still pretty much along the woorm’s trail, and it seemed to have made a detour every time it came within sight of houses. They didn’t see any cows, sheep, goats, or horses, either. The thing had to eat, and considering its size, it probably had to eat a lot.

Early the next day, though, the monster’s trail turned more northerly than Aspar wanted to go, putting them at a crossroad. The time came to test his resolve. A glance at Winna kept his mind made up, and they went northeast, toward the Sarnwood.

Within a bell they came across some foraging cows and a couple of people with them. As they got closer, Aspar saw it was a boy and girl, neither one older than thirteen or so. They looked at first as if they might run, but they stood their ground until Aspar and his companions were fifty or so kingsyards away.

“Hello!” the girl shouted. “Who is that?”

Aspar held up empty hands. “I haet Aspar White,” he called back. “I’m the king’s holter. These are my friends. We mean you no harm.”

“What’s a holter?” the girl returned.

“I ward the forest,” he replied.

The girl scratched her head, then looked around as if searching for a forest. “Are you lost?” she asked.

“No,” Aspar replied. “But can I come closer? All this shoutin’ is wearing out my throat.”

The two looked at each other, than back at the trio. “I don’t know,” the girl said.

“We should dismount,” Winna said. “They’re frightened.”

“They’re scared of me,” Aspar said. “I’ll dismount. Winna, why don’t you go closer first. But stay on your horse, at least until you get there.”

“That’s a good idea,” she assented.

Aethlaud and her brother Aohsli were both fair-haired, pink-cheeked youths. She was thirteen, and he was ten. They had some bread and cheese, to which Aspar added a generous portion of the last day’s venison. He hadn’t had time to cure it properly, so what they hadn’t eaten would soon spoil, anyway. They sat on a gentle rise beneath a solitary persimmon tree and watched the cows.

“We’re taking ’em down to Haemeth,” Aethlaud explained, “to my uncle’s place. But we’re supposed to graze them on the way.”

“Where is that?” Aspar asked.

Her expression said that anyone who didn’t know where Haemeth was didn’t know much of anything.

“It’s about a league that way,” she said, pointing northeast. “On the Thaurp-Crenreff road.”

“We’re going that way,” Winna said. Aspar wanted to shush her before she offered to accompany them. He didn’t want to be kept to the speed of cows. But she looked so gaunt and brittle, it froze his voice.

“Are you sick?” Aohsli blurted.

“Yes,” Winna said. “We all are. But it isn’t catching.”

“No, it’s from the waurm, isn’t it?”

They were out of Oostish country, and her pronunciation was a little different, but there wasn’t any mistaking what she meant.

“Yah,” Aspar said.

“Haudy saw it,” the boy confided.

His sister popped him on the back of the head. “Aethlaud,” she snapped. “I’m too old for that nickname. I’ll be married by next year, and Mom will send you to live with me, and I’ll make you eat kalfsceit if you call me that.”

“Mom still calls you that.”

“That’s Mom,” the girl said.

“You saw the woorm?” Winna interrupted. “West of here?”

“No,” she said. “That’s it coming back, I think.”

“How do you mean?” Aspar asked, leaning closer.

“It was back before Yule,” she said. “I went with my mom’s brother Orthel to Mael to have some rye ground. That’s on Fenn Creek, what flows into the Warlock. We saw it in the river. The people around there, a lot of’em took sick, like you.”

“Before Yule.”

“Yah.”

“So it did come out of the Sarnwood.”

“Oh, yah,” the girl said, her eyes rounding. “Where else would it come from?”

That lifted Aspar’s spirits, if only a little. He’d made one good guess; perhaps the rest of his “maybes” were true.

“What do you know about the Sarnwood?” Aspar asked.

“It’s full of ghosts and alvs and booygshins!” Aohsli said.

“And the witch,” Aethlaud said. “Don’t forget the witch.”

“Do you know anyone who’s been there?” Winna asked.

“Eh… no,” the girl replied. “’Cause anyone who ever went—they never came back.”

“ ’Cept Grandpa,” the boy corrected.

“Yah,” Aethlaud agreed. “But he’s gone west t’ the wood.”

“Is that where you’re going?” Aohsli asked Aspar. “The Sarnwood?”

“Yah.” Aspar nodded.

The boy blinked, then glanced at Ogre. “When you are dead, may I have your horse?”

Ehawk, not usually given to outbursts, exploded at that. He was laughing so hard that Winna caught it, and in the end even Aspar found himself grinning.

“Now you’re wishing for things you’d might rather not have,” he said. “Ogre might be a little much for you.”

“Nah, I could handle ’im,” Aohsli said.

“How much longer do you expect it’ll take you to get to Haemeth?” Winna asked.

“Another two days,” Aethlaud said. “We don’t want to walk the fat off ’em.”

“Is it safe, just the two of you out here?”

Aethlaud raised her shoulders. “Used to be safer, I guess.” She frowned, then continued a little more defiantly. “But there’s not much choice. There’s nobody else to do it, not since our father died. And we’ve done it before.”

Winna glanced at Aspar. “Maybe we could—”

“We can’t,” he said. “We can’t. Two days—”

“A moment over here, Aspar?” Winna asked, gesturing with a toss of her head.

“Yah.”

There wasn’t anyplace to go except away, and Winna was having trouble moving, so they didn’t go all that far. But whispering made it feel a little private.

“You aren’t as sick as I am,” Winna said. “Something happened when the Briar King saved your life, something that made you stronger. You don’t really drink the medicine you got from Fends man anymore, do you?”

He acknowledged that with a small nod. “I still feel it,” he admitted, “but yah, I’m not so sick as you.”

“How much farther to the Sarnwood?”

He considered. “Three days.”

“At the pace we’re traveling, I mean.”

He sighed. “Four, maybe five.”

She coughed, and he had to catch her to keep her from falling.

“I’m pretty sure I won’t be sitting a horse in two days, Aspar. You’ll have to tie me on. Ehawk’s got a little longer, I’d guess.”

“But if we dally here…”

“Just me and Ehawk, Aspar,” Winna said. Her eyes were brimming with tears. “If I’m only going to live a few more days, I’d rather use them helping these two get where they’re going than chasing after some cure that isn’t there.”

“It is there,” Aspar insisted. “You heard ’em: Fend got the woorm in the Sarnwood. I’m sure he got the antidote there, too.”

“I also heard them say that most everyone who has ever gone into the Sarnwood never came out.”

“That’s because it’s never been me before.”

She shook her head wearily. “No,” she said. “Let’s take them to Haemeth. You can ask questions there, learn more about the witch.”

“We can do that, anyway, without dallying to drive cattle.”

“I want to help them, Aspar.”

“They don’t need help,” he argued, desperation creeping into his words. “They’ve done this before. They said so.”

“They’re terrified,” Winna contradicted. “Who knows what they’ll come across out here in two days. If not a woorm or greffyn, then maybe just cattle thieves.”

“They aren’t my concern, Winna—you are.”

“Yah. I know. But do this for me.”

She was crying freely but silently. Her face was red, her lips tinted blue.

“I’ll go,” he said. “I’ll go by myself. It’ll be easier that way; you’re right about that. Ehawk won’t be in any condition to fight by then; you’re right. I wasn’t thinking.”

“No, love,” Winna said. “No. Then I’ll die without you, you see? I want to breathe my last in your arms. I want you to be there.”

“You aren’t going to die,” he said evenly. “I’ll be back, with your cure. I’ll meet you in Haemeth.”

“Don’t. Can’t you hear me? I don’t want to die alone! And she’ll kill you!”

“What about Ehawk? You’ve given up on yourself, but there still might be time to save him, even by your reckoning.”

“I… Aspar, please. I’m not strong enough for this.”

His throat was clotted, and his pulse pounded in his ears.

“Enough,” he said. He lifted her, strode back to her mount, and pushed her up on it, then brushed away her clinging hands.

“Ehawk,” he shouted. “Come here.”

The boy obeyed.

“You and Winna’ll go with these two to the town. Then you find a leic, you hear? The folk around here may know more about monsters and their venom then we think. You wait there, and I’ll be back.”

“Aspar, no!” Winna wailed weakly.

“You were right!” he shouted back. “Go with them.”

“You come, too!”

Instead of answering, he clapped his mouth and mounted Ogre.

“I’ll tell him to find you when I am dead,” he told Aohsli. “But you take care of him.”

“Auy, sir!”

He turned to regard Winna and found her and her horse only a few paces away.

“Don’t leave me,” she whispered. Her lips moved, but he scarcely heard the sound.

“Not for long,” he promised.

She closed her eyes. “Kiss me, then,” she said. “Kiss me one more time.”

Grief welled up like a monster, climbing out of the caves of his guts, trying to claw its way out of his eyes.

“Keep that kiss,” he said. “I’ll get it when I return.”

Then he turned and rode and did not—could not—look back.

7 The Mad Wolf

Robert Dare stroked his mustache, sipped his wine, and sighed. From their vantage on the dike he glanced out over the flooded lands toward Eslen.

“I’ve always favored the Galléan wines,” he commented. “You can all but taste the sunlight in them, you know? The white stone, the black soil, the dark-eyed girls.” He paused. “You’ve been there, Sir Neil? Vitellia, Tero Galle, Hornladh—you’ve had quite the tour of this continent. I really hope you can arrange to see the rest of it. Tell me—they say that traveling opens the mind, broadens the palate. Did you learn any new tastes in your travels? Or anything at all?”

Watching the prince, Neil had the strange impression he was seeing some sort of an insect. It wasn’t anything obvious but something subtle about the way he moved.

A dog, a stag, even a bird or lizard—all those things moved smoothly, in time with the larger world around them. Beetles, in contrast, moved weirdly. It wasn’t just that they were quick or had six legs; it was more that they seemed to move to the rhythms of a different world, a smaller one, or perhaps to the smaller rhythms of this world that giants such as Neil could not feel.

That was how it was with Robert. His gestures studied normality but could not reproduce it. Seen from the corner of the eye, even the parting of his lips seemed oddly monstrous.

“Sir Neil?” Robert prompted politely.

“I was just thinking,” Neil said, “how best to sum it up. I was overwhelmed at first by the size of the world, how many parts it has. I was amazed by how different people are, and at the same time how they are all the same.”

“Interesting,” Robert said in a tone that suggested it was anything but.

“Yes,” Neil said. “Until I came to Eslen, I thought my world was large. The sea, after all, seems endless when one is upon it, and the islands seem uncountable. But then I came to discover all of that could fit into a cup, if the world were a table.”

“Poetic,” Robert said.

“In the little cup of the world I lived in,” Neil went on, “things were pretty simple. I knew who I fought for, I knew why. Then I came here, and things became confusing. As I traveled farther into the world, they became more confusing yet.”

Robert smiled indulgently. “Confusing how? Did you lose your sense of right and wrong?”

Neil returned the smile. “I grew up fighting, and mostly I fought Weihand raiders. They were bad people because they attacked my people. They were bad people because they fought for Hansa, people who once kept my people in bondage and would do it again if they could. And yet looking back on it, most of the men I killed were probably not that different from me. They probably died believing their cause was just, hoping their fathers would look from beyond the world and be proud of them.”

“Yes, I see,” Robert said. “You may not know this, but there is a philosophy of considerable weight built on that same premise. It is not a philosophy suited to the weak-minded, however, because it suggests—as, in fact, you just suggested—that there is really no such thing as good or evil, that most people do what they think is right. It’s just the lack of agreement on what is right that leads us to believe in good and evil.”

He leaned forward almost eagerly.

“You traveled great distances, Sir Neil. Leagues. But one can also travel, so to speak, in time, through the study of history. Consider the argument that sits before us now; I am vilified for trying to strengthen our bonds of friendship with Hansa and thus avert a war we can ill afford. My detractors point out that by doing so I create conditions that might allow a Reiksbaurg to take the throne a few years hence.

“Now, why should that be considered wrong? Because Hansa is evil? Because they desire control of this kingdom? And yet my family, the Dares, wrested Crotheny from Hansa in a bloody conflict. My great-great-grandfather murdered the Reiksbaurg emperor in the Hall of Doves. Who was good and who was evil then? It’s a meaningless question, don’t you think?”

“I’m not as learned as you,” Neil acknowledged. “I know little about history, even less about philosophy. I am a knight, after all, and my job is to do as I am told. I have killed many men I might have liked if we had met under other circumstances, because they weren’t—as you say—evil. We were merely serving masters at cross-purposes. In some cases, it wasn’t even that. To do my duty, I had to stay alive, and to stay alive sometimes means killing others.

“As you say, most people in this world are just trying to do the best they can, protect the ones they love and the life they know, live up to their duties and obligations.”

“All perfectly reasonable.”

“Yes,” Neil continued. “And so when I meet real evil, it stands out all the more, like a tall black tree in a field of green heather.”

Robert’s eyes fluttered, and then he chuckled. “So after all that, you still believe there are genuinely evil men. You somehow possess the ability to read their hearts and see that they aren’t like most people, who think they are doing the right thing.”

“Let me put it another way,” Neil said.

“Oh, please do.”

“Do you know the island of Leen?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“There’s no reason you should. It’s not much more than a rock, really, though a rock with a thousand small valleys and crevices. There are wolves there, but they keep to the heights. They don’t come down to where people dwell.

“In my fifteenth year I was on Leen for most of a summer, part of a Lierish garrison. And that year a wolf did come down—a big one. At first it only killed kids and ewes, but soon enough it started in on children, and then grown women and men. It didn’t eat what it killed, mind you; it just mauled them and left them to die. Now, there might have been any number of reasons for it doing that; maybe its mother died, along with its brothers and sisters, and it grew up outside the pack, a loner hated by its own kind. Maybe it was bitten by something that gave it the waterfearing madness. Maybe a man mistreated it once, and it had sworn revenge on all of our kind.

“We didn’t ask those questions. We didn’t have to. This thing looked like a wolf, but it didn’t behave like one. It couldn’t be frightened away, or appeased, or reasoned with. The only way to make the world a better place was to take that beast out of it, and that we did.”

“One might argue that you did not make the world a better place for the wolf.”

“One might reply that to ask the world to accommodate itself to the needs of a single mad wolf can never make it a better place for anyone. And the wolf that would ask such a thing of the world—well, that’s my black tree in a field of heather, you see?”

“Why not a green tree in a field of black heather?” Robert mused.

“Why not?” Neil agreed. “It’s not the color that matters, really.”

“Here’s my question, then,” Robert said, quaffing the rest of the wine and reaching for the bottle. He stopped in midgrasp.

“May I?”

“If you wish.”

Robert poured himself more wine, took a sip, then returned his regard to Neil.

“My question. Suppose you felt someone was this black tree of yours, this truly evil person. A mad wolf that needed killing. Why ever would you entrust the safety of, say, a young woman to his promise?”

“Because he serves only himself,” Neil replied. “Never something higher. So I can be sure he would never sacrifice himself.”

“Really? Not even out of spite or revenge? I mean, we all must die. I see no escape from that, do you? Let us suppose this man of yours had ambitions, and seeing them thwarted was just, well, impossible for him. If a man cannot inherit a house he covets, might he not burn it down? Wouldn’t that be in keeping with the sort of person you’ve been describing?”

“I’m tired of this,” Neil said. “If anything happens to Anne, you will not die quickly.”

“What is her signal? I wonder. How will you know she is well?”

“There is a signal,” Neil assured him. “Something we can see from here. If we do not see it before sundown, I will cut off one of your fingers and send it to your men. That will continue until she is either free or proved dead.”

“You’re going to feel so foolish when this is all over and Anne and I are fast friends. What do you suppose will happen to a knight who threatened his liege?”

“At the moment,” Neil said, “that isn’t my concern. When it is, I will of course accept whatever fate the queen thinks I deserve.”

“Of course you will.” Robert sneered.

Robert glanced up at the sky and twitched a smile. “You haven’t asked about your last queen, Muriele. Aren’t you curious about her?”

“I’m more than curious,” Neil replied. “I haven’t asked about her because I’ve no reason to trust anything you say. Whatever you tell me about her will leave me in doubt. I will find out how she is in good time.”

“And suppose she complains about my treatment of her? Suppose everything else goes well here—I step aside, Anne takes the throne—and yet Muriele still has some protest concerning her treatment?”

“Then you and I will have another discussion about mad wolves.”

Robert drained his cup and reached for the bottle again. When he tried to pour, however, he found it empty.

“Surely there is more of this around,” he said in a loud voice.

At Neil’s nod, one of Artwair’s squires hurried to fetch another bottle.

“This isn’t about Fastia, is it?” Robert asked. “These feelings of yours? That’s not what this is really about, I hope.”

Neil had managed to feel mostly contempt for Robert until that point. That was good, because it kept his murderous inclinations toward the man in check. But now rage came howling up, and it was only with great effort that he forced it back into his marrow.

“Such a tragedy,” Robert said. “And poor Elseny, just about to be wed. If only William had had more sense.”

“How can you blame the king?” Neil asked.

“He forced the Comven to legitimize his daughters. How could he imagine that they would not become targets?”

“Targets for whom, Prince Robert?” Neil asked. “An usurper?”

Robert sighed heavily. “What are you suggesting, Sir Neil?”

“I thought it was you doing the suggesting, Prince Robert.”

Robert leaned forward, and his voice dropped very low. “How did it feel? Royal wool? Different from the lesser sort? I’ve always found it so. But they buck and cry like animals, all of them, don’t they?”

“Shut up,” Neil grated.

“Don’t get me wrong; Fastia really was in need of a good thumping. She always seemed the sort to like it from behind, on all fours, like a dog. Was that the way it was?”

Neil was aware that his breath was coming harshly, and the world was taking on the bright edge that came with the quetiac, the battle rage. His hand was already gripped on the hilt of the feysword.

“You should be quiet now,” Neil said.

The boy arrived with a new bottle of wine.

“This will quiet me,” Robert said. But as he took the bottle, he suddenly stood and shattered it against the boy’s head.

It seemed to go very slowly: the heavy glass container cracking against the squire’s temple, the spray of blood. Neil saw one eye pop from its socket as the skull deformed under the impact. At the same time, he saw Robert reaching for the boy’s sword.

And he was happy. Happy, because now the feysword hummed from its sheath and he lunged forward. Robert twisted the dying lad in front of him, but the blade cut through and deep into the prince. Neil felt an odd jolt, almost a protest from the weapon, and his fingers loosened reflexively.

From the corner of his eye he saw Robert’s fist coming, still holding the neck and upper third of the bottle. He brought his hand up without thinking.

Too late. The side of his head seemed to explode in a white-hot concussion. He fell away from the blow, his rage sustaining his consciousness, but when he came back to his feet, Robert was already two yards away, holding the feysword, a demonic smirk on his face.

Dizzily, Neil reached for his knife, knowing it wouldn’t help much against the ensorcelled weapon.

But an arrow struck the prince high in the chest, and then another, and he stumbled back, shouted, and pitched over the side of the dike into the water. Neil lurched after him, gripping the knife.

Artwair’s men caught him at the birm, preventing him leaping the eight kingsyards down into the water.

“No, you fool,” Artwair shouted. “Let my archers have him.”

Neil fought his captors, but blood had filled one of his eyes, and his muscles felt horribly loose.

“No!” he screamed. But following that, a deep silence fell. They waited for the prince to surface, dead or alive.

But after many long breaths he did not. Artwair sent men into the water then, but they found nothing.

A cold mist ran up the river that evening, but the Pelican Tower stood above all that, its north face clearly visible and dark.

“Even if she puts out the light,” Neil said, pressing a clean rag to his head wound, “it might only mean she was tortured into telling her signal.”

“Auy,” Artwair agreed. “The only thing that will have real meaning is if she doesn’t put out the light at all.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Neil snapped. “Dead at the hand of Robert’s men, Anne might be more useful to you than alive—at least now that you know her mind.”

Artwair was silent for a moment, then took a pull on the green glass bottle he’d put beside them on the boards. The two men sat on the upper story of a half-burned malend, watching for Anne’s signal.

He offered the bottle to Neil.

“I won’t pretend she left me happy this morning,” the duke said. “She reached right inside me. I could feel ’er there. What happened to her, Sir Neil? What has that girl become?”

Neil shrugged and reached for the bottle. “Her mother sent her to the Coven Saint Cer. Does that mean anything to you?”

Artwair stared skeptically as Neil took a drink from the bottle, tasting fire, peat, and seaweed. He looked at the bottle in surprise.

“This is from Skern,” he said.

“Auy. Oiche de Fié. The Coven Saint Cer, eh? A coven-trained princess. Muriele is an interesting one.”

He took the bottle and swallowed more of the stuff as Neil let the aroma filter up his nose. He’d never drunk much; it dulled the senses. Right now he didn’t much care, because his senses had proved pretty useless and every piece of him hurt.

“But you’ve got me wrong, Sir Neil,” Artwair said. “Just because I think a girl of seventeen winters doesn’t have the skills to lay siege to the greatest fortress city in the world, that doesn’t mean my aim is the throne. I’m unhappy enough with my duller duties as duke without being saddled and ridden by the Comven. Believe me or not, I do think she’s the one ought be on the throne, and I’m trying to put her there.” He drank again. “Well, she got her way, and see what’s happened.”

“Because of me,” Neil said, taking the bottle back and swallowing hard. He thought he would gag for a moment, but then it went down, feeling smoother this time. “Because of my rage.”

“Robert provoked your rage,” Artwair said. “He wanted to die.”

“He wanted me to fight him,” Neil said, ignoring Artwair’s outstretched hand long enough to take another drink. Then he relinquished the bottle. “That part is true, and I fell for it like the fallow-brained fool I am. I let the anger take me away from common sense. But he isn’t dead; that’s the thing.”

“I didn’t see it, but they say you fair skewered him, and it’s for sure he didn’t come up,” Artwair pointed out.

“Well, these days that’s nothing certain at all,” Neil said. “In Vitellio and in Dunmrogh both I fought a man who couldn’t die. The first time he nearly killed me. The second time I cut off his head, yet he kept moving. In the end we chopped him into a hundred pieces and burned them. A friend of mine told me he was a thing called a nauschalk, that he could exist because the law of death had been broken. Now, I’m far from an expert on this, but I have fought one nauschalk, and I’m pretty sure Prince Robert is another.”

Artwair swore in a language Neil didn’t know, then said nothing for the time it took each of them to have three drinks. It was the customary silence after one had spoken of something unnatural—at least while in cups.

“There are rumors,” he said finally, “rumors that suggest such a thing, but I discounted them. Robert always had unhealthy appetites, and people exaggerate.”

Neil took another drink. By now the oiche felt like an old friend drawing a blanket up from his toes to warm him.

“That was what we were missing,” he said. “He probably told his man to have Anne killed or taken captive the moment they passed through the gates. Then all he had to do was make sure we didn’t lock him up or slice him into pieces. All he had to do was provoke me into attacking him, which he did right well.”

“Yes, but whatever you might have done, the result to Anne would have been the same, you see.”

“Unless she’s safe until he returns,” Neil said. “That would have been the wiser plan. When he’s back, safe in the city, then the trap is sprung.”

“Auy,” Artwair replied. “That would make more sense, I’m supposing. But Anne isn’t helpless, either. I’ll bet Robert doesn’t know what she can do. And she has fifty good men with her.”

Across the water they heard the first, melodious chime of the Vespers bell.

The window of the Pelican Tower remained dark.

“She might make a fight of it, for a while, if she found the right place to defend. If she isn’t lulled into taking poison or has an arrow sunk into her eye.”

“I doubt she’s lulled,” Artwair said. “The tower isn’t lit. That means she’s dead, captured, or for some other reason not in the castle. Whichever it is, our duty is clear.”

“What’s that?”

“We have to strike, and now. The rumor has gone out by now of what happened with Robert. Even if he lives, everyone believes him dead. If we give him time to reappear, it will prove confusing. So we strike immediately, while we can.”

“Strike what?” Neil asked.

“Thornrath. After what she did to me this morning, I’m tempted to believe Anne’s prophecy concerning Baron Fail and the Lierish fleet. We have two days to take control of Thornrath. If we manage that—and if Fail arrives as foretold—then we have a chance to take Eslen and save her.”

“Unless she is already dead.”

“In which case we will avenge her. In no case would I see Robert on the throne, nor, I’m sure, would you.”

“You have that right,” Neil said, lifting the bottle. The liquor was now a tide, lifting his anger even as the night darkened and the water deepened. “Can we capture Thornrath?”

“Possibly,” Artwair said. “It will be costly, though.”

“May I lead the charge?”

Artwair swirled the bottle, then sipped at it. “I’d meant to have you do that,” he said, “on account of that feysword of yours. It’s a narrow approach, and that sword might have made a difference. Now…”

“I’d still prefer to lead it,” Neil said. “I’m a warrior. I can kill. About strategy I know little. Without Anne here, that would be the best use for me.”

“You’ll probably die,” Artwair said. “Anne would think I’d sent you to your doom to avenge myself on her. I can’t have her thinking that.”

“I’m not too attached to this life,” Neil confessed. “And I don’t much care anymore what Her Highness thinks, if she’s still able to think anything. She’s the one put me in this situation. I’m tired of being set up to fail, only to live and lament it. Let me lead that charge, and I’ll write a note in my own hand for you to give to whoever might care. I suspect that’d be no one.”

“You’ve a better reputation than you think,” Artwair said.

“Then let me better it yet and live on in song,” Neil replied. “I don’t need a feysword. Just get me a few spears and a broadsword that won’t break at the first swing. Then find me some men who love death, and I’ll give you Thornrath.”

Artwair handed him the bottle. “As you wish, Sir Neil,” he said. “I’d never deny a good man his destiny.”

8 A Well-Mannered Viper

Hespero smiled and rose from his chair.

“Praifec?” Ehan gasped.

“You seem chagrined,” Hespero said, raising an eyebrow at the little man.

“Surprised, perhaps,” Stephen quickly replied. “Sir Elden led us to expect a humble sacritor.”

“But I am a sacritor,” Hespero said, stroking his goatee. “And a fratir, a patir, a peslih, an agreon.”

“Of course, your grace,” Stephen said. “It’s only that one usually is known by one’s most exalted title.”

“Generally true, depending on one’s purpose.” His brows knitted. “Brother Stephen, are you unhappy to see me?”

Stephen blinked.

“Brother Stephen?” the praifec said impatiently.

“Praifec, I—”

“Perhaps your anxiety stems from what you have to tell me. I have had no word of you. Where are the holter and your friend Winna? Have you failed in the task with which I entrusted you?”

Stephen felt the first sense of relief he’d experienced since meeting Sir Elden. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

“They were slain, your grace,” he said, putting on the most doleful face he could manage.

“Then the arrow did not work?”

“We never had a chance to use it, your grace. We were beset by slinders. We never even saw the Briar King.”

“Slinders?”

“I beg your pardon, your grace. That is the Oostish term for the wild men and women Ehawk reported to you.”

“Ah, yes,” Hespero said. “Did you at least learn more about them?”

“Nothing of note, your grace,” Stephen lied.

“A pity. But still I don’t understand. How did you know to find me here? I came to this place in secrecy.”

“Your grace, I hadn’t the slightest idea I would find you here,” Stephen replied, his mind spinning down the false road he was building, wondering what he would find over the next hill.

The praifec frowned. “Then why are you here? You failed in the mission I assigned you. I should think your first priority would be to report that failure, and the logical place to do that would be Eslen. What on earth brought you to this remote place?”

Stephen’s road had narrowed to a rope of the sort jugglers walked to amuse children. He’d tried it once, in the town square of Morris Top, and the relief at managing to take two steps had felt like a triumph. But it hadn’t been; it had only been two steps, and then he had lost his balance and fallen.

“We came here at my request, your grace,” Brother Ehan interrupted.

Stephen tried to keep his face neutral. He hoped he had succeeded, even though the praifec’s glance already had shifted to the Herilanzer.

“Pardon me,” Hespero said. “I don’t believe I know you.”

Ehan bowed. “Brother Alfraz, your grace, at your service. I was with Fratrex Laer when he went to the monastery d’Ef to cleanse the heretics there.”

“Really. And how is Fratrex Laer?”

“Then you haven’t heard, your grace. Word should have reached you by now; we sent messengers to Eslen. He was slain by the slinders, the ones Brother Stephen spoke of. We were fortunate to escape.”

“So many fortunate escapes,” the praifec commented. “Still, how does that explain your presence here?”

“We arrived at the monastery and found only piles of bone. Everyone had vanished—or so we thought. But that evening we discovered Fratrex Pell, locked away in the uppermost meditation room. He was quite mad, raving about the end of the world and how the only hope was to find a certain mountain in the Bairghs. Less than a bell later, the same fate that befell the monks of d’Ef befell us, and the slinders attacked. But Fratrex Laer thought there might be something to Brother Pell’s ravings, and so he charged us with the mission of saving the books he had with him in the tower and finding the mountain of which Pell spoke.

“Almost too late, we discovered Brother Stephen, locked in a cell in the tower. The fratrex had him captive, forcing him to translate the more obscure texts.”

“I’m confused. How did you come to be in the tower, Brother Stephen?”

“When Aspar, Winna, and Ehawk were slain, I went to the only place I knew,” Stephen said, trying to get both feet planted on the wildly swaying rope. “The only place I knew in the King’s Forest was d’Ef. But the instant I arrived, Fratrex Pell took me captive.”

“I believe you earlier reported to me that Pell was dead,” Hespero said, suspicion in his voice.

“I was wrong,” Stephen replied. “He was crippled—his legs destroyed—but he was alive. And as Brother Alfraz said, quite mad.”

“Yet you believed his wild speculations?”

“I—” Stephen broke off. “I had failed, your grace. My friends were dead. I suppose I was grasping at any hope for redemption.”

“This is all very interesting,” the praifec said. “Very interesting, indeed.” His eyes tightened at the corners, then relaxed.

“I’ll hear more of this in the morning. I’m most particularly interested in learning what Fratrex Pell considered so pressing. For tonight, I’ll have someone show you to your quarters and see what can be done about a meal. I’m sure you’re hungry.”

“Yes, your grace,” Stephen said. “Thank you, your grace.”

A monk named Brother Dhomush appeared and showed them to a small dormitory somewhere in the building. It had no windows and only one door, and that left Stephen feeling intensely claustrophobic.

As soon as they were alone, he turned to Brother Ehan.

“What was all that?” he asked, his heart thundering in his chest. His deeply submerged panic had found a way up now that the immediate danger seemed past.

“Something had to be said,” Ehan replied defensively. “Brother Laer led the expedition to replace us at d’Ef—he was a Hierovasi, of course, like Hespero. With the help of the slinders, we destroyed them all. I reckoned he might know that, but not the details. It looks like I was right.”

“I don’t know,” Stephen said dubiously. “The one thing I do know, I don’t like.”

“What’s that?”

“That we’re here. And Hespero is here. Do you really think that’s a coincidence?”

Ehan scratched his head. “I suppose I thought it was just bad luck.”

“It’s impossible,” Stephen asserted. “He’s either following us or he’s after the same thing we are. I can’t think of any other explanation. Can you?”

Ehan was still mulling that over when Brother Dhomush reappeared with bread and mutton broth.

Dhomush and two other monks slept in the dormitory with them, but by the time the night had half turned above their heads, their breathing indicated to Stephen that they were asleep. He quietly reached his feet down from the hard wooden cot and padded to the door, fearing it would be locked or would squeak loudly if it wasn’t.

Neither was true.

Padding lightly on marble was as close to absolutely silent as anyone could be. Another initiate of Saint Decmanus might hear him, but as they had passed, he’d noticed that the church’s altar was dedicated to Saint Froa, whose gifts usually didn’t involve acute senses.

It wasn’t difficult to find his way back to the library. He approached it tentatively, fearing Hespero would still be there, but found it dark. A moments listening disclosed no breath or heartbeat, but he still didn’t feel as if he could trust his ears. Henne had regained more or less normal hearing, as had Ehan and Themes, but none of them had begun with the ability to hear a butterfly’s wing.

Knowing he had to take the risk eventually, he entered the room and felt along the wall for the window ledge where he’d earlier seen a tinder-box. He found it and managed to light a small candle. In its friendly light he began his search.

It didn’t take long to find the first item he sought: a volume detailing the history of the temple itself. It was large, massively thick, and prominently displayed on a lectern. He loved it immediately because he could see that it had been rebound many times to accommodate new pages. All the layers of time were there in the type and the condition of the scrifti bound into it.

The most recent pages were smooth and white, crafted in Vitellia of linen rag, using a secret Church process. The next layer back was more brittle and yellowed, rough at the edges; it was Lierish bond made mostly of pulped mulberry fibers.

The oldest sheets were vellum, thin and flexible. The writing was worn in some places, but the scrift itself would outlast its younger neighbors.

Smiling despite himself, he flipped through the first few pages, hoping to discover when the temple was founded.

The first page was of no use, a dedication to Praifec Tysgaf of Crotheny for his vision in establishing the church in Demsted. Tysgaf had been praifec a bare three hundred years ago; that meant that despite the seeming age of the building, it had not been established in Hegemonic or pre-Hegemonic times.

That meant he wasn’t going to find anything useful here.

Or so he thought, until he reached the last paragraph of the introduction.

Stephen almost laughed out loud. Choron, the priest who was carrying Virgenya Dare’s journal. Not only had he stopped here, he had in essence founded a religion!

Stephen flipped ahead and discovered to his delight that the next page was older, written in a strange but comprehensible version of Old Vitellian script. The language, however, was not Vitellian but rather a Vhilatautan dialect. Translating it might be possible, given time, but reading it wasn’t, so Stephen scanned through it.

He found the name “Kauron” many times, but it was only after two bells that he spotted what he was really searching for: the word “Vel-noiraganas” juxtaposed with a verb that seemed to mean “he went.” Stephen backed up and concentrated on that section. After a moment he went rummaging about the room until he found a scrap of paper, an inkwell, and a quill. He copied most of the page word for word, then scratched out the best translation he could manage.

Never, someone whispered in his right ear. He felt the aspiration, and his muscles stiffened and spasmed from the sheer terror of finding someone so close without his knowing it. He batted at the sound, swinging his right arm and stumbling away at the same time.

But there was no one there.

His mind refused to accept that, and he sent his gaze searching through the shadows. But no one could move that quickly, have his mouth against his ear in one moment and be gone the next.

But he’d felt it, a double puff of breath, because “never” had been “nhyrmh,” in Vadhiian dialect, as clear as could be, and it hadn’t been his voice.

“Who’s there?” Stephen whispered, turning constantly, unwilling to put his back to anything.

No answer came. The only sound not made by his body was the faint lisp of the candle, the only motion the play of light and shadow from that small flame. He tried to relax, but some part of him felt seized in the moment, like a fish striking bait and finding itself on a hook.

Helplessly he studied the random shifting from dim to black to lumined and gradually saw what he feared the most: that the play of light and darkness wasn’t random. That from the moment he had lit that candle he had been surrounded by something studying him more intently than he had been studying the book. Horrified, he watched glyphs and letters trace themselves on the walls and fade, always hinting at sense, never quite forming it.

“What are you?” He thought speaking aloud would help, but it didn’t. It only made things worse, as if he’d been attacked by a brute, pulled a knife, and found it made of a green leaf.

The woorm reared up. The utin crouched in the corner. The greffyn stalked out of the edge of his sight. He felt as if he were in a house painted in gay colors, yet when he leaned against the wall, it crumbled, revealing the rotten wood full of termites and weevils.

Only it wasn’t a room but the walls of the world, the bright illusion of reality shattering to reveal the horror that lay behind.

Nearly weeping, he dragged his eyes from the shadow and back to the candle.

The flame had formed a little face with black round eyes and a mouth.

With a stifled shriek he snuffed the light, and darkness poured in to comfort him. He moved to the window and crouched there on the cold stone, chest heaving, trying to collect his wits, trying to believe it hadn’t happened. He drew his legs and arms up and hugged himself, feeling his heartbeat gradually slow, afraid to move lest he somehow bring it all back.

He heard another voice, but this one wasn’t in his ear. It was a perfectly normal voice, up the corridor.

The book. He reached up and found it with his fingers. He could feel the old vellum section. This might be his last chance to see it, but he dared not light the candle again. Could he tear the pages out? The very thought sickened him, but the answer was no, anyway; the vellum would require cutting, and he didn’t have anything sharp enough to serve. He quickly flipped back toward the beginning, and as he did so, something wisped by his hand. He jerked back, but it touched against his robe and then went to the floor.

He heard footfalls now. He quickly scooted underneath another table.

The footsteps rang closer, and momentarily the doorway was framed in candlelight.

“Who’s there?” A voice he didn’t recognize echoed his own earlier query.

Stephen almost answered, thinking he might be able to make up some sort of excuse, but then he heard a commotion farther away. He froze, and his palms felt chill and damp against the floor.

He could hear Ehan shouting his name, telling him to flee, the clumping of booted feet, the sound of steel drawing. The man at the doorway made a sound like a curse and ran off.

Ehan stopped shouting.

“Saints,” Stephen murmured under his breath. He patted the floor, searching for the paper that had fallen out. The man in the hall was returning, now, at a dead run.

Stephen’s finger touched the paper, and then he had it and was up, dashing toward the window. It was narrow, and he had to turn to squeeze his way into the cold night air before dropping two kingsyards to the ice-hardened ground. The fall hurt more than he had expected it to, but he felt as if he had fire in his veins.

He ran around the building, searching for the stables. He had the horrible Black Mary feeling of running without getting anywhere, and his pulse deafened him to whoever might be coming after him. The thing from the room seemed all around him, and all he could think to do was run until he found someplace where the sun was up and would never go down.

He found the stables more by their smell than by memory, and once inside, he began hunting for the horse he’d been riding since Ever.

He wished he had light.

That wish suddenly was granted as he heard the grating of the shutter on an Aenan lamp and its fiery eye turned to reveal him. He couldn’t see who held it, but whoever it was had a sword; Stephen could see it projecting into the cone of illumination.

“Hold there,” the voice commanded. “Hold by the word of his grace the praifec of Crotheny.”

For an instant, Stephen stood frozen. The lamp started toward him, wavered, and then dropped to the ground, casting its beam sideways.

Stephen bolted for the open door of the stable. He’d gotten only a few paces before someone grabbed his arm. Gasping, he tore at it, and it fell away.

“You’ll want my help,” a soft voice said urgently. He knew instantly who it was.

“Sister Pale?”

“Your Decmanian memory doesn’t fail you,” she replied. “I’ve just killed a man for you. I think you should listen to me.”

“I believe my friends are in danger,” Stephen said.

“Yes. But you can’t help them now. Maybe later, if they live. Not now. Come on, we have to go.”

“Where?”

“Wherever you’re going.”

“I need some things from my horse.”

“The books? The praifec has them. His men had taken them before you even met with him. Come, or he’ll have you, too.”

“How can I trust you?”

“How can you not? Come along.”

Helplessly, mind whirling, Stephen did as he was told.

9 Skin

Leoff woke to screaming and a damp rag on his brow. The screams, of course, were his own, and for a moment he didn’t care about where the rag had come from. But when it moved, he swatted at it and jerked himself up in the bed.

“Hush,” a feminine voice whispered. “You’ve nothing to fear. Just wait a moment.”

He heard the sound of a lantern. A tiny light appeared, then brightened into a flame, illuminating ash-blond curls framing a heart-shaped face. It was odd, Leoff thought, how he’d never really seen the origins of Mery in her mother, but in this light the resemblance was obvious.

“Lady Gramme,” he mumbled. “How—” He suddenly realized that his upper body was exposed and drew the covers up.

“I’m sorry to trouble you, Cavaor Ackenzal,” Lady Gramme said, “but I really need to speak to you.”

“Have you seen Mery? How did you find us?” An ugly thought occurred as the words slipped off his tongue, that Lady Gramme somehow was involved in the whole affair. It made a certain sense. She was a highly political creature, after all.

He didn’t voice it, but she must have seen it in his eyes. She smiled, dabbing his brow again.

“I’m not in league with Robert,” she assured him. “Please believe me when I say I would never lend him Mery for any purpose.”

“Then how did you come to be here?”

She smiled again, a melancholy grimace, really.

“I was mistress to the emperor for almost twenty years,” she said. “Did you know that? I was fifteen when I first shared his bed. I did not spend all that time on my back. There are few places on Eslen, Ynis, or Newland where I don’t have eyes, ears, and pending favors. It took me a while to find you and my daughter after you were moved from the dungeons, but I managed it. After that it was merely a matter of paying the right bribes.”

“How was Mery when you saw her?”

“Sleepy. Concerned about you. She doesn’t think you’ve been well. Now that I see you, I understand why.”

“I’ve been working. It’s taxing.”

“I daresay. Roll over.”

“Milady?”

“Onto your belly.”

“I really don’t see—”

“I’ve risked my life to speak to you,” Lady Gramme said. “The least you can do is obey my every whim, especially when it’s for your own good.”

Reluctantly, Leoff complied, careful to keep the sheet over him.

“Do you always sleep without a nightshirt?” she asked.

“It is my habit,” he said stiffly.

“Lack of habit, I would rather say,” she replied.

His back felt cold. He wondered if she had been sent by someone to slip a knife or poisoned needle into his spine so he couldn’t write Robert’s singspell.

He should have cared, but he didn’t; his outrage was still around someplace, but his dreams tended to misplace it. It took some waking distance from them for him to recall it.

Lady Gramme’s fingers brushed against his back, and to his horror he heard himself moan. It was the first really nice thing his skin had felt in a long time, and it was incredibly good. The tips began to tease gently into his muscles, pressing out soreness and tension.

“I was never trained for much of anything,” she said softly. “No coven education for me. But William hired me tutors, to train me in certain arts. The one who taught me this was from Hadam, a thick-fingered girl with dark, dark hair named Besela.”

“You shouldn’t—it isn’t—”

“Proper? My dear Leovigild, you’ve been imprisoned by a mad usurper. You think that proper? We’ll decide—you and I—what is proper. Do you like this?”

“I like it very much,” he admitted.

“Then relax. We have things to discuss, but I can practice this upon you while we do so. Are we agreed?”

“Yes,” he groaned as she worked up either side of his spine, then sent each hand kneading in a different direction along his shoulders and upper arms.

“It’s nothing very complicated,” she went On. “I think I can help you escape, all three of you.”

“Really?” He tried to sit up and engage her gaze, but she pushed him back down.

“Just listen,” she said.

When he didn’t protest again, she went on.

“An army has laid siege to Eslen,” she said. “An army commanded, or so it seems, by Muriele’s daughter, Anne. What chance they have of defeating Robert I do not know. He will have help shortly from both the Church and Hansa, but if Liery weighs in, this war could last for quite some time.”

Both of her hands had gone to his right arm now, her fingers digging deeply into the twisted tendons of his forearms. He gasped as he felt small spasms in his fingers, where he thought no feeling remained. His eyes dampened with mixed pain and pleasure.

“My larger point being that Robert is at the moment quite distracted. I have a few friends in this castle, and I believe I can take advantage of them to spirit you, Mery, and the landwaerden girl to someplace safe.”

“Surely that is too much to hope for,” Leoff said. “I would see Mery and Areana safe. As for me—”

“It is all the same,” she said flatly. “If I can get them out, I can liberate you, as well. But it is a noble thought. And there is only one thing I would ask of you.”

Of course, Leoff thought.

“What is that, lady?” he asked.

“Muriele likes you. You have her ear. I admit that once I thought I might place my son on the throne—he is, after all, William’s son—but now I only wish protection for my children. If Anne wins and Muriele is again queen mother, I only ask you to put it in her ear that I helped you. Nothing more.”

“I can do that without reservation,” Leoff said.

She was massaging him with only one hand now, and he was wondering about that when she pressed down on him and he felt something sticky and warm against his back that sent a thrill all the way to his toes. A ridiculous gasp escaped him. She’d been using her other hand to undo her bodice and was pressing her naked breasts against him. What kind of bodice could be opened with one hand? Did all women have them, or did courtesans have specially designed clothing?

Then she was straddling him, moving down his back, kissing along his spine, drawing the covers down with her torso, and his whole body was instantly awake, on fire. He couldn’t take it; he twisted beneath her, and she was neither heavy nor strong enough to stop him.

“Lady,” he gasped, trying to keep his eyes averted. She still wore her gown, but it was pulled up around her waist, and he could see the ivory skin of her thighs above her stockings. And of course her breasts were there, lily and rose…

“Hush,” she said. “Part of the treatment.”

He held up his hands. “Look at me, Lady Gramme,” he pleaded. “I am a cripple.”

“I should think you might call me Ambria under the circumstances,” she replied. “And you seem to be functional in the parts and territories that interest me.” She leaned down and kissed him with a warm, familiar, very practiced kiss. “This is not love, Leovigild, and it is not charity. It is something between—a gift for what you have done for Mery, if you wish. And to deny it would make you uncharitable indeed.”

She kissed him again, then on the chin, the throat. She rose up and after a bit of bustling was suddenly all flesh upon him, and he certainly couldn’t protest anymore. He tried to be active, to be a man, but she gently guided him away from everything but experiencing her.

It was slow, and mostly quiet, and very good indeed. Ambria Gramme wasn’t the first woman he’d been with, but this was far beyond anything he’d ever experienced, and he suddenly understood something about her that he never had imagined before. What he could do with music, she could do with her body.

For the first time he understood that love could be art, and a lover an artist.

For that insight he would be grateful for however many days he had left in the lands of fate.

And so he felt a bit of guilt when, at his most helpless moment, it was Areana’s face he saw and not Ambria’s.

When they were done, she poured them wine and reclined, still nude, against a pillow. She had seemed tall when he first met her, but she really wasn’t. She was quite small—almost as narrow-waisted as she appeared in a corset—but her body curved luxuriously, and he could just make out the tiger-stripe marks on her belly from bearing William’s children.

“And now you feel better, don’t you?” she said.

“I admit it,” he replied.

She reached over and shuttered the flame so that she became an alabaster goddess in the shaft of moonlight seeping in the window. She finished the wine and crawled under the covers, turning him so she was spooned against his back.

“In three days,” she whispered into his ear. “Three nights from now, at midnight. You will meet me in the entrance hall. I will have gathered up Mery and Areana. Be prepared.”

“I will,” Leoff said. He thought for a moment. “Should you—will you be discovered here?”

“I will be safer here for the next few hours than anywhere I can imagine,” she said. “Unless you want me to leave.”

“No,” Leoff said. “I don’t.”

Her warmth against him was pleasant, still sexual but in a subdued mode that allowed him to drift off into an agreeable, comforting sleep.

When he awoke again, he wasn’t sure why, but he looked up at a faint sound. At first he thought it was Ambria again, looking down at him in the darkness, but Ambria was still nestled against his back.

And then, even in the feeble light, he recognized Areana, tears glistening.

Before he could think of anything to say, she hurried away in her stocking feet.

10 Gobelin Court

Cazio thought he understood what was going on pretty well, until Anne stood up in her stirrups, flourished a short sword, and shouted, “I am your Born Queen! I shall avenge my father and sisters; I shall have my kingdom back!”

For one thing, the sword she brandished was so silly; he’d rather fight with a piece of stale bread. But then again, she wasn’t fighting with it; she was leading with it.

Men in surcoats who didn’t look friendly were pouring into the square, and Anne didn’t seem surprised. From his point of view, she ought to be surprised, and if she wasn’t, by Lord Mamres, he ought to know why.

Had this been her plan all along, to be ambushed in a public square? It wasn’t a plan that made a lot of sense.

“What shall we do?” he shouted.

“You stay close to me,” Anne replied, then, raising her voice, gestured toward the men entering the square. “Keep them back!”

Forty of the fifty men in Anne’s company responded by charging across the square toward the city guard, or Robert’s guard, or whatever it was. It was a messy business right away, as the plaza was full of people, and though they were trying to clear the way between the two armed forces, there was a good deal of pushing and tripping and falling down.

Anne’s remaining guardians clumped around her as she dismounted and strode toward the actors. Taken by surprise, Cazio dismounted so quickly, he nearly fell.

As his feet hit the square, he was suddenly very pleased to have cobbles under them again. Not grass, not tilled land or wild forest floor or a lord-forsaken beaten desert of a track in the middle of nowhere, but a city street. He nearly laughed with joy.

He realized then that he had mistaken Anne’s target. It wasn’t the actors but Sir Clement, who had leapt from his horse and run to stand by the patir, arming himself with a sword from one of the churchman’s guards. The other Church soldiers lowered their spears into a hedge around the patir, keeping their swords in reserve.

But Clement, their betrayer, was a knight, so he would prefer a sword.

Cazio sprinted to put himself between Anne and the knight.

“Allow me, Highness,” he said, noticing the somewhat unnatural look in Anne’s eye, not unlike her aspect that evening in Dunmrogh. He realized he was doing Clement a favor.

She nodded curtly, and Cazio drew his steel as Clement rushed at him.

It wasn’t Caspator, but Acredo, the rapier he’d taken from the Sefry dessrator. It felt unfamiliar, too light, oddly balanced.

“Zo dessrator, nip zo chiado,” he reminded his opponent. “The swordsman, not the sword.”

Clement ignored him and came on.

To Cazio’s delight, the fight wasn’t as simple as it might have been. Knights, Cazio had discovered, were extraordinarily hard to fight when they were in armor, but that had nothing to do with their swordplay, which was uniformly clumsy and boring to the point of tears. Part of it was the weapons they used, which were really more like flattened steel clubs with edges.

The sword Clement bore was a little lighter and thinner than most he had seen since leaving Vitellio, but it was still essentially the same sort of cutting tool. What was really different was the way the fellow held his blade. Knights in armor tended to cock their weapons back, to swing from the shoulder and hips. They didn’t fear the swift stop-thrust to the hand, wrist, or breast since they were usually sheathed in iron.

But Sir Clement dropped into a crabwise stance not so different from that of a dessrator, although he put a little more weight on his back leg than Cazio would recommend. The sword he held in front of him, arm extended toward Cazio’s head, so that he was looking straight at the knights knuckles, while the tip of the sword slanted curiously down, aimed roughly at Cazio’s knees.

Curious, Cazio lunged for the exposed top of the hand. Moving the sword far faster than Cazio would have guessed was possible, Clement merely flipped his wrist, with only a slight motion of his forearm and none from his shoulder at all. That quick, simple turn brought the forte of his blade up to intersect Cazio’s thrust. The tip came up, too, and sliced quickly down along Cazio’s rapier, forcing it away and exposing his wrist to a cut that would have arrived if Cazio hadn’t been ready to take a step back.

“That’s very interesting,” he told Clement, who was following up his riposte by bounding forward, inside the point of Cazio’s weapon, dropping his tip again and raising his hand to keep Cazio’s sword parried to the outside. With that odd twist of the wrist, he cut at the right side of Cazio’s neck. Cazio lengthened his retreat and parried swiftly, bringing his hilt nearly to his right shoulder, then quickly threw himself to his left, dropping his point toward the knights face.

Clement ducked and made a stronger, arm-driven slash at Cazio’s flank as he closed. Cazio felt the wind of it, and then he was past his opponent, turning in hopes of a thrust to the back.

But he found Clement already facing him, on guard.

“Zo pertumo tertio, com postro pero praisef” he said.

“Whatever that means,” Clement replied. “I’m certain I’m fortunate your tongue isn’t a dagger.”

“You misunderstand,” Cazio said. “If I were to comment on your person and call you, for instance, a mannerless pig with no notion of honor, I would do it in your own tongue.”

“And if I were to call you a ridiculous fop, I would do that in my own language for fear that speaking yours would unman me.”

Someone nearby shrieked, and with chagrin Cazio suddenly realized he wasn’t in a duel but a battle. Anne had gotten away from him, and he couldn’t look for her without risking being hamstrung.

“My apologies,” he said. Clement looked briefly confused, but then Cazio was attacking him again.

He started the same as before, lunging for the top of the hand, and drew the same result. The cut came, just as before, but Cazio avoided the parry with a deft turn of his wrist. To his credit, Sir Clement saw what was coming and took a rapid step back, dropping the point of his blade again to stop the thrust now aimed at the underside of his hand. He let his blade recede a bit and then cut violently up Cazio’s blade toward his extended knee.

Cazio let the blow come out, withdrawing his knee quickly, bringing his front foot all the way back to meet his rear foot so that he was standing straight, leaning forward a bit. He took his blade out of the line of the cut at the same time and pointed it at Clement’s face. The cutting weapon, a handsbreath shorter than Cazio’s rapier, sliced air, but Clement’s forward motion took him onto the tip of Cazio’s extended blade, which slid neatly into his left eye.

Cazio opened his mouth to explain the action, but Clement was dying with a look of horror on his face, and Cazio suddenly had no desire to taunt him, whatever he had done.

“Well fought,” he said instead as the knight collapsed.

Then he turned to see what else was happening.

He got it in sketches. Austra was still where she ought to be: away from the fighting, watched over by one of the Craftsmen. Anne was standing, looking down at the patir, who was holding one hand to his chest. His face was red and his lips were blue, but there was no evidence of blood. His guards were mostly dead, although a few still were engaged in a losing battle with the Craftsmen guarding Anne.

Their forces seemed to be winning across the square, as well.

Anne glanced up at him.

“Free the players,” she said crisply. “Then mount back up. We’ll be riding in a few moments.”

Cazio nodded, both elated and disconcerted by the strength of her command. This wasn’t the Anne he remembered from when he’d first met her—a girl, a person, someone he liked—and for the first time he feared that she was gone, replaced by someone else entirely.

He cut the actors free, smiling at their thanks, then got back up on his horse as Anne had commanded. The battle in the square was all but over, and her warriors were rallying back to her. By his quick count of the fallen, they’d lost only two men—quite a good bargain.

Anne sat tall.

“As you can all see, we were betrayed. My uncle intended our murder or capture from the moment we entered the gate. I’ve no idea how he intends to escape his own punishment, but I’ve no doubt he does. We are fortunate we discovered this before setting foot in the castle, for we could never have fought our way out of there.”

Sir Leafton, the head of her detail of Craftsmen, cleared his throat.

“What if that isn’t what happened here, Majesty? What if those troops attacked us by mistake?”

“Mistake? You heard Sir Clement; he gave the order. He knew they were there.”

“Yes, but that’s my point,” Leafton said, pushing his long black hair from his sweaty brow. “Perhaps Sir Clement was, ah, incensed by your conversation with the patir and gave an order Prince Robert would not have wished him to give.”

Anne shrugged. “You are too polite to say it, Sir Leafton, but you suggest that my poor judgment may be to blame. That is not the case, but it hardly matters now. We cannot continue to the castle, and I strongly suspect we could not fight our way back out of the gate. Even if we could, the fleet stands between us and our army.

“We certainly cannot remain here any longer.”

“We might take the east tower of the Fastness,” Sir Leafton offered. “Perhaps hold it long enough for the duke to come to our aid.”

Anne nodded thoughtfully. “That’s rather along the lines of what I was thinking, but I was considering the Gobelin Court,” she said. “Could we hold that?”

Sir Leafton blinked, opened his mouth, then fingered his ear, a puzzled expression on his seamed face.

“The gate is sturdy, and the streets within are all narrow enough to throw up workable redoubts. But with this many men, I don’t know how long we could keep it. It would depend on how determined they were to stop us.”

“A few days, at least?”

“Perhaps,” he replied cautiously.

“Well, it will have to do. We’ll go there now, and quickly,” she said. “But I need four of you to volunteer for something a bit more dangerous.”

As they made their way down the crooked street, Anne had to resist the temptation to take her mount to a run, to leave Mimhus Square and its surroundings as quickly as possible.

The patir had known what was happening to him. She hadn’t meant to kill him, only to put the fear of her in him. But the more she squeezed his fat, corrupt heart and the more he begged and pleaded for her to spare him, the angrier she got.

Still, she thought she’d released him in time. His heart must already have been weak.

“He probably would have died soon, anyway.”

“What?” Austra asked.

Anne realized then that she must have spoken aloud.

“Nothing,” she replied.

Thankfully, Austra didn’t push the matter, and they continued their downhill clatter, passing through the south Embrature gate into the lower city.

“Why so many walls?” Cazio asked.

“Ah, I’m not sure,” Anne replied, a bit embarrassed but happy to have a harmless topic before them. “I never paid proper attention to my tutors.”

“They—” Austra began, but then she stopped.

Anne saw that her friend’s face was white. “Are you well?”

“I’m fine,” Austra replied unconvincingly.

“Austra.”

“I’m just scared,” Austra said. “I’m always scared. This never stops.”

“I know what I’m doing,” Anne said.

“That worries me more than anything,” Austra said.

“Tell Cazio about the walls,” Anne requested. “I know you remember. You always paid attention.”

Austra nodded, closed her eyes, and swallowed. When her lids lifted again, they were damp.

“They… the walls were built at different times. Eslen started out as just a castle, a tower, really. Over the centuries they built it bigger, but most of it was constructed all at once by Emperor Findegelnos the First. His son built the first city wall, called the Embrature wall; that’s the one we just rode through. The city kept growing outside the wall, though, so a few hundred years later, during the de Loy regency, Erteumé the Third built Nod’s wall.

“The outer wall, what we call the Fastness, went up during the Reiksbaurg reign by Tiwshand II. It’s the only one that’s completely intact; the inner walls have gaps where stones were pulled for other construction.”

“Then the only real wall is that last one.”

“The last time the city was invaded, it was by Anne’s great-great-grandfather, William I. Even after he broke through the Fastness, it took him days to get to the castle. The defenders threw up barricades in the elder wall gaps. They say the streets ran with blood.”

“Let’s hope that doesn’t happen this time.”

“Let’s hope it’s not our blood,” Anne said, hoping to be amusing. Cazio smiled, but Austra’s smile seemed more like a grimace.

“Anyway,” Anne went on, “I may not know the history, but I’ve been to the Gobelin Court before, and my father once told me the most unusual thing about it.”

“And what is that?” Cazio asked.

“It’s the only place in the city where two of the walls meet. Nod’s wall goes right into the Fastness. It makes a sort of long cul-de-sac.”

“You mean there’s only one way out,” Cazio said.

“More or less. There’s a gate near the place where they meet, but it’s not too large.”

“So that’s why you choose Gobelin Court?” Austra asked. “I didn’t know you knew so much about strategy. Did you and Artwair discuss this before you came? Was this all a secret plan of yours?”

Anne felt a surge of anger. Why did Austra have to question everything she did?

“I did not discuss it with Artwair,” Anne said flatly. “And this wasn’t a plan, it was an option. I would have rather gone into the castle as we had agreed, but I didn’t really think Robert would be faithful to his word. So yes, I had thought of this beforehand.”

“But why did you come in at all if you were so sure we would be betrayed?” Austra wondered aloud.

“Because I know something no one else does,” Anne replied.

“But you’re not going to tell me what that is, are you?”

“Certainly I am,” Anne said, “because I’m going to need your help. But not here. Not now. Soon.”

“Oh,” Austra said. Anne thought she looked a little more content after that.

Given Anne’s description, Cazio had no problem recognizing the Gobelin Court when they entered it, passing through a modest gate in a rather more impressive wall of reddish stone. Beyond a cobbled square, a single row of outlandish buildings butted up against another wall only about thirty kingsyards away. The second wall was even more impressive, of a nearly black stone, and Cazio recognized it as the Fastness.

Following his sword hand, he saw that the two walls indeed met, and right in the corner a weird, narrow manse seemed almost to lean into the juncture, looking sinister. The space between the walls widened a bit but stayed uncomfortably close as the walls climbed up around the hill and out of sight.

He didn’t know much about war and stratagems, but it didn’t seem like the sort of place easily held by fifty men. For one thing, the outer wall was surely controlled by the castle. What was to prevent hot oil and arrows being dropped on them from above? Or warriors from swarming down on ropes?

Nod’s wall was high enough, but houses had been built close on the other side of it, providing stepping-stones that might allow attackers to come within a few yards of the top even if there weren’t stairways up, which there probably were.

In short, Cazio felt a good deal more trapped than protected.

Despite his misgivings, he was fascinated. The buildings, the signs, and the pale faces peeping out from beneath broad-brimmed hats and veils all seemed exotic.

“Echi’ Sievri,” he said.

“Yes,” Anne acknowledged. “Sefry.”

“I’ve never seen so many in one place.”

“Just wait,” Anne said. “Most of them don’t come out until night. That’s when Gobelin Court really comes alive. People also call this the Sefry quarter. There are hundreds living here.”

Cazio knew he was gawking, but he couldn’t help it. The neighborhoods on the other side of the wall were dingy, to say the least: dilapidated huts with leaky roofs, stone buildings whose days of grandeur were decades if not centuries in the past, streets full of rubble, rubbish, and dirty children.

But Gobelin Court was neat, clean, and colorful. The buildings were tall and narrow, with roofs so high-pitched that they were comical. They were all tidily painted: rusty red, mustard, burnt orange, violet, teal, and other muted but cheerful shades. Bright clothing flew like banners from lines stretched between upper windows, and umber signs with black lettering proclaimed the shops of diviners, card readers, apothocaries, and other outlandish businesses.

“Majesty,” Sir Leafton said, breaking the spell, “we’ve little time to spare.”

“Very well,” Anne said. “What do you suggest?”

“The Fastness is the most important thing,” Leafton said. “We’ll need to scale it and take control of the Saint Ceasel and Vexel towers and everything in between. Next we need to throw up a barrier north of here; I think Werton Cross would be the best place. And we’ll need men on Nod’s wall, too. That’s easy; we’ve stairs on this side. The Fastness will be a bit more difficult.”

Who says I don’t know anything about strategy? Cazio thought to himself. Aloud, however, he offered a suggestion.

“That mansion in the corner goes almost to the top,” he said. “We might be able to climb the rest of the way.”

Leafton nodded. “Possibly. I’ll have some men strip their armor.”

“That will take time,” Cazio said. “Why not let me get a start?”

“You have to guard Anne,” Austra pointed out.

“But I’m already without armor,” he said. “If we give anyone time to position themselves up on that wall, they’ll be dropping stones on us before we know it.”

“He’s right,” Anne said. “Sir Leafton can guard me until he’s done. Go on, Cazio. The Craftsmen will be with you as soon as they’ve stripped.”

They rode up to the house, where Cazio dismounted and knocked at the door. After a moment a Sefry woman answered. She was so swaddled in red and orange cloth that Cazio couldn’t see much of her save a single pale blue eye surrounded by a patch of skin so white that he could make out the veins through it. She didn’t even give them a chance to speak.

“This is my house,” the woman said.

“I am Anne Dare,” Anne said from horseback. “This is my city, so that is also my house.”

“Of course,” the woman said matter-of-factly. “I’ve been expecting you.”

“Have you?” Anne asked a little coldly. “Then you know that my man needs to find the shortest route to your roof.”

“No, that I did not know,” the woman replied, “but of course I will help.” She focused her eye again on Cazio. “Go straight in. There is a central stairway that spirals to the top. The small door opens onto the uppermost balcony. You’ll have to climb from there to the roof.”

“Thanks you, lady,” Cazio said pleasantly. He doffed his hat and waved it at the girls. “I won’t be long.”

Anne watched Cazio vanish up the stairs, feeling Austra stiffen next to her. “He’ll be fine,” Anne whispered. “This is the sort of thing Cazio lives for.”

“Yes,” Austra said. “And the sort of thing that will kill him.”

Everyone dies, Anne thought, but she knew it wasn’t the politic thing to say at the moment. Instead, she turned her attention back to the Sefry woman.

“You said you were waiting for me. What did you mean?”

“You mean to use the Crepling passage. That is the reason you have come.”

Anne glanced at Sir Leafton. “Can you repeat what she just said?” Anne asked the Craftsman.

Leafton opened his mouth, then looked puzzled.

“No, Your Highness,” he said.

“Sir Leafton,” Anne said. “Organize the rest of our defense. I’ll be fine here for the moment.”

“I’m not very comfortable with that, Majesty,” he said.

“Do it. Please.”

He puckered his lips, then sighed. “Yes, Majesty,” he said, and hurried off to direct his men.

Anne turned back to the Sefry. “What is your name?” she asked.

“They call me Mother Uun.”

“Mother Uun, do you know what the Crepling passage is?”

“It is the long tunnel,” the woman said. “It begins in the depths of Eslen castle, and it ends in Eslen-of-Shadows. I am its watcher.”

“Watcher? I don’t understand. Did my father appoint you? My mother?”

The old woman—or at least Anne had the impression that she was old—shook her head. “The first queen in Eslen appointed the first of us. Since then, we have chosen from among ourselves.”

“I don’t understand. What are you watching for?”

The eye grew wider. “Him, of course.”

“Him?”

“You do not know?”

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about now.”

“Well, now. How interesting.” Mother Uun stood back a bit. “Would you mind continuing the discussion inside? The sunlight hurts my eye.”

She stood farther aside as six Craftsmen approached, wearing only their padded gambesons. The old woman repeated the instructions she’d given Cazio, and they went past her into the house.

“You Highness?” the Sefry prompted.

But before Anne could answer, Austra’s stifled shriek drew her attention. Her blue eyes were focused high above, and Anne quickly followed the arrow of her gaze.

She saw a tiny figure—Cazio—somehow working himself up the wall above the high, steepled roof. It didn’t look like he had far to go, only a couple of kingsyards.

But on the wall, two armored soldiers with spears were rushing to meet him.

11 Sarnwood

The man looked Aspar up and down with piercing gray eyes and one eyebrow lifted.

“You’re a dead man,” he said.

The fellow didn’t look far from dead himself. He was as spindly as a skeleton, and his gray hair was thin and mussed. The flesh of his face was sun-browned and hung from his skull like an unshaped mask. His words were simple, unironic, and unthreatening, an old man telling things as he saw them.

“You ever seen her?” Aspar asked.

The old man gazed off at the green line of the forest.

“Some say it’s best not to even speak of these things,” he replied.

“I’m going in after her,” Aspar said. “You can help me or not.” He paused. “I’d rather you helped me.”

The old man raised an eyebrow again.

“That wasn’t a threat,” Aspar said quickly.

“Eyah,” the fellow said. “I’ve lived all my life a stone’s throw from the forest. So eyah, I reckon I’ve seen her. Or what she wanted me to see.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean she’s not always the same, ’swhat I mean,” he replied. “One time a bear came down into the hollow. Big black bear. I might have shot it—would have shot it—till she looked at me, let me know. Sometimes she’s a flock of crows. Sometimes a Sefry woman, they say, but I’ve never seen that. Them that see her in Sefry or human shape don’t usually have many breaths left in the lands of fate.”

“How would you know? I mean if anyone saw her…”

“Some of ’em live a little while,” the man said. “So they can tell us. So the rest of us can know.” He leaned nearer. “She only talks to the dead.”

“Then how do people talk to her?”

“They die. Or they take someone dead.”

“What the sceat does that mean?”

“It’s just what they say. She can’t talk the way we do. Or leastwise, she won’t. I reckon she might, only she prefers murder as often as she can get it.” He looked glum. “I reckon every day she’s gonna come out to claim me.”

“Yah.” Aspar sighed. “Anything else you can tell me?”

“Eyah. There’s a trail’ll take you to her. Stay on it, though.”

“Good enough,” Aspar said, turning back toward Ogre.

“Traveler!” the old man called out.

“Yah?”

“You could stay here tonight. Think it over. Have some soup; that way at least you won’t die on an empty stomach.”

Aspar shook his head. “I’m in a hurry.” He started to turn, then glanced back at the man. “If you’re so scared of her, why do you still live here?”

The man looked at him like he was crazy. “I told you. I was born here.”

The old man wasn’t the only one who worried about the Sarnwood. A long picket of poles topped with cow, horse, and deer skulls suggested that others might have given the place an anxious thought or two. Aspar wasn’t sure what the bones were supposed to accomplish, but some of the poles had little platforms about halfway up, made of plaited willow branches, and on them he saw the rotting remains of sheep and goats, bottles he reckoned to be filled with beer or wine, even bunches of blackened flowers. It was as if they figured the witch might be appeased by something but didn’t know exactly what.

The forest itself lay just beyond, slouching down from the hills into the wide valley of the White Warlock. The river itself vanished into its ferny mouth a couple of bowshots north of him. He crawled his regard across every bit of the tree line he could see, trying to take its measure.

Even at a glance it was different from the King’s Forest. The familiar fringe of oak, hickory, witaec, larch, and elm was replaced by high green spears of spruce and hemlock, thickly bunched though currently leafless heads of ironwood, and stands of birch so white that they resembled bones against the dense green conifers. Off toward the river black alder, twisting willow, crack willow, and pine dominated his view.

“Well, Ogre,” he grunted. “What do you think?”

Ogre didn’t opine until they were closer, and then he did it silently, with a bunching of muscles and a studied hesitation that was uncharacteristic of the stallion. Of course he was tired, hungry, and still feeling the effects of the woorm’s poison, but even so…

Aspar found himself trying to recall how old Ogre was as the trail led them beneath the first branches of the Sarnwood. He remembered, didn’t like the answer, and started wondering instead why there should be a path in a forest no one dared enter. What kept it clear?

He had a few hours of daylight left, but the overcast sky and high-reaching evergreens brought dusk early to Aspar and his mount. He strung his bow and rested it on the pommel of his saddle, felt the shifting of massive muscles beneath his thighs as Ogre continued his reluctant way forward, trudging through the frequent streams that Aspar reckoned came from snowmelt in the foothills. Despite the cold, the understory was already verdant with fern, and emerald moss carpeted the ground, as well as the trunks and branches of trees. The forest appeared healthy to the eye, but it didn’t smell right. Even more than the King’s Forest, it seemed somehow diseased.

He thought they were probably about a league in when it finally got dark enough to make camp. It was cold, and Aspar could hear wolves waking up not far away, so he decided he didn’t much care how the witch felt about fire. He gathered tinder, twigs, and branches, set them up in a cone, and with a spark brought it all to life. It wasn’t a big fire, but it was enough to keep one side of him warm. He sat on the corpse of a linden tree and watched the flame feed, wondering glumly if Winna was still alive, if he should have stayed as she had asked.

To hear her last words? Sceat on that.

The horrible thing was, part of him was already thinking about how life would be without her. The same part that was shy about the idea of a permanent arrangement in the first place. What were men made of, he wondered, that they thought such thoughts? In his deepest heart, did he want her to die? When Qerla—

“No,” he said, loudly enough that Ogre looked at him.

There it was.

He’d met Qerla when he was very young, younger than Winna. He’d loved her with an absolute madness he’d never imagined feeling again. He could still remember the smell of her, like water caught in the bloom of an orchid. The touch of her skin, a little hotter than Mannish flesh. Looking back on it, she had been even madder than he, for whereas Aspar had little to lose in the way of community and friends, Qerla had been born to a family famous for seers. She had property, and prospects, and all the best marriage opportunities.

But she’d run away with him to live alone in the forest, and for a time that had been enough.

For a very short time. Maybe if they could have had children. Maybe if either the Sefry or the Mannish world had been a little more accepting.

Maybe. Maybe.

But instead it was hard, and it grew harder every day, so hard that Qerla slept with an old lover. So hard that when Aspar found her body, part of him was relieved that it was over.

He hated Fend for killing Qerla, but he saw now that he hated Fend more for showing him this dirty thing about himself. Aspar had spent twenty years without a lover, but it hadn’t been because he feared losing her. It was because he knew he hadn’t been worthy of loving someone.

He still wasn’t.

“Sceat,” he told the fire. When had he started all this thinking? Much good it was doing him.

The wolves had found him. He could hear them rustling in the dark, and now and then a pair of eyes or a gray flank would pick up the firelight. They were big, bigger than any wolves he’d seen before, and he had seen some pretty big ones. He didn’t reckon they would come after him, not with the fire going, but that would depend on how hungry they were. It also depended on whether they were like the wolves he was familiar with. He’d heard tell of some northern varieties that hadn’t the same worries about men that the common sort did.

For now they were keeping their distance. They might be more trouble in daylight.

He brightened the fire with a few pokes, turned for one of the logs he’d placed beside him—and stopped.

She was only four kingsyards away, and he hadn’t heard anything, not the slightest sound. But there she sat, crouching on the balls of her feet, watching him with sage-colored eyes, her long black hair settled on her shoulders, skin as pale as the birches. She was naked and looked very young, but the top pair of her six breasts was swollen, which happened in Sefry only after the age of twenty.

“Qerla?”

She only talks to the dead.

But Qerla was very dead. Bones. Town people saw the dead, or so they claimed, on Temnosnaht. Old Sefry women pretended to speak to them all the time. And he himself had seen something in the deep mazes of Rewn Aluth that had been either an illusion or—something else.

But this…

“No,” he said aloud. “Her eyes were violet.” But other than that, she was so like Qerla: the faint turn of her lip, the trace of veins on her throat, in one place shaped almost like those of a hawthorn leaf.

Very like.

Her eyes widened at the sound of his voice, and he hardly dared breathe. His right hand was still reaching for the log; his left had gone instinctively for his ax, and it still rested there on its cold steel head.

“Are you her?” he asked.

Them that see her in Sefry or human shape don’t usually have many breaths left in the lands of fate, the old man had said.

She smiled very faintly, and the wind started, jittering his fire and wisping her fine hair.

Then she was gone. It was as if he had been seeing her reflected in a giant eye, and the eye had blinked.

He was still breathing the next morning and set out at the earliest hint of the sun. He worried about the wolves, but pretty soon he noticed they wouldn’t cross, or even come onto, the trail he was following.

That bothered him more in some ways. Wolves belonged in the forest. What could be so bad about this bit of ground that they wouldn’t walk on it?

He counted a pack of about twelve. Could he and Ogre take that many in the state they were in? Maybe.

The forest opened up for a while as the girth of the trees increased, revealing small, mossy meadows here and there. The sky was blue when he saw it, dazzling when a shaft or two of it fell through to the forest floor. The wolves paced him until midday, then vanished. Not much later he heard wild cattle trumpet in alarm and knew the predators had found prey they reckoned worth their while.

He was glad to be rid of the wolves, but something was still following him. It bent branches not like a wind but like a weight settling on them from above. As if it was walking on them, all of them at once, or at least all of them around him. If he stopped, it stopped, and he was reminded of a very stupid entertainment given by a traveling troupe in Colbaely. One fellow walked stealthily behind another, mimicking his motions exactly, and whenever the person being followed turned, the stalker would freeze in place, and the fool in front wouldn’t see him. Aspar had found it annoying rather than funny.

But deer couldn’t see you when they were feeding. When they had their heads down to the ground, you could walk straight toward them so long as they were upwind and couldn’t smell you. Frogs couldn’t see you unless you moved, either.

So maybe to whatever was following him, Aspar was basically a frog.

He chuckled under his breath. It might have been the fatigue, but that actually did seem funny. Maybe he should have given the actors a little more credit.

A rasping wheeze caught his attention, something off the trail a bit. He didn’t forget the old man’s warning to stay on the path, but he didn’t much trust it, either. After all, if no one lived through coming here, what was the point of following directions? With only a little hesitation he turned Ogre toward the sound.

He didn’t go far before he saw it: a large black hairy form quivering in the ferns. It raised a bristly head when it saw him and grunted.

Ogre whinnied.

It was a sow, a big one, bigger because she was pregnant. It was a little early for that—the piglets usually came with the first flowers—but something much more fundamental was wrong, he could see. Whatever was pushing from inside its belly was a lot larger than a piglet. And there was blood, a lot of it, around the sow, leaking from her wheezing nostrils, from her eyes. She didn’t even know he was there; her grunt had been one of pain, not of perception.

She died half a bell later even as he watched, but whatever was inside her kept moving. Aspar noticed that he was shaking, but he didn’t know with what, only that it wasn’t fear. He felt the weight above him, the thing bending the branches, and suddenly the side of the boar split open.

Out pushed a bloody beak, a yellow eye, and a slimy scaled body.

A greffyn.

Very deliberately he dismounted as the thing fought to release itself from its mother’s womb.

“Stop me if you can,” he said to the forest.

Its scales were still soft, not hard like an adult’s, but its glare took a long time to dim even after its head was off.

He wiped his ax on dead leaves, then doubled over, retching.

But at least he knew something now. He knew why he’d passed forty years in the King’s Forest without seeing a trace of a greffyn, an utin, a woorm, or anything of the like, yet now the whole world was lousy with them.

People had said they were “waking up,” like the Briar King, which implied they’d been sleeping like a bear in a hollow tree—except for a thousand years.

They hadn’t been sleeping anywhere. They were being born. He remembered an old tale about basil-nix coming from hen’s eggs.

Sceat, they probably did.

He waited for the wrath of the witch to descend on him, but nothing happened. Still shaking, he remounted and went on.

It was almost without surprise that he saw buds on the trees. They were not natural buds but black spikes splitting through trunks and branches. It was easy enough to recognize the black thorns he’s seen in the King’s Forest and again in the Midenlands. Here they sprouted from galls on the trees themselves, and the deeper he went, the more growth he saw, and the more variety.

The thorns in the King’s Forest had all looked the same, but here he saw many sorts, some narrow, their spines almost feathery in their delicacy and number, and others that bore blunt knobby growths. Within a bell he didn’t even recognize the parent trees anymore; like the sow, they were giving birth to monsters and were being consumed in the process.

Then he came to the end of the trail and an eldritch mere beneath the boughs of the strangest forest he had ever seen.

The largest of the trees were roughly scaled, with each branch spawning five smaller ones and each of those five spawning more, endlessly, so that the fringes were cloudlike. Aspar was reminded of some sort of pond weed or mossy lichen more than of any real tree. Others looked something like weeping willows save that their fronds were black and serrated like the tail of a fence lizard. Some of the saplings looked as if a mad saint had taken pinecones and stretched them out ten yards high.

Other plants were a bit more natural. Pale, nearly white ferns and gigantic horsetails sedged the edges of the pool stretched out before him. Beyond and to his left and right, rocky walls rose up to place him and the mere in the bottom of a gorge. The entire grotto had been decorated with human skulls, which japed down at him from the trees, from the crannies in the rock, and along the ground bordering the pool.

Everything bent toward him.

“Well,” Aspar said. “Here I am.”

He felt the presence, but the silence stretched until, very quietly, the water started to mound, and something rose up out of the mere.

It wasn’t the Sefry woman but something larger, a mass of black fur mated with pond weed, dead leaves, and fish bones. It stood more like a bear than a man, but its face was froglike, with one bulging, blind white eye visible and the other occluded by a mane of oily strands that seemed almost to pour from the crown of its head. Its mouth was a downturned arc that took up most of the bottom of its face. Its arms dangled down to the water, depending from massive sloping shoulders. There was nothing feminine—or masculine, for that matter—about it.

Aspar faced the thing for a few moments, until he was certain it wasn’t going to attack, at least not yet.

“I’ve come to see the woman of the Sarnwood,” he finally said.

Silence followed for several long tens of heartbeats. Aspar was starting to feel a little foolish when something else stirred in the water just in front of the whatever it was.

A head emerged. At first Aspar thought it was just another, smaller version of the creature, but the resemblance was superficial. This once had been a man, though his eyes were now filmed and his flesh an ugly shade of bluish-gray. Aspar couldn’t see what had killed him, but aside from the fact that he was standing up, he was clearly long dead.

The corpse suddenly started jerking, and water spurted from his lips. As this continued, a sort of wet gasping sound emerged and grew louder.

Finally, after the last of the water, Aspar began to recognize speech, soft around all the edges but understandable if he concentrated.

“They bring blood who come to see me,” the corpse said. “Blood and someone to speak for me. This one has almost been dead too long.”

“I had no one to bring.”

“The old man would have done.”

“But I didn’t bring him. And you’re talking to me.”

The witch shifted her monstrous head, and even without human expression, he felt her anger.

“I wish to kill you,” she said.

Aspar lifted what he held in his hand: the arrow given him by Hespero, the treasure of the Church said to be capable of killing anything.

“This was meant to slay the Briar King,” he said. “I reckon it will murder you.”

The corpse started gasping, as if for air. It took a while for Aspar to recognize laughter.

“What will you slay?” the witch asked. “This?” The massive paw reached up to touch its breast. “You might kill this.”

The trees around him suddenly creaked and groaned, and he felt the presence that had followed him since he’d entered the forest press down with incredible weight, then push through him so that he fell roughly to his knees. He tried to bring the arrow to the bow, but both were suddenly too heavy to hold.

“Everything around you,” the corpse gurgled. “Everything you see that grows or creeps or crawls in the Sarnwood—that is me. Can you put an arrow in that?”

Aspar didn’t answer, concentrating his will in a fierce effort to stand, to at least not die on his knees. Muscles trembling, groaning, he lifted first one knee, then the other, and from a squat tried to come upright. He felt as if he had ten men standing on his shoulders.

It was too much, and he collapsed again.

To his vast surprise, the pressure suddenly eased.

“I see,” the witch said. “He has touched you.”

“He?”

“Him. The Horned Lord.”

“The Briar King.”

“Yes, him. What have you come here for?”

“You sent a woorm from here with a Sefry named Fend.”

“Yes, I did that. You’ve seen my child, haven’t you? Isn’t he beautiful?”

“You gave Fend an antidote to its poison. I need that.”

“Oh. For your lover.”

Aspar frowned. “If you already knew—”

“But I didn’t. You say certain things, I see others. If you never say anything, I never see anything.”

Aspar decided to let that pass.

“Will you help me?”

The leaves rustled around him, and he heard a murder of crows cawing somewhere in the trees.

“We do not have the same purposes in this world, holter,” the Sarnwood witch told him. “I can think of no reason to help someone who is determined to slay my child, who has already slain three of my children.”

“They were trying to kill me,” Aspar said.

“That is meaningless to me,” the witch replied. “If I give you the medicine you seek, you will return to the trail of my woorm and with that arrow of yours you will try to slay him.”

“The Sefry with your child, Fend—”

“Killed your wife. Because she knew. She was going to tell you.”

“Tell me? Tell me what?”

“You will try to slay my child,” the witch repeated, but this time in a very different tone, not so much stating a fact as reflecting, musing. “He has touched you.”

Aspar let out a deep breath. “If you save Winna—”

“You shall have your antidote,” the witch interrupted. “I have changed my mind about killing you, and you will hunt my son whether I give you the cure for his poison or not. I see no reason to help you, but if you will agree you owe me a service, I see no reason to refuse you.”

“I—”

“I won’t ask you for the life of anyone you love,” the witch assured him. “I won’t ask you to spare one of my children.”

Aspar thought that over for a moment.

“That’ll do,” he said finally.

“Behind you,” the witch said, “the thorny bush with the cluster of fruit deep in the leaves. The juice of three of those should be sufficient to cleanse a man of venom. Take as many as you like.”

Still suspecting a trick, Aspar looked where he was told and found hard, blackish purple fruit about the size of wild plums. Defiantly, he popped one in his mouth.

“If this is poison,” he said, “I’ll find out now.”

“As you wish,” the witch said.

The fruit had a sharp, acidic bite with a bit of a putrid aftertaste, but he felt no immediate ill effects.

“What are you?” he asked.

Again the corpse laughed. “Old,” she replied.

“The black thorns. Are they your children, too?”

“My children are being born everywhere now,” she said. “But yes.”

“They’re destroying the King’s Forest.”

“Oh, how sad,” she snarled. “My forest was destroyed long ago. What you see here is all that remains. The King’s Forest is a stand of seedlings. Its time has come.”

“Why? Why do you hate it?”

“I don’t hate it,” the witch said. “But I am like a season, Aspar White. When it is time for me, I arrive. I’ve nothing to do with the order of the seasons, though. Do you understand?”

“No,” Aspar replied.

“Nor do I, really,” the witch replied. “Go now. In two days your girl will be dead, and all of this will have been for nothing.”

“But can you see? Will I save her?”

“I see no such thing,” the witch replied. “I only tell you to make haste.”

Aspar took as much of the fruit as his saddlebag would hold, fed a handful to Ogre, and left the Sarnwood.

12 Sister Pale

Sister Pale led Stephen through the night without benefit of a torch. She somehow knew where she was going and kept one hand clasped firmly on his. It was a peculiar sensation, that contact of flesh against flesh with a strange woman. He hadn’t held the hands of many women: his mother’s, of course, and his older sisters.

Embarrassingly this recalled that; he felt very much the little boy, protected from things he did not understand by the caring grip of fingers in his own. But because this wasn’t his mother or his sister, it brought out other, more adult feelings that didn’t contrast very well with the childish ones. He found himself trying to translate the pressure of her fingers, the shift of grip from intertwined digits to clapped palms into some sort of meaningful cipher, which of course it wasn’t. She just wanted him to keep up with her.

He didn’t know what she looked like, but he teased himself with an image based on the shadowed glimpses he’d gotten. It was only after a bell or so that he realized that the image was that of Winna, almost precisely.

They weren’t alone on the trail; he heard the snuffling of her dogs moving around them, and once one of them nosed into his free hand. He wondered what faneway the sister had walked that allowed her to move in such utter darkness; even his own saint-blessed senses didn’t allow for that.

The moon finally rose; it was half-gone and a strange, astringent yellow Stephen had never quite seen before. Its light revealed a little more of his companion and surroundings: the hood and back of her paida, jagged lines of landscape that seemed impossibly far above them, the silhouettes of the dogs.

Neither of them had spoken since leaving the town through a secreted gate Stephen was certain he could never find again. He’d been concentrating too closely on not stumbling, on straining for sounds of pursuit, and on the hand holding his. But finally the muffled sounds of Demsted faded into the winds south quarter, and he couldn’t make out any hoofbeats or footsteps pursuing them.

“Where are we going?” he whispered.

“A place I know,” she answered unhelpfully. “We’ll find mounts there.”

“Why are you helping me?” he asked bluntly.

“Sacritor Hespero—the man you know as the praifec—he’s your enemy. Did you know that?”

“I know it well,” Stephen said. “I just wasn’t certain he knew it.”

“He knows,” Pale replied. “Did you think it a coincidence that he arrived shortly before you did? He’s been waiting for you.”

“But how could he know I was coming here? That doesn’t make sense unless…” He allowed the words to trail off.

Unless the praifec and Fratrex Pell were in league.

Pale seemed to pluck the thought from his mind.

“You weren’t betrayed by whoever sent you,” she told him. “At least, that isn’t required to explain why he’s here. He may not have even known you were the one who was coming.”

“I don’t understand.”

I suppose you wouldn’t,” she said. “You see, before he was praifec in Crotheny, Hespero was sacritor in Demsted for many years. We liked him at first; he was wise, caring, and very smart. He used Church funds to make improvements in the village. Among other things, he expanded the temple a bit to include a ward for the care of aged persons with no kin to tend them. The elders tried to stop him from doing that.”

“Why? It seems a worthy endeavor.”

“Nor would the elders disagree. It was the location they objected to. To build the addition, he broke down an old part of the temple, a part that had once been the sanctuary of the older pagan temple that was here before. And he found something there, something our forefathers hid instead of destroying. The Ghrand Ateiiz.”

“Book… ah, returning?”

She squeezed his hand in what felt like affection, and he nearly swallowed his tongue.

“The Book of Return,” she corrected. “After he found it, Hespero changed. He became much more distant. He still managed the attish—managed it better than ever, in fact—but his love for us seemed forgotten. He took to long trips into the mountains, and his guides came back changed with fear. They would not speak of what had happened or even where they went. Eventually he tired of that and focused all his energies on advancing his rank in the Church.

“When he was promoted and finally left, we were relieved, but we shouldn’t have been. Now the resacaratum is upon us, and I fear he will hang everyone in Demsted.”

“Are you all heretics?” Stephen asked.

“In a way, yes,” she replied with surprising frankness. “We understand the teachings of the Church a little differently than most others.”

“Because your church was founded by a Revesturi?”

She laughed quietly.

“Brother Kauron did not found our Church. Because he was Revesturi, he saw that we already followed the saints in our own way. He merely helped us shape our outward image so that when the Church finally came, they would not burn us as heretics. He helped us preserve our old ways. He cherished them, and he cherished us.”

“So the Book of Return …”

“Is about Kauron’s return. Or, more properly, the coming of his heir.”

“Heir? Heir to what?”

“I don’t know. None of us have ever seen the book. We thought Kauron took it with him. Our traditions were passed down mouth to ear, and we know its writings foretold these times. That much has been made clear by the things that have come to pass. And we know that Kauron’s one heir is destined to come, driven by a serpent into the mountains. The one who comes will speak with many tongues, and it is he who will find the Alq.”

“The Alq?”

“It means a sort of holy place,” she explained. “A throne or a seat of power. We’ve debated endlessly whether it is a physical place or a position, like that of sacritor. Whichever is true, it was fated to remain hidden until the day the one returned.

“And that one seems to be you. We knew you were coming, and we have only the scraps of knowledge remembered from the Book of Return. Hespero has the book itself, so his knowledge of the signs is more precise. He was waiting for you because he knew you could lead him to the Alq.”

“Then all he need do is follow us,” Stephen said, instinctively glancing over his shoulder into the darkness.

“True. But this way we have a chance of arriving ahead of him and preventing him from becoming the heir.”

“But how could he ever do that? You just admitted you don’t even know what that means,” Stephen said.

“No, we don’t, not exactly,” Sister Pale allowed. “But we do know that if Hespero becomes the heir, no good can come of it.”

“And how do you know I would be any better?”

“That’s obvious. You aren’t Hespero.”

There was a logic there that Stephen had no way to contradict. Besides, it served his purposes.

“Does your tradition tell you who sent the woorm or why it’s following me?”

“About the khirme—what you call the waurm—little is said, and what we’ve gleaned can be contradictory. One legend says that it is your ally.”

Stephen vented a humorless laugh. “I don’t expect I’ll count on that,” he said.

“It is a debated tradition,” she admitted. “Besides the khirme, there is also mention of a foe called the Khraukare. He is a servant of the Vhelny, who does not wish you to have the prize.”

Stephen’s head was beginning to swim.

“Khraukare. That translates as ‘Blood Knight,’ doesn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“And the Vhelny?”

“Vhelny. It means, ah, a king, of sorts, a lord of demons.”

“And where are these people? Who are they?”

“We don’t know. We didn’t know who Kauron’s heir was, either, until you showed up.”

“Could Hespero be the Blood Knight, the servant of the Vhelny?”

“It’s possible. The Vhelny has other names: Wind-of-Lightning, Sky-Breaker, Destroyer. His only desire is to see the end of the world and everything in it.”

“Perhaps you mean the Briar King?”

“No. The Briar King is lord of root and leaf. Why would he destroy the earth?”

“There are prophecies that say he might.”

“There are prophecies that say he might destroy the race of Man,” she corrected. “That isn’t the same thing.”

“Oh. True. But why would Hespero want to destroy the world?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Sister Pale replied. “Perhaps he is insane. Or very, very disappointed in things.”

“And you, Sister Pale? What’s your interest in this? How do I know you aren’t an agent of Hespero, tricking me into leading you to the Alq? Or a disciple of the Destroyer, or whoever else wants this thing?”

“You don’t, I suppose. And there’s nothing I can say to convince you. I could tell you that I am descended of the line of priestesses Kauron met when he came here. I could tell you that I was trained in a coven but that it was not the Coven Saint Cer. And I could tell you I am here to help you because I have waited all my life for you to come. But you have no reason to believe these things.”

“Especially when you’ve already lied to me once. Or perhaps twice,” he replied.

“The once I understand: what I told you about Saint Cer. But that wasn’t for your benefit; it was for the benefit of others. But when did I lie to you a second time?”

“When you told me you attended a different coven. There are many covens, but all are of the Order of Saint Cer.”

“If that’s true, then it would mean I told the truth the first time and am only lying now. So it’s still only one lie, not so much, really, between friends.”

“Now you’re making fun of me.”

“Yes. What did I tell you earlier about assuming that you know everything?”

“Then there really is a coven dedicated to a saint other than Cer? And it isn’t a heretical sect?”

“I never claimed that it wasn’t heretical,” Pale replied. “Unsanctioned by z’Irbina, certainly. But neither are the Revesturi sanctioned by the Church, yet you are one.”

“I’m not!” Stephen snapped. “I’d never even heard of the Revesturi until a few ninedays ago, until I started on this bloody quest. And now I don’t understand anything at all!”

He jerked his hand away from her and groped away into the dark.

“Brother Darige—”

“Stay away,” he said. “I don’t trust you. Every time I think I have some inkling of what’s going on, this happens.”

“What happens?”

“This! Blood Knights, Destroyers, prizes, treasure troves, prophecies, and Alqs, and…”

“Oh,” she said. He could almost see the shape of her face in the moonlight now and the liquid shimmer of her eyes. “You mean knowledge. You mean learning. You think you’d be more content if the world continued to bear out what you believed to be true when you were fifteen.”

“Yes!” Stephen shouted. “Yes, I think I would!”

“Then there’s something I don’t understand. If learning is so painful to you, why do you pursue it? Why were you there in the scriftorium tonight?”

“Because…”

He felt like strangling someone, possibly himself.

“Don’t do that,” he said sullenly.

“Do what?”

“Make sense. Even better, don’t talk to me at all.”

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he found her much nearer, near enough that he could feel her breath on his face. He could make out the curve of her cheek, rounded so she looked young. Ivory in the moonlight. One eye was still dark, but the other shone like silver. He could see half her lip, too, either pouting or naturally made that way.

Her breath was sweet, faintly herbal.

“You started this,” she breathed. “You started talking. I was perfectly happy holding your hand in silence, helping you, taking you where you need to go. But you had to start asking all the questions. Can’t you just let things happen?”

“That’s all I have been doing,” Stephen said, his voice cracking. “It’s like one of those dreams where you’re trying to do something, but you keep getting distracted, pulled off the track, and your original purpose falls farther and farther away. And I’m losing people. I lost Winna and Aspar. I lost Ehawk.

“Now I’ve lost Ehan, and Henne, and Themes, and I keep trying to pretend it doesn’t matter, but it does.”

“Winna, Aspar, Ehawk. Are they all dead?”

“I don’t know,” he said miserably.

“Winna was your lover?”

That went in like an arrow.

“No.”

“Ah, I see. But you wanted her to be.”

“What’s this got to do with anything?”

“Nothing, maybe.” He felt her hand wrap around his again. They were both cold.

“Were they with you on this quest of yours?” she pressed. “Did the waurm kill them?”

“No,” Stephen said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I came to Crotheny to join the monastery d’Ef. On the way I was kidnapped by bandits. Aspar—he’s the king’s holter—he saved me from them.”

“And then?”

“Well, then I went on to d’Ef, but only after learning about terrible things in the forest and about the Briar King. And then at d’Ef—” He stopped. How could he explain in a few words the betrayal he’d felt at finding the corruption at d’Ef? At the first beating Brother Desmond and his cohort had given him?

Why should he?

She squeezed his hand encouragingly.

“Thing went wrong there,” he finally said. “I was asked to translate terrible things. Forbidden things. It was as if the world I thought I knew ceased to exist. Certainly the Church was different than I believed it to be. Then Aspar showed back up, nearly dead, and it was my turn to save him, and suddenly I was off on his quest, off to rescue Winna—and save the queen, of all things.”

“And you did that?”

“Yes. And then the praifec sent us out after the Briar King, but halfway through that business we figured out that the real evil was Hespero himself, and we ended up trying to foil their plans to awaken a faneway of the Damned Saints. After doing that we were thrown in with a princess off to reclaim her throne from an usurper—something I really had no idea how to do—and the next thing I know I’ve been snatched by slinders and I’m sitting with my old fratrex, whom I thought dead, and he tells me the world’s only hope is for me to come up here… I just wanted to study books!” He couldn’t continue then. Why was he going on like this, anyway?

He sounded like a child.

“I’m sorry,” he finally managed. “That must all sound ridiculous.”

“No,” she said, “it sounds reasonable. I knew a girl who wanted to study letters at the Coven Saint Cer. She’d wanted to do so since she was five, when she was in the care of her aunt, who dusted the temple library in Demsted. Everything looked hopeful, but then a boy she’d known forever but never thought twice about seemed suddenly to shine like a watchstar, and she couldn’t bear the thought of not knowing his touch.

“And then she found herself with child, and her dreams of a coven education dropped away. Suddenly marriage—something she had always wished to avoid—became her only path.

“She’d just begun to settle in to that, to lose the edge of her resentment, when her husband died and then her child. Just to live, she had to become the maid of a foreign noble, tending children who were not hers. Then one day a woman appeared and offered her another chance at her dream, to study in a coven…”

Her voice had become hypnotic, and he could see both of her eyes now, small half-moons.

“That’s how life is, my friend. Yours seems strange because it is full of wonders fantastic, but the fact is that few people remain on the path they begin on. The truth is, we have dreams like you describe because our dreams are dark mirrors of waking.

“But here is where you are lucky,” she continued. “I have come to put you back on your path. You joined the Church because you loved knowledge, yes? Loved mystery, old books, the secrets of the past. If we find the place you’re looking for—if we find the Alq—you’ll have all of that, and more.”

Stephen felt as if he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think of anything to say.

“The girl, the one who wanted to study—”

She leaned forward, and her lips met his, caressed them slightly. A shock ran down his spine, a very pleasant one.

But he pulled away.

“Don’t do that,” he said.

“Why? Because you like it?”

“No. I just told you. I don’t trust you.”

“Hmm,” she said, leaning back in. He meant to stop her, he really did, but somehow her lips were on his again, and he did like it, of course, and as if he had gone mad, he suddenly let go of her hand and reached around her, drew her body against his, realizing with a shock how small she was, how good she felt.

Winna, he thought, and touched her face, ran his fingers under her hood into her blond hair, seeing her in his mind’s eye with the perfect clarity only an initiate of Decmanus could conjure.

She placed both hands on his chest then and pressed him away gently. “We can’t stay here,” she said. “It’s not much farther, and we’ll be safe.”

“Hush. Try not to think too much about it.”

He couldn’t help it. He laughed quietly. “That will be very difficult,” he said.

“Think about this instead,” she told him, taking his hand again and beginning to lead him back to the trail. “Soon the sun will rise, and you will see that I am not her. You should be prepared for that.”

Sunrise found them on a rocky white path winding through a high, treeless moor. The clouds were low, wet and cold, but the ground cover was brilliant green, and Stephen wondered what it was. Could Aspar name it, or were they too far from the plants the holter knew?

Snow capped the surrounding peaks, but it had to be melting, for the path was often crossed by rivulets, and virtual waterfalls cascaded down the sides of many of the hills. They stopped at one of them to drink, and Sister Pale pushed back her weather cloak.

In that gray light he finally saw her.

Her eyes really were silver or, rather, a blue-gray so pale that they caught the light that way at times. Her hair, however, wasn’t blond but a thick auburn, cut simply and short. Her cheeks were rounded, as had been hinted in the darkness, but whereas Winna’s face was an oval, Pale’s tapered sharply to the chin. Her lips were smaller than they had seemed when he was kissing them, but they had the natural pout he’d imagined. She had two large pox marks on her forehead and a long, raised scar on her left cheek.

She kept her eyes averted as she drank, then studied their surroundings, knowing he was studying her, giving him his chance.

It was disappointing. Not only was she not Winna, she wasn’t as beautiful as Winna. He knew it was a terrible thought, but he couldn’t deny his reaction. In the phay stories, the hero always won the beautiful virgin and everyone else had to settle for what was left.

Aspar was the hero of this tale, not Stephen; he’d known that for some time. Winna wasn’t a virgin, but she had that air about her, the aura of the hero’s prize.

Pale tilted her head to look at him then, and he almost gasped. He recalled the time Sacritor Burden had been trying to explain the saints to him; he’d produced a piece of crystal, triangular in cross section but long, like the roof of a lodge house. It seemed interesting, even unusual, and when he put it into the sunlight, it sparkled fetehingly. But it was only when he turned it just so that it threw out the colors of the rainbow and revealed the beauty that had been hidden in white light.

When he met her eyes now, there was suddenly so much more than his first glance had found, and her features came into clearer focus. For the first time he saw them as her own.

“Well,” she said, “that’s what you get for kissing a girl before you’ve seen her.”

“You kissed me,” he blurted, realizing in the same breath that it wasn’t what he was supposed to say.

She just shrugged and pushed the hood of her cloak back on her head.

“Yes,” she allowed.

“Wait,” he said.

She turned and cocked her head.

“What’s happening here?” he asked desperately.

“Most likely the praifec and his men are just starting after us,” she replied. “We’ll need mounts, and we can get some just ahead. After that, we might stay ahead of them.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know that,” she replied.

“Well, then? I mean, I hardly know you. It’s simply not reasonable.”

“Where I come from,” Pale said, “everything isn’t reasonable. And we don’t wait a lifetime for a perfect kiss from the perfect person, because then we die alone. I kissed you because I wanted to, and you wanted me to, and maybe we both needed it. And until the sun came up, you seemed to be happy with that and maybe ready to do it some more.

“But here we are instead, and that’s life, too, and not worth dwelling on. We can only get so much done before we die, yes? So let’s go.”

13 Crepling

Cazio heard someone shout his name; it was a thin, distant thing.

He’d had most of his attention on climbing, wedging boot tips and fingers into the precarious notches that had been cut into the stone and mortar. He’d been delighted to find them there and wondered who had carved them originally. Some ancient thief? Children exploring the wall, or perhaps a Sefry magician? It didn’t matter, really. He could probably have managed the climb at the intersection of the walls using only the meager purchase offered naturally by the masonry, but the ancient climbers had helped him considerably.

They increased his chances of survival only slightly, however, when he spotted the soldiers who were rushing toward him. He still had a kingsyard to go, and at the rate he was climbing, he wasn’t going to make it before cold iron married him.

With a silent prayer to Mamres and Fiussa, he flexed his knees and leapt as hard as he could up and to his right, toward the first spearman.

The problem with that was that the jump threw him away from the wall. Not much, but enough that he wouldn’t be able to reach it again. He felt the cobbles of Gobelin Court below him, eager to smash his spine, as he stretched his arms nearly out of their sockets.

As he had prayed, the spearman was taken aback, seeing a crazy man leaping toward him. If logical thought was his guide, he would step away, watch Cazio grasp at empty air, and laugh as he fell.

Instead, the man reacted instinctively and thrust the spear at his attacker.

Cazio caught the thick shaft just above the wickedly pointed steel, and to his delight, the guard’s second reaction was to yank back. That pulled Cazio toward the wall, and he let go so he could catch the top of the edifice with his arms and upper chest.

The spearman, overcompensating, tumbled backward. The wall was sufficiently wide that he didn’t fall off, but with him down and his companion still a few strides away, Cazio had the time to jerk himself to his feet and draw Acredo.

Heedless, the second fellow lowered the sharp of his weapon and prepared for the attack. Cazio was pleased to see that he was wearing only chain, a breastplate, and a helm rather than a knight’s plate.

As the thrust came, he parried prismo and stepped quickly toward his opponent, lifting his left hand to seize the shaft and then flipping the tip of his blade up for a long lunge that ended in the man’s throat. If it hadn’t been for the armor, he might have tried for a less lethal spot, but the only other exposed place was the thigh, where his sword point might become lodged in bone.

As the man dropped his spear and whistled in despair through novel lips, Cazio turned to the first fellow, who was regaining his feet.

“Contro z’osta,” Cazio said, “Zo dessrator comatia anter c’acra.”

“What are you babbling about?” the man screamed, clearly distressed. “What are you saying?”

“My apologies,” Cazio said. “When I speak of love, wine, or sword-play, I find it easier to use my native tongue. I quote the famous treatise of Mestro Papa Avradio Vallaimo, who states—”

He was rudely interrupted as the man screamed and lunged forward, leaving Cazio wondering exactly how much training these men had been given.

He threw his rear leg back and dropped his body and head below the line of the attack while extending his arm. Carried by momentum, the attacker more or less threw himself onto the tip of Cazio’s blade.

“ ‘Against the spear, the swordsman shall move inside the point,’” Cazio continued as the man folded over on his side.

Here came another one out of the tower to his left. He set his stance and waited, wondering how many of them he would have to fight before the Craftsmen joined him.

This one proved more interesting, because he understood that Cazio had to come within reach. So he used his feet like a dessrator, allowing Cazio what looked like a good chance to close the distance, when in fact it was a ruse designed to make him commit to his own foolish charge.

Even more interesting were the shouts he heard coming from behind him and the next man running along the wall in the direction he was facing.

With a grim smile, he began teaching the rest of Mestro Papa’s chapter “Contro z’osta.”

Anne watched breathlessly as Cazio, in typical form, did the craziest thing imaginable and somehow survived.

Austra stood there, fists at her sides, growing whiter and whiter as the battle went on, until at last the Craftsmen appeared, swarming up the wall and joining the Vitellian. Then they split up and ran toward the towers. They appeared there a short time later, waving pennants.

Cazio had his broad-brimmed hat clutched in one hand.

“Saints,” Austra breathed. “Why must he always—” She didn’t finish but sighed instead. “He loves fighting more than he loves me.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” Anne replied, trying to sound convincing. “Anyway, at least it’s not another woman.”

“I’d almost rather that,” Austra replied.

“When it happens,” Anne said, “I’ll take your bearings again.”

“You mean if it happens,” Austra said, sounding a bit defensive.

“Yes, that’s what I meant,” Anne said. But she knew better. Men took mistresses, didn’t they? Her father had had many. The ladies of the court had always agreed that it was the nature of the beast.

She glanced back at the Sefry house. She and Austra had backed up to witness the action on the wall, but Mother Uun was still waiting in the shadow of her doorway.

“I apologize for the distraction, Mother Uun,” she said, “but I would be pleased to discuss the Crepling passage now.”

“Of course,” the old woman replied. “Please come in.”

The room where the Sefry took them was disappointingly ordinary. It had touches of the exotic, to be sure: a colorful rug, an oil lamp made of some sort of bone carved into the form of a swan, panes of dark blue glass that gave the room a pleasant, murky underwater feel. Except for that last feature, however, the room could have belonged to any merchant who traded in goods from far away.

Mother Uun indicated several armchairs arranged in a circle and waited until they were settled before she herself took a seat. Almost the instant she did so, another Sefry—a man—entered the room with a tray. He bowed without upsetting the teapot and cups he was carrying, then placed it all onto a small table.

“Will you have some tea?” Mother Uun asked pleasantly.

“That would be nice,” Anne replied.

The Sefry man seemed young, no older than Anne’s seventeen winters. He was handsome in a thin, alien way, and his eyes were a striking cobalt blue.

He then departed, only to return moments later with walnut bread and marmalade.

Anne sipped the tea and found it tasted of lemons, oranges, and some spice she wasn’t familiar with. It occurred to her that it might be poison. Mother Uun was drinking from the same pot, but since she’d touched the Sefry assassin and found him so wrong inside, she thought it possible that what was poison to a human might be pleasing to a Sefry.

Her next sip was feigned, and she hoped Austra was doing the same, although if her maid drank it, at least she would know if it was poisoned.

Horror followed swiftly on the heels of that thought. What was wrong with her?

Austra’s face crinkled in concern, and that only made matters worse.

“Anne?”

“It’s nothing,” she replied. “I had an unpleasant thought.”

She remembered that her father had had someone to taste his food. She needed someone like that, someone she didn’t care about. But not Austra.

Mother Uun sipped her tea.

“When we arrived,” Anne began, “you said something about watching someone. Will you explain that?”

In the dense blue light from the windows, Mother Uun’s skin seemed less transparent, because the fine veins were no longer visible. Anne wondered idly if that was why she’d chosen indigo for her glass rather than orange or yellow. She also seemed somehow larger.

“You’ve heard him, I think,” Mother Uun said. “His whispers are loud enough now to escape his prison.”

“Again,” Anne said impatiently, “of whom do you speak?”

“I will not say his name, not just yet,” Mother Uun replied. “But I ask you to recall your history. Do you remember what once stood where this city now stands?”

“I was a poor student in every subject,” Anne replied, “history included. But everyone knows that. Eslen was built on the ruins of the last fortress of the Scaosen.”

“Scaosen,” Mother Uun mused. “How time deforms words. The older term, of course, was ‘Skasloi,’ though even that was merely an attempt to pronounce the unpronounceable. But yes, here is where your ancestress Virgenya Dare won her final battle against our ancient masters and pressed her booted foot on the neck of the last of their kind. Here the scepter passed from the race of demons to the race of woman.”

“I know the story,” Anne said absently, interested by the Sefry’s odd turn of phrase.

“When the Skasloi ruled here, it was known as Ulheqelesh,” Mother Uun continued. “It was the greatest of the Skasloi strongholds, its lord the most powerful of his kind.”

“Yes,” Anne said. “Why do you say ‘woman,’ though, and not ‘man’?”

“Because Virgenya Dare was a woman,” Mother Uun replied.

“I understand that,” Anne said. “But the name of her race was not ‘woman.’”

“I meant the race to which women belong, I suppose,” the Sefry said.

“But you are a woman, are you not, though not of Man-kin?”

“Indeed,” she said, the corners of her mouth lifting faintly.

Anne frowned but wasn’t sure she wanted to crawl farther into this odd warren of semantics, not when the Sefry seemed perfectly content to be drawn farther and farther from the original question.

“Never mind,” she said. “This person you say whispers to me. I want to know about him.”

“Ah,” Mother Uun said. “Yes. Virgenya Dare did not kill the last of the Skasloi. She kept him alive in the dungeons of Eslen.

“He is there yet, and it is my charge to make certain that he stays there.”

An unexpected vertigo seized Anne; she felt as if her chair were nailed to the ceiling and she must grip its arms tightly to keep from falling out as the room slowly revolved.

Again she heard unintelligible words breathed into her ear, but this time she thought… almost… that she understood them. The voices of strange birds warbled beyond the window.

No, not birds at all, but Austra and Mother Uun.

She focused on them.

“That’s impossible,” Austra was saying. “The histories clearly say that she killed him. Besides, that would make him more than two thousand years old.”

“He was older than that when his kingdom fell,” Mother Uun replied. “The Skasloi did not age as your kind does. Some of them did not age at all. Qexqaneh is one of those.”

“Qexqaneh?”

As she said the name, Anne suddenly felt something rough sliding against her skin, and her nostrils filled with a scent like burning pine. It happened so quickly that she burst into a fit of coughing.

“I should have warned you to be careful with that name,” Mother Uun said. “It draws his attention, but it also gives you power to command him, if your will is strong enough.”

“Why?” Anne asked hoarsely. “Why keep such a thing alive?”

“Who knows the mind of the Born Queen?” Mother Uun said. “Perhaps, at first, to gloat. Or perhaps from fear. He made a prophecy, you know.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Anne said.

Mother Uun closed her eyes, and her voice changed. It dropped lower and canted somewhere between song and chant.

“You were born slaves,” she said. “You will die slaves. You have merely summoned a new master. The daughters of your seed will face what you have wrought, and it will obliterate them.”

Anne felt as though a hand were cupped across her mouth and nose. She could hardly draw breath.

“What did he mean by that?” she managed.

“No one knows,” the Sefry replied. “But the time he spoke of has come; that much is certain.” Her voice was of normal pitch now, but she was almost whispering.

“Even bound, he is terribly dangerous. To enter the castle, you must pass him. Be strong. Do nothing he asks and do not forget that it is in your blood to command him. If you ask him a question, he cannot lie, but he will nevertheless do his best to mislead you.”

“My father? My mother? Did they know of him?”

“All the kings of Eslen have known the Kept,” Mother Uun replied. “As will you. As you must.”

Well, at least that wasn’t something I missed when I wasn’t paying attention, Anne mused to herself.

“Tell me,” she said, “do you know anything about a certain tomb beneath a horz in Eslen-of-Shadows?”

“Anne!” Austra gasped, but Anne shushed her with a motion of her hand.

Mother Uun paused, the cup just inches from her lips, and her smooth brow wrinkled.

“I can’t say that I do,” she replied at last.

“What of the Faiths? Can you tell me anything about them?”

“I suspect you know them better than I,” the old woman said.

“But I would be more than moderately pleased to learn what you know of them,” Anne countered in what she hoped was an insistent tone.

“Sorceresses of the most ancient sort,” the old woman offered. “Some say they are immortal; others say that they are the heads of a secret order and are replaced with each generation.”

“Really? Which explanation do you fancy?”

“I do not know if they are immortal, but I suspect they are long-lived.”

Anne sighed. “This is no more than I have already heard. Tell me something I don’t know. Tell me why they wish me to be queen in Eslen.”

Mother Uun was silent for a moment, then she sighed.

“The great forces of the world are not aware of themselves,” she said. “What drives the wind, what pulls the falling rock to earth, what pulses life into our shells and pulls it away—these things are senseless, with no will, no intelligence, no desires or intentions. They simply are.”

“And yet the saints control these things,” Anne said.

“Hardly. The saints—No, leave that aside. Here is what is important: Those forces might be diverted by art, certainly. The wind can be harnessed to pump water or drive a ship. A river can be dammed, its currents used to drive a mill. The sedos power can be tapped. But the forces themselves dictate the ultimate shape of things, and they do so by their nature, not by their design.

“The Skasloi knew this; they did not worship gods, or saints, or any other such creatures. They found the sources of power and learned how to use them to their advantage. They fought for control of these sources, fought for millennia, until their world was all but destroyed.

“Finally, to save themselves, a few banded together, slaughtered their kin, and began remaking the world. They discovered the thrones and used them to keep the powers in check.”

“Thrones?”

“It’s not a good term, really. They aren’t seats or even places. They are more like the position of king or queen, an office to be filled, and once filled it confers the powers and obligations of the throne on the person who is filling it. There are several sorts of arcane power in the lands of fate, and each possesses a throne. These powers wax and wane in relative puissance. The throne that controls the power you know as sedos has been strengthening for millennia.”

“But you say there are others?”

“Of course. Do you think the Briar King is nurtured by the sedoi? He is not. He sits a very different throne.”

“And the Faiths?”

“Counselors. Queenmakers. They fight to see you receive the power, sit the sedos throne, rather than seeing it fall into the hands of another. But they have enemies, as do you.”

“But the sedoi are controlled by the Church,” Anne said.

“Up until now, yes, insomuch as they were controlled at all.”

“Then surely Fratrex Prismo already sits on that throne,” Anne said.

“He does not,” Mother Uun said. “No one does.”

“But why?”

“The Skasloi hid it.”

“Hid it? But why?”

“They forbade the use of the sedos power,” she replied. “Of all the forces they knew, it was the most destructive and could be used most effectively against the other thrones. Whoever sits the sedos throne can destroy the world. Virgenya Dare found that throne, used it to free your people and mine, and then abdicated it for fear of what it might do. For two thousand years men have been searching for it in vain. But now, like a season long in coming or a slow tide rising, the sedos power waxes again, and the throne will reveal itself. When that happens, it is important that the right person seize it.”

“But why me?” Anne asked.

“The throne isn’t open to just anyone,” Mother Uun replied. “And of the possible candidates, the Faiths probably consider you the best chance for preserving the world.”

“And the Briar King?”

“Who knows what his desires may be? But I should think his intention is to destroy whoever fills the throne before the sedos power can destroy him and everything he embodies.”

“And what is that?”

Mother Uun raised an eyebrow. “Birth and death. Germination and decay. Life.”

Anne set her cup down. “And how do you know all this, Mother Uun? How do you know so much about the Skasloi?”

“Because I am one of his keepers. And along with him, my clan preserves the knowledge of him from generation to generation.”

“But what if none of this is true? What if it’s all lies?”

“Why, then I know very little at all,” the Sefry said. “You must decide for yourself what is true. I can only tell you what I believe to be so. The rest is up to you.”

Anne nodded thoughtfully. “And the Crepling passageway? There is an entrance in this very house, isn’t there?”

“Indeed. I can show you if you are ready.”

“I’m not yet prepared,” Anne said. “But soon.” She settled her cup down. “You seem very helpful, Mother Uun.”

“Is there something else, Your Majesty?”

“Male Sefry can remember the passages, can’t they?”

“They can. Our kind are different.”

“Are there Sefry warriors here in Gobelin Court?”

“It depends on what you mean. All Sefry, male and female, have some training in the arts of war. Many who live here wander far in the world, and many have known battle.”

“Then—”

Mother Uun raised a hand. “The Sefry of Gobelin Court will not help you. In showing you the passageway, I fulfill the only obligation we have.”

“Perhaps you should not think in terms of obligations,” Anne said, “but of rewards.”

“We make our own way in the world, we Sefry,” Mother Uun said. “I don’t ask you to understand us.”

“Very well,” Anne said. But I will remember this once I am on the throne.

She rose. “Thank you for the tea, Mother Uun, and for the conversation.”

“It was my pleasure,” the Sefry replied.

“I’ll return shortly.”

“Whenever you wish.”

“You said you were going to tell me what was going on,” Austra reminded her as they reentered the sunlight. They shielded their eyes from the glare.

Something seemed to be happening at the far end of the square, but Anne couldn’t tell what it was. A small group of men broke off from the rest and moved in her direction.

“I have dreams,” Anne said. “You know that.”

“Yes. And your dreams told you about this Crepling passage?”

“I saw all the passages,” Anne said. “There’s a sort of map in my head.”

“That’s rather convenient,” Austra replied. “Who showed you this map?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said you had a vision. Was it the Faiths again? Were they the ones who told you about the passages?”

“It isn’t always the Faiths,” Anne replied. “They are, in fact, more confusing than helpful. No, sometimes I just know things.”

“Then no one actually spoke to you?” Austra pressed, sounding doubtful.

“What do you know about this?” Anne said, trying to keep a sudden burst of anger leashed.

“I think I was there, that’s all,” Austra said. “You were talking in your sleep, and it seemed as if you were talking to someone. Someone who frightened you. And you woke up screaming, remember?”

“I remember. I also remember telling you that you aren’t to question me so boldly.”

Austra’s face went stony.

“Begging your pardon, Your Majesty, but that isn’t what you said. You said I was free to question you and make my arguments in private but that once you had spoken on a subject, I was to be obedient to that word.”

Anne suddenly realized that Austra was shaking and very near to tears. She took her friend’s hand.

“You’re right,” Anne said. “I’m sorry, Austra. Please understand. You’re not the only one under a strain, you know.”

“I know,” Austra said.

“You’re right about the vision, too. There was someone in the dream, and it was he who showed me the passages.”

“He? A Sefry, then?”

“I don’t think so,” Anne said. “I think it was something else. Something neither Sefry nor human.”

“The Kept, you mean? The Scaos? But how could you ever trust that creature?”

“I don’t. I’m sure that what he wants in return for his help is to be released. But remember what Mother Uun said—that I command him. No, he’ll give me what I want, not the other way around.”

“A real Scaos,” Austra murmured, wonder in her voice. “Living below us all this time. It makes me sick to even think about it. It’s like waking up to find a snake coiled around your feet.”

“If my ancestors kept such a thing alive, they must have had their reasons,” Anne said.

While they were speaking, five of her Craftsmen stepped up and formed a hedge around her. She noticed that Sir Leafton also was approaching.

“What’s going on at the other end of the square?” Anne asked.

“You’d best find a safe place, Majesty,” Leafton said. “Someplace that is easily defensible. We are already attacked.”