The Briar King

1 In the Warhearth

William poured another goblet of his favorite Virgenyan wine and paced across the red marble floor of Warhearth Hall. He took a healthy swallow of the amethyst-colored vintage, then set the goblet down on the broad black table in the center of the room.

The paintings were looking at him again. Rebelliously, he returned their scrutiny.

They were everywhere; whole floor-to-ceiling panels of the wall were bracketed in gilded oak-leaf molding and painted in dense and murky colors, as if rendered with mud and soot and blood. In a sense they were, for each was a depiction of some part of the long history of his family’s wars.

“Would you rather look at those old pictures or me?” Alis Berrye inquired sulkily. She was draped upon an armchair, bodice unlaced so as to reveal her firm, rose-tipped breasts. She rolled off her stockings and threw one bare leg over the arm of the chair. It was a pretty leg, slender, white as milk. Her chestnut hair was mildly tousled, sapphire eyes languid, despite her vexed tone. She was nearly as full of wine as he, and totally unlike the paintings in character.

Well, not entirely true. She wasn’t murky, but she was a bit dense.

“I am sorry, my dear,” William murmured. “The mood is no longer on me.”

“I can put it on you, my lord, I assure you.”

“Yes,” he sighed. “I’m certain you could. But I do not wish it.”

“Do you tire of me, Your Majesty?” Alis asked, unable to hide a bit of panic in her voice.

He regarded her for a moment, taking the question seriously. She was an exuberant, enthusiastic lover, if one without the skills of an older woman. Her political designs were charmingly transparent and naïve. She got drunk well, and when her guard was down she was unselfconsciously sweet, and her mind went down tracks strange to his, which he enjoyed on the pillows.

She was a welcome change from Gramme, whose mind had turned almost obsessively to her bastards these last few years. They were provided for, of course, and he liked them, especially little Mery, but Gramme wanted them to have the Dare name and said so far too often. Alis was less ambitious, and perhaps didn’t even have the intelligence for such ambition.

That was fine. Two intelligent women in his life were more than enough.

“No, not at all,” he told her. “You are a delight to me.”

“Then shall we to bed? It’s something past midnight. I can soothe you to sleep, if you don’t desire loving.”

“You go to bed, lady,” he said gently. “I shall join you presently.”

“In your chambers, Majesty?”

William turned an irritated frown on her. “You know better than that. That is my marriage bed, and I share it only with my wife. Do not presume, Alis, merely because she is away.”

Her face fell as she realized her mistake. “I’m sorry, Sire. You’ll come to my chambers, then?”

“I said I would.”

She swayed to her feet and picked up the stockings, then came over, stood on tiptoe, and gave him a little kiss on the lips. Then she smiled, almost furtively, and cut her eyes down, and for a moment he felt himself stir, but he was too drunk and too sad, and he knew it.

“Good night, Sire,” she murmured.

“Good night, Alis.”

He didn’t watch her go, examining instead the largest painting in the room. It depicted Genya Dare, burning like a saint, leading a great army. Before her towered the vague but threatening shadow of the Skasloi fortress that had once stood on the very spot where Eslen castle now stood. Against that dark red citadel, giant formless shapes of black were barely discernible.

“What shall I do?” he murmured. “What is right?” He took his gaze round the other paintings—the battle of Minster-on-Sea, with its rolling thunderheads, the fight at the Ford of Woorm, the siege of Carwen. In each, a Dare stood at the head of an army, resolute and steadfast.

A hundred years ago, these same walls had depicted scenes of Reiksbaurg victory. They had been stripped and painted over.

It could happen again.

He shivered at the thought, and wondered if it wasn’t time to go see him. The thing in the dungeon, the thing his father had shown him, so long ago. He found that thought nearly as troubling as a Reiksbaurg victory, however, and dismissed it.

Instead, William moved back to the table and unscrolled a map, weighting its corners with brass counters made to resemble ram-headed vipers, coiled to strike.

“Still up? Still brooding?” a faintly mocking voice asked.

“Robert?” William swung around, nearly lost his balance, and cursed.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I can hardly drink at all, these days. It takes no more than a bottle to give me clumsy legs. Where the saints have you been this past nineday?”

Robert smiled thinly. “Saltmark, actually.”

“What? Without my leave? For what?”

“It were better not to have your leave for this,” Robert said darkly. “It was more of my—I think you would say inappropriate—dealings.” He put on a grim smile. “You did make me your prime minister, remember?”

“Had this to do with Lesbeth?”

Robert fingered his mustache. “In part.”

William paused for courage before he asked the next question. “Is she murdered?”

“No. She is alive. I was even allowed to see her.”

William took a deep draught of the wine. “Thank Saint Anne,” he muttered. “What sort of ransom do they want?”

“May I have some wine?” Robert asked mildly.

“Help yourself.”

Robert glanced at the carafe on the table and made a disgusted noise. “Do you have anything else? Something from a little farther south? I don’t see how you stomach that sour stuff.”

William waved at the cabinet. “There is a freshly decanted bottle of that red from Tero Gallé you’re so fond of.”

“Vin Crové?”

“That’s the one.”

He watched impatiently as Robert produced and poured some of the sanguine liquid and tasted it.

“Ah! That’s better. At least your vintners have good taste.”

“How you can be so calm, when our sister has been kidnapped?”

“Don’t ever doubt my concern for Lesbeth,” Robert said sharply.

“I’m sorry—I was wrong to remark so. But please, give me the news.”

“As I said, she is well, and I was allowed to see her. She sends her love.”

“From where? Where is she?”

“She is a captive of the duke of Austrobaurg.”

“How? In the name of the saints, how? She was last seen on her horse, riding east from the Sleeve. How did they abduct her from this island?”

“That, Austrobaurg would not tell me.”

“Her fiancé from Safnia arrived, you know. A day ago. He is beside himself.”

“Indeed?” Robert’s eyes gleamed strangely.

“Well, come. What does the duke want?”

“What do you suppose? He wants a ransom.”

“What ransom is that?”

“He wants a ransom of ships. Twenty, to be precise.”

“Twenty sailing ships? We cannot spare them, not if we go to war with Saltmark. Or Hansa, saints-me-to-bed.”

“Oh, he doesn’t want twenty of our ships. He wants twenty Sorrovian ships. Sunken. To the bottom of the sea.”

“What?” William thundered. He hurled the goblet against the wall and watched it shatter into a thousand purple-drenched shards. “He dares? By Saint Rooster’s balls, he dares?”

“He is an ambitious man, Sire. Twenty ships to his credit will take him far with the court at Hansa.”

“To his credit? My ships must appear to be from Saltmark? You mean he expects my ships, my crews, to sail under his flag?”

“That is his demand, Your Majesty,” Robert said. His voice took on an angry edge. “Else, as he put it, he will rut with our sister to his heart’s desire, then give her to his men with orders to ride her until her back is broken.”

“Saint Michael,” William swore, taking his seat. “What has the world come to? Is there no honor in it?”

“Honor?” Robert bittered a humorless laugh. “Listen, William—”

“You know I cannot do it.”

“You—” Robert actually lost his tongue, for a moment. “You pompous ass!” he finally got out. “This is Lesbeth!”

“And I am emperor. I cannot sell the honor of my throne for one sister, no matter how well I love her.”

“No,” Robert said, voice very low, finger pointing like a dagger. “No. William, I will sink those ships myself, do you hear me? With my bare hands, if need be. You should have sent Lesbeth off with the rest, but you heeded her whim and let her stay here to meet her Safnian prince. The same Safnian prince, I might add, who sold her to Austrobaurg.”

“What?” William stared at his brother, wondering if he had somehow misunderstood the words.

“I said Austrobaurg would not tell me how he kidnapped her. But I did discover it through my spies, one murder and torture I’m sure you don’t want to hear about. Austrobaurg has enemies, some very near him, though not near enough to open his throat, more’s the pity. Not yet. But I discovered what I wanted to know. Lesbeth’s Safnian prince has called in Hansa many times. He is well known there, and he is in their pay. He sent a letter, telling Lesbeth to meet him on the Cape of Rovy, that his ship was damaged and he’d made camp there. She went to him, only to find a Hanzish corvette.”

“Prince Cheiso did this? You have proof ?”

“I have the proof of my ears. I trust my sources. Oh, and there is this.”

He pulled something from the pouch at his belt and tossed it to William, who caught it. It was a slim metal box, with a catch fastening it.

“What is this?”

Robert made a peculiar sound, and William was stricken to see tears start in his brother’s eyes.

“It’s her finger, damn you.” He spread his right hand and wiggled the index finger. “This one, with the twin of this ring. We put them on when we were eight, and have not, either of us, been able to remove them since we were fifteen.”

William opened the catch. Inside, indeed, was a slim finger, nearly black. On it was a gold band with a scroll of oak leaves about it.

“Ah, saints of mercy!” He snapped the box shut with shaking hands. Who could do this to Lesbeth? Lesbeth the ever smiling, the best, the most compassionate of them all?

“Robert, I did not know. I—” He fought back tears.

“Do not console me, Wilm. Get her back. Or I will.”

William found another goblet. He needed more wine for this, to pacify the blood thundering in his ears, the blind rage he felt building again.

“How, Robert?” he snapped. “If we do this thing, it could cost us every alliance. Even Liery might break with us. It’s impossible.”

“No,” Robert said, his voice still quavering. “It isn’t. We have already sent ships in secret to the Saurga Sea, haven’t we?”

“It’s not much of a secret.”

“But the ships have not been counted or accounted for. Only the two of us know how many have been sent. Crews can be found; I know where to find them. Crews that will ask no questions and tell no stories, if they are paid well enough.”

William stared at Robert for a long moment. “Is this true?”

“It is. Austrobaurg will get all the credit, as he desires— and he will get all of the blame. The sea lords of Liery will be none the wiser of our part and will remain our friends. I will oversee this personally, William. You know my love for Les-beth; I would risk nothing, here, that might mean her life. But I would never risk our kingdom, either.”

William drank more wine. Soon it would be too much; already the world was flat, like the paintings on the wall. This was a poor time for judgment. Or perhaps, in such matters, the best.

“Do it,” he whispered. “Only do not give me details.”

“It is done,” Robert replied.

“And Prince Cheiso. Have him arrested and put in Spinster Tower. Him I’ll deal with in the morning.”

2 The Prince of Shade

The air above the ochre brick of the Piato da Fiussa shimmered like the top of a stove. It was so hot that even the pigeons and grackles—which normally covered the square, scavenging for bits of bread or cheese—would not light upon it for fear of roasting themselves.

Cazio, similarly concerned, exerted himself just enough to scoot an armspan, following the shadow of the marble fountain his back rested against as he gazed laconically around the square. There he found few people with any more ambition of mobility. Earlier, the little market town of Avella had been a bustling place. Now, with the sun at noon, people had more sense.

Buildings of the same yellow brick up to three stories high walled the piato, but only on the south side did they cast a meager shadow. In that welcome umbra, the shopowners, bricklayers, vendors, street officers, and children of Avella, sat, lay, or otherwise lolled, sipping the brash young wines of the Tero Mefio, nibbling cellar-cooled figs, or dabbing their brows with wet rags.

Smaller gatherings under awnings, next to stairways— wherever the sun was thwarted—made plain why the hours between noon and three bells were named z’onfros caros— the treasured shadows. And, in a city where noon shadows had value—indeed, were sometimes bought and sold—the shade of Fiussa’s fountain was one of the dearest.

That was where Cazio rested, with the nude, flower-adorned goddess watching over him. The three nymphs at her feet disgorged tall plumes of water, so that a gentle damp mist settled on his darkly handsome face and broad shoulders. The marble basin was cool, and no matter which hour of the sessa it might be, there was ample shade—for perhaps four people.

Cazio lazily examined the upper-floor windows across the piato. This time of day the rust or sienna framed windows were all thrown open, and sometimes pretty girls could be seen, leaning on the casements to catch a breeze.

His laconic search was rewarded.

“Look there,” he said to his friend Alo, who reclined nearby. “It’s Braza daca Feiossa.” He nodded his head toward a dark-haired beauty looking out over the square. She wore only a cotton undershift, which left much of her neck and shoulders bare.

“I see her,” Alo said.

“She’s trying to catch my attention,” Cazio said.

“Of course she is. The sun came up just for you today, too, I’m sure.”

“I wish he hadn’t bothered,” Cazio murmured, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead and pushing back his thick mop of black hair. “What was I thinking, getting up so early?”

Alo started at that. “Early? You’ve just now risen!” A sallow-faced boy with caramel-colored hair, at sixteen Alo was a year younger than Cazio.

“Yes, and see, it’s too hot to work. Everyone agrees.”

“Work? What would you know of work?” Alo grunted. “They’ve been working all morning. I’ve been up since dawn, unloading bushels of grain.”

Cazio regarded Alo and shook his head sadly. “Unloading grain—that isn’t work. It’s labor.”

“There’s a difference?”

Cazio patted the gleaming pommel of his sword. “Of course. A gentleman may work. He may do deeds. He may not labor.”

“A gentleman may starve, then,” Alo replied. “Since I labored for the food in this basket I doubt that you want any.”

Cazio considered the hard ewe’s cheese, the flat brown round of bread, the stoneware carafe of wine. “On the contrary,” he told Alo. “A gentleman has no objection to living off the labor of others. It’s the nature of the arrangement between master and servant.”

“Yes, but I’m not your servant,” Alo observed. “And if I were, I don’t see what I would get out of the arrangement.”

“Why, the honor of serving a gentleman. And the privilege of resting here, in my palace of shade. And the protection of my sword.”

“I have my own blade.”

Cazio eyed his friend’s rusty weapon. “Of course you do,” he said, with as much condescension as he could put in his voice.

“I do.”

“And much good may it do you,” Cazio replied. “And see, look, you may soon have a chance to use it.”

Alo turned to follow his gaze. Two men had just ridden into the square from the Vio aza Vera. One was trimmed out in red velvet doublet, black hose, and broad-brimmed hat jaunted with a plume. His beard was neatly trimmed and his mustache delicately curled. His companion was attired more modestly in a plain brown suit. They were headed directly for the well.

Cazio put his head back and closed his eyes, listening to the sound of hooves approaching. When they were quite near, he heard a squeak of leather and then boots scuffing on brick as the two dismounted.

“You don’t mind if I get a drink from the fountain, do you?” an amused voice asked.

“Not at all, casnar,” Cazio replied. “The fountain is a public work, and its water free to all.”

“Very true. Tefio, fetch me a drink.”

“Yes, master,” the fellow’s lackey said.

“That looks a comfortable spot you’re sitting in,” the man said, after a moment. “I think I shall have that, too.”

“Well, now there you are mistaken, casnar,” Cazio said, in an amiable tone, his eyes still closed. “The shade, you see, is not a public work, but is cast by the goddess Fiussa, as you can see. And she—as you can also see—favors me.”

“I see only a pair of boys who do not know their station.”

Alo made to move, but Cazio restrained him with a hand on his arm. “I know only what I have been taught, casnar,” he answered softly.

“Are you begging me for a lesson?”

Cazio sat up a little straighter. “Beg, did you say? I don’t know the meaning of that word. Since you seem so well acquainted with it, am I to understand that you are offering me instruction in grammar?”

“Ah,” the fellow said. “I understand now. You are the village fool.”

Cazio laughed. “I am not, but if I were, my position would have changed the moment you rode through the gate.”

“That is quite enough of that,” the man said. “Relinquish your spot or my lackey will beat you.”

“Set him on me and you shall be lackless. And do I understand you now, casnar? Do you feel unqualified to instruct me? Please, tell me more of this ‘begging’ of which you speak.”

“You mark yourself when you speak so and wear a sword,” the man said, his voice suddenly low and dangerous.

“Mark myself ? What, with this?” Cazio asked, pointing to his weapon. “This is for marking, yes. It’s a right good pen, if I dip it in the proper inkwell—but I’ve never marked myself with it. Or do you mean you see the marks of dessrata on me, and wish to trade in proficiencies? What a wonderful idea. You will teach me about begging, and I will teach you about swordplay.”

“I will teach you to beg, yes. By Mamres, I will.”

“Very good,” Cazio replied, slowly levering himself to his feet. “But how is this: Let us make an agreement that whoever learns the best lesson shall pay the going rate for it. Now, I’ve no idea what they charge for lessons in begging, but at Mestro Estenio’s school of fencing, I hear the rate is a gold regatur.”

The man looked over Cazio’s faded leather jerkin and threadbare velvet breeches. “You don’t have a regatur to your name,” he sneered.

Cazio sighed, reached under the collar of his white shirt, and drew forth a medallion. It was gold, with a rampant boar embossed on it. It was nearly all that remained of his father’s fortune, and worth at least three regaturs.

The man shrugged his shoulders. “Who shall hold our money?” the man asked.

Cazio pulled off the medallion and tossed it to the man. “You seem an honest sort,” he said. “Or at least you will be, as a corpse, for all the dead are stiffly honest. They lie, but they cannot lie, if you understand me.” He drew his sword. “Meet Caspator,” he said. “Between us, we are happy to teach you the art of dessrata.”

The man drew his own weapon. Like Caspator, it was a rapier, with a light, narrow blade and half-basket hilt. “I do not bother to name my swords,” he said. “My own name is Minato Sepios daz’Afinio, and that is quite enough.”

“Yes, what need have you of a sword, with a name like that? Repeat it often enough—say, twice—and your opponent will fall straight to sleep.”

“To guard, you,” daz’Afinio said, taking a stance.

Cazio frowned and waggled a reproving finger. “No, no. Lesson one: stance is everything. See? Yours is too narrow, and too forward facing, unless you plan to use an off-hand bodkin. Point your front toe like so—”

Daz’Afinio roared and lunged.

Cazio danced to the side. “Ah,” he said. “The lunge. The lunge is properly executed thus.” He feinted with his shoulders, hopped to his left, and when daz’Afinio jerked his blade up to parry the nonexistent attack, flicked his blade out and kicked his front foot forward. The tip of Caspator pricked lightly into daz’Afinio’s arm, not deeply enough to bring blood.

“You see? You prepare the ground with some other movement, then—”

Daz’Afinio just set his mouth grimly and came forward with a flurry of hard blows, shallow thrusts, and poor attempts to bind. Cazio laughed delightedly, parrying each or sidestepping, dancing clockwise around his opponent. Suddenly daz’Afinio lunged deep, his point aimed straight at Cazio’s heart. Cazio ducked, so the steel went right over his head, extending his own blade as he did so. Daz’Afinio, still moving forward with the momentum of his attack, impaled his shoulder on Cazio’s point—again, not deeply, but this time the tip of Caspator had a bit of red on it that wasn’t velvet.

“The pertumum perum praisef,” Cazio informed his foe.

Daz’Afinio threw a draw cut to Cazio’s hand. Cazio caught the blade with his own, captured the fellow’s weapon with a quick rotation, and then drove through. Daz’Afinio had to scramble backwards quickly to avoid another cut.

“The aflukam en truz.”

Daz’Afinio beat his blade and lunged again.

Cazio parried, paused, and skewered him through the thigh.

“Parry prismo,” Cazio said, “com postro en utave. A difficult riposte, but it pleases.”

He watched as daz’Afinio dropped his weapon and crumpled to his knees, clutching his freely bleeding leg.

Cazio took a moment to bow toward the applause from the shaded spectators around the piato, noticing with interest that one of them was Braza daca Feiossa. He winked at her and blew her a kiss, then turned back to his fallen opponent.

“I believe, sir,” he said, “that my lesson is concluded. Would you care to teach yours now? The one about begging?”

The door shuddered, uttered a rusty protest, and sagged on its hinges as Cazio tugged it open. Something—a rat, most likely—scurried along the cracked pavement in the darkened portico beyond.

Ignoring both, Cazio strode through the covered way to the inner courtyard of his villa.

Like the rest of the place, it was a mess. The garden had gone to weeds, and grapevines crept out of control on casement and wall. The copper basin and sundial that had once marked the center of the yard was lying on its side, as it had been for two years. The only orderly element of the house, in fact, was the small area set aside for the practice of dessrata— a cleared place on the flagstones, with a small ball dangling from a string, a battered practice mannequin with the various humors and crucial points of the body marked in faded ink. Near that, stretched out on a marble bench, a man snored fitfully.

He was perhaps fifty, his face covered in coarse black and gray stubble, save for a long white scar that marred one cheek. His long hair was an unruly mess. He wore a tattered brown jerkin stained copiously with red wine, and no pants at all. An empty carafe of wine lay near his half-opened hand, which rested on the floor.

“Z’Acatto.”

The man snuffled.

“Z’Acatto!”

“Go, or I kill you,” the man snarled, without opening his eyes.

“I have food.”

He cracked his lids, then. The eyes within were red and watery. Cazio passed him a hempen bag. “There is cheese, and bread, and cloved sausage.”

“And what to wash it down with, then?” z’Acatto asked, a murky spark appearing in his gaze.

“Here.” Cazio handed him a ceramic carafe.

Z’Acatto immediately took a deep drink. An instant later he spat, howled like a damned soul, and hurled the container against the wall, where it burst into a hundred pieces.

“Poison!” he shrieked.

“Water,” Cazio corrected. “That substance that falls from the sky. The grass finds it most nourishing.”

“Water is what they drink in hell,” z’Acatto groaned.

“Well, then you should begin building up a tolerance now, for there is no doubt that you will be the guest of Lord Ontro and Lady Mefita in the next life. Besides, I had no coin for wine.”

“Ungrateful wretch! You think only of filling your own belly.”

“And yours,” Cazio corrected. “Eat.”

“Bah,” he groaned, levering himself slowly into a sitting position. “I—” His nose suddenly twitched, and suspicion knotted his forehead. “Step closer!”

“I don’t think I will,” Cazio told him. “Water can also be used on the outside of the body, you know,” he added.

But z’Acatto stood and advanced on him. “I smell wine on your breath,” he accused. “Last year’s vino dac’arva, from Troscia.”

“Nonsense,” Cazio replied. “It was from Escarra.”

“Hah! It’s the same grape!” z’Acatto shouted, waving his arms like a madman. “The blight destroyed the Escarran vines ten years ago, and they had to beg their cuttings from Troscia.”

“Interesting. I’ll try to remember that. In any event, the wine was not mine; it was Alo’s, and it is gone, now. Eat something.”

“Eat.” He frowned again. “Why not?” He returned to his bench, fumbled in the bag until he brought out the bread. He tore a hunk and began chewing it. Speaking through the paste thus formed, he asked, “How many fights did you get into today?”

“Duels, I take you to mean? Only one, that being the problem. It was too hot, I think, and there weren’t enough strangers. So not enough coin.”

“You do not duel,” z’Acatto grumbled. “You brawl. It is a foolish waste of the art I teach you. A prostitution.”

“Is it?” Cazio said. “And tell me, how should we live, if not like this? You scorn the food I bring, and yet it’s the only food you are likely to see. And where does your wine come from, when you get it? You buy it with the coin you filch from me!”

“Your father never stooped so low.”

“My father had estates, you fool. He had vineyards and orchards and fields of cattle, and he saw fit to get himself killed in one of your duels of honor, and thus pass his property to his killer instead of to me. Besides his title, the only thing my father left me was you—”

“And this house.”

“Yes, and look at it.”

“You could make income from it,” z’Acatto replied. “It could be rented—”

“It is my house!” Cazio shouted. “I will live here. And I will make my money as I please.”

Z’Acatto wagged a finger at him. “You will get killed, too.”

“Who here can best me at swordplay? No one. No one has even come near in nigh on two years. There is no danger in this, no gambling. It is pure science.”

“I am still your better,” z’Acatto replied. “And though I am perhaps the greatest master of dessrata in the world, there are those who approach me in skill. One day, you will meet one of them.”

Cazio looked unblinkingly at the old man. “Then it is your duty to make certain I am ready when they arrive. Or you will have failed me as you failed my father.”

The old man’s head dropped then, and his face pinched ever more sullen. “Your brothers have put it behind them,” he said.

“I suppose they have. They would let our good name blow away in the sea wind to which they’ve fled. Not me, not Cazio. I am a da Chiovattio, by Diuvo!”

“I do not know the face of the man who killed your father,” z’Acatto said softly.

“I care little about that. My father dueled the wrong man, for the wrong reasons. I will not make that mistake, and I will not mourn him. But neither will I pretend to come from common birth. I was born to fight and to win, to reclaim what my father lost. And I will.”

Z’Acatto grabbed him by the sleeve. “You think you are wise. You think you know something of the world. Boy, Avella is not the world, and you know nothing. You would rebuild your father’s estates? Start with this house. Start with what you have.”

Cazio brushed the hand from his sleeve. “I have nothing,” he said, rising.

Z’Acatto did not reply as Cazio went back outside.

Once back on the street, Cazio felt a pang of regret. Z’Acatto wasn’t much, but he had raised Cazio from the age of five. They had had their share of good times.

Just not lately.

Avella at night was darker than a cave, but Cazio knew his way around it well. He found the north wall as easily as a blind man feeling about his own house, and after ascending the stairs stood in the night wind looking out over the moonlit vineyards and olive groves, the gently rolling hills of the Tero Mefio, the heartland of Vitellio. He stood thus for more than a bell, trying to clear his head.

I’ll apologize to him, he thought to himself. After all, there are secrets of the dessrata he still holds to himself.

Returning to his house, Cazio felt an odd prickling at the back of his neck, and his hand strayed to Caspator.

“Who’s there?” he asked.

All around him he heard the soft kissing of leather on brick. Four, maybe five of them.

“Cowards,” he said, more softly. “Lord Mamres spit on you all.” Caspator made no sound as he slid from his sheath. Cazio waited for the first rush.

3 Flight and Fancy

Anne pushed open the wooden shutters, wincing as they squeaked faintly. Outside, the night air was warm and strong with the scent of woodfire and the stink of horse manure. The moon wore her scantiest gown and fretted the slate rooftops of the hamlet with dull pearl light.

Anne couldn’t see the ground—the street below was sooted with shadow—but she knew from earlier that it was only a single story down, that just beneath her window a narrow eave jutted, and under that was the front door of the small inn. She had jumped from higher places, in her life.

Twenty long days had come and gone since they left Eslen—Austra, five Craftsmen, and she. Anne didn’t know where they were or how far they had to go, but she knew her best chance to escape when she saw it. She had been able to lay aside enough hard cheese and bread to last for a few days. If she could but find a bow and a knife, she was certain she could live off the land.

If only she had better clothes for riding—but she could find those, too. Saint Erenda would surely smile on her and bring her fortune.

Anne cast a glance in the direction of Austra’s regular breathing, and repressed a pang of regret. But she couldn’t tell her best friend what she planned; it would be better for Austra if she knew nothing of this, if she was just as surprised in the morning as Captain Marl and the rest of her escort.

Taking a deep breath, Anne sat up on the windowsill and felt for the eave below with her stocking feet. She found it—farther down than she had hoped, and more sloping than she remembered it. Fear of falling held her for a moment, but then she eased her weight on down.

And promptly slipped. Her hands scrabbled wildly as she slid forward. At the last moment she caught something—and held it, breath coming in gasps, her feet dangling over the unseen ground.

By its feel, she had grabbed the wooden gamecock that peered from over the doorway of the inn.

Nearby, harsh laughter suddenly cut through the darkness. At first she thought someone had seen her, then two men started talking in some language she didn’t understand. Their voices passed under her as she held her breath, and continued on.

Her arms began shaking with the effort of holding herself up. She had to either drop or climb back up to her window.

She looked down, though she couldn’t see even her feet, and after another quick prayer, she let go. Air seemed to rush by for much longer than it ought to, then she found the ground. Her knees buckled, and she fell face first. One of her hands went into a pile of something that gushed, and she recognized the smell of a fresh horsecake.

Trembling, but with a growing feeling of triumph, she came to her feet, shaking the wet dung from her hand.

“Anne!” A desperate voice from above, cracking with the attempt to whisper as loudly as possible.

“Hush, Austra!” Anne hissed back.

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know. Go back to sleep.”

“Anne! You’ll get killed. You don’t even know where we are!”

“I don’t care! I’m not going to any coven! Farewell, Austra— I love you.”

“This will be the end of me!” Austra gasped. “If I let you go—”

“I slipped off while you were asleep. They can’t blame you for that.”

Austra didn’t answer, but Anne heard a scrabbling from above.

“What are you doing?”

“Coming with you, of course. I’m not going to let you die alone.”

“Austra, no!”

But it was too late. Austra gave the briefest of shrieks. Her passing made a slight breeze before she hit the ground with a pronounced thud.

“Her arm is badly bruised, but not broken,” Captain Marl told her, very matter-of-factly. He was that sort of man, taciturn and plainspoken. His manner went well with his pitted, homely face.

“I want to see her,” Anne demanded.

“Not just yet, Princess. There is the matter of what you two were doing.”

“We were being silly. Wrestling near the window, and lost our balance.”

“And how is it you aren’t even bruised, when she was hurt?”

“I was lucky. But I did soil my gown, as you can see.”

“There’s that, too. Why were you fully dressed?”

“I wasn’t. I didn’t have my shoes on.”

“Your maid was in a nightgown—as you should have been.”

“Captain, who are you to presume how a princess of Crotheny ought to be dressed? You treat me as if I’m a captive of war!”

“I treat you as what you are, Princess—my charge. I know my duty, and I take it seriously. Your father trusts me. He has reason to.” He sighed and folded his hands behind his back. “I dislike this. Young women should have their privacy, away from the company of men. I thought I could afford to give you that. Now I see I was foolish.”

“You aren’t suggesting that I share my room with one of your men?”

“No, Princess. None of my men will do.” His face pinkened. “But when I cannot find lodging that precludes escape, I must stand watch in your room myself.”

“My mother will have your head!” Anne shouted.

“If that’s so, that’s so,” Marl replied obligingly.

She had learned not to argue with him when he adopted that tone. He had made up his mind and really would take a beheading before changing it.

“May I see Austra, now?” she asked, instead.

“Yes, Princess.”

Austra’s face was white, and her arm bound in a sling. She lay on her back and wouldn’t meet Anne’s gaze when she entered.

“I’m sorry,” Austra said, voice curiously flat.

“You ought to be,” Anne replied. “You should have done what I told you. Now Marl will never let me out of his sight.”

“I said I was sorry.” Tears were streaming down Austra’s face, but she made none of the sounds of crying.

Anne sighed and gripped her friend’s hand. “Never mind,” she said. “How’s your arm?”

Austra set her mouth stubbornly and didn’t reply.

“It’s all right,” Anne said, more softly. “I’ll find another chance.”

Austra turned to her then, red eyes glaring and angry. “How could you?” she said. “After all the times I’ve watched out for you, lied for you, helped you play your stupid games. Your mother could have sent me to work with the scouring maids! Saints, she could have had me beheaded, but I always did what you said anyway! And for what? So you could leave me without a second thought?”

For a moment, Anne was so shocked she couldn’t say anything.

“I would have sent for you,” she finally managed. “When I was safe, and—”

“Sent for me? Do you have any idea what you’re planning?”

“To run away. Seek my love and destiny.”

“The destiny of a woman, alone, in a strange country where you don’t even speak the language? What did you think you would do for food?”

“Live off the land.”

“Anne, someone owns the land. People are hanged for poaching, do you know that? Or rot in prison, or serve as slaves until their debt is done. That’s what happens to them who ‘live off the land’ in your father’s kingdom.”

“No one would hang me,” Anne replied. “Not once they knew who I was.”

“Oh, yes. So once caught, you would explain that you are a very important princess, and then they would—what? Let you go? Give you a small estate? Or call you a liar and hang you. Of course, since you’re a woman, and pretty, they wouldn’t hang you right at first. They’d have their pleasure from you.

“Or suppose you could somehow convince them of who you are. In the best case they would send you home, and this would all start again—except for me, for I’ll be carrying charcoal on my back up from the barges, or something worse. Worst case, they would hold you for ransom, maybe send your fingers to your father one at a time, to prove they really have you.”

“I plan to dress as a man,” Anne said. “And I won’t get caught.”

Austra rolled her eyes. “Oh, dress as a man. That will work.”

“It’s better than going into a coven.”

Austra’s eyes hardened further. “That’s stupid. And it’s selfish.” She balled her unbound fist and banged it against the bedpost. “I was stupid—to ever think you were my friend. To think you gave a single piss about me!”

“Austra!”

“Leave me alone.”

Anne started to say something else, but Austra’s eyes went wild. “Leave me alone!”

Anne stood up. “We’ll talk later.”

“Away!” Austra shrieked, dissolving into tears.

On the verge of bawling herself, Anne left.

Anne watched Austra’s face, limned against a landscape of rolling pasture broken by copses of straight-standing cedar and elegant cottonwood. Her head eclipsed a distant hill where a small castle lorded over a scattering of red-roofed cottages. A herd of horses stared curiously at the carriage as it rattled by.

“Won’t you talk to me yet?” Anne pleaded. “It’s been three days.”

Austra frowned and continued to look out the window.

“Fine,” Anne snapped. “I’ve apologized to you until my tongue is green. I don’t know what else you want me to do.”

Austra murmured something, but it went out the window like a bird.

“What was that?”

“I said you could promise,” Austra said, still not looking at her. “Promise not to try to run away again.”

“I can’t escape. Captain Marl is much too watchful, now.”

“When we get to the coven, there will be no Captain Marl,” Austra said slowly, as if speaking to a child. “I want you to promise not to try to escape from there.”

“You don’t understand, Austra.”

Silence.

Anne opened her mouth to say something else, but it fell short of her teeth. Instead she closed her eyes, let her body fall into the restless shuddering of the coach, and tried to pretend she was far away.

She put on dreams like clothes. She tried on Roderick, to start with, the memory of that first, sweet kiss on horseback, their steadily more intimate trysts. In the end, however, that brought her only to that night in the tomb and the humiliation that followed. Her whole memory of that night was tainted, but she wanted to remember, to feel again those last exciting, frightening caresses.

She changed the scene, pretending that she and Roderick had met instead in her chambers at Eslen, but that went no better. When she tried to imagine what his chambers in Dunmrogh were like, she failed utterly.

At last, with a burst of inspiration that stretched a little smile on her face, she imagined the small castle on the hill she had seen a few moments before. She stood at its gates, in a green gown, and Roderick rode across the fields, brightly caparisoned. When he came near her he dismounted, bowed low, and kissed her hand. Then, with a fire in his eyes, pulled her close against the steel he wore and kissed her on the mouth.

Inside, the castle was light and airy, draped in silken tapestries and brilliant with sunlight through tens of crystal windows. Roderick entered again, clad in a handsome doublet, and now, finally she could conjure the feeling of his hand on her flesh, and imagine more, that he went farther, that they were both, finally, unclad. She multiplied the remembrance of the touch of his palm on her thigh, imagining the whole length of him against her. There was just one part she couldn’t picture, exactly, though she had felt it against her, through his breeches. But she had never seen the privates of a man, though she had seen stallions aplenty. They must be shaped the same, at least.

But the image that conjured was so ridiculous she felt suddenly uncertain, and so she adjusted her imagination again, to his eyes staring into hers.

Something didn’t fit there, either, and in swift horror, she understood what it was.

She couldn’t remember Roderick’s face!

She could still have described it, but she could not see it, in the shadows of her mind. Determined, she shifted scenes again, to their first meeting, to their last—

But it was no good. It was like trying to catch a fish with her hands.

She opened her eyes and found Austra asleep. Frustrated, Anne watched the scenery go by and now tried to imagine what sort of people lived out there, in that country so unknown to her.

But in the vain search for Roderick’s face, she had somehow awoken something else and found a different face.

The masked woman with amber hair. For almost two months, Anne had pushed that phantasm away, encrypted it as she had the dream of the black roses. Now both came back, joined, nagging for her attention, despite Praifec Hespero’s assurances. Having endured three days of silence and Aus-tra’s sulking, and with nothing else to distract her, thoughts of that day on Tom Woth nagged at Anne like an itch, and the only scratch for it was thinking.

What had happened? Had she fainted, as the praifec believed? That seemed most likely, and it was what she most often told herself. And yet, in the middle of her heart, she knew somehow it wasn’t the truth.

Something real had happened to her; she had seen a saint, or a demon, and it had spoken to her.

She could almost feel the voice in her head, a sort of remonstration, a scolding. How could she be thinking of herself and Roderick when so much was happening? Her mother and father were in danger, maybe the whole kingdom, and only she knew it. Yet despite that, she had done nothing, told no one, pursued this hopeless, selfish love. The praifec’s word had only given her the excuse.

“No,” Anne said, under her breath. “That isn’t me talking. That’s Fastia. That’s Mother.”

But it was neither, and she knew it. It was Genya Dare, her voice whispering across the leagues from that crack in her tomb. Genya Dare, the first queen, her most ancient ancestress.

Would Genya Dare have ignored her responsibilities for the selfish pleasure of youth?

Anne gave a start. That hadn’t been her own thought; that had been a voice, spoken into her ear. Not a whisper, either, but a confident tone. A woman’s voice.

The voice of the masked woman, she was nearly certain.

Anne tossed her head back and forth, searching for the speaker, but there was only Austra, sleeping.

Anne settled back in her seat, breathing hard.

“Are you there?” she whispered. “Who speaks?”

But the voice didn’t return, and Anne began to wonder if she had dropped into sleep for a moment, long enough for the Black Mary to whisper in her ear.

“You are not Genya Dare,” she murmured. “You are not.”

She was going crazy, talking to herself. That was certainly it. She had read of such things, of prisoners in towers who spoke at length to no one, whose minds were shaved of reason.

She shook Austra’s knee. “Austra. Wake up.”

“Hmm?” Austra opened her eyes. “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

“I promise, Austra.”

“What?”

“I promise. I won’t try to run away.”

“Truly?”

“Yes. I have to …” She frowned, embarrassed. “Everyone is trying to tell me the same thing. Mother, Fastia, you. I’ve been selfish. But I think—I’m needed for something.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know. Nothing probably. But I’m going to do my best. To do what I’m supposed to.”

“Does that mean you’re giving up Roderick?”

“No. Some things are meant to be, and the two of us are fated to be together. I asked Genya to make him fall in love with me, remember? This is my fault, and I can’t just abandon his love.”

“You asked Genya to make Fastia nicer, too,” Austra reminded her.

“But she was,” Anne replied, remembering their last two meetings. “She was. She was almost like the Fastia I loved, when I was a girl. She and Mother did this thing to me—but they think what they are doing is for the best. Lesbeth explained it, but I didn’t want to listen, at the time.”

“What convinced you?”

“A dream, I think. Or a memory. Mostly you. If even my dearest friend thinks I’m a selfish brat, how can I not wonder?”

“Now you’re starting to worry me. Did you bump your head, going out the window?”

“Don’t make fun of me,” Anne said. “You wanted me to be better. I’m trying.”

Austra nodded gravely. “I’m sorry. You’re right.”

“I was lonely, without you to talk to.”

Austra’s eyes watered up. “I was lonely, too, Anne. And I’m afraid. Of where we’re going, of what it will be like.”

“We’re in this together, then, from now on. Yes?”

“By Genya?”

“By her grave. If I had lead to write it on, I would. I swear I will make no attempt to escape from whatever awful place my mother has sent us. And I will be your companion in this, and no matter what, I will never, ever leave you.”

Finally, fitfully, Austra smiled. “Thank you,” she said. She reached across the space, and they briefly squeezed hands.

“Where do you suppose we are, anyway?”Anne remarked, to change the course of the conversation. “I gather we’ve been traveling south.”

Austra dimpled a little.

“I know that look!” Anne said. “You know something.”

“I’ve been keeping directions,” Austra said. “The names of towns, rivers, and all. So we might find our route, if ever we see a map.”

Anne gaped in astonishment. “Austra! Clever girl. Why didn’t I think of that? I’m so stupid!”

“No,” Austra said. “You’ve just never been out in the world. You probably figured if you ran away the road would just take you where you wanted to go, like in the phay stories. But in the real world, you have to have directions.”

“Your journal, then! May I see it?”

Austra reached into her purse and withdrew a small book.

“I didn’t get every town,” she said. “Only when I heard one of the guards mention it, or sometimes I would see a sign. The writing looks almost the same here, though with some odd flourishes. Here, I’ll read it to you; you could have trouble with my scribbling, and I can sum up for you.”

“Go on,” Anne replied.

“We first crossed over the Warlock on the raised road. The sun set on our right, so we were going south. Then we went up into some hills, still south.”

“We were in Hornladh, then!” Anne said. “Roderick is from Hornladh! I found it on the map, after meeting him.”

“In the hills we stayed in a place called Carec, a very small town. The next few nights I didn’t catch any names, but we went through a forest I think was named Duv Caldh, or something like that. At the edge of it we stayed in a little place named Prentreff.”

“Oh, yes. The inn with the dreadful lute player.”

“Exactly. From there, I think we went still south but more west, but then the next day it rained, so I couldn’t tell. Then we spent two nights in Paldh.”

“I remember Paldh from the map! It’s a port, so we were on the sea! I thought I smelled the sea that night.”

“After that we crossed a river. I think it was called the Teremené, and so was the town there. That’s when we started seeing more fields than woods, and the houses with red or pale roofs. And vineyards—remember those endless vineyards? Then we slept in a little town named Pacre, then Alfohes, Avalé, and Vio Toto. Most of that time, I think we were going south and west. We crossed another river; I don’t know its name, but the town on the other side was Chesladia. I missed some towns, after that, but the place where you tried to run away was named Trivo Rufo. Since then I haven’t written anything. I was too angry.”

“It’s enough!” Anne said. “But I don’t understand. If you didn’t want me to run away, why do this? Why map me a way home?”

“I wasn’t going to tell you about it until you promised not to run away. But I thought—it’s always better to know where you are. Suppose something awful happens? Suppose we’re attacked by bandits, our escort is killed, and we have to run? It’s better to know.” She shook a finger at Anne. “But a promise is still a promise, yes?”

“Of course,” Anne replied. “But you’re right. From now on, I’ll keep a journal, too.”

“What country do you think we’re in, now?” Austra asked.

“I have no idea. I never paid attention in the tutorials, and I looked at the map only to find where Roderick was from. Perhaps we’re in Safnia, where Lesbeth’s fiancé lives.”

“Perhaps,” Austra said. “But I don’t think so. I think it’s Vitellio.”

“Vitellio!” Anne peered out the window again. The road arrowed through a vast field of some sort of grain. It had cut steep banks, and the soil was a vivid white.

“I thought Vitellio was all yellow and red, and covered up with great cities and fanes! And the people are supposed to dress all in silk of fantastic colors, and quarrel most constantly.”

“I could be wrong,” Austra allowed.

“Wherever it is, the countryside is quite beautiful,” Anne remarked. “I would love to run Faster through those fields. I wonder how far we have to go?”

“Who can say?” Austra replied. “This coven must be on the very edge of the earth.”

“Maybe this will be an adventure after all!” Anne said, feeling her spirits rise.

But she did have one quick, guilty thought.

Roderick would walk off the end of the earth to find me, Anne told herself. And if I can send him one letter, he’ll know where that is.

She tried to brush that away, stay firm to her new convictions, and a few moments later, as the girls chattered about what Vitellio might be like, she almost forgot that it had even occurred to her.

And eight days later, by the tattered light of sunset, in a countryside empty of houses but replete with gently swaying trees and pasture, she and Austra stepped from the carriage for the last time.

4 The Faneway

Brother Ehan stood arms akimbo, a worried expression on his face, watching Stephen prepare.

“Look out for Brother Desmond and his bunch,” the little man said. “They’re none too happy with you taking the walk this soon.”

“I know.” Stephen shrugged. “What can I do? If they follow me, they follow me. If they catch me alone in the woods, there won’t be much I can do, whether I see them coming or not.”

“You could run.”

“They would just wait for me at the next fane. I still wouldn’t be able to finish the walk.”

“But you would be alive.”

“That’s true,” Stephen allowed.

“You don’t sound as happy about that as you might.”

“Something’s troubling him,” Brother Alprin said. He’d just walked in from the vineyards, still wearing a broad-brimmed hat to protect him from the sun. “And it isn’t Brother Desmond.”

“Homesick?” Ehan said, a little tauntingly.

“No,” Stephen replied. Except that he was. Homesick not for a place, but for a world that still made sense.

“What is it, then?” Ehan persisted. But Stephen remained silent.

“He’ll tell us when he’s ready,” Alprin said. “Won’t you, Brother? In any event, don’t worry about Brother Desmond. The fratrex sent him off yesterday.”

“Off ?” Stephen said. “You mean away?”

“No such luck. Just off to do some sort of church business.”

Stephen had a sudden memory of Brother Desmond that night on the hillside, when he had gone quiet and strange.

“After supplies or something?”

“Hah,” Brother Ehan grunted. “No. He sends ’em to take care of things. Brother Desmond walked the fanes of Saint Mamres. He’s one promotion short of being a knight of the church. Why do you think he’s so strong and fast? That’s the blessing of Mamres. A few ninedays before you got here, some bandits were raiding the temple at Baymdal, in the Midenlands. The fratrex sent Brother Desmond and his cohort.”

“Desmond put a stop to the bandits, all right. A very decisive stop, as I hear it.”

Ehan’s brow pinched up. “This might be worse. What if they hung around, out in the woods for a day? If you’re found with a broken neck, they’ll have an alibi.”

“Wait,” Stephen said. “I didn’t think a fratrex had that authority. He can dispose men only for the defense of his monastery. An order to send them someplace has to come from a praifec.”

“A messenger from Praifec Hespero in Eslen came yesterday,” Brother Alprin said.

“Oh.”

“I shouldn’t worry about Brother Desmond too much,” Brother Alprin said. “He enjoys these trips he goes on. He can kill you anytime he wants.”

“Very comforting,” Stephen said.

Alprin smiled. “Besides, you must cultivate a meditative state to walk the fanes properly.”

“I’m trying,” Stephen said. “Can you tell me what to expect, what it feels like?”

“No,” Brother Ehan and Brother Alprin said together.

“But you’ll be different, after,” Brother Ehan added. “After, nothing will be the same.”

Ehan probably meant that to sound encouraging, but instead it opened another pit in Stephen’s belly. Since leaving home, he had received one surprise after another, each ruder than the last. His whole world had already been turned upside down, and he had a sinking feeling that whatever he had thought walking his first faneway would be like, the reality would be completely different. And if it followed suit with everything else he had experienced, unpleasant.

And so, though he tried his best to contemplate the saints and begin his first step toward priesthood in a meditative mood, it was with trepidation that he set his foot on the path and approached the first of the twelve fanes of Saint Decmanus.

To Stephen, his own footsteps somehow sounded like intruders in the great nave of the monastery. He had never seen it this empty and still. He wished for ordinary sounds, for another person to talk to. But from this moment until he finished his circuit of the fanes, he would be alone.

He stood for a moment, examining the great buttresses that supported the ceiling, amazed that frail and imperfect human beings could make such beauty. Was that what the saints saw in them, that potential? Was the creation of a few beautiful things worth the price of the evil men could do?

He wouldn’t get an answer to that question. Perhaps there wasn’t one.

Mouthing prayers, he stopped at the stations, twelve small alcoves that held statues and bas-reliefs of the various guises of holy Decmanus. There was no power in them beyond the power inherent in any image, but they reminded him of what he would soon undertake, for the faneway was akin to these small stations, written large.

When he had lit a candle in each, he finally turned to the first fane. It lay behind a small door, in the rear of the nave. The stone around the door looked much older than the stone of the rest of the monastery, and almost certainly it was. The saint had left his mark here before the church ever found its way to these lands, before even the dread Skasloi were defeated.

Once there had been nothing here but a hill. Having a fane or even a monastery did nothing to enhance the power of the sedos itself; it could serve only to prepare those who were about to walk the way, to partake of the saint, for what was to come.

When he reached for the handle of the door, he felt a sudden prickling in his belly and knew that if he hadn’t been fasting for three days he might have lost whatever was in it.

He stood, staring, unwilling to begin.

He wasn’t ready to begin; his mind wasn’t on his goal, on the sanctification of his flesh and soul. There was too much else in there that was decidedly unsacred.

So, sighing, he knelt on the stone before the door and tried to meditate.

Sometimes, when he couldn’t sleep, it was because the events of the day kept scurrying around in his skull, like rats chasing their tails. What he should have said, should have done, shouldn’t have said and done—playing over and over again. Trying to meditate now was like that. He tried to will the thoughts away, dissolve them like salt in boiling water, but each time they re-formed, more insistent than ever.

And chief among those thoughts was a simple question: After doing what he had done, how could he deserve the blessing of the saint?

After perhaps half a bell, Stephen knew the meditation of emptiness would never work, so he changed his tactics. Rather than trying to empty his head, he would try the meditation of memory. If in remembrance he could find a few moments of peace, he might achieve the state of calm acceptance needed for entering the fane.

So he closed his eyes and opened the gallery of memory, glanced down it at the images there, frozen like paintings.

There hung Brother Geffry in the oratory hall of Lord’s College, straight and tall in the murky light filtered through narrow windows. Brother Geffry, explaining the mysteries of sacarization in language so eloquent it sounded like song.

His father, Rothering Darige, kneeling on the bluff of Cape Chavel, white-toothed sea behind and blue sky above. His father, giving him his first instruction in how to behave in the temple. Stephen was eight, and in awe both of his father’s knowledge and the fact that he would soon see the altar chambers.

His sister Kay, holding his hand during the festival of Saint Temnos, where everyone wore masks like skulls and carried censers of smoking liquidamber. Watchfires in the shapes of burning men stood along the coast like immolated titans. Se-fry musicians and acrobats, painted like skeletons, capered madly through the crowd once the sun was down. The Sverrun priests, all in black, singing dirges and dragging chains behind them. Kay, telling him that the Sefry took little boys away and they were never seen again. It was one of the most powerful experiences in his life, for it was the first time he had ever really felt the presence of the saints and ghosts that walked among humanity, felt them as surely as flesh and bone.

Yet of all these paintings of his memory, it was old Sacritor Burden, the elder priest of Stephen’s attish, that brought him closest to what he needed. On that canvas, Stephen could see the old man’s sallow face, his quick but somehow sad smile, his brows, almost lizardlike with age—as if time were making of him something quite different from human.

But his voice was human, and it had been soft that day he had taken Stephen into the small scriftorium in the rooms behind the altar.

Stephen concentrated, then relaxed, until the frozen painting began to move, until he saw again through eyes twelve summers old, heard the voice of his past.

He was gazing around the room at the boxes and rolls of scrifti. He had seen his father write, seen the book of prayer his mother kept at her belt, but these he had trouble comprehending. What could all of this writing be about?

“The greatest gift of the saints is knowledge,” Sacritor Burden told him, pulling down a faded vellum scroll and unrolling it. “The most refined form of worship is in learning that knowledge, coaxing it like a little flame in the wind, keeping it alive for the next generation.”

“What does this say?” Stephen asked, pointing to the scroll.

“This? I chose it at random.” The priest gazed over the contents. “Aha. See, it’s a list of all of the names of Saint Michael.”

Stephen didn’t see at all.

“Saint Michael has more than one name?”

Burden nodded. “It would be better to say that Saint Michael is one of many names for a power that is actually nameless— the true essence of the saint, what we call the sahto.”

“I don’t understand.”

“How many saints are there, Stephen?”

“I don’t know. Hundreds.”

“If we go by their names,” the sacritor mused, “I should say thousands. Saint Michael, for instance—he is also known as Saint Tyw, Nod, Mamres, Tirving—and that names only four of forty. Likewise, Saint Thunder is also called Diuvo, Far-gun, Tarn, and so forth.”

“Oh!” Stephen replied. “You mean they’re called that in other languages, like Lierish or Crothanic.” He smiled and looked up at the priest. “I learned some Lierish from a sea captain. Would you like to hear?”

The priest grinned. “You’re a bright boy, Stephen. I’ve noticed your quickness with language. It recommends you to the priesthood.”

“That’s what Father said.”

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”

Stephen looked down at the floor and tried not to squirm. His father didn’t like it when he squirmed. “I—I don’t think I want to be a priest,” he admitted. “I’d rather be the captain of a ship that sails everywhere, sees everything. Or a mapmaker, maybe.”

“Well,” Sacritor Burden said, “that’s something for later. Just now you made a keen observation; some of the names for the saints are just what other people call them in other languages. But it’s more complicated than that. The very true essence of a saint—the sahto—is without name or form. It is only the varying aspects of the sahto we experience and name, and each sahto possesses many aspects. To each of these many aspects we attribute the name of a saint, in the king’s tongue. In Hansa, they call them ansi, or gods, and in Vitellio they call them lords. The Herilanzers call the aspects angilu. That doesn’t matter; the church allows local custom to call aspects whatever they wish.”

“So, Saint Michael and Saint Nod are the same saint?”

“No. They are both aspects of the same sahto, but they are different saints.”

He chuckled at the confused look on Stephen’s face.

“Come here,” he said.

Then Sacritor Burden led Stephen to a small, rickety table, and from a small wooden coffer lying on it he withdrew a peculiar piece of crystal, cut to have three long sides of equal width and two triangular ends. It rested easily in the sacri-tor’s palm.

“This is a prism,” Burden said. “A simple piece of glass, hmm? And yet see what happens when I place it in the light.” He moved the prism into a shaft of sunlight coming through a small, paneless window and shining on the desk. At first Stephen didn’t notice anything unusual—but then he understood. It wasn’t the crystal that had changed but the desk. A small rainbow spread upon it.

“What’s doing that?” Stephen asked.

“The white light actually contains all of these colors,” the priest explained. “Passing through the crystal, they become divided so that we can see them individually. A sahto is like a light, and the saints like all of these colors. Distinct, and yet a part of the same thing. Do you understand?”

“I’m not sure,” Stephen replied. But then he did, or thought he did, and felt a sudden giddy excitement seize him.

“Ordinarily,” Sacritor Burden went on, “we can never experience the truth of any sahto. We know only their aspects, their various names, and what their nature is in each form. But if we take care, and understand the colors, and put them back together, we can briefly experience the white light—the real sahto. And in so doing, we can become, in a way, a minor aspect of the holy force ourselves.”

“How? By reading these books?”

“We can understand them here, using the books,” Burden replied, tapping his wisp-locked skull. “But to understand them here—” He motioned toward his heart. “—to put on even the feeblest of their raiment, we must walk the fanes.”

“I’ve heard of that. It’s what priests do.”

“Yes. It is how we become sanctified. It is how we know them.”

“Where do the fanes come from?”

“There are places where the saints rested or dwelt, or where parts of them are buried. We call these places sedoi— sedos in the singular. Little hills, usually. The church is blessed with the knowledge to find these sedoi and identify the saint whose power lingers there. Then we build fanes, to identify them, so those who visit them know to whom they pray and offer.”

“And so if I go to a fane, I’ll be blessed?”

“In some small way, if the saint chooses. But walking a faneway is something different. To do that, one must walk many fanes, each left by a different aspect of the same sahto. They must be walked in a prescribed order, with certain ablutions made along the way.”

“And the saints—er, the sahto—gives you his powers?”

“They give us gifts, yes, to use in their service—if we are worthy.”

“Could I—could I walk a faneway? Could I learn from these books?”

“If you want,” Sacritor Burden said softly. “You have the potential. If you study, and devote yourself to the church, I believe you could do well, bring much good to the world.”

“I don’t know,” Stephen said.

“As I said, your father is in favor of it.”

“I know.”

And yet, for the first time, it didn’t sound so bad. The mystery of the words all around him pulled at his imagination. The prism and its patterns of colored light enthralled him. In a few words, Sacritor Burden had shown Stephen an unknown country, as strange and distant as rumored Hadam, and yet as near as any beam of light.

Burden must have seen something in his face. “It’s not the easiest path,” he murmured. “Few walk it of their own free will. But it can be a joyous one.”

And in that instant, Stephen had believed the old man. It was a relief, really. He didn’t know if he could have stood up to his father even if he wanted to. And now wonder had a grip on him, and he remembered how Sacritor Burden could bring light from the air, coax music from stones, summon fish from the shoals when the catch was poor. Little miracles, the sort that were so everyday no one even thought about them.

But there must be bigger miracles in such a wide, complex world. How many faneways were there? Had they all been discovered?

Maybe being a priest wouldn’t be so bad after all.

He bowed his head. “Reverend, I would like to try. I would like to learn.”

The sacritor nodded solemnly. “It’s a joy to an old man to hear that,” he said. “A joy. Would you like to begin now?”

“Now?”

“Yes. We start with the first gift of Saint Decmanus. With the alphabet.”

Stephen came back from remembrance to the sound of a jay chasing some other bird in the high reaches of the nave, complaining loudly. He managed a troubled smile. Sacritor Burden had been a man of faith and principle, a good man. Fratrex Pell seemed like a good man, too, if a bit severe at times. The fratrex knew exactly what Stephen had done, and still thought him fit to walk the faneway. If there was any lesson that the past few months had taught him, it was that taking his own thoughts too seriously led only to trouble. What was he, anyway? Only a novice. No—he had trusted Sacritor Burden, and he would trust Fratrex Pell.

That sounded good, but he wondered if Sacritor Burden could have imagined that, hidden in the bright colors of the rainbow, there was a streak of purest darkness. That wonder held in its embrace more than its share of terror.

Fratrex Pell knew. And if that wasn’t enough, the ineffable something that some called Saint Decmanus could judge whether Stephen was still worthy.

He pulled himself up by the door handle, tried once again to settle his thoughts, and opened the wooden portal. He hesitated briefly at the entrance, his hand on the weathered stone, then, murmuring a prayer, he stepped in and closed the door behind him. Darkness swallowed him.

Once inside, he produced his tinderbox and a single white candle. He struck fire to tinder and touched it to the wick, and watched the flame climb its ladder of smoke.

The fane was small enough that he could almost touch both walls by stretching his arms wide. It was spare, as well; a stone kneeling bench and the altar were its only furniture. Behind the altar, on the wall, was a small bas-relief of Saint Dec-manus, a weathered figure crouched over an open scroll, a lantern held up in one hand and pen in the other.

“Decmanus ezum aittis sahto faamo tangineis. Vos Dadom,” Stephen said. Decmanus, aspect of the Sahto of Commanding Knowledge. I surrender to you.

“You embody the power of the written word,” Stephen continued, in the liturgical language. “You gave us ink and paper and the letters we make from them. Yours is the mystery and the power and the revelation of recorded knowledge. You move us from past to future with the memories of our fathers. You keep our faith clean. I surrender to you.”

In the inconstant light, the statue of the saint seemed to be laughing at Stephen, a gentle but mocking laugh.

“I surrender,” Stephen repeated, very faintly this time.

When the candle was half-gone, and his vigil was complete, nothing had changed; he felt no different. With a sigh he reached to snuff the flame with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.

The flame hissed out, and for a heartbeat Stephen understood something was wrong, but couldn’t place what. Then he realized that he hadn’t felt the flame at all. Or the wick.

He rubbed his fingers together, and again felt nothing. From the tips of his fingers to his wrist, his hand was that of a ghost. He pinched it until the blood welled red, but he might as well have been pinching a piece of roast.

Stephen’s astonishment turned quickly to horror and then to brittle panic. He bolted from the fane, out into the empty chapel, where he fell to his knees and heaved dry, croaking sobs from an empty belly trying to be emptier. The dead thing that had been his hand disgusted him, and he suddenly found himself tearing into his pack, looking for the little wood-chopping ax.

By the time he found it, he had gotten around to asking himself what he wanted it for. He sat there, wild eyed, switching his gaze from the ax to his unfeeling hand. He felt like a beaver with its foot in a trap, preparing to gnaw it off.

“Oh, saints, what have I done?” he groaned. But he knew; he had put himself in their hands, the saints’ hands, and they had found him wanting.

Trembling, he put the ax away. He couldn’t chop it off, now that the moment of madness was passing. Instead, still shaking and occasionally retching, he lay on the stone, staring up at the light coming through the stained glass, and wept until he was almost sane again. Then he rose shakily, retrieved his candle, and said another prayer to Saint Decmanus. Then, without looking back, he went through another door—a small one, which led outside to where the trail began.

Bleakly, he looked at the trail. From this point it went in only one direction. He could stop now, admit failure, and be done with it. His father would despise him, but that would hardly be anything new. If he quit now, he could escape it all—Brother Desmond, the awful texts, Fratrex Pell’s demands, this cursing by the saints. He could be free.

But a hard resolve came after his panic. He would see this through. If the saints hated him, his life was done anyway. Perhaps, when they had punished him enough, they would offer him absolution. If they didn’t—well, he would find out about that. But he wouldn’t turn around.

The path went in only one direction.

He reached the fane of Saint Ciesel a few bells after noon, under a sky already dimmed by clouds, in a grove of ashes. It was fitting, for the story of Saint Ciesel was a dark one.

Once he’d been a man, the fratrex of a monastery on the then-heathen Lierish Isles. A barbarian king burned Ciesel’s monastery and all of his scrifts, many of which were irreplaceable, then threw Ciesel in a dungeon. There, in the dark, the saint had written the destroyed scrifts again, from memory— carved them into his own flesh with his fingernails, sharpened by filing them against the stone of his cell, using the oily filth from the floor to darken the scars. When he died, his captors threw his body into the sea, but Saint Lier, lord of the sea, delivered the corpse to the shore of Hornladh, near a monastery of Ciesel’s own order, where the monks found him. Ciesel’s skin had been preserved and copied through the ages. The original skin was said to be preserved in salt in the Caillo Vallaimo, the mother temple of the church in z’Irbina.

Stephen burned his candle and made his ablutions. He left the fane without feeling in the skin of his chest.

Two bells later, Saint Mefitis, patroness and inventor of writing to the dead, took the sensation from his right leg. He camped a little later, and while building a fire to keep the beasts at bay, he was surprised to discover blood on his breeches. He had hit his leg a glancing blow with his ax and not noticed. The wound was minor, but he could have chopped the foot off and it would be no different.

He did not sleep, but dreamed of terror anyway. It hovered beyond the light of his fire; it had invaded his body. If he finished the fanewalk, he would surely die.

The first triad of fanes had been aspects of knowing connected with the written word; the next three were wilder, as reflected by the cruder, more primitive carvings. Saint Rosmerta, the patroness of memory and poetry, was picked out in almost savage simplicity, barely recognizable as human. She took the use of his tongue. Saint Eugmie took his hearing, and from then on Stephen stumbled through the forest in eerie silence. Saint Woth took the sight in his left eye.

When he woke to all of this on the third day, he wondered if he was already dead. He remembered his grandfather talking about how death prepares the old by taking their senses one at a time. How old did that make Stephen now, a hundred? He was crippled, deaf, and half blind.

The next day seemed better; the fanes were to Coem, Huyan, and Veiza—aspects of wisdom, cogitation, and deduction. So far as he could tell, they took nothing from him at all, and by now he was getting used to walking on an insensible leg.

He was settling into the silence, too. Without birdsong or creaking branches or the sound of his own feet, the forest became a dream, so unreal that Stephen could no longer imagine danger in it. It was like his memory paintings, an image or series of images to which he was only distantly connected, that seemed to have very little to do with the here and now.

But when he started to build his fire that night, he didn’t know how to do it. He rummaged through his possessions, knowing that he had the tools he needed. He could not recognize them. He tried to picture the process, and failed in that, as well.

He couldn’t even remember the word fire, he realized, with swelling dismay. Or his mother’s name, when he tried, or his father’s.

Or his own.

But he remembered fear perfectly, if not what it was called, and spent the night huddled over his knees, praying for the sun, praying for an end to everything.

Dawn peeked over the trees, and he wondered who he was. The only answer he got was I am walking this path. He stopped in the various buildings he encountered. He couldn’t remember why he was doing it and he didn’t care. When he reached the last—somehow he knew that it was the last, and he was nearly finished—he was a cloud with a single eye, moving through a jumble of unfamiliar colors and shapes, many alike, all different. He passed like less than a wind, and the only sensation that remained was a rhythmic beating that the Stephen of a few days before might have recognized as his heart.

When he walked into the last fane, that beating stopped, too.

5 Duel in the Dark

An eye of fire blinked open in the darkness, just to Cazio’s right, and Cazio found himself leafed in lamplight. Another lantern was unshuttered near his right hand. Both were Aenan lamps, which directed their light strictly in one direction by means of a mirror of polished brass enclosed in a tin hood.

Now Cazio’s enemies could see him quite well, but he could see only vague shapes and the occasional gleam of steel.

He turned slowly, relaxing his shoulders and thighs, holding Caspator almost languidly in his fingers. He hoped fervently his attackers had only swords. Bows were forbidden inside the city gates to all but the guard, but in Cazio’s experience, murderers didn’t care whether they broke the law or not.

One of the men grew bold, and the long tip of a sword cut into the light, in a slice aimed at Cazio’s hand. Cazio laughed, stepping away easily. He let the tip of his weapon drop to touch the ground.

“Come, you brave fellows,” he said. “You have me outnumbered and nearly blinded. And still you begin with this timid bit of poking?”

“Keep it shut, lad, and you may still have a heart beating when we leave you,” someone said. His voice sounded vaguely familiar.

“Ah!” Cazio said. “It speaks, and sounds like a man, yet demonstrates none of the equipage. Do you keep a bag of marbles tied between your legs, so none will know in daylight how fainthearted you are beneath the moon?”

“I warned you.”

A blade slashed into the light, swinging up for a cut from overhead. This wasn’t a rapier, but a heavier sword suited for cleaving arms and heads from shoulders. In that instant, as the fellow cocked back for the cut, Cazio saw his forearm, limned by the lamplight. He hit it with a stop thrust, skewering through the meat and into the elbow joint. The man never completed his swing. The weapon clattered to the ground, as its owner shrieked.

“You do sing soprano,” Cazio said. “That’s the voice I imagined for you.”

The next instant, Cazio found himself defending against three blades—two light rapiers and another butcher’s chopper— and now he knew where his opponents were, sort of; attacking him, they entered the beams of light. He parried, ducked, lunged from the duck and very nearly pricked a surprised face. Then, very quickly, he spun and bounced toward one of the lanterns. A quick double lunge, and his point went right into the flame and on through. The startled bearer let go as oil spurted, caught fire, and turned the lantern into a torch.

Cazio spun again. Burning oil rushed along the length of his blade. Lifting his boot, he kicked the flaming mass that was clinging to the end of it, sending it flying toward his antagonists. They appeared in the sudden burst of light, and with a shout Cazio leapt toward them. He push-cut one along the top of his wrist, leaving a second man who couldn’t hold a sword, then he bounced after another, rapier still flaming. He recognized the face—one of the household guards of the z’Irbono family, a fellow named Laro-something.

Laro looked as he might if Lord Ontro were come to take him to hell, which cheered Cazio considerably.

Then something struck him in the back of the head, hard, and pale lilies bloomed behind his eyes. He swiped with his weapon, but the blow was repeated, this time to his knee, and he toppled with a groan. A boot caught him under the chin, and he bit his tongue.

And then, suddenly, he was lying in the street, and the attack upon him had ceased. He tried to rise on his elbow, but couldn’t find the needle of strength in the haystack of pain.

“This is no concern of yours, drunkard,” he heard Laro say. “Move along.”

Cazio finally managed to lift his head. The burning lamp lit the alley fully, now. Z’Acatto stood at the edge of the light, a carafe of wine in one hand.

“You’ve done wha’ y’came for,” z’Acatto slurred. “Now leave ’im alone.”

“We’re done when we say so.”

Behind Laro, holding the other lantern, was daz’Afinio, the man Cazio had dueled earlier that day. One of the men nursing his hand was Tefio, daz’Afinio’s lackey.

“This man took me unawares and robbed me,” daz’Afinio asserted. “I merely return the favor.”

“I’ll fix him, my lord,” Laro said, lifting his foot to stamp on Cazio’s outstretched hand. “He won’t play his sword games after this.”

But Laro didn’t stamp down. Instead, he pitched over backwards as z’Acatto’s wine carafe shattered on his face and broke his nose.

And, somehow in the same instant, z’Acatto had his blade out. He stumbled forward unsteadily. One of the other men made the mistake of engaging z’Acatto’s blade. Cazio watched as the old man put it almost lazily into a bind in perto, then impaled the man in the shoulder.

Cazio wobbled to his feet, just as daz’Afinio drew his weapon and launched an attack—not on z’Acatto, but at Cazio. He managed to straighten his arm in time, and Caspator sank halfway to the hilt into daz’Afinio’s belly. The noble-man’s eyes went very round.

“I—” Cazio choked. “I didn’t mean to—”

Daz’Afinio fell back, off of Caspator, clutching both hands to his gut.

“The next man to step forward dies,” z’Acatto said. He didn’t sound drunk.

Only one of the men was left unwounded, now, and they all backed away with the exception of daz’Afinio, who was clutched into a ball.

“You’re both fools,” another fellow said. Cazio recognized him from the z’Irbono guard—Mareo something-or-other. “Do you have any idea who you just ran through?”

“A skulk and a murderer,” z’Acatto said. “If you get him to the chirgeon at the sign of the needle, he might yet live. It’s more than he deserves. Than any of you deserve. Now, go.”

“There’ll be more to this,” Mareo said. “You should have just taken your beating, Cazio. Now they’ll hang you in the square.”

“Hurry,” z’Acatto urged. “See? He’s spitting out blood now, never a good sign.”

Without another word, the men gathered up daz’Afinio and carried him off.

“Come,” z’Acatto said. “Let’s get you to the house and have a look at you. Were you stabbed?”

“No. Just beaten.”

“Did you fight that man today? Daz’Afinio?”

“You know him?”

“I know him. Lord Diuvo help you if that man dies.”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“No, of course not. It’s all just a game to you. Prick on the arm, cut on the thigh, and collect your money. Come.”

Limping, Cazio did as his swordsmaster bade.

“You’re lucky,” z’Acatto said. “It’s just bruising, for you.”

Cazio winced at the old man’s touch. “Yes. Just as I said.” He reached for his shirt. “How did you happen to be following me?”

“I wasn’t. I went to find some wine and heard you shouting. Lucky for you.”

“Lucky for me,” Cazio repeated. “How do you know daz’Afinio?”

“Anyone with sense would. He’s the brother-in-law of Velo z’Irbono.”

“What? That lout married Setera?”

“That lout owns a thousand versos of vineyards in the Tero Vaillamo, three estates, and his brother is the aidil of Ceresa. Of all of the people to pick a brawl with—”

“It was a duel. And he started it.”

“After sufficient insult from you, I’m sure.”

“There were insults to go around.”

“Well, whatever. Now you’ve insulted him with a hole from back to front.”

“Will he die?” Cazio asked.

“You worry about that now?” The swordsmaster cast about for something. “Where’s my wine?”

“You broke it on Laro Vintallio’s face.”

“Right. Damn.”

“Will daz’Afinio die?” Cazio repeated.

“He might!” z’Acatto snapped. “What a stupid question! Such a wound isn’t always lethal, but who can know?”

“I can’t be blamed,” Cazio said. “They came at me, like thieves in the dark. They were in the wrong, not me. The court will stand with me.”

“Velo z’Irbono is the court, you young fool.”

“Oh. True.”

“No, we must away.”

“I won’t run, like a coward!”

“You can’t use dessrata against the hangman’s noose, boy. Or against the bows of the city guard.”

“No!”

“Just for a time. Someplace where we can hear the news. If daz’Afinio lives, things will cool.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

Z’Acatto shrugged. “As in swordsmanship, deal with each attack as it comes.”

Cazio wagged a finger at the old man. “You taught me to look ahead, to understand what the opponent’s next five moves will be.”

“Yes, of course,” z’Acatto replied. “But if you rely on your prediction, you may die if you are wrong about his intentions. Sometimes your opponent isn’t smart enough or skilled enough to have intentions, and then where are you? I had a friend in the school of Mestro Acameno; he had studied since childhood, for fourteen years. Even the mestro couldn’t best him in a match. He was killed by a rank amateur. Why? Because the amateur didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t react as my friend assumed he would. And so my friend died.”

Cazio sighed. “I cannot leave the house. Suppose they take it as lien on my return?”

“They will. But we can see that it is purchased by someone we trust.”

“Who would that be?” Cazio murmured. “I trust only you, and even you not so much.”

“Think, boy! Orchaevia. The countess Orchaevia loved your family well, and you especial. She will take us in. No one will think to look for us there, so far in the country. And the countess can arrange that your house falls into the right hands.”

“The countess,” Cazio mused. “I haven’t seen her since I was a boy. Would she really take us in?”

“She owes your father many favors, and the countess isn’t the sort to let her obligations go unattended.”

“Still,” Cazio grumbled.

At that moment a fist thundered against the door.

“Cazio Pachiomadio da Chiovattio!” a voice cried, carrying faintly through the portal.

“You cannot duel a rope,” the old man said, for the second time.

“That’s true. If I die, I die by the sword,” Cazio swore.

“Not here, you won’t. You’ll take a few, and then they’ll bear you down by weight, just as they did in the alley.” Z’Acatto shrugged. “You’ll remember I said this, when you feel the noose tighten.”

“Very well!” Cazio snapped. “I do not like it, but I concede your point. We’ll gather our things and leave by the cistern.”

“You know about the tunnel from the cistern?”

“Since I was eight,” Cazio replied. “How do you think I got out, all of those nights, even when you sealed my window?”

“Damn. I should have known. Well, let’s go, then.”

6 The Abode of Graces

A prim woman in an ochre habit with black wimple and gloves greeted Anne and Austra as they stepped down from the carriage. Her gray eyes surveyed the two girls rather clinically from above a sharp and upturned nose. She was perhaps thirty years of age, with a wide, thin mouth plainly accustomed to the shape of disapproval.

Anne drew herself straight, as behind her the knights began taking down her things from the roof of the carriage. “I am the princess Anne of the house of Dare, daughter of the emperor of Crotheny,” she informed the woman. “This is my lady-in-waiting, Austra Laesdauter. Whom do I have the honor of addressing?”

The nun’s lips twitched as if at a private joke.

“I am called Sister Casita,” she said, in heavily accented Virgenyan. “Welcome to the Abode of Graces.”

Sister Casita didn’t bow or even nod as she said this, so that Anne wondered if she were perhaps hard of hearing. Could Vitellio be so different that they did not acknowledge the daughter of a king here? What sort of place had she come to?

I’ve made my decision, she thought, fighting down the sudden bad taste in her mouth. I’ll make the best of it.

The Abode of Graces wasn’t an unpleasant-looking place. Indeed, it was rather exotic, rising from the spare, rustic landscape as if it had grown there. The stones it was built from were of the same color as those they had seen exposed in seams along the road, a yellowish red. The coven itself sat on a ridgetop encircled by a crenulated wall longer than it was wide and enclosing an area the size of a small village. Square towers with sharply steepled roofs of rust-colored tile rambled up at odd intervals and inconsistent altitudes around the wall, while through the arched gate Anne could make out the large but oddly low-built manses across a flagstoned courtyard. The only height within the wall was a single ribbed dome that Anne assumed to be the nave of the chapel.

Grapevine and primrose crawled up the walls and towers, and olive trees twisted through cracked cobblestones, giving the place a look that was somehow both untidy and immaculate.

The only discordant note was provided by the ten persons with carts and mules who seemed to be camped outside of the gates. They were swaddled head to toe in patchwork linens and gauzy veils and sat or squatted beneath temporary awnings of light cotton fabric.

“Sefry,” Austra whispered.

“What was that?” Sister Casita asked sharply.

“If it please you, Sister,” Austra said, “I was just noticing the Sefry encampment.” She gave a small curtsey.

“Be wary,” the sister said. “If you keep your voice low, it will be assumed you mean mischief.”

“Thank you, Sister,” Austra replied, more loudly.

Irritated, Anne cleared her throat. “Where shall I have my men carry our things?” she asked.

“Men are not allowed within the Abode of Graces, of course,” Sister Casita replied. “What you want, you will carry yourself.”

“What?”

“Choose what you want and can carry in a single trip. The rest remains outside of the gates.”

“But the Sefry—”

“Will take it, yes. It is why they are here.”

“But that’s insane,” Anne said.

“These things are mine.”

The sister shrugged. “Then carry them.”

“Of all—”

“Anne Dare,” the sister said, “you are a very great distance from Crotheny.”

Anne did not miss the lack of any title or honorific.

“Crotheny travels with me,” she said, nodding at Captain Marl and the rest of her guard.

“They will not interfere,” Sister Casita assured her.

Anne turned to glare at Captain Marl. “You’re going to let her treat me this way?”

“My orders preclude interfering with the will of the sisters,” Captain Marl replied. “I was to deliver you here, safe and whole, and place you in the care of the Coven Saint Cer, also known as the Abode of Graces. I have done so.”

Anne switched her gaze from the captain to the sister, then looked back down at her things. There were two trunks, both too large and unwieldy for her to lift.

“Very well,” she said at last. “Do your orders preclude giving me a horse, Captain Marl?”

“They do, Princess.”

“A rope?”

He hesitated. “I see no reason not to supply you with a rope,” he said at last.

“Give me one, then.”

Anne grunted, straining her back and legs at the earth, and her trunks dragged reluctantly forward another handspan or so. She shifted her footing.

“I can assure you,” Sister Casita said, “whatever you have there will not be worth the effort. Little is needed within these walls—habit, nourishment, water, tools. And all of those will be provided. If you are vain, rescue your comb. You will not be allowed to wear jewelry or fine gowns.”

“It’s mine,” Anne said, through gritted teeth.

“Let me help her,” Austra asked, for the sixth time.

“They aren’t your things, my dear,” the sister replied. “You may carry only your own things.”

Anne looked up wearily. After an hour of dragging, she had nearly made it to the gate. She had attracted an audience, some twenty girls of various ages but tending toward her own. They wore simple brown habits with wimples of the same color. Most of them were laughing and jeering at her, but she ignored them.

She strained again, feeling the rope she had strapped across her chest cut into her bodice. Her foot sought purchase on the first of the flagstones and failed.

The Sefry seemed to be enjoying the spectacle as much as everyone else. One had produced a tambour and another a small five-stringed croth, which he played with a little bow.

“Give it up, Princess Mule!” one of the girls shouted. “You’ll never bring them in, no matter how stubborn a jackass you be! And why would you?”

The japing girl got a good chorus of laughter for that. Anne marked her, with her long, slender neck and dark eyes. Her hair was hidden by her wimple.

Anne did not, however, reply but set herself grimly and pulled some more. She had to go back and work each trunk onto the flagstones individually, but after that they went a bit smoother. Unfortunately she was wearing out.

At first she didn’t notice the sudden silence that fell across the other girls, and when she did she thought it was because she had stumbled. Then she looked up and saw what had really silenced them.

First she noticed the eyes, fierce and piercing and bright, like the eyes of Saint Fendve, the patroness of war madness, in the painting in her father’s battle chapel. So striking were they that it took moments for her to understand their color— or rather that they had almost none, so black were they.

Her face was harsh and old and very, very dark, the color of cherry wood. Her habit was black, wimpled in storm gray, and the moment Anne laid her gaze on her she was afraid of her, of what damage crouched behind those eyes and the rough seams of that face.

“Who are you,” the old woman said, “and what do you think you’re doing?”

Anne set her jaw. Whoever this was, she was just a woman. She couldn’t be any worse than Mother or Erren.

“I am Anne of the house of Dare, princess of Crotheny. I am told I may have only those things that I can carry to my room, so I am carrying them there. And may I ask your name, Sister?”

A collective gasp went up from the assembled women, and even Casita raised an eyebrow.

The old woman blinked, but her expression did not change. “My name is not spoken, nor is the name of any sister here. But you may call me Sister Secula. I am the mestra of this coven.”

“Very well,” Anne said, trying to remain brave, “where shall I put my things?”

Sister Secula looked at her for another dispassionate moment, then lifted her finger. Anne thought at first she was pointing to the sky.

“The top room on the left,” she said softly. It was then Anne realized she was pointing at the tallest of the towers on the wall.

Midnight found Anne collapsed at the base of the narrow spiral stairs that led to the tower heights. Sister Casita had been replaced by another observer, an older member of the order who identified herself as Salaus. Austra was still there, of course, but otherwise the courtyard was empty.

“Why persist in this, Anne?” Austra whispered. “You would have left all this behind had you succeeded in fleeing. Why do you care so much for it now?”

Anne regarded her friend wearily. “Because that would have been my choice, Austra. All of my other choices have been made for me. To keep my things is the only choice it is still in my power to make.”

“I have been up the stairs. You cannot do it, and they will not let you separate yourself from them. Leave one of the trunks behind.”

“No.”

“Anne …”

“What if I give one to you?” Anne asked Austra.

“I’m not allowed to help you.”

“No. I mean I will give one of the trunks to you, and all of its contents.”

“I see,” Austra said. “And then I would give it back, later.”

“No. It would be yours, Austra. Forever.”

Austra’s hand flew to her mouth. “I’ve never owned anything, Anne. I don’t think I’m allowed to.”

“Absurd,” Anne said. She raised her voice.

“Sister Salaus. I’m giving one of my chests to my friend Austra. Is that permitted?”

“If it is a true gift.”

“It is,” Anne replied. She tapped the smaller of the chests. “Take this one. It has two fine gowns, stockings, a mirror and combs—”

“The mirror set with opal?” Austra gasped.

“Yes, that one.”

“You can’t give me that.”

“I already have. Now. You can choose to carry your things to our rooms, or you can leave them for the Sefry. I’ve made my choice. Now you make yours.”

They crossed the threshold into their room an hour or so before dawn, dragging the trunks behind them. Sister Salaus presented them with a lit taper and a pair of dun habits.

“The morning meal is at seven bells,” she said. “You should not miss it.” She paused, and her frown deepened. “I’ve never quite seen the like of that,” she said. “I do not know if it bodes ill or well for you as a beginning here, but it certainly sets you apart.”

And with that, she left. Anne and Austra looked at each other for a few moments, then both burst out in a fit of laughter.

“It certainly sets you apart,” Austra said, imitating the sis-ter’s thick Vitellian accent.

“There’s something to be said for that, I suppose,” Anne replied. She cast her gaze around the room. “Saint Loy, is this really where we’re to stay?”

The room was a quarter of the tower, about five paces on a side. The roof was mere beams, and above that was the deep darkness of the conical roof. The girls could hear doves cooing, and feathers and bird droppings decorated the floor and the two wooden beds that were the only furnishings. There was a small window.

“It’s hardly better than a dungeon cell,” Austra said.

“Well,” Anne sighed. “It’s a good thing I’m a princess and not a greffess, I suppose.”

“It’s not so bad,” Austra supposed dubiously. “Anyhow, now you’re a princess in a tower, just as in the story of Rafquin.”

“Yes, I’ll begin knitting a ladder from spider silk right away, so when Roderick comes—”

Austra’s face went serious. “Anne!”

“I’m joking, dove,” Anne said. Nevertheless, she went to the window and peered out. “Look,” she said. “The sun is rising.”

The pale horizon became a golden seam and eventually the sun himself peeked up to reveal the leagues of gently rolling pasture, sprinkled with gnarled olive trees and slender cedars. In the middle distance, a gently meandering river clothed itself more verdantly in cypress and willow, and beyond that, the scenery faded into pale green, yellow, and finally sky.

“This place will do,” Anne said softly. “If I can see the horizon, I can bear anything.”

“We’ll test that now,” Austra said, holding one of the habits toward Anne.

“Well, there’s Princess Mule,” the girl with the long neck said as Anne and Austra entered the refectory.

Anne’s ears burned as the girls within earshot laughed, and a chatter went up in Vitellian.

“I seem to have earned a nickname,” she noticed.

The refectory was an airy place, its flat roof supported by slim, open arches on all sides. The tables were long, common, and rustic, and few empty seats greeted them. Anne chose the least populated bench and sat at an end across from a thickset young woman with a large jaw and close-set eyes. As Austra settled beside her, Anne noticed that the other girls had already been served bowls of porridge dressed with some sort of curd or fresh cheese.

The girls at the table glanced at her from the corners of their eyes, but no one spoke until several uncomfortable moments had passed, when the thickset girl, without looking up from her meal, said, speaking Virgenyan, “You have to serve yourself, you know. From the cauldron on the hearth.” She gestured, and Anne saw a cauldron tended by a pair of the dun-dressed girls.

“I’ll fetch ours, Anne,” Austra said quickly.

“They won’t allow that,” the girl said.

“Doesn’t she know anything?” another of the girls wondered aloud.

“You didn’t know when you arrived, Tursas,” the thick girl pointed out. Then, to Anne, she said, “You’d best hurry. Soon they’ll take the food to the goats.”

“What kind of place is this?” Anne whispered. “My father—”

“You’d best forget your station here,” the girl said. “Forget it, and quickly, or Mestra Secula will teach you to regret your stubbornness. You’ve already been foolish enough. Take my advice.”

“Rehta should know,” the other girl said. “Sister Mestra put her—”

“Hush, Tursas,” Rehta said sharply.

Anne considered ignoring the advice, but her belly added the final weight to the argument. Cheeks burning, feeling all of their eyes upon her, she went and fetched the porridge, ladling it into a stoneware bowl and procuring a spoon to eat it with. Austra joined her. Despite its consistency, the mush was surprisingly good. Anne washed it down with cold water and wished for bread. Halfway through her meal, she glanced back up at the girl identified as Rehta.

“Thanks for the advice,” she said.

“And so what happens now, I wonder?” Austra asked. “What do you do all day?”

“You’ll interview with the mestra,” Tursas said. “You’ll get your names, then you’ll be assigned studies and tasks.”

“That sounds wonderful,” Anne said sarcastically.

The other girls didn’t answer.

They met the mestra in a small, dark room with no windows and lit by a single oil lamp. The ancient sister regarded the girls from behind a small writing desk for a very long space before speaking. Then she looked down at the ledger before her.

“Austra Laesdauter. Henceforth, in this place, you shall be known as Sister Persondra. You, Anne Dare, shall be Sister Ivexa.”

“But that means—”

“In the language of the church it signifies a female calf, and denotes the behavior I desire from you—obedient and passive.”

“Stupid, you mean.”

The mestra focused her frightening gaze on Anne again. “Don’t think to make trouble here, Sister Ivexa,” she said quietly. “An education in the Abode of Graces is a rare privilege and a priceless opportunity. The lady Erren recommended you, and she is well thought of by me. When you disappoint me, I am disappointed in her, and to feel disappointment toward her is upsetting.”

“I endeavor to do my best,” Anne replied rigidly.

“You do nothing of the kind. You began your tenure here with an unseemly tantrum. I wish it to be your last. It may be that you will return to the world one day. If you do, your behavior must reflect well your time here or I and every other sister of this order and the very Lady of Darkness herself will bear your shame. If, after a time, I’m not assured that you will represent us well, I promise you—you shall not leave at all.”

Anne’s scalp prickled at that, and a sudden panic caught at the base of her throat. She suddenly felt very uncertain and very far from home, as she considered just how many ways Mestra Secula could make good on that promise. Already she could think of two, and neither seemed very promising.

7 Gifts

Stephen awoke to his breath, and agony that shot like flames from his lungs out to his fingers and toes, burning holes where his eyes ought to be and scorching hair from his head. His eyes flickered open to a terrifying light that poured nightmare colors into his skull and left them there to clot into shapes so terrible and fantastic that he shrieked at their very existence. He lay on the ground wailing, covering his eyes, until gradually the pain subsided, until he realized that it wasn’t pain at all, but a return from nothingness to normal sensation.

Nothingness. He had been nothing at all. He hadn’t even been dead. He’d been less and less and then—nothing.

Now he was back, and as he gradually grew more accustomed to feeling again, he saw that the terrible shapes were only the trees of the forest and the blue sky above it. The rasping across his skin was a gentle breeze swaying the fern fronds.

“My name,” he said shakily, “is Stephen Darige.” He sat up and brought his hands to his face, felt the shape of his bone beneath the skin, the stubble of beard on his chin, and began to weep. He drew breath and worshipped it.

A long time later he pulled himself to his feet with the aid of a nearby sapling. The bark was a luxury against his raw fingers, and he coughed out a laugh that sounded strange to his ears.

He was filthy, covered in mud and blood from shallow scratches. He smelled like he hadn’t bathed in weeks, and it smelled wonderful.

As reason reasserted itself, he began to try to work out where he was. He had collapsed—who knew how long ago— on the gently sloping hill of a sedos, bare of trees but covered in bracken fern. At its summit was a small fane, and by the characters graved on its face he recognized it as dedicated to Saint Dryth, the final incarnation of Decmanus on the faneway.

Which meant he had finished the walk. The saints had not destroyed him.

He found a pool fed by the clear waters of a spring, stripped off his rank clothing, and bathed beneath the overhanging branches of an ancient weeping willow. His stomach was as flat and hollow as a tambour, but he felt incredibly good despite his hunger. He scrubbed his clothes, hung them out to dry, and lazed on the mossy bank, drinking in the sounds around him, so happy to be alive and sensible that he didn’t want to miss anything.

Some sort of bird trilled a complex bramble of notes and was answered by another with a slightly different song. Bronze and metal-green dragonflies danced over the water, and water-skitters dimpled along the transparent surface of another world where silver minnows darted and crayfish lurked in search of prey. All was fascinating, all was wonder, and for the first time in a long time it seemed, he remembered why he had wanted to be a priest: to know the world, in all its glory. To make its secrets a part of him, not for gain, but for the simple pleasure of knowing them.

The sun climbed to noon, and when his clothes were reasonably dry he donned them and set his feet back on the path toward the monastery, whistling, wondering how long he had been gone. Trying to understand what had happened to him. He spoke aloud, to hear his own voice.

“Each saint took a sense from me,” he told the forest. “In the end they gave them back. But did they fashion them? Did they change them, as a blacksmith takes rough metal and makes something better? Nothing feels the same!”

Moreover, he felt that nothing ever would be the same again.

He started whistling again.

He stopped still when his whistling was answered in kind, and with a start he realized that it was the birdsong he had heard earlier. Every note, every variation of it was still in his head, clear and delicate. He laughed again. Could he have done that before, or was it a gift from walking the fanes? The gifts were different for each faneway and for each person who walked them, so there was no way of knowing what he had gained. At the moment, he felt that if this one thing—the power to imitate the birds—was all he had received, it would be enough.

At night the songs changed, and as he sat beside his fire, Stephen delighted in learning them as he had those of the day. It seemed he could forget nothing, now. With no effort at all he could recall to the least detail the appearance of the pool he had bathed in. He could feel the patterns in the night as if he had always understood them.

The sahto of Decmanus was that of knowledge, understanding in all of its forms. It seemed he had indeed been … improved.

The next day he further tested his abilities by reciting ballads as he traveled. The Gorgoriad, the Fetteringsaga, the Tale of Findomere. He never stumbled on a word or phrase, though he had heard the last only once, ten years earlier, and its recitation took almost two bells.

He sacrificed near each shrine and thanked the saints but did not mount their sedoi. Who knew what walking the fanes backwards would do?

His second night, something in the nightsong changed. There was a tremor in it, an echo of a thing he knew, as if the forest were gossiping about something dark and terrible that Stephen had once met. The more Stephen listened, the more convinced he became that it had to do with him. The conviction grew as sleep eluded him, but he tried to ignore it. He was expected back at the monastery. He had work to do, and the fratrex probably would be unhappy if he dallied. He had walked the fanes early so as to better perform his tasks, after all.

But morning found the waking forest with the same terrible undertone, and whenever Stephen turned his face east he felt a chill and a vague sickness. He remembered the dark tales at Tor Scath, the old knight’s conviction that something evil was abroad. When he thought of the Briar King, he felt a terror that nearly scalded him.

At the fane of Saint Ciesel, the feeling began to fade, and with each step nearer the monastery it faded more. Soon he began whistling again, singing other songs and ballads he knew, but even so his joy was diminishing, replaced by a nagging in his bones. Something out there was wrong, something needed him, and his back was to it.

He came to a stream, one he remembered crossing early in his journey. He was nearly there, would probably be at the monastery by sundown. By morning he would be testing his new gifts on the things he loved best, the ancient scrifts and tomes of the church. Surely that was what Saint Decmanus wanted of him, not to go chasing a bad dream through the wilderness.

He stared at the stream for a while, dithering, but in the end he let his newly minted heart turn him east. He struck from the path, out to the wilderness.

Hunger was a living thing in him now. He must have lost the food he’d brought early in his journey; he didn’t think he had eaten for three or four days. The forest provided little; nothing edible grew beneath the great trees, and he knew nothing of hunting or snaring. He managed to spear a few fish with a stick he sharpened using his finger knife, and he discovered that open places, burned off by lightning in years past, were veritable oases; in those places not shadowed by branches he found understories of hard apples and persimmons, tiny cherries and grapes. By seeking these he managed to sustain himself, but his hunger continued to grow.

For the rest of the day he traveled east and camped in a high place where stone had cut up through the earth and dressed itself in lichen. He built a small fire and listened to the night grow frantic.

For whatever worried the forest was near. His ears were sharper than they had been; he could hear labored footsteps in the darkness, the snapping of limbs and scraping of something against bark. Now and then a coughing growl wended through the columns of the trees.

What am I doing here? he wondered, as the snapping became a crashing through the forest. Whatever that is, what can I do about it? He wasn’t Aspar White. If it was the greffyn, he was surely dead. If it was the Briar King …

The crashing was very close, now. In a sudden panic, Stephen felt hideously exposed in the firelight. With his sharpened fish spear, he moved out of the circle of light, wondering belatedly if he should climb a tree, if he could find one with branches low enough.

Instead he crouched near a large bole, trying to still the echo of his heart beating in his ears.

Then the sounds ceased. All sounds had ceased. The nighthawks and whippoorwills, the frogs and the crickets. The night was an empty box. Stephen waited, and prayed, and tried to keep his fear from clawing out of his head and into his legs. He’d seen a cat, once, stalking a field rat. The cat had toyed with the smaller creature, never striking until the mouse’s fear made it bolt. Not because the cat couldn’t see its prey, but because the cat, like all of its kind, had a cruel streak. Stephen felt very much like the mouse now, but he wasn’t one. He had reason. He could fight his instincts.

But maybe in this case, after all, it would be better to run …

The old Stephen would never have heard the sound in time to move, the faint whisper of leather against damp leaves. He threw himself forward, away from the sound, but something struck him hard across the back of his legs, and he lost his stride and fell. A dark thing clawed at his feet, and Stephen turned on his back and kicked at it, pushing away from it with the palms of his hands. The creature came on, rearing up and revealing itself in the firelight. It had the frame of a man, and a visage so terrible and so well known at the same time.

“Aspar!” Stephen shrieked, even then not absolutely certain.

But it was the holter, his face blackened and bruised, his eyes bereft of human knowing. He lurched forward at his name, gasping.

“Aspar, it’s me, Stephen Darige!”

“Ste—?” The holter’s face softened to a sort of insane puzzlement, and then he collapsed at Stephen’s feet. Stephen opened his mouth and took a step toward the holter, then held himself very still as he saw what was behind his erstwhile companion, what his body had hidden when he was standing.

Behind the holter, a pair of glowing yellow eyes stared at Stephen through the darkness. They shifted noiselessly closer, and the wavering firelight limned something huge with a beak like a bird. It sniffed at him, and the eyes blinked slowly. Then the head raised, and it uttered a sound like a butcher sawing the long bone of a cow.

It took another step toward Stephen, then nodded its beaked head angrily at him. The eyes blinked once more, and in a silent rushing it was gone, off through the trees, running faster than anything could run, leaving only the silence, and Stephen, and the dead or unconscious Aspar White.

8 Course of Study

Anne felt a brief taste of bile in her throat as the flesh of the man’s chest opened in two great flaps like floppy cupboard doors. Within was a wormy mess such as she had never imagined could be found in a human being. She supposed she had always imagined the inside of a person much like the outside, perhaps redder for the blood, but relatively featureless. What she saw now seemed senseless and bizarre.

The girl on her right dropped to her knees, retching, which began a trend that left all but two of the eight girls in the chamber relinquishing their morning meal. Anne did not join them, and neither did Serevkis, the long-necked young woman who had nicknamed her “Princess Mule.” From the corner of her eye, Anne caught a glance from Serevkis and was surprised when the girl sent her a brief, sardonic smile.

Sister Casita, who had made the incisions on the corpse, waited patiently for the involuntary purging to end. Anne absently maneuvered to keep her shoes clean, but focused her attention on the cadaver.

“That’s a natural reaction,” Casita said, when the round of sickness seemed to be over. “Be assured that this man was a criminal of the worst sort. Serving the church and our order in death is the only virtuous thing he has ever accomplished, and it will earn his remains decent internment.”

“Why isn’t he bleeding?” Anne asked.

Casita regarded her with a lifted eyebrow. “Sister Ivexa asks an interesting question,” she said. “Out of turn, but interesting.” She gestured at something fist-size and bluish gray in the center right of the chest. “Here is the heart. An ugly thing, is it not? In appearance hardly worthy of the praise heaped on it in poetry and metaphor. But it is indeed an organ of importance. In life it contracts and expands, which makes the beating you feel in your own breasts. In so doing, it sends blood racing around the body within tubular canals. You see four of these here.” She indicated four large pipes stuck fast to the heart. “In death, the heart ceases its activity and the blood ceases to move. It pools and congeals in the body, so as Sister Ivexa notices, even the most grievous cut draws little blood.”

“Permission, Sister?” Serevkis murmured.

“Granted.”

“If you were to cut a live man, we would see his heart beating, and the blood would flow?”

“Until he died, yes.”

Anne placed her hand over her sternum and felt the heart beneath. Did hers really look like that?

“And whence comes the blood?”

“Ah. It is generated by a confluence of humors in the body. All of this you will learn in due time. Today we will learn the names of certain parts, and later the humors that control them. Eventually we will discuss how each organ can be made to sicken and die, whether by insult from a wound, from physic, or from holy sacaum. But today, I want you to be most clear on this.” She swept her eyes about the chamber. “Sister Facifela, Sister Aferum—are you paying attention?” she snapped.

Facifela, a gangly girl with a weak chin, looked up meekly. “It is hard to look at, Sister Casita.”

“At first,” Casita said. “But you will look. By the end of the day, you must name all of these organs to me. But the first lesson is this, so all of you listen carefully.” She reached into the body cavity and pushed things around, making a wet sucking sound.

“You, your father, your mother. The greatest warrior of your kingdom, the highest fratrex of the church, kings, scoundrels, murderers, stainless knights—inside, all of us are this. To be sure, there is variation in strength and health and internal fortitude, but in the end it matters little. Beneath armor and clothing and skin, there is always this soft, wet, infinitely vulnerable interior. Here is where life resides in our bodies; here is where death hides, like a maggot waiting to be born. Men fight from the outside, with clumsy swords and arrows, trying to pierce the layers of protection we bundle in. They are of the outside. We are of the inside. We can reach there in a thousand ways, slipping through the cracks of eye and ear, nostril and lip, through the very pores of the flesh. Here is your frontier, Sisters, and eventually your domain. Here is where your touch will bring the rise and fall of kingdoms.”

Anne felt a little trembling in her and for an instant thought she smelled the dry decay of the crypt she and Austra had found long ago. The feeling wasn’t one of fear but of excitement. It felt, suddenly, as if she sat in a tiny boat on a vast sea and had for the first time been explained the meaning of water.

Walking into the hall, she nearly bumped nose to nose with Sister Serevkis and found herself staring into the girl’s cool gray eyes.

“You weren’t repelled?” Serevkis asked.

“A little,” Anne admitted. “But it was interesting. I notice you didn’t get sick either.”

“No. But my mother was the undertaker for the meddix of Formesso. I’ve seen the insides of bodies all of my life. This was your first time, yes?”

“Yes.”

Serevkis looked off somewhere behind Anne. “Your Vitellian has improved,” she noticed.

“Thank you. I’m working hard on it.”

“A good idea,” Serevkis replied. She smiled and her gaze met Anne’s again. “I must go to my cyphers tutorial. Perhaps I’ll see you at the evening meal, Sister Ivexa.”

The rest of Anne’s classes were less intriguing, and numbers least of all, but she did her best to pay attention and do her sums. After numbers came greencraft, which she thought at first would be better. Even Anne knew that the weeds from beneath a hanging tree and the dark purple blossoms of the benabell were used as poisons. They did not discuss any such thing, however, but instead doted on the care of roses, as if they were training to be gardeners instead of assassins. At the end of greencraft, Sister Casita came in and called three names. One of them was Anne’s. The other two girls Anne did not know. They went, of all places, to the yard out back of the coven, where sheep were brought in from the fields to be milked and fleeced. Anne stared at the dumb creatures as they wandered aimlessly, while Sister Casita explained something to the other girls in their own language, which Anne thought might be Safnian. She turned her attention back to the older woman when she switched to Vitellian.

“My apologies,” the sister said. “These two haven’t made the progress in Vitellian you have. I must say, you’ve done very well in a short time.”

“Brazi, Sor Casita,” Anne said. “I studied the church Vitellian at home. I suppose more of it stuck than I thought, and many of the words are similar.” She nodded at the animals. “Why are we here with the sheep, Sister?” she asked.

“Ah. You’re going to learn to milk them.”

“Is sheep’s milk of some use in physic?”

“No. At the end of the first month, each sister is assigned a duty. This is to be your job, milking and making cheese.”

Anne stared at her, then laughed aloud.

Tears stung Anne’s eyes as the switch laid a bright strip across her bare shoulders, but she did not cry out. Instead, she fixed her tormentor with a glare that would have sent any courtier scurrying.

Sister Secula was no courtier, and she did not so much as flinch at Anne’s expression.

Another lash came down, and this time a little gasp escaped Anne’s lips.

“So,” Sister Secula exclaimed. “Only two for you to find your breath? You don’t have the bravery to suit your attitude, little Ivexa.”

“Switch me all you want,” Anne said. “When my father finds out—”

“He’ll do nothing. He sent you here, my dear. Your royal parents have already agreed to any medicine I administer— and that is the last time I shall remind you of that. But I won’t switch you again, not just now. I’ve already learned what I wanted. Next time, you may expect more than three strikes of the switch. Now—back to the task set for you.”

“No, I will not go,” Anne told her.

“What? What did you say?”

Anne straightened her back. “I won’t milk sheep, Sister Secula. I was born a princess of the house Dare and a duchess of the house de Liery. I will die as such, and I will be those things all the years between. However long you keep me in this place, and however you choose to treat me, I remain who I am, and I will not be lowered to menial tasks.”

Sister Secula nodded thoughtfully. “I see. You’re protecting the dignity of your titles.”

“Yes.”

“As you protected them when you ignored your mother’s wishes and rode like a wild goat all over Eslen? As when you were busy spreading your legs for the first buck to spout poetry at you? It seems you’ve discovered the dignity becoming your station right quickly and conveniently when asked to do something you find distasteful.”

Anne laid her head back down on the chastising table. “Strike me more if you wish. I do not care.”

Sister Secula laughed. “That is another thing you will learn, little Ivexa. You will learn to care. But perhaps it is not whipping that will make you do so. Who do you think the ladies of this coven are, lowborn peasants? They are from the best families in all the known lands. If they choose to return to the world, they will find their titles waiting. Here, they are members of this order, nothing more and nothing less. And you, my dear, are the very least of them.”

“I am not the least,” Anne replied. “I will never be the least of anything.”

“Absurd. You are the least learned in every subject. You are the least disciplined. You are the least worthy of even that novice robe you wear. Listen to you! What have you ever done? You have nothing that was not given to you by your birth.”

“It is enough.”

“It is if your only ambition is to be the brood mare for some highborn fool, for brood mares neither need nor have brains enough to want more than they were born with. Yet my understanding is that the very reason you were sent to me is that even that lowest of ambitions escapes your thick head.”

“I have talents. I have a destiny.”

“You have inclinations. You have desires. A plow-ass has those.”

“No. I have more.” My dreams. My visions. But she didn’t mention those aloud.

“Well, we shall see, shan’t we?”

“What do you mean?”

“You think yourself a creature apart, better than every other girl here. Very well—we shall give you the chance to prove that is so. Yes, we will. Come with me.”

Anne gazed down into the utter blackness and tried not to tremble. Behind her, three sisters tightened a series of ropes supporting the leather harness they had strapped on her.

“Don’t do this,” Anne said, trying to keep her voice low.

None of the sisters answered, and Sister Secula was already gone.

The air wafting out of the hole was cold and metallic.

“What is it?” Anne asked. “Where are you putting me?”

“It is called the womb of Lady Mefitis,” one of the initiates answered. “Mefita is, as you know, an aspect of Cer.”

“The aspect that tortures damned souls.”

“Not at all. That’s a common misconception. She is the aspect of motion in rest, of pregnancy without birth, of time without day or night.”

“How long am I to be down there?”

“A nineday. It is the usual penance associated with humility. But I urge you to use your time in meditation, and in perceiving the glory of our lady. After all, her fane is there.”

“A nineday? I’ll starve!”

“We’re going to lower food and drink sufficient for that time.”

“And a lamp?”

“Light is not permitted in the womb.”

“I’ll go mad!”

“You won’t. But you’ll learn humility.” Her smile hid an uncertain emotion. Triumph? Grief ? Anne thought it could be either. “You must learn it some time, you know. Now, in you go.”

“No!”

Anne kicked and screamed, but for naught. They had her strapped well, and in no time the initiates had her out over the black well and descending into it.

The opening was as wide as she was tall. By the time her descent ended and her feet touched stone, it seemed no larger than a bright star.

“Keep near, where the stone is flat and level,” a voice floated down. “Do not go beyond the wall we have built, or you will find danger. The caves are empty of beasts, but full of cracks and chasms. Stay in the wall, and you will be safe.”

Then the circle vanished, and the only light remaining was the illusion of it painted on her eyelids, a single spot fading quickly from green, to pink, to deep red—gone.

And Anne screamed until her throat felt torn.

9 The Kept

Prince Cheiso of Safnia spasmed and coughed flecks of blood onto the stone floor as his torturer drew a score across his back with a red-hot iron, but he did not scream. William could see the scream anyway, buried in the Safnian’s face, digging to get out like the larvae of an earth wasp struggling to emerge from a paralyzed spider. But it stayed prisoned in that proud, dark face.

William could not help but admire Cheiso’s bravery. The man had been whipped and burned, the flesh of his back sanded raw and rubbed with salt. Four of his fingers were broken, and he had been dunked repeatedly in a vat of urine and offal. Still he did not beg, or cry out, or confess. They were made of sterner stuff than William had known, these Safnians. He doubted that he would have held up so well.

“Will you speak now?” Robert asked gently. He stood behind the prince and stroked his brow with a damp rag. “You have sisters yourself, Prince Cheiso. Try to imagine how we feel. We degrade ourselves when we treat you thus, but we will know why you betrayed her.”

Lying there on a table turned upright, Cheiso lifted his eyes then, but he did not look at Robert. Instead, his black eyes focused steadfastly on William. He licked his lips and spoke.

“Your Majesty,” he said, in that faraway accent of his kind, “I am Prince Cheiso of Safnia, son of Amfile, grandson of Verfunio, who turned away the Harshem fleet at Bidhala with two ships and a word. I do not lie. I do not betray my honor. Lesbeth your sister is my dearest love, and if any evil has come to her, I will live to find who did it and make him pay. But you, Emperor of Crotheny, are a fool. You have supped on lies, and they have fattened your wits. You may dig with your prick of iron down to my very bones and carpet your floor with my blood, but there is nothing I can tell you save that I am innocent.”

Robert gestured, and the torturer took the Safnian’s ear in a grip of red-hot tongs. The prince’s lean body arched, as if trying to break his own back and bend double, and this time a ragged sigh escaped him, but nothing more.

“’Twill take but a little time,” the torturer told Robert. “He will confess to us.”

William clasped his hands behind his back, trying not to fidget.

“Robert,” he grunted. “A word.”

“Of course, dear brother.” He nodded to the torturer. “Continue,” he said.

“No,” William said. “Respite, until we’ve spoken.”

“But brother dear—”

“Respite,” William said firmly.

Robert lifted his hands. “Oh, very well. But this is an art, Wilm. If you ask the painter to lift his brush in midstroke—” But he saw William meant it, and broke off. They moved away, into the dank and vaulted hall of the dungeons below Eslen, where they could speak unheard.

“What troubles you, brother?”

“I am altogether unconvinced that this man is dishonest.”

Robert folded his arms. “The birds that twitter in my ear say otherwise,” he said.

“Your birds have been magpies before,” William said, “leading us astray. Now is such a time.”

“You cannot be certain. Let us continue until all doubt is cleared away.”

“And if we find him innocent after all? They have ships in Safnia, you know. They might lend those ships to our enemies, and in a time when war approaches, that is no small thing.”

Robert’s eyebrows arched. “Are you joking with me, Wilm?”

“What joke can you possibly hear in that?”

“I have already given it out that the prince and all of his retainers were killed by Rovish pirates in the Sea of Ale. Word of what we do here will not travel.”

“You don’t expect me to have this man murdered,” William said incredulously.

“What sort of king are you? What sort of brother?”

“If he is innocent—”

“He is not,” Robert exploded. “He is Safnian, born of a thousand years of oily southern lies. Of course he seems convincing. But he will confess, and he will die, and Lesbeth’s betrayal will be avenged. My sources are not mistaken, Wilm.”

“And how does this bring our sister back to us, Robert? Revenge is a sad feast next to a loved one restored.”

“We will have both, I promise you, Wilm. You have met Austrobaurg’s conditions; twenty ships have been sent to the basin of the Saurga Sea already.”

“And you trust Austrobaurg to keep his word?”

“He is an ambitious coward; there is no more trustworthy sort of man, so long as you understand them. He will do as he says.”

“Austrobaurg maimed Lesbeth, Robert. How can he hope to stay our revenge if he returns her to us?”

“Because if you try to take revenge, he will send word to the lords of Liery that you have been aiding his cause against their allies. Certainly he can produce proof.”

“And you did not foresee this?”

“Indeed I did,” Robert said. “And I saw it as the only guarantee of Lesbeth’s safe homecoming.”

“You should have been clear about that, then.”

Robert lifted his nose a fraction. “You are emperor. If you cannot see the consequences … I am not your only councilor, brother.”

“Liery must never know what we have done.”

“Agreed. For that matter, it must never be known abroad that Lesbeth was ever taken captive. It would make us seem weak, which we can ill afford even in the best of times. No, this entire business must be erased. Austrobaurg will not talk. Lesbeth is our sister.”

“And that leaves Cheiso,” William grunted. “Very well.”

Robert bowed his head, then lifted his eyes. “You need not witness the rest. It may take some time.”

William frowned, but nodded. “If he confesses, I’ll want to hear it. Do not kill him too quickly.”

Robert smiled grimly. “The man who betrayed Lesbeth shall not die easily.”

William’s steps through the dungeon were slow ones. The vague fear that had lived in him for months was deepening, and at last it was beginning to take sharper form.

His reign had known border squabbles and provincial uprisings, but it had escaped real war. On the surface, this affair with Saltmark seemed another such petty dispute, yet William felt as if he and the empire were balanced on the tip of a needle. His enemies were striking somehow into his very house—first Muriele and then Lesbeth. They were laughing at him, the impotent king of the most powerful empire in the world.

And while Robert spun dark webs to snare their troubles, William did nothing. Maybe Robert ought to be king.

William paused, suddenly realizing that his steps had not taken him nearer the stairway that led to the palace, but rather, deeper into the dungeons. Torches still flickered here, clouding the dank air with scorched oil, but the passage faded into darkness. He stood there a moment, peering into it. How many years since he had been that way? Twenty?

Yes, since the day his father first showed him what lay in the deepest dungeon of Eslen castle. He had never returned.

He knew a moment of panic, and checked himself from fleeing back up into the light. Then, with something at least pretending to be resolve, he continued on a bit, until he came to a small chamber that was not a cell, but that did have a small wooden door. Through it, William heard a faint, sweet music, a not-quite-familiar tune played on the strings of a theorbo. The key was minor and sad, with small trills like birdsong and full chords that reminded of the sea.

Hesitating, he waited for a break in the music, but the melody never quite seemed to find its end, teasing the ear with promise of closure but then wafting on like a capricious zephyr.

Finally, remembering who was king, he rapped on the wooden surface.

For long moments, nothing happened, but then the music stopped in midphrase, and the door swung inward, silently, on well-oiled hinges, and in the orange light a narrow wedge of ghost-pale face appeared. Eyes of milky white looked upon no world William knew, but the ancient Sefry smiled as if at a secret joke.

“Your Majesty,” he murmured, in a slight voice. “It has been many years.”

“How—?” William faltered again. How could those unsighted eyes know him?

“I know it is you,” the Sefry said, “because the Kept has been whispering for you. You were bound to come.”

Corpse fingers tickled William’s spine. The dead are speaking my name. He remembered that day in his chambers, the day Lesbeth returned. The day he’d first learned about Saltmark from Robert.

“You will want to speak to him,” the old one said.

“I don’t remember your name, sir,” William said.

The Sefry smiled, to reveal teeth still white but worn nearly to the gums. “I was never named, my liege. Those marked to keep the key are never named. You may call me Keeper.” He turned, and his silk robe shifted and pulled over what might have been a frame of bone. “I will fetch my key.”

He vanished into the darkness of his abode, and reappeared a moment later with an iron key gripped in his white fingers. In the other hand he carried a lantern.

“If you would but light this, Your Majesty,” he said. “Fire and I are not friendly.”

William took a torch from the wall and got the wick going.

“How long have you been down here?” William asked. “My father said you were the Keeper in his father’s time.” How long do Sefry live?

“I came with the first of the Dares,” the withered creature said, starting down the hall. “Your ancestors did not trust my predecessor, since he was a servant of the Reiksbaurgs.” He hissed a small laugh. “A wasted fear.”

“What do you mean?”

“That Keeper no more served the Reiksbaurgs than I serve you, my liege. My task is older by far than any line that ever sat this throne.”

“You serve the throne itself, then, without regard for who sits it?”

The Sefry’s soft footsteps scraped ten times on stone before he softly answered. “I serve this place and this land, without regard for thrones at all.”

They continued in silence, down a narrow stair that cut through stone in which the black bones of unknown beasts could be seen now and then—here a rib cage, there the empty eyes of a flat and alien skull. It was as if the stone had melted and flowed around them.

“These bones in the rock,” William asked. “Are they monsters imprisoned by my ancestress, or some older Skasloi sorcery?”

“There are sorceries more ancient than the Skasloi,” the Keeper murmured. “The world is very old.”

William imagined his own skull, gazing emptily from the stone across unimaginable gulfs of time. He felt suddenly dizzy, as if suspended over a great pit.

“We are below Eslen, now,” the Sefry informed him. “We are in all that remains of Ulheqelesh.”

“Do not speak that name,” William said, trying to control his breathing. Despite the narrowness of the stair, his strange vertigo persisted.

The Sefry shook his head. “Of all names that might be spoken here, that is the least powerful. Your ancestress destroyed not only the form of the citadel, but the very soul of it. The name is only a sound.”

“A dread sound.”

“I will not speak it again, if it bothers you,” the Sefry promised diffidently.

They continued without speaking, but the way was no longer silent. Along with the scraping of their shoes on the stone there was a hissing, a whispering. William could not make out the words, if indeed there were words, if it were not some movement of air or water in the deeps of the place. And as he drew nearer their destination, it began to sound familiar.

Was the old man right? Was the Kept calling his name? The words lisped, as if from some creature with no lips, Hriiyah. Hriiyah Darrrr …

“Why are his guardians never named?” William asked, to shut the voice from his head.

“You feel why, I think. Names give him a little power. Never fear. He is feeble, and what strength he has I will check.”

“You’re certain?”

“It is my only duty, Sire. Your grandfather did come here often, your father, as well. They trusted me.”

“Very well.” He stopped, staring at the door that appeared before them. It was iron, but despite the damp no rust marred its surface. In the lamplight it was black, and the curling characters that grooved its surface were blacker still. A faint smell hung in the air, a bit like burning resin.

The Keeper approached the door and placed his key in one of two locks. But he paused.

“You need not do this, Sire,” the Sefry said. “You may always turn back.”

He thinks me weaker than my father and grandfather, William thought, ashamed. He senses a lack of will.

“I think I must continue,” he said.

“Then it needs the other key.”

William nodded and reached beneath his doublet to the chain that hung there, and extracted the key he had worn since taking the throne, the key that every king of Crotheny had worn since the days of the elder Cavarum. William himself normally didn’t wear it; its weight felt cold against his breast, and most days it remained in a coffer near his bed. He had put it on that morning before descending to the dungeons.

Like the door it fitted, the key was black metal, and like the door, it seemed impervious to rust and all other marks of time’s scythe.

He placed the key in the lock and turned it. There was hardly any sound, just the faintest of snicks from somewhere within the great portal.

I am king, William thought. This is my prerogative. I am not afraid.

He grasped the handle of the door and tugged, and felt the amazing mass of it. Yet despite its inertia, it moved, almost as if it was the touch of his hand rather than the strength of his arm that moved it.

The voice grew louder and broke into a weird, low sound that was perhaps a laugh.

“And now, Sire, you must extinguish the lantern,” the Keeper said, “before we open the inner door. Light has no place there.”

“I remember. You can guide me?”

“That is my task, Sire. I am not yet too infirm for it.”

William snuffed the lantern, and black welled up from the dark heart of the world. He felt the press of ancient bones all around him, as if in the darkness the stone were flowing, creeping closer to take him in.

A moment later, he heard the sound of metal sliding, and the odor strengthened and bittered. He had smelled something like it once in his own sweat, just after an unexpected bee-sting.

“Qexqaneh,” the Sefry said, in the loudest voice William had yet heard him use. “Qexqanehilhidhitholuh, uleqedhinikhu.”

“Of course,” a voice burred, so close and familiar it made William jump. “Of course. There you are, Emperor of Crotheny. There you are, my sweet lord.”

The tone was not mocking, nor were the words, quite. Nevertheless, William felt mocked.

“I am emperor,” he said, with forced confidence. “Speak to me accordingly.”

“A mayfly emperor, who will live hardly more than two beats of my heart,” the Kept replied.

“Not if I have your heart stopped,” William said.

Motion then, a sound like scales scraping against stone, and more airy laughter. “Can you, could you? I would weep black garnet tears for you, Prince of Least. I would bleed white gold and shit you diamonds.” A rasping cough followed. “No, little king,” the Kept continued. “No, no. Those are not the rules of our game. Your bitch ancestress saw to that. Go back to your sunlit halls and cuddle ’round your fear. Forget me and dream away your life.”

“Qexqaneh,” the Keeper said firmly. “You are commanded.”

The Kept snarled, and sultry rage infused his voice. “My name. Older than your race, my name, and you use it like a rag to wipe up the run from your bowels.”

William tightened his lips. “Qexqaneh,” he said. “By your name, answer me.”

The Kept’s anger vanished as quickly as it came, and now he whispered. “Oh, little king, gladly. The answers shall give me joy,” he said.

“And answer truthfully.”

“I must, ever since that red-tressed whore that began your line shackled me. Surely you know that.”

“It is so, Sire,” the Keeper agreed. “But he may answer elusively. You must sift his words.”

William nodded. “Qexqaneh, can you see the future?”

“Could I see the future, I would not be in this place, foolish manling. But I can see the inevitable, which is something else again.”

“Is my kingdom bound for war?”

“Hmm? A tide of blood is coming. A thousand seasons of woe. Swords will lap their fill and more.”

Dread gripped William, but not surprise.

“Can I prevent it?” he asked, not really hoping. “Can it be stopped?”

“You can own death or it can own you,” the Kept said. “There are no other choices.”

“Do you mean by that that I should prosecute this war? Attack Saltmark, or Hansa itself ?”

“Little does that matter. Would you own death, little king? Would you keep it near your heart and be its friend? Will you feed it your family, your nation, your pitiful human soul? I can tell you how. You can be immortal, King. You can be like me, the last of your kind. Eternal. But unlike me, there will be none to prison you.”

“The last of my kind?” This was confusing talk. “The last Dare?”

“Oh, yes. And the last Reiksbaurg, and the last de Liery— the last of your pitiful race, manling. Your first queen killed you all. It has been a slow death, a sleepy death, but it is awake now. You cannot stop it. But you can be it.”

“I don’t understand. No war can kill everyone. That’s what you are saying, is it, Qexqaneh? That only one man will survive the slaughter? What nonsense is this?” He looked at the Keeper. “You are certain he cannot lie?”

“He cannot knowingly lie, no. But he can twist the truth into rings,” the Keeper replied.

“I can tell you,” Qexqaneh murmured silkily. “You can be the one. You can put out the lights of this world and start a new one.”

“You’re mad.”

“Someone will do it, little king. The Nettle-man is already arising, you know. The rot has spread deep, and maggots crawl up. Even here I smell the putrescence. You can be the one. You can wear the night raiment and wave the scepter of corruption.”

“Be clear. Do you really imply the end of the world is at hand?”

“Of course not. But the end of your house, your kingdom, your foul little race and all its issue—that is indeed on time’s nearest horizon.”

“And one man shall cause this?”

“No, no. What are those things on the side of your head? Does nothing you hear reach your brain? One shall benefit from it.”

“At what cost?” William asked skeptically. “Other than the cost of being like you?”

“The cost is light. Your wife. Your daughters.”

“What?”

“They will die anyway. You might as well profit from their slaughter.”

“Enough!” William roared. He turned to leave, then suddenly spun on his heel.

“Someone attempted to murder my wife. Was this why? This tainted prophecy of a future even you admit you cannot truly see?”

“Did I admit that?”

“You did. Answer me, Qexqaneh. This prophecy of yours. Do others know it?”

The Kept panted for a few moments, and the air seemed to warm. “When you wretched slave beasts stood on the bones of my kin,” he grated at last, “when you burned every beautiful thing and believed that you—you lowly worms—finally owned the world, I told you then what would happen. My words began the new era, this age you name Everon. They are remembered in many places.”

“So the attempt on my wife?”

“I do not know. Coincidences happen, and your race is fond of murder. It’s what made you such entertaining slaves. But she will die, and your daughters, too.”

“You do not know that,” William said. “You cannot. You speak only to deceive me.”

“As you wish it, so it is,” Qexqaneh said.

“Enough of this. I was mistaken to come here.”

“Yes,” Qexqaneh agreed. “Yes, you were. You do not have the iron in you that your ancestors did. They would not have hesitated. Good-bye, mayfly.”

William left then, returning to the halls above, but laughter walked behind him like a thousand-legged worm. He did not sleep that night, but went to Alis Berrye.

He had her room lit with tapers, and she played on the lute and sang lighthearted songs until the sun rose.

10 Lost

Aspar white opened his eyes to a vaulted stone ceiling and a distant, singsong litany. Fever crawled like centipedes beneath his skin, and when he tried to move, his limbs felt like rotting fern fronds.

He lay still, listening to the strange song and to his old-man breath, rasping, puzzling at the air above him, interrogating his mute memories.

He was better than he had been, he remembered that. He’d been fevered, his mind fettered with pain.

What had happened? Where was he now?

With an effort, he turned his head from side to side. He lay on a hard wooden bed with stone walls around him on three sides, a low curved ceiling above. It was almost like a tomb, except a slit of a window in the wall above his head let in air from the outside. It smelled like late spring. Looking over his feet, he saw the niche opened into a much larger space—the hall of a castle or, judging by the weird language of the singing, a church.

By inches he tried to sit up. His legs throbbed with agony, but an inspection showed them both still there, to his relief. But by the time he had lifted his head halfway to sitting, it was spinning so badly he surrendered to a supine position. He fought down his gorge, and sweat broke out thickly on his brow.

It was a while before he could continue his inspection. When he did, he found that beneath the sheet he was naked except for bandages. His weapons, armor, and clothes were nowhere to be seen. The bandages suggested someone was well disposed toward him, but that was anything but certain.

Where was he? He tracked along his memory like a hound on a faint trail, pausing at landmarks. He’d come down from the mountains that he knew, clinging to Ogre’s back. He remembered half falling his way down a talus slope and a plummet into a ravine. At some point, he’d fallen off the beast and couldn’t find him again. He had flashes of days clinging to a tree trunk floating down a river, then endless stumbling through hill country that grew steadily flatter. And he remembered something following him, always just behind, making a game of it.

After that, memory failed completely.

He walked backwards up the trail in his mind, back into the mountains, climbing a black tangle of boughs, a song repeating endlessly in his head.

He remembered with sickening suddenness the thing in the living barrow. He is waking. It’s all true.

“Winna!” he croaked. The Briar King be damned. The world be damned. Fend had Winna. First Qerla, now Winna.

He heaved his legs over the side of the cot, ignoring the great waves of agony. Something in his head whirled like a child’s top, but he nevertheless managed to stand. Two steps brought him to the upward-curving wall, and he used it for support to make his way out of the niche.

A black flash passed behind his eyes, and then he was in the larger space, an enormous cave, like a Sefry rewn, but regular, curving high, high above.

No, not a cave. That was stupid. He was inside a building …

His legs weren’t under him anymore. The stone floor abruptly explained to him how foolish he had been to try to walk. Cursing it, he settled for crawling.

A bell tolled somewhere, and the singing stopped. A few moments later, he heard a gasp nearby.

“Gentle saints!” a man’s voice exclaimed. “Sir, you should still be abed.”

Aspar squinted up to see a man in the black habit of a churchman.

“Winna,” Aspar explained, through gritted teeth. Then he fainted.

When he came around the next time, it was to a familiar face.

“Huh,” Aspar grunted.

“I spent a lot of time and effort dragging you here,” Stephen Darige said. The young man was sitting on a stool a few feet away. “I’d appreciate it if you’d not make that labor wasted by killing yourself now.”

“Where am I?” Aspar asked.

“The monastery d’Ef, of course.”

“D’Ef ?” Aspar grunted. “More than sixty leagues?”

“Sixty leagues from where? What happened to you, Holter White?”

“And you found me?” Aspar grunted skeptically.

“Yes.”

He tried to sit up again. “Darige,” he said, “I have to go.”

“You can’t,” Stephen said, placing a hand on his arm. “You’re better than you were, but you’re still badly wounded. You’ll die before you get half a league, and whatever it is you need so badly to do will no more get done than if you rest here a while.”

“That’s sceat. I’m hurt, but not that bad.”

“Holter, if I hadn’t found you, you would be dead, right now. If I hadn’t found you near a monastery where the healing sacaum are known, you would still be dead or at the very least you would have lost your legs. There are three sorts of poison still trying to kill you, and the only thing keeping them down are the treatments you get here.”

Aspar stared into the young man’s eyes, considering. “How long, then,” he snarled, “before I can leave?”

“Fifteen, twenty days.”

“That’s too long.”

Stephen’s face went grim and he leaned forward. “What did you find out there?” he asked in a low voice. “What did this to you?” He paused. “When I discovered you, there was some sort of beast with glowing eyes following you.”

It’s not what I found, Aspar thought bleakly. It’s what I lost. But he looked Stephen in the eye again. He had to tell someone, didn’t he?

“That was the greffyn,” he grunted. “It was as Sir Symon told us. I saw it all. The dead, the sacrifices at the sedos. The greffyn. The Briar King. I saw it all.”

“The Briar King?”

“I saw him. I don’t think he’s fully awake yet, but he was stirring. I felt that.”

“But who … what is he?”

“I don’t know,” Aspar said. “Grim take me, I don’t know. But I wish I had never seen him.”

“But he did this to you?”

“A man named Fend did some of it. His men shot me up with arrows. The greffyn did more.” He rubbed his head. “Darige, at the very least I must get word to the other holters, as soon as possible. And to the king. Can you arrange that?”

“Yes,” Stephen said, but Aspar thought he detected a hesitation.

“This man that wounded me—Fend. He took captive a friend of mine. I need to find Fend.”

“You will,” Stephen said softly. “But not now. Even if you found him—in this state, could you fight him?”

“No,” Aspar said reluctantly. If Fend was going to kill Winna, she was dead. If he had some reason to keep her alive, she was likely to remain that way for a while. He winced at an image of her, spiked to a tree, her entrails pulled out and—

No. She’s still alive. She must be.

The boy was right. He was letting his feelings get in the way of his sense.

Suddenly, something occurred to him.

“You saw the greffyn,” Aspar said. “Up close.”

Stephen nodded. “If that’s what it was. It was dark, but it had luminescent eyes and a beak like a bird’s.”

“Werlic. Yah. But you didn’t get sick? It didn’t attack you?”

“No, that was strange. It acted cross, sort of, and then left. I don’t know why. It could have killed me with a single blow, I’m sure.”

“It could have killed you with its breath,” Aspar corrected. “I fell down from merely meeting its gaze. I know one boy died just of touching a corpse that died of touching the monster. And yet you never even got a stomachache?”

Stephen frowned. “I’d just walked the faneway of Dec-manus. Perhaps the saint protected me.”

Aspar nodded. There was more than one thing he didn’t understand about the greffyn, anyway. It could have killed Aspar any number of times, but it hadn’t. “Can you take that letter for me?”

“I can find someone to do it,” Stephen said. “Right now I have duties.”

“Take it when you can, then. I don’t trust anyone else here.”

“You trust me?”

“Yah. Don’t take it too close to heart. I don’t know anyone else here. You I know a little.” He paused. “Don’t take this for much either—but, ah … thanks.”

The young priest tried not to smile. “I owed you that,” he replied. His face grew more serious. “I’ve something else to ask you. When I found you, you had this.”

Stephen reached into a leather pouch and produced the engraved horn. A shudder ran through Aspar’s limbs when he saw it.

“Yah,” he allowed.

“Where did you find it?”

“I don’t know. There’s a space I don’t remember, after I saw the Briar King. After, I had it with me. You know what it is?”

“No. But the language on it is very old.”

“What does it say?”

“I don’t know.” The priest sounded troubled. “But I intend to find out. May I borrow it for a while?”

“Yah. I’ve no use for the damned thing.”

Stephen nodded and started to rise. “Oh, another thing,” he said. “Your horses showed up a day after I brought you here. No one can get near them, of course, but they have plenty of pasture. They’ll be left alone until you recover.”

Aspar’s throat caught, and for an instant he had a terrible fear he might cry in front of the boy. At least he hadn’t lost Ogre and Angel. They’d followed him, the damned stupid, loyal beasts, even with a greffyn behind them.

“I’ll be back when my duties are done,” Stephen assured him.

“Don’t trouble yourself,” Aspar said gruffly. “I don’t need a nursemaid.”

“Actually, you do,” Stephen replied.

Aspar grunted and closed his eyes. He heard Stephen’s footsteps recede.

I’ll find you, Winna. Or I’ll avenge you, he promised.

Fratrex Pell smiled at Stephen as he entered his spare chamber.

“I am most pleased,” he said, tapping the newest sheaf of translations. “No one else has managed even a phrase of this lamina. The saints must have blessed you well.”

“They did, Fratrex,” Stephen replied. “The language itself was not difficult—a dialect of the elder Cavarum.”

“Then why the difficulty?”

“It was written backwards.”

The fratrex blinked, then laughed. “Backwards?”

“Each word, front to back.”

“What scribe would do such a thing?”

Stephen remembered the disturbing content of the lamina. “A scribe who did not want his work widely read, I should say.” He struggled for his next words. “Fratrex, I know we’ve discussed this before, but I feel I must say again that my heart tells me these things are best left encrypted.”

“Knowledge belongs to the church,” the fratrex said gently. “All knowledge. Let’s have an end to your questioning, Brother Stephen, once and for all. I admire your persistence, but it is ill placed.”

Stephen nodded. “Yes, Fratrex.”

“Now, this other thing.” He held up a vellum scroll. “I’m puzzled. I didn’t ask you to translate this.”

“No, Fratrex, but in light of what the holter told us, I thought it pertinent to see what the scriftorium might hold concerning the Briar King and greffyns.”

“I see. I assume you’re doing this in spare time?”

“At night, Fratrex, in the meditation hour.”

“The hour is called that for a reason, Brother Stephen. You should meditate.”

“Yes, Fratrex. But I think this might be important.”

The fratrex sighed and pushed the scrifti back. “The holter was mad with fever when you brought him here, at the quay awaiting Saint Farsinth’s boat. Whatever hallucinations he may have had aren’t likely to be relevant to anything.”

“He was badly hurt,” Stephen admitted. “And yet I know this man, somewhat. He is deeply pragmatic and not given to flights of fancy. When last I saw him, he thought greffyns and Briar Kings no more than children’s fantasy. Now he is convinced he has seen them both.”

“We often mock those things we believe most deeply,” the fratrex said, “especially those things we do not wish to believe. There is much separation between the waking mind and the mind of madness.”

“Yes, Fratrex. But as you see, in the Tafles Taceis, the Book of Murmurs, there is a passage copied from an unnamed source in old high Cavari. In it, mention is made of the gorgos gripon, the ‘bent-nosed terror.’ They are described as the ‘hounds of the horned lord,’ and it is further said that their glance is fatal.”

“I can read, you know,” the fratrex said. “The Tafles Taceis is an enumeration of pagan follies. It goes on to say in the annotation that this was most likely a term used to describe the personal guard of the witch-king Bhragnos, yes? Vicious killers known for their beaked helms?”

“It does say that,” Stephen allowed. “And yet that annotation was written five hundred years after the original passage.”

“By a learned member of the church.”

“But, Fratrex, I saw the beast.”

“You saw a beast, certainly. Lions have been known to come out of the hills, on occasion.”

“I do not think this was a lion, Fratrex.”

“Have you ever seen a lion, in the dead of night?”

“I have never seen a lion at all, Eminence.”

“Just so. If what you saw was one of these beasts, why did

it not slay you? Why were you not poisoned by its mere presence? You should have been, if we take the holter’s ravings seriously.”

“I cannot answer that, Fratrex.”

“I feel this inquiry of yours is a waste of our time.”

“Is it your wish I no longer pursue the matter?”

The fratrex shrugged. “So long as it does not interfere with the tasks expected of you, you may pursue whatever you wish. But to my mind, you’re chasing phantasms.”

“Thank you for your opinion, Fratrex,” Stephen said, bowing.

Why didn’t I mention the horn? Stephen wondered, as he left the fratrex’s presence. The horn was something of a problem. The script on it was one he had seen only twice. It was a secret script used during the reign of the Black Jester. It was decipherable only because of a single scrift—written on human skin—which was accompanied by a parallel inscription in the Vadhiian script.

The letters were unlike any other writing known to the church, and heretofore Stephen had always assumed that it had been invented by the scribes who used it. And yet here it was again, this time recording something in a language so strange Stephen hadn’t the faintest inkling what it might say. The language resembled no tongue he had ever seen or heard.

No human tongue, rather. But the way the words were formed resembled the tiny fragments of the Skasloi language he had seen glossed in elder Cavarum texts.

What had the holter found?

Pursing his lips, Stephen returned to the scriftorium.

A closer inspection of the Book of Murmurs proved frustrating. In the back of his mind, he’d thought that perhaps horned lord might be better translated as lord with horns, but the word in question quite plainly referred to something like antlers, not a sounding instrument made of horn. He sat for a while, staring glumly at the text, wishing he had the original sources the unknown author had drawn upon.

His mind whirred up various roads that went nowhere. He thumbed through the Tome of Relics, hoping to find some religious icon that matched the horn’s description, though without much hope. If the language was really a Skasloi dialect, it probably predated the triumph of the saints over the old gods.

As he was putting the book away, memory intruded, of an evening not long past, when Aspar White had frightened him with the threat of Haergrim the Raver. He remembered his own fanciful connection to his grandfather’s mention of Saint Horn the Damned, and on impulse he tracked down a volume of obscure and false saints peculiar to eastern Crotheny. It didn’t take him long to find it. Since walking the fanes, Stephen found that the scriftorium had become almost like an extension of his own mind and fingers; simply thinking of a subject led him quickly to the appropriate shelves.

The book was a recent one, written by a scholar from the Midenlands, and though its organization was somewhat archaic, he soon found the reference he was seeking. He thumbed to the page and began to read.

Stephen paused at that, but read on. What followed, however, was mostly a recitation of other names for the Raver, one of which was indeed Saint Horn the Damned, for it was said he had drawn the curse of the old gods upon himself by betraying them.

But Stephen kept returning to the reference to the Wicker Lord, and when he was done, searched for an entry concerning him. To his disappointment, the entry was slim.

Excited, Stephen pored through similar sources, and found some of the children’s songs mentioned, but nothing that cast more light on the current situation.

The hour was late, and he alone remained in the scriftorium. Sleep tugged at the corners of his eyes, and he was near concluding that he had found all he was going to. One scrift remained, and it wasn’t promising, being little more than a book of children’s tales, but as he wearily unscrolled it, a small illustration caught his eye. It was of a manlike creature made up of leaves and vines, with limbs spreading from his head like antlers. In one hand, he gripped a small horn. It captioned a song he had already seen twice, a circle dance for children.

As he was about to put it away, his fingers brushed the margins, and he felt something—an imprint in the vellum. Intrigued, he examined it more closely.

It looked as if someone had written a note on another vellum or piece of paper, likely with a lead stylus, and the impression had gone through. Eagerly, he found a piece of charcoal and lightly rubbed the paper, as he had the stone markers on the Vio Caldatum, and faint characters emerged. When he was done, he sat staring at the results.

The characters were the same as those inscribed on Aspar’s horn, to the letter. Following it was a single word in the king’s tongue.

Find.

“I’d stay away from her, if I were you,” Brother Ehan remarked the next day as Stephen sidled nearer Angel.

“I’ve ridden Angel before,” Stephen said. “Haven’t I, girl?”

The mare looked dubious.

“Well, she may not be as crazy as the other, but she’s learned some wildness.”

“Shh. Angel.” He proffered the mare an apple. She sniffed suspiciously and her eyes rolled, but she took a step or two closer.

“That’s it, good girl. Come here.”

“I don’t see what the point is, anyway,” Ehan said.

“The point is,” Stephen said softly, “I want to ride her.”

“Why?”

“Because it would take too long to walk where I want to go.”

“What in Saint Rooster’s name are you talking about?”

The mare was almost close enough to touch now. Her flanks were trembling as she took another step, ducked her head, pulled it back up, and gently took the apple.

“That’s fine, girl,” Stephen said. “Remember this?” He drew a bridle from behind his back.

Angel eyed the thing, but seemed almost calmed by its presence. Stephen lay it against the side of her head, letting her get a good whiff of him and it, then gently started putting it on her. She didn’t object.

“That’s my sweetheart,” Stephen cooed.

“Tell me where you’re going,” Ehan demanded. “We’re supposed to be tending the orchard after this.”

“I know. If I’m missed, I don’t expect you to lie for me. I’m not going to tell you where I’m going for the same reason.”

Ehan chewed his lip and spat. “You’ll be back by vespers?”

“Or not at all,” Stephen assured him. “All right, girl, are you ready?”

Angel answered by not throwing him once he’d gingerly climbed on her back. She stamped a little skittishly, but then took the bridle. Stephen switched her into a brisk trot, which wasn’t all that pleasant bareback, for either party.

“Sorry, girl,” he said, “I couldn’t have brought a saddle out here without being noticed.”

It had taken him almost two days to drag Aspar White from where he had found him to the monastery, but in fact the distance was only about a league. Unencumbered and mounted, he covered the distance in under two bells. His memory was as perfect at mental mapmaking as in every other thing since his fanewalk, so he found the spot without much trouble.

He surveyed the scene, frowning, and dismounted. Dead leaves littered the ground, fallen from a tree that might have been lightning struck but there was no mark of lightning on it. Nevertheless it was dead, and so was a trail of ferns and undergrowth that wound into the clearing, stopped short of the remains of his fire, then continued off in a different direction. The point where the trail turned was exactly where he remembered the beaked creature standing.

“No lion did this, Angel,” he murmured. Not that he had ever accepted the fratrex’s rationalization.

He was still studying the unnatural trail when he heard voices in the distance.

Stephen had had plenty enough experience with strangers in the forest for one lifetime, so he began quietly leading Angel away. Remembering Aspar’s story, he went up a ridge where a line of thicker growth hid him from the valley. He tethered the mare on the other side of the ridge, then crept down where he could have a view of the place he’d found As-par White.

After perhaps half a bell, eight mounted men came into view. Stephen felt a cold shock when he saw who they were.

It was Desmond Spendlove and his men. They had their cowls down, and Stephen recognized several of them: the hulking Brother Lewes, Brothers Aligern, Topan, and Seigereik—the four nastiest of the bunch, according to Ehan. The others he had seen but couldn’t name. They were eight in all.

They stopped and examined the campfire and dead vegetation.

“What is it up to?” Lewes grunted.

Spendlove shook his head. “I don’t know. It was chasing someone. Maybe that holter Fend told us about.”

“Right. Then where is he?”

“Someone dragged his body out,” Seigereik said, examining the ground. “That way.”

“D’Ef is a league that way,” Spendlove mused. “How interesting.”

“But the greffyn didn’t follow,” Seigereik said.

“It probably left after killing its prey.”

“Are we to take up its trail again, then?”

Spendlove shook his head. “No. We’ve work to do in the west.”

“Ah. The queen?”

“The changeling in her guard bungled her killing. Now it’s our turn. We’re to meet with Fend in Loiyes.” He looked again at the greffyn’s trail. “But first I think we’d better stop in at d’Ef, to learn more about what happened here.”

“With the allies Fend has, he should be able to handle this on his own,” Topan said, his ice-blue gaze needling casually through the surrounding forest.

“Fend can fail, just like the changeling. They should have sent us to begin with, but ours isn’t to question.”

“Still, it could take us a month to get there,” Topan argued. “What if we go all that way for nothing?”

“There are other matters to tidy,” Spendlove assured him. “Besides, the country air will do you good.”

“I’ve had too much of that lately.”

“We do what we do,” Spendlove replied. “If you don’t want to do it anymore, you know the way out.” He started for his horse.

As they rode off, Stephen didn’t dare breathe. He lay there, teeth clenched, realizing that he had taken Aspar White to perhaps the most dangerous place imaginable.

11 The Womb of Mefitis

Anne dreamed of the light of the sun on the grassy Sleeve, of the furnace of sunset on the rinns, of the simple dance of a candle flame. She wrapped herself in the memory of color and shadow and hoped she wouldn’t forget the way the wind in the leaves of the tall elms along the canals shivered the light into pieces of phay gold. Not the way she had forgotten Roderick’s face.

They won’t let me go mad, she thought. They won’t leave me down here for a nineday.

But maybe they already had. Maybe she had been here for a month. A year. Maybe her hair had turned gray and Roderick was married. A father dead of old age. Maybe her madness was in clinging to hope, in pretending she hadn’t been here for very long at all.

She tried to re-create time by counting heartbeats or tapping her fingers. She tried to measure it by her periods of hunger, and how much food and water remained. She preferred to keep her eyes shut rather than open. With them shut, she could pretend things were as they ought to be, that she was in her bed, trying to sleep.

Of course, she had mostly lost the difference between waking and sleeping.

Her only consolation was that she had begun to hate the darkness. Not to fear it, as she first had, or capitulate to it as Sister Secula surely meant her to.

No, she loathed it. She plotted against it, imagining how she might strike a light in its ugly belly and kill it. She searched through the meager supplies, hoping to find some small piece of steel, something that would make a spark against stone, but there was nothing. Of course there wasn’t. How many girls had they put down here, over the centuries? How many must have thought of the same thing?

“But I’m not another girl,” Anne muttered, listening as the sound of her voice filled the place. “I’m a daughter of the house Dare.”

And so, with great determination, she stared at nothingness and imagined a single point of light, banishing every other thought. If she couldn’t break the darkness in reality, she could at least do so in her heart. She tried, and maybe she slept, and she tried again. She took the idea of light, her memories of it, and squeezed them together between her eyes, willing it to be real with every fiber of her being.

And suddenly it was there—a spark, the tiniest of points, no larger than a pinprick.

“Saints!” she gasped, and it vanished.

She wept for a little while, dried her eyes, and with greater determination than before, began again.

The next time the spark appeared, she held it, nurtured it, fed it all of the membrance of light she could find, and slowly, hesitantly, beautifully it grew. It grew to the size of an acorn, then as large as a hand, and it had color in it, and spread like a morning glory opening its petals. She could see things now, but not what she had expected. No walls and floor of stone, but instead the rough bark of an oak, twining vines, a spray of yellow flowers—as if the light was really a hole through the wall of a dark room, opening into a garden.

But it wasn’t a hole; it was a sphere, and it pushed away the darkness until there was none left and she stood not in a cave, but in a brightly lit forest glade.

She looked down and could not see her shadow, and with a skip of her heart knew where she was. She also knew her madness must be complete.

“You’ve come without your shadow,” a voice said.

It was a woman, but not the same one she had seen before, that day on Tom Woth. This one had unbound hair of fine chestnut and a mask carved of bone polished very smooth. Its features were fine and lifelike, and her mouth was not covered by it. She wore a dress of golden brown silk embroidered with interlaced braids and knots of ram-headed serpents and oak leaves.

“I didn’t mean to come here at all,” Anne told her.

“But you did. In Eslen you made a pact with Cer. It took you to the Coven Saint Cer and now it brings you here.” She paused. “I wonder what that means?”

For some reason, that simple question frightened Anne more than the darkness had.

“Don’t you know? Aren’t you a saint? Who are you, and where is the other woman, the one with the golden hair?”

The woman smiled wistfully. “My sister? Near, I’m sure. As for me, I don’t know who I am, anymore,” she said. “I’m waiting to know. Like you.”

“I know who I am. I’m Anne Dare.”

“You know a name, that’s all. Everything else is a guess or an illusion.”

“I don’t understand you.”

The woman shrugged. “It’s not important. What do you want?”

“What do I want?”

“You came here for something.”

Anne hesitated. “I want out of the cave, out of the womb of Saint Mefitis.”

“Easily done. Leave it.”

“There’s a way out?”

“Yes. You found one way already, but there is another. Is that all?”

Anne considered that carefully for a moment. She was probably mad, but if she wasn’t …

If she wasn’t, she would do better this time than she had the last.

“No,” she said firmly. “When your sister abducted me she said some things. I thought they were nonsense, or that I was having a dream. Praifec Hespero thought so, too, when I told him.”

“And now?”

“I think she was real, and I want to understand what she said.”

The woman’s lips curved in a smile. “She told you that there must be a queen in Eslen when he comes.”

“Yes. But why, and who is ‘he’? And why tell me?”

“I’m sure you asked those questions of my sister.”

“Yes, and she answered with nonsense. I was scared then, too scared to demand better answers. Now I want them.”

“You can’t always have the things you want.”

“But you—she—wants me to do something. Everyone wants me to do something. Act one way instead of another, go to a coven, promise this or that. Well, here I am! If you want something from me, explain it or stay out of my dreams!”

“You came here this time, Anne, of your own free will.” The masked woman sighed. “Ask your questions. I’ll try to be more helpful than my sister. But you must understand, Anne, that we are far less masters of ourselves than you are, however you might feel. A dog cannot speak like a man and a cloud may not sound like a lute. The dog can bark, the cloud can thunder. It is how they are made.”

Anne pursed her lips. “Your sister said that Crotheny must not fall, and that there must be a queen in Eslen when your mysterious ‘he’ comes. At the very moment she told me that, my mother the queen was nearly killed. Did she know about that?”

“She knew.”

“Why didn’t she tell me?”

“What good would it have done? The attempt on your mother was over before you returned to Eslen. My sister told you what you needed to know.”

“She didn’t tell me anything. Who is this man who is coming? Why must there be a queen? And mostly—mostly— what must I do?”

“You’ll know when the time comes, if you only remember what she said. There must be a queen. Not the wife of a king, you understand, but a queen paramount.”

Anne’s jaw dropped. “No. No, I didn’t understand that at all. But still—”

“You must see that there is a queen, Anne.”

“You mean become one?”

The woman shrugged. “That would be one way.”

“Yes, an impossible one. My father and mother and brother and all of my sisters would have to be dead … before …”

For a moment she couldn’t go on.

“Is that it?” she asked, feeling cold. “Is that what’s going to happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t tell me that! Tell me something real.”

The woman cocked her head to the side. “We only see need, Anne. Like a good cook, I know when the roast needs more salt or a bay leaf, whether it needs to stay on the spit for another bell or not.”

“Crotheny is not a roast.”

“No. Nor is the world. Perhaps I am more like a chirgeon, then. I see a man so wounded and infected that parts of him have begun to rot, and the worms, growing bolder, begin to devour what is left. I feel his pain and disease, and know what salves he needs, where fire needs to be put to the wound, and when.”

“Crotheny isn’t rotting.”

The woman shook her head. “It is very nearly dead.”

Anne slashed the back of her hand in the woman’s direction. “You’re a cloud, you’re a chirgeon. Crotheny is a roast, it’s a wounded man. Speak plain words! You suggest that my country and family are in gravest danger, and that I must be queen or queen-maker, yet here I am in Vitellio, a thousand leagues away! Should I stay or leave? Tell me what to do, and no more nonsense about roasts and invalids.”

“You’re where you are supposed to be, Anne, and I’ve already told you what to do. The rest you must discern for yourself.”

Anne rolled her eyes. “No better. No better. Then answer this straight, if you can. Why me? If you can’t really see the future, why am I needed, and not Fastia, or Mother, for love of the saints?”

The woman turned her back on Anne and walked a few paces. Her back still turned, she sighed. “Because I feel the need for you,” she said. “Because the oaks whisper it, even as the greffyn kills them. And because, of all living women, you are the only one who can come to me like this, unbidden.”

“What?”

“My sister summoned you when you walked widdershins under the sun. I did not summon you—you summoned me.”

“I … how?”

“I told you. You made a pact with Saint Cer. When you send prayers by the dead, there is always a cost, there is always consequence.”

“But I didn’t know.”

The woman uttered a chilling little laugh. “If a blind man walks over the edge of a cliff, does the air ask if he knew what he was doing before it refuses to hold him up? Do the rocks below ask what he did or didn’t know about them before they break his bones?”

“Then Cer has cursed me?”

“She has blessed you. You have walked her strangest faneway. You are touched by her as no other mortal.”

“I never walked any faneway,” Anne said. “Faneways are for priests, not for women.”

A smile drew across the woman’s thin and bloodless lips. “The tomb below Eslen-of-Shadows is a sedos,” she said. “The womb of Saint Mefitis is another, its twin. They are two halves of the same thing. A very short faneway, I suppose, but very difficult to find. You are the only one to walk it in more than a thousand years. You will be the last to walk it for another thousand, perhaps.”

“What does it mean?”

The woman laughed again. “If I knew, I would tell you. But I do know this: It needed to happen. Your prayer to Saint Cer brought you here and set in motion every consequence of that trip. Including this one. As I said, you are where you were meant to be.”

“So I’m to stay in the coven, even if they throw me in the earth to rot? No, I see. They were supposed to throw me down here, because Saint Cer willed it.” She snorted. “What if I choose not to believe you? What if I think you’re some shine-crafting witch, trying to trick me? You come into my dreams and tell me lies and expect I will eat them like gingercake.”

A sudden thought occurred that struck her straight to the middle. “What if you’re a Hanzish shinecrafter? That you and your sister bewitched the knight into trying to murder my mother? Of course, you must be! How stupid of me!”

The implications made her knees buckle. Everyone in Eslen was looking for someone with the power to bewitch a Craftsman and at the very moment it happened Anne had been holding conversation with just such a person.

And she hadn’t told anyone but the praifec, who hadn’t believed her, and now here she was, caught in the grip of sadistic nuns a thousand leagues from anyone she trusted.

Even Austra had made her promise not to run away. Maybe Austra was bewitched, too.

“You’re a liar,” Anne said. “A liar and a witch.”

The woman shook her head, but Anne couldn’t tell if it was a denial. She started to walk off, into the woods.

“No! Come back here and answer me!”

The woman waved her hand, and all was darkness.

“No!” Anne wailed again. But she was back on the cold stone floor of the cave. She pounded the floor with her fists, tears of anger wincing from her eyes.

After calling herself stupid a few hundred times, Anne came to one very certain conclusion: She could not and would not trust Sister Secula to let her out of the caves. The masked woman had told her there was another way out. It was probably a lie, but she remembered now the stories in which caves figured, and indeed there usually was more than one exit.

And so, very carefully, moving very slowly and on all fours like a beast, she crossed the boundary the nuns had warned her not to cross, and passed onto the unknown, uneven floor of the cave.

It was easier than she expected it to be. Each dip and curve in the floor seemed to be somehow where it ought to be, and exploring quickly became more like remembering. It was both frightening and exciting. What if she really had somehow walked a faneway, like a priest? Like Genya Dare and her heroes? What if this strange new sense wasn’t her imagination, but exactly what it seemed to be?

Imagination or not, she grew more and more confident of her way, and stood up. The echo of her footsteps told her when she was in a large gallery or small. A colder feel to the air warned her of a deep cleft in the rock, and the taste of the cave’s breath suggested water. The taste grew stronger as she went along, until finally she could hear a merry trickling. And, after crawling up and down through passages—some almost too small to move through at all—she saw light.

Dim light.

Real light.

Soon the light was bright enough to be painful, and she had to stop to let her eyes regather their strength after so many days of darkness. But finally, when the sun’s rays were no longer daggers, she advanced farther to the mouth of the cave, and for a while she did nothing more than luxuriate in the feel of the light and wind upon her skin. Then she began taking in her surroundings.

The cave opened from a hillside thick in olive, bay, and juniper. Anne reasoned it was the same long ridge that the coven stood upon, but a few careful glances showed the towers nowhere in sight, which meant she must be on the other end of it. She carefully picked her way toward the top until she finally could see the coven, and see as well that it was quite a distance away. Satisfied that she knew where she was, Anne made her way back down and began to explore, being careful to fix the landmarks near the cave firmly in her mind.

The flatter land below the cave was lightly forested, the lines of trees broken often by grassy clearings. It must once have been pasture—probably for the stupid sheep—but she saw no recent signs of grazing.

A little farther on she again heard the trickle of water, and to her delight found a spring-fed pool. A flight of birds darted up from the trees surrounding it, such a bright yellow in color that she exclaimed aloud.

Finishing her survey around the pool, she tested the water and found it cool. She looked around again, until she convinced herself she was quite alone, then stripped out of the smelly habit and eased into the water. It felt wonderful, and after a little swimming she was content to rest in the shallows, submerged to her chin, and close her eyes. The insides of her eyelids shone red, and she tried to forget about her experiences in the womb of Saint Mefitis—and to forget, too, that she had to go back there. Whether the woman of her vision was a liar or not, there was still her promise to Austra, and she would not break that.

She might have dozed, for she came awake certain she had heard something but wasn’t at all sure what it was. Suddenly frightened, she looked quickly around the pool, realizing this wasn’t Eslen, that there could be any number of wild beasts around that she knew nothing of.

But it wasn’t a beast staring at her with wide, dark eyes. It was a man, a tall, young one, in black doublet with brown hose and large-brimmed hat. He had one hand draped on the pommel of a very long sword. He smiled a smile that Anne did not like at all.

12 A Quick Decision

When Brother Spendlove and his men were out of sight, Stephen urged Angel into a walk that angled them away from the direct path that led back to d’Ef. Spendlove had walked the faneway of Mamres, but he had also walked the same faneway that Stephen had. Each person who walked a faneway received different gifts, but it was reasonable to suppose that Spendlove’s senses had been heightened, as well— and prudent to suppose he could hear at least as well as Stephen.

Once Stephen couldn’t make out their voices anymore, he turned Angel to a parallel path back to the monastery and urged her to a gallop.

Riding a running horse with a saddle on a trail was one thing; doing so bareback in the forest was another. Stephen gripped his knees against Angel’s flanks, dug his fists into her mane, and kept his body low. Angel splashed through a stream, stumbled climbing the opposite bank, then recovered. Stephen prayed the mare wouldn’t step into some leaf-hidden hole or den, but he couldn’t afford to spare the poor beast; he knew to his marrow that if he didn’t reach d’Ef before Desmond Spend-love, Aspar White was a dead man.

He swallowed his fear at the breakneck pace and did his best to hold on.

He and the mare broke from the woods into the lower pasture, where a handful of cows scattered from their path and the two brothers tending them gawked curiously. Once in the clearing, Angel’s pace went from breathtaking to absolutely terrifying. The two of them pounded up the hill to where he had last seen Ogre.

The big stallion was still there, watching their approach with suspicious eyes. Stephen slowed as he neared, cleared his throat and shouted, “Follow, Ogre!” in the best approximation of Aspar White’s voice he could manage. He was startled by how good the impersonation was. To his ears and memory, it sounded exactly right.

Ogre hesitated, stamping. Stephen repeated the command, and the beast tossed his head before—with a steely glint in his eye—he began trotting after Angel.

Together, they raced through the orchard, whipping past Brother Ehan. The short fellow shouted something Stephen couldn’t hear. Stephen ignored him; he didn’t have time to go back, and there was no need to involve the closest thing he had to a friend in this mess. He had to reach Aspar. With the possible exception of Brother Ehan, there was no one else at d’Ef he could count on. The holter would never survive alone in his condition, and anyway, Stephen himself would be in danger for helping White.

They would have to flee together, and though he felt shame and failure and all of those things his father would see in this flight, he also had to admit that he was damned well ready to leave the monastery d’Ef. There was too much wrong here, too much darkness, and he wasn’t equipped to deal with it. Furthermore, if the queen of Crotheny was in danger, it was his duty to warn her.

He halted Angel at the very foyer of the nave and leapt down, then rushed into the cool dark, hoping he wasn’t already too late. Aspar lay where he had been, eyes closed and pale, but before Stephen was within five strides the holter’s eyes flicked open and he sat up.

“What?” Aspar grunted.

“You’re in danger,” Stephen said. “We’re in danger. We have to go, and right away. Can you do it?”

Aspar’s mouth pinched, probably around a caustic remark, but then he snapped his head in assent. “Yah. I’ll need a horse.”

Stephen drew a deep breath of relief, surprised and gratified that the holter took his word so readily. “Ogre is just outside,” he said.

“You have weapons?”

“No. And there isn’t time to find any.”

“Will we be pursued?”

“I’m sure we will.”

“I’ll need weapons. A bow. Do you know where you can get one?”

“Maybe. But, Holter—”

“Go.”

Exasperated, Stephen sprinted back outside, remembering that a bow used for shooting at deer in the orchard was kept in the garden shed. He had never seen any other weapon at d’Ef, unless the butcher’s cleavers counted. There must be an armory somewhere, but he’d never thought to discover it.

He nearly bowled over Brother Recard on the way out.

“Brother!” the Hanzish monk asked. “What’s the matter?”

“Bandits,” Stephen improvised. “Maybe fifty of them, coming through the orchards! We’ll need to defend against them. Ring the alarm.”

The monk’s eyes went wide. “But why did you come in here?”

“Because I know the bandits,” Aspar grunted. “They may have followed me here. Outlawed cutthroats from beyond the Naksoks. Bloody-handed barbarians. They’ll not respect your clericy. If you don’t fight them, they take you alive and eat one eye while you watch with the other.”

“I’ll ring the bell!” Recard said, already racing to do so.

“I’ll get your bow, now,” Stephen said.

“Yah. The horses are outside? I’ll meet you there.”

Stephen reached the shed and took the bow down from its peg, checking quickly to make sure the sinew was there and grabbing the quiver of eight arrows hung next to it. On the way back out of the shed, he noticed a swingle-blade leaning against the wall, the kind used for clearing underbrush. He grabbed that, too, and hurried back to the nave. He found the holter outside, his face white and sweating as he tried to mount Ogre. Monks darted past him, going to the places assigned them in the event of an attack on the monastery, there to await orders from the fratrex.

The fratrex, who stood in the doorway of the nave, watched the holter mount with a frown.

Stephen approached warily. The fratrex shifted his gaze.

“Brother Stephen,” he asked mildly. “Are you behind this commotion? Why are you armed?”

Stephen didn’t answer but handed the holter the bow and climbed upon Angel, keeping the swingle-blade in his hand.

“Answer me,” the fratrex said.

“Brother Spendlove is coming to kill this man,” Stephen said. “I will not allow it.”

“Brother Spendlove will do no such thing. Why should he?”

“Because he’s the one murdering people in the forest, doing the blood rites on the sedoi. The same blood rites you’ve had me research.”

“Spendlove?” the fratrex asked. “How do you know that?”

“I heard him say it,” Stephen said. “And now he’s going to murder the queen.”

“One of our own order?” the fratrex asked. “That’s not possible, unless—” His eyes went wide, and wider still. He gurgled, spit blood from his mouth, and collapsed. From the shadows of the nave behind him, Desmond Spendlove stepped into the light, his men just behind him.

“Congratulations, Brother Stephen,” Spendlove said. “To spare this holter, you’ve killed the fratrex.”

Once again, Stephen’s orderly world of assumptions collapsed around his ears.

“But I thought …”

“I know. Very amusing, to think this doddering old fool was at the bottom of anything. Did you ever think him wise?” He looked up at Aspar. “And you. I have friends looking for you. I suspect they will be happy enough with some token of your death. Your head, perhaps. And stop trying to string that bow, or I’ll have you cut down right now.” He looked back at Stephen. “Brother, despite your trespasses, you can be forgiven. Well, perhaps not forgiven, but certainly spared. You can still be useful.”

“I won’t help you anymore,” Stephen said. He swallowed a hard lump of fear, but to his surprise he felt in his chest something stronger forming. “I won’t betray my vows or my church or the people of my country. You’ll have to kill me, too.” He raised his makeshift weapon. “I wonder if you have the courage to kill me yourself.”

Spendlove shrugged. “Courage? Courage is nothing. You’ll see what happens to your courage when we cut you open. Not to kill you, mind you. Just to convince you of your worth. I’m afraid I can’t merely release you to Saint Dun.”

Stephen tried to say something in return, but he faltered. Hands shaking, he raised the weapon.

“Ride away, Aspar White,” he said. “I’ll do my best to keep them back.”

“I wouldn’t get far,” Aspar replied. “I might as well die here as anyplace.”

“Then do me a favor,” Stephen said. “Stick that arrow of yours in my heart if they take a step toward me.”

“This is very touching,” Spendlove said. He suddenly bared his teeth, and Stephen felt something like a hot wind pass him. Aspar White gasped in agony and the arrow he was holding dropped to the ground.

“There,” Spendlove said. “And now …”

He looked down at a sudden movement near his feet. It was the fratrex, pushing himself up on his palms, reaching toward the wall of the monastery.

“Spendlove, betrayer, heretic,” the old man murmured, just barely loud enough to hear.

Suddenly cracks spidered up the stone walls of the nave, multiplying, and in an instant, with a gritting roar, the entire face of the building collapsed. Spendlove and his men vanished behind the rubble and dust.

“Ride, damn you,” Aspar shouted, even before the stones settled.

“But I—” Stephen started helplessly toward the collapsing building.

“Ride and we may live to fight later. Stay and today we’ll die.”

Stephen hesitated an instant longer, then spun on his toe and leapt up on Angel’s back. Together, the two men rode as if all the dark saints were at their backs.

As perhaps they were.

13 A Meeting

Cazio rested his hand on the pommel of Caspator and leaned against a pomegranate tree. The girl in the pool saw him, and with an audible gasp sank suddenly to her chin, which was disappointing. Though he’d only been teased by the view of her slim white body in the water, her neck had been shapely enough, and now even that was hidden.

He smiled and picked at her pile of clothes with the tip of his sword.

“Thank you,” he said, in a carrying voice, directing his face at the sky. “Thank you, Lady Erenda, patroness of lovers, for granting my wish.”

“I am not your wish,” the girl snapped angrily. “You must leave immediately, whoever you are.” She spoke with a lilt as foreign and exotic as the color of her hair. This girl was growing more interesting all of the time. Of course, she was also the first girl he had seen in weeks, since he and z’Acatto had accepted the hospitality of the countess Orchaevia. The countess preferred male servants, and the nearest village was a full day’s walk. But here, only a league’s ramble from the mansion, he’d happened on a bit of luck.

“And I am not your slave, lady,” Cazio replied. “I do not answer to your orders.” He waggled a finger at her. “Anyway, who are you to know what I do or do not wish? As I was walking along, just now, I said to our lady Erenda, ‘Lady, this world is full of ugliness and pain. It is a dismal domain of woe, and my trials have taught me to despise it. As a result, I, Cazio Pachiomadio da Chiovattio, who once loved life, now weary of it. Lady Erenda—’ I prayed this. ‘—if you could show me but one instant of the most perfect beauty imaginable, just a single glimpse, I could find the strength to forge on, to bear the burdens a man such as myself is fated to bear.’ Only a moment later I heard the sound of this water, saw this pool, and in it the answer to my prayer.”

That wasn’t entirely a lie. He had been hoping steadily for female company, but hadn’t actually addressed the lady of love, at least not formally.

The girl frowned a little deeper. “Are Vitellian girls more stupid than the usual sort? Or do you think me dense because I am from another land?”

“Stupid? Not at all. I can see the intelligence in your eyes. You have, perhaps, been careless, to bathe in a pool frequented by highwaymen and other scoundrels of low repute, but I’m certain it’s only because you don’t know the area.”

“I’m learning it quickly enough,” the girl replied. “I’ve been here only a few moments and already I’ve met someone of ill repute.”

“Now you try to wound me,” Cazio said mournfully.

“Leave, so I may dress.”

“I cannot,” Cazio said regretfully. “My heart will not let me. Not until I know your name.”

“My name? My name is … Fiene.”

“An intriguing name.”

“Yes, and now you have it, so begone.”

“A musical name. Already my heart is singing it. From what distant land comes that name, lady?”

“Liery, you graceless oaf. Will you go now?”

Cazio blinked at her. “You’re smiling at me, Fiena.”

“Fiene. And I’m not. Or if I am, it’s because you’re so absurd. And it’s pronounced Fee-en-uh.”

“Don’t you want to know my name?”

“You already said. Cashew, something like that.”

“Ca-tsee-oh,” he corrected.

“Cazio. Cazio, you must leave now.”

Cazio nodded and sat down on the gnarled root of a willow.

“Certainly I must,” he agreed. It suddenly struck him that the pile of clothes was a habit. “Are you a nun?” he asked.

“No,” the girl said. “I found one and killed her and took her clothes. What do you think, you lout, with the Abode of Graces right up the hill?”

Cazio looked up and around. “There’s a coven nearby?”

“On the other side of the hill.”

“A whole house full of women as lovely as you? Lady Erenda must indeed be pleased with me.”

“Yes, you’d better hurry and court them,” Fiene said. “They’re all quite naked as I am.”

“It would be a waste of time,” Cazio said, trying to sound mournful. “I’ve already seen the loveliest of them. I’d have to go up around that hill just to come back here. Which raises a question—why are you here? Something tells me you aren’t supposed to be.”

“Are you a highwayman?” the girl demanded suddenly. “Are you a rogue?”

“I am at your command,” Cazio answered. “If you want a rogue, I can certainly be that.”

“I want a gentleman who will allow me to get dressed.”

“This gentleman will allow that,” Cazio replied, patting the clothes.

“Not while you’re watching.”

“But the sight of you was granted me by a goddess. Who am I to deny her will?”

“You didn’t see me,” Fiene corrected, though her tone betrayed some doubt. “I was submerged.”

Cazio peered over his nose. “I admit, I’ve not viewed the undistorted image. The rippling of the water might mask defects in figure. I’m starting to wonder if you could actually be as beautiful as I imagine.”

“Figs!” Fiene replied. “I don’t have to take such a slight. Here, you judge whether there are any defects.”

So saying she began to rise from the water—but when the water rested across her breastbone, she snorted derisively and sank back down. “I repeat,” Fiene said, “why do you think I’m stupid?”

Cazio drooped his head. “I’m the stupid one. I already know that your beauty is perfect.”

Fiene rolled her eyes, then settled them boldly on him. “I am betrothed, sir,” she said. “I don’t care whether you find me perfect or perfectly ugly.”

“Ah. Then you are not a nun.”

“I have been sent here for my education, that is all.”

“Praised be every lord and lady in the night sky and under earth,” Cazio said. “For now I have at least a slim hope.”

“Hope? For you and me?” She laughed. “There’s no hope of that, unless you intend to kill me and abominate my body. After that you can look forward to your own death at the hands of my betrothed, Roderick.”

“Roderick? That is an unwholesome name. It sounds of pimples and deception.”

“He is noble and good, and he would never take advantage of a lady’s distress, as you do.”

Despite himself, Cazio suddenly felt his ears burning. “Then he is hardly a man,” he replied, “for no true man could ever unfasten his eyes from your face.”

“Oh, it’s my face you’re interested in. Then you won’t mind my dressing. My wimple will not hide my features.”

“Not if you’ll promise to stay here and speak with me a bit,” Cazio relented. “I sense that you’re in no great hurry.”

The girl arched her brows. “You’ll turn your back, at least?”

“Lady, I will.” And he did so, despite the tantalizing sound as she emerged from the pool, and the rustle of her clothes as she retrieved them. For a moment she was so near he could have turned and touched her. But she was skittish, this one. She would take work.

He heard her carry her clothes back toward the pool.

“What day is it?” she asked.

“May I turn yet?”

“You may not.”

“The day is Menzodi,” he replied.

“Three more days,” she murmured. “Good. Thank you.”

“Three more days of what?” he asked.

“Do you have anything to eat?” Fiene asked, instead of answering him.

“Nothing, I’m afraid.”

“Very well. No, keep your back turned. I’m not quite finished.”

Cazio puffed his cheeks and tapped his foot.

“You never told me what you were doing out here,” he said. “You’re up to mischief, aren’t you?”

She didn’t answer. “May I turn yet?” he asked. “I’ve kept my bargain.”

When she didn’t answer again, he did turn—in time to see her vanish up the hillside.

“Faithless beauty!” he shouted after her.

She popped back into view briefly, waved, and blew him a kiss. Then she was gone. He thought about chasing her, but decided against it. If she wanted to play that sort of game, to Lord Ontro with her.

With a sigh, he turned and began walking back toward the mansion of the countess Orchaevia. But he took care to remember the landmarks of the place.

The sun was a perfectly golden coin and it was an hour before sunset when Cazio came back in sight of the manse. It lay below him, in the midst of a hundred versos of vineyards, a single narrow road wandering to and away from it. The house itself was splendidly huge, white-walled and red-roofed, with a spacious inner courtyard and a rustic-walled horz on its west wing. Behind that were stables, barnyard, and the must-house where wine was fermented and bottled.

Cazio descended between rows of grapevines, idly picking the amethyst fruits now and then, enjoying the sweet, wine-like smell of those that had fallen to rot upon the ground.

He couldn’t stop wondering about the girl. She said she’d come from Liery. What country was Liery? One of the northern ones, surely, where such pale skin and strangely colored hair were commonplace.

He found himself at the mansion gate almost before realizing it. A sharp-featured serving boy in yellow stockings and plum doublet recognized him and let him into the red-flagstoned courtyard.

A throaty female voice greeted him as he entered. “Cazio, my dello!” she said. “Where have you been? You’ve almost missed dinner.”

Cazio bowed. “Good evening, casnara Countess Orchaevia. I was merely taking my leisure in the beautiful countryside around your estate.”

The countess Orchaevia sat at a long table beneath the eaves of the courtyard wall. She was a woman in her middle years, enlarged and rounded by the copious foods that always graced her table. Her face was as round and shiny as a porcelain platter, with a little snubbed nose, emerald eyes, and pink cheeks. Cazio had rarely seen her without a smile on her face.

“Rambling again? I wish I could think of more to entertain you with here, so you needn’t walk all over creation.”

“I enjoy it,” Cazio told her. “It keeps me fit.”

“Well, a young man should be fit,” she allowed. “Please, join me in repast.” She nodded at the viands before her.

“I think I will,” he said. “I’ve worked up a bit of an appetite.” He pulled out a leather-bottomed chair, sat, and surveyed what was to be had. He settled on a fig, cut and opened to resemble a flower and garnished with the dry, salty ham of the region. A servant approached and poured him a goblet of dark red wine.

“Was z’Acatto with you?” the countess asked. “I haven’t seen him today either.”

“Have you checked your wine cellars?” Cazio asked. “He has a tendency to settle there.”

“Well, let him stay there then,” she pouted, spooning a cube of fresh cheese, drenched in olive oil and garlic, onto a slice of toasted bread. “He can’t get to the choicest vintages, anyway. He thinks I don’t know he’s searching for them.” She looked up at Cazio. “Which direction did you go today?”

Cazio gestured west with the half of the fig that remained.

“Oh! You paid a visit to the Abode of Graces.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cazio replied innocently, taking a sip of the wine. “I saw only trees and sheep.”

She looked at him suspiciously. “You’re telling me a handsome young dello like you hasn’t yet sniffed out a coven full of young ladies? I never thought it would take you this long.”

Cazio shrugged and reached for a ripe black olive. “Perhaps I’ll go there tomorrow.”

The countess wagged a grilled partridge leg at him. “Don’t go to cause trouble. Those are my neighbors, you know. Each year I throw a small fete for them. It’s the only such luxury they are allowed.”

“Do you indeed?” Cazio said, placing the olive pit in a small dish and turning his attention to a plate of sliced pears and hard ewe’s cheese.

“Oh, Orchaevia has your attention now, doesn’t she?”

“Nonsense,” Cazio said, stretching his legs out and lazily crossing them at the ankle.

“Well, if you’re not interested …” She shrugged and took a long draught of her wine.

“Oh, very well, let us assume I have some slight interest. When might this fete take place?”

The countess smiled. “On the eve of Fiussanal, the first day of Seftamenza.”

“In three weeks’ time.”

“Of course, you aren’t invited,” she said slyly. “But I might be able to arrange something, if a matter of the heart is involved.”

“No such matter exists. Besides, I may not be here in three weeks.”

Orchaevia shook her head. “Oh, things haven’t cooled in Avella yet. That will take more time.”

“I had considered a trip to Furonesso,” Cazio said.

The countess sputtered into her wine. “In this heat? Whatever for?”

“My sword is growing rusty.”

“You practice every day with my guards!”

Cazio shrugged.

The countess narrowed her eyes, then suddenly laughed merrily. “You’ll stay,” she opined as she spread rabbit liver pâté on another toast. “You’re only trying to convince yourself that someone hasn’t got you by the nose.”

Cazio stopped with a buttered quail egg halfway to his mouth. “Casnara, what under heaven are you talking about?”

She smiled. “I can see it in that distracted look on your face, the expression when I mentioned my fete. Never try to fool Orchaevia when it comes to matters of love. You are in love.”

“And that is very ridiculous,” Cazio said emphatically. He was becoming annoyed. “Even if I did meet someone today, you think my heart could be so quickly swayed? That’s the stuff of your romances, Countess, not real life.”

“That’s what every young man thinks until it happens to him,” the countess replied, with a wink. “Tomorrow you’ll wander in the same direction you did today. Trust me.”

Anne woke in darkness. From a vantage on the hill, she’d watched the strange man leave, but she didn’t trust him not to return, so she’d slept in the cave. Of course, he seemed relatively harmless; he’d never threatened her, only swaggered and strutted like a rooster. But there was no sense in being stupid.

She rose, stretched, got her bearings, and began cautiously back toward the outside. Her stomach rumbled; all of the food that had been sent down with her was back in the fane of Mefitis, and Anne didn’t want to go back there until she had to. She’d considered going all the way back there to sleep, on the off chance that the sisters might check on her, but if they hadn’t in the six days that had already passed, she couldn’t imagine they would today.

Still, she would have to do something about her hunger soon. Perhaps she could find apples or pomegranates.

She waited at the cave entrance for a while, watching and listening, then began climbing back down. She found the pool again, circled it several times, and found no one there. Then she went to look for food.

Around noon she was ready to give up and go back to the fane. She’d found some fruits, but either didn’t know what they were or didn’t find them ripe. She’d seen a rabbit and many squirrels, but knew nothing of hunting or how to build a fire if she did manage to get one. Austra had been right, of course; her fantasy of living free and off the land was just that, a fantasy. It was a good thing she hadn’t managed to run away.

Disconsolate, she started back toward the cave.

Passing by the pool again, she caught a motion from the corner of her eye and ducked behind a bush. She winced at the stir of noises she made, then cautiously peered around the leaves.

Cazio was back. Today he wore a white shirt and dark red breeches. His sword was propped against a nearby olive tree and he sat on a blanket. He was busy removing items from a basket—pears, cheese, bread, a bottle of wine.

“I’ve brought food this time,” he said, without turning.

Anne hesitated. He was far enough away that if she ran, he probably couldn’t catch her. Still, what did she know of this fellow other than he was an arrogant ass?

That he’d kept his back turned when she was naked, as she’d asked him. After a moment’s consideration, she emerged and walked toward him.

“You’re persistent,” she noticed.

“And you’re hungry,” the fellow replied. He stood and bowed. “There were no proper introductions, yesterday. I am Cazio Pachiomadio da Chiovattio. I will be in your debt if you will join me for a time.”

Anne quirked her mouth. “As you say, I am hungry.”

“Then, if you please, casnara Fiene, sit with me.”

“And you’ll be a gentleman?”

“In every way.”

She settled warily on the other side of the blanket, with the food between them. She eyed the victuals hungrily.

“Please, eat,” Cazio said.

She reached for a pear and bit into it. It was sweet and ripe, and the juice drizzled down her chin.

“Try the cheese with it,” Cazio suggested, pouring her a goblet of red wine. “It’s caso dac’uva, one of the best in the region.”

Anne took a wedge of the cheese. It was sharp, hard, and piquant, and went very well with the pear. She washed it all down with the wine. Cazio began eating, too, at a much more leisurely pace.

“Thank you,” Anne said, when she had eaten some of the bread and had a little more wine, which was already warming her thoughts.

“Seeing you is thanks enough,” Cazio replied.

“You aren’t a rogue at all,” Anne accused.

Cazio shrugged. “Some would argue with that, but I’ve never made the claim, only the offer.”

“What are you, then? Not a shepherd, with that sword. A wanderer?”

“Of sorts,” Cazio replied.

“So you aren’t from these parts?”

“I’m from Avella.”

Anne let that pass. She didn’t know where Avella was, and didn’t care. “You’ve taken a holiday?” she asked.

Cazio grinned. “Of sorts,” he repeated. “Though it was never festive until now.”

“I’m still betrothed, you know,” Anne reminded him.

“Yes, so I’ve been told. A temporary situation, for once you’ve gotten to know me—”

“I will undoubtedly still think you an ass, if you keep talking that way,” Anne replied.

Cazio clutched at his chest. “Now that was an arrow,” he said, “striking right to my heart.”

Anne laughed. “You have no heart, Cazio, or at least not a loud one. I think other parts of you are more outspoken.”

“You think you know me well, so soon?” Cazio said. “This fiancé of yours—he is better spoken?”

“Infinitely so. He writes wonderful letters, he speaks poetry.” She paused. “Or he did when he could still speak to me and write to me.”

“Does he tell you how your hair is like the rarest red saffron of Shaum? Does he reflect on the myriad colors of your eyes? Does he know your breath as well as he knows his own?” Cazio’s eyes were suddenly, uncomfortably focused on hers.

“You shouldn’t say things like that,” Anne mumbled, feeling a sudden empty pain. I can’t even remember his face. Nonetheless she loved Roderick. She knew that.

“How long since you’ve seen him?” Cazio asked.

“Almost two months.”

“Are you sure you’re still betrothed?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean a man who would let his love be carried off to a coven a thousand leagues away might be less sturdy in his affections than some.”

“That … You take that back!” Anne rose to her feet in fury, almost forgetting that her “betrothal” was a lie. Roderick had mentioned nothing of marriage. She’d brought that up only to deflect Cazio’s attentions.

“I did not mean to offend,” Cazio said quickly. “If I’ve gone too far, I apologize. As you say, I can be an ass. Please, have some more wine.”

The wine was already having considerable effect on Anne, but she nevertheless knelt back down and accepted the newly filled glass. Still, she regarded him with something resembling a cold stare.

“I have an idea,” Cazio said, after a moment.

“What a lonely creature it must be.”

“I have apologized,” he reminded her.

“Very well. What is your idea?”

“I presume your lover has not written you because you are not allowed correspondence in the coven?”

“He doesn’t know where I am. But even if he did, a letter of mine would never reach him, I fear.”

“You know his hand?”

“Like my own.”

“Very well,” Cazio said, leaning back on one elbow and holding his wineglass up. “You write and seal a letter, and I shall see it delivered to this Roderick person. I shall receive any reply and bring it to you, at a place of your liking.”

“You would do that? Why?”

“If he is, as you say, fond of you, he will write you back. If he is in love with you, he will ride here to see you. If he has forgotten you, he will do neither. In that case, I hope to gain.”

Anne paused, stunned at the offer, though she quickly saw the flaw in it. “But if I trust you with his correspondence,” she pointed out, “you might easily libel him as faithless by never sending the letter.”

“And I give you my word I will deliver any letter he sends to you. I swear it on my father’s name and on the blade of my good sword, Caspator.”

“I could still never accept the absence of correspondence as proof.”

“Nonetheless, my offer still stands,” Cazio replied easily.

“Again, why?”

“If nothing more is to exist between us,” Cazio said, “I want you to at least know I’m honest. Besides, it costs me little to do this. A trip to a nearby village, a handful of coins to a cuveitur. I need only know where your Roderick might be found.”

“It might be difficult for us to meet after today,” Anne said. “And I have nothing to write with.”

“Surely we can think of something.”

Anne considered that for a moment, and it struck her that she could send not only Roderick a message, but also one to her father, warning him of her visions and the threat they foretold to Crotheny. “You have seen the coven?” she asked.

“Not yet. It is around the hill, yes?”

“Yes. My room is in the highest room of the highest tower. I will write the letter, weight it with a stone, and drop it down. Perhaps we can contrive something with string for you to send his return letters up. Or perhaps I can meet you here again. If so, I will drop further notes to you.” She looked up at him. “Does this require too much of you?”

“Not in the least,” Cazio replied.

“You aren’t going to wander on?”

“I am comfortable in this region for the moment,” he said.

“Then I thank you again,” Anne replied. “Your offer is more than I dreamed to hope for. I will find some way to reward you.”

For an instant, it almost looked as if Cazio was blushing. Then he shrugged again. “It is nothing. If there is a reward, it shall be our friendship.” He raised his glass. “To friendship.”

Smiling, Anne matched the toast.

Cazio grinned wryly to himself as he crossed the fields toward Orchaevia’s manse. He was well pleased with himself. It might be that there was no one in these parts worthy of his sword, but at least he had found a challenge. Love, no. Orchaevia was a foolish romantic. But the chase, yes, that was worthwhile. It would make the loving all the sweeter when Fiene submitted. She was a project worthy to occupy his time.

And if this Roderick should come looking? Well, then Caspator might teach him a lesson or two, and that would be even better.

14 Pursuit

“I hear them,” Stephen whispered in as low a voice as he could manage. “That way.” He thrust his finger east, pointing through the trees.

“I don’t hear anything,” the holter said.

“Shh. If I can hear them, they may be able to hear us. The faneway blessed my senses, and some of them have marched the same fanes.”

Aspar just nodded and laid his finger to his lip in a gesture of silence.

After a time, the sounds of horses and riders receded.

“They’re out of earshot,” Stephen told the holter, when he was sure.

“They took the false trail, then. Good.” The holter stood. His face was still strained and pale, and he moved as if his limbs were half-severed.

“You need rest, and attention,” Stephen said.

“Sceat. I’ll live. I’m feeling better.”

Stephen was dubious, but didn’t argue. “What now?” he asked instead.

“Tell me exactly what you heard them say.”

Stephen repeated the conversation as he’d heard it. When he came to the part about Fend, the holter stiffened.

“You’re sure. You’re sure they mentioned Fend?”

“Yes. My memory is better now, too.”

“Fend and a bunch of monks, off to kill the queen. What in the Raver’s eye is going on?”

“I wish I knew,” Stephen said.

“Cal Azroth,” Aspar mused. “It’s in Loiyes. It’s where the royals go when they need extraordinary protection. I don’t see how a handful of assassins plan to get in there.”

“They have the greffyn.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Aspar said. “They were following it, yes, and it didn’t attack them, but I don’t think they control it.”

“But the Briar King controls it,” Stephen replied. “And the Briar King seems to be behind all this. And who knows what powers Spendlove has gained from the dark faneways?”

“Yah,” Aspar grunted. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll follow ’em and kill ’em.”

“You’re not in any shape to kill anyone,” Stephen said. “Can’t we contact the king? Get him to send knights?”

“By the time we could do that, they’ll be at Cal Azroth.”

“What about Sir Symen?”

“Too far out of the way.”

“So it’s just us?”

“Yah.”

Stephen took a deep breath. “Well, then. I guess we’ll do that.” He cast a glance at the holter. “Thank you, by the way.”

“What for? Was you saved my hide. Again.”

“For believing me. Trusting me. If you’d paused to question—”

“Listen,” the holter said. “You’re green and naïve and annoying, but you’re not a liar, and if you see danger, it must be pretty damned obvious.”

“I almost didn’t see it in time,” Stephen said.

“But you saw it. Must be those new eyes of yours.”

“I didn’t see it in time to save the fratrex,” Stephen said, feeling the dig of that fact in his belly.

“Yes, well, the fratrex was there longer than you. He should have known, himself,” Aspar said, moving toward Ogre. “Anyway, this is a waste of time, all this back-patting and bemoaning. Let’s pick up their trail before it cools.”

Stephen nodded, and they mounted and set out. Around them, the forest sang of death coming.