The Charnel Prince

1 Assassin

Breathing as softly as she might, Muriele felt along the wall until she found the small metal plate she was searching for. She slid it up and latched it, revealing a faintly glowing circle the size of a fingertip. Leaning forward, she brushed her hair from her face, placed her eye against the peephole, and peered into the room beyond.

The Warhearth was empty, but a few flickering tapers illuminated it, giving just enough light to show the statue of Saint Fienve on a small table near William’s old armchair, and suggesting but not quite revealing the paintings of battle and victory that covered the garish walls of the place.

The room still seemed unoccupied.

She sighed and consigned herself to patience. Erren had shown her the passages within the walls of the castle years ago, not long after she had become queen. The corridors were very narrow and very old. Erren claimed that her order of coven-trained assassins had manipulated the choice of architects when the palace was built, convinced him to include their covert additions, and then made certain that neither he nor the workman who built them would ever tell anyone. Thus the dark hallways were a secret kept only by the sisters of Cer, and a few of their charges.

Muriele had often wondered if such secrecy was truly possible, over the course of centuries. If other queens had been shown the passages as she had, surely a few of them would have told their husbands, daughters, friends.

And yet, in her time, she had never met anyone other than Erren in the recondite halls, which suggested her old friend had known what she was talking about.

They were well and cleverly hidden, the peepholes disguised and clotted with glass to keep them from being easily discovered. The doors were marvels, showing no seam when closed.

She had used them often since Erren’s death. They seemed safer than her own rooms, and without Erren or a trustworthy replacement, she had to do her own spying, if she was to have the faintest idea what was being plotted around her. But tonight she wasn’t merely browsing, trying to catch Praifec Hespero or some member of the Comven in secret conversation; tonight she had a particular business.

It had come to her in the form of a note, folded and slipped beneath her door, written in a clean, simple style.

Well, there was her reply, safely hidden from sight—and here she was playing this childish game—but in five hours, no one had come to collect the note. She had signed the note “agreed,” of course, but she was determined that she would know who the messenger was—the entire affair could be an elaborate ruse of some sort.

Perhaps whoever it was had come earlier, before she had been able to excuse herself from her duties. They might have read the note and then returned it to its hiding place. But the Warhearth was located in the central part of the castle, and while quiet at night, during the day any visitor would attract attention. Besides, why leave the note?

Darkness was just falling, and she had formally retired. She had until morning, and no use for sleep and the dreams it brought.

And so another bell passed before a sound caught her attention, a faint scuff of leather against stone. She squinted through the small hole, trying to see who or what had made the sound, and noticed a shadow edging from the west end of the room. That was peculiar, as the entrance to the Warhearth was on the east end. She waited impatiently for the figure to step into the light, and in due time was rewarded.

It was a woman; she saw that first, with curly chestnut locks, wearing a pale blue dressing gown. Her “friend” was clever, then. He’d sent a serving girl to fetch the note. Perhaps I will recognize her, she thought, and thus know her master. But she had little real hope of that. There were many servants in Eslen Castle, and she knew no more than a tenth of them on sight.

Then the woman turned, and the light caught her face, and Muriele blinked in utter astonishment. She did, indeed, know the girl, but she was no maid or serving girl. No, that youthful face belonged to Alis Berrye, the youngest of her late husband’s mistresses.

Alis Berrye.

Anger, jealous and reflexive, began heating in Muriele, but she fought to cool it, because something wasn’t right here. Alis Berrye had the brains of a leek. She was the younger daughter of Lord Berrye of Virgenya, who oversaw one of the poorest cantons in the country. William had taken a liking to her sapphire eyes and girlish curves when her family had visited two years earlier. Since William’s death, she’d been all but invisible, and though it had crossed Muriele’s mind several times to have her ejected from her old rooms, the truth was that she had far more important things to do than satisfy a pitiable and now-irrelevant resentment.

Until now. Now Alis Berrye was once more very much her concern. Even Erren had thought the girl too stupid and frivolous to harbor political motives beyond keeping the king’s favor. Gramme had always been the dangerous one. Berrye didn’t even have issue, and had apparently never tried to conceive any.

That meant her first guess had been right, and Berrye was someone’s servant in this. But whose? Besides William, she’d never shown obvious ties to anyone in the court. Still, there had been plenty of time for that to change, and in the present climate, with everyone scrambling for whatever position and advantage they could, someone had clearly found a use for the girl.

Berrye retrieved the message, read it, nodded to herself, and then turned again toward the west end of the room. A moment later there was a very soft sound, but it lifted the hairs on Muriele’s neck.

The only exit from the west end of the room was a secret one that let into the very corridors Muriele now occupied. Alis Berrye knew about it.

She knew the girl used to meet with William in the Warhearth, at times. But William hadn’t known about the passages at all.

Or maybe he had, and Muriele hadn’t known her husband as well as she had supposed.

She felt a pang of loss so sudden and deep, it was shocking. She and William hadn’t married for love, but they had found it, at least for a time. And even though she had always resented his mistresses, she’d always felt that one day, somehow, they would settle into their love again.

And she missed him—his laugh, the smell of his clothes, the silly names he called her in private.

All gone. And now it seemed he had known about the passages all along, and never told her, never trusted her with that information. That wouldn’t be so bad—after all, she hadn’t told him—but that he had told Alis Berrye of all people, the silliest, most irrelevant of his whores—that hurt.

It also worried Muriele. What if he had told Gramme, too?

She waited a bit, both hoping and fearing that the girl would come down her passage, so she could strangle her and hide the body where it would never be found, but after several minutes, when no one appeared, Muriele padded back along the long, winding way to her own chambers, feeling for the raised signs on the wall that gave the directions.

When she opened the secret door that led to her bedchamber just a crack, she knew something was wrong. She had left a lamp burning in her room, but no light greeted her. The room was utterly dark. Had her maid Unna come in and put out the light? Why would she do that?

She stood frozen for an instant, her eye pressing through the crack at the darkness. Maybe the lamp had gone out on its own.

Someone said something. A single word, too low to hear. She gasped and shut the panel, backing away, knowing whoever it was must have heard her, but her mind was cluttered with spidering fear-webs, and she couldn’t do anything but gape at the blackness in front of her.

She could only think how wrong she had been. Berrye knew about the passages of Cer, so others did, too. Did the man in her room know? Was it a man?

Something bumped against the wall, and she heard the faint hiss of breath. Her hand dropped to the dagger she wore next to her chatelaine, but it gave her small comfort.

The bump was followed by a muffled tap, and then another, and another, moving along the wall. The chill in her grew so deep, she began to shake. Someone was searching for the door. But that meant that they didn’t know where it was. It would be hard to find, from the other side. Still, she had given away its approximate location.

The tapping grew a little duller as it moved away from her, then began moving back. She could hear his breath now, and suddenly, another whispered word, though still she could not make out what it was.

She backed farther away, trembling, realizing that she was growing light-headed because she hadn’t breathed. She kept her hands against the walls, guiding by them, and when she thought she had gone far enough, she quickened her pace, feeling more panicked than ever, because she didn’t know if he was still in the room, or in the tunnels with her.

She found the doorway to the Hall of Doves, looked in, confirmed that no one was there, and burst into it, then pushed the panel closed behind her, and ran.

After a few moments she slowed to a walk, but being in the common halls didn’t make her feel any safer, even where they were well-lit and populated by servants. Her enemy had an unknown face, and anyone in the castle might wear it. Worse—and this was just starting to sink in—if the person in her room had really come to kill her, this was no mere attempt at murder. It was an attempt at a coup. Which meant she needed help, now, and help she could trust.

She was still considering who might be trusted when she nearly collided with Leovigild Ackenzal. She yelped and jumped back. For his part, the composer looked extremely flustered and then tried to get down on one knee. He was having trouble doing so, and she remembered the last time she had seen him he had been on crutches.

The hero of Broogh.

“Never mind that,” she said, calming her own anxiousness. “What are you doing in the halls at this hour, Fralet Ackenzal?”

“Majesty? I was just exercising my leg.”

His face showed no signs of deceit, so she made a quick decision.

“Come with me,” she commanded. “Are you armed?”

“A-armed?” he stuttered.

“No, I suppose you aren’t. Ah, well. Come along anyway.”

“Yes, Majesty.”

She moved away quickly, then had to slow her pace so he could keep up with her, and she wondered why she wanted him with her. He was all but a stranger—why should she trust him? But she remembered the day he had played for her, the absolute earnestness of it, and somehow felt he could do her no harm. She rarely trusted her feelings, but at this point she had no choice but to do so.

He hobbled silently after her, clearly puzzled but unwilling to ask any questions.

“How is my commission coming along?” she asked, largely to break the strained silence.

“Very well, Majesty.” A note of excitement entered his voice, which even under these circumstances was charming. She was struck by how much he resembled Neil MeqVren—Neil was passionate and excitable, a true knight with nothing cynical in him. This composer was like that, too, though his passion was of an entirely different nature. But they were both—authentic.

She desperately wished Neil were here now, but she had been right to send him after Anne. He was the only one she could trust with Anne’s location.

“You will be done with it soon, I hope,” she said. “I’ve already arranged for a performance and an accompanying banquet in the Candle Grove, about three weeks hence.”

“Three weeks? Well, yes, it’s nearly done. But I’ll need to start rehearsing immediately.”

“Just let me know what you need.”

“I’ve wanted to talk to you about something, actually,” he said.

“In regards to what?”

“The size of the ensemble, Majesty.”

“Make it whatever size you wish,” she replied.

“What I’m hoping for is a bit unusual,” he said, a little uncertainly. “I—the composition I’m working on—I think it would be best done by thirty pieces.”

She stopped and glanced curiously at him. “That’s rather large, isn’t it?” she asked.

“There has never been an ensemble of its size,” he said.

He made it sound very important, and all of a sudden she was struck by the ridiculousness of the whole situation. Here she was in fear of her life and her kingdom, and she somehow found herself discussing how many musicians she ought to engage.

But her heart had slowed to its normal pace, and she felt almost eerily calm.

“Then why should ours be so large?” she asked.

“Because there has never been a piece written like this,” he replied.

She stopped for a moment to study him, to see if there was any pride or haughtiness to be found in that statement. If it was there, it did not show.

“I’ve no objection to a large ensemble,” she said finally. “Even the largest.”

“The Church might, Majesty.”

“On what grounds?”

He grinned, looking suddenly very boyish. “On the grounds that it’s never been done before, Majesty.”

She felt a wry smile twitch her lips. “Make it as large as you want,” she said. “Larger, even.”

“Thank you, Majesty.”

She nodded.

“Majesty?” he asked.

“Yes?”

“Is something wrong?”

She closed her eyes, then opened them and began walking again. “Yes, Fralet Ackenzal, something is very wrong. There is someone in my suite, someone I did not invite there.”

“You think— I mean, Majesty, do you believe it was an assassin?”

“I can’t think what else it might be.”

He paled. “That’s— Well, shouldn’t we call a guard, Majesty?”

“Unfortunately,” she replied, “I don’t trust most of the guards.”

“How can that be? How can a queen not trust her guards?”

“Are you that naive, Fralet Ackenzal? Do you know how many kings and queens have died at the hands of their own servants?”

“But I’ve heard the royal guards of Eslen—the Craftsmen?—that they are incorruptible.”

“In the past few months, on different occasions, two of them have tried to kill me.”

“Oh.”

“They were bewitched, as it turns out, by some sort of encrotacnia, and they are now supposed to be protected against such shinecrafting. Nevertheless, I find it hard to put faith in them, since they killed two of my daughters.”

“I can understand that, Your Majesty. I’m sorry.”

“Beyond that there is the fact that one of them was stationed outside my door. It follows that he either let the assassin in, he is the assassin, or he’s dead.”

“Oh, saints.”

“Precisely.”

“And so—ah—I’m your bodyguard at the moment?”

She smiled at him. “Indeed you are.”

“Majesty, I wouldn’t be much use to you if you were attacked.”

“But you are the hero of Broogh, Fralet Ackenzal. Surely the mere sight of you would frighten off most attackers.”

“I think that rather unlikely,” Ackenzal opined. “But I will protect you as best I can, Majesty. It’s just—if you think there is a coup in progress, you ought to find better help and more of it.”

“I know,” she said. “And that’s what we’re going to do. But I don’t like it.”

“Why is that?”

“Because I’m going to have to apologize.”

Fail de Liery waved her apology away.

“You were right,” he said. “I went beyond my bounds, and more to the point, beyond my heart. Sometimes when more than one duty calls, it’s difficult to decide which to follow. Glorien de Liery is my liege, but William was my emperor and you are my empress—and my beloved niece. It is I who owe you an apology—and my allegiance, if you will still have it.”

She wanted to hug him right then and there, but at the moment they were queen and subject, and she did not want to spoil that moment.

“Now, tell me why you’re here, Majesty,” Fail said. “You look as if the dead are calling your name.”

He listened as she explained.

When she was done, he nodded grimly.

“You’ll have to come with us,” he said at last. “Even if the Craftsmen are loyal, they won’t let a party of armed men into the royal suites.”

“I’m aware of that.”

Fail nodded. “When you are ready, Majesty.”

“I’m ready.” She turned to Ackenzal. “You are excused,” she said. “And I thank you for your company.”

He bowed, less clumsily this time. “Thank you, Your Majesty. I am always pleased to be of service.”

“When will my commission be ready?”

“It is more than half done already,” he replied. “By the end of the month, I should think.”

“I look forward to it.”

“Thank you, Majesty. Saints be with you.”

She watched him limp off, as Sir Fail roused his men.

They left Sir Fail’s chambers with eight men-at-arms, and though the party encountered a number of puzzled looks, they met with no resistance.

They found two Craftsmen standing guard at the entrance hall of the royal residence. As they approached, one stepped forward, eying the men from Liery with evident suspicion.

“Stand aside, Sir Moris,” Muriele commanded. “These men are accompanying me to my chambers.”

Moris, a round-faced man with a blond mustache, reddened. “Majesty, I cannot allow that,” he said. “No one but the royal family and the Craftsmen are allowed to bear arms beyond this point.”

Muriele drew herself a bit higher. “Sir Moris, someone has invaded my chambers, apparently underneath your nose. You will let us pass, do you understand?”

“Invaded your quarters?” Sir Moris said. “That simply isn’t possible.”

“Yes, one would think,” Muriele said dryly, “and yet I assure you it is so.”

Moris chewed that for a moment. “If Your Majesty will permit us to look into the matter—”

She shook her head and brushed past him. “Strike any of these men with me, and I’ll have your head,” she said.

“Majesty, this—at least let me come with you.”

“As you wish.”

They found a Craftsman crumpled outside the door to her suites. His eyes were open, and blue, and very dead.

With a bellow, Sir Fail burst through the door, his men behind him.

On the other side of the door lay Unna’s body, her little nightshirt a mess of blood. She would not see her twelfth year.

Muriele sat staring at Unna’s body as Fail’s men searched her apartments, but they found no one, and no sign of anyone other than the rather obvious corpses.

When it was certain, Sir Fail placed his hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said.

She shook her head and looked up into her uncle’s eyes.

“No more of this,” she said. “Sir Fail, I wish to induct you and your men as my personal guard.”

“Done, Majesty.”

She turned to Sir Moris. “Discover how this happened,” she said, “or the head of every single Craftsman will roll. Do you understand?”

“I understand, Majesty,” Moris said stiffly. “But if I may speak, every man among us is loyal to you.”

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to prove that, Sir Moris. Start with this: Bring me Alis Berrye, and bring her to me now. Alive and in secret.”

She turned back to Sir Fail. Through her eyes he must have seen what was burning in her.

“Are you all right, Majesty?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I am sick. Sick to death of being a target.”

She went to the window and threw it open, looking out over the few lights still twinkling in the dark city below.

“I believe,” she said, “that I will start finding targets of my own.”

2 A Game of Fiedchese

As Neil sank through the emerald waters, he heard the draugs begin to sing. It was a far-off song with no words, but he could still hear the bitter loneliness of it, the avarice. They sang from Breunt-Toine, the land beneath waves, where the only things of light and love were those that sank there to be devoured.

Now they sang of Neil MeqVren and his coming.

Neil beat against his slow fall, kicking with his legs and rowing up with his arms, but his armor took him down like an anchor, and he had little experience with swimming anyway, having grown up around seas far too frigid for such exercise. He couldn’t even tell which direction was up anymore, so murky was the water. He reached for the catches of his armor, knowing he would never get it off in time, wondering why he hadn’t thought of it earlier.

He held on to his last breath, but it was gone, turning black inside him. The sea wanted in, and the sea could never be long denied.

You have me, foam-father, he thought. I have always been yours. But there is more I need to do here.

Yet Lier did not answer, and the dirge of the draugs grew nearer, until they were all around him. Still, he could see nothing of their cold eyes and shark’s teeth through the lightless depths.

His lungs opened and the sea rushed in. At first it hurt, like nothing he had ever felt, but the pain was brief, and he felt a peace settle. He had failed the queen for the last time.

He was done.

His fingers had gone numb, and he could no longer feel the fastenings of his armor, but strangely, it felt as if it were falling away, as if someone else were taking it off for him, and a pale light rose around him. He felt himself settle upon a surface as soft as a down mattress, but as cold as winter breakers. Fingers traced across his bare back and down his arm, and though they had no more warmth than the sea, he knew the touch.

“Fastia,” he groaned, and found it strange that he could speak when he was full of water.

“You have forgotten me,” she whispered. It was her voice, but brittle and somehow distant, though she spoke in his ear.

“I have not,” he said. “My love, I have not.”

“Have. Will. It is the same.”

The light was stronger. He grasped her hand and pulled, determined that now, at least, he should see her.

“Do not,” she said. But it was too late. When he saw her, he screamed, and could not stop screaming.

He was still screaming when yellow light struck, and a face before him appeared as if in a sunrise. It was a woman’s face, but it was not Fastia.

At first he saw only her paradoxical eyes. They were so dark a blue that her pupils were lost. She seemed both blind and capable of seeing to the heart of anything. There was a nearly unbearable sadness there, and at the same time an uncontainable excitement. They were the eyes of a newborn and of a tired old woman.

“Be calm,” she said. Her voice had a faint husk to it. She was holding his arm, but suddenly she let go and stepped away from him, as if he had done something to make her fearful. Her eyes became shadows beneath her brows, and now he saw her face was strong, with high, broad cheekbones carved of ivory and hair like spider silk, cut very short, just beneath her ears. She glowed like a brand in the light of the lantern she held in one pale hand, but her gown was of black or some other dark color, and seemed not to be there at all.

Confusion gripped him. He was in a bed, and dry. It was air in his lungs, not brine, but he was still in the belly of the sea, for he could feel it all around him and hear the creak of timbers. He darted his gaze about the bulkheads of dark lacquered wood and understood that he was in a ship’s cabin.

“Be calm,” the woman repeated. “You are alive, if not entirely well. You only dream of death.” Her free hand went to her throat and fingered a small amulet there.

He knew he was alive. His heart was thundering, his head ached, and his side felt as if it had been split open.

Which, if he remembered correctly, it had.

“Who are you?” he managed.

The question seemed to perplex her for a moment.

“Call me Swanmay,” she said at last.

“Where—?” He tried to sit up, but something in his head whirled, and the pain in his side became overwhelming agony. He swallowed a howl so that it came out only as a grunt.

“Be still,” Swanmay said, starting forward, then stopping again. “You’ve had many injuries. Don’t you remember?”

“Yes,” Neil murmured, closing his eyes, trying to keep his stomach from heaving. “Yes, I remember.” He remembered her now, as well. This was the face he’d seen on the docks, the woman peering from the strange ship.

Which ship he was now likely on.

“We’re at sea,” he said. His thoughts were unschooled boys refusing to be brought to task. Fastia’s dead touch still lingered on his shoulder.

“Yes,” she said. “We put to sea two days ago.”

“Two days ago?”

“Yes. You’ve been unconscious that whole time. I was starting to fear you would not wake.”

Neil tried to think. Two days. What had happened to Anne?

Swanmay moved nearer again. “Do not think to harm me,” she said. “If I call, my men will come in and kill you.”

“I have no reason to harm you, lady,” he said. “Or none that I know of. And I would not even if I knew a reason.”

“That’s very sensible,” she said. “But in your sleep you made most violent sounds and motions. You fought whole battles, I think. Do you remember those dreams?”

“Nothing of battle,” Neil said.

“A pity. I’m sure your dreams would be interesting.” She paused. “I’m going to trust you. I’m going to sit here a moment, for I’m sure you have questions. I know if I awoke in a strange place, to a strange person, I would. I would be terrified.”

She sat down on a small stool.

“I’ll tell you this first,” she said, “in case you’re afraid to ask. The people you were fighting for—the people you were protecting—they escaped.”

Neil sighed, and felt something in him relax a bit.

“You were right,” he said. “I was afraid to ask that.”

She smiled tentatively. “They cast off safely. One was calling after you and tried to leave the ship, but the others would not let her.”

“They escaped,” Neil repeated, relief coming like an eastern breeze.

“Yes,” she said, and her tone became inquiring. “I wondered if I was aiding in some crime.”

“I am no criminal, lady, I promise you that.”

She shrugged. “Vitellio is not my home and I hardly care if you violated some law of their country. But I admire the way you fought. I admire the way you went to your doom singing. I’ve read stories about men like you, but never thought to meet one. I could not leave you to the depths.”

“So you—how did you—?”

“Some of my men can swim. They dived with a stout rope and pulled you up, but by then you were senseless.”

“I owe you and your men my life.”

“Yes, I suppose you do, but I shouldn’t feel too uncomfortable about it.” She cocked her head. “Who was she?”

“Who?”

“The girl with the red hair. She was the one you fought for, yes?”

Neil didn’t know quite how to answer that, and he suddenly realized he shouldn’t. From the moment his body struck the sea, he had no certain idea of what had happened. Perhaps everything Swanmay said was true. Perhaps none of it was. Perhaps he was captive of the very people who had attacked him. They were, after all, from Hansa, or at least some of them were. Swanmay had a Hanzish look about her, though she could as easily be from Crotheny or Herilanz. Her flawless king’s tongue told him nothing.

Her ship, he recalled, was unmarked.

“Lady,” he said, reluctantly, “please forgive me, but I can tell you nothing of why I fought.”

“Ah,” Swanmay said, and this time her smile seemed stronger. “You’re not stupid, then. You’ve no reason to believe anything I say, do you?”

“No, milady,” Neil allowed, “none whatsoever.”

“Never mind, then. I just wondered if your battle was a matter of love or duty. I see now that it is somehow both. But your love isn’t for the girl on the boat.”

He could see her eyes again, and this time they did not seem blind at all.

“I’m tired,” he said.

She nodded. “You need time to think. I’ll leave you for now, but please don’t try to move. My physician says you will start to leak like a broken boat if you do, and you interest me. I’d rather you lived long enough to find a little trust in me.”

“May I ask where we are bound?”

She clasped her hands on her knees. “You may, and I will answer, but how will you know I do not lie?”

“I suppose I don’t.”

“We’re sailing west, at the moment, to the Straits of Rusimi, and from there to Safnia. After that, I cannot say.”

She stood. “Fair rest, for now,” she said. “If you need anything, pull that rope on the other side of the bed.”

Neil remembered Hurricane then.

“Lady? What of my horse?”

Her face saddened. “I last saw him watching us depart. We have no berth or provisions for beasts aboard. I am sorry. I am certain so fine a beast will find a good master.”

That was just another dull ache for Neil. Crow was destroyed, his armor damaged probably beyond repair, and Hurricane was lost. What more could he lose, except his life?

“Thank you, lady,” he murmured.

He watched her leave. For a moment, before she closed the door behind her, he caught a glimpse of a ship’s deck in moonlight.

He tried to pull his thoughts back together. He still had his duty.

Swanmay had said they were sailing west. Anne was supposed to be sailing east, toward Paldh.

If she was sailing anywhere.

Neil inspected his wounds as best he could, and discovered that Swanmay had told the truth about them, at least. The glowing sword had cut through his armor and two of his ribs. It hadn’t gone into his vitals, but it had been a near thing.

So he wouldn’t be walking, much less fighting, for a while. For the time being, whether she was lying or telling the truth, he was at Swanmay’s mercy.

In fact, he was already worn-out, and though he tried to remain awake to ponder the situation, the sea—the one familiar thing around him—soon lulled him back to sleep.

When he woke again, it was to the soft strains of music. Swanmay sat nearby on a stool, strumming a small cherrywood harp with golden tuning pegs. The cabin window was draped, but daylight leaked through, and without the glow of fire she was like a creature from a children’s story, a woman made from snow.

“Lady,” he murmured.

“Ah. I did not mean to wake you.”

“The sound of a harp is not the worst thing to wake to, especially one played so beautifully.”

To his surprise she seemed to color a bit at that. “I was only passing the time,” she said. “How do you feel?”

“Better, I think. Milady—I wonder if it is proper that you watch over me, so. I promise you, I will lie quiet. I have little choice.”

She cast her eyes down a bit. “Well, it is my cabin,” she said. “And I tire sometimes of being on deck. When it’s bright like this, the sun hurts my eyes and burns my skin.”

“You aren’t Sefry, are you?” he joked.

“No. Just unused to daylight.” She looked back at him. “But you’ve met Sefry, haven’t you?”

“I have. It’s not difficult to do.”

“I’ve not seen one yet. I hope to, soon.”

“I should not be in your cabin, lady,” Neil persisted. “Surely there are more suitable quarters for me.”

“There are none more suitable to someone in your condition,” she replied.

“But this is not appropriate. Your men—”

She lifted her chin. “My men wished you left to the sharks. My men do not command here. I do. And I think I am in no danger from you. Do you disagree?”

“No, milady, but still—”

“I can change my clothes there, behind that screen, and wash, as well. There is a cot for me to sleep on.”

“I should sleep on the cot.”

“When you are better, you will. When you are better yet, you will sleep with the men.”

“I wish—”

“What is your name?” she asked suddenly. “You have not told me your name.”

“I—” He fumbled for a moment. “My name is Neil,” he said finally. He was sick of lying.

“Neil,” she repeated. “That’s a good name. A Lierish name. Or perhaps you are from Skern. Do you—do you know the game of fiedchese?”

Neil raised his brow in surprise. “I know it, lady. My father taught me how to play when I was a boy.”

“I wonder—would you like to play it? No one on the ship knows how, and they’re too busy to learn. But you . . .”

“Well, it’s something I can do from my back,” Neil said. “If you have a board.”

Swanmay smiled a little shyly and crossed to a small cupboard built into the cabin. From it she produced a fiedchese board and a leather bag full of playing pieces. The board was beautiful, its squares made of inlaid wood, one set red-brown and the other bone-white. The throne in the center of the board was black.

The pieces were of matching beauty. The king was carved of the dark wood, and he wore a sharply peaked helm for his crown. His men were figured with shield and sword, and they were tall and slender like their king.

The raiders were of all sorts, no two pieces alike, and they were a bit grotesque. Some had human bodies and the heads of birds, dogs, or pigs. Others had wide bodies and short legs or no legs at all, just long arms that served the function. Neil had never seen a set like it.

“Which would you like me to play, lady?” Neil asked. “The king or raiders?”

“I have played the king far too often,” Swanmay mused. “But perhaps I should play it again, to see if there is an omen in it.”

And with that opaque statement she began setting up the board. The king went in the center, surrounded by his knights in the form of a cross. The raiders—Neil’s men—were placed around the edge of the board. There were four gates, at each corner of the board. If the king reached any of the gates, Swanmay would win. Neil would win if he captured the king.

She took the first move, sending one of her knights east, but not so far as to strike one of his men. He studied the board a bit and countered by capturing the man.

“I thought a warrior might take that bait,” she said. She sent another knight across the board, this one to block one of his pieces.

Five moves later, her king crossed through the north gate and Neil was left wondering what exactly had happened.

“Well,” he said, “if it was an omen you were seeking, you found a good one.”

“Yes,” she replied. “In fact, I am nearly to my own gate. I hope to pass through it soon.” She began placing the pieces back on the board.

3 Leshya

“Aren’t many who can sneak up on me,” Aspar muttered to the Sefry behind him. He hadn’t turned, but he knew two things about the Sefry now that he didn’t know before. The first was that it certainly wasn’t Fend. He knew Fend’s voice as well as he knew his own.

The other was that she was a woman.

“I wouldn’t guess so,” she answered. “But it’s no matter. I mean you no harm if you mean me none.”

“That will depend on a few things,” Aspar said, turning slowly. He no longer feared that the monks or the greffyn might have spotted him. Whatever was coming from the east had attracted all of their attention. His immediate problem was the one behind him.

She was slight, even for a Sefry, with violet eyes and black bangs that dropped almost to her eyelashes. She had loosened her cowl so she could speak unmuffled, and he could just make out the sardonic bow of her lips. She looked young, but he guessed by the set of her eyes she wasn’t. She might be as old as he was, or older, but Sefry aged young in the skin and lived longer than Mannish folk.

He wondered how he could have ever thought she was Fend, even at a distance.

“What things would those be?” she asked.

He could see both her hands, and they were empty. He relaxed slightly.

“You’ve been leading me around,” he told her. “Playing with me. I don’t like that.”

“No? You didn’t have to follow.”

“I thought you were someone else.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Ah. You thought I was Fend.”

The name jabbed him like a prickle. “Who the sceat are you?” Aspar hissed.

She put a finger to her lips. “I can explain that later,” she said. “You’ll want to watch what’s about to happen.”

“You know what’s coming? You’ve seen it?”

She nodded. “It’s the slinders. See—there they are.”

“Slinders?” He looked back, and at first all he saw was forest. But the trees seemed to be shivering oddly, as if a wind was blowing through them in just one place. Blackbirds swirled up in clouds against the silvery sky. The monks stood like statues, frozen by the moment.

Then something came from the trees, creatures loping sometimes on four legs, sometimes on two. There were ten of them, and their baying became more frantic as their feet hit the clearing and they saw the monks.

At first Aspar thought they might be smaller versions of the utin or some other ugly thing from boygshin stories, but when he understood what they actually were, the shock went cold through him.

They were men and women. Naked, scuffed, dirty, bleeding, utterly mad—but Mannish, just as Ehawk had described.

As the leaves began to rustle in a strong autumn wind, the main pack of them came behind the leaders—twenty, fifty—more than he could count. He guessed at least a hundred. They moved strangely, and it wasn’t just that they sometimes dropped to their hands. They ran jerkily, frantically—like insects, in a way. A few carried rocks or branches, but most were empty-handed.

The majority looked to be relatively young, but some were stoop-shouldered and gray-haired. Some were little more than children, but he didn’t see any that looked as if they had seen fewer than fifteen winters.

They spread to encircle the monks, and their cacophonic yowling settled into a hair-prickling sort of song. The words were slurred and broken, just sounds really, but he knew the tune. It was a children’s song, about the Briar King, sung in Almannish.

“Those are the slinders?” he asked.

“It’s what the Oostish have taken to calling them,” the Sefry said. “At least those who haven’t joined them.”

As she spoke, the slinders began to fall, quilled black by arrows. The monks were firing with inhuman speed and precision. But it hardly slowed the wave of bodies. They poured around the fallen like a river around rocks. The monks drew swords and formed themselves into a ring fortress—only two kept their bows out, and they were in the center.

Almost without thinking, Aspar reached for his own bow.

“You’re not that foolish,” she said. “Why would you fight for them? You’ve seen what they do.”

Aspar nodded. “Werlic.” The monks deserved what they got. But what they were facing was so weird and dread, he’d almost forgotten that.

What was more, he had forgotten the greffyn. He remembered it now as it let out a low unearthly growl. It stood pawing the ground, the spines on its back stiff. Then, as if reaching a sudden decision, it turned and bounded into the forest.

Straight toward him.

“Sceat,” Aspar mouthed, raising his bow. He already felt the sickness burning in the thing’s eyes. He let fly.

The arrow skipped off the bony scales above its nostrils. The greffyn glanced his way, and with blinding speed changed direction, bounded off into the forest and was gone.

Aspar had tracked one greffyn over half of Crotheny. He’d never seen it run from anything.

If the greffyn had fought alongside them, the monks might have stood a chance. He had seen how their kind could fight, and even a poor fighter with a sword was more than a match for any number of naked, unarmed attackers.

But these attackers didn’t care if they died, and that in itself was a potent weapon.

So he watched as the slinders hurled into the monks’ glittering blades like meat into a grinder, with much the same results. In instants the clearing was bathed in gore, viscera, severed heads and limbs. But the attackers kept coming without hesitation, without fear, like Grim’s birsirks—though birsirks usually carried at least a spear. He saw one who had lost a leg dragging himself toward the monks. Another impaled himself on a sword, locking his hands around his foe’s throat.

There was fighting against that, but there was no winning. One by one the monks were dragged down by sheer force of numbers and had their throats bitten out or their bellies clawed open. Then, with his stomach lurching, Aspar watched the slinders feed, tearing into the bodies like wolves.

He glanced aside at the Sefry, but she wasn’t watching the slinders. Her eye was on the forest edge from which they had emerged. He followed her gaze and saw that the trees were still trembling, swaying even, and he felt as if the sun were rising, but there was no light. Just the feel of radiance on his face and the sense of change.

Something new stepped from the forest, then, not as tall as the trees but twice the height of a big man. Black antlers branched from its head, but its face was that of a man with birch-bark-pale skin and a beard like thick brown moss. He was as naked as the slinders, though thick hair or moss covered much of him. Where his feet struck the ground, black briars spurted up like slow fountains.

“He didn’t look like that before,” Aspar muttered.

“He’s the Briar King,” the Sefry replied. “He’s always different, always the same.”

A crowd of slinders followed him, and when the briars sprouted, they hurled themselves upon them, trying to tear them from the ground. Their bodies were flushed with blood, for the thorns cut deep, but like the monks, the thorns were no match for determination and numbers. The slinders bled and died, but the thorns were ripped apart as surely as their human foes.

The Briar King, seemingly unconcerned with any of that, strode up to the fallen monks, and the forest at his back seemed to strain to follow him.

Grimly, Aspar reached for the black arrow. He knew his best chance when he saw it.

“And here is where your choice lies, holter,” the Sefry whispered.

“No choice,” Aspar said. “He’s killing the forest.”

“Is he? Are your eyes truly open, holter?”

For answer, Aspar fitted the arrow to the sinew of his bow.

The wind dropped, and then the Briar King turned. Even at that distance, Aspar could see the green glint of his eyes.

The slinders looked up, too, and started toward Aspar, but the horned monarch lifted one hand, and they stopped in their tracks.

“Think, holter,” the Sefry said. “I only ask you to think.”

“What do you know, Sefry?”

“Little more than you do. I only know what my heart tells me. Now ask yours what it tells you. I brought you here because no one knows this forest better than you—no Sefry, no Mannwight. Who is the enemy here? Who gave you that arrow?”

The wind was nothing now. He could make the shot almost without thinking.

He could end it.

“Those things that follow him,” Aspar said, “they used to be people. Villagers.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “I’ve seen the empty villages.”

“Then . . .”

But the Briar King had saved his life. He’d been poisoned by the greffyn, and the king had stooped upon him. He remembered only a dream of the roots, sinking deep, of treetops drinking in the sun, of the great wheel of seasons, of birth and death and decay.

He’d told himself it was a lie.

The Briar King turned very slowly and walked back toward the forest. Aspar pulled the bow to its full draw, and suddenly noticed that his fingers trembled.

The Briar King’s gaze lingered. In the eyes of the greffyn, he’d seen only sickness. In the eyes of the Briar King, he saw life.

Cursing softly, he lowered the bow as the creature and its entourage faded into the trees.

The howling stopped, and the forest was quiet.

“I cannot say for certain that was the right choice, holter,” the Sefry said, breaking the silence. “But it is the one I would have made.”

Aspar returned the arrow to its case. “And now suppose you just tell me who you are?” he muttered.

“My clan is Sern,” she replied. “My talking name is Liel, but I prefer the name I was given in Nazhgave—Leshya.”

“You’re lying. No one from clan Sern has left the Halafolk rewns in a thousand generations.”

“Did you find any of my clan at Rewn Aluth? You’ve seen for yourself that we have. And I broke that prohibition long ago, before any of my folk.”

“Sceat,” he snarled. “How do you know so much about me, when I’ve never heard of you?”

She smiled grimly. “You think you know everything about the Sefry, Aspar White? You do not, and far less about me. As I said, I’ve been away. Thirty winters I spent in the north. I only came back when I felt him wakening.”

“You didn’t answer my question. How do you know so much about me?”

“I’ve taken an interest in you, Aspar White,” she said.

“That’s still no answer,” he said. “I don’t have much patience with Sefry two-talk.” He narrowed his eyes. “Every Sefry in the forest left months ago. Why are you still here?”

“The others flee from their duty,” she said sternly. “I do not.”

“What duty is that? I’ve never heard of any Sefry having a duty to any beyond themselves.”

“And I’m afraid that for the time being you’ll remain unenlightened,” she said. “Will you attack me for my silence?”

“I might. You got a friend of mine killed.”

“The mannwight? I had no way of knowing that would happen—I only wanted you to see what the Church was doing. He must be somehow sensitive to the fanes. Was he a priest?”

“So you don’t know everything either.”

“No, of course not. But if he was a priest, and has walked another faneway, perhaps one related to this one, it might explain—”

“Wait,” Aspar said, as memory suddenly struck him. “This sedos—is it part of the same faneway as the first one you led us to?”

She raised an eyebrow. “It seems most likely. Those monks built that fane first, then came here.”

“And were they finished here? Did they complete their rites?”

She glanced at the messy corpses around the mound. “I think so,” she said, “but I am certainly no expert on these matters.”

“Then I’ll bring the one who is,” Aspar replied. He turned to leave.

“Stay a moment, holter. We still need to talk. We are, it seems, working toward the same purpose.”

“I have only one purpose right now,” Aspar replied, “and I doubt very much that it’s the same as yours.”

“I’m going with you, then.”

Aspar didn’t answer. He found Ogre, mounted, and rode toward where he had left the others.

But still the Sefry followed.

He found Ehawk, Winna, and Stephen not far from where he’d left them, except they had somehow gotten Stephen’s body up into an ironoak, safely wedged in the crotch of two branches. Ehawk had his bow out.

“That’s them,” he said, when he saw Aspar. “That’s what attacked us in the Duth ag Pae. Hear them?”

The song of the slinders had begun again, albeit very distantly. “Yah,” Aspar said. “But I don’t think they’re coming this way.”

“You saw them?” Winna asked, starting to clamber down.

“Yah. I saw ‘em.”

Winna’s feet hit the ground, and she ran to throw herself into his arms. “We thought they had you,” she whispered, pressing her face into his neck. He felt dampness.

“It’s fine, Winna,” he said. “I’m fine.” But it felt good, after the days of tension and argument.

But then she stiffened in his arms. “He’s here,” she said. “Behind you.”

“Yah. It’s not Fend.” Nonetheless, he shot Ehawk a cautioning glance. The boy nodded and stayed in the tree with his weapon ready.

“No?” she pulled away from him, and they watched the Sefry walk into the camp.

Leshya glanced at Winna, then bemusedly at Ehawk. “The squirrels run large here,” she said.

“And dangerous,” Aspar replied.

“Who is she?” Winna asked.

“Just a Sefry,” Aspar grunted. “As full of lies and trouble as any of them.”

“And she can speak for herself,” Leshya said. She sat on a log and pulled off one of her buskins, spilling a rock from it and massaging her foot.

Winna stood watching her for a few moments, trying to absorb the new situation.

“Our friend was hurt because of you,” Winna finally said, angrily. “You led us—”

“I heard he was dead,” Leshya interrupted. “Was that opinion somewhat exaggerated?”

“Maybe,” Aspar allowed.

“What?” Winna said. “You’ve changed your mind?”

Aspar held his hands out, cautioning. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he said. “But something like this happened to him before, to hear him tell it. When he walked the faneway of Saint whoever.”

“Decmanis.”

“Yah. He said he lost all feeling in his body, forgot who he was, that even his heart stopped beating. Maybe something like that’s happened now. Maybe he just needs to finish the faneway.”

Winna’s eyes lit with hope, then dulled again. “We don’t know about these things, Aspar. Last time he managed it alone, because the saints intended it. This time—” She nodded up at the still body.

“You said yourself he hasn’t started to rot.”

“But— No, you’re right. We can’t just do nothing. We have to try. But we don’t even know where the rest of the faneway is.”

“We know where part of it is,” Aspar said. “That’s a start.”

“Consider carefully,” Leshya interposed, “whether anyone—even your friend—should walk a faneway such as the Church is creating.”

“The Church?” Winna looked at Aspar.

“Yah,” he said. “There were priests at the sedos. They cut people up and hung them about, like we’ve seen before.”

“But that was Spendlove and his renegades,” Winna said. “Stephen said the Church didn’t know anything about them.”

Leshya snorted. “Then your friend was wrong,” she said. “This is no small band of renegades. You think Spendlove and Fend were working alone? They are but a finger of stone on a mountain.”

“Yah,” Aspar said. “And what do you know of that? Where would I find Fend?” He cocked his head. “For that matter, you knew about the arrow. How could you know that?”

She rolled her eyes. “I saw you shoot the utin. I examined its body. The rest I either heard from you when I was following you or guessed. Someone from the Church gave it to you, didn’t they? And asked you to kill the Briar King.”

“Fend,” Aspar insisted, not to be sidetracked. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know where to find him,” she said. “I heard he was in the Bairghs when I came through there on my way south. One rumor was that he was going to the Sarnwood Witch, but who knows if that’s true?”

“Then how did you find us? How did you know who we were?” Winna demanded.

“You? Luvilih, I’ve no idea who you are, or who that boy in the tree is. But Aspar White is well known throughout the King’s Forest.”

“Not thirty years ago, I wasn’t,” Aspar said. “If you haven’t been here in that long, then it’s a fair question.”

“No, it’s still a stupid question. I was searching for the king’s holter, so I started asking who he was and how I might find him. Among other things, I heard about your fight with the greffyn, and that you were the one who first saw the Briar King. They said you’d gone to Eslen, so I was on my way there to find you. I was in Fellenbeth a few ninedays ago and heard you’d come through heading this way. So I followed.”

“But didn’t bother to introduce yourself.”

“No. I’ve heard of you, but I don’t know you. I wanted you to see the things I had seen, and I wanted to see what you would do.”

“And now you’re our best friend,” Winna said acidly. “And after all your help with the utin and leading poor Stephen straight to his doom, you reckon we’re yours.”

Leshya smiled. “You like them young, don’t you, holter?”

“That’s enough,” Aspar said. “More than enough. What’s the Church got to do with this?”

“Everything,” Leshya replied. “You saw the monks.”

“Not the praifec,” Winna blurted angrily. “If he knew about this, why would he—?”

“—send you to kill the only enemy strong enough to interfere with his designs?” Leshya finished rather smugly. “Saints know.”

“What makes you think the Briar King is against the Church and not with it?”

“Ask your lover.”

Aspar nearly jumped at the word, and when he looked back at Winna found an odd expression on her face.

“What, Aspar?” she asked.

“We saw him,” he told her. “The slinders—the things Ehawk saw, the things you heard—they were at his command. They killed the priests, and could have killed us, but he held them back.”

“Then the Briar King is good?”

“Good? No. But he’s fighting for the forest. The thorns that follow him—they’re trying to destroy him, pull him down like they’re doing the trees. The greffyn wasn’t his servant—it was his foe.”

“Then he is good,” Winna insisted.

“He fights for the forest, Winna. But he’s no friend of us, no friend of people.”

“Still, you didn’t kill him,” she said. “You said you didn’t even try.”

“No. I don’t know what’s going on exactly. I can use this arrow only once more—as long as the praifec wasn’t lying about that—and I don’t want to use it on the wrong thing, if you catch my meaning.”

Winna shot a sharp glance at Leshya. “We’ve no idea whom we can trust, then.”

“Werlic.”

“So what do we do? The praifec sent us out here to kill the Briar King. You didn’t do it. So what do we do now?”

“We take Stephen to the sedos and see what happens. That’s where we start. After that, we figure out who’s lying to us, the praifec—” He looked straight at Leshya. “—or you.”

The Sefry just smiled and pulled her boot back on.

4 The Third Faith

Anne managed to crawl out onto the deck before being sick again. She even made it to the steerboard rail, and there her whole body spasmed and she vomited until she thought her breast would tear apart. Then she slid trembling to the deck and huddled there, weeping.

It was night, and if the ship wasn’t still, the wind was. She heard a sailor laugh briefly and another hush him. She didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything.

She wished she could just die and have it over with. She deserved it.

She had killed Sir Neil, as certainly as if she had pushed him into the ocean herself. He had traveled across half the world and saved her—saved all of them—and all she had been able to do was watch the sea close over his head.

If she lived forever, she would never forget the look of betrayal in his eyes.

She took a deep, shuddering breath. It was better out here in the air. When she went below to the tiny cabin she shared with Austra, everything spun around. Two days now like that. She couldn’t keep any food down at all, and wine just made it worse, even when it was mixed with water.

She rolled over onto her back and looked up at the stars.

The stars stared back at her. So did an orange half-moon that seemed somehow far too bright.

She was starting to feel sick again.

She fixed her eye on the moon, trying to make the motion go away, to focus beyond it. She picked out features from the dark splotches, remembered maps, and noticed strange patterns that signified nothing she had ever seen, but nevertheless seemed to have meaning.

The motion of the ship gradually faded, and the light of the Moon went from orange to yellow to—as she hung directly overhead—shining silver.

With a soft movement, the ship was gone altogether. Anne looked around, only half surprised this time to find herself in a forest still bathed in moonlight.

She gathered her feet under her and stood up shakily. “Hello?” she said.

There was no answer.

She had twice been to this place. The first time she had been forced—drawn from her sister’s birthday party by a strange masked woman. The second, she had come herself, somehow, trying to escape the darkness of the cave where she had been confined by the sisters of the coven Saint Cer.

This time she wasn’t sure if she had been called or come or something in between. But it was nighttime, where before it had always been bright. And there was no one here—no strange masked women making obscure statements about how she had to be queen, or the whole world was going to end.

Maybe they didn’t know she was here.

A cloud passed across the moon, and the shadows in the trees deepened, seemed to slink toward her.

That was when she remembered that there were no shadows in this place, not under the sun, at least. Then why should they be here when it was night?

She was starting to think she wasn’t in the same place at all.

And it dawned upon her that she had been wrong about another thing. There was someone there, someone her eye kept avoiding, would not let her stare straight at. She tried harder, but each time she turned one way, she found herself looking another, so the tall shadow was always at the corner of her eye.

A soft laugh touched her ears. A man. “What is this,” a voice said. “Is this a queen, come to see me?”

Anne realized she was trembling. He moved, and she gritted her teeth as her head turned in response, so as not to see him. “I’m not a queen,” she said.

“Not a queen?” he asked. “Nonsense. I see the crown on your head and the scepter in your hand. Didn’t the Faiths tell you?”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Anne said. “I don’t know any Faiths.” But she knew she was lying. The women she had met here before had never named themselves, but that name seemed very right, somehow.

He knew, too. “Perhaps you do not know them by name,” the voice purred, echoing her thoughts. The shadows drew closer. “They are known by many. Hagautsin, Vhateis, Suesori, Hedgewights—the Shadowless. It doesn’t matter what they’re called. They are meddlesome witches with not nearly the wisdom or power they pretend to.”

“And you? Who are you?” Anne tried to sound confident.

“Someone they fear. Someone they think you can protect them from. But you cannot.”

“I don’t understand,” Anne said. “I just want to go home.”

“So you can be crowned? So you can become what the Faiths predicted?”

“I don’t want to be queen,” Anne replied truthfully, continuing to edge away. Her fear was a bright cord around her heart, but she reached for the power she had unleashed in z’Espino. She felt it quivering there, ready, but when she reached toward the shadow, there was no flesh, no blood, no beating heart. Nothing to work upon.

And yet there was something, and that something came suddenly, racing across the green from not one direction, but from all of them, a noose of darkness yanking tight. She balled her fists, trembling, and turned her face to the moon, the only place her flesh would let her look.

Light flashed through her, then, and the thing in her turned altogether different and she felt like marble, like luminescent stone, and the darkness was a wave of chill water that passed around her and was gone.

“Ah,” the voice said, fading. “You continue to learn. But so do I. Do not hold your life too dear, Anne Dare. It will not belong to you for long.”

Then the shadows were gone, and the glade was filled with perfect moonlight.

“He’s right,” a woman’s voice said. “You do learn. There are more diverse powers in the moon than darkness.”

Anne turned, but it wasn’t one of the women she had seen before. This one had hair as silvery as the lunar light and skin as pale. She wore a black gown that flashed here and there with jewels and a mask of black ivory that left her mouth uncovered.

“How many of you are there?” Anne asked.

“There are four,” the woman replied. “You have met two of my sisters.”

“The Faiths.”

“He named to you but a few of our names.”

“I’ve never heard of you by any names until now.”

“It has been long since we moved in the world. Most have forgotten us.”

“Who was that? Who was he?”

“He is the enemy,” she said.

“The Briar King?”

She shook her head. “The Briar King is not the enemy, though many of you will die by his hand. The Briar King is a part of the way things were and the way things are. The one you just spoke to is not.”

“Then who was he?”

“A mortal, still. A thing of flesh and blood, but becoming more. Like the world, he is changing. If he finishes changing, then everything we know will be swept aside.”

“But who is he?” Anne persisted.

“We do not know his mortal name. But the possibility of him has been arriving for millennia.”

Anne closed her eyes, anger welling in her breast. “You’re as useless as your sisters.”

“We’re trying to help, but by our nature we are restricted.”

“Yes, your sister explained that, at least,” Anne replied. “But I found it just as unhelpful as anything else any of you have told me.”

“Everything has its seasons, Anne. The moon goes through its cycle each month, and each year brings spring, summer, autumn, winter. But the world has larger seasons, stronger tides. Flowers that bloom in Prismen are dormant in Novmen. It has been so since the world was young.”

“And yet the last time this season came around, the cycle itself was nearly broken, a balance was lost. The wheel creaks on a splintered axle, and possibilities exist that never did before. One of those possibilities is him. Not a person, at first, just a place, a throne if you will, never sat before but waiting to be filled. And now someone has come along to fill it. But we do not yet know him—we see only what you saw, his shadow.”

“Is he the one behind the murder of my sisters and father? Did he send the knights to the coven?”

“Ultimately, perhaps. He certainly wants you dead.”

“But why?”

“He does not want you to be queen.”

“Why?” Anne repeated. “What threat am I to him?”

“Because there are two new thrones,” the Faith said, softly. “Two.”

Anne woke on the deck of the ship. Someone had slipped a blanket over her. She lay there a moment, fearing that if she straightened, the wave-sickness would return, but after a moment she realized that she felt well.

She sat up and rubbed her eyes. It was morning, the sun just peeking over the marine horizon. Austra was at the railing a few yards away, conversing in low tones with Cazio. She was smiling, and when Cazio reached to touch her hand, she went all rosy.

Silly girl, Anne thought angrily. Can’t she see there’s no sincere love in him? He’s just a boy, playing games.

But why should Austra’s foolishness bother her? After all, if he was focused on Austra, perhaps he’d leave her alone. That certainly would be for the best.

Still, Austra was her friend, and she had to watch out for her. So she pulled herself to her feet using the rail. There was no renewal of her nausea. She felt well, at least physically.

“Ah, she’s alive after all,” Cazio said, glancing in her direction. Austra jumped guiltily, and her blush deepened. Anne suddenly wondered if things had gone farther than a bit of hand-touching. While she was sick and asleep, perhaps?

She wouldn’t have to ask. Austra would volunteer any information eventually. Or—maybe not. There had been a time when they shared everything, but they had grown apart. Anne knew it was her own fault, for hiding things from Austra. Perhaps Austra was getting her revenge.

“Do you feel better?” Austra asked. “You were missing from your bed, and I couldn’t find you at all. I thought you had fallen overboard. Finally I saw you sleeping here, and brought a blanket to keep you warm.”

“That was kind of you,” Anne said. “I felt less sick out here. And altogether better now.”

“That’s good,” Cazio said. “You’ve been a bit of a bore.”

“Which makes our company perfectly matched,” Anne replied.

Cazio opened his mouth to answer, but something behind her got his attention, and his brow furrowed. She turned to see what it was.

When she saw it was Captain Malconio, her jaw tightened.

“Well,” he said. “You seem to be feeling better. The dead have risen.”

“Not all of them,” Anne said coldly. “Some remain quite dead.” Malconio’s eyes flashed something that might have been anger or chagrin, it was hard to tell.

“Casnara, I’m sorry that you lost a friend back there. But I was never hired to fight a battle, only to give you passage.” He leveled his gaze at Cazio, and her uncertainty about his mood vanished. Malconio was angry, and he had been before she ever said anything.

“In fact,” the captain went on, “I was never let in on the fact that there was danger of any sort involved.”

“Of course not,” Cazio retorted. “I know better than to rely upon either honor or bravery from you, Malconio.”

Malconio snorted. “And I know as well not to rely on sense, judgment, or gratitude from you. Or from your friends, I see. If we had delayed casting off another instant, my ship would have been overrun. Even if we hadn’t all been killed, we would have been trapped in dock for twice ninedays, settling the legalities. As far as I can see, I’ve saved all your lives, and now I’m wondering why I shouldn’t throw you overboard.”

“Because,” Cazio said, “If you try, I will acquaint Caspator with your gullet.”

“You’re making my decision easier, Cazio.”

“Ah, by Diuvo stop it, you two,” z’Acatto rasped, limping around the base of the mainsail. “Neither of you could lay a hand on the other, and you know it, so spare us all your childish threats.”

Malconio nodded his head toward the swordmaster. “How have you put up with him all of these years?”

“By staying drunk,” z’Acatto grunted. “But if I’d had the both of you around, I’d have had to find stronger drink. Which reminds me—is there any of that Gallean stuff left?”

“You already know each other?” Austra asked, her gaze switching from z’Acatto to the captain to Cazio.

“Hardly,” z’Acatto said. “But they are brothers.”

“Brothers?” Austra gasped.

Austra’s surprise mirrored Anne’s own, but she could see the resemblance now.

“No brother of mine would abandon the family honor,” Cazio said evenly.

“In what way have I abandoned the family honor?” Malconio asked. “By leaving that rotting hulk of a house to you?”

“You sold off the country estate to buy a ship,” Cazio said. “Land that’s been in our family since the Hegemony held sway. You sold it for this.” He flapped the back of his hand at the ship.

“There was no profit to be gained in the land, Cazio, nor had there been in a generation. I had no mind to laze around Avella and pick swordfights for a living, either—that role you most adequately filled. I’ve done well as a merchant. I own four vessels, and soon enough I’ll have my own estates, built by my own hands. You cling to the Chiovattio past, brother. I represent our future.”

“That’s a pretty speech,” Cazio allowed. “Do you practice it in front of a looking glass?”

Malconio started to reply, rolled his eyes, placed his hands on his hips, and smiled sardonically at Anne.

“Marry him and make his life miserable, won’t you?” he said.

Anne drew herself up. “You presume far too much,” she said, “even in jest. You are like your brother in that, if in nothing else.”

“Thank Diuvo that’s the extent of it.”

“You should be so lucky as to be like your brother,” Austra exploded. “He’s a valiant fighter. We would be dead ten times over if it weren’t for him.”

“And if it weren’t for me,” Malconio said, “you would be dead only one time, which, I think, would suffice.”

Cazio lifted his finger and seemed about to add something, but his brother waved him off, “Z’Acatto’s right—this is useless. I should have known better than to take my brother on ship, much less his friends, but now I have. What’s done is done, so, to the heart of the matter—who were those men that were pursuing you?”

“I thought your business with us was limited to our passage,” Anne said. “Why this sudden curiosity about our enemies?”

“For two reasons, casnara. The first is that I am now connected in their minds with you. I have an enemy I never sought to offend. The second is that we are presently being followed by a rather fast ship, and I very much suspect that it contains your friends from the docks at z’Espino.”

5 Alis Berrye

“Majesty?” Muriele looked up. It was the young man-at-arms whom Sir Fail had stationed in her antechamber.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Someone is knocking for admittance.”

Muriele rubbed her eyes. She hadn’t heard.

“See who it is.”

“Yes, Majesty.”

He vanished into her receiving room while she stared nervously at the concealed door. Though it seemed clear enough now that the assassin had entered through the front, she wasn’t as sure he had left that way. The door was invisible, if one did not know it was there, but given sufficient time and the knowledge that it existed, the latch could certainly be found.

Until she could be sure he wasn’t still there, hiding in the walls, she would never be comfortable being wholly alone.

The man-at-arms returned. “It is the praifec Hespero, Majesty,” he announced.

“Is he alone?”

“Yes, Majesty.”

“Very well.” She sighed. “Admit him.”

A moment later the dark-gowned praifec entered her chambers and bowed. “Majesty,” he said.

Muriele had always felt there was something missing about the praifec, but she had never been able to say what it was. He was a man of intelligence, certainly, and even of passion when it came to matters of state and religion. He was well-spoken to the point of being glib. And yet somehow—even in his most impassioned argument—it seemed to her that he wasn’t entirely present, that there was some basic quality that he was counterfeiting, that he didn’t actually have. When she focused on any particular quality of his, however, it seemed genuine.

It could be, she decided, that she simply didn’t like him, and what was missing was merely her acceptance of him.

“To what do I owe this visit, praifec?” she asked.

“To my natural concern for your well-being,” he replied.

She lifted an eyebrow. “Please explain,” she directed.

“I should think it should be evident,” Hespero said. “Suddenly, in the middle of the night, Sir Fail and his guard sweep into the royal apartments. His Majesty, King Charles, is brought in, also under Lierish guard. The Craftsmen become agitated, and the entire castle is thrown into a state of disarray.”

Muriele shrugged. “Someone tried to kill me, Praifec,” she said. “Under such circumstances, disarray is only natural. What would you have me do?”

“Someone tried to kill you?” His surprise seemed as genuine as his concern.

“Unless their true intent was to slaughter my guard and then my young maid, I would have to conclude so,” Muriele said.

“This is terrible. How was it done?”

She smiled grimly. “As when the churchmen killed my daughters, no one seems to know.”

The praifec’s mouth opened in a little o, then closed before he began speaking again. “Majesty, if you are implying that the Church had any hand in this, I forgive you. Clearly the stress has clouded your judgment.”

“Nevertheless, this has the same stink about it,” Muriele replied.

“Brother Desmond and his men were renegades,” Hespero reminded her. “Worse, they were heretics practicing the forbidden arts.”

“In afterthought, yes,” Muriele agreed. “But I took the liberty of checking the rolls of the monastery d’Ef and discovered that he—and his men—were trusted members of the Church until just before his death.”

“Actually, I think he was probably considered less than sanctified when he murdered the fratrex of his order,” Hespero said sarcastically. “The possibility of evil exists everywhere, even within the Church. I do not deny that. The murders of your children—and the methods used to accomplish them—have served to reawaken us to that simple but neglected truth. We have begun the most serious investigation of our various orders since the days of the Hegemony, a search which starts with the Fratrex Prismo himself and descends to the humblest frater and most rural sacritor. If you have any evidence at all that tonight’s attempt on your life was connected with any man of the Church, I am compelled to ask you what it is.”

“There is none,” Muriele admitted.

“I see,” the praifec returned. “Then what is known?”

“That someone killed the guard at my chamber door with a knife. That he then entered my apartments and slew my maid in the same fashion.”

“But you escaped.”

“I was not here,” Muriele replied.

“That was very fortunate,” the praifec said.

“Yes, it was,” she said wearily. “Praifec, why are you here?”

Both eyebrows lifted in surprise. “To offer my support and my council.”

“What council would that be?”

“Majesty, I must speak plainly. Though I now see your actions were spurred by fear and desperation—and were therefore perhaps in some way justified—they have created pandemonium. Rumors are abundant. Some say that this is some sort of Lierish coup, that you are being forced—or worse, have chosen—to take the kingdom by force.”

“May I remind you, Praifec, that the kingdom is already mine?”

“It is not, Majesty,” the praifec said, with what seemed excessive gentleness. “It is your son’s, and he is a Dare, not a de Liery. You have no claim to the throne at all.”

“Fair enough,” Muriele replied. “Let me be candid, as well. Somehow, an assassin walked by or around the vaunted Craftsmen, entered my chambers, killed my maid, and would have killed me if I had had the bad fortune to be here. Since Cal Azroth, I have found it difficult to place full faith in the royal guard, and now I find it impossible. I trust Fail de Liery, and I trust his men. I do not trust anyone else in this castle, nor should I as you well may know. So I am protecting my life and the life of my son, and my son’s throne as best I can. If you can think of a better way, please share it.”

Hespero rubbed his forehead and sighed. “You are not a fool, Majesty. You must understand the repercussions of this. Whatever you are actually doing, if Hansa perceives that you are installing some sort of Lierish regency here, they will send armies. I and the praifec of Hansa have been working tirelessly to prevent this war. If you continue down this path, we will fail.”

She spread her hands. “Then tell me what to do, Praifec.”

He was silent for a moment. Then, hesitantly, he cleared his throat. “Well, there is a precedent here,” he said at last.

“What precedent do you refer to?”

“Three hundred years ago, Liery ruled most of Crotheny, but controlled only the western part—the east was in relative chaos, until it was ceded to Virgenya.”

“Yes. The lords of Liery hadn’t the strength to control it, and considered it preferable to have it under Virgenyan control than Hansan.”

“Yes,” the praifec agreed, “the animosity between Liery and Hansa runs very deep, to the days of the Hegemony, perhaps to before, when they were warring tribes. In any event, while the Church recognized the legal cession and the marriage that concluded it—the first in the series of Lierish and Virgenyan alliances of which you are the most immediate example—Hansa was the stronger nation, and prepared to take eastern Crotheny by force. Or retake it, as they might put it, since it was originally tribes from Hansa that broke the hold of the Hegemony in this region.”

“I see,” Muriele said, stiffening. “You’re suggesting I allow a Pax Sacer.”

The praifec nodded. “As it was done then. His eminence the Fratrex Prismo could be persuaded to lend troops to secure the peace and allay suspicions that you are showing favoritism.”

“And yet fifty years later, Hansa conquered all of Crotheny, east and west.”

“True, but only after the pax was put aside.”

“So your suggestion is that I allow the occupation of this city by troops from Vitellia.”

“From z’Irbina,” Hespero corrected. “The most holy Fratrex Prismo’s own men. Only until the political situation here is peacefully resolved. It is the best way, Majesty. Hansa will never dare go against the Church. Peace will be preserved, countless lives saved.”

Muriele closed her eyes. It was tempting. If she gave control to the Church, she could rest. She could concentrate on protecting the children she had left.

“The Church hasn’t taken sides on the part of any country in three hundred years,” she said. “Why now?”

“Surely you understand, Majesty, that this goes well beyond determining who will sit the throne of Crotheny a year hence. A great evil has risen in the world, one we do not understand, but one which we cannot ignore.”

“You’ve read the latest reports from Duke Artwair, in the east? Half his men have been slain by what can only be described as hordes of naked madmen, by demons and monsters the likes of which the world has not seen since the Warlock Wars. Whole towns have been destroyed, and the east empties out. Eslen is near to bursting from the refugees, and we are still losing ground.”

“But it isn’t just on the frontiers—Broogh was in the heart of Newland, and destroyed by an unholy creature none of us suspected remained in the world. Now is the time for nations to unite, not for them to be divided. You must stand together against this dark rising of the tide, not fight amongst yourselves as it drowns you. That is what I am offering you—not merely the chance to save this earthly throne, but to make it possible for us all to combat the real foe—together.”

“Under the leadership of z’Irbina.”

Hespero fingered his beard. “The reason we do not take sides in the secular conflicts of nations, Majesty, is because we have a higher calling. Virgenya Dare cleansed our world of the first evil, of the Skasloi. And yet it seems that no matter how well and deeply evil is defeated, it always returns, in a different guise. It is the Church which took up Virgenya Dare’s mantle and her mission. When the Black Jester rose, it was through the leadership of the Church that he was thrown down in defeat.”

“Yes. And then the Church ruled most of the known world for six hundred years.”

“It was a golden age,” Hespero said, frowning at her tone. “The most perfect peace and prosperity Everon has ever known.”

“You wish a return to that?”

“We could do worse, but I am suggesting no such outcome. What I am saying is that we must be unified, and not through war or conquest. We need a cleansing, a resacaratum, that will prepare us for the great test to come. The resacaratum has already begun, Majesty, within the Church itself, but it must—it will—go further than that.”

“You’re asking me to let an army march through my gates and occupy my country without a fight.”

“By holy mandate, Majesty. To bring the peace and justice Crotheny so desperately needs.”

“What if I refuse?” Muriele asked.

Hespero’s face seemed to wither a little. “Then you deal us all a mortal blow,” he said. “But we will be unified—we will fight this evil somehow. I am suggesting the best course of action, but not the only one.”

“Suggest another,” she challenged.

He shook his head, and his eyes glinted strangely. “It should not come to that. Please, Majesty—will you at least consider my words?”

“Of course, Praifec,” she said. “They are wise words, and these are large matters, and I am tired. We will speak of this again soon. Be prepared to tell me in more specifics how your plan would be implemented.”

“I pray the saints send you their best judgment, Majesty.” He bowed and left, leaving Muriele with the distinct impression that she had been threatened.

Hespero seemed sincere, and he was correct—something terrible was happening in the world, and he probably knew more about it than she did. The Church’s intention might be entirely pure, and it was entirely possible that Hespero was right, that allowing sacred troops in her city would be the best for everyone.

But she saw what the praifec had carefully hinted at, as well. Whatever the Church’s ultimate motives and intentions, they needed a tool to accomplish them. A nation. If Crotheny would not be that nation, only Hansa remained.

She was still considering that when they brought in Alis Berrye, who was still wearing the dressing gown Muriele had last seen her in.

“Majesty,” the girl murmured, bowing. She stood uncomfortably as Muriele appraised her. She was a pretty thing—there was no way around that, even with the dark circles under her sapphire eyes and her curly hair in absolute disarray.

“She has been searched?” she asked the man-at-arms.

“Yes, Majesty. She has no weapons.”

“You searched her hair?”

“Ah—no, Majesty. But I shall.”

He proceeded to do just that. Berrye took it with a tiny smile on her face.

“Do I seem so dangerous to you, Majesty?” she asked.

Muriele didn’t answer, but nodded toward the man-at-arms. “Please leave us, sir,” she said.

When the door was closed behind him, Muriele settled into an armchair.

“Lady Berrye,” she said. “Much has happened in the past few bells. Doubtless you have heard some of the rumors.”

“Some, Majesty,” she allowed.

“Someone tried to kill me last night.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Thank you. I know you’ve never wished me anything but the best of health.”

Berrye looked puzzled. “I never have, Majesty. I have always admired you and wished you well.”

“Even when you were in bed with my husband?”

“Of course.”

“But it never occurred to you that it might bother me?”

Berrye shrugged. “That was a matter between you and His Majesty. If it bothered you, he was the one to tell. Unless I was the only one of his mistresses you took exception to.”

“You are too bold, perhaps,” Muriele said, “especially now, when you don’t enjoy his protection.”

“I have no one’s protection, Majesty,” Berrye said. “I am most acutely aware of that.”

Something was wrong here, Muriele realized. Wasn’t anything the way she thought it was?

“You are too bold,” she repeated. “Where is the simpering, nervous girl who used to cower when I entered the room?”

Again, Berrye smiled faintly. “She died with William.”

“You will refer to my late husband as his Majesty or as the king or not at all, Lady Berrye.”

“Very well,” she said easily.

“Enough of this,” Muriele said. “My time is precious. You wrote to me claiming that I was in danger. Within a few bells of that correspondence, there was an attempt on my life. If you want that head of yours to stay where it is, you’ll explain to me—this moment—precisely what you know.”

If Berrye was surprised that Muriele knew she had left the note, she didn’t show it. She stood straight, without any fidgeting, and met Muriele’s gaze squarely. “I will tell you everything I know, Majesty, but I believe my letter also mentioned my own need for protection.”

“At this moment, you need protection from me. And the only thing that will save you is the truth.”

Berrye acknowledged that with a small nod of her head.

“Do you know why His Majesty was on the headland of Aenah that day?” she asked Muriele.

“You’re going to tell me you know?”

“Prince Robert came to the king, in the Warhearth. He had been gone for some time, on a secret embassy to Saltmark. When he returned, he brought something with him—the severed finger of Princess Lesbeth.”

“Lesbeth.” Lesbeth was William’s younger sister, Robert’s twin. She had long been missing.

“Prince Robert claimed that Lesbeth’s betrothed—Cheiso of Safnia—had betrayed her into the hands of the Duke of Austrobaurg, who was holding her hostage.”

“For what ransom?”

“Saltmark, you remember, was pursuing a war against the Sorrow Isles. The ransom was that His Majesty arrange to secretly aid them in that war.”

Muriele crossed her arms. “The Sorrows are a Lierish protectorate and thus under our protection, as well. He could not do that.”

“His Majesty could and did,” Berrye said. “You must know how much he loved Lesbeth.”

“Everyone loved Lesbeth. But to aid our enemies in a war against our friends—William was rarely that poor in judgment.”

“Prince Robert pushed him into it—he was very convincing, especially since he had Lesbeth’s finger as proof. Ships from Crotheny, under assumed banners, attacked and sank twenty Sorrovian ships. His Majesty went to Aenah to collect the princess Lesbeth, and there he was betrayed.”

“By whom? Austrobaurg was killed, as well.” But a terrible sense was emerging, now. Perhaps the Lierish arrows that had slain her husband’s guard had not been artificially planted after all. Perhaps it really had been the retribution of some Lierish lord who knew what William had done.

And if that were true, did Fail de Liery know? Had this entire attempt on her life been designed to lead her directly into his hands?

“I have a guess as to who the betrayer was,” Berrye said, “but no certain proof.”

“Well?”

The girl paced a few steps, hands clasped behind her back. Then she turned to face Muriele again. “Did you know that Ambria Gramme had another lover?” she asked.

Muriele snorted. “Whom didn’t she spread her legs for—that’s the question.”

Berrye shook her head. “This was a very secret lover. A very important one.”

“Do not tire me, Lady Berrye. Who was he?”

A small look of triumph spread across Berrye’s face. “Prince Robert,” she said.

Muriele took a moment to absorb that fact. After the initial shock, she realized that it wasn’t really that surprising. Robert had always wanted what William possessed. He had even tried to seduce Muriele a time or two. “What of it?”

“Prince Robert convinced His Majesty to pay the ransom. Prince Robert set the time and the place for both His Majesty and Austrobaurg to meet. Only the prince knew all the details.”

“You believe Robert betrayed William to his death?”

“I believe it.”

“Despite the fact that Robert was also killed in the ambush?”

Berrye blinked. “Robert was never found, Majesty.”

“They only found part of William,” Muriele said. “He was thrown into the sea. Presumably Robert . . .” She trailed off. Why had she so easily assumed Robert was dead? Because everyone else had? “What has this to do with Gramme?” she demanded.

“I recently heard her speak of the prince as if she knew he was still alive. She intimated that she had seen him.”

“She said this to you?”

“No,” Berrye admitted, “but I heard it, nevertheless. And I think she knows it.”

“You’ve made it your business to hear a great many things, it would seem,” Muriele noticed.

“Yes, Majesty, I have.”

“And how did you hear all of this?”

“I think you know, Majesty,” Berrye said, pushing her disorderly curls away from her face, finally showing a bit of real nervousness. “The same way you knew who had left you the note.”

“So. William knew about the passages.”

To her surprise, Berrye laughed, a terse little giggle. “His Majesty? No, he knew nothing of them.”

Muriele frowned. “Then how did you—?” It hit her then. “You’re coven-trained.”

Berrye nodded infinitesimally.

Muriele sat back, trying to reform her picture of the girl, wondering if there was anything at all solid in her life.

“Did Erren know?” she asked, her voice sounding weak to her own ears.

“I do not think so, Majesty. We were not of the same order.”

A chill tightened Muriele’s spine. “There is only the order of Cer.” But Erren herself had voiced the opinion that there were other, illicit orders.

“There is another,” Berrye confirmed.

“And they sent you here.”

“Yes, Majesty. To keep my eyes and ears open, to stay near the king.”

Now it was Muriele’s turn to laugh, though somewhat bitterly. “That you did most admirably well. Aren’t you supposed to be celibate?”

Berrye looked down, shyly, and for the first time since the conversation had begun looked no older than her nineteen years. “My order has no such restrictions,” she murmured.

“I see. And why come to me now with this knowledge?”

Berrye looked back up. Her eyes were round and threatening tears. “Because, Your Majesty, they are all dead—all my sisters. I am orphaned. And I believe their murderers were the same as those who killed William, Fastia, Elseny, and Lesbeth.”

Muriele felt a sudden rush of sympathy, and her own grief threatened to surface, but she crushed it away. She would have time for that later, and she had already allowed herself to appear too weak in front of Berrye. Instead, she concentrated on the facts.

“Lesbeth? So Austrobaurg killed her?”

“I believe Austrobaurg never even saw her,” Berrye said. “I think she died here, in Eslen.”

“Then where did Robert get her finger?”

“From the author of all of this, of course. From the one who designed this entire tragedy.”

“Gramme?”

“Or Robert. Or the both of them. I cannot say for sure.”

“Robert loved Lesbeth better than anyone.”

“Yes,” Berrye said. “With a terrible love. I think an unnatural love that she did not share.”

Muriele felt a sick twisting in her belly, and her mouth went dry.

“And where is Robert now?”

“I don’t know. But I think Ambria Gramme does.”

“And where is she?”

“At her estates, preparing a fete of some sort.”

“I’ve heard nothing of this,” Muriele said. “It was not widely advertised in Eslen.”

“Then who attends it?”

“That I did not discover either,” Berrye confessed. Muriele sat back, her head whirling. She closed her eyes, hoping things would settle, but it was too much.

“If you have lied to me,” she said at last, “you will not die quickly.”

“I have not lied to you, Majesty,” Berrye said. Her eyes were clear again, and her voice strong.

“Let us hope not,” Muriele said. “Is there anything else you can tell me?”

“There is a good deal,” Berrye said. “I can tell you which members of the Comven favor you and which do not. I can tell you who Gramme has on her side. And I can tell you she is planning to move against you soon.”

“Have I cause to doubt Sir Fail and his men?”

“None that I know of.”

Muriele sat up. “Lady Berrye, will you declare an oath to take me as your personal liege, swearing by whatever saints you swear by?”

“If you will protect me in turn, Majesty.”

Muriele smiled. “You must know that I can barely protect myself.”

“You have more power than you know,” Berrye told her. “You just haven’t learned how to use it. I can help you. I was trained for it.”

“You would be my new Erren?” Muriele asked bitterly. “My new coven-trained bodyguard?”

“I would do that, Majesty. I swear it by the saints I swear by.” She touched her forehead and breast with her thumb.

Muriele sighed. “I would be a great fool to trust you,” she said.

“If I were already in your employ, I would tell you exactly that,” Berrye said. “You have no reason to trust me. But I’m asking you to. You need me, and I need you. My entire order was slaughtered, women I loved. And believe me or not, but I cared for His Majesty. He was not a good king, but he was, for all his faults, a good man, and there are few such in the world. I would see those who brought him down go screaming to Mefitis, begging her mercy. And there is one more thing.”

“What is that?” Muriele asked.

“Do not ask me to explain this. It is the one thing I cannot explain.”

“Go on.”

“Your daughter, Anne. She must live, and she must be queen.”

A long shock ran through Muriele, starting at her feet and working up to the crown of her head.

“What do you know of Anne?” she demanded.

“That she is alive. That she was at Saint Cer. That the sisters of the coven Saint Cer, like those of my own order, were all murdered.”

“But Anne escaped?”

“I have no proof, but I feel it in my heart. I see it in my dreams. But she has many enemies.”

Muriele stared at the girl, wondering how she could have ever believed her to be the empty-headed pretty thing she had pretended to be. Even Erren had been fooled, which was remarkable. Alis Berrye was a very dangerous woman. She could also be a very useful ally.

Muriele rose and summoned the footman. “Give the lady Berrye an escort and instruct them to take her to her apartment, where she will retrieve her personal effects. Settle her in the small apartment down the hall. And please tell Sir Fail that I request his presence.”

“You won’t regret this, Majesty,” Berrye said.

“See that I don’t. Go along now, Lady Berrye.”

She watched the girl go and then returned to her chair, ticking her finger against the wooden arm, waiting for Sir Fail.

It was time to pay a visit to her husband’s other mistress. But she had another call to make first. One she had been avoiding.

She went to her dresser, and though she had made her decision, she hesitated before the small coffer, thinking of the Him, deep beneath the castle, where no light ever shone. His voice of silk and nightmare. She had not spoken to the Kept since that day she discovered the key in William’s study, after his death.

But she had questions for him now. With no more faltering, she opened the wooden box.

The key was not there.

6 Observations on Diverse Things Such as Being Dead By Stephen Darige

I had to learn to hear again once before. It was after I walked the faneway of Decmanis. Each stop along the way took something from me—the sensation in my hand first, then my hearing, then my sight—until there was nothing left of me but a body, not even a mind. Somehow I finished the path, and it all came back to me, but different, better.

That’s how it is to be dead. I heard a lot at first, but it made no sense. It was just noise, like the wailing of ghosts in the halls of the damned. Then the noises began to make sense, and eventually to become familiar.

I can hear Aspar, Winna, and Ehawk, but my body is lost to me. I cannot speak to them or move a finger or an eyelid.

I remember I used to care for them.

I do still, in many ways. When Winna is near I can smell her, feel her, almost taste her. When she touches me, it sends shivers through me that somehow are not revealed on my dead flesh.

I heard her and Aspar last night. She smells different when they do that, sharper. So does Aspar.

Observations of the quaint and curious holter-beast—in the act of procreation, this ordinarily closemouthed creature vocalizes extraordinarily, though only in low tones. He makes rhymes of his lover’s name—mina-Winna, fenna-Winna, and the inevitable winna-Winna. He calls her by other silly appellations of his own invention, notwithstanding that Winna is already a rather silly name.

There’s someone new, a Sefry. Winna doesn’t like her because Aspar does, though he denies it every way he can. I wonder if she looks like his wife, the dead one?

They’re taking me to the next faneway, which for them is clever. I wonder what will happen there? The first was very strange, and I am hard put to explain why it affected me the way it did. It was consecrated to one of the damned saints, she who was known as the queen of demons. Perhaps Decmanis is punishing me for stepping on her faneway, and yet somehow that doesn’t feel right. The only other possibility that occurs is that she is somehow also an aspect of Saint Decmanis, which would be very interesting indeed, not to mention heretical.

Can saints be heretics?

We’re approaching the fane. I can feel it like a fire.

Aspar surveyed the clearing and the mound. The bodies were still there, and none of them were moving. Of the Briar King and his hunt there was no sign, save the dead bodies of slinders and the monks they had killed.

“Oh, saints,” Winna said when she saw the carnage.

“Weak stomach?” Leshya asked.

“I’ve seen bodies like this before,” Winna said. “But I don’t have to pretend I like it.”

“No, you don’t,” the Sefry agreed.

“So what do we do now?” Winna asked.

Aspar shrugged and dismounted. “Take Stephen up on the mound, I reckon. See what happens.”

“Are you quite certain this is the wise thing to do?” Leshya asked.

“No,” Aspar answered shortly.

Stepping carefully, they picked their way around where the bodies were thickest and up to the top of the sedos. Aspar laid Stephen out in the very middle.

As he’d more or less expected, nothing happened.

“Well, it was worth a try,” he muttered. “You three watch him. I’m going to have a better look around.”

Aspar walked back down through the carnage, feeling tired, angry at himself for having nursed such a forlorn hope. People died. He knew that by now, didn’t he? He used to be easy about it.

The slinders looked like people now, their faces relaxed in death. They could have come from any village around the King’s Forest. He was thankful that he didn’t see anyone he knew.

After a time he wandered to the edge of the forest, and before he realized it found himself standing beneath the gnarled branches of the naubagm and the strands of rotted rope that hung from them. The earth had drunk a lot of blood in this place. It had drunk his mother’s blood.

He’d never been told what brought her here. His father and foster mother rarely spoke of her, and when they did it was in hushed tones, and they made the sign against evil. Then they had died, and he’d ended up with Jesp.

A raven landed on the uppermost branch of the tree. Farther above, he saw the black silhouette of an eagle against the clouds. He took a deep breath and felt the land roll away from him, getting bigger, stretching out its bones of stone and sinews of root. He smelled the age and the life of it, and for the first time in a long while felt a kind of peaceful determination.

I’ll fix this, he silently promised the trees.

“I’ll fix this.” It was the first thing Jesp had said when she found him. He’d been running and bleeding for a day, the forest turned to shadow around him. When he finally fell, he’d dreamed he was still running, but now and then he woke and knew he was lying in the reeds of some marsh, half covered in water. He’d been awake when he heard her coming, and tried to reach for his knife, but he didn’t have the strength to move. Seven winters old, he’d been. He still remembered the way his breath whistled, because he’d kept forgetting that’s what it was, kept thinking it was some sort of bird he’d never heard of.

Then he’d seen Jesp’s face, that ancient, pale Sefry face. She stood there for what seemed a long time, while he tried to talk, and then she knelt down and touched his face with her bony fingers.

“I’ll fix this,” she said. “I’ll fix you up, child-of-the-Naubagm.”

How she knew that about him, she never said. But she raised him, and filled him with Sefry nonsense, and she died.

He missed her. And now that he knew that Sefry stories weren’t all nonsense, he desperately wished he could talk to her again. He wished he’d paid more attention when she was alive. And maybe he wished that he’d thanked her, at least once.

But that was done.

He sighed and cracked his neck.

A few kingsyards north, something ran out of the forest, moving faster than a deer.

It was a man, dressed in the habit of one of the monks. He had a bow, and he was making straight for the sedos, where Aspar could still see the others.

With a silent curse, Aspar pulled a shaft from his quiver, set it to the string, and let it go.

The monk must have seen the motion from the corner of his eye—even as the arrow arced toward him, he dropped into a sudden crouch and whirled, firing at Aspar.

Aspar’s shot missed by a thumb’s breadth; the monk’s missed Aspar by just twice that.

Aspar stepped behind the Naubagm as the monk fitted and fired another arrow. It struck quivering into the ancient tree.

The monk turned again and sprinted toward the mound and out of range. Cursing—and at a much slower pace than his adversary—Aspar ran after him.

The monk did a strange, twisting dance, and Aspar realized that Ehawk and Leshya were firing at him now. Both missed, and before either could draw new arrows, the churchman shot back. Aspar watched in throat-choking helplessness as Ehawk jerked weirdly and fell. Winna was crouching, but still far too large a target.

Leshya fired again and again without success.

The monk’s dodging gave Aspar a chance to get back in range, and he drew back to shoot, still running.

His bowstring snapped with a hollow thud.

He drew his ax, snarling.

Leshya drew and shot. This time the monk had to dodge so violently that he stumbled, but he rolled and came back up, facing Aspar.

Aspar threw the ax and sidestepped. The churchman’s shaft sang through empty air, but the ax also missed.

The monk suddenly jogged to the right, and Aspar grimly understood he had no intention of closing for close combat. He’d just keep running and shooting until they were all dead or he was out of arrows.

He reached into his haversack, found his extra sinew, pulled it out to restring the bow. An arrow struck his boiled-leather cuirass with a thump, and he cursed and dropped to the ground. He finished stringing his bow. Another arrow plowed the soil right in front of his nose, and now the monk was hurtling toward him again, ignoring Leshya.

Aspar nocked the arrow to his string, the bow turned flat to the ground. It was an awkward pull, and he knew the other man would have one more shot before he got his.

But the monk stumbled, an arrow suddenly standing in his thigh. He shouted, turned, and loosed his dart toward the mound, but another arrow hit him in the center of the chest, and he sat down, hard. Aspar fired, hitting him in the right collarbone, and the fellow pitched over, howling.

Leshya was on him almost immediately, kicking the bow from his hands.

“Don’t kill him,” a familiar voice shouted.

Aspar looked toward the mound. Stephen stood there, holding Ehawk’s bow. Winna was running toward him, and nearly barreled him over with a hug.

Aspar couldn’t stop the smile from raising his lips. It felt too good, seeing Stephen standing there.

“Sceat,” he murmured. “It worked.”

“Keep him alive,” he told Leshya, waving at the monk.

She was already binding the man’s hand with cords. “If it can be done,” she said. “I’ve a few questions to ask him myself.”

Aspar hesitated. She had helped in the fight. She had probably saved his life when the Briar King came. But trusting her—trusting any Sefry—was a foolish proposition.

She looked back up, as if he had shouted his thoughts. Her violet gaze held his for an instant, and then she shook her head in disgust and returned to her task.

Aspar took another good look around the clearing, then started toward Stephen and Winna, his step feeling lighter.

It grew heavier again when he saw Ehawk. The boy was sprawled on the grass, pawing weakly at an arrow in his thigh. The ground around him was slick with blood. Winna and Stephen were already ministering to him.

“Hello, Aspar,” Stephen said without looking.

“It’s good to see you up and—ah—alive,” Aspar said.

“Yes, it’s good to be that way,” Stephen replied, not looking up from his task. “Winna, put something in his mouth so he doesn’t bite his tongue off.”

“I can deal with that, if you’re not up to it,” Aspar offered.

“No,” Stephen said. “I trained for this. I’ll do it. But I could use some foolhag for this wound, to stop the bleeding.”

Aspar blinked. The last time Stephen had confronted a bleeding wound, he’d collapsed in a fit of vomiting and been useless. Now he bent over Ehawk, his hands slick with blood, working quick, sure, and steady. The boy had certainly changed in the few months he had known him.

“I’ll find some,” he said. “Ehawk, how are you, boy?”

“I’ve f-felt better,” he gasped.

“I’ll bring saelic for the pain,” Aspar promised. “You just breathe deep and slow. Stephen knows what he’s doin’.” He went after the herbs, hoping that was true.

As soon as Ehawk’s bleeding was staunched and his leg bandaged, they put him on his horse, loaded the still-unconscious monk on Angel, and set off to get as far from the sedos as possible before nightfall.

“We’re going the wrong way,” Leshya said.

“I picked it, I’m in charge, it can’t be the wrong way,” Aspar pointed out.

“We should be following the monk’s trail.”

“What trail? The Briar King’s hunt missed him, that’s all.”

“I doubt that,” she said. “I think he came to bring them a message.” She held up a document with some sort of seal on it.

“That’s a Church seal,” Stephen said from where he was riding by Ehawk, some ten yards away.

“Well, your eyes are still good,” Aspar said.

“Yes.” Stephen smiled.

“How are you?”

“A little confused. I don’t know what’s happened since—well, whatever it was happened.”

“You don’t remember?” Winna asked.

Stephen trotted nearer. “Not really. I remember going into the sedos and feeling strange. Or, rather, not feeling much of anything. The bodies made me sick—I was going to be sick—and then suddenly I didn’t care. They might as well have been stones.”

“The letter?” Leshya interrupted.

“Stephen is our friend,” Winna snapped. “We thought he was dead. You’re going to have to tend your own beehive for a breath or two.”

Leshya shrugged and pretended interest in the forest.

“Was when you came down you fell,” Aspar said.

Stephen shook his head. “I don’t remember that, or anything else until I woke up on the sedos and saw you fighting the monk.”

“That was a nice shot you made. Didn’t know you could handle a bow so well.”

“I can’t,” Stephen said.

“Then—?”

“You remember how I hit Desmond Spendlove with his knife? Sometimes I can see something done and—well, do it. It doesn’t always work, and never with anything complicated. I can’t watch someone fight with a sword and learn how to do it, though I might be able to make some of the strokes. But to know when to do them—that’s different.”

Shooting a bow isn’t that simple either, Aspar thought. You have to know the weapon, allow for the wind . . .

Something was different about Stephen, but he couldn’t say what.

“That was one of the, ah, saint gifts you got?” he asked.

“From walking the faneway of Saint Decmanis, yes.”

“And do you have anything new like that? From this sedos?”

Stephen laughed. “Not that I know of. I don’t feel any different. Anyway, I didn’t walk the whole faneway, just two sedoi, if I understand what happened.”

“But something happened,” Aspar persisted. “The first killed you; the second brought you back to life.”

“What would the next one do, I wonder?” Leshya asked.

“I’ve no intention of finding out,” Stephen replied. “I’m alive, walking, breathing, I feel good—and I don’t want to have anything more to do with the saint that faneway belongs to.”

“You know the saint?” Leshya asked.

“There was a statue in the first one,” Stephen said, “with a name: Marhirehben.”

“I’ve never heard of him,” Winna said.

“Her,” Stephen corrected, “at least in that aspect, the saint is female. If the word saint really applies.”

“What do you mean?”

“Marhirehben was one of the damned saints, whose worship was forbidden by the Church. Her name means ‘Queen of Demons.’”

“How can a saint be completely forgotten?”

“She wasn’t. You’ve heard of her—Nautha, Corpse Mother, the Gallows Witch—those are some of her names that survive.”

“Nautha isn’t a saint,” Winna protested. “She’s a monster from children’s stories.”

“So was the Briar King,” Stephen said.

“Anyway, somebody remembers her old name.” He frowned. “Or was reminded. She was mentioned in several of the texts I deciphered. Another of her aspects was ‘mother devouring.’ She who eats life and gives birth to death.” He looked down. “They couldn’t have done this without me, without my research.”

“Stephen, this isn’t your fault,” Winna said.

“No,” Stephen said. “It isn’t. But I was an instrument of whoever’s fault it is, and that doesn’t please me.”

“Then we should follow the monk’s trail,” Leshya said.

“Let me see the letter,” Stephen said. “Then we can decide what to do. We were sent to find the Briar King, not to chase my corrupt brethren all over the King’s Forest. It may be that one of us ought to take word back to the praifec.”

“We already found the Briar King,” Aspar said.

“What?” Stephen turned in his saddle.

“It was the Briar King and his creatures killed the rest of those monks back there,” Aspar explained.

“You said something about the Briar King’s hunt,” Stephen said, “but I didn’t realize you had seen him again. Then the arrow must not have worked.”

“I didn’t use it,” Aspar said.

“Didn’t use it?”

“The Briar King isn’t the enemy,” Leshya replied. “He attacked the monks and let us be.”

“He is the enemy,” Ehawk’s voice came weakly. “He turns villagers into animals and makes them kill other villagers. He may hate the monks, but he hates all men.”

“He’s cleansing his forest,” Leshya said.

“My people have lived in the mountains since the day the Skasloi fell,” Ehawk said. “It is our right to live there.”

Leshya shrugged. “Consider,” she said. “He wakes, and discovers his forest is diseased, and from the rot monsters are springing which will only hasten its end. Utins, greffyns—the black thorns. It is the disease he is fighting, and so far as he is concerned, the people who live in this forest and cut its trees are part of that disease.”

“He didn’t kill us,” Aspar pointed out.

“Because,” she said, “like him, we are part of the cure.”

“You don’t know that,” Stephen said.

Again she shrugged. “Not for certain, I suppose, but it makes sense. Can you think of another explanation?”

“Yes,” Stephen said. “Something is wrong with the forest, yes, and terrible creatures are waking or being born. The Briar King is one of them, and like them he is mad, old, senile, and terribly powerful. He is no more our friend or our enemy than a storm or bolt of lightning.”

“That’s not so different from what I just said,” Leshya replied.

Stephen turned to Aspar. “What do you think, holter?”

Aspar blew out a breath. “You may both be right. But whatever is wrong with the forest, the Briar King isn’t the cause of it. And I think he is trying to fix it.”

“But that could mean killing every man, woman, and child within its boundaries,” Stephen pointed out.

“Yah.”

Stephen’s eyes widened. “You don’t care! You care more about the trees than you do about the people.”

“Don’t talk for me, Stephen,” Aspar cautioned.

“You talk, then. You tell me.”

“Read the letter,” Aspar said, to change a topic he wasn’t sure about himself. “Then we’ll reckon where to go from here. It may be that we should have another talk with the praifec.”

Stephen frowned at him, but took the letter from Leshya’s hand. When he examined the seal, he smiled grimly.

“Indeed,” he said. “We may well want to have another conversation with Praifec Hespero. This is his seal.”

7 At the Ball

“Fralet Ackenzal?” Leoff looked up at the young man who stood at his door. He had blue eyes and wispy yellow hair. His nose bent to one side, and he seemed a bit distracted by it.

“Yes?”

“If it please you, I’ve been sent to conduct you to the lady Gramme’s affair.”

“I . . . I’m quite busy,” Leoff said, tapping the music notation on his desk. “I’ve a commission . . .”

The man frowned. “You did accept the lady’s invitation.”

“Well, yes, actually, but—”

The fellow wagged his finger as if Leoff were a naughty child. “Milady made it quite clear that she would be most insulted if you did not attend. She’s had a new hammarharp brought in just for you.”

“I see.” Leoff cast his gaze desperately around the room in the vague hope that he would see something that would get him out of this predicament.

“I’ve not much to wear,” he attempted.

The man smiled and beckoned to someone unseen. A round-faced girl dressed in servant’s garb appeared, bearing a bundle of neatly folded clothes.

“I think these will fit you,” the man said. “My name is Alvreic. I’m your footman for the night.”

Seeing no escape, Leoff took the clothes and went to his bedchamber.

Leoff watched the slowly turning saglwics of a malend on the side of the canal and shivered, both from the cold and the memory of that night near Broogh. A full moon, pale in the daylight, rose just behind it, and in the clear air he heard the distant barking of dogs. The autumn smell of hay was gone, replaced by the scent of ash.

“I had rather thought the ball was to be held in the castle,” Leoff ventured.

“Is the coat not warm enough?”

“It’s a beautiful coat,” Leoff said. It was, for it was quilted and embroidered with leaves on the high collar and wide cuffs. He just wished it were as warm as it was pretty.

“The lady has excellent taste.”

“Where are we going, may I ask?”

“Why, Grammeshugh, of course,” Alvreic replied. “Milady’s estate.”

“I thought the lady Gramme lived in the castle.”

“She does, most of the time, but she does have the estate, of course.”

“Of course,” Leoff repeated, feeling stupid.

He felt as if he were in one of those dreams where one kept getting farther and farther from one’s goal, gradually forgetting altogether what that goal was.

He still remembered his intention had been to avoid the party. After Artwair’s warning and the strange night with the queen, any connection to the lady Gramme seemed foolish.

So he’d decided to pretend he’d forgotten her invitation. That had clearly failed, so his next-best hope had been to make a brief appearance and then quietly excuse himself. Now somehow he’d left the castle, passed down through the gates of the city, and onto a narrow boat headed back out across Newland. It would be night soon, and the city gates would close—it would be tomorrow before he could get back to his rooms.

He should simply have refused to go, but it was too late for that. Now he could only hope the queen didn’t find out.

The world darkened, and Leoff huddled against it. For him, there was no longer anything innocent about the night. It hid things, but unfairly it did not hide him. On the contrary, it seemed as if he were prey for everything out there, and he felt hunted. He even slept with a lamp lit, these nights.

Presently he noticed a line of cheerful lights ahead, and as they drew nearer saw lanterns strung along the side of the canal. They led up to a quayside pavilion, where twice a score or more canal boats were docked.

Music was in the air. He first heard the high, sweet voice that sounded like a flageolet, but with a more haunting timber and odd glissando passages between certain notes. The rhythm was odd, too, first in two, then in three, to two, broadening to four. The unpredictability of it made him grin.

So did the underlying play of the croth and the bright comments of a push-pull. The tune seemed light and cheerful, but overall it felt melancholy, because the foundation was a slow, deep movement of a bass vithul, played with a bow.

It wasn’t exactly like any music he had ever heard, which was both exciting and strange.

They were near enough to dock before the lantern light showed him the faces of the players—four Sefry men, their broad hats set aside for night, faces like silver sculptures in the moonlight.

Two normal men came to take the bowline and tie the boat up. Ignoring his guide, Leoff stepped off onto the quay and approached the Sefry, hoping to speak with one of them. The flageolet, he saw, had no windcap; the musician was blowing directly onto the diagonal cut made into the bone—ivory?—instrument. The other instruments were standard, so far as he could see.

“Come, come,” Alvreic said. “Make haste. You’re late already.” The musicians showed no sign that they noticed his attentions, and the song did not seem near its end.

The lanterns continued up a low hill, limning a road that led to the looming shadow of a manse. As Leoff and Alvreic made their way silently up to the estate, a voice joined the music, and everything about the piece snapped into place in a way that brought a sigh to his lips. He strained to hear the words, but they weren’t in the king’s tongue. He had a sudden, vivid image of the cottage by the sea where he had grown up. He saw his sister Glinna playing in his mother’s garden, her blond hair muddy, her face huge with smile, his father on a stool, playing a little croth.

A pile of stones, that house now. Ghosts, his father and sister. And it suddenly seemed he did understand the words, if only for an instant.

Then the din from the manse trod over the Sefry melody. There was music in that, too, a familiar country dance that seemed heavy and vulgar after what he’d just heard. But by the laughter and shouts he made out along with it, he guessed it was pleasing to most of its audience.

Presently they reached a pair of immense iron-bound doors, which—at a sign from Alvreic to someone unseen—slowly creaked open. A doorman in bright green hose and brown tunic greeted them. “Leovigild Ackenzal,” Alvreic said. “He’s to be announced.” Leoff held back a sigh. So much for avoiding notice. They followed the doorman down a long, candlelit hall to another pair of doors, which also swung open, this time to reveal a hall ablaze with lamp- and candlelight. Sounds came pouring out, music mixed with the chatter of the crowd. The musicians were at the far end, a quartet, now playing a pavane. Perhaps twenty couples were dancing to it, and easily twice as many standing about in conversation.

But as he entered the room, all that stopped, and more than a hundred people turned to regard him. The music fell silent.

“I present Leovigild Ackenzal,” the doorman announced in a clear, carrying voice. “Composer to the court and hero of Broogh.” Leoff wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but the sudden roar of applause took him utterly by surprise. He’d performed before the public before, of course, and had received praise for his compositions. But this—this was something different. He felt his face reddening.

The lady Gramme appeared suddenly on his arm, coming from nowhere. She leaned in to peck his cheek, then turned back to the crowd. Leoff noticed someone else stepping up on his other side, a young man. He put a hand on Leoff’s shoulder. Leoff could only stand there, feeling more and more uncomfortable.

When the crowd finally quieted, Lady Gramme curtsied to them. Then she smiled at Leoff.

“I suppose I might have told you that you were the guest of honor,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?” Leoff blurted.

But Gramme already had turned back to the crowd. “Fralet Ackenzal is nothing if not modest, my friends, and it won’t do to embarrass him too much, nor would it do for me to keep him to myself, when so many of you wish to visit with him. But this is my house, after all, and I’m allowed a few liberties.”

She smiled through the chorus of laughter that followed her statement. Then, when she spoke again, her voice was suddenly serious.

“This hall is full of light,” she said. “But do not be fooled. Outside there is darkness, whether the sun is shining or no. These are hard days, terrible days, and what makes it worse is that our own courage seems to have deserted us. Adversity crowns heroes, isn’t that the old saying? And yet who has been crowned here? Who has stepped forth from the shadows of our tragedies and taken a strong hand against the rising evil? I—like you—have despaired that such men no longer seem to be born in this world. And yet this man, a stranger to our country, not even trained as a warrior, has been our savior, and I hereby crown him our hero! From hence, let him carry the title of Cavaor!”

Something settled on Leoff’s head as the crowd began cheering again. He felt it and realized it was a metal circlet.

The crowd suddenly stilled again, and Leoff waited nervously to see what would happen next.

“I think they’d like a word from you,” the lady said. Leoff blinked, surveying the waiting faces. He cleared his throat.

“Ah, thank you,” he said. “It is most unexpected. Most. I, umm—but you haven’t got it quite right.”

He glanced at Gramme nervously, and his tension increased when he saw the small wrinkle that appeared between her eyes. “You were at Broogh, weren’t you?” someone shouted.

“I was there,” Leoff said. “I was, but I wasn’t alone. That is, no credit goes to me. Duke Artwair and Gilmer Oercsun, they deserve the credit. But lady, I have to disagree with you. I haven’t been here long, but this country has many heroes. A townful of them. They died for you at Broogh.”

“Hear, hear,” a few shouted.

“There is no doubt of that,” Gramme said. “And we thank you for helping us to honor them.” She shook her finger at him as if scolding a child. “But I was present when Duke Artwair gave his report, and if there is one man in this kingdom who does have the courage and sense of his ancestors, it is the duke. Indeed, I wished to have the duke here tonight, but it seems he has been ordered to the eastern marches, far from the court and Eslen. Still, in his absence, I will not dispute his word, Cavaor Ackenzal, and should hope you would not either.”

“I would never do that,” Leoff said.

“I did not think so. Well, enough of my talking. Be at home here, Leoff Ackenzal—you are among friends. And should the mood strike you, I hope you will try my new hammarharp, and tell me if it is as well-tuned as I am assured it is.”

“Thank you, milady,” Leoff said. “I’m really quite overwhelmed. I’ll examine it right away.”

“I don’t imagine you will,” she said, “but you are welcome to try.”

She was right. He’s gone only a few steps before a young woman of perhaps sixteen had taken his arm.

“Won’t you dance with me, cavaor?”

“Ah . . .” He blinked stupidly at her. She was pretty, with a friendly, oval face, dark brown eyes, and red-gold hair hanging in ringlets.

The music had started again, a whervel in triple meter.

He glanced around. “I don’t know this dance,” he said. “It seems a bit lively.”

“You’ll pick it up,” she assured him, taking his hands. “My name is Areana.”

“It’s my pleasure to meet you,” Leoff said, fumbling at the steps. As she said, it wasn’t difficult—very much like the country rounds of his youth—soon he had it.

“I’m fortunate to be the first to dance with you,” Areana said. “It’s good luck.”

“Really,” Leoff said, feeling his neck burn. “Too much has been made of this. Tell me of yourself, rather. What family are you?”

“I’m a Wistbirm,” she replied.

“Wistbirm?” He shook his head. “I’m new to this country.”

“There’s no reason you should have heard of us,” she said.

“Well, it must be a good family to have produced such a charming daughter,” he said, feeling suddenly bold.

She smiled at that. It felt good, dancing with her. His leg was still stiff, and occasionally moved awkwardly, so their bodies bumped. It had been a long time since he’d been this close to a woman, and he found himself enjoying it.

“What’s the court like?” she asked.

“Haven’t you been there?”

She stared at him and then giggled. “You think I’m nobility?”

Leoff blinked. “I suppose I did.”

“No, we’re just lowly landwaerds, my family—though my father is the Aethil of Wistbirm. Do you find me less charming now?”

“No less,” he replied, though now he realized that she had the accent he’d heard in the countryside—not as thick as Gilmer’s but still marked—and very different from the lilt of the court speech he’d come to know. “It’s not as if I have noble blood myself.”

“And yet there is such nobility in you.”

“Nonsense. I was terrified. I barely remember what happened, and it’s a miracle I wasn’t killed.”

“I think it was a miracle that brought you to us,” Areana said.

The song ended with a sort of bumping bang, and Areana stepped back from him.

“I shan’t hog you,” she said. “The other ladies will never forgive me.”

“Thank you very much for the dance,” he replied.

“Next time you will have to ask me,” she said. “A girl in my position can only be so bold.”

There was no shortage of bold girls, however, all of whom, as it turned out, were from the landwaerd families. After the fourth dance, he begged a break, and made toward where the servers were dispensing wine.

“Eh, cavaor,” a rough voice said. “How about a dance for me?” Leoff spun on the voice, delighted.

“Gilmer!” He shouted, and caught the little man up in a hug.

“Hey, now,” the man grumbled. “I was just joking. I’m not hopping about with you.”

“But where were you earlier, when Her Ladyship was giving the honors? This ball should be for you, not me.”

Gilmer laughed and clapped his shoulder, then whispered, “I snuck in with a crowd. But never fear—this party aens’t for neither of us.”

“What do you mean?”

“Weren’t you listening to the lady’s pretty speech? Haven’t you noticed the quality of the guests?”

“Well, they seem to be mostly landwaerden.”

“Auy. Oh, there’s nobility about—there’s Her Ladyship, of course, and the Greft of Nithergaerd over there in the blue, the Duke of Shale, Lord Fallow, Lord Fram Dagen, and their ladies, but most here are landwaerden or fraleten. Country- and townfolk.”

“It seems an odd sort of party for a lady of the court to throw,” Leoff admitted.

Gilmer reached for a passing tray and snagged them two cups of wine.

“Let’s walk a bit,” he said. “Have a look at your hammarharp.” They moved toward the instrument, which was still across the room.

“These families here are the backbone of Newland,” Gilmer said. “They may not have noble blood, but they have money, and they have militias, and they have the loyalty of those who work the land. They haven’t been happy with the noble families for a generation, but things are worse now, especially since what happened at Broogh. There’s a deep canal between the royals and the people out here, and it’s getting deeper and wider every day.”

“But Duke Artwair—”

“He’s a different sort, and as the lady Gramme said, he’s been sent away, hasn’t he? And the emperor don’t turn his eye here. He don’t hear us or see us, and he don’t help us.”

“The emperor—” Leoff began.

“I know about the emperor,” he said. “But his mother, the queen—where is she? We’ve heard nothing from her.”

“But she—” He stopped, unsure if he was allowed to mention his commission.

He sipped his wine. “What is this, then?” he asked. “Why am I here?”

“I don’t know,” Gilmer replied. “But it’s something dangerous. I only slipped in to warn you. I’ll be leaving as soon as I see my chance.”

“Wait. What do you mean, something dangerous?”

“When the nobles court the landwaerds like this, it’s not usually just to be friendly. Especially when no one seems to know who is really in control of this country. The lady Gramme has a son, you know—he was standing just next to you. I suppose you know who his father was.”

“Oh,” Leoff said.

“Auy. Take my advice—play something on that hammarharp and then get out of here.”

Leoff nodded, wondering if Alvreic would take him back if he asked.

They had reached the instrument. It was beautiful, maple lacquered a deep red with black-and-yellow keys.

“What are you doing, now that your malend is burned?”

“Duke Artwair arranged a new position,” Gilmer said. “One of the malends on Saint Thon’s Graf, near Meolwis. Not too far from here.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

He settled on the stool and glanced back up. Gilmer was gone. With a sigh he touched the keyboard and started playing.

It was an old composition of his, one that had pleased the Duke of Glastir very well. He’d once been pleased with it, too, but now it felt clumsy and childish. He pushed on to the end, adding variations in hopes of making it more interesting, but when he was done, it felt hollow.

To his surprise, the final notes were greeted by applause, and he realized a small crowd had gathered, Lady Gramme among them. “Enchanting,” she said. “Please play something else.”

“Whatever you would like, milady.”

“I wonder if I could commission a piece from you.”

“I would be pleased to do so, though I’ve already agreed to one commission I must complete first.”

“I was rather thinking you could invent something for this occasion,” she said. “I’m told you can do such things, and I’ve made a wager with the Duke of Shale that you can make an impromptu that pleases.”

“I could try,” he agreed reluctantly.

“But see here,” said the duke, a puffy man in a jacket that looked too tight, “how shall we know if he is inventing and not playing some obscure older piece?”

“I think we can trust to his honor,” Gramme replied.

“Not where my purse is concerned,” the duke huffed.

Leoff cleared his throat. “If it please you, Duke, hum a snatch of some favorite tune of yours.”

“Well . . .” He considered for a moment, then whistled a few notes. The crowd murmured laughter, and Leoff wondered exactly what sort of tune it was.

Leoff spied Areana in the crowd. “And you, my dear,” he said. “Give me another melody.”

Areana blushed. She looked around nervously, then sang:

She had a sweet soprano voice.

“Very well,” Leoff said, “that’s a start.”

He began with Areana’s tune, because it began with a question: “How will I know my lover, good mother? How will I know my true love?” He put it in a plaintive key, with a very light bass line, and now the mother answered, in fuller, more colorful chords, “You’ll know him by his coat, which has never known a needle.”

He separated the two halves of the melody now, and began weaving them through each other, and as counterpoint added in the duke’s whistle near the top of the hammarharp’s range. When they heard that, almost everyone laughed, and Leoff himself smiled. He’d guessed the juxtaposition of the lover’s riddle song against the other, probably vulgar tune, would amuse, and now he made it a dialogue: the girl asking how she would know her lover, the leering lecher who overheard her, and the stern mother warning the fellow away, bringing it all to a head with a sort of bang as the mother threw a crock at the man and he ran off, his melody quickly fading, until only the girl remained.

Raucous applause followed, and Leoff suddenly felt as if he’d been playing in a tavern, but unlike the polite and often insincere acknowledgment he’d had in the various courts he had entertained, this felt sincere to the bone.

“That’s really quite remarkable,” Lady Gramme said. “You have a rare talent.”

“My talent,” Leoff said, “such as it is, belongs to the saints. But I’m glad I pleased you.”

The lady smiled and began to say something else, but then a sudden commotion at the door made everyone turn. Leoff heard a clash of steel and a howl of pain, and grim-faced men in armor bearing swords burst into the hall, followed by archers. The room seemed to explode into chaos; Leoff tried to get up, but someone bumped into him from behind and he tumbled to the floor.

“By order of the emperor,” a heavy voice thundered above the general din, “you are all arrested for collaboration against the throne.”

Leoff tried to rise, but a boot struck him in the head.

8 Swanmay

Neil tensed himself and saw all his roads go black. If he killed Swanmay, he would protect Anne’s destination and serve the queen in the only way he now could. But to kill a woman he had promised not to harm would be the end of any honor he could claim.

Either way, he was certainly dead.

He stared at Swanmay’s white throat, willing her closer, wondering how he could have been so wrong about her.

She bowed her head slightly, and wisps of her short hair fell across her face. “I wish I could grant you your wish, Sir Neil,” she said. “But I cannot take you to Paldh. I am nearly free, do you understand? If I help you more than I have, I jeopardize everything. And you would probably be killed, which I would not see.”

He let his head relax on the pillow. Bright spots danced in his vision, and for a moment he wondered if she had enchanted him somehow.

But he recognized the onset of the battle rage. It was leaving him now, but his blood was still moving too fast, and he was beginning to shake.

“Are you well?” she asked.

“I was dizzy for a moment,” he said. “Please. What did you mean—about me being killed?”

“I told you that your friends’ ship escaped the harbor, and that much was true. But they were followed—I saw the ship sail after them. If they are not caught at sea, they will be caught at Paldh. I imagine there will be a fight then, and you are in no condition to fight.”

“I beg you, lady. Take me to Paldh. Whatever your trouble—whatever it is you are fleeing—I will protect you from it. But I must reach Paldh.”

“I believe you would try to protect me,” Swanmay said. “But you would fail. Don’t you understand? The people who attacked your friends—I flee them also. Your enemy is my enemy. I took a greater risk than you can know saving your life. If they had noticed me, recognized my ship, all would have been done. If I follow them, they cannot fail to know me.”

“But—”

“You know you would not be able to protect me,” she said softly. “The nauschalk cannot be slain. He beat you when you were hale and whole—do you think you could do better now?”

“Nauschalk? You knew him? Know what he is?”

“Only from the old tales. Such things are no longer supposed to exist, and until a short time ago, they did not. But now the law of death has been broken.”

Her voice had gone a little eerie, as if she spoke to him from a great distance. Her eyes were mirrors.

Neil tried to sit up. “Who are you, lady, to speak of such things? Are you a shinecrafter?”

She smiled weakly. “I know something of those arts, and others you will not have heard of.”

“I cannot believe that,” Neil said, feeling cold. “You are too kind, lady. You cannot be evil.”

Her brow dropped in a frown, but her mouth bent up at one side. She steepled her fingers together. “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t think I’m evil. But why would you think I am?”

“Shinecrafters are evil, milady. They practice forbidden arts, abhorred by the Church.”

“Do they?” she asked.

“So I have always been told. So I have always believed.”

“Then perhaps you have been wrong. Or perhaps I am evil, and we merely disagree on what evil is.”

“There can be no disagreement there, milady,” Neil said. “Evil is what it is.”

“You live in a simple world, Sir Neil. I do not begrudge you that. In truth, I envy you. But I believe things to be more complicated.”

He was about to retort, when he remembered the choice he had been facing only moments before. Maybe it was more complicated. He was no churchman, to debate such things.

The law of death has been broken. Fastia had said that, in Eslen-of-Shadows.

“Lady, my apologies. You speak of things I don’t understand. What is the law of death?”

She chuckled. “Simply that things that die stay dead.”

“Are you saying that the man I fought was dead?”

“No, not exactly. But he exists because someone who should be dead is not. Someone has passed beyond the lands of fate and returned. That changes the world, Sir Neil, breaks something in it. It allows things to happen that could not before, creates magicks that have never existed. It is what allowed me to escape.”

“Escape from where, lady? Who pursues you?”

She shook her head. “It is an old story, yes? The woman locked in the tower, awaiting a prince who would rescue her? And yet I waited, and did my duty, and no man came. So I had to escape myself.”

“What tower?”

She combed her fingers through her hair and then dropped her head down, the first motion he had seen from her that resembled defeat. “No,” she whispered, “I cannot trust you that much. I cannot trust anyone that much.”

“Your crew? What about them?”

“With them I have no choice—and I believe they love me. If I were wrong about them, you and I would not be speaking now. Still, in a day or a month or a year, one of them will betray me. It is the way of men.”

“You have seen this in some vision?”

“No. But it is most likely.”

Neil sighed. “You are nothing if not a mystery, Lady Swanmay.”

“Then perhaps I am nothing.”

“I do not think so.”

She smiled wistfully. “I would help you if I could, Sir Neil. I cannot.”

“Then put me off at the next port,” he urged. “Let me make my own way. I won’t tell anyone about you.”

“Is my company so tiresome?” she asked.

“No. But my duty—”

“Sir Neil, believe me when I say that the pain of leaving behind your obligations will fade.”

“Never. And you cannot think so, either. You are too good for that.”

“A moment ago you called me evil.”

“I didn’t. I said you couldn’t be.”

She considered that. “I suppose you did, in a roundabout way.” She shrugged. “But whether you are right or not, I must believe that there is more to life than duty.”

“There is,” Neil said. “But without duty, the rest of it is meaningless.”

She stood and paced away from the lamplight, then turned to regard him with a slightly feral glint in her eye. “When you fell in the water,” she said, her words measured carefully, “you were still conscious. Yet you didn’t try to take off your armor. Not a single catch was unfastened.”

“I didn’t think to take it off, at least not until it was too late,” Neil replied.

“Why? You are not stupid. Armor is not new to you. Any man who was drowning would have tried to take it off, and instantly unless—”

“What, lady?”

“Unless he thought of his armor as so much a part of himself that he believed he could not take it off. Unless he would rather die than take it off. As if, perhaps, he wished to die.”

He felt a moment’s disorientation. How could she—? “I have no wish to die, Swanmay,” Neil insisted.

She stepped back into the light. “Who was she? Was it Fastia?”

Now it felt as if he had been struck by a spinning bolt. He opened his mouth before his sense overtook him.

“I don’t know that name,” he lied.

“You spoke it many times as you slept. She is the one you love, yes, not the girl on the ship?” She lowered her voice further. “The King of Crotheny had a daughter by that name. They say she was slain at Cal Azroth.”

“Who are you, lady?” Neil demanded.

“No one,” she replied. “Your secret is safe with me, Neil MeqVren. The only reason I ask these questions is to satisfy my own curiosity.”

“I cannot trust you about that.”

“I know. Did you really want to die?”

Neil sighed and laid his head back. “You change targets so frequently, lady.”

“No. This is the one I have aimed at all along.”

“I did not seek to die,” Neil said. “But I was—I think I was relieved. Relieved that there was nothing I could do.”

“And then I spoiled it all.”

“You saved my life, and I am grateful.”

Swanmay regarded her nails. “There was a time, Sir Neil,” she said, “when I stood with a razor in my hand and contemplated my wrists. There was another when I held a goblet of poison, fingers away from my lips. Of anyone I have ever known, I think you might understand why, how the unstoppable crush of duty can extinguish the flames in us.”

“Duty is the flame in me.”

“Yes. And when you fail it, or worse, when it fails you, there is nothing left.”

“No.”

“I shed my armor, Sir Neil. I did not drown. I will find better things to fill my life with, better reasons to rise one day to the next.”

“But you haven’t found them yet.”

“Now you shoot at my target.”

“It seems only fair.”

“You’ve missed,” she said. “I’ve no longer any target to shoot at.” She came and sat by him again.

“I do not care who you are, Sir Neil. I do not care whom you have served. But I would like you to serve me. I need someone like you, someone I can trust.”

Neil smiled faintly. “If I betray one master, how could you ever trust me not to betray you?”

She nodded. “I suppose you have a point. I was hoping you wouldn’t make it.”

“But you’d already thought of it.”

“Of course. But it seems to me you have been the one betrayed, not the other way around.”

“The one I serve has never betrayed me.”

“That isn’t what you mumble in your sleep,” Swanmay said. “I will go now. Think about what I’ve said.”

“I do not think I will change my mind. I beg you once more—let me off at the next port.”

“If you decline my offer, I will put you off when you are well enough to travel, though not before,” she said.

He watched her leave, and through the open door heard the squeal of gulls. He waited a moment, then, ignoring the pain in his side, he went to the porthole.

The sapphire sea danced beneath the sun, and less than a league away, he made out a coast.

Then it wasn’t a trick. If their course had been set for Paldh, they would be in deep water. No island in the southern Lier Sea was as big as that.

He sank back down onto the bed, wondering what he mumbled in his sleep. Or had that been a guess? The queen hadn’t betrayed him, but . . . he did feel betrayed. She had sent him away from her, and she was surrounded by a dangerous court. If she were attacked, there would be nothing he could do. He had begged her to keep him near.

But he had been relieved when she finally did send him away, because part of him felt her death would be on her own head, that he wouldn’t be responsible. In Vitellia, he had felt truly alive again, actually competent, facing foes he could see and fight, even if they didn’t die when he cut them. Even that was easier than the knife-bladed shadows of the court.

Serving Swanmay had its appeals, and part of him yearned for it.

You have forgotten me, Fastia had told him.

I haven’t.

Have, will. It is all the same.

There were tears on his face, and a hundred yards of pain knotted beneath his chest began to loosen and uncoil, as he turned his face to the bedclothes and cried.

She came back six bells later, when the sun had gone into the wood beyond the world. He pretended he was asleep, and she did not try to wake him. He listened to her settle on the cot beyond the screen, heard her shift and toss for a while before her breathing softened and become shallow and regular. Then he rose, holding his bandaged side, and shuffled across the wooden deck.

The hatch was latched but not locked, and he cracked it and peered out. The deck was mostly quiet and only faintly lit by a moon he could not see. Two men were standing by the wheel, speaking in soft accents. Another stood against the steerboard rail a few kingsyards away. There was no one to backboard, however.

Keeping low, he pushed the door a little wider.

He nearly hit a man with it. He sat just beyond the hatch, a spear across his knees.

She was right. She needed better guardians. But Neil couldn’t be one of them.

No one called out as he approached the side of the boat. He strained in the moonlight, trying to make out whether or not the land he had seen earlier was still close. He thought he saw distant lights, though it could have been sparks from the fire in his side.

With no further hesitation, he slipped over the rail.

He hit the water with a splash. The cold shocked him, but he managed to turn onto his back and begin stroking and kicking with his feet, hoping the wound in his side didn’t come open again. He had no plan for what he would do when he got to shore, but every day on the ship took him farther from where he had to go.

“Hwas ist thata?” someone shouted. “Hwasfol? Airic?”

“Ne, ni mih.”

Neil grimly kept stroking with dogged determination. He knew the language—it was Hanzish, the tongue of the enemy.

The sound of voices receded. Once he thought he heard Swanmay’s voice, but he wasn’t certain. Then there was only his own struggle with the waves.

His arms became leaden all too quickly and despite the fire in his ribs, he felt the warmth draining from his body. If shore was not near, then he would complete the death Swanmay had saved him from.

Was she right? Did he want to die?

He summoned an image of the queen, her pale face and dark hair, and hands reaching for her from every direction, but he could not hold it. Instead, in the half-face of the moon, he saw Swanmay’s blue eyes. A strange despair seized him, and more questions, always questions. If she was Hanzish—and he was now certain of that—then why had she helped him? Whom was she fleeing?

The ocean swelled beneath him, and his face went under. He sputtered the water from his mouth and nose and turned to swim on his belly. He heard a faint shushing that might be surf and might be the dying beat of his heart.

He swam on. It was all he could do.

He woke to a blue sky and the warm crackle of a fire. For a moment he thought he’d been dreaming, but then Swanmay’s voice broke through it. He felt immensely better, as if he had slept for ten days. The pain in his side was only a dull ache now, and for a moment he thought that perhaps everything that had happened since he had left Eslen was merely a dream.

But then he heard the chatter all around him, in Hanzish, and reached for his sword.

“You are a very stupid man,” Swanmay’s voice informed him.

He opened his eyes and sat up. He lay on a blanket. The fire was nearby, and beyond it there was a sandy shingle and the sea. Two langschips were pulled up on the beach, and Swanmay’s ship was anchored a hundred kingsyards offshore.

In the other direction was a plain covered in short, wiry grass. Swanmay sat beside the fire, on a small stool. Her men seemed to have set up camp. Nearby, two of them were dressing a small, odd-looking deer.

Swanmay wore a broad-brimmed hat, as if she really were a Sefry, but her face looked drawn and weary. The blue in her eyes had dulled, as if something vital had left her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had to try.”

“I understand that now,” she replied. “It makes you no less stupid.”

He conceded that with a nod.

She shrugged. “We weren’t able to fully provision at z’Espino. My men are remedying that now.” She cocked her head. “How do you feel?”

“Wonderful,” he replied.

“Good. Do you remember anything?”

“The last thing I remember was hearing the sound of the surf.”

“We found you on the strand. Your wounds were open, and your breath was faint. You were very cold.”

“But now—what happened?”

“As I told you, I know some arts. I hesitate to use them, because there is a price.” She smiled fiercely. “You are fortunate that the walls between life and death are so thin.”

A sick dread fluttered in Neil. “Was I dead? Did you—?”

“You were not dead. The life in you was a flickering candle, but it was not extinguished.”

“Lady, whatever sorcery you used, you should not have. Tell me its price, and I will pay it.”

“It isn’t yours to pay,” she said softly. “And it is already done.” Her voice grew firmer. “And I make my own decisions. Have no fear, you are not cursed or possessed of spirits unhultha. You will not walk the night and do evil at my bidding.”

“I could never imagine you doing me harm,” Neil replied.

“No? Yet you spurned my company when you owed me your life.” Her voice rose. “Do you understand? You threw your life away in z’Espino, and with it any duty or obligation you ever had. You threw it away and I picked it up. Can you not concede that it is mine now? Do you feel no duty toward me?”

“Of course I do,” Neil blurted, “and that is the problem. And now I owe you twice, but I cannot repay you. That is agony to me, lady. Do you understand? You have put me between the rising tide and the cliff—”

“And can think of nothing better to do than drown yourself again.”

She snorted. “Enough. I am done with this.”

“Done?”

“You will never enter my service, I see that now. But you do owe me twice, and I do not expect you to forget that. One day I will ask you a favor and you will answer. Do you understand?”

“If I can.”

“No. If you feel obligation toward me, then take it as a geis. I will not call on you soon.”

He sighed and bowed his head. “Are you saying you will release me now if I accept this geis?”

“Hush. By noon we leave here, and I will take you to Paldh, no matter what you say now. But if you have any of the fabled integrity of Skern, you will take my geis.”

“I swear by the saints my fathers swore by, and take this geis,” Neil said. “When you have need of me, I will come, so long as it does not bring harm to those it is my charge to protect.”

“Very well,” she said. She stood and looked off across the distant fields. “I never went ashore in z’Espino,” she said softly. “This is the only strange land I have ever set foot on. It is fair.”

“Lady—”

“Make the ship ready,” she called to her men in Hanzish. Then she strode away from him without even a backwards glance.

9 The Wind and the Sea

“Will they catch us?” Anne asked, watching intently as the masts of the pursuing ship appeared and disappeared behind the high swells. The sky was a turquoise gem, flawed only with a few streaks of white cloud. There was no land in sight.

Captain Malconio put his callused hands on the rail and leaned forward. Perversely, she noticed that he exuded the same faintly almond scent Cazio had when he sweated.

“Lord Netuno knows,” he said. “That’s a fast ship, a brimwulf built in Saltmark. And they’ve got a strong wind behind them.”

“Are they faster than us?” Anne asked.

“Much faster,” Malconio said.

“Then they will catch us.”

Malconio scratched his beard. “Ah, well—there’s more to it than speed, della. We can run against the wind a little better than she can, and we’ve got a shallower keel. If we can reach the shoals around Ter-na-Fath before nightfall, I give us a chance.”

“Only a chance?” Cazio sneered.

Malconio regarded his brother with narrowed eyes. “It’s not often I have the need to outrun a man-o’-war,” he said acidly. “In fact—why, that’s never happened to me before. It took you to come along and present me this delightful opportunity, frater mio. Indeed, it occurs to me our pursuers might be satisfied if I just gave up my cargo.”

“You won’t do that,” Anne said.

Malconio’s eyebrows shot up, and he looked at her as if she had just asked to cut off his foot. “Pardon me? I wonder how you formed that opinion?”

“These men came after me when I was in the coven Saint Cer. They killed every sister there. What makes you think they would spare you?”

“There’s also the maritime guild to consider,” z’Acatto added a bit drunkenly. He waved the narrow-necked bottle of wine he’d found somewhere. “You know they would never stand for it if one of their ships had been accosted, for any reason. The captain of the ship behind us won’t take that risk—he’ll never give you the chance to report him. So don’t be a collone.”

“Easy, old man,” Malconio said. “You know I was just talking—it’s the family curse. But if we can’t slip them, we’ll never be able to fight them. A ship like that will carry three or four arbalests, probably armed with sea fire. My brother will never even get to use his sword, unless they want the girl alive, for some reason.” He looked back at Anne. “Is that likely to be the case?”

“I don’t think so,” Anne said. “I think they just want to see me dead.”

“And you still won’t tell me why?”

“I still don’t know why,” Anne said helplessly.

“Well,” Malconio said. “So we run, and hope the breeze favors us.”

They tacked hard to the north, and at first the larger ship seemed to drop back a bit, but then it started picking up speed again. It wasn’t even noon yet.

“Unless we get some luck, they’ll have us long before we reach the shoals,” Malconio finally admitted.

“Well, then, they’re in for a fight,” Cazio told his brother, resting his hand on the hilt of his rapier.

“I told you before,” Malconio said, “they’ve no reason to come close when they can sink us from a distance.” He put his hands on his hips. “But suppose they did try to board us—that fellow with the glowing sword—how do you intend to fight him? Your friend back at the docks dealt him a blow that should have had him buried in two places. But he was walking fine, last I saw him.”

“I’ve fought his kind before,” Cazio said with that overabundance of confidence that Anne found so infuriating. “I’ll cut off his head and send him to the bottom of the sea.”

“Last time you had me to drop bricks on him,” z’Acatto reminded him. “What shall I drop on this one?”

Cazio shrugged. “Perhaps an anchor? Surely we can find something.”

Malconio folded his hands. “What? No single combat this time? What of your honor?”

“It’s hardly honorable to fight with the aide of hell,” Cazio replied. “I’ve sworn to protect these ladies. I’ll do that even if I have to fight with less than perfect honor.”

Malconio rolled his eyes. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” he said. “They’ve twice our numbers without taking Casnar z’Estrigo into account. Drop an anchor on him if you wish, though I have only so many anchors.” He nodded at the approaching ship. “But it won’t come to that. See those arbalests? What did I tell you?”

Anne could see some sort of ungainly devices mounted on the other ship’s deck, but couldn’t make out what they were supposed to do. Austra saved her the embarrassment of asking what an arbalest was, by asking herself.

“It’s a huge mechanical bow,” Malconio replied. “Hurls stones, lead balls, pots of flame—things like that.”

“Don’t you have any sort of war engines, Captain?” Anne asked. “Some way to fight back? Surely you’ve had to fend off pirates before.”

Malconio shook his head. “We’ve got one small arbalest. It’s all we ever needed against the few pirates that dare the wrath of the guild.”

“I suggest you set it up, then,” z’Acatto said.

“I suppose you’re right, old man. A little fight is better than none at all. And perhaps Netuno will smile on me. He has before.”

Five bells later, their pursuer lobbed a few experimental stones at them. They fell short, but not far short, and Malconio’s sailors stood nervously with their bows and set up their arbalest—which did indeed resemble a large crossbow. Anne could hear the sailors on the other ship now and see them scuttling about on the deck and in the rigging.

“We’ll be within their range long before they’re in ours,” Malconio said. “Ladies, I suggest you go below.” He glanced off toward the horizon, where black clouds were piling up. “It’s not often I wish for a storm, but you might pray to whatever saints you revere that that one catches us before they do. In a blow, we might be able to lose them.”

“I’ll stay up here,” Anne said.

“And do what?” Cazio asked. “Can you shoot a bow?”

“I could try.”

“We don’t have enough arrows to waste them,” Malconio said. “Go below. It’s my ship, and that’s an order.”

Anne prepared another objection, but let it fade behind her lips. Sir Neil had died because of her last poor decision. Malconio knew his business far better than she did. “Come on, Austra,” Anne said.

“Take this,” Cazio said. He held out the hilt of a dagger.

“I have one,” she said.

“I don’t,” Austra said.

“You take it, then,” Cazio replied.

Austra took the weapon, but her face puckered. “I want to stay up here with you,” she said.

Cazio smiled and took Austra’s hand. “My brother is right this time,” he said. “Up here you would only be a distraction. With you safe below I can fight the way the saints intend me to.”

Austra lowered her eyes, then suddenly reached up and kissed Cazio on the lips.

“Don’t die,” she said.

“I won’t,” he assured her. “I’m not meant to die at sea. Go on, and be brave.”

She nodded and turned away, stumbling toward their cabin, trying vainly to hide her tears.

Cazio glanced at Anne then, and for a moment she couldn’t take her gaze away from his. She felt as if she had been caught doing something she shouldn’t have, but couldn’t form the words of an excuse.

Cazio broke the spell.

“Well, that’s one kiss for luck,” he said. “How about another?”

“That wasn’t a kiss for luck,” Anne said softly. “And you’re still a fool.”

Then she followed Austra.

“She’s right,” Malconio said, once the two women were out of sight. “You’re a fool, and playing at a fool’s game.”

“What could you possibly mean?” Cazio asked, irritated.

“Two girls. The one you’ve set your hopes on is the rofola—Diuvo knows why—but you’re cozying up to her friend.”

“I’ve no interest in Anne,” Cazio lied, “though if I did, it would be none of your business.”

“Your very apparent interest in her is about to get me killed, so it’s entirely my business,” Malconio said, “but I’ll let that pass. Still, it’s cruel to play with a girl’s heart.”

“Anne doesn’t have a heart.”

“I’m talking about the other one now.”

“Ah, but you just said we were about to be killed, so there’s no time for that to happen.”

“Yes, well, that’s your best hope.” To Cazio’s surprise, Malconio clapped him on the shoulder. “Stay under cover. You won’t be of any use until they actually board us, if they do.”

He started off.

“Wait a moment,” Cazio said.

His brother paused. “Only a moment.”

“What do you know about z’Acatto?”

Malconio shrugged. “Less than you, I should think. What do you mean?”

“A man in z’Espino—a man who knew him—called him Emratur.”

“That’s odd,” Malconio conceded.

“So I thought.”

“He did fight in the wars,” Malconio said. “Almost everyone did, even father.”

“Yes, but as a commander? Then why would he—?”

“Why would he dedicate his life to teaching the ill-behaved brats of a nearly destitute nobleman how to swing a sword around? I don’t know. Maybe you should ask him.”

“Have you ever tried asking him anything personal?”

Malconio smiled. “Once or twice, when I was too young to know better. But he’s always loved you, Cazio. You were different to him. It was you he stayed for.”

“Who killed our father, Malconio?”

His older brother’s features softened a bit. “Cazio, I’ve never understood you. Maybe when we were boys—we had a little fun, didn’t we? You were so serious and sober, like a little priest. Then after father died—”

“I don’t want to talk about this. And you don’t have time.”

“This may be the only time,” Malconio said. “After father died, you took to the sword as if you had no other life. Like any little boy, you were sworn to avenge his death. We wouldn’t tell you anything about the duel because we were afraid you would run away and try to find the man.”

“I would have.”

“But when you were older and—do not doubt this—the best dessrator in Avella, maybe in the whole Tero Mefio—you never asked, never tried to find out.”

“Because I didn’t care anymore,” Cazio replied. “Father was a fool. He frittered away our estates and got himself killed.”

“You fight duels every day,” Malconio said. “How can you fault father for fighting one? Especially when you know nothing of the circumstances?”

“I know he was hit in the back,” Cazio said softly. “I saw the body, Malconio. What kind of duelist gets hit in the back?”

Malconio’s face worked silently for a moment. “I didn’t see the fight, and neither did you,” he finally said. “Why do you suddenly care about this again?”

“I don’t know,” Cazio said. “It just popped into my head.”

“Z’Acatto saw the fight. He’s the one you need to talk to. But—father wasn’t so bad, Cazio. When our mother was still alive, he was a better man. A lot of him left with her.”

Another uncomfortable silence followed.

“Have you seen Chesco lately?” Cazio asked.

“Two months ago. He’s well. He’s got three ships of his own. You know, you’ve always been welcome to join us.”

“I can’t abandon our name and our home,” Cazio said. “I can’t.”

Malconio rolled his eyes. “Look around you,” he said. “You have—you just don’t know it yet.”

Cazio sighed and looked off at the distant storm. “It won’t get here in time to help us, will it?”

Malconio shook his head. “It’s not even coming this way.”

Anne felt a little queasy again as she sat on the edge of her cot. Austra was peering out through the thick panes of the window.

“They’re coming from backboard,” Anne said, “the other way.”

“I know,” Austra said stiffly. “It’s just—we should be up there.”

“They’re right,” Anne said. “We’d just be in the way.”

“We might be able to help,” Austra protested. “It’s not like we haven’t been in danger before.”

“Yes, but we don’t know anything about sailing or arbalests. And I think Captain Malconio hopes that if our enemies don’t see us there’s some small chance they’ll think they’re chasing the wrong boat.”

Austra shook her head. “Those men are guided by devils. They’ll never stop until we’re dead.”

“Until I’m dead,” Anne corrected. “It’s me they’re after, not the rest of you.”

Austra’s brow bunched. “You’re not thinking of running off again? You promised me you wouldn’t. Or are your promises to me no good now?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Anne demanded.

“Nothing.”

“Look, you’re the one spending all the time with Cazio. You’re the one who has no time for me, anymore,” Anne said.

Austra turned away and said something under her breath.

“What was that?” Anne asked.

“Nothing.”

“Tell me!”

Austra spun then, her face red. “You’ve been lying to me! Lying! Who are you?”

Anne stepped back from her sheer fury. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“I mean you know why they’re after you. You know, and yet you won’t tell me. And like you said, I’m going to get killed as dead as you, and so is Cazio, and z’Acatto—as dead as Neil MeqVren!”

“Don’t mention him!” Anne said.

“Why? Because it’s your fault he got killed?”

Anne’s growing anger collapsed into a lump in her throat, congealed fury and sorrow and frustration. She couldn’t say anything.

Which was fine. Austra had plenty more to say.

“Something happened to you at the coven. You see things other people don’t. You can do things other people can’t. I’ve been waiting for you to explain, but you aren’t going to, are you?”

“Austra—”

“You don’t trust me, do you? When was I ever anything but your loyal friend, even when it was dangerous for me?”

“You don’t understand, Austra. I don’t understand.”

Something struck the ship, hard, and they heard men yelling above deck.

“Well that’s not good enough!” Austra shrieked.

The sails of the Delia Puchia began to drop as their pursuer threw a wind shadow over them, and moments later the first of the arbalest stones struck their bow with a hollow thud and bounced off into the water.

“That didn’t do much,” Cazio observed.

“They were just finding their range,” Malconio said grimly. “It will get worse.”

“They aren’t coming any closer.”

“Yes. They’re right in assuming my weapon doesn’t have that kind of range. They’ve got us in their wind shadow, so we can’t move. They’ll stay there and pound us until we sink.”

“Then why did you even set up the arbalest?”

“In case they were stupid. They aren’t.”

While Cazio watched, a pair of the enemy war engines fired, nearly at the same time. Two flaming balls leapt skyward, leaving tails of thick black smoke.

“I see what you mean about it getting worse,” Cazio said.

One of the balls plunged harmlessly into the sea, but the other hit squarely in the middle deck, blossoming in a tulip of flame. One of Malconio’s sailors caught fire, too, and fell screaming and thrashing to the deck as his comrades tried to smother the fire with a wet canvas.

Cazio gripped Caspator’s hilt until his knuckles went white. Malconio was right—he would never even get a chance to kill one of them. He’d never felt so helpless in his life.

He glanced at his brother, intending to ask him if there was anything he could do, but noticed Malconio wasn’t watching the other ship, but was staring out across the sea. And he was smiling.

“What?” Cazio asked.

“Look there,” he said. “At the water.”

Cazio followed his gaze but didn’t see anything remarkable.

Malconio put his hand on the steersman’s shoulder. “Prepare to come about,” he said. “You see where?”

“Aye, I see it,” the fellow said. “It’ll be close.”

“What’s going on?” Cazio asked.

“Watch their sails,” he replied.

Cazio tried, but it was difficult, as about that time another volley of flaming pots came hurtling toward them. One struck the mainsail.

“Put that out!” Malconio hollered. “We’re about to need it.”

At that moment, the sails of the other ship went suddenly slack.

“Come about, now!” Malconio thundered.

Sailors leapt to their tasks, pulling yards. The boom swung around and the still-flaming sail filled with a faint puff of air. It hardly seemed enough to move the ship, but then the men all cheered.

“What happened?” Cazio asked.

“Netuno took their wind and sent us one from another direction,” Malconio said.

“It’s not much of a wind,” Cazio observed.

“No, which makes it perfect for us. We can run straight before it, and we’ll start out faster than her.”

“I thought she was faster,” Cazio said.

“Aye, in full wind. But we’ll make the speed faster, because we’re smaller. By the time they turn and start again, we’ll have two leagues on them.”

Once again, his brother was right. Even though they barely seemed to be moving, the big ship wasn’t moving at all. The arbalests kept up the rain of fire, however. Cazio joined the crew putting out the fires as they slowly, painfully tacked out of range. When the arbalest rounds started at last falling short, another cheer went up.

They ran straight with the wind, then—no more tacking—and with a sluggishness Cazio found maddening they began to outpace their pursuer.

But by dusk the big ship was gaining again.

The sounds of bombardment waxed and then gradually waned away.

Since her outburst, Austra had huddled on her cot, unspeaking. “They’re cheering,” Anne noticed. “It must be good news.” Austra nodded vaguely but still wouldn’t meet her gaze. “I’ll go see what’s happening,” Anne said. “Do you want to come along?”

Austra shook her head and closed her eyes. “It’s too much,” she said.

Anne regarded the younger girl for a moment, wishing there were something she could say. “You were right before,” she said finally.

“About what?”

“Back when I tried to run away. When I thought I could dress as a man and make my own way in the world. When I wanted adventure. You told me that I was being stupid, that I would starve or be killed or kidnapped within a nineday.”

“Oh, right,” Austra said. “I did say that.”

“At the time I only agreed to stay because you asked me to, because I worried about what would happen to you if I left. Now I know you were right about everything. I didn’t know anything at all about how the world works. I barely do now. But if there is one thing I do know, it’s that I don’t want any more adventure. I want to be back in Eslen. I want the worst thing that could happen to me to be a scolding from Fastia or mother. And I want you there with me.”

“I’m glad you finally admit that I can be right about something,” Austra said.

“A lot of people have died for me,” Anne said. “The sisters at the coven. Sir Neil. I’m afraid to go abovedecks, because I’m afraid to find out who else. I don’t want anyone else to die for me, Austra. I’m sick of this whole thing.”

“Well, why not try telling them that?” Austra said. “The next time those men catch up with us, just tell them you don’t want to play anymore, and that you’ll be good, and please leave us alone.”

Anne smiled, thinking Austra was joking and the mood was finally starting to lighten. But then she saw her friend’s face.

“It doesn’t matter what you’re sick of,” Austra said. “It’s all going to happen anyway.”

Anne felt her heart slacken. “Please, Austra—”

“You still aren’t going to tell me what’s going on.”

Anne felt herself near tears, and even nearer to begging. “I think if I tell you anything, it will only make things worse for you. I’m afraid it will get you killed.”

“I’m going to get killed anyway,” Austra said. “Can’t you feel it? Don’t you know?”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“Nothing. Nothing.”

“Austra—”

“I’m tired now.”

Austra rolled over so her back was to Anne. Anne watched, helpless, her eyes wet. How could she tell Austra about her visions? How could she burden her best friend with trying to decide whether Anne had gone mad, or whether she was so important to the world that if she did not become queen it would end? How could she tell anyone about the man in the woods? She didn’t believe it herself, after the visions had faded. Anyway, it would make breaking her promise harder to do, and Austra would try to come with her. She hadn’t lied just now when she told Austra that she’d been right about running away the first time. But things were different now. Now Austra had Cazio to protect her. This time she wasn’t running from her duty, she was running toward it, and if the Faiths were so insistent that she must be queen, they could bloody well protect her until she was.

She wouldn’t have her friends dying for her anymore. Because Austra was right. They wouldn’t stop. They would never stop. And though it would hurt Austra when she left again, Austra would live, and she would be protected.

Resolved to that, she went back up abovedecks to see whom else she had killed, and to find out whether any of them would live through the night.

She found the ship still following, and getting closer. As night fell, clouds rolled in, and the dark that followed was complete. Malconio put the ship through a series of turns as the wind quickened. There was no cheering now, because the only thing their enemies might have to follow was sound.

Anne returned to her cabin to try and sleep, but was awakened a few bells later by an explosion. Throwing on her dressing gown, she ran back up on the deck, fearing the ship had somehow found them.

But the ship hadn’t found them—a storm had.

10 Canals

Leoff awoke to a splitting headache and a small voice in his ear.

“Get up sir,” it said. “Please don’t be dead.”

The voice was nearly drowned out by a background cacophony of shouting and stamping feet. With an effort, Leoff opened his eyes. At first he saw only a blur, which, as it sharpened, became Mery’s small face.

“What’s happening?” he groaned.

“You aren’t dead!” she exclaimed.

“No,” he agreed, “though I might be soon.” He felt the side of his head, and his fingers came away sticky with blood. That didn’t seem like a good sign.

“Hurry,” Mery urged, “before the soldiers get here.” He realized she was tugging at his hand.

He tried to rise, but a wave of dizziness went through him.

“No, don’t stand up,” she said. “Just follow me.”

He crawled on hands and knees, following Mery through the pandemonium. He figured that he must have been unconscious for only a few seconds.

Mery vanished behind a tapestry and he followed, wondering what he was doing and why.

When he got behind the tapestry, he saw the blue fringe of Mery’s dress as it vanished through a narrow slit in the wall. The slit went for about a kingsyard and then opened into a larger, torch-lit corridor.

“Wait,” Mery cautioned, waving him back. “Not yet.”

He waited, his head feeling huge, swollen with pain.

“Now, quickly.”

She stood and darted across the hall, to an open doorway there. He followed, making it somewhat shakily to his feet, and saw, down the hall, several men in the king’s colors standing in front of a much larger door, brandishing swords and spears at those in the ballroom. They seemed far too busy to notice him.

“Good,” Mery said. “I don’t think they saw us.”

“What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Come on.”

His head felt a little better, but he sincerely hoped Mery knew what she was doing, because after a few moments in the darkened maze of the manse he knew he would never find his way back. Mery never hesitated, however, taking turn after turn, leading him through huge rooms and tiny compartments. It was as if the entire building were a sort of magic chest, with ever smaller and cleverer boxes nested within. The din of the ballroom was well behind them.

He concluded by touch that the cut on his head wasn’t serious. He only hoped the bone hadn’t broken.

Finally, Leoff felt fresh air. The room was utterly dark, but Mery led him to what felt like a shaft that was angling down and away from him.

“In there,” she said. “We have to go through there.”

“What is it?”

“This is the kitchen,” she explained. “They dump the garbage in here.”

“Maybe we should just wait here until things calm down,” Leoff said.

“The bad men will find us,” she said. “We have to get outside.”

“The bad men may be outside, too,” he said.

“Yes, but there are secret ways out there,” she said. “Don’t you want to go back to Eslen?”

“Wait,” he sighed. He was trying to sort it out. The “bad men” were the queen’s men. Those in the corridor wore the same colors as the knight—Fail de Liery—to whom he had escorted the queen only two nights before.

Someone had tried to kill the queen, and two nights later her men were attacking Ambria Gramme’s ball.

Had Gramme planned the assassination?

Saints, what had he gotten himself into?

“Yes,” he told her. “I think we had better get back there.” Otherwise, he was going to be implicated in this whole affair, and he suspected that would lead to a loss of more than simple employment.

But the queen might find out anyway. Running would only make him look guilty.

Still, there was also Mery to consider, wasn’t there?

Hoping he would fit, he pulled himself down the shaft, which reeked of pork grease, rotten vegetables, and less wholesome things.

The pile he landed on was worse. He was glad it was too dark to see exactly what it was.

Another night lost in Newland. He was really beginning to hate this place.

He caught Mery when she came out, sparing her the same messy stop he’d found.

“Which way now?” he asked.

“We’ll go get a boat on the canal.”

“I think the bad men came on the canal,” Leoff said. “I think there will be a lot of them there.”

“Not that canal,” she said, “there’s another one. Come on. This way.”

They mazed through dark gardens of hedges trimmed fantastic, around still marble basins that glimmed faintly in the moonlight. The grass crunched with frost, and two owls were making ghostly conversation. Not too far away, he could hear men’s voices, but they were growing fainter.

He stopped suddenly.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Gilmer. My friend Gilmer was in there.”

“The little man? No, he left when you started playing the hammarharp.”

“Oh. Good.” Or maybe not. How long had the soldiers been outside? They might have caught him as he left.

But there was nothing he could do about it right now, not with Mery. She was probably in more danger than he was.

“How did you know to run, Mery?” he asked, suddenly suspicious. “It was like you had the whole thing planned out.”

“Yes,” she said, after a silence.

“Why?”

“I always have a way planned out.”

“But why?”

“Mother says they may come to kill me one day.”

“Did she say why?”

“No. Only that they might come one day, the king’s men, and kill me and my brother. So I figured out ways to run and places to hide. It’s how I found the music room.”

“You’re a very clever girl, Mery.”

“Are you going to marry my mother?” she asked.

“What?” For a moment his dizziness returned. “Did she say something like that?”

“No,” Mery replied.

“Then why do you ask?”

“Because I like you.”

He took her hand. “I like you, too, Mery. Come on, let’s find someplace warm.”

They found the canal easily enough, and several small narrow-boats. They were approaching them when Mery suddenly grabbed him by the arm.

“Shh,” she said.

There were voices in the darkness, and straining, Leoff made out several indistinct figures near the canal. He and Mery crouched behind a bush.

“They captured the lady Gramme and her son,” one of the men said in a husky baritone.

“That’s of no concern,” a second man said. Something about that voice sent a chill through Leoff. It wasn’t the voice itself, which was perfectly normal, tenor, cultured. But just as any note played on a lute had numerous smaller tones hidden within it, there was something hidden in that voice—something somehow wrong.

“How can you say that?” the baritone asked. “Our plans are ruined.”

“Hardly. I’m amazed that Muriele discovered this, much less acted on the information, but once our spies reported them coming, I did my best to encourage them.”

“What do you mean?”

“Some of my men met them at the docks with bow and arrow and killed one or two, then fled into the darkness. After that, the queen’s men didn’t ask questions—they stormed through the front door, where the guards naturally reacted to them before they understood who they were fighting. What was probably meant to be a peaceful interrogation ended up in bloodshed. Do you know how many were killed?”

“I’m not sure, my lord—but more than a few.”

“I feel foolish for not having planted the evidence of this meeting myself,” the tenor said. “Still, it’s all worked out quite well.”

“I really don’t see how.”

“He’s right,” a third voice said. This one sounded familiar to Leoff, but he couldn’t place it. “If one of us had been found there, things might be different. As it is, Muriele’s men will find little of substance—little to justify this attack. It will seem as if they burst into an innocent gathering and began slaughtering landwaerden.”

“Indeed,” the tenor agreed. “Even the few loyal members of the Comven won’t be able to support this action. I believe this moves us well ahead of our schedule.”

“I urge caution, my lord,” the third man said. “Give the kingdom time to absorb this before you move.”

“No, I don’t think so,” the second man said. “The time to strike is now.”

“You mean tonight?” the baritone asked incredulously.

“Not tonight. But soon. Go to the camp. Tell them to be ready to cross the water.”

“Yes, my lord.”

One of the figures moved to the narrow-boats, and soon he was rowing away on the canal.

“I’ll take my leave now, as well,” the familiar voice said. “But heed my advice—moving too quickly could be a mistake.”

“No, this is the perfect time.”

“There are many who still sympathize with the queen, and many more who will not care for you, milord. The situation does favor you, but there might be ways to sweeten it.”

“Well, your advice is always welcome,” the tenor said.

“After tonight, the landwaerden will be incensed,” the familiar voice went on. “Through Gramme, you can be certain of their support. The nobility, however, will not care much about a few dead waerds. In fact, this might actually draw a few of them back to the queen.”

“She’s worried them enough by forming her own Lierish guard.”

“Yes. But what if she began truncating all lines of succession other than Charles and Anne?”

“You mean by killing Gramme and her bastards?”

“Precisely.”

“But we need Gramme, I think, and her son could prove useful. He is, after all, William’s.”

“Yes. The assassinations of Gramme and the boy might be seen as bungled. But the girl is of no use to us.”

“Mery? No, I suppose she isn’t. And she’s probably in the queen’s custody right now. I suppose it couldn’t hurt matters. Can you arrange this?”

“It wouldn’t be hard,” the familiar voice said.

“Before tomorrow?”

“Are you in that much of a hurry?”

“Three days. No more.”

“That’s sufficient time, I suppose,” the familiar voice sighed. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“Just be ready to play your part, and all will go perfectly.”

“That’s just it. My men won’t arrive for another month.”

“We don’t need your men, Praifec. Only your word. Do I have it?”

“You have it.”

They left then, the praifec on foot, the other man in a narrow-boat. Leoff held Mery still, shivering to the bone, only partially from the cold.

“I told you,” Mery said softly.

“It’s not going to happen, Mery,” Leoff promised. “They aren’t going to kill you. Come on.”

“If we go to the castle, they’ll find me.”

“I know. We’re not going to the castle.”

They took one of the narrow-boats and went the direction the other man had not. By morning, they had reached a small, cheerful-looking town called Plinse. There Leoff carefully obtained directions to the vicinity of Meolwis. He also bought a cloak to hide Mery’s dress, and from there the two of them followed Leokwigh Road north. They reached Meolwis near sundown and stayed in an abandoned house. The next day, they went west along the dike of Saint Thon’s Graf, and within a bell had come upon a malend.

Hiding Mery below the birm, Leoff went to the door and rapped on it.

To his great relief, Gilmer was the one who answered it, his eyes bugging in gnomish surprise.

“It’s good to see you well,” the little man said, after they’d embraced. “I heard about the trouble at Her Ladyship’s. Almost caught some of it myself. I guess you must have heeded my advice.”

“I was still there,” Leoff said. “Someone helped me escape.”

“One of the young ladies, eh?”

Leoff smiled. “I need a favor, Gilmer.”

“You’ve just to ask.”

“This isn’t an easy favor, and it’s dangerous. Let me explain it before you say yes.”

He called Mery in and related everything that had happened, including what the two of them had heard that night.

“Who do you think it was?” Gilmer asked. “Besides the praifec? Who were the other two?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“One of them was Prince Robert,” Mery said.

Gilmer looked at her. “Prince Robert’s dead, lass.”

“It was him,” the girl insisted.

Gilmer made a long, low whistle. “This aens’t good. Not one bit good.” He slapped his knees. “But you’ve done the right thing. There’s nothing you can do back there. The royals will settle that mess and that’s that. But the praifec—well, they go that way sometimes.”

“I can’t let anything happen to Mery,” Leoff said.

“No, of course you can’t,” Gilmer replied. He tousled the girl’s hair. “I don’t care if the fratrex Prismo himself has come up from z’Irbina, there’s no little girl getting killed while I’m around. No, you two will stay here. When this all blows over, we can reckon what to do.”

“Gilmer, I need you to keep Mery safe—that much is true. But I’ve got to go back.”

Gilmer shook a finger at him. “That’s crazy,” he said. “You think you’ll stop a palace coup all by yourself? Or that anyone would be grateful to you even if you did? You were the guest of honor at that party. Even if the queen wins, she’s going to think you a traitor. Learn your lesson, son—stay away.”

“I can’t. The queen needs to be warned.” He squared his shoulders. “Besides, I have a commission to finish and a concert to perform.”