The Lions of Al-Rassan

Ten

Nino di Carrera, young, handsome and adept, the most favored courtier of King Bermudo of Jalona and concurrently the latest of the furtive lovers of Bermudo's demanding queen, Fruela, was in a condition of anxious perplexity.

In fact, he hadn't the least idea what to do.

Confusion made him angry. Anger was compounded by the increasing embarrassment of what was presently taking place. Nino swept off his iron helmet and shook out his yellow mane of hair, the envy and desire of most of the women at Bermudo's court in Eschalou. His breath and that of the two scouts and all of their horses made white puffs in the frigid early-morning air.

Behind him his company had come to a halt in this high valley ringed with hills. They were well trained, his own men. The horses had been turned outward and the mules with their chests of gold from Fibaz were in the center of the formation. Six chests. A year's parias from an infidel city in Al-Rassan. The first-ever such tribute payment to Jalona. A promise of wealth, of power, and of much more to come. The horse thieves of Valledo were not the only ones who could whip Asharites to heel like the mongrels they were. And he, Nino di Carrera, had been entrusted with claiming this first treasure and bringing it back to Eschalou before the winter snows. The king had promised him much upon his return; the queen ... the queen had already given him a reward, the night before he left.

My golden one, she'd called him, lying in her bed after their frenzy. A phrase more apt than ever now. He was bringing back gold, six chests of it, to the greater glory of Jad and Jalofta—and of Count Nino di Carrera, who was soaring like a golden falcon now. And who knew how high that might be before all was done and spoken before the god?

But all that—that shining, lofty future—was dependent on whether he could get these six chests safely home and, more to the immediate point, whether he could silence the woman's voice that kept echoing down upon them in this supernaturally resonant highland valley he wished they had never entered.

"Nino, Nino, Nino! Oh, my darling! It is I, Fruela, your queen! Come to me, my love!"

The plangent summons, high and clear, rang like a bell, filling the valley with sound over and over again. Nino di Carrera was, among other things, aware that his color had risen: a lifelong affliction that came with fair skin. It wasn't—of course it wasn't!—Queen Fruela's voice they were hearing, but it was a woman, fluent in Esperanan, and her tone was urgent with desire.

"Come, Nino! Take me. Take me here on the hills! Make me yours!"

It was not, in any conceivable way, useful for a rising figure at King Bermudo's court to have this sort of request publicly uttered. By anyone. Anywhere. And the words were very public here. They were soaring all about them, echoing endlessly. Someone was amusing themselves at Nino di Carrera's expense. Someone was going to pay for that.

He was careful not to glance back at his company, but as the woman's voice, ripe with longing, continued to offer explicit variations on the same theme, Nino heard—unmistakably—ripples of suppressed laughter behind him.

"Oh, my rampant stallion, I must have you! Make me yield to your mastery, my love!"

Sound carried absurdly well in this place. It was unnatural, that was what it was! And not only did the words carry, they echoed, so that each yearning proclamation of his name, each vividly proposed activity, resonated as if sung by a choir in chapel.

The two outriders were ashen-faced, refusing to meet his eyes. No trace of amusement there. They wouldn't have dared, in any event, but the tidings they had brought precluded levity. The woman wailing with desire was an offense, even a mortal one; armed men waiting in ambush ahead were something else.

Reckless as his appearance and youth might suggest him to be, Nino di Carrera was a careful commander of a good company, and his outriders, in particular, were excellent. The odds were, in fact, that few companies would have received this advance warning. Most leaders would have felt blithely secure in the presence of almost a hundred mounted men. Nino had been too conscious of how important this parias mission was, however: to Jalona, to himself. He'd had outriders ahead and behind, and on both flanks until the hills forced those men back in. The pair up front had spotted the carefully laid ambush at the northern exit from this valley.

"Nino! I burn for you! Oh, my love, I am a woman before I am a queen!"

It was almost impossible to concentrate with that voice filling the valley bowl. But concentration had become vital now: whoever had laid this trap had to know exactly how many men the Jaddites had. Which meant that they weren't fazed by the numbers. Which meant serious trouble. They couldn't be from Fibaz: that would be absurd, to give them the gold and then attack them for it. And King Badir of Ragosa, who controlled the small, wealthy city of Fibaz, had authorized this parias payment himself, however grudgingly. Why release it from behind defended walls, then attack in open country? Why agree to pay in the first place, if you felt secure enough to attack?

None of it made any sense. And therefore, obviously, the ambush ahead had been laid by outlaws. Nino was pleased he could still think clearly enough—the woman on the hills was now intimating that her clothing was being removed in anticipation of his presence—to sort this through.

There were still problems, though; what was happening still didn't seem conceivable. It was almost impossible to imagine any outlaw band large enough and well-equipped enough to try to waylay a hundred trained Horsemen of Jad.

Something occurred to Nino di Carrera then. He narrowed his eyes. He scratched his jaw. Unless, unless ...

"I throb, I yearn, I die. Oh, Nino, come to me with the short sword of your loins!"

The short sword?

One of the outriders coughed abruptly and turned his head sharply away. Unmistakable sounds could now be heard from behind, where the company had halted.

That did it. That was enough.

"Edrique! To me! Now!" Di Carrera barked the command without looking back. Immediately he heard a horse cantering up.

"My lord?" His burly, competent second-in-command, unusually ruddy-faced, appeared at his side.

"I want that woman silenced. Take five men."

Edrique's expression was carefully neutral. "Of course, my lord. At once."

"My stallion, come! Let me ride you to Paradise!"

Edrique's turn to cough, averting his crimson features.

"When you are sufficiently recovered," said Nino icily, "go about your business. You might be interested to know there is an ambush laid at the neck of this valley."

That sobered the man quickly enough.

"You think the woman is connected with—"

"How in Jad's name would I know?" Nino snapped. "Deal with her, whoever she is, and get back, quickly. Bring her with you. I want her alive. In the meantime, we're going to double back south and loop around this valley, however far it takes us out of our way. I hate this place!" He said it with more feeling than he'd intended. "I won't ride into a narrow space where the enemy knows the ground."

Edrique nodded and clapped spurs to his horse. They heard him rattling off names to accompany him. Nino remained motionless a moment, thinking as best he could with a feverish woman crying his name so that it rang through the valley.

He'd had an important thought, a moment ago. It was gone now.

But doubling back was the right decision, he was sure of it, much as it gnawed at him to retreat from Asharite scum. If these outlaws were confident enough to have set a trap, it made no sense to ride into it, however strong his company might be. Pride had to be swallowed here. For the moment. Revenge, as his people said, was a wine to be slowly savored.

He heard horses approaching. The outriders looked quickly past him. Nino turned. The two men he had assigned to cover their rear were galloping up. They pulled their horses rearing to a halt before him.

"My lord! There is a company of men behind us! They have closed the south end of this valley!"

"My rampant one, my own king! Take me! I burn for you!"

"What is that accursed woman doing?" Nino snarled.

He fought to control himself. He had to think, to be decisive, not angry, not distracted. He looked at the outriders for a blank moment then turned back north to gaze towards the end of the valley. There was a darkness there, where the hills came together in a long neck and the sunlight died. An ambush ahead, and men now closing the space behind. They would be pincered here if they waited. If the enemy was in strength. But how could they be in strength? It made no sense!

"How many back there?" he snapped over his shoulder to the second pair of scouts.

"Hard to say, my lord. A first group of twenty-five or so. There seemed to be others behind them."

"On foot?"

"Of course, my lord. Outlaws would not have—"

"If I want opinions I will ask!"

"Yes, my lord!"

"Ask of me anything, oh my true king! I am your slave. I am naked, awaiting your mastery! Command me to your will!"

Cursing, Nino pushed a hand roughly through his hair. They were bottled up here! It was unbelievable. How could there be so many bandits in this place? He saw Edrique, with his five men, beginning to mount the slope to the east, after the wailing woman. They would only be able to take the horses partway, then they'd have to go on foot. She'd see them coming, all the way.

He made his decision. It was a time for a leader's decisiveness.

"Edrique!" he roared. The captain turned his horse. "Get back here!"

He waited, four outriders anxious-faced beside him, for his second-in-command. Edrique picked his way back down then galloped up.

"Forget her!" Nino rasped. "We're going north. There are men behind us now. If there are outlaws at each end we push forward. They will have balanced their forces. No point going back now. I have changed my mind. I will not retreat before Asharite bandits."

Edrique smiled grimly. "Indeed no, my lord. We shall teach them a lesson they will never forget." He wheeled back to the company, barking commands.

Nino clapped his helmet firmly on his head. Edrique was good, no question about it. His calm, sure manner gave confidence and support to his leader. The men would see that, and respond to it. It was a fine company he had, superbly mounted, every man of them proud to have been chosen for this mission. Whoever these Asharite scavengers might be, they would have cause to regret their presumption today.

For this provocation, Nino decided, it would be necessary to burn them. Right here in the valley. Let the screaming echo. A message. A warning. Future companies coming south for the parias would thank him for it.

"Nino, my shining one, it is your own Fruela! I am dying for you!"

The woman. The woman would have to wait. If she was burning and dying, well, there would be a flame for her as well, soon enough, and for whoever had put her up to this humiliating charade.

And so, focused in anger, did Nino di Carrera banish confusion and doubt. He drew his sword. His company had already wheeled into position behind him. He looked back, saw Edrique nod crisply, his own blade uplifted.

"To Jalona's glory!" cried Nino then. "Ride now! Ride, in the holy name of Jad!"

They started north, moving quickly, but in tight formation, the mules with their gold still safely in the center of the company. They traversed the valley, shouting in battle fever now, in anticipation. There was no fear. They knew what they were and could do. They rode through bright sunlight over frosted grass and came to the shadows where the hills closed in. They thundered into the dark defile, screaming the god's name, one hundred brave, trained Horsemen of Jad.

Idar ibn Tarif, who had command of the forty men on the western side of the gorge, had been swearing without surcease and with considerable inventiveness since the Jaddite advance scouts had been spotted above them on the slopes. They had been shot at and briefly pursued, to no avail.

They had been discovered! Their trap was exposed. The long hunt was over. Who would ever have imagined a Jaddite commander would be so timorous as to send scouts! The man had a hundred Horsemen! He was supposed to be arrogant, reckless. In Ashar's star-bright name, what was he doing being so cautious?

Across the narrow, sharply angled canyon at the north end of the valley his brother and father were still waiting, oblivious to the disaster that had just taken place, readying their archers for a feathered volley of death against unsuspecting men. Idar, sick at heart, had been about to slip across the shadowy ground to tell them about the scouts when he heard the woman's voice begin, up on the eastern ridges of the Emin ha'Nazar—the echoing valley where the stinking, dog-faced Horsemen had halted.

On this side of the defile beyond the valley the high voice could be clearly heard. Idar was far from fluent in Esperanan, but he knew enough to be suddenly arrested in his purpose. Wondering—and even amused in spite of the catastrophe that had befallen them—he decided to await events.

The Jaddites were going to double back. It was evident to anyone with half a mind. If they had spotted the ambush they would draw all the obvious conclusions. They were swine and unbelievers, but they knew how to wage war. They would circle back out of the Emin ha'Nazar and take the longer way around to the west.

And there was no other place of entrapment between here and the tagra lands that would allow eighty unevenly equipped men—a mix of bowmen, cut-throats, some riders, he and his brother and their notorious father—to have any hope of defeating so many soldiers. Gold was worth a great deal of risk, and so was glory, but neither, in Idar's view, justified certain death. He despised the Jaddites, but he was not so foolish as to underestimate how they could fight. And his father had based his long career never giving battle save on ground of his own choosing.

It was over then, this uncharacteristic chance they had taken, so far north, so late in the year. Well, it had always been that: a gamble. They would wait for the Jaddites to clear the valley and head west. Then they would start back south themselves and begin the long journey home. If the season had not been so close to the winter rains and mud, they might have been able to take their time and find some solace in raiding through Ragosan lands along the way.

Solace, Idar thought glumly, was unlikely to be found before they got back to their own stone walls. He wanted a drink right now, actually, but his father would forbid that. Not for religious reasons of course, but as a commander on a raid. A rule of forty years, that one. Idar would have balked at the old man's strictures save for two things: he loved him, and he feared him more than anyone alive.

"Look!" whispered one of the archers beside him. "In the name of Ashar's Paradise, look!"

Idar looked. He caught his breath. They were coming. The god had driven the Jaddites mad, or perhaps the woman's voice had done so. Who knew what made men do such things as this? What Idar did know was that he and his brother and father and their men were about to be in a battle such as they hadn't known in years. Their ambush had been uncovered, and the Horsemen were still coming.

The Jaddites approached the defile, one hundred riders, with six mules laboring in their midst. They were riding too fast. They would be blind, Idar knew, the moment they entered the shadows where the steep slopes hid the sun. They were making a terrible mistake. It was time to make them pay for that.

His was one of the first arrows. He launched another, and a third, then he started running and sliding down the slope to where Jaddites and their horses were screaming now in the pits that had been dug, hurled upon each other in a mangling of limbs, falling on the sharp spears planted in the cold ground for killing.

Fast as he moved, Idar saw that his father was ahead of him.

Jehane had been affronted at first by Rodrigo's suggestion, then amused, and finally inspired to inventiveness. In the midst of the exercise she discovered that it was unexpectedly stimulating to be crying aloud in feverish, explicit desire for the whole of the valley below them to hear.

The two men beside her were nearly convulsed in silent hilarity as she offered increasingly flamboyant variations on the theme of her anguished physical yearning—as Queen Fruela of Jalona—for the golden-haired count who had come to claim the paras from Fibaz. She had to concede that it was partly her pleasure at their helpless mirth, their unstinting approval of her performance, that led her on to wilder flights of suggestive fantasy.

They were high on the eastern slopes of the hills that ringed the valley bowl of Emin ha'Nazar, the well-known Place of Many Voices. Well-known, that is, save to the Jaddites who had entered the valley this morning. Even Rodrigo hadn't heard of the place before today, but ibn Khairan had not only known of it, he had anticipated that this might be the place where a trap would be laid for the gold of Fibaz.

The Emin ha'Nazar was known for more than echoes. Among the ghostly voices said to resonate in the valley at night were those of men slain here in battles going back for centuries.

The first such encounter had involved Jaddites as well, in the great wave of the Khalifate's initial expansion, when the boundary between Ashar and Jad had been pushed as far north as it was ever to go. Where it remained now, in fact, just south of the River Duric and the mountains that screened Jalona.

That savage long-ago campaign had begun—in the endless paradox of things—the centuries-long splendor of Al-Rassan. A brilliant succession of khalifs in the growing Al-Fontina of Silvenes had chosen to name themselves for what they achieved in war: The Conqueror, The Destroyer, Sword of the Star-born, Scourge of the Unbelievers.

They had been those things, there was no hubris in the naming. Those khalifs and their armies, following upon the first reckless, astonishingly successful thrust northward across the straits from the Majriti more than three hundred years ago, had carved and hewed a glorious realm in this peninsula, driving the Esperanans into the farthest north, raiding them twice a year for gold and grain and slaves, and for the sheer pleasure and great glory of doing so in Ashar's ever-bright name.

It had been called a Golden Age.

Jehane supposed that, as such things were measured, it had been. For the Kindath, treading lightly at all times, the expanding world of the khalifs had offered a measure of peace and fragile security. They paid the heretics' tax, as did the Jaddites who dwelt in Al-Rassan; they were to worship the god and his sisters in their fashion only behind closed doors; they were to wear blue and white clothing only, as stipulated in Ashar's Laws. They were forbidden to ride horses, to have intimate congress with Believers, to build the roofs of their sanctuaries higher than any temple of the Asharites in the same city or town ... there were rules and laws that enclosed them, but there was a life to be found, and the enforcement of laws varied widely through the passing centuries.

A Golden Age. Now gone. The moons waxed and the moons waned. Silvenes was fallen; the petty-kings bristled and sparred against each other. And now the Jaddites were coming south again, on the magnificent horses they bred in the north. Valledo claimed tribute from Fezana. Ruenda was making overtures towards Salos and the towns north of it along the coast, and here now, below them in this valley, was the first parias party from Jalona, come to share in the banquet, to bring Fibaz gold back to King Bermudo in his drafty castle in Eschalou.

If they could.

High on the slopes above the valley, Jehane lifted her voice again and cried out in Esperanan, in a tone she hoped would convey uncontrollable desire:

"Nino, my golden king, it is Fruela! I am afire for you!"

Screened behind cedar and pine, they saw the young Jaddite commander look up again. He hesitated, then clapped his helmet back on his head.

"That's it," said Rodrigo softly. He had stopped laughing. "I think you've done it, Jehane."

"He's calling back the party he sent up here," Ammar said, also quietly.

"What have I done?" Jehane asked, careful to whisper now. Neither of them had yet bothered to explain. They had simply asked her to come up here and pretend to be helpless with desire. It had seemed amusing at the time.

"Goaded him," Rodrigo murmured, not taking his eyes from the valley below. The Horsemen were beginning to move, shifting alignment, turning north. "Nino di Carrera is vain but not a fool. He had outriders ahead and behind. Given a calm space in which to think he would do the intelligent thing and double back. You've been taking space and calm away from him. He is not thinking properly because he is humiliated and angry."

"He is dead," said Ammar ibn Khairan flatly. He, too, had never stopped scanning the valley. "Look what they're doing."

The Jaddites had begun to ride, Jehane saw. High up among the trees in the wind she heard their voices lift in cries of menace and exaltation. Their massed formation looked terrifying to her. The huge thundering of hooves carried up to where they watched. She saw Nino di Carrera lead his company into the shadows at the valley's end and she lost them there.

"Too fast," said Rodrigo.

"Much. There will be a spear pit where the canyon bends," Ammar said grimly.

"And arrows as the horses pile up."

"Of course. Messy."

"It works," said Rodrigo.

A moment later Jehane heard the screaming begin.

The two men looked at each other. They had shaped events to achieve exactly this, Jehane understood that much. What they were striving towards, she did not yet know. There were deaths involved, though; she could hear men dying.

"First part done," Ammar said calmly. "We ought to go down."

She looked from him to Rodrigo, who had been the one to suggest the performance as Queen Fruela. "You aren't going to explain this, are you?"

"Later, Jehane, I promise," Rodrigo said. "No leisure now. We need our own swords to be ready, and then a doctor's labors, I fear."

"There's Lain already," ibn Khairan said, pointing to the other end of the valley bowl. Jehane saw their own men coming up from the south towards the shadows where the Jalonans had disappeared.

"Of course," Rodrigo said. She detected a note of complacency. "He knows how to do this. What do you think we are?"

Ammar grinned at that, the white teeth flashing. "Valiant Horsemen of Jad," he said. "The same as the ones being butchered down below."

"Not quite," Rodrigo replied, refusing to be baited. "Not quite the same. You'll see. Come on, Jehane. Can you control your smoldering enough to get down from here?"

She would have hit him with something, but by then the sounds of men and their horses in the darkness beyond the north end of the valley were appalling and she followed her two companions down in silence.

"We kill anyone who comes out from the defile," Lain Nunez said flatly when he gave the command to ride. "No surrender accepted. Treat both parties as enemies. We are seriously outnumbered here."

Alvar was intimidated by the grimness in the old warrior's face as he gave his orders. It was no secret that Lain had always thought this intricate, many-layered plan to be foolish and unworkable. But with Mazur ben Avren in Ragosa, Ser Rodrigo and Ammar ibn Khairan all vying to outdo each other in subtlety the scheme had acquired so many nuances as to be almost incomprehensible. Alvar had long ago given up trying to follow what was happening.

He understood no more than the essence: they had made certain that a notorious outlaw leader knew about the Fibaz gold. They wanted him to come after the parias. King Badir had delayed agreeing to payment of the gold to Jalona until as late in the year as possible to give this outlaw time to act, if he chose.

Then, after a lone messenger had arrived from the south one night, Rodrigo and ibn Khairan had led fifty of the Valledans out from Ragosa the next morning in a cold rain on the brink of winter. No banners, no identifying emblems, not even their own horses—they rode nondescript mounts from Ragosa. They had passed like ghosts through the countryside, heading east, twenty of them at any time scattering to watch for the movement of companies of men.

It was Martin, predictably, who had spotted the outlaw band coming north. The Captain and ibn Khairan had smiled then; old Lain had not. From that point on the bandit chieftain's progress had been carefully monitored all the way to this valley. He had about eighty men.

The Jalonans, led by a Count Nino di Carrera—not a name Alvar knew—were already in Fibaz, east and south of where the outlaws waited. Di Carrera had a hundred men, superbly mounted, by report.

When word came of where the ambush was being laid, Ammar ibn Khairan had smiled again. Rain had been falling that day too, dripping from hat brims and into the collars of overtunics and cloaks. The cart roads and fields were already turning to winter's thick mud, treacherous for the horses.

"The Emin ha'Nazar? That old fox," ibn Khairan had said. "He would do it in the valley. Truly, I shall be a little sorry if we must kill him."

Alvar was still not sure how he felt about the lord Ammar ibn Khairan.

Jehane liked him, he was fairly certain of that—which complicated matters. Her presence on this ride was complication enough. He worried about her in the cold and the rain, sleeping in a tent on damp or frozen ground, but she said nothing, offered no complaint, rode a horse—normally forbidden the Kindath, of course—surprisingly well. She had learned in Batiara, he discovered. It appeared that in Batiara any number of normally forbidden things could be done.

"What is that valley?" Rodrigo had asked ibn Khairan. "Tell me all you know about it."

The two of them had walked off together into the mist, talking quietly, so Alvar heard no more. He had happened to be watching Lain Nunez's face, and from the older man's expression had grasped a part of why Lain was so unhappy on this winter expedition. Alvar wasn't the only man here feeling displaced by recent developments.

Nonetheless, Lain's disapproval seemed unwarranted in the end. Even with all the complexity and the need for absolute secrecy of movement, it had all come together after all, here at this strange, high, echoing valley. There was even sunshine today; the air bright and very cold.

Alvar had been part of the first small group that had run up—no horses allowed, by ibn Khairan's orders—to close the southern entrance to the valley after the Jalonans had gone through. They were posing as outlaws, he understood that much: as part of the same band lying in ambush to the north. And they were meant to be seen by the Jalonan outriders.

They were. Martin spotted the two scouts in plenty of time to have killed them had they wanted to. They didn't want to. For whatever reason in this indecipherable scheme, they were to allow the scouts to see them and then race back into the valley to report. It was very hard to puzzle out. It was made even harder for Alvar because all through the tense movements of the morning he had been forced to listen to Jehane's voice from high on the slopes as she moaned her desire for the yellow-haired Jalonan commander in the valley ahead of them. He didn't like that part at all, though most of the others seemed to find it killingly funny.

By the time Lain Nunez gave the order to ride—the horses had been brought up the moment the two scouts left—Alvar was in a mood to do injury to someone. It did cross his mind, as they galloped north in the wintry sunlight, that he was about to kill Jaddites in an Asharite cause. He tried not to let that bother him. He was a mercenary, after all.

Nino was wearing good armor. One arrow hit his chest and was turned away, another grazed his unprotected calf, drawing blood. Then his horse, moving too quickly, trod on emptiness and fell into a pit.

It screamed as it impaled itself upon the forest of stakes below. The screaming of a horse is a terrible sound. Nino di Carrera, lithe and desperate, hurled himself from the saddle even as the horse was falling. He grabbed for the near wall of the pit, clutched, held, and hauled himself out. Just in time to be nearly trampled by the mount of one of his men, veering frantically around the death pit.

He took a kick in the ribs and sprawled on the frozen ground. He saw another horse coming and rolled, agonizingly, away from flailing hooves. He fought for air. The breath had been knocked out of him and his ears were ringing, but Nino found that all limbs were intact. Gasping, wheezing, he could move. He scrambled to his feet, only to discover that he'd lost his sword in the pit. There was a dead man beside him with an arrow in his throat. Nino seized the soldier's blade, ignoring the pain in his ribs, and looked around for someone to kill.

No shortage of candidates. Outlaws were pouring down from the slopes on either side of the defile. At least thirty of Nino's men—probably more—were down, dead or crippled by the spear trap and the volley of arrows. That still left a good number of Horsemen, though, and these were Asharite bandits opposing them, offal, dogs, food for dogs.

Holding a hand to his side, Nino roared his defiance. His men heard him and cheered. He looked around for Edrique. Saw him battling three men, fighting to maneuver his horse in the narrow space. Even as Nino watched, one of the bandits ducked in under the legs of Edrique's mount and stabbed upwards. A peasant's way to fight, knifing horses from below. It worked, though. Edrique's stallion reared up on its hind legs, screaming in pain as the man with the short sword scrambled away.

Nino saw his second-in-command beginning to slide in the saddle. He was already sprinting towards him. The second outlaw, waiting for Edrique to fall, never knew what killed him. Nino's swinging sword, white rage driving it, hewed the man's unhelmed head from his shoulders. It landed in the grass a distance away and rolled like a ball. The blood that fountained from the headless torso spattered them all.

Nino roared in triumph. Edrique swung his feet free of the stirrups to fall free of the maimed horse. He was up on his feet instantly. The two men exchanged a fierce glance then fought together, side by side in that dark defile, two of Jad's holy warriors against legions of the infidels.

Against bandits, really, and as he swung his sword again and again and strove to carve a space to advance, Nino abruptly reclaimed the thought he had found and then lost earlier.

It chilled him, even amid the clotted, sweating chaos of battle: whoever his outriders had seen coming up south of the valley couldn't have been part of this ambush. It was so obvious. Where had his mind been? No one laid a death trap like this and then split his forces.

Struggling for understanding again, Nino tried to get some sense of what was happening, but the narrow ground between the steep slopes meant that the fighting was desperately close, hand-to-hand, fists and knives and shoulders as much as swords. No chance to step back and evaluate anything. They were spared the arrows now. With their own men entangled with the Jaddites, the bandits could not shoot.

The mules! Nino suddenly remembered the gold. If they lost that there was no point to anything else. He hammered his metal-clad forearm into a bandit's face and felt bones crunch with the blow. With a moment's respite he looked quickly around and spotted a cluster of his men ringing the gold. Two of the mules were down: the cowards had shot at the animals again.

"Over there!" he shouted to Edrique, gesturing. "Fight over that way!"

Edrique nodded his head and turned. Then he fell. Someone jerked a sword out from his ribs.

In the space where his second-in-command had stood a moment before, a brave, competent, living man, Nino saw an apparition.

The man who had killed Edrique had to be at least sixty years old. He was built like an ox, though, massive and thick-muscled, broad-shouldered, heavy-browed, a huge, ugly head. He was dripping with blood. His long, snarled white beard was dyed and clotted with it; blood streamed from his bald head and had soaked the dun-colored clothing and leather armor he wore. The man, eyes wild with battle lust, levelled his red sword at Nino.

"Surrender or you will die!" he roared in crude Esperanan. "We grant ransoming if you yield!"

Nino glanced past the outlaw. Saw the ring of his men still holding around the mules. Many dead, but more of their foes fallen in front of them—and his company were soldiers, the best Jalona had. The old man was bluffing, taking Nino for a coward and a fool.

"Jad rot you!" Nino screamed, his throat scraped raw. He cut viciously on the backhand against the other man's blade and drove the blood-soaked figure back a step with the sheer force of his rage. Another outlaw rushed up on Nino's left; Nino twisted under his too-high sword stroke and swept his own blade back across and down. He felt it bite into flesh. A red joy filled him. His victim made a sloppy, wet sound and fell to the frosted earth.

The white-bearded outlaw froze for a moment, screaming a name, and Nino used that hesitation to ram straight into him and then past, as the man gave way, to where most of his remaining men were ferociously defending the gold. He stumbled into their ranks, greeted with glad, fierce cries, and he turned, snarling, to fight again.

Surrender? To these? To be ransomed by the king from Asharite bandits, with the parias lost? There were worse things than dying, far worse things.

This is not war as I dreamed it, Alvar was thinking.

He was remembering the farm, childhood, an eager boy, a soldier's only son, with a wooden sword always by his bed at night. Images of glory and heroism dancing beyond the window in the starry dark after the candles had been blown out. A long time ago.

They were waiting in pale cold sunlight at the north end of the valley.

Kill anyone who comes out, Lain Nunez had said. Only two men had. They had been battling each other, grappled together, grunting and snorting like animals. Their combat had carried them right out of the defile, tumbling and rolling, fingers clawing at each other's eyes. Ludus and Martin, efficient and precise, had moved their horses over and dispatched both men with arrows. The two bodies lay now, still intertwined, on the frosted grass.

There was nothing remotely heroic or even particularly dangerous about what they were doing. Even the night sweep into the burning hamlet of Orvilla last summer had had more intensity, more of a sense of real warfare, than this edgy waiting while other men killed each other out of sight in the dark space north of them. Alvar glanced over his shoulder at a sound and saw the Captain riding up, with Jehane and ibn Khairan. Jehane looked anxious, he thought. The two men appeared calm, unconcerned. Neither spared a glance for the two dead men on the grass. They cantered their horses up to Lain Nunez.

"It goes well?" Rodrigo asked.

Lain, predictably, spat before answering. "They are killing each other for us, if that is what you mean."

Ammar ibn Khairan grinned at the tone. Rodrigo offered a level glance at his second-in-command. "You know what this is about. We've had our real battles and we'll have them again. We're trying to achieve something here."

Lain opened his mouth to reply, then shut it firmly. The expression in the Captain's face was not conducive to argument.

Rodrigo turned to Martin. "Take a quick look. I need the numbers in there. We don't want the Jalonans to win, of course. If they are, we'll have to move in, after all."

Alvar, vainly trying to follow, was made edgy again by his ignorance. Lain might know what was going on, but no one else did. Was it always this way in war? Didn't you usually know that your enemy was ahead of you and your task was to be braver and stronger? To kill before you were killed? He'd a feeling Lain felt the same way.

"He's already been in there," Lain said sourly. "I do know what I'm doing. It is balanced, about thirty of each left. The outlaws will break soon."

"Then we have to go in."

It was ibn Khairan who spoke, looking at Rodrigo. "The Jalonans are good. You said they would be." He glanced at Lain. "You get your battle, after all."

Jehane, beside him, still looked worried. It was difficult to relate her expression to the intoxicated words Alvar had heard her crying from among the trees.

"Your orders, Captain?" Lain was staring at Rodrigo. His tone was formal.

For the first time Rodrigo Belmonte looked unhappy, as if he'd rather have heard different tidings from the defile. He shrugged his shoulders, though, and drew his sword.

"Not much choice, though this won't be pretty. We've wasted our time if Di Carrera fights free or the outlaws break."

He lifted his voice then, so fifty men could hear him. "We're going in. Our task is exact: we are joining the bandits. Not a man of the Jalonans leaves that defile. No ransom. Once they see us and know we are here we have no choice about that. If even one of them makes it back to Eschalou and reports our presence this has all been for nothing and worse than that. If it helps at all, remember what they did at Cabriz in the War of Three Kings."

Alvar did remember that. Everyone in Valledo did. He had been a bewildered child, watching his father weep when tidings came to the farm. King Bermudo had besieged the city of Cabriz, promised amnesty on surrender, then slaughtered every Valledan fighting man when they rode out under the banner of truce. The Asharites were not the only ones with a grasp of savagery.

Even so, this was still not war as he had imagined it. Alvar looked towards Jehane again. She had turned away. In horror, he thought at first, then saw that she was gesturing to someone near the back of their ranks. Velaz came forward, calm and brisk as ever, with her doctor's implements. Alvar felt ashamed: she wasn't reacting emotionally, as a woman, she was simply readying herself, physician of a company about to go into battle. He had no business doing less than the same. No one had ever said a soldier's life was designed to give fulfillment to a child's dreams.

Alvar drew his sword, saw others doing the same. A few shaped the sign of the sun disk as they did, whispering the words of the soldier's invocation: Jad send us Light, and let there be Light waiting for us. The archers fitted arrows to strings. They waited. Rodrigo looked back at them, nodded his approval. Then he lifted and dropped his hand. They rode out of the sun into the defile where men were killing each other in the cold.

Nino di Carrera knew that he was winning. There came a moment in every battle when one could sense the rhythm changing and he had felt it now. The outlaws had needed to defeat them quickly, with the chaos of the spear pit and the shock of their archers' ambush. Once those had been survived—if barely—this became a clash of roughly even forces and could have only one result. It was only a question of time before the Asharites broke and fled; he was mildly surprised they hadn't done so by now. Even as he fought, shoulder to shoulder with his men in the ring around the gold, Nino was beginning to calculate his next course of action.

It would be pleasant to pursue this rabble when they ran, exceedingly pleasant to bur them alive for the deaths of so many men and so many purebred horses. There was the woman, too, if she could still be found on the slopes. A burning would go a long way towards addressing the grievances of this morning.

On the other hand, he was likely to emerge from this evil place with no more than twenty men and a long way yet to travel through hostile country with the gold of Jalona's future. He simply could not afford to lose any more soldiers after this. They were going to have to travel at speed, Nino realized; no rest except what was utterly necessary, riding by night as well. They could travel with two horses, at least, for each man left, which would spare the beasts, if not the riders.

That would be the only course until they reached the tagra lands where he might assume there would be no forces large enough to trouble twenty mounted men. There will be time for revenge, he told himself, battling. There will be years and years for the taking of revenge. Nino might be young, but he knew exactly what this first installment of the parias meant. Almost contemptuously he blocked an outlaw's slash and drove the man staggering back with a counterblow.

It was all beginning here, with him and this small company. The men of Jalona would be coming back south once more, again and again. The long tide of centuries was turning, and it was going to sweep all the way through Al-Rassan to the southern straits.

First, though, there was this matter of bandits in a defile. They ought to have broken by now, Nino thought again. Grimly he hacked and chopped, with more space to move now, and even, at moments, room to advance a few paces. They were brave enough, these outlaws from the south, but Jaddite iron and Jaddite courage were going to prevail.

Someone fell with a grunt beside him; Nino pivoted and thrust his sword deep into the guts of the man who had just killed one of his soldiers. The bandit shrieked; his eyes bulged. Nino twisted his blade deliberately before hauling it free. The fellow's hands clutched at his oozing, slippery intestines, trying to keep them from spilling out.

Nino was laughing at that, as it happened, when the fifty new riders swept into the defile.

They were Jaddites, he saw that much in the first astonished glance. Then he saw—and tried desperately to understand—that their mounts were small, nondescript horses of Al-Rassan. Then he realized, with a cold pressing of blackness against his heart, that they had come not to aid him but to kill.

It was in that frozen moment of revelation that Nino recognized the first of these riders by the image of an eagle on the crown of his old-fashioned helmet.

He knew that emblem. Every fighting man in Esperana knew of that helmet and the man who wore it. There was a paralyzing weight of disbelief in Nino's mind. He experienced an appalling sense of the unfairness of things. He raised his sword as the eagle-helmed horseman came straight towards him. Nino feinted, then swung savagely for the man's ribs. His blow was parried, casually, and then, before he could right himself, Nino saw a long, bright, final blade come scything and he left the world of living men and fell down into the dark.

Idar, fighting beside his father, had been struggling to summon the courage to suggest retreat.

It had never happened before that his father had persisted this long with what was clearly a failed assault. They had established their name, their fortune, their castle at Arbastro, by knowing when to engage and when—as now, surely!—to withdraw and fight another time.

It was his brother's wound, Idar knew, laboring with his sword in the trammeling press. Abir was dying on the hard ground behind them and their father was out of his head with grief. One of their men was beside Abir on his knees, cradling his head, two others stood by, to defend him should any of the accursed Jaddites break free of their tight circle.

Their father was a wild, terrifying figure beside Idar, frenzied in his attacks on the ring of their enemies, oblivious to circumstance and need, to the devastating fact that more than half their number were dead. There were barely thirty men doing battle now with almost as many of the dung-eating Horsemen. Their weapons and armor were less good, their style of combat was not and never had been this kind of savage face-to-face confrontation.

The ambush had almost succeeded but it had not quite been enough. It was time to break free, to run south, to accept that a huge risk had nearly worked, but had not. They had a desperately long way to go to get home to Arbastro, on evil winter paths, through mud and rain, and with the wounded to slow them. It was past time to pull out while they could, while yet some of them lived.

As if to mark the truth of his thought, Idar was forced in that moment to duck swiftly down and to one side as a burly Jaddite with a studded mace stepped forward and hammered a sideswung blow at his face. The Jaddite was armored from head to calves, Idar wore a leather helm and a light chain breastpiece. What were they doing fighting face to face?

Twisting under the lethal mace, Idar chopped sharply at the back of the Jaddite's ankle. He felt his sword bite through the boot and into flesh. The man screamed and fell to one knee. They would say it was a coward's way to fight, Idar knew. They had their armor and their iron. The men of Arbastro had decades of experience in the tactics of cunning and entrapment. When it came to killing or dying there were no rules; his father had drilled that into them from the beginning.

Idar killed the fallen giant with a slicing blow to the neck, where the helmet did not quite meet his body armor. He thought about grabbing the mace, but decided it would be too heavy for him, especially if they had to run.

And they did have to run, or they were going to die in this defile. He watched his father, still wild with rage, pounding his blade over and again against a Jaddite shield. The Jaddite withdrew, one pace and then another, but the shield arm held, steady and resilient. Just beyond his father Idar saw the Jaddite captain, the yellow-haired one, dispatch another of their men. They were going to die here.

It was in that moment that the second wave of Jaddites came galloping up behind them, the hooves of their horses like sudden thunder in the defile.

Idar wheeled about, aghast. Too late now, he thought, and in his mind he saw a swift, vivid image of a white-faced, black-haired maiden coming for him, her long fingernails reaching for his red heart. And then, a pulsebeat later, Idar realized that he understood nothing at all of what was happening here today.

The leader of this new wave of Horsemen came sweeping through the outlaw line. He rode straight up to where the yellow-haired man wielded his heavy sword. Leaning in the saddle, he blocked a thrust and then, curbing his horse tightly, swept his own long blade down with incisive mastery and killed the other Jaddite where he stood.

Idar became aware that his mouth was gaping open. He closed it. He looked desperately towards the red-smeared figure of blood and grief and fury that was his father and he saw the sharp-eyed clarity that he remembered—that he needed—suddenly return.

"We have been used," his father said to him then, quiet amid the roiling chaos of new horses and dying men in front of them. He had lowered his sword. "I am in my dotage. Too old to be allowed to lead men. I ought to have died before today."

And, amazingly, he sheathed his blade and stepped back, seemingly indifferent, as the new Jaddites killed the first ones without mercy or respite, even though swords were being thrown down in the circle around the gold and men were crying aloud for ransom.

No one's surrender was accepted. Idar, who had killed many men in his time, watched in silence from where he and his father had withdrawn beside his dying brother.

The men from Jalona, who had come south for a fortune in parias gold, who had ridden foolishly into a trap and then survived it by main courage and discipline, died that morning, every one of them, in that dark place.

Afterwards it was quiet, save for the moaning of injured outlaws. Idar realized that some of the new Jaddite archers were shooting the wounded horses, which is why those sounds had stopped. The animals' screaming had been going on so long he had almost blocked it out. He watched as the undamaged horses were rounded up. They were magnificent stallions; no mounts in Al-Rassan could match those from the ranches of Esperana.

Idar and his father and the others laid aside their weapons, as ordered: there was no point resisting. They numbered barely more than twenty, all exhausted and many wounded, with nowhere to run, facing fifty mounted warriors. On the ground beside them, his head now pillowed on a saddle cloth, Abir breathed raggedly, dealing with pain. The wound in his thigh was too deep, Idar saw; it was still bleeding despite the knot tied above it. Idar had seen that kind of wound before. His brother was going to die. There was a kind of blankness in Idar's mind because of that, an inability to think properly. He remembered, quite suddenly, the vision he had had when the new Horsemen had appeared: death as a woman, her nails raking for his life.

It wasn't his life, after all. He knelt and touched his younger brother's cheek. He found that he could not speak. Abir looked up at him. He lifted a hand so their fingers touched. There was fear in his eyes but he said nothing at all. Idar swallowed hard. It would not do to cry. They were still on a battlefield. He squeezed Abir's hand and stood up. He walked a few steps back to stand beside their father. The old man's blood-smeared head was high, his shoulders straight as he looked up at the new men on their horses.

Tarif ibn Hassan of Arbastro, captured at last after almost forty years.

The outlaw who had become more a king—and who had always been more a lion—than any of the myriad pretenders to royalty since Silvenes fell.

The numbness in Idar extended to this as well. Their world was ending in this defile. A new legend to go with the old ones about the haunted Emin ha'Nazar. His father betrayed no expression at all. For more than three decades a series of khalifs and then half a dozen of the petty monarchs of Al-Rassan had vowed to cut off his fingers and toes one by one before they allowed him to die.

The leaders of the new company sat astride their horses, gazing down upon him. They looked undisturbed, as if nothing of note or consequence had taken place. Their own weapons had been sheathed. One of them was an Asharite. The other was Jaddite, as were all of the soldiers. The Jaddite wore an old-fashioned helm with a bronze eagle on the crown. Idar didn't know either man.

His father said, not waiting for them, "You are mercenaries from Ragosa. It was Mazur the Kindath who planned all of this." He did not put it as a question.

The two men looked at each other. Idar thought he saw a trace of amusement in their expressions. He felt too hollow to be angered by that. His brother was dying. His body ached, and his head hurt in the silence after the screaming. It was in his heart, though, that the real pain lay.

The Asharite spoke. A courtier's voice. "A measure of self-respect requires that we accept some of the credit, but you are correct in the main: we are from Ragosa."

"You arranged for us to know about the parias. You drew us north." Tarif's voice was flat. Idar blinked.

"That is also correct."

"And the woman on the slopes?" Idar said suddenly. "She was yours?" His father looked at him.

"She travels with us," the smooth-featured man said. He wore a pearl in one ear. "Our doctor. She's a Kindath, too. They are very subtle, aren't they?"

Idar scowled. "That wasn't her doing."

The other man, the Jaddite, spoke. "No, that part was ours. I thought it might be useful to have di Carrera distracted. I'd heard some rumors from Eschalou."

Idar finally understood. "You drove them into us! They thought you were part of our company, or they would never have ridden into the trap. They had sent spies, I saw them. They knew we were here!"

The Jaddite brought a gloved hand up and touched his moustache. "Correct again. You laid your ambush well, but di Carrera is—was—a capable soldier. They would have doubled back and around the valley. We gave them a reason not to. A chance to make a mistake."

"We were supposed to kill them for you, weren't we?" Idar's father's voice was bitter. "I do apologize for our failure."

The Asharite smiled and shook his head. "Hardly a failure. They were well trained and better armed. You came close, didn't you? You must have known this was a gamble from the moment you set out."

There was a silence.

"Who are you?" Idar's father asked then, staring narrowly up at the two of them. "Who are you both?" The wind had picked up. It was very cold in the defile.

"Forgive me," the smooth one said. He swung down from his horse. "It is an honor to finally meet you. The fame of Tarif ibn Hassan has spanned the peninsula all my life. You have been a byword for courage and daring. My name is Ammar ibn Khairan, late of Cartada, currently serving the king of Ragosa."

He bowed.

Idar felt his mouth falling open again and he shut it hard. He stared openly. This was ... this was the man who had slain the last khalif! And who had just killed Almalik of Cartada!

"I see," said his father quietly. "Some things are now explained." His expression was thoughtful. "You know we had people die in villages near Arbastro because of you."

"When Almalik was searching for me? I did hear about that. I beg forgiveness, though you will appreciate that I had no control over the king of Cartada at that point."

"And so you killed him. Of course. May I know who your fellow is, who leads these men?"

The other man had taken off his helm. It was tucked under one arm. His thick brown hair was disordered. He had not dismounted.

"Rodrigo Belmonte of Valledo," he said.

Idar actually felt as if the hard ground had suddenly become unstable beneath his feet, as in an earth tremor. This man, this Rodrigo, had been named by the wadjis for years to be cursed in the temples. The Scourge of Al-Rassan, he had been called. And if these were his men ...

"More things," Idar's father said gravely, "are now explained." For all the blood that smeared and stained Tarif ibn Hassan's head and clothing, there was a remarkable dignity and composure to him now.

"One of you ought surely to have been enough," he murmured. "If I am to be finally defeated and slain, I suppose it will at least be said in years to come that it took the best men of two lands to do it."

"And neither man would claim to be better than you."

This fellow, ibn Khairan, had a way with words, Idar thought. Then he remembered that the Cartadan was a poet, to go with everything else.

"You aren't going to be slain," Rodrigo Belmonte added. "Unless you insist upon it." Idar stared up at him, keeping his mouth firmly closed.

"That last is unlikely," Idar's father growled. "I am old and feeble but not yet tired of life. I am tired of mysteries. If you aren't going to kill us, tell me what it is you want." He said it in a tone very nearly of command.

Idar had never been able to keep up with his father, to match or encompass the raw force in him; he had long since stopped trying. He followed—in love, in fear, very often in awe. Neither he nor Abir had ever spoken about what would happen when their father was gone. It did not bear thinking about. There was an emptiness that lay beyond that thought. The white-faced, dark-haired woman with her nails.

The two mercenaries, one standing before them, the other still on horseback, looked at each other for a long moment. An agreement seemed to pass between them.

"We want you to take one mule's worth of Fibaz gold and go home," said Rodrigo Belmonte. "In exchange for that, for your lives and that measure of gold, you will ensure that the world hears of how you successfully ambushed the Jalonan party and killed them all and took all the parias gold back to Arbastro."

Idar blinked again, struggling. He folded his arms across his chest and tried to look shrewd. His father, after a moment, laughed aloud.

"Magnificent!" he said. "And whose is the credit for this part of the scheme?"

The two men before him glanced again at each other. "This part," said ibn Khairan a little ruefully, "is indeed, I am sorry to have to say, the thought-child of Mazur ben Avren. I do wish I had thought of it. I'm sure that I would have, given time."

The Valledan captain laughed.

"I have no doubt," Tarif ibn Hassan said dryly. Idar watched his father working through all of this. "So that is why you killed them all?"

"Why we had to," Rodrigo Belmonte agreed, amusement gone as swiftly as it had come. "Once they saw my company, if any of di Carrera's party made it home the story would never hold. They would know we had the gold back in Ragosa."

"Alas, I must beg your forgiveness again," Tarif murmured. "We were to do your killing for you and we failed miserably. What," he asked quietly, "would you have done if we had taken them for ransom?"

"Killed them," said Ammar ibn Khairan. "Are you shocked, ibn Hassan? Do you fight by courtly rules of war like the paladins of the old tales? Was Arbastro built with treasure won in bloodless adventures?" There was an edge to his tone, for the first time.

He didn't like doing this, Idar thought. He may pretend otherwise, but he didn't like it.

His father seemed satisfied by something. His own manner changed. "I have been an outlaw most of my life, with a price on my head. You know the answer to your own questions." He smiled thinly, his wolf's expression. "I have no objection to taking gold home and receiving the acclaim for a successful raid. On the other hand, once I am back in Arbastro, it might please me to embarrass you by letting the truth be known."

Ammar ibn Khairan smiled, the edge still there. "It has pleased a number of people over the years to embarrass me, one way or another." He shook his head sorrowfully. "I had hoped that a loving father's concern for his sons in Ragosa might take precedence over the pleasure of distressing us."

Idar stepped quickly forward, but his father, without glancing at him, extended a hand and held him back. "You would stand before a man whose youngest child is dying as we speak and propose to take away his other son?"

"He is far from dying. What sort of medical care are you accustomed to?"

Idar wheeled around. Beside Abir now, on her knees, was a woman. They had said their doctor was a woman. A servant was with her, and she had a cloth full of implements already opened. Idar hadn't even seen her walk around them to Abir, so intense was his focus on the two men. She was unexpectedly young, pretty for a Kindath; her manner was crisp and precise, though, almost curt.

She said, looking at his father, "I ought to be able to save his life, though I am afraid it is going to cost him the leg. It will need to be taken off above the wound, the sooner the better. I need the place and time of his birth, to see if it is proper to do surgery now. Do you know these things?"

"I do," Idar heard himself saying. His father was staring at the woman.

"Good. Give them to my assistant, please. I will offer your brother the best care I can here, and I will be pleased to look after him when he returns with us to Ragosa. With luck and diligence he ought to be able to move about with sticks before spring." Her eyes were extremely blue, and quite level as her gaze rested on Idar's father. "I am also confident that having his brother as a companion will speed his recovery."

Idar watched his father's face. The old warrior's expression moved from relief to fury to a gradual awareness that he had no resources here. Nothing to do in the presence of these people but accede. It was not a role he had ever played happily in his life.

He managed another thin, wolf's smile. Turned from the Kindath doctor back to the two men. "Do help an old man's faltering grasp of things," he said. "Was this elaborate scheme truly worth a single season's delay? You must know that King Bermudo will send again to Fibaz in the spring, demanding parias, almost certainly a doubled sum."

"Of course he will," said ibn Khairan. "But this happens to be an important season and this gold can be put to better use than arming Jalona for the coming year." The pearl in his right ear gleamed. He said, "When next he comes Fibaz might refuse him tribute."

"Ah!" said Idar's father then. He pulled a bloody hand slowly through his beard, smearing it even further. "I am illuminated! The spirit of Ashar allows me sight at last." He bowed mockingly to both men. "I am humbled to be even a small part of so great an undertaking. Of course it is an important season. Of course you need the gold. You are going after Cartada in the spring."

"Good for you!" said Ammar ibn Khairan, encouragement in his voice and the blue eyes. He smiled. "Wouldn't you like to come with us?"

A short time later, back in the sunlight of the valley, Jehane bet Ishak prepared to saw off the right leg of Abir ibn Tarif, assisted by Velaz and the strong hands of Martin and Ludus, and with the aid of a massive dose, administered by saturated sponge, of her father's strongest soporific.

She had performed amputations before, but never on open ground like this. She didn't tell them that, of course. Ser Rezzoni again: "Let them always believe you do nothing but this procedure, day after day."

The wounded man's brother hovered impotently nearby, begging to be of assistance. She was struggling to find polite words to send him away when Alvar de Pellino materialized beside the man with an open flask.

"Will I offend you if I offer wine?" he asked the white-faced bandit. The look of grateful need was answer enough. Alvar led the man to the far side of their temporary camp. The father, ibn Hassan, was conversing there with Rodrigo and Ammar. He betrayed his distraction by glancing in their direction with regularity. Jehane noted that, then put all such matters from her mind.

Amputations in the field did not have a high success rate. On the other hand, most military doctors had no real idea what they were doing. Rodrigo had known that very well. It was why she was here. It was also why she was nervous. She could have asked the moon sisters and the god for an easier first procedure with this company. For almost anything else, in truth.

She let none of this show in her face. She checked her implements again. They were clean, laid out by Velaz on a white cloth on the green grass. She had consulted her almanac and cast the moons: those of the patient's birth hour were in acceptable harmony with today's. She would only have delayed if faced with the worst possible reading.

There was wine to pour into the wound and the cauterizing iron waited in the fire, red-hot already. The patient was dazed with the drugs Velaz had given him. Not surprisingly: the sponge had been steeped in crushed poppies, mandragora and hemlock. She took his arm and pinched it, as hard as she could. He didn't move. She looked into his eyes and was satisfied. Two strong men, used to battlefield surgery, were holding him down. Velaz—from whom she had no secrets—offered her a reassuring glance, and her heavy saw.

No reason, really, to delay.

"Hold him," she said, and began to grind through flesh and bone.

Eleven

"Where's Papa now?"

Fernan Belmonte, who had asked the question, was lying in clean straw in the loft above the barn. Most of him was buried for warmth, only the face and brown, tousled hair showing.

Ibero the cleric, who had reluctantly acceded to the twins' morning lessons taking place up here today—it was warmer in the barn above the cows, he'd had to concede—opened his mouth quickly to object, but then shut it and looked with apprehension towards where the other boy lay.

Diego was completely invisible under the straw. They could see it shift with the rise and fall of his breathing, but that was all.

"Why does it matter?" His voice, when it came, seemed disembodied. A message from the spirit-world, Ibero thought, then surreptitiously made the sign of the sun disk, chiding himself for such nonsense.

"Doesn't really," Fernan replied. "I'm just curious." They were taking a brief rest before switching courses of study.

"Idle child. You know what Ibero says about curiosity," Diego said darkly from his cave of straw.

His brother looked around for something to throw. Ibero, used to this, quelled him with a glance.

"Well, is he allowed to be rude?" Fernan asked in an aggrieved tone. "He's using you as authority for impolite behavior to his older brother. Will you let him? Doesn't that make you a party to his action?"

"What's impolite about it?" Diego queried, muffled and unseen. "Do I have to answer every question that comes into his empty head, Ibero?"

The little cleric sighed. It was becoming increasingly difficult to deal with his two charges. Not only were they impatient and frequently reckless, they were also ferociously intelligent.

"I think," he said, prudently dodging both queries, "that this particular exchange suggests that our rest is over. Shall we turn to the matter of weights and measures?"

Fernan made a ghastly, contorted face, pretended he was strangling, and then pulled straw over his head in unsubtle protest. Ibero reached for and found a buried foot. He twisted, hard. Fernan yelped and surfaced.

"Weights and measures," the cleric repeated. "If you won't apply yourself properly up here we'll just have to go down and inform your mother what happens when I'm tolerant of your requests."

Fernan sat up quickly. Some threats still worked. Some of the time.

"He's somewhere east of Ragosa," Diego said. "There's a fight of some kind."

Ibero and Fernan looked quickly at each other. The matter of weights and measures was, for the moment, abandoned.

"What does somewhere mean?" Fernan demanded. His tone was sharp now. "Come on, Diego, do better than that."

"Near some city to the east. There's a valley."

Fernan looked to Ibero for help. The straw on the other side of the cleric shifted and disgorged a blinking thirteen-year-old. Diego began brushing straw from his hair and neck.

Ibero was a teacher. He couldn't help himself. "Well, he's given us some clues. What's the city east of Ragosa? You both ought to know."

The brothers looked at each other.

"Ronizza?" Fernan hazarded.

"That's south," Ibero said, shaking his head. "And on what river is it?"

"The Larrios. Come on, Ibero, this is important!" Fernan had the capacity to seem older than his years when military matters were being discussed.

But Ibero was equal to this challenge. "Of course it's serious. What sort of commander relies on his cleric to help him with geography? Your father knows the name and size and the terrain surrounding every city in the peninsula."

"It's Fibaz," Diego said suddenly. "Beneath the pass to Ferrieres. I don't know the valley, though. It's north and west of the city." He paused and looked away again. They waited.

"Papa killed someone," Diego said. "I think the fighting is stopping."

Ibero swallowed. It was difficult with this child. It was almost impossibly difficult. He looked closely at Diego. The boy seemed calm; a little distracted, but it was impossible to see from his face that he was registering events unimaginably far away. And Ibero had no doubt—not after so many trials—that Diego was reporting them truly.

Fernan had none of that calm just now. Grey eyes gleaming, he stood up. "I'll bet you anything this has to do with Jalona," he said. "They were sending a parias party, remember?"

"Your father wouldn't attack other Jaddites for the infidels," Ibero said quickly.

"Of course he would! He's a mercenary, he's being paid by Ragosa. The only promise he made was not to come with an army into Valledo, remember?" Fernan looked confidently from Ibero to Diego. His whole being was afire now, charged with energy.

And it was Ibero's task—as tutor, guardian, spiritual counsellor—to somehow control and channel that force. He looked at the two boys, one feverish with excitement, the other seeming a little unfocused, not altogether present, and he surrendered yet again.

"You are both going to be useless for the rest of the morning, I can see that much." He shook his head darkly. "Very well, you are released." Fernan whooped: a child again, not a commander-in-waiting. Diego hastily stood up. Ibero had been known to change his mind.

"One condition," the cleric added sternly. "You will spend time with the maps in the library this afternoon. Tomorrow morning I am going to have you mark the cities of Al-Rassan for me. Major ones, smaller ones. This matters. I want you to know them. You are your father's heirs and his pride."

"Done," said Fernan. Diego just grinned.

"Then go," said Ibero. And watched them hurtle past him and down the ladder. He smiled in spite of himself. They were good boys, both of them, and he was a kindly person.

He was also a devout man, and a thoughtful one.

He knew—who in Valledo did not, by now?—of the holy war being launched this coming spring from Batiara, an armada of ships sailing for the eastern homelands of the infidels. He knew of the presence in Esteren, as a guest of the king and queen, of one of the highest of the clerics of Ferrieres, come to preach a war of the three kingdoms of Esperana against Al-Rassan. The Reconquest. Was it truly to come now, in their lifetime, after so many hundreds of years?

It was a war every devout man in the peninsula was duty-bound to support and succor with all his being. And how much more did that apply to the clerics of holy Jad?

Sitting alone in the straw of the barn loft, listening to the milk cows complaining below him, Ibero the cleric of Rancho Belmonte began a hard wrestling match within his soul. He had been with this family most of his life. He loved them all with a fierce, enduring passion.

He loved and feared his god with all his heart.

He remained up there, thinking, for a long time, but when he finally came down the ladder his expression was calm and his tread firm.

He went directly to his own chamber beside the chapel and took parchment and quill and ink and composed then, carefully, a letter to the High Cleric Geraud de Chervalles at the king's palace in Esteren, writing in the name of Jad and humbly setting forth certain unusual circumstances as he understood them.

"When I sleep," said Abir ibn Tarif, "it feels as if I still have my leg. In my dreams I put my hand down to my knee, and I wake up, because it isn't there." He was reporting it, not complaining. He was not a man who complained.

Jehane, changing the dressing on his wound, nodded her head. "I told you that might happen. You feel tingling, pain, as if the leg were still attached?"

"That is it," Abir said. Then, stoutly, "The pain is not so great, mind you."

She smiled at him, and across the infirmary bed at his brother, who was always present when she visited. "A lesser man would not say that," she murmured. Abir looked pleased. She liked both of them, these sons of an outlaw chieftain, hostages in Ragosa for the winter. They were gentler men than she might have expected.

Idar, who had developed an attachment to her, had been telling stories through the winter of Arbastro and their father's courage and cunning. Jehane was a good listener, and sometimes heard more than the teller intended. Physicians learned to do that.

She had wondered before about the price paid by the sons of great men. This winter, with Idar and Abir, she addressed the question again. Could such children move out from under that huge shadow into their own manhood? She thought of Almalik II of Cartada, son of the Lion; of the three sons of King Sancho the Fat of Esperana; indeed, of Rodrigo Belmonte's two young boys.

She considered whether the same challenge confronted a daughter. She decided it didn't, not in the same way. She wasn't in competition with her father, she was only trying, as best she could, to be worthy of his teaching and his example; deserving of the flask she carried as heir to his reputation.

She finished with Abir's dressing. The wound had healed well. She was pleased, and a little proud. She thought her father would have approved. She'd written to him soon after their return to Ragosa. There were always some hardy travellers who could carry messages back and forth through the winter pass, though not swiftly. Her mother's neat handwriting had conveyed Ishak's reply: This will be too late to be useful, but in cases when you operate in the field you must watch even more carefully for the green discharge. Press the skin near the wound and listen for a crackling sound.

She had known about this. Such a sound meant death, unless she cut again, even higher—and few men survived that. But Abir ibn Tarif's wound did not turn green and his endurance was strong. His brother seldom left his side and the men of Rodrigo's company seemed to have taken a collective liking to the sons of ibn Hassan. Abir did not lack for visitors. Once, when Jehane had come to attend upon him, she caught a lingering trace of the scent favored by the women of a certain neighborhood.

She had sniffed the air elaborately and tsked her disapproval. Idar laughed; Abir looked shamefaced. He was well on the road to recovery by then, however, and secretly Jehane was pleased. The presence of physical desire, Ser Rezzoni had taught, was one of the clearest signs of returning good health after surgery.

She checked the fitting of the new dressing a last time and stepped back. "Has he been practicing?" she asked Idar.

"Not enough," the older of the brothers replied. "He is lazy, I told you." Abir swore in quick protest, then apologized even more quickly.

This was a game, in fact. If he wasn't watched carefully, Abir was likely to push himself to exhaustion in his efforts to learn how to get about with the shoulder sticks Velaz had fashioned for him.

Jehane grinned at both of them. "Tomorrow morning," she said to her patient. "It looks very good, though. By the end of next week I expect you can leave this place and go live with your brother." She paused a moment, for effect. "It will surely save you money on bribes here, when you have company after dark."

Idar laughed again. Abir turned red. Jehane gave his shoulder a pat and turned to leave.

Rodrigo Belmonte, booted and cloaked, leather hat in one hand, was standing by the fire on the far side of the room. From the expression on his face she knew something had happened. Her heart thumped.

"What is it?" she said quickly. "My parents?"

He shook his head. "No, no. Nothing to do with them, Jehane. But there are tidings you ought to know."

He crossed towards her. Velaz appeared from behind the screen where he made his salves and tinctures.

Jehane straightened her shoulders and held herself very still.

Rodrigo said, "I am presuming in a way, but you are, for the moment, still my company physician, and I wanted you to hear this from me."

She blinked. For the moment?

He said, "Word has just come from the southern coast, one of the last ships in from the east. It seems a great army from several Jaddite lands has gathered in Batiara this winter, preparing to sail to Ammuz and Soriyya in the spring."

Jehane bit her lip. Very large news indeed, but ...

"This is a holy army," Rodrigo said. His face was grim. "Or so they call themselves. It seems that earlier this autumn several companies attacked and destroyed Sorenica. They set fire to the city and put the inhabitants to the sword. All of them, we are told. Jehane, Velaz, I am so sorry."

Sorenica.

Mild, starry nights in winter. Spring evenings, years ago. Wine in the torchlit garden of her kinfolk. Flowers everywhere, and the breeze from the sea. Sorenica. The most beautiful sanctuary of the god and his sisters that Jehane had ever seen. The Kindath High Priest with his sweet, laden voice intoning the liturgy of the doubled full moons. White and blue candles burning in every niche that night. So many people gathered; a sense of peace, of calm, of a home for the Wanderers. A choir singing, then more music after, in the winding torchlit streets outside the sanctuary, beneath the round, holy moons.

Sorenica. Bright city on the ocean with its vineyards above. Given to the Kindath long ago for service to the lords of Batiara. A place to call their own in a hostile world.

To the sword. An end of music. Trampled flowers. Children?

"All of them?" she asked in a faint voice.

"So we have been told," Rodrigo said. He drew a breath. "What can I say, Jehane? You said you could not trust the Sons of Jad. I told you that you could. This makes a liar of me."

She could see genuine distress in the wide-set grey eyes. He would have hurried to find her as soon as he heard the tidings. There would be an emissary from court waiting at her home, or coming here even now. Mazur would have sent. Shared faith, shared grief. Should it not have been another Kindath who told her this? She could not answer that. Something seemed to have shut down inside her, closing around a wound.

Sorenica. Where the gardens were Kindath gardens, the blessings Kindath blessings, the wise men and women filled with the learning and the sorrow of the Wanderers, century upon century.

To the sword.

She closed her eyes. Saw a garden in her mind's eye, and could not look at it. Opened her eyes again. She turned to Velaz and saw that he, who had adopted their faith the day her father made him a free man, had covered his face with both hands and was weeping.

She said, carefully, to Rodrigo Belmonte of Valledo, "I cannot hold you responsible for the doings of every man or woman of your faith. Thank you for bringing these tidings so speedily. I think I will go home now."

"May I escort you there?" he asked.

"Velaz will do so," she said. "Doubtless I shall see you at court later in the day. Or tomorrow." She didn't really know what she was saying.

She could read the sorrow in his face, but she had nothing in her to offer to that. She could not assuage. Not this moment, not now.

Velaz wiped at his eyes and lowered his hands. He was not a man she had ever seen weep before, save for joy, the day she came home from her studies in Batiara.

Batiara, where bright Sorenica had been.

Whichever way the wind blows ...

It was fire, this time, not rain that had come. She looked around for her cloak. Idar ibn Tarif had picked it up and was holding it for her. Wordlessly he helped her into it. She turned and walked to the doorway, past Rodrigo, following Velaz.

At the very last moment, being what she was—her father's daughter, trained to ease pain where she saw it—she reached out a hand and touched his arm as she went by.

Winter in Cartada was seldom unduly harsh. The city was sheltered from the worst of the winds by forests to the north and the mountains beyond them. Snow was unheard-of, and mild bright days not at all unusual. There was also rain of course, churning market squares and alleys to mud, but Almalik I and now his son and successor had allocated substantial resources to keeping the city clean and functioning, and the winter produce market flourished.

The season was an inconvenience, not the serious hardship it could be further north or to the east where it seemed to rain all the time. Winter flowers flecked the celebrated gardens with colors. Fish thrived in the Guadiara, and boats still upstream from Tudesca and Silvenes and went back down.

Since Cartada had shaped a kingdom of its own after the fall of the Khalifate, the inns and cook shops had never suffered a shortage of food, and plenty of wood was brought into the city from the forests for the hearth fires.

There were also winter entertainments of esoteric variety, as befitted a city and court that claimed aesthetic as well as military pre-eminence in Al-Rassan.

The Jaddite taverns were always crowded in winter, despite the imprecations of the wadjis. At court, in the taverns, in the better homes, poets and musicians vied for patronage with jugglers, acrobats and animal trainers, with women who claimed to converse with the dead, Kindath fortune tellers who would read one's future in the moons, or with itinerant artisans settled for the season in premises on the perimeter of the city. This winter the fashion was to have one's portrait done in miniature by an artist from Seria.

There were even some entertaining wadjis to be found in the smaller out-of-the-way temples, or on street corners on the mild days, pronouncing their warnings of doom and Ashar's wrath with fiery eloquence.

Many of the higher-born women of Cartada enjoyed attending upon these ragged, wild-eyed figures in the morning, to be pleasingly frightened by their prophecies of the fate awaiting Believers who strayed from the true path Ashar had decreed for the Star-born children of the sands. The women would repair from such an outing to one gracious home or another to sip from delicately mulled concoctions of wine and honey and spice—forbidden, of course, which only added piquancy to the morning's adventure. They would appraise the latest flamboyant invective much as they discussed the declamations of the court poets or the songs of the musicians. Talk by the warming fire would usually turn then to the officers of the army, many of them quartered in town for the winter—with diverting implications.

It was not at all a bad place to be in the cold season, Cartada.

This remained true, the longer-lived and more thoughtful of the courtiers at the palace agreed, even in this year of a change of monarchs.

Almalik I had governed Cartada for the khalifs of Silvenes for three years, and then reigned as king for fifteen. A long time to hold power in a turbulent peninsula. Younger members of the court couldn't even remember a time when someone else had governed, and of course there never had been another king in proud Cartada.

Now there was, and the prevailing view seemed to be that the son was beginning well. Prudent where he needed to be, in defense and in minimizing disruption to the civil service and court; generous where a powerful monarch ought to be generous, with favor shown to artists and those courtiers who had taken risks for him in the days when his succession was ... problematic, to put the matter discreetly. Almalik II might be young, but he had grown up in a clever, cynical court and seemed to have learned his lessons. He'd had an exceptionally subtle tutor, some of the courtiers noted, but that remark was offered quietly and only among friends.

Nor was the new king a weakling, by all early appearances. The twitch above one eye—a legacy of the Day of the Moat—remained, but it seemed to be no more than an indicator of the king's mood, a useful clue for a cautious courtier. Certainly there were no signs of indecisiveness in this monarch.

A number of the more visibly corrupt of the officials had already been dealt with: men who had allowed their long association with the last king to ... override their integrity, and had been engaged in a variety of fiscal improprieties. Several were involved in the dyeing monopoly that was the foundation of Cartada's wealth. In the valley south of the city the cermas, beetle made its home, feeding on the white ittixa flower and then producing, dutifully, the crimson dye that Cartada exported to the world. There were fortunes to be made from supervising that trade, and where great wealth went, as the old saying ran, the desire for more would follow.

There were some of this sort at every court. It was one of the reasons one came to court. And there were, of course, risks.

Those apprehended officials who were not yet castrates had been gelded before execution. Their bodies were hung from the city walls with dead dogs on either side of them. The castrates of the court, who really ought to have known better, were flayed and skinned and then staked out on the cleared ground beyond the Silvenes Gate. It was too cold for the fire ants, but the animals were always hungry in winter.

New officials were appointed from the appropriate families. They swore all the proper oaths. Some poets and singers left for different courts, others arrived. It was all part of the normal course of events. One could tire of an artist, and a new monarch needed to put the stamp of his own taste on a great many things.

The harem, long dominated by Zabira, the late king's favorite, went through a predictably unsettled phase as the women maneuvered viciously for their opportunity with the young king. The stakes were extreme. Everyone knew how Zabira had begun, and how very high she'd risen. There were knifings, and one attempt at poisoning, before the harem-mistresses and the castrates managed to reassert a measure of control.

One cause of the turmoil was that so little was known about the new king's preferences, though rumor was always willing to oblige with guesses. There had been tales, especially those concerning the disgraced Ammar ibn Khairan of Aljais, the king's former guardian and mentor—but shortly after Almalik II's ascension word from certain of the less discreet supervisors in the harem put the more scandalous of these stories to rest.

The women, it was reported, were being kept extremely busy. The young king appeared to have an entirely conventional orientation in matters of love, and an appetite that—by one of the oldest omens for the outset of a reign in Asharite lands—presaged well for his prowess in other matters.

The auspices were good in a great many ways. Fezana had been subdued, rather violently it would always be remembered. Silvenes was quiescent, as usual: only broken, dispirited men still lingered in and about the sad ruins of the Al-Fontina. Elvira on the coast had seemed inclined to offer some signs of unwonted independence when Almalik I died, but these flickerings had been quickly snuffed out by the new ka'id of the army, who made a symbolic journey south with a company of Muwardis just before winter came.

The old ka'id was dead, of course. As a much-applauded gesture of courtesy the king had allowed him to take his own life rather than face public execution. This death, too, was only normal: it was not considered a wise idea for new monarchs to allow generals to continue in power, or even remain alive. It was one of the inherent risks that came with accepting a position of high command in an army in Al-Rassan.

Even the outlaw Tarif ibn Hassan, the terror of merchants on the southern roads and all lawful tax collectors, seemed to have decided to turn his attentions elsewhere this season. He had eschewed his chronic, debilitating raids from impregnable Arbastro into the Cartadan hinterlands in favor of a genuinely spectacular action in Ragosan territory to the north.

Talk of that affair continued through the winter as hardy travellers and merchants straggled into the city with newer versions of the story. It appeared that ibn Hassan had actually managed to seize the first-ever parias tribute from Fibaz to Jalona, slaughtering the entire Jaddite party in the process. An astonishing coup in every respect. Another strand to the forty-year legend.

The embarrassment to Ragosa—since King Badir had authorized the payment in the first place—was extreme, and so were the economic and military implications. Some of the more free-spoken of those drinking in the taverns of Cartada that winter offered the view that the Jalonans might even ride south in numbers come spring, to teach Fibaz a lesson. Which meant, to teach Badir of Ragosa a lesson.

That was someone else's problem, the drinkers agreed. For once ibn Hassan had caused real trouble elsewhere. Wouldn't it be nice if the aged jackal obligingly died soon? Wasn't he old enough, already? There was good land around Arbastro, where a loyal courtier of the new king of Cartada might one day find himself with, say, a small castle and a crown-bestowed estate to manage and defend.

Winter was a time for dreaming, among other things.

The new king of Cartada had neither the leisure nor the disposition to share in such dreams. An edgy, precise man, very much the son of his father—though both would have denied that—Almalik II knew too much that his citizens did not and his own winter, accordingly, encompassed little of the optimism of theirs.

Not that this was unusual for kings.

He knew his brother was with the Muwardis in the desert, with the blessings and hopes of the wadjis accompanying him. He knew with certainty what Hazem would be suggesting. He had no way of knowing how the proposals would be received by Yazir ibn Q'arif. The transition from a strong king to his successor was always a dangerous time.

He made a point of pausing in his business to pray each time the bells rang during the day. He summoned the most prominent of the wadjis of Cartada and listened to their list of complaints. He lamented with them that his beloved father—a Believer of course, but a secular man—had let their great city slip some distance from the Laws of Ashar. He promised to take regular counsel with them. He ordered a notorious street of Jaddite prostitutes to be cleared immediately and a new temple built there, with gardens and a residence for the wadjis.

He sent gifts, substantial ones, to Yazir and his brother in the desert. It was all he could do, for the moment.

He also learned, early in the winter before the flow of news from abroad slowed to a trickle, that a holy war was being readied in Batiara, with armies from four Jaddite lands massed to sail to Ammuz and Soriyya in the spring.

That was potentially the most momentous news of all, but not his immediate problem, and it was difficult to imagine that after a bored, fractious winter together such a disparate force would ever really sail. In another way, though, whether they did or didn't embark, the mere assembling of that army represented the gravest danger imaginable.

He dictated a message of warning to the Grand Khalif in Soriyya. It would not arrive before spring, of course, and there would be other warnings sent, but it was important to add his voice to the chorus. They would ask him for soldiers and gold, but it would take time for that request to make its way back.

Meanwhile it was more important to decipher what the Jaddites in the north of this peninsula might be contemplating in the wake of these tidings of war, which they too would have by now. If four Jaddite armies were massing to sail east, what might the Esperanans be considering, with Asharites so near to hand and an example of holy war? Would not their holy men be preaching to the kings even now?

Could the three rulers of Esperana even gather in the same place without one of them killing another? Almalik II doubted it, but he took counsel with his advisors and then sent certain gifts and a message to King Sanchez of Ruenda.

The gifts were princely; the message took carefully worded note of the fact that Fezana, which Cartada controlled and which currently paid parias to arrogant Valledo, not Ruenda, was at least as close to the latter kingdom, and at least as much potentially subject to Ruendan protection. He besought, respectfully, King Sanchez's thoughts on these thorny matters.

There were divisions to be sown in the north, and it was not especially hard to sow them among the successors of Sancho the Fat.

Jalona in the northeast was not, for the moment, of concern to him. They were more likely to cause difficulty for Ragosa, and that was useful, so long as it didn't amount to more than that. It occurred to him more than once that he really ought to be exchanging counsels with King Badir this winter, but he balked at that. Any interaction with Badir meant dealing, now, with Ammar ibn Khairan, who had fled to Cartada's principal rival the day after his exiling.

It had been a cowardly thing to do, Almalik had decided. It even bordered on the treasonous. All Ammar would have had to do was withdraw discreetly somewhere for a year, write some poems, maybe make a pilgrimage east, even fight for the Faith in Soriyya this coming year, in Ashar's name ... and then Almalik could have welcomed him back, a contrite, chastened courtier who had done a decent time of penance. It had seemed so obvious.

Instead, ibn Khairan, prickly and contrary as ever, had stolen away with Zabira straight to Badir and his wily Kindath chancellor in dangerous Ragosa. Very dangerous Ragosa, in fact, because Almalik's sources then informed him, belatedly, that the woman had apparently sent her two sons—his own half-brothers—to Badir during the summer, immediately after the Day of the Moat.

That was news he ought to have had sooner, before his father died. He was compelled to make an example and execute two of his men: it was perilous to be receiving such important tidings so late. Those two boys represented a threat to his tenure on this throne almost as great as Hazem in the desert.

Superfluous brothers, the new king of Cartada decided, were best disposed of swiftly. Look at what had happened among the Jaddites, for example. Ramiro of Valledo, for all his vaunted prowess, had only begun to flourish after the abrupt passing of his brother Raimundo. And though there had been rumors from the moment of that death, they hadn't impeded Ramiro's steady ascent at all.

A lesson to be learned there. Almalik summoned two men known to him and gave them careful instructions and explicit promises and sent them east, equipped as spice merchants, to cross the mountains to Ragosa while the pass was still open to legitimate traders.

He was sobered, and more than a little shaken, to learn later in the winter that they had both died in a tavern brawl the very evening of their arrival in Badir's city.

Badir was clever, his father had always said so. The Kindath chancellor was extremely clever. And now Ammar was with them, when he ought to have been here, or at least waiting quietly somewhere for permission to return.

Almalik II, seeking transitory solace one windy night in his father's harem, which was now his own, felt very much alone. He rubbed absently at his irritating eyelid while an extremely tall yellow-haired woman from Karch ministered eagerly to him with scented oils and supple hands, and he considered certain facts.

The first was that Ammar ibn Khairan was not going to be amenable to a swift return to Cartada, even with a promise of restored honor and immense power. He knew this with certainty. His carefully thought-out exiling of ibn Khairan on the day of his father's demise had begun to seem a less judicious course of action than it had at the time.

Angrily, he confronted and accepted the fact that he needed Ammar. Too many things were happening this winter, too many disparate events needed to be addressed and responded to, and the men around him were not equal to that. He had need of good counsel and the only man he trusted to provide it was the one who had always treated him with the amused condescension of a master towards a pupil. He was king of Cartada now; it could not be the same way again, but he had to get Ammar back.

He arranged the woman on her hands and knees and entered her. She was extraordinarily tall; it was briefly awkward. Her immediate sounds of rapture were patently exaggerated. They were all like that, desperately anxious to win favor. Even as he moved upon the Karcher woman he found himself wondering what the delicate, subtle Zabira had been like, with his father in this same bed. The woman beneath him moaned and gasped as if she were dying. He finished quickly and dismissed her.

Then he lay back alone among the pillows, and began to give careful thought to how to regain the one man he needed before the threats from so many directions burst into flame like bonfires to consume him.

In the morning, at first pale light, he sent for a spy he had used before. The young king of Cartada received this man alone, without even his bedchamber slaves in the room.

"I want to know," he said, without greeting or preamble, "everything you can discover about the movements of the lord Ammar ibn Khairan in Fezana on the Day of the Moat."

On their way of a midwinter morning to their booth in the market, Jehane and Velaz were abducted so smoothly that no one in the street around them was even aware of what was happening.

It was a grey day; sliding clouds, lighter and darker. Wind and some rain. Two men came up to them; one begged a moment of her attention. Even as he spoke a knife was against her ribs, screened by his body and fur-lined cloak.

"Your servant dies if you open your mouth," he said pleasantly. "You die if he does." She looked quickly over: Velaz was engaged in identical circumstances by the second man. They appeared, to anyone casually glancing at them, to be doing no more than converse.

"Thank you, doctor," the man beside her said loudly. "The rooms are just this way. We are most grateful."

She went where he guided her. The knife pricked her skin as they moved. Velaz had gone white, she saw. She knew it was rage, not fear. There was something about these men, a quality of assurance, that made her believe they would kill, even in a public place.

They came to a door, opened it with a heavy key, entered. The second man locked it behind them with one hand. The other hand held the knife against Velaz. She saw him drop the key into a purse at his belt.

They were in a courtyard. It was empty. The windows of the house beyond were shuttered. There was a fountain basin full of dead leaves, empty of water. The statue in the center had lost its head and one arm. The courtyard looked as if it had not been used for a long time. She had passed this doorway a score of mornings. How did a place such as this become the setting for what might be the end of one's life?

She said, keeping her voice as firm as she could manage, "You invite death and you must know it. I am a court physician to King Badir."

"Now that is a relief," said the first man. "If you were not, we might have had a problem."

He had a dry, precise voice. No accent she could identify. He was Asharite, a merchant, or dressed like one. They both were. Their clothing was expensive. One of them wore a fragrant perfume. Their hands and nails were clean. These were no tavern louts, or if they were, someone had been at pains to conceal the fact. Jehane drew a deep breath; her mouth was dry. She could feel her legs beginning to tremble. She hoped they could not see that. She said nothing, waiting. Then she noticed blood on Velaz's tunic, where his own cloak fell away, and her trembling abruptly stopped.

The second man, taller and broader than the first, said calmly, "We are going to bind and gag your servant and leave him in this place. His clothing will be removed. No one ever comes here. Look around if you wish to satisfy yourself of that. No one knows where he is. He will die of exposure if we do not return to release him. Do you understand what I am saying to you?"

Jehane stared at him, contempt in her eyes disguising fear. She made no reply. The man looked briefly amused; she saw the muscles in his forearm flex, just before the knife moved. Velaz made a small, involuntary sound. There was a real wound now, not a cut.

"If he asks a question you had best answer it," the first man said mildly. "He has an easily affronted nature."

"I understand you," Jehane said, through her teeth.

"Excellent," the bigger man murmured. With a sudden motion he ripped off Velaz's blue cloak and dropped it on the ground. "Remove your clothes," he said. "All of them." Velaz hesitated, looking at Jehane.

"We have other ways of doing what we are here to do," the first man said briskly to Velaz, "even if we have to kill you both. It will cause us no distress to do so. Believe me in this. Take your clothes off, you disgusting Kindath offal. Do it now." The savage insult was the more chilling for the utterly calm tone in which it was spoken.

Jehane thought then of Sorenica. Of those who had died there at autumn's end: burned, decapitated, babies cut in half by the sword. There had been more stories after that first messenger, each one worse than the one before. Did two more deaths matter? Could the god and his sisters possibly care?

Velaz began to disrobe. His face was expressionless now. The second man moved a few steps away to the far side of the fountain basin and retrieved a coil of rope and a square of heavy cloth. It started to rain again. It was very cold. Jehane began trying to calculate how long a man could survive, lying naked and bound here.

"What is it you want of me?" she asked, against her will. She was afraid now.

"Patience, doctor." Her captor's voice was bland; the knife never left her ribs. "Let us deal with your surety first."

They did so. Velaz was not even allowed his undergarments. Utterly naked, looking small and old in the damp grey chill, he was trussed hand and foot. A cloth was tied tightly about his mouth. Then the bigger man lifted him and dropped him into the fountain basin. Jehane winced. The wet stone would be as ice on his exposed flesh. Velaz had not said a word, of protest or appeal. He was unable to do so now. He lay on his back, helpless; his eyes were on hers, though, and what she saw still was a burning anger, not fear.

He was indomitable, he always had been. His courage gave her back her own.

"Once more," she said, moving a deliberate step away from the knife. "What is it you want?" The man did not follow her. He seemed indifferent to her defiance.

He said calmly, "It is our understanding that as physician to the court you know where the two sons of the Lady Zabira are lodged. This has proven to be difficult information to obtain. You will take us to that place and gain us admission. You will remain with us for a time there, and then you are free to return here and release your servant."

"You expect me to simply walk you into that place?"

The second man had turned away again. From another large satchel he began removing items of clothing. Two white tunics, two blue robes fringed in white, two small soft blue caps.

Jehane began to understand.

"We are your kindred, dear lady. Physicians of your own faith from Fezana, come to study with you. We have too little knowledge in the diseases of children, alas, and you are widely known for such expertise. The two boys are past due for a routine examination. You will take us there, introduce us as doctors you know, and bring us into their presence. That is all."

"And what will happen?"

The second man smiled from by the fountain; he was donning the white and blue Kindath garments. "Is that a question you really want answered?"

Which was, of course, an answer.

"No," she said. "I will not do it."

"I am sorry to hear that," the first man said, undisturbed. "Personally I do not like gelding men, even when provoked. Nonetheless, you will note that your servant is securely gagged. When we cut off his organs of sex he will naturally try to scream. No one will hear him."

Jehane tried to breathe normally. Sorenica. They would have done this in Sorenica. "And if I scream now?" she asked, more to gain time than anything else.

Nothing seemed to perturb them. The one by the fountain was fully garbed as a Kindath now, the first one removed his fur-trimmed robe, preparing to do the same.

He said, "There is a locked door here and a high wall. You will have noted these things. You would both be dead and we would be out through the house and a back passageway and lost in the city long before anyone broke through that door to find a castrated man and a dead woman with her intestines spilling out. Really, doctor, I had hoped you would not be foolish about this."

Inwardly then, and quite unfairly, Jehane began to curse all the men she knew here in Ragosa. Mazur. Ammar. Rodrigo. Alvar and Husari. With so much prowess surrounding her, how had this come to be?

The answer, of course, was her own insisted-upon independence, and their willingness to grant her that—which is what made the cursing unfair. Under the circumstances, she decided, fairness didn't matter in the least: one of them, somehow, ought to have been here to prevent this.

"Why do you want the children?" she asked.

"You really are better off not asking too many questions, doctor. We are not unwilling to let you both live after this is done, but you will appreciate that we are moderately exposed to risk here, and must not allow you to increase that."

But even as he spoke Jehane realized that she knew. She could confront them with that knowledge but she was thinking clearly enough to know that that might mean her death warrant, and Velaz's, here in the abandoned courtyard. She kept silent.

It was Almalik II in Cartada, she was certain of it. Seeking to destroy the young boys, his brothers, who were threats to his throne by their very existence. Kings and their brothers; an ancient story, retold in every generation, including hers now.

The two men had completed their disguises. Each of them picked up a small satchel and took out a urine flask: emblems of their assumed profession. Velaz had been carrying Jehane's implements and her flask. The larger of the assassins gestured and Jehane, after a moment, picked them up herself.

"I am going to be next to you the whole way," the smaller man said. "You can cry out, of course. You will die when you do, and so, of course, will your servant here, unrescued. We might also be killed, but you have no certainty of that, for we are skilled at our trade. I wouldn't advise an attempt at disruption, doctor. Where are we going?"

There really were no options. Not yet. Not until she was out from this courtyard. She looked back towards Velaz, but she couldn't see him now, over the fountain rim. The wind had picked up and the rain was falling harder, slanting in cold, stinging drops. There wasn't much time. Bleakly, she named the house. Then she put up her hood and went out with them.

The residence where the two small children of Zabira of Cartada were lodging, occasionally in the presence of their mother, more often not, was close to the palace quarter. It was an affluent district, and a quiet one.

Any hopes Jehane might have nourished of being seen by someone who knew her were quickly abandoned. Her two captors knew Ragosa well—either from previous visits, or from quick study. They took her by a winding route that bypassed the market and palace squares entirely. They were not in a hurry now.

They did go past one of the infirmaries where Jehane had patients too ill to be left at home, but the assassins evidently knew this as well: they kept to the far side of the street and did not break stride. She remembered, as they went by the door, seeing Rodrigo Belmonte and Ammar ibn Khairan disappear together one night around the same corner where she now passed with two men who were using her to kill children.

They walked closely together, the men simulating intense conversation on either side of her: to all the world, three Kindath physicians with their implements and flasks, attending upon some patient wealthy enough to afford them. In the neighborhood into which they passed, this was not cause for note or comment. In the wet, cold morning few people were abroad to take notice in any case. Even the weather seemed to be conspiring against her, Jehane thought. She had an appalling image of Velaz, naked and shivering under the needle-like rain in that empty courtyard.

They came to the house she had named.

For the first time Jehane thought specifically about the children who lived here. She had only seen them twice, summoned for the treatment of minor illnesses. She had even thought about refusing, she remembered. The younger of these two was the cause of her father's darkness and his silence. Thinking about Ishak, though, knowing what he would have done, had caused her to attend as requested. The children were not to be blamed. The children were entitled to her care, to the strict observance of her Oath of Galinus.

Which raised a terrible question about what she was doing now. She knocked on the door.

"Ask for the mother," the bigger man muttered quickly. He betrayed, for the first time, a tension in his voice. In a curious way, that calmed Jehane. They were not quite so unruffled as they seemed. Kindath offal, he had named Velaz. She wanted these men dead.

The door opened. A steward stood in the entrance, a well-lit hallway behind him and an inner courtyard beyond. It was a gracious house. She remembered the steward from before; an innocuous, earnest man. His eyes widened in surprise.

"Doctor? What is it?"

Jehane took a deep breath. Unseen beneath the cloaks, a knife pressed against her back. "The Lady Zabira? She is waiting for me?"

"But no, doctor." The steward looked apologetic and anxious. "She is at court this morning. She left no word about your visit."

The smaller of the two men with Jehane offered a dry chuckle. "A typical mother! Only when the little ones are gravely ill do they wait for us. We made an appointment two days ago. Jehane bet Ishak has been kind enough to allow us to attend upon her visits to her younger patients. We are studying to improve our own skills with the young ones." He lifted his flask slightly.

The steward looked uncertainly at Jehane. The knife pressed; she felt the point fret through her clothing against her skin.

"This is so," she said, despairing. "Did your mistress leave no word at all?"

"Not with me, doctor." He was still apologetic. Were he a sterner man, she thought, he would now close the door upon them and tell them to come back when Zabira was in residence.

"Well then," Jehane tried, "if she left no—"

"But doctor, I do know you, and I know she trusts you. It must have been an oversight. The boys are making mischief, I'm afraid, but please come in." The steward smiled ingratiatingly. One of the men with her gave him a kindly glance and a silver coin. Too much money, in fact; it ought to have warned a good servant something was amiss. The steward palmed it and bowed them in. Jehane would have happily dissected him.

"Go right upstairs, doctor," he murmured to Jehane. "Shall I have hot drinks prepared? It is bitter this morning."

"That would be wonderful," the smaller assassin said, removing his cloak and then, courteously, Jehane's. The knife was nowhere to be seen for a moment but then, as the steward hastily claimed all three outer garments, Jehane felt the blade against her side.

From upstairs the sound of laughing children could now be heard, and the protests of an evidently overmatched servant. Something fell with a reverberating crash. There was a moment of silence, then renewed high-pitched laughter.

The steward looked anxious again.

"Sedatives may be called for," one of her abductors murmured suavely, and smiled to let the man see it was a jest.

They moved to the stairway and started up. The steward watched for a moment then turned away to give his orders for their refreshments.

"They are only children," Jehane said softly. There was a hammering in her breast and a growing fear, colder than anything outside. She was becoming aware that it was not going to be possible for her to do this.

At the top of the stairs, she thought. Last chance. She prayed there might be someone there.

"Children die all the time," the man with the knife beside her murmured. "You are a physician, you know this. One of them ought never to have been born. You know this too. They will not suffer pain."

They reached the top of the stairs.

Corridors in two directions, ahead and to the right; the hallways wrapped around the inner courtyard of the house. She saw elaborate, glass-paned doors opening out to the ambulatory overlooking the garden. Other doorways led into the rooms. The laughter had ceased now. It was very quiet. Jehane looked both ways, a little frantically. Death was here, in this house, and she was not ready for it.

No aid, though, no answers to anything. Only one young servant, little more than a boy himself, could be seen, hurriedly sweeping with a broom at the shards of what had evidently been a large display urn.

He looked up, saw them. Dropped the broom in dismay.

"Doctors! Holy Ashar, forgive us! An accident ... the children." He nervously picked up and then laid aside the broom. He hurried anxiously forward. "May I assist you? The steward—

"We are here to see the children," the bigger man with her said. His tone was crisp, but again with its inflection of tension. "Take us to them."

"Of course!" the young servant smiled, eagerly. Why were they all so eager here? Jehane's heart was a drum in her breast. She could stand here, walk with them, let this happen, probably live.

She could not do that.

The boy stepped forward, one hand extended. "May I take your satchels for you, doctors?"

"No, no, that is fine. Just lead on." The nearer man withdrew his bag slightly.

It will take them time to find the boys, Jehane thought. There are many rooms. Help might come in time. She drew breath to scream, knowing it meant her death.

In that same moment she thought, absurdly, that she recognized this servant. But before the memory could coalesce into something more, he had continued his reaching motion, stumbled slightly, and bumped into the small man who was holding the blade against her side. The assassin grunted; a surprised sound. The boy straightened, withdrawing his right hand, and shoving Jehane hard with his left.

Jehane stumbled, falling—and cried out then, at the top of her voice: "Help! They are killers! Help us!"

She dropped to her knees, heard something shatter. She turned back, expecting a blade, her death, the soft dark presence of the sisters of the god.

Tardily, she saw the stiletto that had materialized in the boy's hand. The smaller assassin was on the floor, clutching with both hands at his belly. Jehane saw blood welling between his ringers, and then much more of it. The bigger man had turned, snarling, balancing his own drawn blade. The boy stepped back a little, ready for him.

Jehane screamed again, at the top of her voice.

Someone had already appeared down the corridor straight ahead. Someone, unbelievably, carrying a bow. The big man saw this, turned swiftly back towards the stairway.

The steward was standing there, holding a sword, no longer smiling or innocuous.

The assassin pivoted again, ducked, and without warning sprang at Jehane. The young servant shouted with alarm, lifting his blade to intervene.

Before the knives engaged there came a clear sound, a note of music almost, and then Jehane saw an arrow in the assassin's throat, and blood. His hands flew upwards, the knife falling away. He clattered to the floor. His flask shattered on the tiles.

There was a stillness, as after thunder has come and rolled away.

Struggling for self-control, Jehane looked back down the hall. The man with the bow, walking forward now, was Idar ibn Tarif, whose brother she had saved and then tended. He was smiling in calm reassurance.

Jehane, still on her knees, began to tremble. She looked at the boy beside her. He had sheathed his knife; she couldn't tell where. The first assassin made a sudden rattling sound in his throat and slid sideways beside the larger one. She knew that sound. She was a doctor. He had just died.

There was broken glass all around them, and blood staining the sand-colored tiles of the floor. A trickle of it ran towards her. She rose to her feet and stepped aside.

Broken glass.

Jehane turned and looked behind her. Her father's flask lay shattered on the floor. She swallowed hard. Closed her eyes.

"Are you all right, doctor?" It was the boy. He could be no more than fifteen. He had saved her life.

She nodded her head. Opened her eyes again. And then she knew him.

"Ziri?" she said, incredulously. "Ziri, from Orvilla?"

"I am honored, doctor," he said, bowing. "I am honored that you remember me."

"What are you doing here?"

She had last seen this boy killing a Jaddite with Alvar de Pellino's sword amid the burning of his village. Nothing made any sense at all.

"He's been guarding you," said a voice she knew. She looked quickly over. In an open doorway, a little distance down the hall, stood Alvar himself, that same sword in his hand.

"Come," he said. "See if you can quiet two impossible children." He sheathed the sword, walked forward, took both her hands. His grip was steady and strong.

As if in a trance, surrounded by these calm, smiling men, Jehane went down the corridor and entered the indicated room.

The two boys, one seven, the other almost five years old, as she knew very well, weren't being particularly loud, in fact. There was a fire burning in the hearth, but the windows above each of the two beds had been shuttered so the room was mostly dark. Candles had been lit opposite the fire and using those for light Ammar ibn Khairan, dressed in black and gold, his earring gleaming palely, was energetically making shadow-figures on the far wall for the boys' entertainment. Jehane saw his sword, unsheathed, on a pillow by his side.

"What do you think?" he said over his shoulder. "I'm proud of my wolf, actually."

"It is a magnificent achievement," Jehane said.

The two boys evidently thought so too; they were raptly attentive. The wolf, even as she watched, stalked and then devoured what was presumably meant to be a chicken.

"I'm not impressed by the fowl," Jehane managed to say.

"It's a pig!" ibn Khairan protested. "Anyone should be able to see that."

"May I sit down?" Jehane said. Her legs seemed to be failing her.

A stool materialized. Idar ibn Tarif smilingly motioned for her to sit.

She did, then sprang to her feet again.

"Velaz! We have to free him!"

"It is done," said Alvar from the doorway. "Ziri told us where the courtyard is. Husari and two others have gone to release him. He'll be safe by now, Jehane."

"It is over," said Idar gently. "Sit, doctor. You are all safe now."

Jehane sat. Odd, how the worst reactions seemed to occur after the danger had passed.

"More!" the elder of Zabira's boys cried. The younger one simply sat cross-legged on the floor, staring at the shadow-figures on the wall, his eyes wide.

"There is no more, I'm afraid," said the lord Ammar ibn Khairan. "Once the wolf eats the pig, or the fowl, whichever, there is no more to see."

"Later?" the older child asked, with some deference.

"Later, indeed," said ibn Khairan. "I will come back. I must practice my pigs, and I'll need your help. The doctor thought it was a chicken, which is a bad sign. But for now, go with the steward. I believe he has chocolate for you?"

The steward, in the doorway behind Alvar, nodded his head.

"The bad man have gone?" It was the smaller one, speaking for the first time. The one her father had delivered through his mother's belly.

"The bad man have gone," said Ammar ibn Khairan gravely. Jehane was aware that she was close to crying. She didn't want to cry. "It is as if they never came looking at all," ibn Khairan added gently, still addressing the smaller child. He looked over then, to Alvar and the steward by the door, eyebrows raised in inquiry.

Alvar said, "Nothing out there. Some stains on the floor. A broken urn."

"Of course. The urn. I'd forgotten." Ibn Khairan grinned suddenly. Jehane knew that grin by now.

"I doubt the owner of this house will forget," Alvar said virtuously. "You chose a destructive way of signalling their arrival."

"I suppose," said ibn Khairan. "But the owner of this house has some answering to do to the king for the absence of any proper security here, wouldn't you say?"

Alvar's manner altered. Jehane could see him tracking the thought, and adjusting. She had made that sort of adjustment herself many times, during the campaign to the east. Ammar ibn Khairan almost never did anything randomly.

"Where is Rodrigo?" she asked suddenly.

"Now we are offended," Ammar said, the blue gaze returning to her. It was brighter in the room; Idar had drawn back the shutters. The two boys had left with the steward. "All these loyal men hastening to your aid, and you ask only about the one who is obviously indifferent to your fate." He smiled as he said it, though.

"He's on patrol outside the walls," Alvar said loyally. "And besides, it was Ser Rodrigo who had Ziri watching you in the first place. That's how we knew."

"In the first place? What does that mean?" Jehane, reaching for something normal, tried to grab hold of indignation.

"I came here some time ago," Ziri said softly. She was trying, unsuccessfully, to glare at him. "After I was certain my sisters were all right with my aunt, I went to your mother in Fezana and learned where you had gone. Then I came through the mountains after you." He said it with the utmost simplicity, as if it was nothing at all.

It was, though. He had left his home, what was left of his family, all of the world he knew, had crossed the country alone, and ...

"You went to my ... you what? Why, Ziri?"

"Because of what you did in my village," he said, with the same simplicity.

"But I didn't do anything there."

"Yes, you did, doctor. You made them allow me to execute the man who killed my mother and my father." Ziri's eyes were very dark. "It would not have happened without you. He would have lived, ridden back to Jaddite lands to tell that tale as a boast. I would have had to walk there after him, and I fear I would not have been able to kill him there."

His expression was grave. The story he was telling her was almost overwhelming.

"You would have gone to Valledo after him?"

"He killed my parents. And the brother I have never had."

No more than fifteen, Jehane thought. "And you have been following me here in Ragosa?"

"Since I arrived. I found your place in the market. Your mother said you would have a booth there. Then I sought out the Captain, Ser Rodrigo. And he remembered me, and was pleased that I had come. He gave me a place to sleep, with his company, and instructed me to watch you whenever you were not at court or with his men."

"I told you all I didn't want to be watched or followed," Jehane protested.

Idar ibn Tarif reached down and squeezed her shoulder. He wasn't much like any outlaw she'd heard about.

"You did, indeed, tell us that," Ammar said, without levity. He was sitting on one of the small beds now and was regarding her carefully. The candlelight burnished his hair and was reflected in his eyes. "We all apologize, in a measured degree, for not obeying. Rodrigo felt, and I agreed, that there was some chance you were at risk, because of your rescue of Husari from the Muwardis among other things."

"But how could you know I wouldn't recognize Ziri? I should have recognized him."

"We couldn't know that, of course. He was urged to be cautious in how he followed you, and had a story to tell if you did see him. Your parents approved of this, by the way."

"How would you know that?"

"I promised your father I would write him. Remember? I try to keep my promises."

It seemed to have been quite thoroughly worked out. She looked at Ziri. "Where did you learn to use a knife like that?"

He looked both pleased and abashed. "I have been with the Captain's men, doctor. They have been teaching me. Ser Rodrigo himself gave me my blade. The lord ibn Khairan showed me how to conceal it inside my sleeve and draw it down."

Jehane looked back at Ammar. "And Velaz? What if he had known him, even if I didn't?"

"Velaz did know him, Jehane." Ibn Khairan's voice was gentle; rather like the tone in which he'd spoken to the younger boy. "He spotted Ziri some time ago and went to Rodrigo. An understanding was achieved. Velaz shared our view that Ziri was a wise precaution. And so he was, my dear. It was Ziri who was on top of the wall of that courtyard this morning and heard the men from Cartada tell you their purpose. He found Alvar, who found me. We had time to be here before you."

"I feel like a child," Jehane said. She heard Alvar's wordless protest behind her.

"Not that," said ibn Khairan, rising from the bed. "Never that, Jehane. But just as you may have to care for us, if arrow or blade or illness comes, so we must, surely, offer our care to you? If only to set things in balance, as your Kindath moons balance the sun and stars."

She looked up at him. "Don't be such a poet," she said tartly. "I'm not distracted by images. I am going to think about this, and then let you all know exactly how I feel. Especially Rodrigo," she added. "He was the one who promised I would be left alone."

"I was afraid you would remember that," said someone entering from the corridor.

Rodrigo Belmonte, still in boots and winter cloak, with his sword on and the whip in his belt, strode into the room. He had, incongruously, a cup of chocolate in each hand.

He offered one to Jehane. "Drink. I had to promise this was for you and no one else. The older one downstairs is greedy and wanted it all."

"And what about me?" Ibn Khairan complained. "I did damage to my wrists and fingers making wolves and pigs for them."

Rodrigo laughed. He took a sip from the other cup. "Well, if you must know the truth, this one was for you as a reward, but I didn't actually promise, and the chocolate is good and I was cold. You've been inside and warm for a while." He lowered the cup and smiled.

"You've chocolate on your moustache," Jehane said. "And you are supposed to be outside the walls. Defending the city. Much good you are to anyone, arriving now."

"Exactly," Ammar said with a vigorous nod of his head. "Give me my chocolate."

Rodrigo did so. He looked at Jehane.

"Martin fetched me. We weren't far away. Jehane, you'll have to choose between being angry with me for having you guarded, or for not being here to defend you myself."

"Why?" she snapped. "Why can't I be angry for both?"

"Exactly," said Ammar again, sipping the chocolate. His tone was so smugly pleased it almost made her laugh. He does nothing by chance, she reminded herself, struggling for self-possession. Ziri and Idar were grinning, and so, reluctantly, was Alvar.

Jehane, looking around her, came to accept, finally, that it was over. They had saved her life and Velaz's, and the lives of the two children. She was being, perhaps, just the least bit ungrateful.

"I am sorry about the broken promise," Rodrigo said soberly. "I didn't want to argue with you back then, and Ziri's arrival seemed a stroke of fortune. You know he came through the pass alone?"

"So I gather." She was being ungrateful. "What will be done about those two men?" she asked. "Who were they?"

"Two that I know of, as it happens." It was Ammar. "Almalik used them several times. It seems his son remembered that. They were the best assassins he had."

"Will this cause a scandal?"

Ammar shook his head and looked at Rodrigo. "I don't think it has to. I think there is a better way to deal with this."

"No one knows they came so close but the servants here," Rodrigo said thoughtfully. "They can be trusted, I think."

Ammar nodded. "That is my thought. I believe I heard," he said carefully, "that two merchants from Cartada were unfortunately murdered in a tavern quarrel shortly after they arrived here. I think the appropriate Guild ought to send apologies and condolences to Cartada. Let Almalik believe they were discerned the moment they came. Let him feel that much more anxious."

"You know the man," Rodrigo said.

"I do," ibn Khairan agreed. "Not as well as I once thought, but well enough."

"What will he do next?" Jehane asked suddenly.

Ammar ibn Khairan looked at her. His expression was very sober now. He had laid down the cup of chocolate. "I believe," he said, "he will attempt to win me back."

There was a brief stillness.

"Will he succeed?" Rodrigo was as blunt as ever.

Ammar shrugged. "I'm a mercenary now, remember? Just as you are. What would your answer be? If King Ramiro summoned you tomorrow would you abandon your contract here and go home?"

Another silence. "I don't know," said Rodrigo Belmonte at length. "Though my wife would stab me if she heard me say that."

"Then I suppose I am in a better circumstance than you, because if I give the same answer, no woman is likely to kill me." Ibn Khairan smiled.

"Don't," said Jehane, "be quite so sure."

They all looked at her uncertainly, until she smiled.

"Thank you, by the way," she said, to all of them.

Twelve

Towards the end of winter, when the first wildflowers were appearing in the meadows, but while snow still lay thick in the higher plateaus and the mountain passes, the three kings of Esperana gathered near Carcasia in Valledo to hunt elk and boar in the oak woods where the smells were of rebirth and the burgeoning of spring could be felt along the blood.

Though even the best of the ancient straight roads were little more than muddy impediments to travel, their queens were with them and substantial retinues from their courts, for hunting—pleasurable as it might be—was merely a pretext for this meeting.

It had been Geraud de Chervalles, the formidable cleric from Ferrieres who, together with colleagues wintering at Eschalou and Orvedo, had prevailed upon three men who hated and feared each other to come together early in the year to hold afternoon converse after chases in field and wood.

A greater hunt was near to hand, the clerics had declared in the court of each king; one that redounded both to the glory of Jad and the vastly increased wealth and fame and power of each of the three lands that had been carved from what was left of Esperana.

The glory of Jad was, of course, an entirely good thing. Everyone agreed on that. Wealth and power, and certainly fame, were prospects worth a journey. Whether these things were also worth the associated company remained, as yet, to be seen.

Two days had passed since the Ruendans, last to arrive, had joined the others within Carcasia's walls. No untoward incidents had yet transpired—little of note either, though King Bermudo of Jalona had proven himself still the equal of his nephews on horseback and with a boar spear. Of the queens, the accolades had gone to red-haired Ines of Valledo, daughter of the hunting-mad king of Ferrieres, clearly the best rider of the women there—and better than most of the courtiers.

For a man known to be clever and ambitious, her husband appeared preoccupied and inattentive much of the time, even during the afternoon and evening discussions of policy and war. He left it to his constable to raise questions and objections.

For his part, Bermudo of Jalona hunted with fury in the mornings and spoke during the meetings of vengeance against the cities of Ragosa and Fibaz, which had defaulted on his first-ever parias claim. He accepted condolences on the death of a favored courtier, the young Count Nino di Carrera, ambushed by outlaws in a valley in Al-Rassan. No one was quite clear how a party of one hundred trained and well-mounted Horsemen could have been slaughtered by a mere outlaw band, but no one was unkind or impolitic enough to raise that question directly. Queen Fruela, still a handsome woman, was seen to grow misty-eyed at the mention of the slain young gallant.

King Sanchez of Ruenda drank steadily from a flask at his saddle horn, or a brimming cup at the afternoon meetings or the banquet hall. The wine had little evident effect on him, but neither did he hunt with notable success. His arrows of a morning were surprisingly erratic, though his horsemanship remained impeccable. Say what you liked about the hot-headed king of Ruenda, but he could ride.

The three High Clerics from Ferrieres, schooled in dealing with royalty, and beginning to comprehend—if belatedly—the depths of distrust they had to contend with here, carried the discussion for the kings.

The two brothers never even looked at each other, and they regarded their uncle with evident contempt. All, however, appeared to have taken due note of the implications of the army now assembled in Batiara, ready to sail with the first fair winds. They wouldn't be here had they not given thought to that.

There was a movement abroad in the world, and the men in this room were privileged to be reigning at such a time, Geraud of Ferrieres declaimed ringingly on the first afternoon. The carrion dogs of Ashar in Al-Rassan, he said, were ready to be swept back across the straits. The whole peninsula was there to be retaken. If only they would act together the great kings of Valledo and Ruenda and Jalona might ride their stallions into the southern sea by summer's end, in the glorious name of Jad.

"How would you divide it?" King Bermudo asked bluntly. Ramiro of Valledo laughed aloud at that, his first sign of animation all day. Sanchez drank and scowled.

Geraud of Ferrieres, who had been ready for this question, and had spent time with maps over the winter, made a suggestion. None of the kings bothered to reply. They all rose instead, without apology—moving in unison for the first time—and walked quickly from the room. Sanchez carried his flask with him. The clerics, left behind, looked at each other.

On the third day they flew falcons and hawks at small birds and rabbits in the wet grass for the delight of the ladies of each court. Queen Ines carried a small eagle, caught and trained in the mountains near Jalona, and loosed it to triumphant effect.

Younger than Fruela, undeniably more accomplished than Bearte of Ruenda, the queen of Valledo, her red hair bound up in a golden net, her eyes flashing and her color high in the cool air, rode between her husband and the High Cleric from her homeland and was very much the focus of all men's eyes that day.

Which made it the more disturbing, afterwards, that no one was able to identify with certainty the source of the arrow that struck her shortly after the dogs had flushed a boar at the edge of the forest. It seemed obvious, however, that the arrow was either a terrible accident, having been intended for the boar beyond her—or that it had been aimed at one of the two men beside her. There was, it was generally agreed, no evident reason for anyone to desire the death of the queen of Valledo.

It did not appear at first to be a deadly wound, for she was struck only on the arm, but—despite the standard treatment of a thick mud-coating, followed by bleedings, both congruent and transverse—Ines of Valledo, clutching a sun disk, took a marked turn for the worse, feverish and in great pain, before the sun went down that day.

It was at this point that the chancellor of Valledo was seen entering the royal quarters of the castle, striding past the grim-faced guards, escorting a lean man of loutish appearance.

She had never been injured in such a fashion in her life. She had no idea how it was supposed to feel.

It felt as if she were dying. Her arm had swollen to twice its normal size—she could see that, even through the coating of mud. When they bled her—working through a screen for decency—that, too, had hurt, almost unbearably. There had been a quarrel between the two physicians from Esteren and her own longtime doctor from Ferrieres. Her own had won: they had given her nothing for pain. Peire d'Alorre was of the view that soporifics dulled the body's ability to fight injury caused by sharp edges. He had lectured on the subject in all the universities.

Her head was on fire. Even the slightest movement of her arm was intolerable. She was dimly conscious that Ramiro had hardly left her side; that he was holding her good hand, gripping it steadily, and had been doing so since she had been brought here, withdrawing only when the doctors compelled him to, for the bleeding. The odd thing was, she could see him holding her hand, but she couldn't really feel his touch.

She was dying. That seemed clear to her, if not yet to them. She had caused a sun disk to be brought for her. She was trying to pray, but it was difficult.

In a haze of pain she understood that someone new had entered the room. Count Gonzalez, and another man. Another doctor. His features—a long, ugly face—swam into view, very close. He apologized to her and the king, and then laid a hand directly upon her forehead. He took her good hand from Ramiro and pinched the back of it. He asked her if she felt that. Ines shook her head. The new doctor scowled.

Peire d'Alorre, behind him, said something cutting. He was prone to sardonic remarks, especially about the Esperanans. A habit he had never shaken in all his years here.

The new man, whose hands were gentle, if his face was not, said, "Do we have the arrow that was removed? Has anyone thought to examine it?" His voice rasped like a saw.

Ines was aware of a silence. Her vision was not good, just then, but she saw the three court physicians exchange glances.

"It is over here," said Gonzalez de Rada. He approached the bed, swimming into view, holding the arrow gingerly near the feathers. The doctor took it. He brought the head up to his face and sniffed. He grimaced. He had an awful face, actually, and a large boil on his neck. He came back to the queen and, again apologizing, he shifted the covers at the bottom of the bed and took one of her feet.

"Do you feel my touch?" he asked. Again, she shook her head.

He looked angry. "Forgive me, my lord king, if I am blunt. It may be I have spent too long in the tagra lands for courtly company. But these three men have come near to killing the queen. It may be too late, and I will have to lay hands and, I fear, more than hands upon her, but I will try if you allow me."

"There is poison?" she heard Ramiro ask.

"Yes, my lord king."

"What can you do?"

"With your permission, my lord, I must clean this ... disgusting coating from her arm to prevent more of the substance from entering the wound. Then I will have to administer a compound I will prepare. It will be ... difficult for the queen, my lord. Extremely unpleasant. It is a substance that may make her very ill as it combats the poison in her. We must hope it does so. I know of no other course. Do you wish me to proceed? Do you wish to remain here?"

Ramiro did, both things. Peire d'Alorre ventured an acerbic, unwise objection. He was unceremoniously ushered by Gonzalez de Rada to a far corner of the room, along with the other two doctors. Ramiro, following part of the way, said something to them that Ines could not hear. They were extremely quiet after that.

The king came back and sat once more beside the bed holding her good hand in both of his. She still couldn't feel his touch. The new doctor's coarse features appeared close to hers again. He explained what he was about to do, and apologized beforehand. When he spoke softly, his voice was not actually unpleasant. His breath was sweetly scented with some herb.

What followed was worse than childbirth had been. She did scream, as he carefully but thoroughly cleaned the mud from her wounded arm. At some point the god mercifully granted her oblivion.

They revived her, though. They had to. She was made to drink something. What ensued was even worse. The queen, racked with spasms in the belly and sweating with fever, found that she could not even bear the muted light of the candles in the room. All sounds hurt her head amazingly. She lost track of time, where she was, who was there. She heard her own voice at one point, speaking wildly, begging for release. She couldn't even pray, or hold properly to her disk.

When she swam back towards awareness, the doctor insisted that she drink more of the same substance, and she sank back into fever and the pain.

It went on for an unimaginably long time.

Eventually it ended. She had no idea when. She seemed to be still alive, however. She lay on the sweat-soaked pillows of the bed. The doctor gently cooled her face and forehead with damp towels, murmuring encouragement. He asked for clean linens; these were brought and, while the men turned away, Ines's ladies-in-waiting changed her garments and the bedding. When they had finished the doctor came back and very gently anointed and then bandaged Ines's arm. His movements were steady and precise. The king watched intently.

When the doctor from the forts was done, he ordered the room cleared of all but one of the queen's ladies. He spoke now with the authority of a man who had assumed command of a situation. More diffidently, he then asked permission to speak in private with the king. Ines watched them withdraw to an adjacent room. She closed her eyes and slept.

"Will she live?" King Ramiro was blunt. He spoke as soon as the door was closed behind them.

The doctor was equally direct. "I will not know until later tonight, my lord king." He pushed a hand through his untidy, straw-colored hair. "The poison ought to have been countered immediately."

"Why did you suspect it?"

"The degree of swelling, my lord, and the absence of any feeling in her feet and hands. A simple arrow wound ought not to have caused such responses. I have seen enough of those, Jad knows. And then I smelled it on the arrow."

"How did you know to do what you did?"

There was a hesitation, for the first time. "My lord, since being assigned the great honor of serving in the tagra forts, I have used the ... proximity to Al-Rassan to obtain the writings from some of their physicians. I have made a course of study, my lord."

"The Asharite doctors know more than we?"

"About most things, my lord. And ... the Kindath know even more, in many matters. In this instance, I was schooled by certain writings of a Kindath physician, a man of Fezana, my lord."

"You can read the Kindath script?"

"I have taught myself, my lord."

"And this text told you how to identify and deal with this poison? What to administer?"

"And how to make it. Yes, my lord." Another hesitation. "There is one thing more, my lord king. The reason I wished to speak with you alone. About the ... source of this evil thing."

"Tell me."

The doctor from the tagra forts did so. He was asked an extremely precise question and answered it. He then received his king's permission to return to the queen. Ramiro of Valledo remained alone in that adjoining room for some time, however, dealing with a rising fury and coming, quite swiftly after long indecision, to a clear resolution.

In such a fashion, very often, had the course and destiny of nations both lesser and greater than Valledo been shaped and devised.

The doctor gave Ines his compound one more time. He explained that the body expelled it more swiftly than the poison it fought. Painful as it was, the substance was the only thing that might save her. The queen nodded her understanding, and drank.

Again she swam towards oblivion, but it wasn't quite so bad this time. She always knew where she was.

In the middle of the night her fever broke. The king was dozing in an armchair by the bed, the lady-in-waiting on a pallet by the fire. The doctor, unsleeping, was attending upon her. When she opened her eyes his harsh features seemed beautiful to her. He reached for her good hand and pinched it.

"Yes," the queen said. The doctor smiled.

When King Ramiro woke it was to see his wife gazing at him by the light of several candles. Her eyes were clear. They looked at each other for a long time.

"I had a sun disk, at one point," she said finally, a pale whisper, "but what I also remember, when I remember anything, is you beside me."

Ramiro moved to kneel beside the bed. He looked a question across it at the physician, whose fatigue was now evident.

"I believe we have passed through this," the man said. The long, unfortunate face was creased by a smile.

Ramiro said, huskily, "Your career is made, doctor. I do not even know your name, but your life is made by this. I was not ready to let her go." He looked back at his queen, his wife, and repeated softly, "I was not ready."

Then the king of Valledo wept. His queen lifted her good hand, hesitated a moment, and then lowered it to stroke his hair.

Earlier that same night, as King Ramiro lingered by the bedside of his queen, harsh words had been exchanged at dinner by the men of the Valledan court with those who served King Sanchez of Ruenda. Accusations, savage and explicit, were levelled. Swords were drawn in the castle hall.

Seventeen men died in the fighting there. Only the courageous intervention of the three clerics from Ferrieres, striding unarmed and bare-headed into the midst of a bloody melee, their sun disks held high, prevented worse.

It was remembered, afterwards, that the party from Jalona had dined by themselves that evening, conspicuously absent from the scene of the affray, as if anticipating something. Wholesale slaughter among the courtiers of the other two kings could only be of benefit to King Bermudo, it was agreed sourly. Some of the Valledans offered darker thoughts, but there was nothing to substantiate these.

In the morning Bermudo of Jalona and his queen sent a herald to King Ramiro with a formal leavetaking and their prayers for the survival of the queen—word was, she had not yet passed to the god. Then they rode towards the rising sun with all their company.

The king and queen and surviving courtiers of Ruenda had already left—in the middle of the night, after the fighting in the hall. Stealing guiltily away like horse thieves, some of Ramiro's courtiers said, though the more pragmatic noted that they had been on Valledan ground here and in real peril of their lives. It was also pointed out, by some of the most level-headed, that hunting accidents were a fact of life, and that Queen Ines was far from the first to be wounded in this fashion.

A majority, however, among the courtiers of Valledo were ready to pursue the Ruendan party west along the Duric's banks as soon as the word was given—but the constable gave no such order, and the king was still closeted with his queen and her new physician.

Those who attended upon them reported that the queen appeared much improved—that she was likely to survive. There was, however, a new report that poison had been used on the arrow.

All things considered, King Ramiro's ensuing behavior—it was three days before he showed his face outside the queen's bedchamber or the adjoining room, which he used as a temporary counsel chamber—was viewed as erratic and even unmanly. It was clearly time to order a pursuit of the Ruendan party before they reached the nearest of their own forts. Notwithstanding the presence of the clerics, there was enough, surely, to suggest that Ruendan fingers had drawn that bow, and holy Jad knew that revenge needed little excuse in Esperana.

Among other things, it had come to light by then—no one was certain how—that King Sanchez had had the audacity to draft a letter asserting authority over and demanding tribute from Fezana. That letter had not, apparently, been sent yet—winter had barely ended, after all—but rumor of the demand was rife in Carcasia in the days following the Ruendan departure. The city of Fezana paid parias to Valledo and every person in the castle knew the implications of a counter-demand.

It was also pointed out by observant men that King Sanchez himself—known to be one of the finest archers in the three kingdoms—had been conspicuously errant with his own arrows for the two days before the morning of falconry. Could that unwonted incompetence have been a screen? A deliberate contrivance, in the event someone did trace a lethal arrow back to him?

Had the arrow been meant for his brother? Had those days of poor shooting produced a last aberrant flight when a true one had finally been intended? It would not, the most cynical found themselves thinking, necessarily have been the first time one of the sons of Sancho the Fat had slain another. No one voiced that particular thought, however.

The untimely death of Raimundo, the eldest son, was not something that could yet be forgotten. It was remembered that among a grimly silent gathering of courtiers that day long ago, the hard questions raised by young Rodrigo Belmonte, Raimundo's constable, had been specific, shocking.

Ser Rodrigo was far away now, exiled among the infidels. His well-born wife and young sons had, in fact, been invited to be among the Valledan company here, but Miranda Belmonte d'Alveda had declined, pleading distance and responsibilities in the absence of her lord. De Chervalles, the cleric from Ferrieres, had expressed some disappointment at this news when it came. He was said to be a connoisseur of women and Ser Rodrigo's wife was a celebrated beauty.

Jad alone knew what the Captain would have said and done today had he been here. He might have told the king this injury to the queen was the god's punishment for Ramiro's own evildoing years ago. Or he might as easily have pursued the king of Ruenda—alone, if necessary—and brought his head back in a sack. Rodrigo Belmonte had never been an easy man to anticipate.

Neither was Ramiro of Valledo, mind you.

When the king finally emerged from his meetings with Geraud de Chervalles and Count Gonzalez and a number of his military captains anticipation ran wild in Carcasia. Finally, they might be going after the Ruendan scum. The provocation was there: even the clerics could be made to see that. It was past time for Valledo to move west.

No commands came.

Ramiro appeared from those meetings with a sternly resolute expression. So did the men with whom he had been speaking. No one said a word, though, as to what had transpired. It was noted that de Chervalles, the cleric, shocked and sobered as he might be by what had happened, did not look censorious.

King Ramiro seemed subtly changed, with a new manner that unsettled his courtiers. He appeared to be reaching inward for strength or resolution. Perhaps he was nurturing the desire for bloodshed, someone suggested. Men could understand that. Spring was the time for war in any case, and war was where a brave man found his truest sense of life.

Still no one was certain what was afoot. The king showed no signs of leaving Carcasia for Esteren. Messengers went out in all directions. A single herald was sent west along the river towards Ruenda. Only a herald. No army. Men cursed in the taverns of Carcasia. No one knew what message he carried. Another small party set out east. One of them told a friend they were bound for the ranching lands where the horses of Valledo were bred. No one knew what to make of that either.

Through the ensuing days and then weeks, the king remained inscrutable. He hunted most mornings, though in a distracted fashion. He spent a great deal of time with the queen, as if her passage near to death had drawn the two of them closer. The constable was a busy man, and he too offered no hint, by word or expression, of what was happening. Only the High Cleric from Ferrieres could be seen to be smiling when he thought he was unobserved, as if something he'd thought lost had been unexpectedly found.

Then, as the spring ripened and flowers bloomed in the meadows and the forest clearings, the Horsemen of Valledo began to ride into Carcasia.

They were the finest riders in the world, on the finest horses, and they came armed and equipped for war. As more and more of them appeared, it slowly became apparent, to even the dullest courtier in Carcasia, what was taking place.

An air of disbelief mingled with a trembling excitement began to pervade the city and castle as the soldiers continued to gather, company after company. Men and women who had been markedly lax in their observances for some time, if not all their lives, began to be seen at the services in Carcasia's ancient chapel, built in those long-ago days when Esperana had ruled all of the peninsula, not just the northlands.

At those services, frequently led by the High Cleric from Ferrieres, the king of Valledo and, after she was allowed to leave her rooms, his queen were present, morning and evening, kneeling side by side in prayer, sun disks of the god clasped in their hands.

Over a span of centuries, the golden, fabulously wealthy khalifs of Al-Rassan had led their armies thundering north, irresistible as the sea, to raid and enslave the Jaddites cowering at the hard fringes of a land that had once been their own. Year after year after year, back beyond the memories of men.

The last, weak puppet khalif in Silvenes had been slain, though, nearly sixteen years ago. There were no khalifs any more.

It was time to start rolling back the tide the other way, in Jad's fierce, bright, holy name.

Eliane bet Danel, wife to a physician and mother of one, was not unused to strangers speaking to her in the street. She was known in the city, and her husband and daughter had both had a great many patients over the years here in Fezana. Some might wish to express gratitude, others to seek a speedy or a less expensive access to the doctor. Eliane had learned to deal briskly with both sorts.

The woman who stopped her on a cool market morning in the early spring of that year fell into neither category. In fact, Eliane was later to reflect, this marked the first time in her life she'd ever been accosted by a prostitute of either sex.

"My lady," the woman said, without stepping from the shaded side of the lane, and speaking much more politely than was customary for an Asharite addressing a Kindath, "might I have a moment only of your time?"

Eliane had been too surprised to do more than nod and follow the woman—a girl, truly, she realized—further back into the shadows. A small alleyway ran off the lane. Eliane had come this way twice a week for much of her life and had never noticed it. There was a smell of decay here, and she saw what she hoped were small cats moving quickly about further along the alley. She wrinkled her nose.

"I hope this isn't where you do business," she said in her crispest tones.

"Used to be, up above," the girl said carelessly, "before they moved us outside the walls. Sorry about the smell. I won't keep you long."

"I'm sure," Eliane said. "How may I help you?"

"You can't. Your daughter has, though, most of us, one way or another. That's why I'm here."

Eliane liked things to be as clear as possible. "Jehane, my daughter, has treated you medically, is that what you are saying?"

"That's it. And she's been good to us, too. Almost a friend, if that doesn't shame you." She said it with a youthful defiance that touched Eliane unexpectedly.

"It doesn't shame me," she said. "Jehane has good judgment in whom she befriends."

That surprised the girl. As Eliane's eyes adjusted further to the darkness here, she saw that the woman with whom she spoke was thin-boned and small, no more than fifteen or sixteen years old, and that she was wrapped only in a torn shawl over a faded green knee-length tunic. Not nearly enough for a day this cold and windy. She almost said something about that, but kept silent.

"I wanted to tell you, there's trouble coming," the girl said abruptly. "For the Kindath, I mean."

Eliane felt something icy slide into her. "What does that mean?" she said, involuntarily looking over her shoulder, back where the sunlight was, where people were moving, and might be listening.

"We're hearing things, outside. From the men that come. There's been sheets posted on walls. A nasty poem. A ... what do they call it ... an allegation. About the Kindath and the Day of the Moat. Nunaya thinks something's being planned. That the governor may be under orders."

"Who is Nunaya?" Eliane realized that she had begun to shiver.

"Our leader. Outside the walls. She's older. Knows a lot." The girl hesitated. "She's a friend of Jehane's. She sold her mules when Jehane left."

"You know about that?"

"I took her to Nunaya myself that night. We wouldn't have let Jehane down." Defiance again, a note of pride.

"Thank you, then. I'm sure you wouldn't have let her down. I told you, she knew where to choose her friends."

"She was always good to me," the girl said, with a shrug, trying to seem indifferent. "Don't see what's so wrong with calling the moons sisters, anyhow, myself."

Eliane had to be careful not to smile, despite the fear in her. Fifteen years old. "Some disagree with you, unfortunately," was all she said.

"I know that," the girl replied. "Jehane's all right?"

"I think so." Eliane hesitated. "She's in Ragosa, working there."

The girl nodded, satisfied. "I'll tell Nunaya. Anyhow, that's all I wanted to say. Nunaya says you should be careful. Think about leaving. She says people here are nervous again because of this claim by that other king in the north ... from Ruensa?"

"Ruenda," Eliane said. "About the parias? Why should that affect the Kindath?"

"Now you're asking the wrong person, aren't you?" The girl shrugged again. "I hear things, but I don't know much. Nunaya thinks there's something funny about it, that's all."

Eliane stood in silence for a moment, looking at the girl. That shawl really wasn't at all warm enough for this time of year. Impulsively, surprising herself again, she took off her own blue cloak and draped it over the girl. "I have another," she said. "Will this be stolen from you?"

The girl's eyes had widened. She fingered the warm, woven cloak. "Not unless someone wants to wake up dead," she said.

"Good. Thank you for the warning." Eliane turned to go.

"My lady."

She stopped and looked back.

"Do you know the toy-maker's shop, at the end of the Street of Seven Windings?"

"I have seen it."

"Just past it, by the city wall, there's a linden tree. There's bushes behind it, along the wall. There's a way out there. It's a small gate, and locked, but the key is hanging from a nail on the tree, on the back side, about my height." She indicated with her hand. "If you ever need to get out that's one way that will bring you to us."

Eliane was silent again, then she nodded her head.

"I am glad my daughter has such friends," she said, and went back into the sunlight, which did not warm her now, without her cloak.

She decided to forgo the market this morning, though it normally gave her pleasure. One of the servants could go. She was cold. She turned back towards the Kindath Quarter and the house that had been her home for thirty years.

Think about leaving. Just like that.

The Wanderers. They were always thinking about leaving. Moving like the moons against the fixed and gleaming stars. But brighter, Ishak had liked to say. Brighter than the stars and gentler than the sun. And he and she had had their home here in Fezana for so long now.

She decided to say nothing to him about this.

The very next day a Jaddite leather worker approached her as she walked out in the morning to buy a new cloak—her old one was distinctly frayed, it turned out.

The man had been waiting just outside the guarded gates to the Quarter. He came up as soon as she turned the corner. He was respectful, and evidently afraid. He wasted little time, which was fine with Eliane. His message was the same as that of the girl the day before. He, too, had been a patient of Jehane's—or his young son had been. Eliane gathered that Ishak's absinthe dilution, offered for a nominal fee, had broken a dangerous fever the summer before. The man was grateful, had not forgotten. And told her it might be wise for them to leave Fezana for a time, before the spring was much further advanced. Men were talking in the taverns, he said, about matters that did not bode well.

There was anger, he said. And the more fiery of the street corner wadjis were not being kept under control the way they usually were. She asked him directly if he was leaving with his family, if the same dangers applied to the Jaddites. He said he had decided to convert, after resisting for many years. At the first branching of streets he walked away from her without looking back. She never learned his name.

She bought herself a cloak from a small, reliable shop in the Weavers' Lane, someone she had done business with for a dozen years or more. It might have been her imagination, but the merchant seemed cool, almost brusque with her.

Perhaps business was simply bad, she tried to tell herself. Certainly Fezana had endured grief and then real hardship this past year, with almost all of those who were central to the life of the city dead in the moat last summer.

But to drive the Kindath away because of that?

It made no sense. The taxes paid by the unbelievers—Kindath and Jaddite, both—went a long way towards supporting the wadjis and the temples, fortifying the walls and supplying the parias Fezana sent north to Valledo. Surely the new young king in Cartada understood that, or his advisors did? Surely they were aware of the economic impact if the Kindath Quarter of Fezana was emptied by a migration to some other city?

Or by something worse than that.

This time she told Ishak about the warnings. She thought she knew exactly what he would say, in the mangled sounds she had learned to understand since last summer.

He surprised her, though. After all these years he could still surprise her. It was the tidings from Sorenica, he explained, laboring to be clear. Something to be read in that: a new mood in the world, a swinging again, like a pendulum. Change in the air, in the winds.

The two of them, with their household, began quietly preparing to leave for Ragosa, and Jehane.

They weren't quite fast enough, however.

* * *

Their daughter, in the same week her mother received these warnings of danger—which was the same week Ines of Valledo nearly died—was, with more anticipation than she liked to admit, preparing for Carnival in Ragosa.

Alvar de Pellino, off-duty and walking up to meet her on a crowded street corner one morning, with Husari beside him and trailed by the watchful figure of young Ziri, privately decided that Jehane had never looked more beautiful. Husari, to whom he had impulsively confided his feelings about her one night, had warned him that springtime did this sort of thing to young men.

Alvar didn't think it was the season. Much had changed in his life since the summer before, and changes were still taking place, but what he had felt for Jehane before the end of that first night by the campfire north of Fezana had not altered, and was not about to. He was quietly certain of that. He was aware that there was something strange about such certainty, but it was there.

Physician to a court and a military company, Jehane bet Ishak was surrounded by brilliant and accomplished men. Alvar could deal with that. He had few expectations of any kind. So long as he was able to play a role, to be nearby, he would be content, he told himself.

Most of the time that was true. There were nights when it wasn't, and he'd had to admit—though not to pragmatic Husari—that the return of the spring flowers and the gentling of the evening breezes off the lake had made those nights more frequent. Men were singing in the streets now at night under the windows of women they desired. Alvar would lie awake listening to the music as it spoke of longing. He was aware at such times of how far he had come from a farm in the northlands of Valledo. He was also aware—how could he not be?—that he would be going back north one day, when the Captain's exile ended.

He tried not to dwell upon that.

They came up to Jehane and greeted her, each in his fashion: Husari with a grin and Alvar with his rapidly improving Asharite court bow. He'd been practicing, for amusement.

"In the name of the moons, look at the two of you!" Jehane exclaimed. "You look as if you're already in costume. What would your poor mothers say?"

The two men regarded each other complacently. Alvar was dressed in a wide-sleeved linen overshirt, ivory-colored, loosely belted at the waist, over hose of a slightly darker shade and Asharite city slippers, worked with gold thread. He wore a soft cloth cap, crimson-colored, bought in the market the week before. He rather liked the cap.

Husari ibn Musa, silk merchant of Fezana, wore a plain brown Jaddite soldier's shirt under a stained and well-worn leather vest. There were knives tucked into his wide belt on both sides. His horseman's trousers were tucked into high black boots. On his head he wore, as always, a brown, wide-brimmed leather hat.

"My sadly departed mother would have been diverted, I hope," Husari said. "She had a gift of laughter, may Ashar guard her spirit."

"Mine would be appalled," Alvar said in his most helpful voice. Husari laughed.

Jehane struggled not to. "What would any rational person say, looking at you two?" she wondered aloud. Ziri had drifted apart from them; he did his guarding from a distance.

"I think," Husari murmured, "such a person—if we could find one in Ragosa this week—might say we two represent the best this peninsula has to offer. Brave Alvar and my poor self, as we stand humbly before you, are proof that men of different worlds can blend and mingle those worlds. That we can take the very finest things from each, to make a new whole, shining and imperishable."

"I'm not actually sure that vest of yours is the very finest Valledo has to offer," Alvar said with a frown, "but we'll let that pass."

"And I'm not sure I wanted a serious answer to my question," Jehane said. Blue eyes narrowed thoughtfully, she looked closely at Husari.

He grinned again. "Did I give you one? Oh, dear. I was trying my pedant's manner. I've been asked to give a lecture on the ethics of trade at the university this summer. I'm in training. I have to give long, sweeping answers to everything."

"Not this morning," Jehane said, "or we'll never do what we have to do." She began walking; the men fell into step on either side of her.

"I thought it was a good answer," Alvar said quietly.

They both glanced at him. There was a little silence.

"So did I," said Jehane, finally. "But we shouldn't be encouraging him."

"Encouragement," Husari said grandly, striding along in his black boots, "never matters to the true scholar, filled with zeal and vigor in his pursuit of truth and knowledge, his solitary quest, on roads apart from the paths trod by lesser men."

"See what I mean," Jehane said.

"Let's try," said Alvar, "to find him a better vest."

They turned a corner, into a street they'd been told to look for, and then all three of them stopped in their tracks. Even Husari, who had seen many cities in his time.

Ragosa was always vibrant, always colorful. When the sun shone and the sky and the lake were blue as a Kindath cloak the city could almost be said to gleam in the light: marble and ivory and the mosaics and engravings of arch and doorway. Even so, nothing in half a year had prepared Alvar for this.

Along the length of the narrow, twisting laneway temporary stalls had been hastily thrown together, scores of them, their tables laden with masks of animals and birds, real and fabulous, in a riot of colors and forms.

Jehane laughed in delight. Husari shook his head, grinning. On the other side of the laneway, young Ziri's mouth hung open; Alvar felt like doing the same thing.

He saw a wolf's head, a stallion, a saffron-bright sunbird, an extraordinarily convincing, appalling fire ant mask—and these were all on the first table of the lane.

A woman approached them, walking the other way, beautifully dressed and adorned. A slave behind her carried an exquisite creation: a leather and fur mask of a mountain cat's head, the collar encrusted with gems. There was a loop on the collar for a leash; the woman was carrying the leash, Alvar saw: it looked like beaten and worked gold. That ensemble must have cost a fortune. It must have taken half a year to make. The woman slowed as she came up to the three of them, then she smiled at Alvar, meeting his eyes as she went by. Alvar turned to watch her go. Ibn Musa laughed aloud, Jehane raised her eyebrows.

"Remember that mask, my friend!" Husari chortled. "Remember it for tomorrow!" Alvar hoped he wasn't blushing.

They had met on this mild, fragrant morning to buy disguises of their own for the night when torches would burn until dawn in the streets of Ragosa. A night when the city would welcome the spring—and celebrate the birth day of King Badir—with music and dancing and wine, and in other ways notably distant from the ascetic strictures of Ashar. And from the teachings of the clerics of Jad, and the high priests of the Kindath, too, for that matter.

Notwithstanding the clearly voiced opinions of their spiritual leaders, people came to Ragosa from a long way off, sometimes travelling for weeks from Ferrieres or Batiara—though there was still snow in the passes east—to join the Carnival. The return of spring was always worth celebrating, and King Badir, who had reigned since the Khalifate fell, was a man widely honored, and even loved, whatever the wadjis might say about him and his Kindath chancellor.

They strolled through the thronged lane, twisting and turning to force a passage. Alvar kept a hand on the wallet at his belt. A place such as this was Paradise on earth for a cut-purse. At the first mask-maker's stall at which they stopped, Alvar picked up an eagle's visage, in homage to the Captain. He donned it and the craftsman, nodding vigorous approval, held up a seeing glass. Alvar didn't recognize himself. He looked like an eagle. He looked dangerous.

"Excellent," Jehane pronounced. "Buy it."

Alvar winced, behind the mask, at the quoted price, but Husari did the bargaining for him, and the cost came down by half. Husari, amused and witty this morning, led them onward, elbowing through the crowd, and a little further along he pounced with a cry upon a spectacular rendition of a peacock's head and plumage. He put it on, not without difficulty. People had to press backwards to make room. The mask was magnificent, overwhelming.

"No one," said Jehane, stepping back to get a better look at him, "will be able to get anywhere close to you."

"I might!" a woman cried from the cluster of onlookers. There was a roar of ribald laughter. Husari carefully sketched a bow to the woman.

"There are ways around such dilemmas, Jehane," Husari said, his voice resonating oddly from behind the close-fitting headpiece and spectacular feathers. "Given what I know about this particular festival."

Alvar had heard the stories too. The barracks and taverns and the towers of the night watch had been full of them for weeks. Jehane tried, unsuccessfully, to look disapproving. It was hard to disapprove of Husari, Alvar thought. The silk merchant seemed to be one of those men whom everyone liked. He was also a man who had entirely changed his life this past year.

Once portly and sedentary, and far from young, ibn Musa was now fully accepted in Rodrigo's company. He was one of those with whom the Captain took counsel, and gruff old Lain Nunez—Jaddite to the tips of his fingers, for all his profane impieties—had adopted him as a highly unlikely brother.

With the assistance of the artisan, Husari removed the mask. His hair was disordered and his face flushed when he emerged.

"How much, my friend?" he asked. "It is an almost passable contrivance."

The artisan, eyeing him closely, quoted a price. Ibn Musa let out a shriek, as of a man grievously wounded.

"I think," Jehane said, "that this particular negotiation is going to take some time. Perhaps Ziri and I will proceed alone from here, with your indulgence? If I'm going to be disguised it does seem pointless for everyone to know what I'm wearing."

"We aren't everyone," Husari protested, turning from the opening salvos of the bargaining session.

"And you know our masks already," Alvar added.

"I do, don't I?" Jehane's smile flashed. "That's useful. If I need either of you during the Carnival I'll know to look in the aviary."

"Don't be complacent," Husari said, wagging a finger. "Alvar may well be in a mountain cat's lair."

"He wouldn't do that," Jehane said.

Husari laughed. Jehane, after a brief hesitation, and a glance at Alvar, turned and walked on. Clutching his eagle visage, Alvar watched her go until she and Ziri were swallowed by the crowd.

Husari, after a negotiating exercise so animated it drew another cluster of people around them for the entertainment, bought the peacock mask at a sum that represented most of a year's income for a professional soldier. The artisan agreed to deliver it later, when the crowds had thinned.

"I believe I need a drink," ibn Musa declared. "Holy Ashar forgive us all our sins in this world."

Alvar, for whom it wasn't a sin, decided he wanted one too, though it was early in the day for him. They had several flagons, in the event, before leaving the tavern.

"Mountain cats," Husari said musingly at one point, "are said to be ferocious in their coupling."

"Don't tell me things like that!" Alvar groaned.

Husari ibn Musa—silk merchant, soldier, Asharite, friend—laughed and ordered another flask of the good red wine.

Walking alone through the crowd past the mask-makers' stalls, Jehane told herself sternly that the deception was minor and that she'd every right to her privacy. She didn't like dissembling, however, and she cared for both men very much. She'd even surprised herself with a twinge of what was unmistakably jealousy when that long-legged Asharite creature with the mountain cat mask had smiled at Alvar in a way that left little room for ambiguity.

Still, it really wasn't any of Alvar's business or Husari's that she already had a mask for the Carnival, courtesy of the chancellor of Ragosa. She was wearied and irritated by the constant speculation that surrounded their relationship. The more so since the arrival of the alluring figure of Zabira of Cartada had rendered Mazur's pursuit of Jehane almost entirely ritualized.

It was inconsistent to be as bothered by his largely abandoned attempts at conquest as she had been by his earlier assumption that her surrender was merely a matter of time, but Jehane was acutely conscious that this was exactly how she felt.

She sighed. She could imagine what Ser Rezzoni in Batiara would have said about all of this. Something about the essential nature of womankind. The god and his sisters knew, they'd argued about that often enough during her years in Batiara. She'd written him since learning the news of Sorenica. No reply, as yet. He was there most of the time, but not always. He often took his family north with him, while he lectured at some of the other universities. He might be dead, though. She tried very hard to avoid thinking about that.

Looking around, she spotted Ziri moving through the crowd a short distance away. For a time after she and Velaz had been abducted in the attempt on the life of the two children, Jehane had had to stave off a flicker of anxiety every time she went into the streets. She had come to realize, quickly enough, that Ziri was always nearby; her lithe shadow, learning—far too young—how to hide knives on his person and use them to deadly effect. He had killed a man to save her life.

They'd summoned her to the barracks one night to attend to Ziri. He'd appeared deathly ill when she first saw him: white-faced, vomiting convulsively. It had only been wine, though. Rodrigo's men had taken him to a tavern for the first time. She'd chided them angrily for that, and they'd allowed her to do so, but in truth, Jehane knew they were initiating him into a life that offered so much more than the one he would have had in Orvilla. Would it be a better fate, a happier one? How could a mortal answer that?

You touched people's lives, glancingly, and those lives changed forever. That was a hard thing to deal with sometimes.

Ziri would realize soon enough, if he hadn't already, that she wasn't really buying a mask this morning. That didn't matter. He would be torn apart between stallions before he said a word to a living soul that might betray anything he knew about her.

Jehane was learning to accept that people besides her mother and father might love her, and do certain things because of that. Another hard lesson, oddly enough. She had not been beautiful or particularly endearing as a child; contrary and provocative were closer to truth. Such people didn't discover young how to deal with being loved, she thought. They didn't get enough practice.

She slowed to admire some of the handiwork on display. It was remarkable how even the most unlikely masks—a badger, a boar, a whiskered grey mouse's head made of softest leather—were crafted in such a fashion as to be sensuous and attractive. How could the head of a boar be sensuous? She wasn't sure, but she wasn't an artisan, either. The masks would be even more alluring, she realized, tomorrow night under torchlight and the risen moons, with wine running in the streets and lanes of the city, mingling anonymity with desire.

Mazur had invited her to dine with him the evening before, for the first time in a long while, and at the end of the meal had presented her, courteous and assured as ever, with a gift.

She'd opened the offered box. Even the container was beautiful: ivory and sandalwood, with a silver lock and key. Inside, lying on crimson silk, had been the mask of a white owl.

It was the doctor's owl, Jehane knew, sacred to the white moon and the pursuit of knowledge, a pale light flying down the long paths of the dark. Galinus, father of all physicians, had had an owl carved at the head of his staff. Not many people knew about that. Mazur, evidently, was one who did.

It was a generous, thoughtful gift, from a man who had never been less than generous or thoughtful with her.

She looked at him. He smiled. The problem with Mazur ben Avren, she had decided in that moment, was that he always knew he was being perceptive; that when he offered a gift it was the precise gift that ought to be offered. There was no uncertainty in him, no waiting to see if approval might come.

"Thank you," she said. "It is beautiful. I will be honored to wear it."

"It should become you," he said gravely, reclining at ease on the couch opposite hers, a glass of wine in one hand. They were alone; the servants had been dismissed when the meal was done.

"Tell me," Jehane added, closing the box and turning the delicate key in its lock, "what have you chosen for the Lady Zabira? If the question is not over-bold?" Contrary, provocative. Why should one be expected to change? And it was always a pleasure—such a rare pleasure—to cause this man to blink and hesitate, if only for a moment. Almost childish, she knew, but surely not everything childlike was a bad thing?

"It would be ungracious of me to reveal her disguise, would it not? Just as it would be wrong for me to tell her what I have offered you."

He did have a way of making you feel foolish.

Her response to that, though, was much the same as it had been all her life. "I suppose," she said lightly. "How many of us will you have personally disguised for Carnival, so no one but you knows who we are?"

He hesitated again, but not from discomfiture this time. "Two, Jehane. You and Zabira." The pale wine in his glass caught the candlelight. He smiled ruefully. "I am not so young as I once was, you know."

He was not above duplicity in this sort of thing, but she had a sense he was speaking the truth here. She was touched, and a little guilty.

"I'm sorry," she said.

He shrugged. "Don't be. Five years ago, even two years ago, I would have deserved that." He smiled again. "Though I must say, no other woman would have asked the question."

"My mother would be horrified to hear you say that."

He shook his head slightly. "I think you malign her. I think she would be pleased her daughter was a match for any man."

"I'm hardly that, Mazur. I'm just prickly. It gets in the way, sometimes."

"I know," he said, making a face. "That I do know."

She smiled, and stood up then. "It is late for a working doctor," she'd said. "May I thank you again, and take my leave?"

He'd risen as well, still graceful, save for the hip that sometimes troubled him in rain. Not nearly so old and infirm as he might want, for the moment, to suggest. There was always a purpose to what Mazur said. Ammar ibn Khairan—who was, of course, exactly the same in this—had warned her about that.

Sometimes one didn't want to track through all the layers of meaning or implication. Sometimes one wanted to simply do a certain thing. Jehane walked towards Mazur and kissed him softly upon the mouth for the first time.

And that surprised him, she realized. He didn't even lift his arms to hold her. She'd done the same thing to ibn Khairan once, in Fezana. She was a terrible woman.

"Thank you," she'd said to the chancellor of Ragosa, withdrawing. "Thank you for my mask."

Walking home, with an escort, she realized that she'd forgotten to ask what he would be wearing at Carnival.

Amid the morning sunlight and the crowds, thinking about that evening, Jehane discovered that she had reached the end of the long street of stalls. She turned left, towards the lake, where it was quieter. Knowing that Ziri was following unobtrusively behind her, she strolled, without real purpose or destination.

She could go back to the infirmary. She had three patients there. There was a woman near her delivery time who could be looked in on at her home. None of them needed her particularly this morning, however, and it was pleasant to be abroad in springtime without immediate responsibilities.

It occurred to her then that what she really lacked here in Ragosa was a woman to befriend. She was surrounded by so many accomplished, even brilliant men, but what she missed just now was the chance to go outside the walls on this bright morning filled with birdsong to sit beside a tumbledown hut with Nunaya and some of the other street women, drinking something cool and laughing at their ribald, caustic stories. Sometimes you needed to be able to laugh at men and their world, Jehane thought.

She had spent—what was it, much of a year?—being serious and professional in a man's world. Sleeping in a tent in winter in the midst of a military company. They had respected her for that, had accepted her skills, trusted her judgment, and some of them even loved her, Jehane knew. But there were no other women with whom she could simply laugh, or shake her head in shared bemusement at the follies of soldiers and diplomats. Or perhaps even confide certain night-time struggles, when she lay awake in bed listening to stringed music played for other women from the dark streets below.

For all its pleasures and satisfactions there had been unexpected stresses to this life away from home, beyond the ones that might have been predicted. Perhaps, thought Jehane, it wasn't such a bad thing that this notorious Carnival was coming, when no one but Mazur ben Avren would know for certain who she was. An edge of excitement came with that thought, and, inevitably, some anxiety.

It would have been nice to have Nunaya to talk to today. Nunaya understood more about men than anyone Jehane knew.

Unaware that she was doing so, she gave her characteristic small shrug and walked on. She wasn't good at meandering. She walked too briskly, as if there was a pressing engagement awaiting her and she was late for it.

She was twenty-eight years old, and nearing the moments that would mark her life forever.

First, though, passing along a quieter laneway, she glanced into an open doorway and saw someone she knew. She hesitated, and then, in part because she hadn't spoken privately with him since learning the tidings of Sorenica, Jehane walked in to where Rodrigo Belmonte stood alone, his back to the doorway, fingering samples of parchment in a scribe's shop.

He was concentrating on what he was doing and didn't see her enter. The shopkeeper did, and came out from around his counter to greet her. Jehane motioned him to silence. The man smiled knowingly, winked and withdrew to his stool.

Why, Jehane wondered, did all men have that same smile? She was irked by the shopkeeper's assumption and so her words when she spoke were cooler than she'd meant them to be.

"And what will you use this for?" she asked. "Ransom demands?"

Rodrigo was another difficult man to surprise. He glanced back and smiled. "Hello, Jehane. Isn't this beautiful? Look. Gazelle skin parchment, and sheepskin. And have you seen the paper this splendid man has?" The scribe beamed. Rodrigo took two steps towards another bin and lifted, carefully, a creamy scroll of flax paper.

"He has linen, as well. Come see. And some of it dyed. Here's crimson. That would do for ransom notes!" He grinned. There was unfeigned pleasure in his voice.

"More money for Cartada," Jehane said. "The dye comes from the valley south of them."

"I know that," said Rodrigo. "But I can't begrudge it to them, if they make something so beautiful with it."

"Would the esteemed Captain wish to purchase some of the linen, then?" the merchant asked, rising from his stool.

"The Captain cannot, alas, indulge himself in anything so extravagant," Rodrigo said. "Even for ransom notes. I'll take the parchment. Ten sheets, some ink, half a dozen good quills."

"Will you wish to avail yourself of my own services?" the man asked. "I have samples of my writing for you to view."

"Thank you, no. I'm sure it is impeccable, judging from the taste you display in your materials. But I enjoy writing letters when I have the leisure, and people claim they can decipher my hand." He smiled.

His spoken Asharic, Jehane thought, had always been excellent. He might have been a native, though unlike Alvar and some of the other northerners, Rodrigo had maintained his style of dress. He still carried his whip in his belt, even when he walked out, as now, without a sword.

"Are they really for ransom notes?" she asked.

"To your father," he murmured. "I've tired of having a physician who's even sharper with me than Lain is. What will he give me for you?"

"Lain?"

"Your father."

"Not much, I fear. He also thinks I'm too sharp."

Rodrigo took a silver coin from his purse and paid the man. He waited for his purchases and accepted his change, counting it.

Jehane walked out with him. She saw him assess the street, instinctively, and note the presence of Ziri in a doorway halfway down. It must be odd, she thought suddenly, to have a view of the world that made such appraisals routine.

"Why," he asked, beginning to walk east, "do you think you are so astringent towards those who genuinely like you?"

She hadn't expected to be immediately in this sort of conversation, though it jibed with where her thoughts had been going before.

She gave her quick shrug. "A way of coping. You all drink together, brawl, train, swear at each other. I have only my tongue, and a manner with it, sometimes."

"Fair enough. Are you having trouble coping, Jehane?"

"Not at all," she said quickly.

"No, really. You're a member of my company. This is a captain's question, doctor. Would you like some time off duty? There will be little chance once the season changes for good, I should warn you."

Jehane bit back a quick retort. It was a fair question. "I'm happiest working," she said at length. "I wouldn't know what to do with time away. It wouldn't be safe to go home, I don't think."

"Fezana? No it wouldn't," he said. "Not this spring."

She picked up on the intonation. "It is coming soon, you think? Will Badir really send the army west?"

They turned a corner, walking north now. The crowds were thinning out, nearing midday. The lake was ahead of them and the curved arms of the walls, reaching out over the water. Jehane could see the masts of fishing boats.

Rodrigo said, "I think a number of armies will be moving soon. I believe ours will be one of them."

"You are being careful," she said.

He glanced at her. Grinned suddenly beneath the thick moustache. "I'm always careful with you, Jehane."

She left a silence, not responding. He went on, "If I knew more for certain I'd tell you. Lain is quite sure this rumored gathering of all three northern kings will lead to one army coming down. I doubt it, myself, but that doesn't mean there won't be three Jaddite kings riding, each with his own little holy war." His tone was dry.

"And where," she asked, stopping by a bench outside a large warehouse, "would that leave Rodrigo Belmonte of Valledo?" It was a trait of hers: when uncertain she tended to be most direct. To cut through, like a surgeon.

He put a booted foot on the stone bench and set down his package. He gestured and she sat. There was a plane tree for shade. It was warmer now, with the sun high. She caught a glimpse of Ziri perched on a fountain rim, playing with his knife, looking for all the world like an apprentice off duty for an hour, or dawdling on the way back from an errand.

Rodrigo said, "I have no easier answer to that than I did in the winter. Remember, ibn Khairan asked me the same thing?"

She did remember: the morning she had nearly died, with two small boys who'd committed no sin other than to be the half-brothers of a king.

"Would the money you are earning here truly come before loyalty to Valledo?"

"Put that way, no. There are other ways to put it, Jehane."

"Tell me."

He looked at her, the grey eyes calm. Very little ruffled him. It almost made you want to try. But this man, she thought suddenly, spoke to her exactly as to a trusted officer. No condescension, no complacency. Well, almost none. She wasn't sure he teased Lain Nunez in the same way.

"Should loyalty to my own idea of honor outweigh a duty to my wife and the future of my sons."

There was a breeze now, nearer the water. Jehane said, "Will you explain that?"

"Lain and Martin are both afraid we might miss a real chance, being exiled this particular year. They've been urging me to petition Ramiro to allow me to return and then break my contract here if he does. I've chosen not to do so. There are some things I won't do."

"Which? Break a contract or petition for return?"

He smiled. "Both, actually. The second more than the first. I could return my salary, I certainly haven't spent it. But Jehane, think about this. The larger point. If Valledo moves south through the tagra and besieges Fezana, what men do you think Ramiro will give land to, should he succeed?" He looked at her. "Do you see?"

Being quick, and her father's daughter, she did. "You could be riding around Ragosa chasing bandits for a salary when there are kingdoms to be won."

"Not quite kingdoms, perhaps, but something substantial, certainly. Much more than a salary, however generous. So, you tell me, doctor? Do I owe my two boys a chance to be the heirs of, say, the king's governor of Fezana? Or of a tract of newly conquered land between there and Carcasia, with permission to build a castle?"

"I can't answer that. I don't know your boys."

"Doesn't matter. They are boys. The question is, what should a man strive for, Jehane? Honorably?" His eyes were direct and even a little intimidating now. Ser Rezzoni used to have a look like that sometimes. She tended to forget, until reminded, as now, that Rodrigo was a teacher, besides being one of the most feared fighting men in the peninsula.

"I still can't answer," she said.

He shook his head, impatient for the first time. "Do you think I go to war and kill, order surrendering foes to be slain, women burned alive—I have done that, Jehane—out of some simple-minded battle-lust?"

"You tell me."

She felt a little cold now, in the shade. This was not what she'd expected from a morning walk through the city.

"There is pleasure in warfare, yes." He was measuring his words. "I would never deny that. For good or ill, I feel most alive in the presence of death. I need danger, comradeship, pride of mastery. The chance to win honor, glory, even fortune—all of which matter in this world, if not in Jad's Paradise of Souls. But it takes me away from those I love and leaves them exposed to danger in my absence. And surely, surely, if we are not simply animals that live to fight, there must be a reason for bloodshed."

"And the reason is? For you?"

"Power, Jehane. A bastion. A way to be as secure as this uncertain world allows, with a chance to build something for my sons to hold on to after I die."

"And you all want this? This is what drives you?"

He thought about it. "I would never speak for all men. For some the sweet excitement is enough. The blood. Some do kill for the love of it. You met some of that sort at Orvilla. But I'd wager ... I'd wager that if you asked Ammar ibn Khairan he would tell you he is here in this city because he hopes to govern Cartada for King Badir before summer's end."

Jehane stood up abruptly. She resumed walking, thinking hard now. Rodrigo collected his small package and caught up, falling into stride beside her. They walked in silence past all the warehouses until they came to the end of a long pier and stood above the blue water. The fishing boats were being decorated for Carnival. There were lanterns and banners in the riggings and on the masts. The sun was overhead now; few people were about in the middle of the day.

"You can't both win those things, can you?" she said finally. "You and Ammar. Or not for long. Ramiro can't conquer Fezana and hold it if Badir takes Cartada and holds it."

"They could, I suppose. But no, I don't think both things will happen. And certainly not if I stay here."

He was not a vain man, but he knew his own worth. She looked up at him. He was gazing out at the water.

"You do have a problem, don't you?"

"As I told you," he said quietly. "There will be armies moving soon, and I don't know what will be the result. Also, you may have forgotten, but there is another set of players."

"No, I haven't," said Jehane. "I never forget about them." Out on the lake one late boat was turning now, white sails bright in the sun, heading back to harbor with the morning's catch. "Will the Muwardis allow your people to begin conquering in Al-Rassan?"

"Re-conquering, we say. But no, I doubt they will," said Rodrigo Belmonte.

"Will they come too, then? This summer?"

"Possibly. If the northern kings do."

They watched the gulls swoop and dart above the water. White clouds, swift as birds, raced by overhead.

Jehane looked at the man she was with.

"This summer ends something then, doesn't it?"

"We could say that every year each season ends something."

"We could say that. Are you going to?"

He shook his head. "No. I have felt for some time we are nearing a change. I don't know what it will be. But it is coming, I think." He paused. "Of course, I have been wrong about such things."

"Often?"

He grinned. "Not very, Jehane."

"Thank you for your honesty."

He continued to look at her. The direct gaze. "Pure self-protection, doctor. I dare not dissemble with you. You may have to bleed me one day. Or cut off a leg."

She realized that she didn't like thinking about that.

"Have you a mask for the Carnival?" she asked, inconsequentially.

He smiled again, crookedly. "Actually, I do. Ludus and Martin, who like to think they are amusing, bought me something elaborate. Perhaps I'll wear it, to humor them, and walk about early for a while, but I don't think I'll stay out."

"Why not? What will you do? Sit in a blanket by the fire?"

He lifted the small parcel he carried. "Write letters. Home." He hesitated. "To my wife."

"Ah," said Jehane. "Stern duty summons. Even during Carnival?"

Rodrigo colored slightly, for the first time she could ever remember, and looked away. The last fishing boat was in now. The sailors were unloading their catch.

"Not duty," he said.

And Jehane realized then, belatedly, something important about him.

He walked her home. She invited him in for a midday meal, but he declined, graciously. She ate alone, fish and fruit, prepared by the cook Velaz had hired for them.

Thoughtfully, she went to look in on her patients later in the day, and thoughtfully she came home at twilight to bathe and dress for the banquet at the palace.

Mazur had sent jewelry for her, another generous act. It was a notoriously elegant occasion, she had learned, the king's banquet on the eve of Carnival. Husari had presented her with her gown, crimson dyed, edged in black. He had flatly refused payment—one argument she had lost, resoundingly. She looked at the gown in her room. It was exquisite. She had never worn anything like it in her life.

The Kindath were supposed to wear blue and white only, and without ostentation. It had been made clear, however, that for tonight—and most certainly for tomorrow—such rules were suspended in King Badir's Ragosa. She began to dress.

Thinking about Husari, she remembered his speech of the morning. The pompous, lofty style of a mock-scholar. He had been jesting, he said.

But he hadn't been, or not entirely.

At certain moments, Jehane thought, in the presence of men like Husari ibn Musa or young Alvar, or Rodrigo Belmonte, it was actually possible to imagine a future for this peninsula that left room for hope. Men and women could change, could cross boundaries, give and take, each from the other ... given enough time, enough good will, intelligence.

There was a world for the making in Esperana, in Al-Rassan, one world made of the two—or perhaps, if one were to dream, made of three. Sun, stars and the moons.

Then you remembered Orvilla, the Day of the Moat. You looked into the eyes of the Muwardis, or paused on a street corner and heard a wadji demanding death for the foul Kindath sorcerer ben Avren, who drank the blood of Asharite infants torn from their mothers' arms.

Even the sun goes down, my lady.

Rodrigo had said that.

She had never known a man like him. Or no, that was not quite so. One other, met on the same terrible day last summer. They were like a bright golden coin, those two, two sides, different images on each, one value.

Was that true? Or did it just sound true, like the words of one of those pedagogues Husari mocked, all symmetry, no substance?

She didn't know the answer to that. She missed Nunaya and the women outside the walls of Fezana. She missed her own room at home. She missed her mother.

She missed her father very much. He would have liked to have seen her looking as she did now, she knew. He would never see her again, never see anything again. The man who had done that to him was dead. Ammar ibn Khairan had killed him, and then written his lament. Jehane had been near to tears, hearing that elegy, in the palace where they were dining again tonight, in a room with a stream running through it.

It was very hard, how many things in life you never discovered the answers to, no matter how much you tried.

Jehane stood before her seldom-used looking glass and put on Mazur's jewelry. She stayed there, looking at herself, for a long time.

Eventually, she heard music approaching outside, and then a knocking at the door downstairs. She heard Velaz going to answer. Mazur had sent an escort for her; strings and wind instruments, it sounded like. She had made him feel guilty last night, it seemed. She ought to be amused by that. She remained motionless another moment, staring at her image in the glass.

She didn't look like a doctor serving with a military company. She looked like a woman—not young with the extreme freshness of youth, but not so old, either, with quite good cheekbones and blue eyes accentuated now by paint and Mazur's lapis lazuli at ears and throat. A court lady, about to join a glittering company at a palace banquet.

Looking at the figure in the glass, Jehane offered her small shrug. That, at least, she recognized.

The mask, her real disguise, lay on the table beside the glass. That was for tomorrow. Tonight, in the palace of King Badir, however altered she might seem, everyone would still know she was Jehane. Whatever that meant.

Thirteen

"Were you pleased?" the king of Ragosa asked his chancellor, breaking a companionable silence.

Mazur ben Avren glanced up from the cushions where he reclined. "I ought to be asking you that," he said.

Badir smiled in his deep, low chair. "I am easily pleased," he murmured. "I enjoyed the food and the company. The music was splendid tonight, especially the reeds. Your new musician from Ronizza is a discovery. Are we paying him well?"

"Extremely well, I'm sorry to say. There have been other offers for his services."

The king sipped from his glass, held it to the nearest candle flame and looked, thoughtfully. The sweet wine was pale: as starlight, the white moon, a northern girl. He tried briefly but failed to think of a fresher image. It was very late. "What did you think of the verses tonight?"

The verses were an issue, as it happened.

The chancellor took his time before answering. They were alone again, in the king's chambers. It occurred to ben Avren to wonder how many times over the years the two of them had sat like this at the end of a night.

Badir's second wife had died six winters ago, giving birth to his third son. The king had never remarried. He had heirs, and no single overriding political interest had emerged to dictate an obvious union. It was useful at times for a secure monarch to be unattached: overtures came, and negotiations could be spun out a long while. Rulers in three countries had reason to believe their daughter might one day be queen of wealthy Ragosa in Al-Rassan.

"What did you think of the verses, my lord?"

It was unlike the chancellor to deflect a question back. Badir raised one eyebrow. "Are you being careful, old friend? With me?"

Mazur shook his head. "Not careful. Uncertain, actually. I may be ... prejudiced by my own aspirations in the realm of poetry."

"That gives me most of an answer."

Mazur smiled. "I know."

The king leaned back and put his feet up on his favorite stool. He balanced his wine on the wide arm of the chair.

"What do I think? I think most of the poems were indifferent. The usual run of images. I also think," he added, "that our friend ibn Khairan betrayed a conflict in his verse—either deliberately, or something he would rather have kept hidden."

The chancellor nodded slowly. "That seems exact. You will think I am flattering, I fear." King Badir's glance was keen. He waited. Mazur sipped from his wine. "Ibn Khairan's too honest a poet, my lord. He might dissemble in speech and act, but not easily in verse."

"What do we do about it?"

Mazur gestured gracefully. "There is nothing to do. We wait and see what he decides."

"Ought we to try to influence that decision? If we know what our own desires are?"

Mazur shook his head. "He knows what he can have from you, my lord."

"Does he?" Badir's tone sharpened. "I don't. What is it he can have from me?"

The chancellor laid his glass down and sat up straighter. They had been drinking all night—during the banquet, and now alone. Ben Avren was weary but clear-headed. "It is, as ever, yours to decide, my lord, but it is my view that he can have whatever it is he wants, should he choose to remain with us."

A silence. It was an extraordinary thing to have said. Both men knew it.

"I need him so much, Mazur?"

"Not if we choose to stay as we are, my lord. But if you wish to have more, then yes, you need him that much."

Another reflective stillness.

"I do, of course, wish to have more," said King Badir of Ragosa.

"I know."

"Can my sons deal with a wider realm when I'm gone, Mazur? Are they capable of such?"

"With help, I think so."

"Will they not have you, my friend, as I have?"

"So long as I am able. We are much the same age, as you know, my lord. That," said the chancellor of Ragosa, "is actually the point of what I am saying."

Badir looked at him. He held up his almost empty glass. Mazur rose smoothly and went to the sideboard. He took the decanter and poured for the king and then, at a gesture, for himself. He replaced the decanter and returned to his cushions, subsiding among them.

"It was an extremely short poem," said the king of Ragosa.

"It was."

"Almost ... perfunctory."

"Almost. Not quite." The chancellor was silent a moment. "I think he was giving you a compliment of an unusual kind, my lord."

"Ah. How so?"

"He let you see that he is struggling. He did not hide the fact behind some bland, elaborate homage."

The king's turn to be silent again. "Let me understand you," he said at length. There was a trace of irritation in his voice now, a rare thing. He was tired. "Ammar ibn Khairan, asked to offer a verse for my birth day, recites a quick little piece about there always being water from a pool or wine in my cup. That is all. Six lines. And my chancellor, my poet, says this is to be construed as a compliment?"

Mazur looked undisturbed. "Because he could so easily have done more, my lord, or at the least, have claimed his inspiration was inadequate to the magnitude of the occasion. He is too experienced not to have done so, had he felt the slightest need to play a courtier's game. Which means he wanted you—and me, I suppose—to understand that he is being and will be honest with us."

"And that is a compliment?"

"From a man such as this, I believe it is. He is saying he believes we are thoughtful enough to read that message in his six lines, and wait for him."

"And we will wait for him, Mazur?"

"It is my counsel, my lord."

The king stood up then, and so the chancellor did the same. Badir strode, in jewelled slippers on the carpet and the marble floor, to a window. He turned the latch and pushed open both panes of beautifully etched glass. He stood overlooking a courtyard with almond and lemon trees and a fountain. Torches had been left burning below to light the play of water.

From beyond the palace the streets of the city were quiet. They would not be tomorrow night. In the distance, faintly, could be heard the sound of a stringed instrument, and then a voice, yearning. The blue moon was overhead, shining through the open window and upon the splashing fountain and the grass. Stars glittered around the moon and through the branches of the tall trees.

"You think a great deal of this man," King Badir said finally, looking out at the night.

"What I think," said his chancellor, "if you will allow me to pursue a poet's conceit and imagine men as bodies in the heavens, is that we have the two most brilliant comets in the sky here in Ragosa this spring."

Badir turned back to look at him. After a moment, he smiled.

"And where would you put yourself, old friend, in such a glittering firmament?"

And now the chancellor, too, smiled.

"That is easy, in truth. I am a moon at your side, my good lord."

The king thought about that. He shook his head. "Inexact, Mazur. Moons wander. Your people are named for that. But you have not. You have been steadfast."

"Thank you, my lord."

The king crossed his arms, still musing. "A moon is also brighter than comets in the dark," he said. "Though being familiar, perhaps it occasions less note."

Mazur inclined his head but said nothing.

"Will you be going abroad tomorrow night?"

Mazur smiled. "I always do, my lord. For a little time. Carnival is useful, to walk about unknown, and gauge the mood of the city."

"And it is solely duty that takes you out, my friend? You find no pleasure in the night?"

"I would never say that, my lord."

The two men shared the smile this time.

After a moment, Badir asked, bemusedly, "Why plain water from a pool, though, Mazur. In his verse. Why not just a rich red wine.'

And this, too, his chancellor explained to him.

A little later, Mazur ben Avren took leave of his king. When, at length, he reached his own quarters in the palace, the Lady Zabira was waiting.

She had been very much present at the banquet, of course, and had all the questions of someone who understood royal courts very well and wished to rise in this one. She also displayed, gracefully, a continuing desire to minister to whatever needs the chancellor of Ragosa might have—in a fashion that might surpass anyone who had come before her.

As it happened, she had been doing just that through the winter, to his pleasure and surprise. He had thought he was too old for such a thing to happen.

Later that night, when he was drifting towards the shores of sleep, feeling her youthful nakedness against his body, soft as a cat, warm as a pleasant dream, Mazur heard her ask one last question. "Did the king understand what ibn Khairan meant in his poem tonight? About the water at the drinking place?"

She was clever too, this lady from Cartada, sharp as a cutting edge. He would do well to remember that. He was getting old; must not allow it to render him vulnerable. He had seen that happen to other men.

"He understands it now," he murmured, eyes closed.

He heard her laugh then, softly. Her laughter seemed to ease him wonderfully, a caressing sound. One of her hands slid across his chest. She turned herself a little, to fit more closely to him.

She said, "I was watching Ammar tonight. I have known him for many years. I believe he is troubled by something beyond ... divided loyalty. I don't think he understands it himself yet. If I am right, it would be amusing, in truth."

He opened his eyes and looked at her, waiting. And then she told him something he would never have even contemplated. Women, Mazur ben Avren had long thought, had an entirely different way of seeing the world. It was one of the reasons he enjoyed their company so much.

Soon after that she fell asleep. The chancellor of Ragosa lay awake for a long time, however, considering what she had said, turning it over and over in his mind, as a stone in the hand, or the different possible endings for a verse.

For the bright lord of Ragosa,

Long-tenured on his dais,

Much-loved, and deservedly,

May there always be in times to come

Cool water from the moonlit pool

And wine in the drinking glass.

He could perhaps have said, alone by the pool, Ammar ibn Khairan reflected, but that would have had a flavor of sycophancy, however subtle, and he wasn't ready—so soon after the elegy for Almalik—to give so much to Badir of Ragosa in a verse. Almost, but not quite. That was the problem.

It was lions, of course, who were alone when they came down to the water to drink.

He wondered if the king had been offended by his brevity, which would be a pity. The banquet tables had barely settled themselves to silence when ibn Khairan, given pride of place, first recital, had already finished speaking his brief verse. The lines were as simple as he could make them, more a well-wishing than an homage. Save for the hint ... the moonlit waters. If Badir understood. He wondered.

I am too old, Ammar ibn Khairan said to himself, justifying, to abuse my craft.

Any of your crafts?

The inner voice always had the hard questions. He was a soldier and a diplomat as well as a poet. Those were the real crafts of his living here in Ragosa, as they had been in Cartada. The poetry? Was for when the winds of the world died down.

What ought a man honorably to do? To aspire towards? Was it the stillness of that pool—dreamed of, and written about—where only the one beast dared stalk from the dark trees to drink in the moonlight and under the stars?

That stillness, that single image, was the touchstone of verse for him. A place out of the wind, for once, where the noise of the world and all the brilliant color—the noise and color he still loved!—might recede and a deceptively simple art be conjured forth.

Standing, as he had stood one night before—the night he'd first come here—by the waters of Lake Serrana, ibn Khairan understood that he was still a long way from that dark pool. Water and water. The dream of the Asharites. The water that nourished the body and the waters the soul craved. If I am not careful, he told himself, I'll end up being good for nothing but mumbled, cryptic teachings under some arch in Soriyya. I'll let my beard and hair grow, walk barefoot in a torn robe, let my students bring me bread and water for sustenance.

Water the body needed, waters the soul desired.

There were lanterns in the rigging of all the fishing boats, he saw by the blue moonlight. They were not yet alight. That would come tomorrow. Carnival. Masks. Music and wine. Pleasures of torchlight. A brilliance until dawn.

Sometimes the darkness needed to be pushed back.

Beloved Al-Rassan, the thought came to him in that moment, sharp and unexpected as a blade from beneath a friend's cloak, shall I live to shape your elegy as well?

In that innermost, jewel-like garden of the Al-Fontina those long years ago the last blind khalif of Silvenes had greeted him as a welcome visitor, before the blade—from beneath a friend's cloak—had ended him.

Ammar ibn Khairan drew a breath and shook his head. It might have been useful to have a friend here tonight, but that had never been the way he'd ordered his life, and it would be a weakness to dwell upon it now. Almalik was dead, which was a part, a large part, of the present difficulties.

It had been decided two nights ago—though not yet made generally known—that in two weeks' time, when the white moon was full, the mercenary army of Ragosa would set out for Cartada, to wrest that city from a parricide. They would march and ride in the name of a small boy, Zabira's elder son, who had besought the shelter and support of King Badir and the intercession of the holy stars.

Ibn Khairan stood motionless for another moment, then turned away from the water and the boats to walk back. The last time he had been here by the lake late at night Jehane bet Ishak had been waiting by the warehouses and they had met Rodrigo Belmonte at the infirmary and he and Belmonte had left her there, laughing, and gone off to get unexpectedly drunk together. The night of the day he had arrived, the day they had fought side by side.

Something too close there, deeply unsettling.

Jehane had looked remarkably beautiful in the banquet room tonight, he thought, inconsequentially. His steps echoed on the planks of the wharf. He came to the first warehouses and continued on. The streets were empty. He was quite alone.

She'd been gowned in crimson silk, extravagantly, with only lapis jewelry and a white shawl as gestures towards the Kindath clothing laws. It would have been Husari who provided that dress for her, Ammar thought, and ben Avren, probably, the jewels.

Her hair adorned with gems, and the lapis at ears and throat adding brilliance to her eyes, the doctor had caused a palpable stir when she entered the banquet room, though she'd been a fixture here, pragmatic and unpretentious, from the day she arrived. Sometimes, he thought, people reached a point where they wanted to say something different about themselves.

He had teased her this evening, about trying to catch the king's glance. Alleged she was harboring aspirations to be the first Kindath queen in Al-Rassan. If they start wagering on me again, she'd answered dryly—quick as ever—do let me know: I wouldn't mind making a little money this time.

He'd looked for her later, after the meal, after the music and all the verses, including his own, but she had already gone. So had Rodrigo Belmonte, it now occurred to him. An idle thought, wispy as a blown cloud across the moon, drifted into his mind.

The two of them, he realized, walking towards the center of the city, were the only people in Ragosa with whom he might have wanted to speak just now. Such an odd conjunction. Jaddite soldier, Kindath woman and physician.

Then he corrected himself. There was a third, actually. One more. He doubted the chancellor of Ragosa was alone, however, and greatly doubted he would be disposed to discuss nuances of poetry just then, so late at night, with Zabira in his bed, accomplished and alluring.

He was both right and wrong, as it happened. He went home alone, in any event, to the house and garden he had leased at the edge of the palace quarter with a small part of the great wealth he had earned in the service of the last king of Cartada.

In the horse-breeding lands of Valledo the next day—the morning of the Carnival of Ragosa, in fact—they came for Diego Belmonte at the ranch of his family where he had lived all his short life.

His mother was away at the time, riding the eastern perimeter of Rancho Belmonte, supervising the spring roundup of new foals. This absence on the part of the lady of the estate had not been planned by those who arrived at the ranch house, but they regarded it, nonetheless, as a highly fortuitous circumstance. The lady was known to be headstrong and even violent. She had killed a man here not long ago. Put an arrow through him, in fact. Nor was it assumed by those who arrived that day charged with a particular and delicate mission that Miranda Belmonte d'Alveda would regard them and their task with favor.

Mothers were chancy, at best.

There had not, in fact, been any great press of volunteers in Carcasia for this task, when word came from the castle that one of the sons of Ser Rodrigo Belmonte was to be brought west to join the army as it assembled just north of the tagra lands.

This absence of enthusiasm was accentuated when it became clear that the request for the presence of the young fellow came not from the king directly, but from the Ferrieres cleric Geraud de Chervalles. It was de Chervalles who wanted the boy, for some reason. A messy business, the soldiers agreed, getting tangled in the affairs of foreign clerics. Still, the king had endorsed the request and orders were orders. A company of ten men had been mustered to ride east along the muddy roads to Rancho Belmonte and bring back the lad.

Many of them, it emerged in campfire discussions along the way, had had their own first taste of warfare—against the Asharites or the pigs from Jalona or Ruenda—at fourteen or fifteen years of age. The boy was said to be almost fourteen now, and as Rodrigo Belmonte's son ... well, Jad knew, he ought to be able to fight. No one knew why the army of Valledo needed a boy, but no one put that question openly.

They came to Rancho Belmonte, riding beneath the banner of the kings of Valledo, and were met in a cleared space before the wooden compound walls by several household officials, a small, nervous cleric and two boys, one of whom they were there to claim.

The lady of the household—who would, in fact, have cheerfully killed the lot of them had she been present to learn of their mission—was elsewhere on the estate, the cleric informed them. The leader of the troop showed him the king's seal and his command. The cleric—Ibero was his name—tore open the seal, read the letter then surprised them by handing it over to the two boys, who read it together.

They were utterly identical, Ser Rodrigo's two sons. A few of the horsemen had already made the sign of Jad, discreetly. Magic and witchcraft were said to attend upon such mirrored twins.

"But of course," said one of the boys, looking up as he finished reading. It was evident that they could read. "If the king believes my ... gift may be of use, if he wishes me to come, I am honored to do so."

The captain of the company didn't know anything about a gift. He didn't much care; he was simply relieved to find things going smoothly.

"And I," said the other brother quickly. "Where Diego goes, I also go."

This was not expected, but it didn't seem to pose a great problem, and the captain agreed. If the king didn't want this other brother in Carcasia, for whatever reason, he could send him back. With someone else. The two boys glanced at each other and flashed identical smiles before dashing off to get ready. Some of the soldiers glanced at each other with ironic expressions. Youngsters, everywhere, looked forward to war.

They were very young, and not especially prepossessing either. Slightly built, if anything. Still, it was not a soldier's place to dwell upon orders, and these were the sons of Rodrigo Belmonte. The riders were offered refreshments, which they accepted, and a night's lodging, which they courteously declined. It would be imprudent, their captain decided, to push the luck that had caused the lady of Rancho Belmonte to be absent this day. They took a cold lunch, fed and watered the horses, and provisioned themselves.

Ten men, escorting two boys and a squire of little more than the boys' age, rode west from the ranch house towards mid-afternoon of that same day, passing to the south of a copse of trees, and crossing the stream at a place Rodrigo's sons suggested. The ranch dogs followed them that far and then went loping back.

Ibero di Vaquez had lived an uneventful, even a sedate life, given the turbulent times into which he had been born. He was fifty-two years old. Raised in what was now Jalona, he had come west to Esteren to study with the clerics there when quite young. Thirteen years old, in fact.

He was a good acolyte, attentive and disciplined. In his early twenties, he had been sent as part of a holy mission bearing relics of Queen Vasca to the High Clerics in Ferrieres and had lingered there, with permission, for two years, spending most of his time in the magnificent libraries of the great sanctuaries there.

Upon his return to Esperana he had been assigned—and had cheerfully accepted—the short-term position of cleric to the Belmontes, a moderately important ranching family in the breeding lands of the southeast. The possibilities for advancement were certainly greater in Esteren or one of the larger sanctuaries, but Ibero was not an ambitious man and he had never had much appetite for courts or the equally faction-riven retreats of Jad.

He was a quiet man, somewhat old before his years, but not without a sense of humor or an awareness of how the stern precepts of the god had, at times, to be measured against an awareness of human frailty and passions. The short-term position had turned, as sometimes happened without one's noticing, into a permanent one. He had been with the Belmontes now for twenty-eight years, since the Captain himself had been a boy. They had built a chapel and a library for him, and then expanded both. He had taught young Rodrigo his letters, and then his wife, and later his sons.

It had been a good, gentle life. Pleasures came from the books he was able to obtain with the sums allocated him; from his herb garden; from correspondents in many places. He had taught himself a little of medicine, and had a reputation for extracting teeth efficiently. Excitement—not inconsiderable—arrived home at intervals with the Captain and his company. Ibero would listen in the dining hall to the tales of warfare and intrigue they brought with them. He'd formed an unlikely friendship with gruff old Lain Nunez, whose profanity masked a generous spirit, in the little cleric's view.

For Ibero di Vaquez the stories he heard were enough turbulence for him, and more than close enough to real conflict. He liked the seasonal rhythms of existence here, the measured routine of the days and years.

His first intervention on the wider stage of the world, seven years ago, had been a brief, respectful essay on a doctrinal clash between the clerics of Ferrieres and Batiara on the meaning of solar eclipses. That clash, and the battle for precedence it represented, was still unresolved. Ibero's contribution appeared to have been ignored, so far as he could tell.

His second intervention had been to write a letter, in the late autumn of last year, to the holy person of Geraud de Chervalles, High Cleric of Ferrieres, dwelling in Esteren.

A company of men had arrived this morning in response to that. They had come and had gone, with the boys. And now Ibero, late that same afternoon, stood with his head bowed and trembling hands clasped before him, learning that he, too, was to quit this house. Leave chapel, library, garden, home. After almost thirty years.

He was weeping. He had never been spoken to, in all his life, in the tones with which he was being addressed by Miranda Belmonte in her small sitting room, as the sun went down.

"Understand me perfectly," she was saying, pacing before the fire, her face bloodless, unheeded tears sparkling on her cheeks. "This was a traitor's betrayal of our family. The betrayal of a confidence we had reposed in you, regarding Diego. I will not kill you, or order your death. I have known you, and loved you, for too long." Her voice caught. She stopped her pacing.

"Rodrigo might," she said. "He might find you, wherever you go, and kill you for this."

"He will not do that," the little cleric whispered. It was difficult to speak. It was also hard for him, now, to imagine what he had expected her response might be, back in the autumn, when he wrote that letter to Esteren.

She glared at him. He found it impossible to sustain her glance. It wasn't the fury, it was the tears.

"No," Miranda Belmonte said, "no, you're right, he won't. He loves you much too dearly. He will simply tell you, or write to you, how you have wounded him."

Which would break Ibero's heart. He knew it would.

He tried, again, to explain. "Dearest lady, this is a time of holiness, of men riding beneath the god's banner. They will be taking ship in Batiara for the east soon. There is hope they may be riding south here, in the name of Jad. In our time, my lady. The Reconquest may begin!"

"And it could begin and continue without my children!" She had clenched her fists at her sides like a man, but he saw that her lips were trembling. "Diego's is a special gift, a frightening one. Something we have kept to ourselves all his life. You know—you know, Ibero!—that clerics have burned such people. What have you done to him!"

He swallowed hard. He said, "The high lord Geraud de Chervalles is an enlightened man. The king of Valledo is the same. It is my belief that Diego and Fernan will be welcomed with honor into the army. That if Diego is able to help in this holy cause he will win renown in his own name, not simply his father's."

"And be named a sorcerer all his life?" Miranda swiped at the tears on her face. "Had you thought of that, Ibero? Had you? What price renown, then? His own, or his father's?"

Ibero swallowed again. "It will be a holy war, my lady. If he aids in the cause of Jad—"

"Oh, Ibero, you innocent fool! I could kill you, I swear I could! It is not a holy war. If it happens, this will be a Valledan campaign to take Fezana and expand south into the tagra. That is all. King Ramiro has been thinking about this for years. Your precious High Cleric simply showed up at the right time to put a gloss on it. Ibero, this is no Reconquest by a united Esperana. There is no Esperana any more! This is just Valledo expanding. Ramiro is as likely to turn west and besiege his brother in Orvedo as anything else before autumn comes. What does your holy god say to that?"

She was blaspheming, now, and her soul was in his care, but he feared to chide her. It was also possible that she was right about much of this. He was an innocent man, he would never have denied that, but even so ...

"Kings may err, Miranda, my lady. So may humble clerics. I do what I do, always, in the name of Jad and his holy light."

She sat down, abruptly, as if the last of her strength had given out. She looked as if she had been physically injured, he saw, and there seemed to be a lost place in her eyes. She had been alone, without Ser Rodrigo, for a long time. His heart ached.

Labelled a sorcerer all his life.

It might be true. He had thought only of the triumph, the glory Diego might accrue should he help the king in battle with his gift of sight.

Miranda said, her voice low now, uninflected. "You were here at Rancho Belmonte to serve Jad and this family. For all these years there has been no conflict in that. Here, for once, it seems there was. You made a choice. You chose, as you say, the god and his light over the needs and the trust of the Belmonte. You are entitled to do so. Perhaps you are required to do so. I don't know. I only know that you cannot make such a choice and remain here. You will be gone in the morning. I will not see you. Goodbye, Ibero. Leave me now. I wish to cry alone, for my sons."

He tried, heartsick, to think of something to say. He could not. She would not even look at him. He left the room. He went to his own chambers. He sat in his bedroom for a time, desolate, lost, and then went next door to the chapel. He knelt and prayed, without finding any comfort.

In the morning he packed a very few belongings. In the kitchen, when he went there to say farewell, they gave him food and wine to begin his journey. They asked for his blessing, which he gave, making the sign of the god's disk over them. They were weeping; so was he. Rain was falling when he went back out; the good, much-needed rain of spring.

Outside the stables there was a horse saddled for him. By the lady's orders, he was given to understand. She was true to her word, however. She did not come out to see him ride away in the rain.

His heart hammering the way it had in battle, Alvar watched as the grey iguana spider approached him slowly. The igwarra was poisonous, sometimes fatally so. The son of one of the farm workers had died of a bite. He tried to move, but could not. The spider came up and kissed him on the lips.

Alvar, twisting, managed to free his arms in the press of people and put them around the spider. He kissed her back as best he could from behind his eagle mask. He was improving, he thought. He had learned a great deal since sundown.

The spider stepped back. Some people seemed to have a knack of finding space to maneuver in the crowd. That trick, Alvar hadn't learned yet.

"Nice. Find me later, eagle," said the iguana. She reached downwards and gave him a quick squeeze on his private parts. Alvar hoped the others hadn't seen.

Not much chance of that.

A hard, bony elbow was driven into his ribs as the spider drifted away. "What I'd give," cackled Lain Nunez, "to be young and broad-shouldered again! Did she hurt you, child?"

"What do you mean again?" roared Martin, on Alvar's other side. He was a fox for the Carnival; it suited him. "You were never built like Alvar, except in your dreams!"

"I assume," said Lain, with dignity, "that you are speaking of his shoulders, and not elsewhere?"

There was a raucous whoop of laughter in response to that. Not that the noise level could possibly get much higher, Alvar thought. Just ahead of them—he had to walk ahead of them, given his spectacular mask—Husari ibn Musa carefully turned around and gave Lain a gesture of encouragement. The normally dour old warrior waved back jauntily. He was a red and green rooster.

They had been drinking since the first stars had come out. There was food everywhere and the smells of cooking: chestnuts roasting, grilled lamb, small-boned fish from the lake, cheeses, sausages, spring melons. And every tavern, thronged to bursting, had opened its doors and was selling wine and ale from booths on the street. Ragosa had been transformed.

Alvar had already been kissed by more women than he'd ever touched in his life. Half a dozen of them had urged him to find them later. The night was becoming a blur already. He was trying to stay alert, though. He was looking for Jehane, however she might be disguised, and, though he certainly wouldn't tell this to the others, for a certain jungle cat mask. He was sure he'd recognize it, even by torchlight and in the press; there was the golden leash, for one thing.

Jehane was beginning, just a little, to regret that she'd insisted on anonymity and on walking the streets alone tonight.

It was fascinating, certainly, and there was an undeniable excitement to being masked and unknown amid a crowd of similarly unrecognizable people. She didn't really like drinking so much, though, and couldn't claim to be thrilled by the number of men—and one or two women—who had already used the license of Carnival to put their arms around her and claim a kiss. No one had really abused the privilege—it was early yet, and the crowds were dense—but Jehane, responding as best she could in the spirit of the night, wouldn't have said it was a pleasure, either.

Her own fault, if so, she told herself. Her own choice, not to be walking about with Rodrigo's men, safely escorted through the chaos of the streets. Out for a while, and then home like a good girl, to bed alone.

Her own choice, indeed. No one knew her, unless someone recognized her walk or tilt of head in the flickering of torches. Martin might, she thought, or Ludus: they were good at such things. She hadn't spotted any of the soldiers yet. She'd know Husari at a distance, of course. There would only be one peacock like that in Ragosa tonight.

She was approached and enveloped by a brown bear. She submitted, good-humoredly, to the bone-crushing hug and a smack on the lips.

"Come with me!" the bear invited. "I like owls!"

"I don't think so," Jehane said, gasping for breath. "It's too early in a long night for broken ribs."

The bear laughed, patted her on the head with gloved hand, and lumbered on. Jehane looked around, wondering if Ziri was somewhere in the crowd swirling past beneath the wavering torches. He didn't know her mask, though, and she had exited her house through the back door into the dark.

She couldn't have said why it was so important to her to be alone tonight. Or no, she probably could have if she demanded an honest answer of herself. She wasn't about to do that. Carnival wasn't a time for inward searching, Jehane decided. It was a night for doing the things one only dreamed about all the rest of the year. She looked around. A grey she-wolf and a horse were improbably entwined not far away.

A stag, seven-tined, emerged out of the tumult in front of her. He was holding a leather flask. He offered it to Jehane with a slight bow. A deeper inclination of his head might have impaled her.

"Thank you," Jehane said politely, holding out a hand for the wine.

"A kiss?" The voice was muffled, soft.

"Fair enough," said Ishak ben Yonannon's daughter. It was Carnival. She stepped forward, kissed him lightly, accepted the flask, and drank.

There seemed to be something familiar about this man, but Jehane didn't pursue the thought: there had been something familiar about half the men who'd kissed her tonight. Masks and imagination and too much wine did that to you.

The stag moved on without speaking again. Jehane watched him go, then realized he'd left her the flask. She called after him but he didn't turn. She shrugged, looked at the flask, drank again. This wine was good, and scarcely watered, if at all.

"I am going to have to start being careful," she said aloud.

"Tonight?" said a brown rabbit, laughing beside her. "How absurd. Come with us instead. We're going down to the boats." There were four of them, all rabbits, three women and a man with his arm around two of them.

It seemed a reasonable thing to do. As reasonable as anything else. And better, after all, than wandering alone. She shared the leather flask with them on the way to the lake.

Behind the mask, which alone made tonight possible, eyes watched from the shadows of a recessed doorway as a stag was briefly kissed by a white owl and then stalked gracefully away, leaving a flask of wine behind.

The owl hesitated visibly, drank again from the flask, and then went off in another direction with a quartet of rabbits.

The rabbits didn't matter at all. The stag and the owl were known. The watching one—disguised, on a whim, as a lioness—left the shelter of the doorway and followed the stag.

There were surviving pagan legends, in countries now worshipping either Jad or the stars of Ashar, about a man changed into a stag. In those lands conquered by the followers of the sun god, the man had been so transmuted for having abandoned a battlefield for a woman's arms. In the east—in Ammuz and

Soriyya, before Ashar had changed the world with his visions—the ancient tale was of a hunter who had spied upon a goddess bathing in a forest pool and was altered on the spot.

In each tale, the stag—once a man—was fair game for the hunting dogs and was torn apart in the heart of a dark wood for his sin, his one unforgivable sin.

In the years since Ragosa's Carnival had begun a number of traditions had emerged. License, of course, was one—and to be expected. Art, its frequent bedfellow, was another.

There was a tavern—Ozra's—between the palace and the River Gate to the south. Here, under the benevolent eye of the longtime proprietor, the poets and musicians of Ragosa—and those who, masked, wished to be numbered among them, if only for a night—would gather to offer anonymous verse and song to each other and to those who paused in their torchlit careen to listen at the door.

Carnival was quieter in Ozra's, though not the less interesting for that. The masks led people to perform in ways they might never have ventured, exposed as themselves. Some of the most celebrated artists of the city had, over the years, come to this unassuming tavern on Carnival night to gauge the response their work might elicit with the aura of fame and fashion removed.

They had not always been pleased with the results. Tonight's was a difficult, sophisticated audience and they, too, were masked.

Amusing things happened, sometimes. It was still remembered how, a decade ago, one of the wadjis had taken the performer's stool, disguised as a crow, and chanted a savage lampoon against Mazur ben Avren. An attempt, clearly, to take their campaign against the Kindath chancellor to a different level.

The wadji had had a good voice, and even played his instrument passably well, but he'd refused the customary performer's glass of wine far too awkwardly, and he had also neglected to remove the traditional sandals of the wadjis, modeled on those Ashar had worn in the desert. From the moment he'd sat down everyone in the tavern knew exactly what he was, and the diversion the knowledge offered had quite removed the sting from the lampoon.

The next year three crows appeared in Ozra's, and each of them wore wadjis' sandals. They drank in unison, however, and then performed together and there was nothing devout about that performance. The satire, this time, was directed at the wadjis—to great and remembered success.

Ragosa was a city that valued cleverness.

It also respected the rituals of this night, though, and the performer now taking his place on the stool between the four candles in their tall black holders was granted polite attention. He was effectively disguised: the full-face mask of a greyhound above nondescript clothing that revealed nothing. No one knew who he was. That was, of course, the point.

He settled himself, without an instrument, and looked around the crowded room. Ozra di Cozari, once of Eschalou in Jalona, but long since at home here in Al-Rassan, watched from behind his bar as the man on the stool appeared to notice someone. The greyhound hesitated, then inclined his head in a greeting. Ozra followed the glance. The figure so saluted, standing by the doorway, had come in some time ago, remaining near the entranceway. He must have had to duck his head to enter, because of the branching tines of his horns. Beneath the exquisite stag mask that hid his eyes and the upper part of his face, he appeared to smile in return.

Ozra turned back to the greyhound between the candles, and listened. As it happened, he knew who this was. The poet began without title or preamble.

There was a stir in the tavern. This was something unexpected, in structure and in tone. The poet, whoever he was, paused and sipped from the glass at his elbow. He looked around again, waiting for stillness, then resumed.

The poet ended. He rose without ceremony and stepped down from the dais. He could not avoid the applause, however, the sound of genuine appreciation, nor the speculative glances that followed him to the bar.

Ozra, following tradition here as well, offered him a glass of his best white wine. He usually made a quip at this time, but could think of nothing to say.

Ask of the wine that flows tonight.

Ozra di Cozari was seldom moved by what was read or sung in his tavern, but there was something about what he had just heard. The man in the greyhound disguise lifted the glass and saluted him briefly, before drinking. It was with no great surprise that Ozra noticed, just then, that the stag had come in from the doorway and was standing beside them.

The greyhound turned and looked at him. They were of a height, the two men, though the horns of the stag made him seem taller.

Very softly, so that Ozra di Cazari was almost certain he was the only other man to hear, the seven-lined stag said, " 'Beloved of Ashar?' "

The poet laughed, quietly. "Ah, well. What would you have me do?"

Ozra didn't understand, but he hadn't expected to.

The other man said, "Exactly what you did do, I suppose." His eyes were completely hidden behind his mask. He said, "It was very fine. Dark thoughts for a Carnival."

"I know." The greyhound hesitated. "There is a darker side to Carnivals, in my experience."

"In mine, as well."

"Are we to have a verse from you?"

"I think not. I am humbled by what I have just heard."

The greyhound inclined his head. "You are far too generous. Are you enjoying the night?"

"A pleasant beginning. I gather it has only begun."

"For some."

"Not you? Will you not come wandering? With me?"

Another hesitation. "Thank you, no. I will drink a little more of Ozra's good wine and listen to the verses and the music a while before bed."

"Are we expecting any crows tonight?"

The greyhound laughed again. "You heard about that? We never expect anything at Carnival, and so hope never to be disappointed and never greatly surprised."

The stag lifted its head. "We differ there, at least. I am always, endlessly, hoping to be surprised."

"Then I wish it for you."

They exchanged a glance, then the stag turned away and found a passage to the doorway and out into the street. A black bull had taken the dais now, holding a small harp.

"I think," said the greyhound, "I will have another glass, Ozra, if you will."

"Yes, my lord," said Ozra, before he could stop himself. He'd said it softly though, and didn't think anyone had heard.

As he poured the wine he saw the first of the women approaching the poet where he stood at the bar. This always happened, too, at Carnival.

"Might we talk a moment in private?" asked the lioness softly. The greyhound turned to look at her. So did Ozra. It was not a woman's voice.

"Private speech is difficult to arrange tonight," the poet said.

"I'm certain you can manage it. I have some information for you."

"Indeed?"

"I will want something in return."

"Imagine my astonishment."

The greyhound sipped from his wine, eyeing the newcomer carefully. The lioness laughed, a deep, disconcerting sound beneath the mask.

Ozra felt a flicker of unease. From the tone of this, this man masked as a woman knew exactly who the poet was, which posed more than a measure of danger.

"You do not trust yourself with me?"

"If I knew who you were, I might. Why have you worn a mask to change your sex?"

Only the briefest hesitation. "It amused me. There is no beast more fierce, in the legends, in defense of her young."

The greyhound carefully laid down his glass.

"I see," he said finally. "You are very bold. I must say, I am surprised, after all." He looked at Ozra. "Is there a room upstairs?"

"Use mine," said the innkeeper. He reached beneath the counter and handed across a key. The greyhound and the lioness moved together across the room and up the stairs. A number of eyes watched them go, as the black bull on the dais finished tuning his instrument and began to play.

"How did you find me?" Mazur ben Avren asked, removing the greyhound mask in the small bedchamber.

The other man struggled with his own mask a moment, then pulled it off. "I was led to you," he said. "I had a choice of two people to follow, and made the right choice. The stag brought me here."

"You knew him?"

"I tend to know men by how they move as much as how they look. Yes, I knew him," said Tarif ibn Hassan, scratching at his chin where the full white beard had been shaved away. He smiled.

So, too, after a moment, did the chancellor of Ragosa.

"I had not ever thought to meet you," he said. "You know there is a price on your life here?"

"Of course I do. I am offended by it: Cartada has offered more."

"Cartada has suffered more."

"I suppose. Shall I rectify that?"

"Shall I let you leave the city?"

"How would you stop me if I killed you now?"

The chancellor appeared to be considering that. After a moment, he moved to a small table and picked up a beaker of wine sitting there. There were glasses, as well. He gestured with the wine.

"As you will perhaps have realized, I have an arrangement here with the innkeeper. We are private, but not entirely alone. I hope you will not require me to demonstrate."

The outlaw looked around then and noted the inner door ajar and another door to the balcony. "I see," he said. "I ought to have expected this."

"I suppose so. I do have responsibilities, and cannot be entirely reckless, even tonight."

Ibn Hassan accepted the glass the chancellor offered. "If I wanted to kill you I could still do it. If you wanted to take me, you could have done so by now."

"You mentioned tidings. And a price. I am curious."

"The price you ought to know." Ibn Hassan looked pointedly over at his discarded mask.

"Ah," said the chancellor. "Of course. Your sons?"

"My sons. I find I miss them in my old age."

"I can understand that. Good sons are a great comfort. They are fine men, we enjoy having them with us."

"They are missed in Arbastro."

"The sad fortunes of war," said ben Avren calmly. "What is it you have to tell me?"

Tarif ibn Hassan drank deeply and held out his glass. The chancellor refilled it.

"The Muwardis have been building boats all winter. In the new shipyards at Abeneven. Hazem ibn Almalik is still with them. He has lost a hand. I don't know how, or why."

Mazur's turn to drink, thoughtfully. "That is all?"

"Hardly. I try to offer fair coinage when I make a request. Almalik II of Cartada has been seeding rumors about the Kindath of Fezana. I do not know to what purpose. There is growing tension there, however."

The chancellor set down the beaker of wine. "How do you know this?"

Tarif shrugged. "I know a good deal of what happens in lands controlled by Cartada. They have a large price on my life, remember?"

Mazur looked at him a long moment. "Almalik is anxious," he said finally. "He feels exposed. But he is clever and unpredictable. I will admit I have no great certainty about what he will do."

"Nor I," the outlaw chieftain agreed. "Does it matter? If it comes to armies?"

"Perhaps not. Have you anything more? Brighter coinage?"

"I have given good weight already, I think. But one more thing. Not brighter, though. The Jaddite army in Batiara. It is sailing for Soriyya after all. I never thought it would. I thought they would feed on each other over the winter and fall apart."

"So did I. It is not so?"

"It is not so."

There was a silence.

It was the outlaw, this time, who refilled both glasses. "I heard your verse," he said. "It seemed to me, listening, that you had a knowledge of these things already."

Ben Avren looked at him. "No. An apprehension, perhaps. My people have a custom, a superstition really. We voice our fears as a talisman: by bringing them into the open, we hope to make them untrue."

"Talismans," said Tarif ibn Hassan, "don't usually work."

"I know," said the chancellor. His voice turned brisk. "You have given, as promised, good weight. In truth, it hardly matters if you reveal the tale of the Emin ha'Nazar now. I can't readily imagine you would, in any case. The offer made to you there still stands: do you want to be part of the army that takes Cartada?"

"That tries to take Cartada."

"With your aid, I have great hopes that we would."

The old chieftain stroked the stubble of his chin. "I fear I will have little enough choice. Both my sons want to do this thing, and I have not the strength to overrule them together."

"That I do not believe," Mazur smiled. "But if you wish to put it in this way, it is no matter to me. Meet us north of Lonza. I will send heralds to you to arrange the exact timing, but we ride from here at the white full moon."

"So soon?"

"Even more urgently now, with what you have told me. If other armies are setting forth, we had best be first in the field, don't you think?"

"Are you covered at your back? In Fibaz?"

"That's where I spent the money the world thinks you stole from the parias party."

"Walls?"

"And soldiers. Two thousand from Karch and Waleska."

"And they will be loyal against Jaddites?"

"If I pay them, I believe they will be."

"What about Belmonte? Is Ser Rodrigo with you?"

Mazur looked thoughtful again. "He is, for now. If Ramiro of Valledo takes the field, I will not say I am sure of him."

"A dangerous man."

"Most useful men are dangerous." The chancellor's smile was wry. "Including beardless outlaws who want their sons back. I will send for them. Right now, in fact. It might be safest if you left tonight."

"I thought the same. I took the precaution of finding them before I looked for you. They are waiting for me outside the walls."

Mazur looked startled for the first time. He set down his glass. "You have them already? Then why ... ?"

"I wanted to meet you," the bandit chieftain said. His smile was grim. "After so many years. I also have a dislike for breaking my sworn word, though that might surprise you. They were granted their lives by ibn Khairan and Belmonte on our oath to accept their being hostages. Abir's life was given back to him by their physician."

"My physician," said the chancellor quickly.

Tarif raised his eyebrows. "As you please. In any case, I would have been unhappy to simply steal them away. It might have confirmed your worst thoughts of me."

"And instead?"

Ibn Hassan laughed. "I have probably confirmed your worst thoughts of me."

"Pretty much," said the chancellor of Ragosa. After a moment, though, he extended his hand. Ibn Hassan took it. "I am pleased to have spoken with you," Mazur said. "Neither of us is young. It might not have happened."

"I'm not planning on making an end soon," said ibn Hassan. "Perhaps next year I'll offer a verse here, at Carnival."

"That," said ben Avren, a hand at his own beard, "might be a revelation."

He sat alone for some time after the chieftain from Arbastro had donned his mask and left. He had no intention of telling anyone, but the news about the army sailing east struck him as almost unimaginably bad.

And rumors being spread about his Kindath brethren in Fezana—that was terrifying. He had literally no idea what Almalik II of Cartada had in mind, but it was clear that the man felt frightened and alone and was lashing out. Frightened men were the hardest of all to read, sometimes.

Ibn Hassan had asked about Rodrigo Belmonte, but not about the other one. The other one was just as much at issue, and in a way, he mattered even more.

"I wish," muttered Mazur ben Avren testily, "that I really were a sorcerer, whatever that is."

He felt tired suddenly, and his hip was bothering him again. It seemed to him that there ought to be orders to give to the bowmen on the balcony or the guards in the adjacent room, but there weren't.

It was Carnival. He could hear the noise from the street. It overwhelmed the harp music from below. The night was growing louder, wilder. Shouts and laughter. The sharp, high whirring of those noise-makers he hated. He wondered, suddenly, where the stag had gone.

Then he remembered what Zabira had told him, in bed the night before.

Fourteen

In fact, it was the cat that found Alvar, late in the wild night, well after the blue moon had risen and was shining down, a wandering presence among the stars.

He had separated from the others some time before. Lain had been dragged off, protesting unconvincingly, by a cluster of field mice. Their giggling gave them away: they were the girls who served at the tables in the favorite tavern of Rodrigo's men. Bristling old Lain had been the object of their teasing—and warnings about his fate tonight—for some time.

Ludus, endlessly curious, had lingered at a street corner to watch a wolf swallowing fire—trying to decipher the trick of it—and had never caught up with the rest of them. Alvar wasn't sure where and when he had lost Martin or how the peacock regalia that flamboyantly disguised a certain silk merchant had somehow managed to disappear. It was very late. He'd had more to drink than was good for any man.

He hadn't seen Jehane anywhere. He'd thought earlier that he might know her by her walk, but as the night continued and the streets grew more frenzied it even became difficult at times to tell if someone passing in the dark was a man or a woman. He reminded himself that she knew his mask; that if he kept moving she might find him in the crowd to offer a greeting, share laughter.

A kiss, perhaps, in this altered, wavering night. Although that was a dangerous channel for his thoughts.

There was too much license surrounding him, too charged and wanton a mood in the streets of Ragosa now. Alvar found himself almost aching with desire, and with something more complex than that.

Alone and far from home in a foreign land at night, amidst animals and birds and fabulous creatures that had never been, passing food stalls and wine sellers and musicians playing by the orange and amber light of candles and torches beneath the blue moon and the stars of spring, Alvar wandered the streets, a leather flask at one hip, and longed for comfort, for a sharing of what this difficult, mutable world offered to men and women.

He found something very different.

A leash, to be precise.

It was slipped over his eagle mask and around his neck as he stood watching dancers in a square not far from the barracks. The dancers had their hands all over each other, and the women were being lifted and swung about in a way he had never seen before. He tried to imagine himself joining in, then dismissed the thought. Not a soldier's son from a farm in the north of Valledo.

It was in that moment that the leash was dropped over him from behind and tightened about his throat. Alvar turned quickly. A passing torch was briefly too close; he couldn't see for a moment, and then he could.

"I will have to decide how offended I am," said the sleek jungle cat he had seen in the street the morning before. "You were to have found me, Valledan. Instead ... "

She wore the necklace that had come with her mask and much other jewelry. Not a great deal of clothing, however, as if to compensate. What she was wearing clung to the lines of her body. The voice beneath the mask was remarkably near to a feline purr.

"I was looking!" Alvar stammered, then flushed beneath his own disguise.

"Good," she murmured. "That earns you some redress. Not all, mind you. I ought not to have had to be the huntress tonight."

"How did you know me?" he asked, struggling for self-possession.

He heard her laugh. "A man of your build wearing Asharite slippers? Not hard, my northern soldier." She paused, tugged a little on the golden leash. "You are mine now, you understand? For whatever I choose tonight."

Alvar discovered that his mouth had gone dry. He didn't answer. He didn't really have to. He saw her smile, beneath the mask. She began walking and he followed her, wherever she was taking him.

In one way, it was not far at all: just around the corner, a house fronting on the same wide square as their barracks, near the palace. They passed through an imposing double doorway, crossed a torchlit courtyard and climbed a flight of stairs. It was an elegantly appointed house. Servants, dressed in black, masked as small forest creatures, watched them pass, in silence.

In another sense, though, what ensued when they came to the room where she led him—with its balcony over the square, and its enormous fireplace, and the wide, canopied bed—marked one of the longest journeys of Alvar's life.

Jehane was alone again. She had left the four brown rabbits by the water, a little reluctantly, because they were amusing, but she wasn't inclined to become too much a part of their visibly growing intimacy, and at one point she had simply slipped off the fishing boat where they had been, and moved quietly back to the pier and into the crowd.

She still had the wine flask the stag had left her, but she'd stopped drinking. She felt clear-headed now, almost unsettlingly so. She was discovering, as she moved through the late-night streets, that Carnival, for all its disguises, was a difficult night in which to hide from the self after all.

At one point she caught a glimpse of Husari in his spectacular mask. The silk merchant was dancing, part of a group of figures. In fact, he was in the center of a ring, turning in neat-footed movements while the laughing crowd applauded him. Jehane paused a short distance away, smiling behind her owl face, long enough to see a woman masked as a vixen step from the circle to come up to the peacock and loop her arms around his neck, careful of the feathers. They began moving together, gracefully.

Jehane watched for another moment and then moved on.

It might have seemed as if her wandering was aimless, carrying her with the swirling movements of the crowd past entertainments and food vendors, to pause outside tavern windows listening to the music floating out, or to sit for a time on the stone bench outside one of the larger homes and watch the people flowing past like a river in the night.

It wasn't so, however. Her movements were not, in the end, random. Honest with herself, tonight and most nights, Jehane knew where her steps were drawing her, however slowly, by whatever meandering paths through the city. She couldn't claim to be happy, or easy in her soul about this, but her heartbeat grew steadily quicker, and the doctor in her could diagnose that, at least, without difficulty.

She rose from a last bench, turned a corner and walked down a street of handsome mansions near the palace. Passing elegant, formal facades, she saw the door of one house closing behind a man and a woman. She caught a glimpse of a leash. That stirred a memory, but then it drifted away.

And so it was that she found herself standing outside a very large building. There were torches set along the wall at intervals but very little ornament and the windows above were all dark save for one, and she knew that room.

Jehane stood against a rough stone wall across the street, oblivious now to the people passing by her in the square, and gazed up at the highest level of that building, towards the solitary light.

Someone was awake and alone, very late at night.

Someone was writing, on newly bought parchment. Not ransom demands; letters home. Jehane looked up past the smoke of the passing torches and those fixed in the walls, and struggled to accept and make sense of what lay within her heart. Overhead, shining along the street and down upon all the people in the square, the blue moon bathed the night in its glow. The sliver of the white moon had just risen. She had seen it by the water. She could not see it here. In the teachings of the Kindath, the white moon meant clarity; the blue one was mystery; secrets of the soul, complexities of need.

A small man, amusingly disguised beneath a blond wig and the thick yellow beard of a Karcher, staggered past her, carrying a long-legged woman in the veiled guise of a Muwardi from the desert. "Put me down!" the woman cried, unconvincingly, and laughed. They continued along the street, lit by torches and the moon, and turned the corner out of sight.

There would be a guard by the door of the barracks. Someone who had drawn one of the short straws and been posted, complaining, on duty for a part of tonight. Whoever it was, he would let her pass. They all knew her. She could identify herself and be allowed to enter. And then go up the first circling flight of stairs and then the second one, and then down a dark hallway to knock on that last door behind which a candle burned.

His voice would call out, not at all alarmed. She would say her name. There would be a silence. He would rise from his desk, from his letter home, and cross to open the door. Looking up into his grey eyes, she would step into his room and remove her mask, finally, and find, by the steady light of that candle ... what?

Sanctuary? Shelter? A place to hide from the heart's truth of tonight and all nights?

Standing alone in the street, Jehane shook her head a little and then, quite unconsciously, gave the small shrug those who knew her best could always recognize.

She squared her shoulders and drew a deep breath. It was Carnival in Ragosa. A time for hiding from others, perhaps, but not from the self. It was important to have come here, she understood. To have stood gazing up at that window and pictured herself ascending a winding stair towards the man in that room. Important to acknowledge certain truths, however difficult. And then, having done so, it was as important to turn away and move on. Truly wandering now. Alone in the frenzy of the night streets, searching again—but, more truly, waiting to be found.

If, indeed, it was to happen. If, somewhere between moon and torchlight and dark, this would be.

As she stepped away from the stone wall and turned her back on that room with its pale glow of light far above, another figure also moved, detaching from shadow, following her.

And a third figure followed that one, unnoticed in the loud streets of Ragosa, as this dance, one among so many in the whirling night and the sad, sweet world, moved towards its beginning and its end.

She was outside the palace, watching two jugglers toss wheels of flame back and forth, when the voice from behind spoke to her.

"I believe you have my wine flask." The tones were low, muffled by a mask; even now, she wasn't entirely certain.

She turned. It was not the stag.

A lion stood before her, golden-maned, imperial. Jehane blinked and took a step backwards, bumping into someone. She had been reaching to her hip for the leather flask, now she let it fall again.

"You are deceived," she said. "I do have someone's flask, but it was a stag who left it with me."

"I have been a stag," the lion said, in oracular tones. The voice changed, "I can assure you I will never be one again."

Something in the inflection. Not to be mistaken. She knew, finally. And the hard, quick hammering was in her pulse.

"And why is that?" she asked, struggling to keep her voice steady. She was grateful for darkness, for fitful, passing light, for her own mask.

"Plays all havoc in doorways," said the lion. "And I ended up collecting ridiculous things on the horns, just walking. A hat. A flask. A torch once. Almost set myself on fire."

She laughed, in spite of herself.

The voice changed again. "It is late now, Jehane," said this man who seemed to have found her in the night after all. "It may even be too late, but shall we walk together a while, you and I?"

"How did you know me?" she asked, not answering the question, nor asking the harder one he'd invited. Not yet. Not quite yet. Her heart was loud. She felt it as a drumbeat in the dark.

"I think," said Ammar ibn Khairan of Aljais, very slowly, "that I should know you in a pitch black room. I think I would know you anywhere near me in the world." He paused. "Is that answer enough, Jehane? Or too much of one? Will you say?"

She heard, for the first time ever, uncertainty in his voice. And that, more than any other thing, was what made her tremble.

She asked, "Why might it be too late? The blue moon is still high. The night has a distance to run."

He shook his head. Left a silence. She heard laughter and applause behind her. The jugglers had done something new.

Ibn Khairan said, "My dear, I have been other things in my time, besides a stag at Carnival."

She understood. For all the wit and edge and irony, there was this grace to him, always, an allowance for her own intelligence. She said, honestly, "I know this, of course. It is a part of why I'm afraid."

"That is what I meant," he said simply.

All the stories. Through the years a young girl hearing, against her will, gossip by the well in Fezana, or at the shallow place by the river where the women washed their clothes. And then, a woman herself, home from studies abroad, hearing the same stories again. New names, new variations, the same man. Ibn Khairan of Aljais. Of Cartada.

Jehane looked at the man in the lion mask and felt something lodge, hard and painful, in the place where her heart was drumming.

He had killed the last khalif of Al-Rassan.

Behind the mask, in the flickering passage of torches all around where they were, she could just glimpse his eyes. They would be blue if he removed the disguise, if they stood in brighter light. She became aware that he was waiting for her to speak.

"Ought I to be afraid?" she asked, finally.

And he said, gravely, "No more than I, Jehane, in this."

Which was what she had needed to hear. Exactly what she needed, and Jehane, still wondering, still incredulous, took his hand in hers, saying, "Let us walk."

"Where would you like to go?" he asked, carefully, adjusting his stride to her pace.

"Where we can be alone," she said steadily, her grip firm, coming home at last to where her heart had been waiting since a summer's day in Fezana. "Where we can set aside owl and lion, apt as they might be, and be what we are."

"Flawed as we might be?" he asked.

"How otherwise?" she replied, discovering with surprise that her heartbeat had slowed the moment she had taken his hand. Something occurred to her, unexpectedly. She hesitated, and then, being what she was, asked, "Were you with me earlier, when I stopped outside the barracks?"

He didn't answer for a moment. At length he said, "Cleverest of women, you do your father and mother proud with every word you speak. Yes, I was there. I had already decided I could not approach you tonight before you made that choice on your own."

She shook her head, and gripped his hand more tightly. A thread of fear; she might so easily have gone up those stairs. "It wasn't the choice you may have thought it. It was a matter of hiding, or not."

"I know," he said. "Forgive me, my dear, but I know that."

His own honesty, risking her ruffled pride. But she did forgive him this, because the hiding had ended now, on a night of masks, and it was all right that he understood this. He had approached. He had found her.

They came to the house he leased. It was nearer the palace than the quarters she shared with Velaz. He opened the door to the street with his own key: the steward and servants had been dismissed for the night to their pleasures. They went inside.

On the street behind them, a figure watched them enter. He had been following Jehane, and he knew who the lion was. He hesitated, then decided it was all right to leave her now. He considered staying out for a while longer but decided against that. He was tired, and wasn't at all sure how he felt about the alleged delights of Carnival.

Ziri went back to the barracks, spoke briefly with the man on duty in the doorway, then went into the dormitory and to bed. He was asleep almost immediately, alone in the large room. All the others were still in the streets.

In Ammar ibn Khairan's house, the servants had left two torches burning to light the entrance hall, and there were candles in the wall sconces. Before going up the stairs they removed their masks and set them aside and Jehane saw his eyes by the burning of those lights. This time it was he who stepped towards her and this time, when they kissed, it was not the same—not at all the same—as it had been in her father's room, by the open window the summer before.

And so she discovered that her heartbeat, which had steadied and slowed while they walked, wasn't quite so steady any longer, and the trembling had returned.

They went up the stairs, and they kissed again, slowly, outside his bedroom door, where a spill of candlelight showed in a line along the floor. She felt his hands around her, strong and sure, drawing her close. Desire was within her, an ache of need, deep and wide and strong as a river rising in the dark.

His mouth moved from hers, and went to one ear. Softly he whispered, "There is someone in my room. The candles would not have been left burning there."

Her heart thudded once, and seemed actually to stop for a moment before starting to beat again.

They had been silent ascending the stairs, and now here. Anyone in the bedroom would have heard the front door open, though, and known Ammar was in the house, alone or accompanied. She asked the question with her eyes only. His mouth came back to her ear. "They want me to know they're here. I have no idea. To be safe, go along to the next room. There's a balcony, shared with mine. Listen there. Be careful."

She nodded. "And you," she murmured, no more than a breath. "I want you healthy, after."

She felt his soundless laughter.

Afterwards, she would remember that: how utterly unafraid he had been. Diverted, intrigued, challenged, perhaps. But not at all frightened, or even disconcerted. She wondered what woman he had thought might be waiting. Or what man.

She went along the corridor. Opened the next door, silently passed within into a dark bedchamber. Just before she closed the door behind her, she heard Ammar call out, raising his voice, "Who is here? Why are you in my house?"

And then she heard the reply.

The door to the street would have been easy enough to unlock, and with the servants gone and candles helpfully burning it must have been no trick to find his bedroom.

Ibn Khairan, all his senses still oriented towards the feel and scent of the woman who had just slipped down the corridor, called out to the intruder, his mind struggling to sort through possibilities. Too many. Tonight and all nights there were too many people who might be waiting for him in his room.

Even so, even with twenty years of experience in such mysteries, he was not, in fact, prepared.

The door swung open, almost as soon as he called out. A man stood there, unmasked, in the spill of candlelight from the room.

"Finally," said King Almalik II of Cartada, smiling. "I had begun to fear a journey wasted."

It took an extreme effort, all his celebrated poise, but ibn Khairan managed a return smile, and then a bow. "Good evening, 'Malik. My lord king. This is a surprise. A long journey, it must have been."

"Almost two weeks, Ammar. The roads were not good at all."

"Were you extremely uncomfortable?" Polite questions. Buying time for thoughts to begin to organize themselves. If Almalik of Cartada was taken in Ragosa, the balance of power in Al-Rassan would change, at a stroke.

"Tolerably." The young man who had been his protege for three years smiled again. "You never allowed me to grow soft, and I haven't been king long enough for that to change." He paused, and Ammar saw, in that hesitation, that the king wasn't quite as composed as he might want to appear. "You understand that I could only do this tonight."

"I wouldn't have thought you could do it at all," ibn Khairan said frankly. "This is a rather extreme risk, 'Malik."

He found himself offering thanks to all possible deities that Jehane was out of sight, and praying she could keep quiet enough. Almalik could not possibly afford to be reported here, which meant that anyone who saw him was in mortal danger. Ibn Khairan deferred, for a moment, the question of where this left him.

He said, "I'd best join you inside."

The king of Cartada stepped back and Ammar walked into his own room. He registered the two Muwardis waiting there. There was an air of unreality to all of this. He was still trying to absorb the astonishing fact that Almalik had come here. But then, suddenly, as he turned to face the king, he grasped what this had to be about and disorientation spun away, to be replaced by something almost as unsettling.

"No one but you," said the king of Cartada quietly, "calls me 'Malik any more."

"Forgive me. Old habits. I'll stop, of course. Magnificence."

"I didn't say it offended me."

"No, but even if it doesn't ... you are the king of Cartada."

"I am, aren't I?" Almalik murmured. He sank down into the northern-style armchair by the bed; a young man, not particularly graceful, but tall and well-made. "And, can you believe it, the first act of my reign, very nearly, was to exile the man I most needed."

Which made it all quite explicit.

He had not changed in this, ibn Khairan noted. A capacity for directness was something Almalik had always had, even as a boy. Ammar had never resolved within himself whether it marked a strength, or a tactic of the weak: forcing stronger friends to deal with his declared vulnerabilities. His eyelid was moving, but that was something one hardly noticed after a while.

"You hadn't even been crowned," ibn Khairan said softly.

He really wasn't prepared for this conversation. Not tonight. He had been readying himself, in an entirely different way, for something else. Had stood watching in the street, holding his breath like a boy, while Jehane bet Ishak had gazed upwards at a high, candlelit window, and he had only begun to breathe normally again when she gave the shrug he knew and moved on, a stillness seeming to wrap itself about her amid the tumult of the night.

He had never thought it might require courage to approach a woman.

"I am surprised to find you alone," Almalik said, a little too lightly.

"You shouldn't be," ibn Khairan murmured, being careful now. "Tonight's encounters lack a certain ... refinement, wouldn't you say?"

"I wouldn't know, Ammar. It seemed lively enough. We spent some time looking for you, and then I realized it was hopeless. It was easier to buy the location of your house and wait."

"Did you really come to Ragosa expecting to find me in the streets at Carnival?"

"I came here because I could see no other way to speak with you quickly enough. I had only hope, and need, when we set out. There is no company of men with me, by the way. These two, and half a dozen others for safety on the road. No one else. I have come to say certain things. And to ask you to come back to me."

Ibn Khairan was silent. He had been waiting for this, and latterly, had been afraid of it. He had been the guardian and mentor of this man, the named heir to Cartada's throne. Had put a great deal of effort into making of Almalik ibn Almalik a man worthy of power. He did not like admitting failure. He wasn't even certain he had failed. This was going to be ferociously difficult.

He crossed to the sideboard, deliberately brushing past one of the Muwardis. The man did not move, or even spare a glance. They hated him; all of them did. His whole life was a sustained assault upon their grim piety. It was a sentiment he returned: their way of life—single-minded faith, single-minded hatred—affronted all his sensibilities, his perception of what life ought to be.

"Will you take a glass of wine?" he asked the king of Cartada, deliberately provoking the Muwardis. Unworthy, perhaps, but he couldn't help this.

Almalik shrugged, nodded his head. Ibn Khairan poured for both of them and carried the glasses over. They saluted each other, top of glass touching bottom, then bottom to top.

"It took courage for you to do this," Ammar said. It was right that he acknowledge this.

Almalik shook his head, looking up at him from the chair. In the candlelight it could be seen how young he still was. And standing more closely now, ibn Khairan could see the marks of strain.

"It took only an awareness that if you do not return I do not know what I will do. And I understand you very well, Ammar, in some things. What was I to do? Write you pleading letters? You would not have come. You know you would not."

"Surely the king of Cartada is surrounded by men of wisdom and experience?"

"Now you are jesting. Do not."

Quick anger flared, surprising him. Before it could be suppressed, ibn Khairan snapped, "It was you who exiled me. Be so good as to remember that, 'Malik."

A raw wound: the pupil turning upon the teacher in the moment of shared ascendancy. An old story, in truth, but he had never thought it would happen to him. First the father, and then the son.

"I do remember it," Almalik said quietly. "I made a mistake, Ammar."

Weakness or strength, it had always been hard to tell. This trait might even be, at different times, a sign of both. The father had never, in twenty years together, admitted to an error.

"Not all mistakes can be undone." He was stalling, waiting for something to make this clearer for him. Behind, beneath all these words lay a decision that had to be made.

Almalik stood up. "I know that, of course. I am here in the hope that this was not one such. What is it you want, Ammar? What must I say?"

Ibn Khairan looked at him a moment before answering. "What is it I want? To write in peace, I could answer, but that would be dissembling, wouldn't it? To live my life with a measure of honor—and be seen by the world to be doing so. That would be true enough and that, incidentally, is why I had to kill your father."

"I know that. I know it better than anyone." The king hesitated. "Ammar, I believe the Jaddites will be coming south this summer. My brother is with Yazir ibn Q'arif in the desert, still. We have learned they are building ships. In Abeneven. And I don't know what King Badir intends."

"So you tried to kill the boys?"

Almalik blinked. It was an unfair thrust, but he was a clever man, very much his father's son. He said, "Those two men weren't killed in a tavern brawl, then? I wondered about that." The king shrugged. "Am I the first ruler in Al-Rassan to try to strengthen himself by dealing with siblings? Were you not my teacher of history, Ammar?"

Ibn Khairan smiled. "Did I criticize?"

Almalik flushed suddenly. "But you stopped them. You saved the boys. Zabira's sons."

"Others did. I was a small part of it. I am exiled here, Almalik, remember? I have signed a contract in Ragosa, and have been honoring it."

"With my enemies!" A young man's voice now, the control slipping, a boy's words.

Ibn Khairan felt something twist within him like a soft blade. He knew this part of the man. Of the king. He said, "It seems we live in a world where boundaries are shifting all the time. This makes it more difficult for a man to do what is right."

"Ammar, no. Your place is in Cartada. You have always served Cartada, striven for it." He hesitated, then set down his glass and said, "You killed a khalif for my father, can you not at least come home for me?"

It seemed that with understanding there so often came sadness. This one was measuring himself, still, against a dead man, just as he had when his father lived. He would probably do this all his life, whether long or short. Testing. Comparing allotments of love. Demanding to be cared for as much, and more.

It occurred to ibn Khairan, for the first time, to wonder how the young king had reacted to the lament Ammar had written for his father. Where lesser beasts now gather ... He also realized, in that same moment, that Zabira had been right: 'Malik would not have suffered the concubine who had loved his father to live.

"I don't know," he said, answering the question. "I do not know where my place is now."

Somewhere inside him though, even as he spoke those words, a voice was saying: This is a lie, though once it might have been true. There is something new. The world can change, so can you. The world has changed. And in his mind, amazingly, he could hear her name, as if in the sound of bells. There was a momentary wonder that no one else in the room seemed to notice this.

He went on, straining to concentrate. "May I take it that this visit is intended to convey a rescinding of my exile and an invitation to return to my position?"

He made his words deliberately formal, to pull them back from the raw place where the king's question had taken them. Can you not come home for me?

The young king opened his mouth and closed it. There was hurt in his eyes. He said, stiffly, "You may take it as such."

"What position, precisely?"

Another hesitation. Almalik had not been prepared for a negotiating session. That was fine. Ammar had not been prepared for any of this.

"Chancellor of Cartada. Of course."

Ibn Khairan nodded. "And your formally declared successor, pending marriage and legitimate heirs?" The thought—monstrous thought!—had only come to him in this moment.

One of the Muwardis shifted by the fireplace. Ibn Khairan turned and looked at him. The man's eyes locked on his this time, black with hatred. Ammar smiled affably and drank slowly from his glass without looking away.

Almalik II of Cartada said, softly, "Is this your condition, Ammar? Is it wise?"

Of course it wasn't wise. It was sheerest folly.

"I doubt it," ibn Khairan said carelessly. "Leave that in reserve. Have you begun negotiations for a marriage?"

"Some overtures have been made to us, yes." Almalik's tone was awkward.

"You had best accept one of them soon. Killing children is less useful than begetting them. What have you done about Valledo?"

The king picked up his glass again and drained it before answering. "I am receiving useless advice, Ammar. They agonize, they wring their hands. They advise doubling the parias, then delaying it, then refusing it! I took some measures of my own to stir up Ruenda and we have a man there, do you remember him?"

"Centuro d'Arrosa. Your father bought him years ago. What of him?"

"I instructed him to do whatever he had to do to cause a mortal breach between Ruenda and Valledo. You know they were all to be meeting this spring. They may have done so by now."

Thoughtfully, ibn Khairan said, "King Ramiro doesn't need his brother's aid to menace you."

"No, but what if he is induced to ride against Ruenda, instead of against me?" Almalik's expression was that of a schoolboy who thinks he has passed a test.

"What have you done?"

King Almalik smiled. "Is it my loyal chancellor who asks?"

After a moment, ibn Khairan returned the smile. "Fair enough. What about Fezana itself, then? Defenses?"

"As best we can. Food storage for half a year. Some of the walls repaired, though money is an issue, as you will know. The additional soldiers in the new wing of the castle. I have allowed the wadjis to stir up anger against the Kindath."

Ammar felt a coldness as if a wind had come into the room. A woman was hearing this, out on the balcony.

"Why that?" he asked, very quietly.

Almalik shrugged. "My father used to do the same thing. The wadjis need to be kept happy. They inspire the people. In a siege that will matter. And if they do push some of the Kindath out, or kill a few, a siege will be easier to withstand. That seems obvious to me."

Ibn Khairan said nothing. The king of Cartada looked at him, a close, suspicious glance. "It has been reported to me that you spent time on the Day of the Moat with a Kindath physician. A woman. Was there a reason?"

It seemed that answers to the hardest questions life offered might come in unexpected ways. In the strangest fashion, that cold, narrowed gaze came as a relief to ibn Khairan. A reminder of what had always kept him from truly loving the boy who had become this man, despite a number of reasons for doing so.

"You had my movements traced?"

The king of Cartada was unfazed. "You were the one who taught me that all information helped. I wanted you back. I was searching for ways to achieve it."

"And spying out my activities seemed a good method of enlisting my willing aid?"

"Aid," said the king of Cartada, "can come for many reasons and in many guises. I could have kept this a secret from you, Ammar. I have not. I am here in Ragosa, trusting you. Now your turn: was there a reason, Ammar?"

Ibn Khairan snorted. "Did I want to bed her, you mean? Come on, 'Malik. I went to find that doctor because she was the physician of someone invited to the ceremony. A man who said he was too ill to come. I had no idea who she was until later. She was, incidentally, Ishak ben Yonannon's daughter. You'll know that by now. Does it mean anything to you?"

Almalik nodded. "My father's physician. I remember him. They blinded him when Zabira's last child was born."

"And cut out his tongue."

The king shrugged again. "We have to keep the wadjis happy, don't we? Or if not happy, at least not preaching against us in the streets. They wanted the Kindath doctor to die. My father surprised me then, I remember." Almalik gestured suddenly with both hands. "Ammar, I have no weapons against you here. I don't want a weapon. I want you as my sword. What must I do?"

This had gone on too long, ibn Khairan realized. It was painful, and there was greater danger the longer it lasted. He carried no blade either, save the usual one taped to his left arm. However calm Almalik seemed, he was a man who could be pushed to rashness, and the Muwardi tribesmen would dance under the desert stars if they learned that Ammar ibn Khairan of Aljais had died.

He said, "Let me think on this, 'Malik. I have a contract that ends at the beginning of autumn. Honor may be served by then."

"By autumn? You swear it? I will have you—"

"I said, let me think. That is all I will say."

"And what should I do in the meantime?"

Ibn Khairan's mouth quirked with amusement. He couldn't help it. He was a man who found many things in life inexpressibly ironic. "You want me to tell you how to govern Cartada? Here and now? In this room, during Carnival?"

After a moment, Almalik laughed, and shook his head. "You would not believe how badly I am served, Ammar."

"Then find better men! They exist. All over Al-Rassan. Put your labors into that."

"And into what else?"

Ibn Khairan hesitated. Old habits died very hard. "You are probably right: Fezana is in danger. Whether the Jaddite army in Batiara sails this spring or not, there is a changed mood in the north. And if you lose Fezana, I do not think you can hold your dais. The wadjis will not allow it."

"Or the Muwardis," said Almalik, with a glance at the guards in the room. The veiled ones remained impassive. "I have already done one further thing about this. Tonight, actually, here in Ragosa. You will approve."

Odd, odd and sometimes frightening, how a lifetime's instincts could put the soldier in one on such instantaneous alert.

"Approve of what?" he asked, keeping his voice calm.

Later, he would realize that he had somehow known, though, even before the king of Cartada answered him.

"As I told you, six others came with me. I've had them find and kill the Valledan mercenary Belmonte. He is too dangerous to be permitted to go back to King Ramiro from his own exile. It seems he never left his room tonight; they know where he is, and there is only one guard at the street door." Almalik of Cartada smiled. "It is a useful blow, Amman I hurt Badir and Ramiro both, very badly, by taking this man away from them."

And me, Ammar ibn Khairan was thinking then, but did not say. And me. Very badly.

They had defeated five men together, in a display last autumn. Rodrigo would have been alone tonight, however, and not expecting an assault. There were people costumed as Muwardis all over the city. Six silent killers, one frustrated guard at the street door. He could picture how it would have been. It would be over by now.

Even so, there were things one did, movements shaped without actual thought. The drive towards action as a blocking of pain. Even as the king of Cartada finished speaking, ibn Khairan had spun back to the door of his room, and was pulling it open. As he did so, in the same smooth movement, he ducked down low, so the blade thrown at his back embedded itself instead in the dark wood of the door.

Then he was out, running down the corridor, taking the stairs three and then four at a time, knowing that if Almalik had told him about this it was much too late already, but running, running.

Even in his haste, he remembered to do one thing before hurtling out the door and back into the street.

"Fool!" Jehane heard the king of Cartada shout. "What were you doing with that knife? I want him with us, you worm!"

"He will not be."

The other man, the Muwardi, had a desert accent and a voice deep as an old grave. She could see none of them. Just out of sight on the double balcony, Jehane felt a grief heavy as a smith's anvil pulling on her heart. She clenched her fists, nails biting into palms. She could do nothing. She had to wait for them to leave. She wanted to scream.

"He will come back," she heard the young king rasp. "He is upset about the Valledan, a comrade-at-arms. I thought he might be, but ibn Khairan is not a man who makes decisions based on such things. He would have been the first to tell me to plan a stroke such as this."

"He will not be with you," the other man said again, blunt, quiet, sure.

There was a short silence.

"Kill this man," said Almalik II of Cartada calmly. "This is a command. You were under orders not to harm ibn Khairan. These orders were violated with that blade. Execute him. Now."

Jehane caught her breath. Then, more quickly than she could have imagined, she heard a grunting sound. Someone fell.

"Good," she heard the king of Cartada say, after a moment. "At least some of you are loyal. Leave his body. I want Ammar to know I had him killed." Jehane heard footsteps. The king's voice came from farther away. "Come. It is time to leave Ragosa. I have done what I could. We can do nothing but wait on Ammar now."

"You can kill him," the second Muwardi said in a soft, uninflected tone. "If he refuses you, why should he be permitted to live?"

The king of Cartada made no reply.

A moment later, Jehane heard them going out, and then down the stairs.

She waited until she heard the front door open and close again, and then she raced to follow—through the second bedroom, and out into the corridor. She spared one quick glance into Ammar's chamber. There was a man lying on the floor.

The doctor in her compelled a pause; for too many years this had been an instinct. She rushed in, knelt beside him, felt for a heartbeat. He was, of course, dead. No blade remained, but the wound was in his throat. The Muwardis knew how to kill.

Rodrigo would have been at his desk. Writing a letter home. Expecting carousing friends, if any knock had come.

Jehane scrambled to her feet and sped down the stairs into the entranceway. She looked for her mask on the small table. It was not there. She froze.

Then she understood. Ammar had taken it: that the Cartadans not see an owl mask and surmise the presence of a woman here. For all she knew, King Almalik might even have understood the symbol of the owl as physician: he had been Ammar's pupil, hadn't he?

Which was a part of the grief that now lay like a stone at the center of a spinning night. She pushed open the door and ran out, unmasked now, into the roiling street. She began forcing her way through the crowd towards the barracks. Someone groped for her, playfully. Jehane twisted away and kept moving. It was difficult, people were everywhere, amid torches and smoke. It took her a long time to get through.

Afterwards, she realized that it was the silence that had warned her.

When she came back into the square before the barracks, she saw that the huge crowd had grown unnaturally still and had forced itself back towards the perimeter of the square, away from a place where someone lay on the ground.

By the torches and the one moon, she saw Ammar standing there, unmasked, ashen-faced, with a number of other men she knew extremely well. She pushed her way through the murmuring onlookers and knelt beside the wounded man on the cobblestones. It only took one glance. It was too late for a doctor's art here. Heartsick, too shocked to speak, she began, helplessly, to weep.

"Jehane," whispered the dying man. His eyes had opened and were locked on hers. "Jehane ... I ... so very ... "

She put her fingers gently to his lips. Then laid her hand against his cheek. There was a Muwardi knife embedded in his chest, and a hideous, pouring sword wound deep in his collarbone, and that was what was going to kill him.

A moment later, it did. She watched him reach for a last, inadequate breath and then close his eyes, as if in weariness. This was one of the ways men died. She had seen it so many times. Her fingers were still against his cheek when he went away from all of them, to whatever lay in wait beyond the dark.

"My dear," she said, brokenly. "Oh, my dear."

Was it always like this? That one thought of all the things one so much wanted to say, endlessly too late?

Above her the circle of soldiers parted. Someone passed between them and sank to his knees on the other side of the body, heedless of the dark blood soaking the cobblestones. He was breathing quickly, as if he'd been running. Jehane didn't look up, but then she saw him reach forward and take the dead man by the hand.

"May there be light waiting for you," she heard him say, very softly. "More and gentler light than any of us can dream or imagine."

She did look up then, through her tears.

"Oh, Jehane," said Rodrigo Belmonte. "I am so sorry. This should never have happened. He saved my life."

At some point, with all the unmixed wine he had drunk, and the heady smell of incense burning in the room, and the many-colored candles everywhere, and the useful pillows on bed and woven carpet, and the extraordinary ways it seemed that a slender golden leash could be used, Alvar lost track of time and place.

He moved with this unknown woman, and upon her, and at times beneath her urgency. They had removed their masks when they entered the house. It didn't matter: she was still a hunting cat tonight, whatever she was by daylight in the customary round of the year. He had raking scratches down his body, as if to prove it. With some dismay he realized that she did, too. He couldn't remember doing that. Then, a little later, he realized he was doing it again. They were standing, coupled, bending forward against the bed then.

"I don't even know your name," he gasped, later, on the carpet before the fire.

"And why should that matter tonight, in any possible way?" she had replied.

Her fingers were long, the painted nails sharp. She was wondrously skilled with her hands, among other things. She had green eyes and a wide mouth. He gathered, through various signs, that he was giving pleasure as well as taking it.

Some time afterwards she chose to blow out all the candles and leash him in a particularly intimate fashion. They went out together, naked, with the marks of their lovemaking on both of them, to stand on the dark balcony one level above the teeming square.

She leaned against the waist-high balustrade and guided him into her from behind. Alvar was almost convinced by then that something had been put into his wine. He ought to have been exhausted by this point.

The night breeze was cool. His skin felt feverish, unnaturally sensitive. He could see past her, look down upon the crowd. Music and cries and laughter came up from below and it was as if they were hovering here, their movements almost a part of the dancing, weaving throng in the street. He had never imagined that lovemaking in such an exposed fashion could be so exhilarating. It was, though. He would be a liar to deny it. He might want to deny many things tomorrow, Alvar thought suddenly, but he was not capable of doing so just now.

"Only think," she whispered, tilting her head far back to whisper to him. "If any of them were to look up ... what they would see."

He felt her tug a little on the leash. He had put it about her, earlier. It was on him again. Very much so. His hands, which had been gripping the balustrade beside her, came up and encircled her small breasts. A man was playing a five-stringed lute directly below them. A ring of dancing figures surrounded him. In the center of the ring a peacock was dancing. The peacock was Husari ibn Musa.

"What do you think?" Alvar heard, tongue at his ear again, the long neck arched backwards. So much like a cat. "Shall we bring a torch out here and carry on?"

He thought of Husari looking up, and winced. But he didn't think he was going to be able to deny this woman anything tonight. And he knew, without yet having tested the limits of it, that she would refuse him nothing he might ask of her between now and dawn. He didn't know which thought excited or frightened him more. What he did know, finally understanding, was that this was the dark, dangerous truth at the heart of the Carnival. For this one night, all the rules of the circling year were changed.

He drew a long breath before answering her. He looked up from the crowd below them to the night sky: only the one moon, blue among the stars.

Still within her, moving steadily in their merging rhythms, Alvar looked down again, away from the distant lights in the sky to the nearer ones lit by mortal men and women to chase away the dark.

Across the square, between torches set into the wall of the barracks, he saw Rodrigo Belmonte falling.

He had indeed been sitting at the writing desk, parchment before him, ink and quills, a glass of dark wine at one elbow, trying to think of what more there was to say—of tidings, counsels, apprehensions, need.

He was not the sort of man who could write to his wife about how much he longed to have her in this room with him. How he would unbind her hair, strand by strand, and slip his arms about her and draw her near, after so long. Allow his hands to travel, and then, his own clothing gone, how they might ...

He could not write these things. He could think them, however, a kind of punishment. He could sit alone at night in a high room and listen to the sounds of revelry drifting up through the open window and he could picture Miranda in his mind, and imagine her here now, and feel weak with his desire.

He had made a promise years before, and had renewed it over and again—to her, but more to himself. He was not the kind of man who broke promises. He defined himself, in large part, by that. A man found his honor, Rodrigo Belmonte thought—and his self-respect, and certainly pride—on many different kinds of battlefields. He was on one, or hovering above one, tonight in Ragosa. He didn't write that to Miranda, either.

He picked up a quill again and dipped it into the black ink and prepared to resume: something for the boys, he thought, to take his mind from these unsettling channels.

The boys. Love there, too, sword-sharp; fear and pride as well. Almost men now. Too soon. Riding with him? Would that be best? He thought of the old outlaw Tarif ibn Hassan, in that echoing valley. A cunning, ferocious giant of a man. He had thought about him often since that day in the Emin ha'Nazar. Two sons there, as well. Kept beside him. Both of them fine men, capable and decent, though the one had lost his leg now, which was a misfortune. Alive though, thanks to Jehane. No longer young, either of them. And neither, it could be seen, would ever break free of the father's wide shade into his own defining sunlight, to cast his own shadow. Not even after Tarif died. It could be seen.

Would he do that to Fernan and Diego?

He became aware that he had been holding the pen for a long time over the smooth pale parchment. Writing nothing. Chasing thoughts. The ink had dried. He laid the quill down again.

There came a knocking at his door.

Later, tracking events backwards, he would realize what had put him—very slightly—on the alert.

He had not heard footsteps. Any of his own company come calling—as many of them had promised, or threatened, to do—would have warned him by their noisy progression up the stairs and along the corridor. The Muwardis were too schooled to silence. The stillness of the desert, at night under stars.

Even so, it was only a partial warning, because he had been expecting some of the men to come up tonight, with more wine, and stories from the streets. He'd even been wondering, feeling a little sorry for himself, what was taking them so long.

So he called out an easy greeting, and pushed his chair back, rising to let them in.

And the door burst open.

He had no weapon to hand: his sword and the rancher's whip lay across the room, by the bed where he always left them. Moving by sheerest instinct, triggered by that half-doubt at the back of his mind, he twisted desperately away from the first flung dagger. He felt it graze his arm. In the same wrenching motion he seized and hurled the candle from the desk into the face of the first man into the room.

There were two more behind that one, he had time to see. The sword was hopeless; he would never get to it.

He heard a cry of pain, but he had already turned. Hurtling straight over the desk, expecting a knife in his back any moment, Rodrigo Belmonte went out the open window.

The third-floor window. Much too far above the ground for a man to survive a fall to the street.

He had no intention of falling.

Lain had taught him a trick years and years ago. Whenever he spent a night in a room well above the ground, whether in castle or palace or barracks hall, Rodrigo would hammer a spike into the wall outside his window and tie a length of rope to that spike. A way out. He always wanted a way out. It had saved his life twice. Once here in Al-Rassan, with Raimundo in the time of exile, once on the Jalonan campaign.

He gripped the window ledge as he went through, and used that grip to turn his body to where he knew the rope to be. He let go of the ledge and reached for it.

The rope wasn't there.

Rodrigo fell, knees scraping along the wall. Even as he plummeted, fighting a blind panic, he realized that they must have scouted the location of his room earlier, while he was out, dining with the company. Someone with extremely good eyesight, and equally good with a bow, had shot and severed the coiled rope.

Figuring this out did nothing whatsoever to break his fall.

Something else did: the fact that Lain Nunez—with the privileges of age and rank—had taken the corner room directly below him, and had done the same thing outside his own chamber.

They hadn't bothered to shoot the lower rope. Hurtling down between moon and torches, Rodrigo reached out as he saw Lain's window rush up towards him and he clutched for—and found—the rope tied to a spike outside it.

It tore through his hands, shredding his palms. But it held, and he held on at the bottom, though his shoulders were almost pulled from their sockets. He ended up swinging back and forth between two torches on the barracks wall, one flight above the crowded square. No one seemed even to have noticed.

Or, no one not actually watching for him from below.

Rodrigo took a knife in the left arm, flung up from the street. No chance to quietly maneuver into a first-floor room. He let go, jerking the Muwardi dagger out as he fell. He landed hard, rolling immediately—and so went under the sword sweeping at him.

He rolled again on the cobblestones and then was up and spinning. A veiled Muwardi appeared before him, sword up. Rodrigo feinted left and then cut back the other way. The descending blade missed him, striking sparks on the stones. Rodrigo pivoted, swinging his knife at the back of the Muwardi's head. It sank into his neck. The man grunted and toppled over. Rodrigo grappled for the sword.

He ought to have died in that moment.

For all his celebrated prowess, his valor and experience, he ought to have died and left the world of men to meet his god behind the sun.

He was armed with only a knife, wounded already, and without armor. The assassins in the square had been hand-picked from among the desert warriors in Cartada for the task of killing him.

He would have died in Ragosa that night, had someone in that square not looked up to see him falling along the wall, and known him, and reacted to the sight of an upward-flung dagger in the night.

The third Muwardi, rushing up as Belmonte reached for that life-preserving sword, had his weapon out and slashing to kill.

His blade was intercepted and deflected by a wooden stave. The Muwardi swore, righted himself and received a hard blow on the shin from the staff. He wheeled, ignoring pain as a warrior had to and, raising the sword high, towards the holy stars, brought it sweeping downwards against the accursed interloper.

The man before him, alert and balanced, moved to parry this. The stave came up, crosswise, in precisely the right fashion. It was light wood, though, only part of a Carnival costume, and the descending Muwardi sword was real as death. The blade sheared through the staff as if it wasn't there and bit deep into the intruder's collarbone in the same moment that another dagger, flung by the third of the assassins, sank into the man's breast.

The nearer Muwardi grunted with satisfaction, ripped his sword roughly free, and died.

Rodrigo Belmonte, with that moment's respite granted—one of those moments that defined, with precision, the narrow space between living and lying dead on stone—had a Muwardi blade in his hand and a black rage in his heart.

He drove the sword straight into the chest of the Muwardi, tore it out, and turned to confront the third man. Who did not run, or visibly quail, though there was reason now to do both. They were brave men, however. Whatever else there was to say about them, the warriors of the sands were as courageous in battle as any men who walked the earth. They had been promised Paradise if they died with a weapon in hand.

The two swords met with a grinding and then a quick, clattering sound. A woman suddenly screamed, and then a man did the same. The crowd around them began frantically spilling away from this abrupt, lethal violence.

It didn't last long. The Muwardi had been chosen for his skill in causing other men to die, but he was facing Rodrigo Belmonte of Valledo on even terms in a cleared space, and Belmonte had not been bested in single combat since he crossed out of boyhood.

Another clanging of metal, as Belmonte drove hard for the other man's knees. The Muwardi parried, retreated. Rodrigo feinted on the backhand, high, moving forward with a long stride. Then he dropped swiftly, unexpectedly, to one knee and slashed his sword into the Muwardi's thigh. The man cried out, staggered sideways, and died as the sword bit a second time, cleanly in his throat.

Rodrigo turned, without pausing. He saw what he had expected to see: three more of them—the ones who had burst into his room—racing out the door of the barracks, fanning apart. He knew that whichever of his men had drawn the short straw for this watch was dead in that doorway. He didn't know who it had been.

The deaths of his men enraged him beyond any words.

He went forward to meet these three alone, to slake rage with retribution, grief with hard and deadly movement. He did know who had died, behind him in the square, saving his life. Rage, a great grief. He moved to face the assassins.

Others were there before him.

An entirely naked man, with something trailing along the ground from his waist, had seized the sword of one of the fallen Muwardis. He was already engaging the first of the new ones. From the other side, the spectacle of a peacock wielding a shepherd's crook presented itself. Even as Rodrigo ran forward he saw the peacock bring that crook down from behind upon the head of one of the Muwardis. The desert warrior crumpled like a child's soft toy. The peacock scarcely hesitated: he brought the staff savagely down again on the fallen man's skull.

The naked man—and now Rodrigo realized it was Alvar de Pellino, and that the trailing object was not, in fact, tied to his waist—faced his Muwardi, crashing straight into him, screaming at the top of his voice as he drove the man back. He began dealing and receiving swordstrokes, heedless of his naked vulnerability. Rodrigo, sprinting past them towards the last man, gave Alvar's foe a quick slash to the back of the calf. This was battle, not courtly display. The man made a high-pitched sound, fell, and Alvar killed him with a stroke.

The last man was Rodrigo's.

Again he was brave, no hint of surrender or flight. Again he was skilled with his sword, defiant in his aggression, seeing the man he had come here to kill standing alone before him. None of these things extended his tenure on life under the blue moon or the torches or the stars he worshipped. Belmonte was enraged, and his fury was always cold and controlling in battle. The sixth Muwardi fell to a heavy, driving, backhand stroke to his collarbone—very much, in fact, like the blow that had killed the man with the staff.

It was over. As so many such battles had ended through the years—seemingly as swiftly as it had begun. He had an extreme facility for combat such as this. It defined him, this skill, in the eyes of the world in which he lived. In which he still lived, though he should have died tonight.

Rodrigo turned, breathing rapidly, and looked towards Alvar and the peacock, who turned out, improbably, to be Husari. Ibn Musa had torn off his mask and stood, white-faced, over the body of the man he'd just clubbed to death. First killing. A new thing for him.

Alvar, in the stillness after combat, seemed to become aware of his condition—and his sole item of golden adornment. In any other circumstance at all Rodrigo would have laughed in delight.

There was no laughter in him. In any of them. A number of the other men of the company were hurrying up. One of them, without comment, threw Alvar his own cloak. Alvar wrapped himself in it and untied the leash.

"You are all right?"

It was Martin, speaking to Rodrigo, eyeing him closely.

Belmonte nodded. "Nothing to speak of."

He said no more, walking past them all, six dead Muwardis and the men of his company and the milling, frightened people in the square.

He came to where Lain Nunez crouched beside the small figure that lay breathing shallowly on the stones, his life seeping away from the deep wound in his throat. Lain had folded his cloak as a pillow for the fallen man. Ludus had seized a torch and was holding it above them. Someone else brought up another light.

Rodrigo took one glance, and then had to close his eyes for a moment. He had seen this many times; it ought to have become easier by now. It never had. Not with people you knew. He knelt on the blood-soaked stones and gently slipped off the token eye-mask the little man had worn as a concession to the rites of Ragosa's Carnival.

"Velaz," he said.

And found he couldn't say anything more. This was not—it was so profoundly not—the proper ending for such a man as this. He ought not to be dying here, with a knife in his chest and this hideous, pouring wound. The wrongness of it was appalling.

"They ... dead?" The dying man's eyes were open; fierce, clear, fighting pain.

"All of them. You saved my life. What words can I say to you?"

Velaz swallowed, tried to speak again, then had to wait as a hard high wave of pain crashed over him.

"Care ... her," he whispered. "Please?"

Rodrigo felt sorrow threaten to overwhelm him. This oldest, endless sorrow of mankind, and new every single time. Of course this would be what Velaz of Fezana needed to ask before he died. How did the world in which they lived cause such things as this to happen? Why hadn't Lain, or Ludus, Martin ... any of a dozen soldiers ... been nearest when Rodrigo fell to the ground among enemies? Any one of so many men who would have been bitterly mourned, but whose death in this fashion could have been seen as something embedded—a known and courted risk—in the life they had chosen?

"We will take care of her," he said quietly. "On my oath. She will be cherished, as you cherished her."

Velaz nodded his head, satisfied. Even that small movement caused a pumping of blood in his terrible wound.

He closed his eyes again. There was no color in his face at all. He said, eyes still closed, "Can ... find?"

And this, too, Rodrigo understood. "I will. I'll find her for you."

He rose then, and strode away, blood soaking his clothes, moving swiftly, purposefully, to try to do a thing that was, in fact, beyond him or any man that night: to find a single, masked woman in the careening dark of Carnival.

Which is why he was not in the square, but hammering at the door of her house and then doubling back through the streets, shouting her name at the top of his voice in a world of noise and laughter, when first Ammar and then Jehane herself came running up, fearing to find Rodrigo dead, only to discover it was Velaz lying on the stones under torches held by silent soldiers.

Jehane had never realized how much affection had been won from a company of Valledan soldiers by the little man who had served her father and then herself all these years. It ought not, perhaps, to have been such a surprise. Military men recognized competence and inner strength and loyalty, and Velaz had embodied these things.

Alvar, in particular, was taking this death very badly, almost blaming himself for it. It appeared that he had been the second man to arrive when Rodrigo was attacked. Jehane didn't know where he'd come from, but she gathered he'd been with a woman not far away.

Her thinking wasn't really very clear. The night was nearly done. The thin crescent of the white moon was overhead now, but there already appeared to be a hint of grey through the open windows facing east. They were in the barracks, the dining room on the ground floor. The streets seemed quieter now, but that may have been an illusion, behind these walls. Jehane wanted to tell Alvar there was nothing inappropriate about having been with a woman at Carnival, but she couldn't seem to be able to manage any words yet.

Someone—Husari, she thought—had brought her a cup of something warm. She gripped it in both hands, shivering. Someone else had draped a cloak over her. Another cloak lay over Velaz, on one of the tables not far away. A third covered the soldier who had died in the doorway when the Muwardis burst in. The door had been unlocked. It seemed he had been watching the dancing in the square.

She had been crying, off and on, for a long time. She felt numb, hollow, light-headed. Very cold, even beneath the cloak. In her mind she tried to begin a letter to her mother and father ... and then stopped. The process of forming those necessary words threatened to make her weep again.

He had been a part of the world all her life; if not at the very center, then never far away. He had not ever, as best she knew, done a violent or a hurtful thing to any man or woman until tonight when he had attacked a Muwardi warrior and saved Rodrigo's life.

That made her remember, much too late, something else. She looked over and saw that Rodrigo's wounds were being cleaned and dressed by Lain Nunez. I ought to be doing that, a part of her said inwardly, but she couldn't have. She could not have done it tonight.

She realized that Ammar had come up and was crouched on his heels beside her. She also realized, belatedly, that it was his cloak she was wearing. He looked at her searchingly, then took her hand, not speaking. How to comprehend that this same night they had kissed? And he had said certain things that opened up new horizons in the world.

Then the king of Cartada.

Then Velaz on the cobblestones.

She had not told anyone about Almalik. A man she loved was here—she could use that word now in her mind, admit it to herself—and that part of this night's dark spinning was his to tell, or to preserve in silence.

She had heard enough from the balcony to understand a little of what lay between Ammar and the young, frightened king of Cartada. The king who had nonetheless been calculating enough to send killers from the desert after Rodrigo Belmonte. He had also ordered the execution of the warrior who'd thrown a blade at Ammar. There was something complex and hurtful here.

She could not seek her vengeance for Velaz by setting these men on the track of the Cartadan king. It was Rodrigo he had tried to kill, and mercenary soldiers, passing back and forth across the tagra lands and the boundaries of Jad and Ashar, lived lives that made that likely, even probable.

Velaz had not. Velaz ben Ishak—he had taken her father's name when he adopted the Kindath faith—had lived a life that ought to have ended in a kind and cared-for old age. Not on a table in a barracks hall with that sword wound in his neck.

It occurred to Jehane then—in the dreamy way thoughts were coming—that she, too, had decisions to make in the days that lay ahead. The divided loyalties were not only Ammar's or Rodrigo's. She was physician to a band of Valledan mercenaries and to the court of Ragosa. She was also a citizen of Fezana, in Cartadan lands. Her home was there and her family. It was her own king, in fact, who was riding away from these walls tonight, with one companion only on a dangerous journey home. The man he had ordered killed was a Valledan, a Jaddite enemy, the Scourge of Al-Rassan.

A man who might, through his valor and his company's, achieve the conquest of her own city if he were to rejoin King Ramiro and the assault upon Fezana became a reality. The Jaddites of Esperana had burned the Kindath, or enslaved them. The island tomb of Queen Vasca remained a place of holiest pilgrimage.

Ammar was holding her hand. Husari came back. His eyes were red-rimmed. She lifted her free hand and he took it in his. Good men all around her in this room; decent, caring men. But the most decent, the most caring, the one who had loved her from the day she was born, was dead on a table under a soldier's cloak.

Somewhere within her grieving soul Jehane experienced a tremor then, an apprehension of pain to come. The world of Esperana, of Al-Rassan, seemed to her to be rushing headlong towards something vast and terrible, and the deaths of Velaz and of Rodrigo's man at the barracks door, and even of seven desert warriors tonight—all these were merely prelude to much worse to come.

She looked around the large room and by the light of the torches saw men she liked and admired, and some she loved, and she wondered—in the strange, hollowed-out mood she had passed into—how many of them would live to see the next Ragosa Carnival.

Or if there would be another one a year from now.

Rodrigo came over, shirtless, a neat, efficient bandage covering his most serious wound. His upper body and arms were hard and muscled, laced with scars. One more now, when this healed. She would have a look at it later in the day. Work was sometimes the only barrier there was between life and the emptiness beyond.

His expression was strange. She hadn't seen him look this way since ... since the night she'd met him and they had watched a hamlet burn north of Fezana. There was that same anger now, and a kind of hurt that didn't sort easily with his profession. Or perhaps that wasn't true: perhaps Rodrigo was good at what he did because he knew the price exacted by the deeds of soldiers at war?

Odd, how her mind was drifting. Questions for which there were no answers. Much like death. The emptiness. The physician's implacable adversary. A sword wound deep into the collarbone. There was no answer for that.

She said, clearing her throat, "Did he clean it ... before he put the dressing on?"

Belmonte nodded. "With a whole flask of wine. Didn't you hear me?"

She shook her head. "It looks like a proper dressing."

"Lain's been doing this for years."

"I know."

There was a little silence. He knelt in front of her, beside Ammar. "His last words to me were to ask that we take care of you. Jehane, I swore that we would."

She bit her lip. Said, "I thought I'd been hired to take care of all of you."

"It goes both ways, my dear." That was Husari. Ammar said nothing, only watched. His ringers were cool, holding hers.

Rodrigo looked at him, registering the linked hands, and said, "Muwardi assassins suggests Cartada." He stood up.

"I would think so," Ammar said. "In fact, I know it was. There was an emissary who found me, as well. A different kind of mission."

Rodrigo nodded slowly. "He wants you back?"

"He does."

"We assumed that, didn't we?"

"I think Almalik wanted to make certain I knew it."

"What was the offer?"

"All the things one might expect." The tone was cool.

Rodrigo registered that, too. "My apologies. I ought not to have asked."

"Perhaps. But you did. Ask the next question?" Ammar released her hand. He rose to his feet.

The two men gazed at each other, grey eyes and blue. Rodrigo nodded his head, as if accepting a challenge. "Very well. What did you tell them?"

"That I didn't know my answer, whether I would return or not."

"I see. Was that true?"

"At the time."

A silence. "Not so long ago, if it was tonight."

"It was. Some things have intervened."

"I see. And what would you answer if the same question were asked of you now?"

A small, deliberate hesitation. "That I am well content with the company in which I find myself." There was a nuance there, Jehane realized. A moment later she saw that Rodrigo had also caught it.

He gestured around the room. "We are that company?"

Ibn Khairan inclined his head. "A part of it." The two men were of a height; the Valledan was broader across the shoulders and chest.

"I see."

"And you?" Ammar asked, and now Jehane understood why he had permitted—even invited—the questions. "Where will the men of Rodrigo Belmonte be serving this summer?"

"We ride against Cartada soon. With the army of Ragosa."

"And if King Ramiro should also be riding? Against Fezana's walls? What then, O Scourge of Al-Rassan? Will we lose you? Will we live to fear the sight of your banner again?"

Some of the company had come over and were listening. It was quiet in the room and there was, indeed, light coming in from the east. Sunrise soon.

Rodrigo was silent a long while. Then, "I, too, am well content with where I find myself."

"But?"

The anger in Belmonte's eyes was gone. The other thing was still there. "But if the armies of Esperana come through the tagra lands, I think I must go to them."

Jehane let out her breath. She hadn't been aware that she'd been holding it.

"Of course you must," Ammar said. "You have lived your life for this."

Rodrigo looked away for the first time and then back. "What do you want me to say?"

Ammar's tone was suddenly hard, merciless, "Oh, well ... how about, 'Die, Asharite dogs! Kindath swine!' Something of that sort?"

There was a sound from the soldiers. Rodrigo winced and shook his head. "Not from me, Ammar. Not from those who ride with me."

"And from those who will ride all around you?"

Rodrigo shook his head again, almost doggedly. "Again, what can I say to you? They will be much as the Muwardis are, I suppose. Driven by hatred and holiness." He made a curious gesture, both hands opening and then closing again. "You tell me. What shall good men do in such a war, Ammar?"

Ammar's answer came, as Jehane had feared and known it would: "Kill each other, until something ends in the world."

Alvar and Husari took her home as the sun was rising over the strewn and empty streets. They all needed sleep very badly. Alvar took his old room on the ground level, the one he'd used when she and he and Velaz had first come through the pass to Ragosa.

Husari took Velaz's bed beside the chamber where Jehane saw her patients.

She bade them good night, though the night was done. She went up the stairs to her room. She opened the window and stood there watching the eastern sky grow brighter beyond the roofs of houses.

It was going to be a beautiful morning. The dawn wind brought the scent of almond trees from the garden across the way. It was quiet now. The streets were empty. Velaz would not see this morning come.

She tried, again, to think how she could tell this to her mother and father, and again backed away from that. She thought of something else: it would be necessary to arrange for burial, a Kindath service. Avren would help. Perhaps she would ask him to do this? Find someone to chant the ancient words of the liturgy:

One sun for the god.

Two moons for his beloved sisters.

Uncountable stars to shine in the night.

Oh, man and woman, born to a dark path,

only look up and the lights shall guide you home.

She cried again, the tears spilling down her cheeks, falling on the windowsill.

After a time she wiped her face with the backs of her hands and lay down on the bed, not bothering to undress, though there was blood on her clothing. The tears had stopped. An emptiness, pushing outwards from her heart, took their place. She lay there but could not sleep.

A little later she heard the sound from outside. She had been waiting for that sound.

Ammar swung up and onto the window ledge. He stayed there, motionless, regarding her a long while.

"Will you forgive me?" he asked finally. "I needed to come."

"I would not have forgiven you, ever, had you not," she said. "Hold me."

He jumped down to the floor and crossed the room. He lay on the bed beside her and she laid her head on his chest. She could feel his heartbeat. She closed her eyes. His hand came up and touched her hair.

"Oh, my love," he said softly. "Jehane."

She began, again, to cry.

This passed as well, though not soon. When she had been quiet for a time he spoke again. "We can lie like this, as long as you like. It is all right."

But there was an emptiness in her, and it needed not to be empty any more.

"No we can't," she said, and lifted her head and kissed him. Salt. Her own tears. She brought her hands up and laced them in his hair and kissed him again.

Much later, with both of them unclothed, she lay wrapped in his arms under the bedcovers and fell into desperately needed sleep.

He did not. He was much too aware of what was to come—later this same day. He had to leave Ragosa, before nightfall. He would urge that she remain here. She would refuse. He even knew who would insist upon coming with them. There was a darkness looming in the west, like a high-piled thundercloud. Above Fezana. Where they had met.

He lay awake, holding her in his arms, and became aware of a great irony—observing how the newly risen sun poured in through the eastern window and fell upon them both, as if someone or something wished to cloak them in a blessing made entirely of light.