The Lions of Al-Rassan

Fifteen

The governor of Fezana was a watchful and a cautious man. If he occasionally remembered that the lamented King Almalik I, the Lion of Cartada, had begun his own ascent to glory from the position of governing that city for the khalifs of Silvenes, he more often reminded himself of his extreme good fortune in having been the only important city governor to survive the transition from father to son in Cartada.

When unsettled by dreams of loftier position he had learned to allow himself an evening of distraction: a quantity of Jaddite wine, dancers, encounters—watching or participating—involving slaves of both sexes in varying combinations. He had discovered that the release afforded by such activities served to quell the disturbances of inappropriate dreams for a time.

In truth, it wasn't merely good fortune that had ensured his continuance in Fezana. During the last years of the reign of the elder Almalik, the governor had taken pains, quietly, to establish cordial relations with the son. Though the tension between the king and the prince was evident, the governor of Fezana nonetheless judged that the young man was likely to survive and succeed his father. His reasoning was simple in the extreme: the alternatives were untenable, and the prince had Ammar ibn Khairan for his guardian.

The governor of Fezana had been born in Aljais.

He had known ibn Khairan from the poet's boyhood in that city. Concerning a number of the tales emerging from that reckless, not-too-distant time he had a first-hand awareness. It was his own considered judgment that any prince being counselled by the man that boy had become was someone a prudent administrator would do well to cultivate.

He had been proved right, of course, though greatly unnerved when the young king had promptly sent ibn Khairan into exile. When he learned that the exiled courtier was in Ragosa he conveyed, by indirect means, his good wishes to him there. At the same time, he continued to serve the younger Almalik with the diligence he had applied to the father's interests. One remained in office—and wealthy, and alive—by such competence as much as by luck or scenting shifts in the wind. He stole very little, and with discretion.

He was also careful not to make assumptions. So when the unexpected, indeed startling, parias demand from Ruenda arrived by royal herald early in the spring, the governor sent it on to Cartada without comment.

He might form conjectures as to how this demand had emerged, and even admire the subtlety that had produced it, but it was not his place, unless invited by his king, to offer opinions about any of this.

His tasks were more pragmatic. He fortified and rebuilt Fezana's walls and defenses as best he could, given a dispirited populace. Having spent years dealing with a dangerously rebellious city, the governor judged he could cope with enervated depression for a time. The additional Muwardis in the new wing of the castle were not especially good at wall-building—desert warriors could hardly be expected to be—but they were being well paid and he had no compunctions about putting them to work.

He was aware of the religious broadsides being posted about the city that winter, as he was aware of most things in his city. He judged that the wadjis of Cartada were being allowed some leeway by the new king as a conciliatory gesture, and that this was spreading to the other cities of the kingdom. He had the prostitutes harassed a little more than usual. A few Jaddite taverns were closed. The governor quietly augmented his own stock of wine from the confiscations that accompanied this. Such actions were normal, though the times were not.

The Kindath were receiving rather more vituperation than was customary. This didn't particularly distress him. He didn't like the Kindath. They seemed always to have an air—even the women—of knowing things he didn't. Secrets of the world. The future mapped in their wandering moons. This made him nervous. If the wadjis chose to preach against the Wanderers more ferociously than in the recent past, it was apparently with the king's approval or acceptance and the governor was certainly not about to intervene.

He had graver concerns that year.

Fezana wasn't fortifying its walls or adding Muwardis to the garrison simply to keep soldiers busy. There was a mood in the north this season that augured ill for the future, whether mapped in the Kindath moons or not.

Even so, the governor, being deeply cautious by nature, couldn't quite believe that Ramiro of Valledo would be foolish enough to come and make war here, laying a siege so far from his own lands. Valledo was being paid parias from Fezana twice a year. Why would any rational man risk life and his kingdom's stability to conquer a city that was already filling his coffers with gold? Among other things, a Valledan army coming down through the tagra lands meant extreme vulnerability back home—to Jalona or Ruenda.

On the other hand, the governor had heard along with everyone else tidings of that Jaddite army assembling in Batiara, due to sail east this spring for Ammuz and Soriyya.

That sort of thing could set a very bad example, the governor of Fezana thought.

Spring came. The Tavares rose and subsided without undue flooding. In the temples Ashar and the holy stars of the god were ritually thanked for that. Fields made rich by the river were tilled and sown. Flowers bloomed in the gardens of Fezana and outside the walls. There were melons and cherries in the market and on his table. The governor was fond of melon.

Word came down through the tagra lands of a gathering of the three Jaddite kings in Carcasia.

This was not a good thing, by any measure. He relayed the information to Cartada. Almost immediately afterwards, further tidings came that the gathering had ended in violence, after an attempt on the life of either the king or queen or perhaps the constable of Valledo.

Information from the north was seldom clear, sometimes it was almost useless. This was no exception. The governor didn't know who, if anyone, had been injured or killed, or who was behind it. He passed this word along as well, however, for what it was worth.

He received swift messages back from Cartada: continue work on the walls, store up food and drink. Keep the wadjis happy and the Muwardis in good order. Post watchmen near the tagra lands. Be endlessly vigilant, in the name of Ashar and the kingdom.

None of this was reassuring. He did all of these things competently in an increasingly nervous city. The governor discovered that he wasn't enjoying his melon in the morning as much as he was wont to do. His stomach seemed to be vexing him.

Then the child died in the tannery.

And that very day came word that the Valledan army had been seen. South of the tagra lands, in Al-Rassan, banners flying.

An army. A very large army, coming swiftly. For the first time in hundreds of years the Horsemen of Jad were riding towards his city. It was folly, the governor thought agitatedly. Sheerest folly! What was King Ramiro doing?

And what could a prudent, diligent civil servant do when the kings of the world went mad?

Or when his own people did, that same day?

Sometimes events in far-distant places speak with a single voice of a changed mood, a turning of the world towards darkness or light. It was remembered long years afterwards that the Kindath massacres in Sorenica and Fezana occurred within half a year of each other. One was achieved by Jaddite soldiers wild with boredom, the other by Asharite citizens in a frenzy of fear. The effects were not dissimilar.

In Fezana it began with a child's fever. The daughter of a tanner, one ibn Shapur, contracted an illness that spring. The poorer laborers lived nearest to the river and in the flooding season sickness was common, especially among children and the aged.

The child's parents, unable or unwilling to pay for the services of a physician, utilized instead the ancient remedy of placing her on a pallet in the tannery itself. The noxious fumes were thought to drive away the evil presence of illness. It was a healing that had been in use for centuries.

It so happened that day that a Kindath merchant, ben Mores by name, was at the tannery buying hides for export to the east by way of Salos then down the coast and through the straits.

While expertly appraising the finished and unfinished leathers in the yard he heard the crying child. Informed of what was being done, the Kindath merchant loudly and profanely began slandering the parents of the girl and proceeded to stride into the tannery and lay hands upon the child—which was forbidden. Ignoring protests, he carried her out from the healing place and into the chill of the spring air.

He was continuing to shout imprecations when ibn Shapur, observing his small daughter being dishonored and abducted by one of the Kindath—knowing that this evil people used children's blood in their foul rites, ran up and struck the merchant on the head from behind with a tanner's hook, killing him instantly. It was common agreement afterwards that ibn Shapur had never been considered a violent man.

The child fell to the ground, crying piteously. Her father picked her up, accepted the grim congratulations of his fellows, and carried her back into the tannery. For the rest of the day the Kindath merchant's body was left where it had fallen in the yard. Flies gathered upon him in the sun. Dogs came over and licked at his blood.

The child died, just before sunset.

The Kindath's touch had cursed her, the leather workers agreed, lingering after work, angrily discussing the matter in the yard. She had been surely on the mend before that. Children died when Kindath laid hands upon them, it was a fact. A wadji arrived in the yard; no one later remembered who had summoned him. When informed of what had transpired the pious man threw up his hands in horror.

Someone pointed out at about that point, echoing a verse widely posted and recited earlier in the year, that none of the Kindath had died in the Day of the Moat—not one. Only good Asharites. They are a poison in our midst, this same man cried. They kill our children and our leaders, both.

The body of the slain merchant was dragged from the place where it had been lying. It was mutilated and abused. The wadji, watching, made no remonstration. Someone had the idea of decapitating the dead man and throwing his corpse into the moat. The head was cut off. The crowd of tanners left their yard, carrying the body, and began proceeding towards the gate nearest the moat.

While crossing the city the leather workers—quite a number of them by then—came across two Kindath women buying shawls in Weavers' Lane late in the day. It was the man who had recited the posted poem who struck one of them across the face. The other woman had the temerity to strike him in return.

An unbeliever, a woman, laying hands upon one of Ashar's Star-born? It was not to be endured.

Both women were bludgeoned to death in front of the shop where their purchases were still being wrapped. The weaver quietly put the two shawls back under the counter and pocketed the money that had been tendered. She then closed up shop for the day. A very large crowd had now assembled. After the briefest hesitation, the two women had their heads cut off. No one could later remember clearly who had actually wielded the blades.

The angry crowd, growing larger all the time, began streaming towards the Gate of the Moat with three headless, bleeding Kindath bodies.

On the way there they met another, even larger, gathering. This crowd was in the market square, almost filling it. It was not a market day.

They had just heard tidings from the north. Jaddites had been seen. They were almost upon them. An army from Valledo, coming to sack and burn Fezana.

Without any person ever voicing the specific suggestion—as best anyone could recall afterwards—the two crowds merged into one, and drew others to their mass, and they turned, together, in the hour before sunset and the rising of the white moon, towards the gates of the Kindath Quarter.

The governor of Fezana received advice of some sort of uprising among the tanners, and violence done, at almost the same moment that the long-feared word of Horsemen thundering south, already down through the tagra, also reached him. He would have greatly preferred that these tidings remain his alone for a time, but this proved impossible. A third messenger reported, immediately on the heels of the first two, that there was a mob gathered in the marketplace and that they had already heard the news from the north.

The governor thus had a number of decisions to make in rapid succession. He sent two separate messengers immediately for Cartada and another to Lonza. It had been agreed that part of the Lonza garrison would be diverted northwards to the slopes of the Tavares Range if a siege actually began at Fezana—they could partly forestall Jaddite raids south of the river. Food for a besieging army, or the absence of it, was often the key to a siege.

The governor also sent an aide running for certain documents that had long since been prepared for him. More than three years ago, in fact, Almalik I of Cartada, who had been a governor before he was a monarch (the thought was an enduring distraction), had recorded with his generals and advisors some plans to be followed in the event of a siege of Fezana. Consulting these written instructions, which had not been superseded, the governor noted with trepidation the boldest element of them. He hesitated for a time, then elected to trust to the wisdom of the dead king. Orders were given to the most senior Muwardi in the room. The man's veiled face revealed nothing, of course. He left immediately, to assemble the men required.

All of this, and other associated commands, took some little while. As a consequence, by the time another messenger arrived to report that an extremely large number of people were now heading towards the Kindath Gates carrying torches, the governor was lagging uncharacteristically behind the sweep of events in his city. The torches spurred him to action, though. It was not yet dark; torches were not needed for light. What was the good of defending against the Valledans if they burned down their own city? Ashar and the stars knew he had no love for the Kindath, but if that Quarter was fired, the whole city could go up. Wooden walls knew nothing of the boundaries of faith. The governor ordered the mob dispersed.

It was the proper thing to do, and it could possibly have even been achieved, had the order come earlier.

Alvar never forgot that evening and night as long as he lived.

He would wake in terror from a dream that he was in Fezana again at sunset watching the mob approach. That memory marked him and stayed with him as nothing in his life ever had and only one moment after—also at sunset—was ever to do.

They had arrived that afternoon, crowding in ahead of the Jaddite dust cloud with a frightened swarm of people from the countryside. The five of them had raced all the way west from Ragosa across the hills and meadows of springtime. They had left the day after Carnival, immediately after burying Velaz with Kindath rites and the slain soldier in a Jaddite ceremony.

No time to mourn. Ibn Khairan had made that clear based on what he had learned, and Jehane, wild with fear for her parents, could not have lingered. They were out of Ragosa by mid-afternoon: Alvar, Husari, Jehane, ibn Khairan—and Rodrigo Belmonte. All of them exhausted after the night just past, all aware that in the mood of this spring something monstrous could happen.

They made the ten days' journey in six, riding into the darkness, arriving late one afternoon to a place where they could see the walls of Fezana. They had already seen the dust cloud that was the army of Valledo.

It was Rodrigo who spotted it. He had pointed, and then exchanged a long glance with ibn Khairan that Alvar could not interpret. Jehane bit her lip, gazing north. Husari said something under his breath that might have been a prayer.

For Alvar, despite weariness and anxiety, the sight of a cloud of dust stirred up by the Horsemen of Valledo in Al-Rassan stirred him deeply. Then he looked again at Jehane and Husari and back to ibn Khairan, and confusion arose once more. How did it happen that something one had desired all one's life became cause for doubt and apprehension?

"They are moving very fast," ibn Khairan had said, finally.

"Too fast," Rodrigo murmured. "They will outstrip some of the fleeing villagers. I don't understand. They want as many mouths in the city as possible."

"Unless this isn't to be a siege."

"What else can it be? He isn't about to storm those walls."

Ibn Khairan looked northwards again from their vantage point, high on a hill east of the city. "Perhaps just the vanguard is flying," he said. "For some reason."

"That wouldn't make sense either," Rodrigo had replied, his brow furrowed. He sounded edgy to Alvar, not exultant at all.

"Does it matter?" Jehane asked sharply. "Come on!"

She had ridden at a soldier's pace all the way. Indeed, there were times when Rodrigo or ibn Khairan had had to restrain her, lest they ruin the horses with their speed.

Her relationship with ibn Khairan had changed since Carnival. They tried not to show it too plainly on the ride, but it was there to be seen, in the man as much as in the woman. Alvar was making an effort not to let this distract him. He was only partly successful in that. It seemed that life could throw confusion and pain at you from many directions.

They came down from that height to cross the moat and enter the city. Alvar for the first time, Jehane and Husari coming home, ibn Khairan returning to where Almalik I had tried to destroy his reputation and curb his power.

And Rodrigo?

Alvar understood that the Captain was with them, disguised as an Asharite—his moustache shaved off, hair and skin darkened—because he had sworn an oath to Velaz ben Ishak to defend the woman who was here with them. He was not a man who forswore his oaths.

Jehane's parents were to be delivered from Fezana and a warning given to the other Kindath. That was the immediate task. After, they would have to turn again to sorting out loyalties and the next steps. They were all, as best Alvar understood, still to join the army of Ragosa somewhere west of Lonza, on the way to Cartada.

The dust cloud north of them had probably altered that.

With Jaddites invading Al-Rassan, did Ragosa still make war on Cartada? Asharite against Asharite with the Horsemen down through the tagra! And did the most renowned leader of Jaddite soldiers in the peninsula fight for Ragosa at such a time?

Alvar, one of those Jaddite soldiers, had no idea. On the ride west he had sensed an emerging distance between ibn Khairan and Ser Rodrigo. Not a coldness, certainly not opposition. It was more like ... a marshalling of defenses. Each man fortifying himself against what might be coming.

Husari, normally voluble and perceptive, was no help at all in trying to sort this out. He kept his own counsel all the way here.

He had killed his first man in the square at Carnival. Jehane, in one of her few exchanges with Alvar on the ride, said she thought that might be the trouble. Husari had been a merchant not a warrior. A gentle man, a lazy, soft one, even. He had slain a Muwardi assassin that night, though, smashing his skull with a blow, spilling brains and blood on the cobblestones.

That could shake a man, Alvar thought. Not all were made for a soldier's life and what came with it.

Truth to tell—though he told no one this—Alvar wasn't certain any more if he was made for that life, either. That was frightening. If he wasn't this, what was he? But it appeared that a soldier needed to be able to see things in extremely simple terms and Alvar had come to realize that he wasn't especially good at that.

On the fourth morning he had broached this much, diffidently, with the Captain. Rodrigo had ridden in silence a long time before answering. Birds had been singing; the spring day was bright.

"You may be too intelligent to be a good soldier," Rodrigo had said, finally.

Which wasn't really what Alvar wanted to hear. It sounded like a rejection. "What about you?" he demanded. "You have been, all your life."

Rodrigo hesitated again, choosing his words. "I grew up in a different age, Alvar, though it was only a little before yours. When the khalifs ruled in Al-Rassan we lived in fear of our lives in the north. We were raided once, sometimes twice, a year. Every year. Even after the raids began to stop, we children were frightened into bed at night with warnings about the infidels coming to take us away if we were bad. We dreamed of miracles, reversals. Of coming back."

"So did I!"

"But now you can, don't you see? It isn't a dream any more. The world has changed. When you can do what you dreamed about, sometimes it isn't ... as simple any more." Rodrigo looked at Alvar. "I don't know if that makes any sense at all."

"I don't either," Alvar said glumly.

The Captain's mouth quirked at that, and Alvar realized he hadn't been very respectful.

"Sorry," he said quickly. He remembered—it seemed an unbelievably long time ago—the day Rodrigo had knocked him from his horse just outside Esteren for such impertinence.

Rodrigo only shook his head now. The world had changed. "Try this, if it helps," he said. "How easy do you find it to think of the three people we're riding with as infidels, vile in their ways and loathsome to the god?"

Alvar blinked. "But we always knew there was honor in Al-Rassan."

Rodrigo shook his head. "No. Be honest. Think about this. Some of us did, Alvar. The clerics deny it to this day. I have a feeling your mother would. Think of Vasca's Isle. The very idea of holy war denies it: Asharites and Kindath are an attack upon Jad. Their existence wounds our god. That's what we've all been taught for centuries. No room for acknowledging honor, let alone grandeur in an enemy. Not in a war driven by such beliefs. That's what I'm trying—badly—to say. It's one thing to make war for your country, your family, even in pursuit of glory. It's another to believe that the people you fight are embodiments of evil and must be destroyed for that. I want this peninsula back. I want Esperana great again, but I will not pretend that if we smash Al-Rassan and all it has built we are doing the will of any god I know."

It was so difficult. Amazingly difficult. Alvar rode without speaking for a long while. "Do you think King Ramiro feels that way?"

"I have no idea how King Ramiro feels."

The answer came too quickly. The wrong question to have asked, Alvar realized. It ended the conversation. And none of the others seemed inclined to talk.

He kept thinking about it, however. He had time to think as they passed west through springtime. Nothing emerged clearly.

What had happened to the sunlit world one dreamed of as a child: when all one wanted was a part in the glory of which Rodrigo had spoken—an honorable role in the battling of lions and a share of pride.

The battling of lions. A child's dreaming. How did that fit in with what Valledan men had done in Orvilla last summer? Or with Velaz ben Ishak—as good a man as Alvar had ever known—dead on the stones of Ragosa? Or, indeed, with what they them' selves had done to a Jalonan party in a valley northwest of Fibaz? Was there glory there? Was there any way to say there was?

He still wore his cool, loose garb of Al-Rassan. Husari had not removed his leather Valledan hat or vest or leggings. Alvar wasn't sure why, but that meant something to him. Perhaps in the absence of real answers men needed their emblems more?

Or perhaps he did spend too much time on thoughts such as these ever to be a proper soldier. It was a little reassuring to see the Captain struggling as well. But that didn't resolve anything.

On a hilltop east of Fezana in Al-Rassan, watching a dust cloud stirred up by the horses of his countrymen, in the moments before the five of them rode down towards the city, Alvar de Pellino decided that glory—the fierce, bright purity of it—was hopelessly hard to come by, in fact.

And then, that same evening, he found it after all and a signing of his future as if branded in the burning sky.

Ammar took control when they approached the Gate of the Moat. Jehane had seen it before, on the campaign near Fibaz, how he and Rodrigo seemed to have an effortless interchange of authority as situations altered. This was, she had come to realize, one of the sorrows she was carrying: whatever bond had evolved, whatever unspoken awareness they shared across two worlds—it was going to be severed now.

A Jaddite army in Al-Rassan made certain of that. The two of them were aware of it. Nothing had been said on the hill, watching the dust, but it was known. They were here to take her parents away from danger, and after that ... ? After that, whatever it was that had begun that autumn day in Ragosa in a symbolic battle beneath the ramparts would come to an end.

She wanted to talk with Ammar. She needed to talk with him; about this, and so many other things. About love, and whether something could truly begin in a time of deaths, with endings all around in the world they had known.

Not on this ride, though. They had spoken with glances and the briefest exchanges. Whatever was to be resolved, whatever diminished or expanded possibilities the future might encompass in the mingled signs of their stars and moons, would have to be considered afterwards. If time and the world allowed.

She had no doubts of him. It was astonishing in a way, but she'd had none at all from those first moments in the street at Carnival. Sometimes the heart's arrow found its way to certainty despite the cautionings of a careful nature.

He was what he was and she knew something about that. He had done what he had done, and the stories ran the length of the peninsula.

And he had said he loved her and she believed him, and there was no need for fear. Not of him. Of the world, perhaps; of darkness, blood, fire; but not of this man who was, it seemed, amazingly, the destination of her soul.

They entered Fezana in the midst of a milling, terrified mass of people from the countryside fleeing the advance of the Jaddite army. Wagons and pushcarts clogged the road into the city and the bridge before the wall, blocking the gates. They were enmeshed among crying children, barking dogs, mules, chickens, shouting men and women; Jehane saw all the signs of a general panic.

Ammar looked over at Rodrigo. "We may be just in time. There could be violence here tonight." He said it quietly. Jehane felt fear, like the pounding of a drum inside her.

"Let's get inside," Belmonte said.

Ammar hesitated. "Rodrigo, you may be trapped in a city your army is besieging."

"My army is in Ragosa, preparing to set out for Cartada, remember?" Rodrigo's voice was grim. "I'll deal with changes as they arise."

The other man hesitated again, as if about to add something, but merely nodded his head. "Cloak yourself, then. You'll be slain on the spot if they know you for a Valledan." He looked over at Alvar and then, improbably, flashed the grin they all knew. "You, on the other hand, look more like a native than I do."

Alvar returned the smile. "Worry about Husari," he said in effortless Asharic. "He'll get us all killed with his hat." He looked over at Jehane and smiled. "We'll get them out."

She managed to nod her head. It was extraordinary what the passage of less than a year had done to him. Or perhaps not so: there had been steel and a mind in Alvar de Pellino from the beginning and he had spent much of this year in the company of two of the most exceptional men in their world. He was on the way, Jehane thought suddenly, to becoming something out of the ordinary himself.

Husari and Ammar led them, urging their horses steadily through the crowd. Stumbling out of their path, men swore at them, but not loudly. They were armed and mounted, and that was enough. They forced a way through.

There were guards at the gate but they were overwhelmed by the clamor and chaos. No one took note of them, no one stayed their course. Late in the afternoon of the day the Valledans arrived. Jehane came back into the city where she had been born and raised.

They reached the Kindath Quarter just ahead of the mob bearing weapons and brands of fire.

Since Ishak had begun to talk again, Eliane had discovered that her husband's hearing was extremely good. It was he who first heard the sounds from outside the Quarter and drew her attention to them. She could understand him almost perfectly now: the mangled words, because they were his, were to her as water in a dry place.

She put down the letter she had been reading him—Rezzoni ben Corli had written from Padrino where he was living now with his family. He had sent news of Batiara in the aftermath of the massacre in Sorenica.

She was to remember, later, that this was what she had been reading when Ishak said he heard a noise outside. Crossing to the window, Eliane opened it and stood listening. An angry sound, a crowd in the distant streets.

The window of Ishak's study overlooked a common courtyard shared by a dozen of the larger homes in the Quarter. Looking down, Eliane saw a number of people below, talking nervously, gesticulating. Someone ran into the courtyard: her friend Nasreh bet Rivek's younger son.

"They are coming!" he shouted. "They've killed Mezira ben Mores! They are coming for us with fire!"

Someone screamed from a window across the way. Eliane closed her eyes, clutching the ledge. She was briefly afraid she would fall. She had been warned of this, explicitly. They had been making plans to leave, hard as it was to abandon a home at their age. It seemed they had waited too long.

There was a scraping sound as Ishak rose from his chair behind her. Eliane opened her eyes and looked out, drawing a ragged breath. Faces appeared at windows, people ran into the courtyard. The sun was westering, the cobblestones sliced by a diagonal line of shadow. Frightened men and women crossed in and out of the light. Someone appeared carrying a spear—Nasreh's older son. Frenzied movement in a once-quiet place, a babble of sound. The huge noise was nearer now. Was this, then, how the world ended?

Ishak spoke her name. She started to turn back to him, but in that moment, blinking in disbelief, she realized that one of the people running into the courtyard below was her daughter.

Jehane had known the guards at the iron gates to the Quarter. They let her enter with the men accompanying her. They had heard and seen the mob gathering by the market square. The Kindath guards were armed—against regulations—and composed.

No signs of panic that Alvar could see. They knew what was coming. They knew about the Jaddites too.

Jehane hesitated just inside the gates. Alvar saw her look at Ammar ibn Khairan. And in that moment—not before, in fact—he finally understood something. He felt a quick, hard pain, much like a blade, then it was gone. A different feeling lingered, nearer to sorrow.

He had never really imagined she might be for him.

"Ser Rodrigo, you take her in," ibn Khairan said quickly. "You're still a danger if you are seen. Husari and Alvar and I will help out at this gate. We may be able to do something. We can gain you time, if nothing else."

If nothing else. Alvar knew what that meant.

Jehane said, "Ammar, it isn't just my parents any more."

"I know that. We'll do all we can. Go get them. I know the house. Be downstairs. If we can, we'll be with you." He turned to Rodrigo. "If you hear we've broken, get them out." He paused, blue eyes on grey in the light of late afternoon. "I charge you with this," he said.

Belmonte said nothing. Only nodded.

Jehane and the Captain left them. No time for more words, of farewell or otherwise. It didn't seem as if the world was allowing any space for such things. The noise from the streets was louder now. Alvar felt fear touch him then, a quick finger beneath the skin. He had never dealt with a mob, he had never even seen one.

"They have already killed three of us," one of the Kindath guards said grimly.

The gates to the Kindath Quarter were recessed into a narrow laneway. The crowd would be channelled and backed up here when they arrived. That would have been deliberate, Alvar realized. The Kindath had experience with these things. A terrible truth. It occurred to him that Queen Vasca, whom his mother worshipped as holy, would have been urging on the people that were coming now.

Eyes on the open space before the gates, Alvar lifted the round shield from his back, looped his left arm through the strap' and drew his sword. Ammar ibn Khairan did the same. Husari touched his weapon, then let it go.

"Give me a moment, first," he said, his words were quiet, scarcely audible over the rising volume of sound from beyond. Husari stepped out from behind the gates into the open space.

Seeing him do so, Alvar instinctively did the same—in the precise moment Ammar ibn Khairan also moved forward and out.

"Lock your gates," ibn Khairan said over his shoulder.

The guards didn't need instructions. Alvar heard the clang of metal behind him, and a key turning. He looked back and up: four more Kindath guards stood on a platform above and behind the double gates. They had bows to hand, nocked with arrows. All weapons were forbidden to the Kindath in Al-Rassan. He didn't think these men were greatly concerned with such laws at this moment.

He stood with Husari and Ammar ibn Khairan, exposed and alone in the narrow lane. The gates were locked behind them; there was nowhere to run. Ibn Khairan glanced at Husari and then at Alvar. "This," he said lightly, "may not be the most intelligent thing we have ever done."

The rumble became a roar and then the mob was there.

The first things Alvar registered, sickeningly, were the three severed heads on spears. The noise was huge, a wall of sound that did not seem entirely human. The howling, screaming press of people spilled around the corner into the space before the gates, and then, seeing three men standing there, the vanguard drew to a skidding halt, pushing back hard against those behind them.

There were half a hundred torches. Alvar saw swords and pikes, wooden cudgels, knives. Faces were contorted, filled with hatred, but what Alvar sensed was fear more than rage. His gaze kept returning to those severed, dripping heads. Terror or anger: it didn't much matter, did it? This crowd had already killed. After the first deaths others would come easily.

In that moment Husari ibn Musa stepped forward, moving from the shadow of the gates into the last of the afternoon sunlight. He lifted both hands, showing them empty. He still wore his Jaddite hat, recklessly.

There was a gradual spilling backwards of silence. They were going to let him speak, it seemed. Then Alvar caught a glint of sunlight on a moving blade. He moved, without conscious thought.

His shield, thrust in front of Husari, blocked the flung knife, a butcher's heavy blade. It fell with a clatter to the stones. There was blood on that knife, Alvar saw. He heard a flurry of shouts, and then stillness again.

"Are you a complete fool, Mutafa ibn Bashir?" Husari's voice was sharp, clear, mocking, it filled the space before the gates. "It's ibn Abazi, right beside you, that your wife's sleeping with, not me!"

In the shocked stillness that followed this, someone actually laughed. A thin, nervous sound, but it was laughter.

"Who are you?" another voice cried. "Why do you stand before the gates of those who kill children?"

"Who am I?" Husari exclaimed, spreading his arms wide. "I am insulted and offended. Among other things, you owe me money, ibn Dinaz. How dare you pretend not to know me!"

Another pause, another subtle shifting of mood. Alvar could see those near the front relaying rapid explanations backwards. Most of the huge crowd was still around the corner, out of sight of this.

"It's Husari!" someone exclaimed. "It's Husari ibn Musa!"

Husari promptly swept off the leather hat and offered an elaborate bow. "And a bolt of good cloth goes to you tomorrow morning, ibn Zhani. Am I so changed that even my friends do not know me? Not to mention my debtors?"

He was, of course. He was very greatly changed. He was also, Alvar realized, buying them as much time as he could. Next to Alvar, Ammar ibn Khairan murmured out of the side of his mouth, "Sword down, look easy. If he holds them long enough the governor will have troops here. He can't afford a fire tonight."

Alvar obeyed, trying to find a balance between watchfulness and the appearance of calm. It was hard to feign ease with those bobbing, severed heads on pikes in front of him. Two of them were women.

"Husari!" someone cried. "Have you heard? The Jaddites are coming!"

"So they are," ibn Musa agreed soberly. "Our walls have held against worse in their time. But in Ashar's holy name, are we madmen, to riot in our own city when an enemy appears?"

"The Kindath are in league with them!" someone shouted thickly. It was the man who'd thrown the knife. There was a quick rumble of agreement.

Husari laughed then. "Ibn Bashir, count the blessings of your birth stars that a butcher needs no more brains than the meat he carves. The Kindath fear the Jaddites more than we do! They are slaves in the north! Here they live freely, and pay half our taxes for us, and buy your stringy meat, even with your fat thumb on the scale!" Alvar saw someone smile at that.

"None of them died on the Day of the Moat!" Another voice, harsh as the butcher's. Alvar felt a movement beside him, then realized he was standing alone.

"And what," said Ammar ibn Khairan, stepping forward into the sunlight, "would have been the point of that?" He made a production of sheathing his magnificent sword, giving them time to look at him.

He was known. Immediately. Alvar could see it happen. He saw shock, confusion, fear again, a measure of awe. Whispers ran backwards like water down a hill.

Ibn Khairan looked out over the crowd in the laneway, taking his time. "The last king of Cartada wished to eliminate the leading citizens of this city last year as a message to all of you. Which man here would name a Kindath as one such? A leading citizen? One of the Kindath? It is," said Ammar ibn Khairan, "an amusing thought."

"You were exiled!" one brave person shouted. "It was proclaimed last summer!"

"And revoked this spring," Husari said calmly. "The man beside me—I see you know him—has been sent by King Almalik II to take charge of our defense against the rabble from the north."

Someone cheered, then more people did. There was a perceptible brightening of countenances, another shift of mood. Alvar drew a breath.

"Why is he here then, why not with the governor?"

"With that stuffed pork chop?" ibn Khairan said indignantly.

Another ripple of laughter. The governor would not be well-liked; governors seldom were. Ammar shook his head. "Spare me, please! I'd far rather be with ibn Bashir's wife, if you want to know the truth. But if I'm charged with your defense, I can hardly let the city be fired, can I?"

"Oh! Oh! My heart! I'm here, my lard! I'm right here!"

A woman's hands could be seen waving vigorously, part of the way up the lane. Ibn Bashir, the butcher, turned to look, his face reddening. General laughter now.

"You do know," Ammar said gravely, as the amusement subsided, "that the Muwardis are coming here even as we speak. They have orders to quell any disturbance. I'm afraid my control over them is not perfect yet. I have just arrived. I do not want anyone killed here this afternoon. It might spoil my pleasure in what I have planned for tonight." He grinned slyly.

"Here, my lord! Why wait for tonight?" A different woman this time. And suddenly there were more than a dozen waving hands and imploring female voices through the crowd.

Ibn Khairan threw his head back and laughed aloud. "I am honored," he said, "and exhausted by the very thought." A ripple of amusement again, a further softening of mood. The westering sun left most of the lane in shadow now.

Ibn Khairan's tone changed. "Good people, go to your homes before the veiled ones come. Put out your torches. We must not do the Jaddites' work for them. Our walls are strong, the king of Cartada has sent me to you and others are coming even now. We have food and water in plenty and the Valledans are far from their homes in a land they do not know. We need only fear weakness in ourselves, or folly. This gathering has been folly. It is time to go home. See, the sun is setting, the prayer bells will be ringing soon. It is a good evening for prayer, my friends, an evening to be as pure as we can be, in the sight of Ashar and beneath his stars when they appear."

The beautiful voice had become lyric, cadenced, soothing. He was a poet, Alvar remembered. Jehane had told him once that ibn Khairan still thought of himself as such, over and above anything else.

The crowd in the laneway seemed to have been lulled. Alvar saw one of the men holding a spear with a severed head look up at what he carried, and he saw repugnance and dismay cross the man's features. These were frightened people, not evil ones. Leaderless and under assault, they had turned to the nearest, most accessible targets to purge their own terror. It seemed that the presence of a strong clear voice before them had blunted the edge of that.

It ought to have.

It might indeed have done so, but Ammar ibn Khairan had only been seen and heard by the leading edge of that mob and the Kindath Quarter of Fezana had been designed to keep the Kindath in at night, not to protect them in any real way.

It was not particularly hard to penetrate through means other than the gates of the entrance. A few makeshift ladders, broken windows in the outer houses and someone angry and determined enough could be right in among the treacherous, child-killing—

"Fire!"

The wild shout came from one of the guards on the platform behind them. Alvar wheeled, saw black smoke. Heard a child cry from inside the Quarter, and then the screaming began. Fire was the purest terror. Fire destroyed cities.

He slung his shield on his back, took three quick, running steps towards the gates, and leaped. One of the guards reached down a hand, gripped Alvar's wrist, and pulled him up. Ammar was right beside him, and Husari too, more agile than he had ever been in his life.

Ibn Khairan turned back to the suddenly agitated crowd in the lane. "To your homes!" he shouted, hard authority in his voice now. "I will order the Muwardis to kill any man or woman who enters this Quarter. We cannot have the city burn!"

It was burning, though, and people would already be dying in the Kindath Quarter. Alvar didn't wait to see what happened in front of the gates. He jumped down from the platform, out of the last sunlight of the day. He stumbled and fell on the cobblestones, rose up and drew his sword.

How do you put out fires when attackers, crazed with hatred and fear, are spilling into your streets and killing you? One of those questions, Alvar thought, sprinting towards the smoke and the screaming, for which there were no answers: only the swirling images of nightmare.

The Kindath were streaming towards a part of the Quarter where the twin domes of the sanctuary could be seen. All the twisting, narrow streets seemed to lead that way. The fires had started in the houses nearest the streets beyond the gate. The Asharites had penetrated through outer windows and torched the homes through which they passed.

Even as he ran, cutting against the flow of running people, Alvar saw an Asharite with a sickle chop at the legs of a running boy. The wickedly honed blade sheared through the child's legs as if they were stalks of grain. The boy went down in blood, screaming. Alvar veered over, not breaking stride and, shouting incoherently, brought his sword down with all his strength, killing the man who had done that thing.

Half a dozen Asharites stopped dead in their tracks just ahead of him. He must look like a wild man, Alvar realized; their faces registered gaping apprehension. It was one thing to pursue unarmed children; another to be confronted by a man wielding a sword, with that look in his eyes.

"Are you all mad!" It was Husari, running up, screaming at his fellow citizens. "Fezana is on fire! Get water! Now! We will destroy our own city!"

"We will destroy the Kindath!" someone shouted back. "Then we will deal with flames. It is the holy work of Ashar we do!"

"It is the work of evil!" Husari screamed, his face distorted with pain and grief. And then Alvar saw him step forward and thrust his sword into the belly of the man he addressed. Instinctively, Alvar advanced, covering Husari with his shield. The Asharites in front of them retreated.

"Go!" screamed Husari, his voice raw. "Or if you stay, get water, now! We give our city to the Horsemen if this goes on!"

Alvar looked back over his shoulder. Kindath men and women were running past; some of the men had turned to make a stand where the tangle of streets reached a square. It was hard to make sense of the chaos in the half-light and the black, blowing smoke.

Even as he watched another house went up in a red sheet of flame. There was screaming everywhere. He had a sudden, appalling memory of Orvilla last summer. This was worse. This was a city, with houses almost all of wood, and if one part of it caught the whole of Fezana might burn. They had to get out.

He had lost sight of ibn Khairan, and had no idea where Jehane and her family home might be. Husari would know. He seized his friend's shoulder. "Come on!" he shouted over the crashing and the screams. "Have to find Jehane!"

Husari turned, stumbling over the body of the man he'd killed. He seemed dazed, aghast; he carried his sword as if he didn't even know what it was any more. There were flames at the head of this lane now. Already. Alvar, gripping Husari by the arm, turned back. His eyes were stinging from the smoke.

In a doorway across the street he saw a girl with a wooden staff facing a pair of men armed with knives. A small boy clutched at the girl's legs from behind. He was crying desperately. The house was on fire above them. The men with knives were laughing.

It was the laughter that took Alvar past his own breaking point. Before he was aware of forming the thought, he had released Husari and was running.

Too many people in between. A thronged, roiling street. Only a dozen strides, but they were too far. The girl stood, smoke billowing around her, defending her burning home and her small brother against two men with blades.

No one else seemed to have seen them; there was too much panic all around. The nearer of the two men feinted with his blade, then drew it back to thrust as the girl overreacted badly.

"No!" Alvar screamed, from the middle of the street, battering a path across a tide of fleeing people. "No!"

Then he saw, in the shadows and flame, the man's knife hand snap backwards uncontrollably. The Asharite cried out, dropped his blade.

And the whip that had caught him immediately coiled and lashed out again, catching the second man across the throat, opening a red gash. Alvar looked up and saw Rodrigo at a window above, leaning out with his whip. Alvar didn't break stride. He came up to those two men and chopped them down like animals, a rage in his heart.

He stood there, fighting for control, and looked at the girl. She eyed him in terror. Was she twelve, thirteen?

"Where are your parents?" he gasped, trying to master his voice.

"They are dead," she replied, her voice flattened out. "Upstairs. Men came in with torches and a spear." Her eyes were too wide, opening on a world given over to horror. No tears.

She ought to be crying, Alvar thought. He looked up again. Rodrigo was shouting something, and gesturing to the next doorway: he couldn't hear the words. The child behind the girl was no more than four years old. He was crying in harsh, convulsive bursts, scarcely able to draw breath.

"Come with me," Alvar snapped, his voice sharp with urgency. He bent down abruptly and picked up the little boy and then pushed the girl out of the doorway with a hand on her back. A burly figure came rushing up to them, an axe raised. Still holding the small child, Alvar twisted away from a blow, pivoted, and thrust his reddened blade into the man's chest.

There was a huge, roaring sound behind him. He looked up. The girl's house was alight now, flames in all the upper windows. The whole of the Kindath Quarter was on fire. He carried the terrified child and guided the girl towards the doorway Rodrigo had indicated from above.

He gasped with relief when he got there. Jehane stood in the doorway with two people who had to be her parents. Rodrigo came hurtling down the stairs.

"Where's Ammar?" Jehane asked quickly. He couldn't ever remember seeing her look so frightened.

"Don't know. Think he's holding the gate with the guards."

"Husari's right over there," Rodrigo said. Alvar looked back. Ibn Musa was wielding his blade again, fighting a slow retreat in the street, letting the running Kindath stream past him towards the square.

"We have to get out. It's all going up," Alvar gasped. He was still carrying the little boy. He handed the child over to the nearest person, who happened to be Jehane's mother. "Is there a way out?"

"There is," Jehane said. "We have a long way to go to get there, though, and—oh, thank the god and the moons!"

Ammar ibn Khairan, bleeding from a gash in one arm, came running up. "The Muwardis are here," he snapped. "This will end soon, but we have to be gone before they round everyone up!"

Alvar, a day ago, half a day, would have been unable to conceive of how tidings of the arrival of the veiled ones could ever have brought him relief.

"Jehane, which way?" It was Rodrigo. "Past the sanctuary?"

"No. The other way! There's a place in the wall, but it's on the far side of the Quarter." She pointed past where Asharites were still streaming in pursuit of her kindred. Even as he looked, Alvar saw a running woman clubbed down from behind. The man who had felled her stopped running and began beating her where she lay. Alvar took a step towards them, but felt Rodrigo's hand grip his arm.

"We cannot save them all. We must do what we can. What we came to do." The Captain's eyes were bleak.

"Let's go," said Ammar ibn Khairan.

"These two come with us," Alvar said flatly, gesturing to the children.

"Of course they do," said Eliane bet Danel. "Can you get us through?"

"Yes we can," said Alvar, speaking before ibn Khairan, before the Captain. "No one is going to stop us." He looked at the two leaders. "I go first, with your permission."

They glanced at each other. He saw something in both faces: a kind of acknowledgment. "You lead," said ibn Khairan. "Jehane guides. Let's go."

Alvar stepped from the doorway in the direction Jehane had indicated. They had to go straight into the stream of the attackers—those who would destroy people, small children, with sickles and axes and cudgels. With utter savagery. The Asharites were terrified themselves, he tried to remind himself. There were invaders approaching their walls.

It didn't matter.

Nuances were not for this evening. At the descent of twilight in the burning Kindath Quarter of Fezana in Al-Rassan, Alvar de Pellino went forward with a shield and a sword and an undivided heart, and he could not be stopped.

Banishing ambiguities, everything but the need to be swift and deadly and sure, he led their small party into the path of the advancing mob and he carved a way with his blade for the others to follow.

He became aware that Husari was with them now, that the merchant had sheathed his blade and was guiding the blind physician who was Jehane's father. When they reached the head of the street, Alvar felt the presence of Rodrigo at his side in the stinging smoke and the heat. He knew, without looking back, that ibn Khairan would be guarding their rear.

They dealt with a sudden swirl of assailants in the open space. Alvar blocked a blow, chopped his sword at someone's knees. Turned and cut back the other way, even as the first man was falling. He had never moved so quickly in his life.

There was a vast, cracking sound; an entire building collapsed across the way in a shower of sparks and a rush of flame. They felt the heat as a wave.

"That way!" Jehane cried.

Alvar saw where she pointed. Led them, slashing with his blade. Went through thick smoke and the heat of the fires, past the running figures of Kindath and their pursuers, forging a path against the flow.

Jehane signalled again and then again, and one more time, and finally they came to a place at the other end of the Quarter, a dead-end laneway leading only to the outer walls.

Alvar looked back. No one was following through the smoke. There was blood in his eyes. He didn't think it was his own. He swiped at it with his forearm.

Rodrigo was beside him, breathing quickly but calm as ever. The Captain gave him a searching glance. "Bravely done," he said quietly. "I could have done no better. This is truth, not flattery."

"Nor I," said ibn Khairan, coming up to them. "I knew you were a soldier. I never knew how much of one. Forgive me that."

"I'm not," said Alvar, but he rasped it under his breath, and he didn't think they heard. With the fever gone, the white rage, it was gradually coming to him how many terrified people he had just sent to their god. He looked at his sword. It was clotted with blood.

It was quieter here. In the distance they could hear new sounds, a change in the noise. The Muwardis had come. They would care nothing for the butchered Kindath but would be ruthless in suppressing the violence. And the fires would have to be contained or Fezana would be at the mercy of the Jaddites outside.

But I'm a Jaddite, Alvar thought. He knelt and began wiping his slippery blade on a clump of weeds by the wall. This is good for us.

It didn't feel that way. He stood up and sheathed his weapon. He looked at the others. The little boy was quiet now, clutching the neck of Jehane's mother. She had carried him all the way here. His sister stood close by, her face white, eyes still wide, still without tears. Jehane's father was stone-faced and silent, a hand on Husari's shoulder.

It was Husari who was weeping.

Alvar felt his heart twist for his friend. This was Husari's city, he would have known so many of these maddened people, he had probably killed men he had known all his life. Alvar opened his mouth and then closed it. There was nothing he could think of to say. There were places into which words could not go. Not the words he knew.

Jehane was on her knees, scrabbling at a stone in the wall. It came loose. She reached in a hand, swore as a scorpion scurried away, and pulled out a key. She stood up.

"Over here," she gasped. She ran a short distance along the wall to a clump of raspberry bushes. Ducking in behind them, she dropped to her knees again, inserted the key and pulled, hard.

A small, low section of the stone wall swung outwards. The hinging mechanism was ingenious; they had no time to admire it.

"Is this," said Eliane, "one of the ways out your friends taught you?"

Jehane glanced up at her mother. "How do you know about them?"

Eliane's expression was bitter. "They warned me. We were too slow to move."

"Then we must not be now," said Ammar ibn Khairan. "Come."

"I'll go," Alvar said. "Wait for my signal." Who knew what lay outside in the darkness? Whatever it was, Alvar was going to be first to meet it.

"There's another key inside," Jehane said. "You need to use it to push the outer piece open."

He slipped behind the hushes and then wriggled into a hollowed-out space in the thick stone city wall. In the close blackness he found the second key by touch and then the keyhole. He inserted, turned, pushed. The outer wall piece swung away and Alvar crawled through. He felt grass, stood up and looked around, blade quickly to hand again.

Only twilight, damp earth by the river, the first stars and a rising white moon. The water rippled just ahead, reflecting the pale moonlight.

"Come on," he said, mouth to the hollow space in the stone.

The others came through then, one by one. He helped them slip out and then stand outside the wall between stone and dark water. Rodrigo, last through, dropped the key back inside and pushed the opening shut.

They crossed the water immediately, those who could swim helping the others. The river was very cold this early in the year. They climbed up on the far bank in the dark. Alvar collapsed among the high grass and the reeds, sucking in deep breaths of the clean air. His face stung; it felt raw and burnt.

He became aware of something. Slowly he rose to his feet again. Rodrigo had walked a few steps from the rest of them and was staring out into the darkness. His sword was drawn.

"Who's there?" the Captain called.

There was silence. Ammar ibn Khairan also stood up.

Then there came an answer from the dark: "A friend. Someone is here to bid you welcome, Ser Rodrigo." The speaker had a deep, calm voice.

But it wasn't the tone, it was the language spoken that caused Alvar to step forward beside Rodrigo, his heart hammering again.

He was close enough to hear the Captain draw breath.

"Light a torch, then," Rodrigo said. "Darkness offers no true welcome."

They heard a command. Flint was struck. Light blazed.

"Welcome back, truly," said the very tall, bearded man illuminated by that torch. Alvar had seen him twice in his life. He forgot to breathe.

"My lord," said Rodrigo, after a moment. "This is unexpected."

King Ramiro of Valledo, surrounded by a company of men, smiled his pleasure. "I had hoped it might be. It is rare that any of us are able to surprise you."

"How come you to be here?" Rodrigo said. His voice was controlled, but Alvar was near enough to know there was effort involved in that. He heard ibn Khairan come quietly up beside them.

King Ramiro's smile deepened. He gestured, and someone stepped from the group of men behind him.

"Hello, Papa," said a young boy, coming to stand beside the king.

Rodrigo sucked in his breath, his control gone. "Fernan? In Jad's name, what—"

"It was Diego," the boy said, a little too brightly. He wore light armor and a sword. "He knew where you were, this morning, and told us where to wait tonight." Rodrigo was silent. "He sometimes knows where you are, remember?" The boy's voice betrayed uncertainty. "Are you not pleased to see me, Papa?"

"Oh, Jad," Alvar heard the Captain say. And then, to the king of Valledo, "What have you done? Why are my sons with this army?"

"There will be time to explain," said Ramiro calmly. "This is not the place. Will you come with us? We can offer dry clothing and food."

"And those I am with?" Rodrigo's tone was ice-cold.

"They are my guests if you speak for them, whoever they may be. Come now, greet your son, Ser Rodrigo. He has been dreaming of this moment."

Rodrigo opened his mouth quickly, then closed it. Slowly he sheathed his blade.

"Come to me," he said to the boy, and with an involuntary sound, Fernan Belmonte ran forward and was gathered fiercely in his father's embrace. Alvar saw the Captain close his eyes as he gripped his son.

"Your mother," said Rodrigo, when he finally stepped back, "is going to kill all of us for this, you realize. Starting with me."

"Mother's with the queen, Papa. We haven't seen her yet but there was a message she came south and joined Queen Ines with the rest of the army following us. We tried to cut you off before you reached the city. That's why we came so fast. Why are you here, Papa? What happened to your moustache?"

"I had friends in danger. I came to get them out. Where is Diego?"

"They are taking great care of him," Fernan said. "He's angry about it. They wouldn't let him come here. They made him stay with the food train, in some village by the river west."

"Ashar, no! Not there!"

All his days Alvar would remember those words and the expression on Ammar ibn Khairan's face, crying them. Rodrigo wheeled on him.

"What is it? Tell me.'"

"Ambush!" snapped the other man, already moving. "The Muwardis. Almalik planned it, years ago. Pray to your god and ride!"

Rodrigo was already running towards the horses.

And so, moments later, for the second time in less than a year, Alvar de Pellino—wet and burnt and cold, pushing past exhaustion and half a dozen small wounds—found himself galloping flat-out through darkness over the plain north of Fezana towards a hamlet named Orvilla.

Ammar ibn Khairan was beside him, against all allegiances, and the king of Valledo was on his other side with Jehane and her parents and Husart and two children and a party of fifty of the king's guard streaming behind them in the cool, clear night.

Ahead of them all, whipping his mount like a madman under the stars and the white moon, was a father racing time and the turning heavens to his child.

Sixteen

Until the very moment, under the stars and the white moon in Al-Rassan of the infidels, when the veiled ones appeared out of the darkening plain, Ibero the cleric had succeeded in persuading himself that the hand of Jad was upon his shoulder after all, guiding him.

He had shaped his plan on that first morning, riding west from Rancho Belmonte in the rain. It was possible—he'd been forced to admit it—that Miranda had been right. That in furthering the demands of holy faith Ibero had done wrong by the family he so dearly loved. If that were so, he had vowed on that grey, cold morning he would do all he could to ensure that the wrong was contained and redressed. Miranda Belmonte might have turned him away, driven him from his home, but he would not turn his back on her or her family.

He had fallen in with a company of soldiers from the ranch country, heading towards Carcasia in response to the king's summons: the same summons that had claimed the two boys. He went with the soldiers. This was a holy war, in name at least, and clerics were not unwelcome if they could keep up on the ride. Ibero knew how to handle a horse. Years with the Belmonte had made certain of that.

He found Fernan and Diego among the king's party seven days later in the plain south of Carcasia, amid the tents and banners of a war camp. Rodrigo's sons were being treated with evident respect, although the scrutiny afforded Diego by those who knew why he was here made Ibero uncomfortable. Against his will, he was reminded of Miranda's words: those with the far-sight, or whatever name was given it, had been burned in the past. In the not-so-distant past. This, Ibero told himself again, was a more enlightened age.

The boys weren't entirely pleased to see him, but Ibero had a streak of stubbornness in his nature and he made it clear to all concerned, including the elegant High Cleric from Ferrieres, that where the sons of Rodrigo Belmonte went, Ibero also would go. He didn't tell the boys he had been driven from the ranch by their mother; perhaps he ought to have, but he couldn't manage to do it. That meant his presence with them involved a deception, but he trusted the god to forgive him for that. He meant well. He had always meant well.

Fernan and Diego had obviously been up to mischief on the way here and since arriving. They were high-spirited and too clever for their own good sometimes. It was judged useful to have their tutor about for discipline. There was a tale doing the rounds of the camp about the rock-laden saddlebags of one of the soldiers who had brought them here. It was quite a funny story, but Ibero was practised at not encouraging his charges with visible amusement.

Soon afterwards they rode south through the no-man's-land with the army of reconquest; with the vanguard, in fact, for Diego and Fernan were kept close to the king himself.

Ibero had never seen his king before. Ramiro of Valledo was a handsome, impressive man. Worthy, the little cleric thought humbly, to be the instrument of Esperana's reconquest. If the god allowed. He was acutely aware that all the men in this army were a part of something momentous. The king kept speaking of a limited campaign, a tactical capture of Fezana, but even Ibero the cleric knew that once Valledo was in Al-Rassan the shape and tenor of their age would have changed forever.

The lean, elegant constable, Count Gonzalez de Rada, hovered unsettlingly close to the boys all the way south. Ibero knew that Ser Rodrigo and this man had no love for each other, but he also remembered that de Rada had sworn to guard Belmonte's family when Rodrigo had been exiled. Ibero hoped—and prayed, each morning and when the sun went down—that the sardonic constable's proximity was a manifestation of that vow and nothing else.

South of the two small tagra forts the king's vanguard began to open a distance from the rest of the army, with outriders galloping back and forth to keep communications flowing.

This was how Ibero learned that Miranda Belmonte d'Alveda had also become a part of their army, joining the entourage of Queen Ines, who had chosen to come with her husband into the lands of the infidels. When he told the boys they seemed unsurprised. Ibero was disconcerted by that until he remembered the obvious.

Diego's gift was difficult to deal with at times. He would have known before the messengers came, Ibero realized. A little reluctantly, he admonished Diego.

"You ought to be telling the rest of us if you ... see anything. It might be important. That is why we are here, after all."

Diego's expression had been comical. "My mother?" he asked. "Ibero, my mother's arrival is important to the war?"

Put that way, he did have a point. Fernan, predictably, had a different perspective entirely.

"Isn't this wonderful," he had exclaimed indignantly. "Our first campaign and everyone from home comes trotting along. Who else should we expect? The cook, our nurses from childhood? This is ridiculous! Are you here to make sure we keep warm at night?"

Diego had laughed. Ibero was too uneasy about the tidings of Miranda to be amused or chastising. Fernan's words were disrespectful, but Ibero could understand how a young man on his first campaign might feel ... crowded by his tutor's arrival, and now his mother's.

Nothing for it. If the boys felt unhappy or the soldiers teased them they would have to deal with that themselves. The truth was, they were too young to be here, and would not have come had Diego not been what he was. And had not Ibero sent a certain letter to Esteren.

He sent another letter—a formal message to Miranda by one of the outriders. He reported his own presence and the good health and respectful treatment of the two boys. No word came back.

They did hear, indirectly, that the queen was entirely recovered from her unfortunate accident and that she had great faith in her new physician, a doctor from one of the tagra forts.

The story was that he had saved Queen Ines's life at the very brink of death. Diego, in particular, was fascinated by the tale and ferreted out all the details he could from those who had been at that meeting of the three kings. Fernan was more interested in upcoming events. He managed to attach himself to the king's entourage, staying close to Count Gonzalez, in fact. It was Fernan who explained to the other two why they were leaving the Asharite farms and hamlets untouched as they rode.

They had passed a number of them since leaving the tagra lands. The villagers and farmers had fled into the hills with most of their belongings, but it had always been customary, in the wars of Ashar and Jad, to fire the houses and fields.

Things were different this time.

Despite a visible disagreement emanating from Geraud de Chervalles, King Ramiro was insistent on the point. This was not a raid, Fernan reported the king as saying. They were coming south to take Fezana and to stay. And if they did that, they would need Asharites to resettle these villages and farmhouses, to pay taxes and till the fields. Time and steady governance would bring Jad back into Al-Rassan, the king had declared, not burnings and destruction. Ibero wasn't entirely sure how that meshed with holy doctrine, but he kept silent in the presence of his betters.

Fernan would spend the time after twilight prayers, before dark and bed, drawing maps for his brother and the cleric, explaining what might happen when they reached Fezana, and after. Ibero noted, a little wryly, that he was entirely conversant now with the location—and the proper spelling—of all the major cities and rivers in Al-Rassan.

Four more days passed. The spring weather remained mild; they made steady progress, drumming hooves and the dust of an army moving over the grasslands of Al-Rassan.

Then Diego announced, shortly before they broke camp one morning, that he had seen his father riding west.

The king and the constable and the tall cleric from Ferrieres had asked all sorts of questions he couldn't answer.

Once, such questions had made Diego feel inadequate, as if he was letting the questioners down by not being able to reply. He didn't like disappointing people. Later, though, the queries—even from his parents—had begun to irritate him, betraying, as they did, such a failure to understand the limits of his capability. Diego had made himself practice being patient at such times. The fact was, people didn't understand his limits; they couldn't possibly, because they didn't understand how he did what he did.

Not that Diego really understood his own gift; where it came from, why he had it, what it meant. He knew some things, of course. He knew that what he could do marked him as different from others. He knew—from his mother long ago—that there was some undefined danger associated with being different in this way, and that he was not to tell others about what he could do.

All that, of course, had changed now. Horsemen had come from the king of Valledo and taken him to war. Fernan, naturally, had come too. Fernan was the one who really wanted to go to war, but when they had reached the encampment by Carcasia's walls it had become clear—during a first intimidating meeting with the king himself and the cleric from over the mountains—that Diego was the one they wanted. He'd had to explain, shyly, what it was he could do.

Not so much, really. He could see their disappointment. At times over the years, he had wondered about all the secrecy and anxiety. It wasn't a complicated gift: he could sometimes tell where his family was, even when they were far away. His father, his mother, his brother, though Fernan was never far from him, and his mother very seldom was.

Also, he could sometimes sense danger coming for any of the three of them. As to that, it had almost always been his father. His father's life involved quite a lot of danger.

Fernan wanted to be exactly like their father. He dreamed of it, practiced for it, had rushed through his childhood hungry for a man's weapons, and war.

Fernan was stronger and quicker, though they had been born identical. There were times when Diego thought their father preferred Fernan, but there were other times when he thought otherwise. He loved his father without reservation. Other people found Rodrigo intimidating, he knew. Diego thought that was funny. Fernan didn't; Fernan considered it useful. They differed in such small things.

It didn't much matter, really. Nothing was ever going to separate the sons of Rodrigo Belmonte; they had realized that, definitively, when they were very young.

Fernan was enjoying almost everything about the campaign they had joined. Diego thought it was an interesting place to be, certainly better than another summer on the ranch, but he had a recurrence of his old feelings of anxiety when it appeared that he was disappointing those who had brought him here to help. At that first meeting he had answered the sharp questions from the High Cleric as best he could, and a few from the constable and the king, too. He liked the king most, though he supposed it wasn't really his place to like the king or not.

In any case, he couldn't be much help to them and he did his best to make that clear. Some days ago he had sensed his mother's arrival among the main body of the army, half a day behind them. He had told Fernan, of course. He'd considered telling the king and the cleric from Ferrieres just to have something to offer them, but thinking about his mother led him to keep quiet. Her movements, surely, weren't a part of this campaign. It felt like a kind of betrayal to talk about her, and so he didn't. Besides, he knew why she had come. Fernan did, too. It made Fernan prickly and angry; Diego just felt sad. They probably ought to have waited for her to come home that day before riding off. He'd been thinking guiltily about that since they left.

He knew she would not have let them join this army had she been at the ranch when the soldiers arrived. Fernan had scoffed at that suggestion when Diego mentioned it, pointing out that their mother, forceful as she might be, was hardly likely to have defied a direct summons from the king.

Diego wasn't so sure about that. He found that he missed his mother. She was gentler with him than with most people. He knew Fernan missed her too, but his brother would deny that if Diego spoke of it, so he didn't. They talked about their father, instead. It was all right, the way Fernan saw the world, to miss their father.

Then one morning Diego woke with an image of Rodrigo in his mind. It was blurred, because his father was riding very fast, and the landscape changed too quickly for Diego to get a clear picture. But he was coming towards them from the east, and he wasn't far away.

Diego lay under his blanket for a little while, eyes closed, concentrating. He heard Fernan wake up beside him, and start to say something. Then Fernan was quiet. He could usually tell when Diego was reaching out, or reaching in. It was hard to know the right words for this.

The landscape refused to become clearer. He saw that his father was with only a few people, not a large company, and there seemed to be a river beyond him—which would make sense, if Diego remembered the maps correctly. Rodrigo would be riding along the Tavares. He seemed to be agitated about something, but Diego had no sense of immediate danger. He tried casting his mind a little away from his father, to see if he could place him more exactly. He saw the river, grasslands, hills.

Then, vividly, an image of a city and its walls. That had to be Fezana.

His father was going into Fezana.

Diego opened his eyes. Fernan was there, watching him. Without speaking, his brother offered him an orange, already sliced. Diego bit into it.

"Why," he asked softly, "would Papa be going into Fezana?"

Fernan's brow knitted. "No idea," he said at length. "Is he? Are you going to tell the king?"

"Guess so. That's why we're here, isn't it?"

Fernan didn't like thinking of it that way, Diego knew, but it was the truth. They told Ibero first. Then Diego and his brother and their tutor went to find King Ramiro.

A remarkably short time after that conversation they were racing, with the king and the constable and one hundred of Valledo's best Horsemen towards Fezana, a full day's fast ride away.

"This is very important," the king had said to Diego. "You have now justified your being here. We thank you."

"Papa isn't in trouble, is he?" Fernan had asked sharply. He was no longer shy in this company. "He isn't exiled from here, is he? Only Valledo."

King Ramiro had paused then, and looked at both boys. His expression had softened. "Is that what you have been fearing? Your father isn't in trouble at all. Not from me. I have to catch him before he gets to Fezana. I have no idea why he's going there, but I want to stop him and end his exile. I need him badly on this campaign. I can't afford to have my best captain trapped inside the city I'm about to besiege, can I?"

Fernan had nodded gravely, as if he'd been thinking along these same lines. Perhaps he had. Diego, different in nature and response, had looked quickly at Count Gonzalez when the king named Rodrigo his best captain. He had been able to read nothing in the constable's features, though.

They rode so rapidly through the morning and into midday, that they actually caught and passed several groups of farmers and villagers heading for Fezana, fleeing their approach. People began screaming as the Horsemen raced by, but it wasn't until noontime that the king ordered a party of Asharites killed. Their first killings in this war.

It was important, Diego was given to understand. The people streaming into Fezana, and those already waiting there, had to fear them terribly—to be made to doubt the wisdom of resistance. Walled cities as well-defended as Fezana couldn't be stormed, they had to be besieged, and the morale of those inside was critical to that. A certain number of people had to die so that word of killings might run ahead into the city.

Neither he nor Fernan was part of the contingent that peeled away from their ranks and began cutting a swath through the cluster of families the king had indicated. Diego, for his own part, was entirely happy not to be involved. He saw Fernan looking back over his shoulder as they rode, watching the slaughter.

Diego didn't look at all, after his first glance. He thought his brother was secretly relieved, as well, not to be part of that group. He didn't say this, of course. But Fernan's play-battles had always been against the veiled Muwardis, where despite being hideously outnumbered, the lords Fernan and Diego Belmonte with their gallant riders had managed to prevail, breaking through the ranks of the desert-spawned to rescue their captive father and the king and earn great praise.

Chopping down farmers and small children on a dusty road was something else entirely. The king's party galloped on, outrunning the screaming. The soldiers who had been detailed to the task caught up with them a little later. Geraud de Chervalles, looking excited and happy, blessed them and their weapons. In a ringing voice Diego thought was too loud, he called what they had done a proud moment in the history of Esperana.

The king ordered a rest after that and men slipped down from their mounts to take water and food. The sun was high, but it was still early in the year and not too hot. Diego walked a little way apart, found some bushes for shade, sat down on the ground and closed his eyes, looking for his father. It was his task. It was why they were here. There was nothing private or personal about his gift any more. He would have to think more about that, later.

He found Rodrigo quickly this time and realized something immediately. He could see the city in the same image as his father. There was something else, too, an aura Diego recognized from many times before.

He stood up, briefly dizzy, which sometimes happened. He went to find the king. Fernan saw him going and rose to follow. Diego waited for his brother and they walked over together. King Ramiro was sitting on a saddle blanket eating food from his lap, like a soldier, and drinking from a leather wine flask. He handed the flask and his platter to a servant when he saw Diego coming. He stood up.

"What is it, lad?"

"When will we reach Fezana, my lord?"

"Sunset. A little before, if we go very fast. Why?"

"My father is already there. On a hill just east of the walls. I don't think we can reach him. And I think ... I believe he's in danger now, after he gets inside."

King Ramiro looked at him thoughtfully.

"Be more precise, in Jad's name!" It was the cleric from Ferrieres.

"He would be if he could, de Chervalles. You must see that." The king didn't appear to much like the High Cleric. He turned back to Diego. "You can anticipate danger as well as see it happening?"

"For my father, yes, but not always, my lord."

"You still have no idea why he is going into Fezana?"

Diego shook his head.

"He is not with his company? A small party, you say?"

Diego nodded.

There was a nervous cough. They all turned to Ibero. Diego hadn't heard him come up. Self-conscious in the extreme, the small cleric said, "I may be able to offer a thought on this, my lord."

"Do so." Geraud de Chervalles spoke before the king. Ramiro directed a glance at him but said nothing.

Ibero said, "In his letters home, Ser Rodrigo did say that his company had retained the services of a physician. A woman. A Kindath from Fezana. Jehane bet Ishak, I believe. Perhaps ... ?"

The king was briskly nodding his head. "That would make sense. Rodrigo knew we might be coming. He would be guided by loyalty if she is part of his company. Would this woman still have family in Fezana?"

"I would not know, my lord."

"I do." It was Fernan, speaking with assurance. "He wrote my mother about that. Her father was a physician as well, and still lives in Fezana."

The king quickly held up a hand. "Ishak of Fezana? Is that the father? The one blinded by Almalik?"

Fernan blinked. "I don't know anything about—"

"It must be! That's the man whose treatise the queen's doctor read! That is how he saved her life!" King Ramiro's eyes gleamed. "By Jad, I see it now. I know what is happening. Ser Rodrigo is going in, but he'll be coming out with them any way he can. He needs time before we arrive."

"You will tell us your thinking, I hope, my lord?" Geraud de Chervalles wore an expression poised between pique and curiosity.

"As much as you need to know," the king of Valledo said agreeably. The cleric reddened. The king, appearing not to notice, turned to Gonzalez de Rada. "Constable, this is what I want done, and I want it done swiftly ... "

King Ramiro seemed to be extremely good at giving orders, so far as Diego could judge. A king must spend most of his time telling people what he wanted them to do, he supposed. A number of men were seen riding back to the main body of the army soon afterwards. He and Fernan remained with the king's guard.

They slowed their pace, however. And shortly before day's end, at a place to which one of the outriders led them—a stand of trees within sight of the river and the city walls, but not too close to them—they stopped, taking shelter at the edge of the trees.

King Ramiro, riding gloves in one hand, walked over, unexpectedly alone, to where Diego and Fernan and Ibero were watering their horses. He gestured, and Diego quickly handed his horse's reins to his brother and followed. Fernan made as if to come too, but the king held up a finger and shook his head and Diego watched his brother stop, crestfallen.

It was the first time he had been alone with the king. Kings weren't alone very often, he thought.

They walked through the stand of trees—beech and oak, a few cypresses like sentries at the edge of the wood. There were small white flowers everywhere, like a carpet on the forest floor. Diego wondered how they grew in such profusion in the dark, cool shade. They came to a place near the eastern end of the woods and here the king stopped. He turned to look south and Diego did the same.

In the light of the setting sun they could see the gleam of the Tavares River. Beyond it was Fezana. River and city had been nothing more than names on a map for Diego once, tests from their tutor: "Name the cities owing allegiance at this time to the king of Cartada. Name that king. Now write those names, and spell them correctly."

Tavares. Fezana. Almalik. Not just names any more. He was in Al-Rassan, land of terror and legend. Here with the army of Valledo, come to conquer. To reconquer, for all of this had once been their own, when Esperana was a name of power in the world, long ago.

Truth to tell, looking out at those massive stone walls the color of honey in the slanting light, Diego Belmonte found himself wondering how even this king and this army dared imagine taking such a city. Nothing in his experience—he had only seen Esteren once, and then Carcasia—could compare with this splendor. Even as he stood looking south, his image of Valledo grew smaller.

Rising behind the walls Diego could see domes gleaming in the last of the light. Places of worship, he knew. Shrines to beliefs the clerics of Jad named foul and evil.

They looked beautiful, though, to Diego.

As if reading his thoughts or following his gaze, the king said softly, "The two nearer domes—the blue and white—are those of the Kindath sanctuary. The silver ones that shine, the larger ones, are the temples of Ashar. At sundown, soon, we ought to be able to hear the bells for prayer, even from here. I remember loving that sound."

The king had spent a year exiled in Al-Rassan, Diego knew. Just as, earlier, Raimundo and Diego's own father had been exiled by King Sancho the Fat to the cities of the infidels. That episode was part of their family history, tangled up with why Rodrigo wasn't constable of Valledo any more.

Diego, feeling he was expected to say something, murmured, "My father ought to know this city well enough. He's been here before."

"I know that, Diego. Do you think you'll be able to tell me when he is coming out, and where? There will have to be a way out through the walls. The gates will be locked by now."

Diego looked up at his king. "I'll try."

"We need some warning. I want to be there, wherever he comes out. Will you know where he's going? Which part of the city?"

"Sometimes I can do that. Not always." Diego felt guilty again. "I'm sorry, my lord. I don't ... I can't tell very well what I'll see. Sometimes there's nothing. I'm afraid I'm not very—"

A hand came down on his shoulder. "You have already been a help and if Jad finds us both worthy you will be again. Believe this. I am not saying words to ease you."

"But how, my lord?" Diego knew he probably shouldn't ask this but he had been wondering about it since leaving home.

The king looked down at him for a moment. "It isn't complex, if you understand war." His brow furrowed as he reached for words. "Diego, think of it this way: you know men cannot see very well in the dark of night. Think of war as all taking place in darkness. During battle or before battle, a captain, a king, knows only what is happening next to him, and not even that much very clearly. But if I have you with me and I have your father commanding a wing of my army—and by Jad I hope I will soon—then you can tell me something of what is happening where he is. Anything you give me is more than I would otherwise have had. Diego, you can be my beam of light, like a gift from the god, to see by in darkness."

There was a stirring of the wind; leaves rustled. Diego, looked up at his king, swallowing hard. It was odd, but in that moment he felt both larger and smaller than he was. He looked away, abashed. But his gaze fell once more upon the mighty walls and gleaming domes of Fezana and there was no comfort there.

He closed his eyes. The familiar spinning came. He reached out a hand and braced himself against a tree.

Then he was with his father, and aware of something else in the same moment. In a stillness at the edge of a wood Diego Belmonte reached out, trying to serve his country and his king, and he found himself enmeshed in Fezana's streets. He felt danger surrounding his father like a ring of fire.

It was fire, he realized.

Heart pounding, eyes still closed, concentrating as hard as he could, he said, "There are torches and a large crowd. People running. Houses are burning, my lord. There is an old man with my father."

"Is he blind?" the king asked quickly.

"I cannot tell that. Everything is burning."

"You're right! I see smoke now. In Jad's name, what are they doing there? Where is your father going?"

"My lord, I cannot, I ... wait."

Diego struggled to orient himself. He never saw actual faces with this sight, only presences, auras, an awareness of people, with his father—or mother, or brother—at the center. He sensed tall houses, walls, a fountain. A press of running figures. Then two domes, blue and white. Behind his father. East. He opened his eyes, fought the dizziness, looking south. He pointed.

"They are going towards a place in the walls on this side of the city. There must be a way out, as you said. There is fighting. Why is there fighting, my lord?"

He looked anxiously up at the king. Ramiro's expression was grim.

"I don't know. I can only guess. If your father is with ben Yonannon and he is fighting, then it may be the Asharites are attacking the Kindath in the city. Why, I cannot tell. But it works to our gain: if Rodrigo gets out."

Which offered no comfort.

"Come!" the king said. "You have helped me again. You are my beam of light, Diego Belmonte, truly."

Even as he said this, the sun went down. Twilight descended, swift and beautiful, over the plain north of Fezana. To the west, a last glow of red suffused the sky. The gleaming of the domes was gone. Diego, looking south as they ran back towards the others, saw smoke rising from the city.

He was not allowed to go see if his father was able to get out and greet him if he did.

The king let Fernan come with him but Diego was forbidden. It was judged that there was too much danger near the walls, with only the fifty men the king took with him, quietly stealing up to the river and moat in darkness.

Diego was outraged. He was the reason the king knew where Rodrigo was going, he was the only reason Ramiro was able to do this, and he was being denied the chance to join them. There were, it emerged, disadvantages to being useful to the king of Valledo.

Fernan was elated, but sympathetic enough to try to conceal it. Diego wasn't fooled. He watched his brother leave with the king's party and he turned, grim and silent, to go with the other half of the vanguard troop. Ibero was with him, of course, and—to Diego's surprise—Count Gonzalez de Rada.

It was possible, he mused, riding west along the river, that the constable had no desire to meet Rodrigo in this unexpected way. It was also possible that the constable was taking his oath to guard Rodrigo's family very seriously. Fernan was with the king, so Gonzalez would stay with Diego. He looked thoughtfully towards the constable but it was almost dark by then and they were riding without torches.

They didn't have far to go. They saw campfires. The white moon was rising behind them as they came up to the hamlet where the food wagons had begun assembling during the afternoon. This was, Diego was given to understand, the obvious place to locate the stores and supplies for a siege. That had been decided upon a long time ago by those who knew the terrain here.

Diego and the others entered the tiny village—it had already been abandoned by the Asharites. The hamlet lay alongside the river. There was a water mill. Almost all of the houses looked new, which was unexpected. The smell of cooking came to Diego. He discovered in that moment that he was ravenous. This was an absurd time to be thinking of food. On the other hand, he told himself, what else was there to do now, besides wait?

He dismounted between Ibero and the constable. Men came running to take their horses. Diego turned back and looked east, towards the low moon. Fernan would be at the river and the walls by now, waiting to surprise their father. It wasn't, Diego decided, fair at all.

He looked around. This hamlet had a name, of course—Fernan had marked it on one of his maps—but Diego had forgotten it. He half-expected Ibero to demand that he give the name. He was prepared to be extremely sarcastic if this happened.

They weren't far from Fezana in this cluster of huts and houses, but at night under stars the city would normally have been lost to sight. It wasn't now. Diego saw a red glow to the east and he knew Fezana was burning. His father was in there.

He put aside his anger with that thought and forgetting about hunger closed his eyes.

He touched Rodrigo's presence, was aware of him by the city walls but still inside. Just across the river he found Fernan. With relief, he realized that he had no sense of immediate danger. No fighting near either of them. On impulse Diego reached out north and found his mother—closer than he had expected.

He took comfort in knowing where she was. That they were all safe, for the moment. It even seemed they might be together soon, here with the king's army in Al-Rassan. That would be good. That would be wonderful, in fact. Diego opened his eyes, letting his mind come back to the hamlet and, reassured, he let himself think about food again.

In that moment he heard a low, hard drumming sound and the first scream, cut off. Then he saw the Muwardis.

It was, in the end, as might have been expected. Not that this mattered to the desert-born. If anything, it was a vexation: when war was too easy there was less glory in it.

Aziz ibn Dabir of the Zuhrite tribe, assigned to serve in Fezana by the king of Cartada—to whom he had originally been posted by his own lord, Yazir ibn Q'arif, ruler of all the desert—had taken one hundred of his men west from the city earlier that day. They had stayed on the south bank of the Tavares and then crossed at a fording place where the river curved and slowed.

At twilight they offered the sunset prayers and then, moving with extreme care, had doubled back west towards the hamlet of Orvilla.

It had been considered, years ago, by the last king of Cartada and his advisors, that if the accursed sun-worshippers ever dared to venture south with designs upon Fezana, they would be very likely to choose Orvilla as a base for their supplies during a siege.

It was the obvious place and because of that the plan of Almalik I, Aziz had to concede, was a shrewd one. This was true notwithstanding that it had been devised by wine-drinkers in Al-Rassan, and not by tribesmen pure in the will of Ashar.

Still, it was the warriors of the Majriti who had been asked to perform the attack. Of course, thought Aziz. Who among the womanish men left in Fezana could have implemented this?

During their silent loop back to the east, Aziz had moved ahead of the company with his two best outriders. Leaving their horses out of sight, they had crawled through the grass to overlook Orvilla.

It was exactly as had been foreseen.

The Jaddites, stupid in their predictability, had indeed sent their wagons here. Whichever of their women had come south would almost certainly be arriving in Orvilla tomorrow. Secure in the notion that the people of the countryside had fled into the city, they hadn't bothered to detail more than a rudimentary force to guard those setting up camp.

Aziz heard careless laughter, saw tents being readied, smelled meat already cooking on the fires. He caught snatches of conversation in the sibilant accents of Esperana. He didn't understand what was being said. It didn't matter. What mattered was that his tribesmen were going to achieve a slaughter here. One that ought to shake the invading northerners to their godless souls. Aziz had ideas as to how to heighten that effect. It was a shame that the women weren't here yet: that would have made things perfect. Aziz had not had a woman for some time.

Unconsciously he stroked the head of the hammer looped at his belt—his own favorite weapon. It had been his father's before him, on the legendary first ride of the Zuhrites out of the farthest west. It would one day belong to his own eldest son, if Ashar's stars allowed it to be so.

Ashar seemed to be with him in that moment. Just as Aziz was about to slip down from his vantage point and order the attack, something alerted him to danger. He held out a warning hand to his two companions and placed an ear to the ground. Hoofbeats. The other two, doing the same, looked at Aziz in the darkness.

They waited. A few moments later a company of soldiers rode up on the proud stallions of Valledo. Aziz coveted those horses almost as much as he wanted to sever the heads and sexual organs of the men who rode them. It was dark of course, but there were fires in Orvilla and Aziz was blessed with good night vision. He made out fifty riders, not more. They could deal with that, in fact he wanted to deal with them. This was now an attack in which glory could be found.

Timing mattered. They had been ordered to engage and then swiftly withdraw—not risk being trapped outside the city. He saw the new Horsemen enter Orvilla, riding through a gate in the low fence rebuilt since the fire of last summer. He bent his head towards one of his men and whispered his orders. Nothing very complex. There was no need for complications here.

"These men will be hungry now, and vulnerable. Get back to the others. Tell them we attack now, in Ashar's name."

The god's stars were steady above them. The new Jaddites were dismounting, even as he watched. Their horses were being led away by servants. These men would be fighters, Aziz knew, but on foot? Against one hundred of the best-trained Muwardis in Al-Rassan?

A moment later Aziz heard the sound of hooves. He stood up and looked back. He saw the curved line of his tribesmen approaching. One man came sweeping up to him, the reins of Aziz's horse in one hand. Aziz swung up onto the saddle cloth while the horses were still moving. He pulled his hammer free of his belt.

He heard a scream from one of the cookfires. The sound broke off sharply. Someone had shot an arrow. There were other cries, the desperate sounds of men caught utterly by surprise.

They reached the low fence and hurdled it. Aziz lifted his own voice then, crying Ashar's name in triumph beneath the watching, holy stars.

They did, in the darkness of night, what they had come out from Fezana to do. They killed, and more than that. A message was to be given here, and the northerners were not to be permitted to avoid that message.

There was some resistance, which offered a kind of pleasure. The fifty men who had come were soldiers, but they were outnumbered and on foot, and the Muwardis knew exactly what they were doing.

Aziz had already identified the leader of the soldiers and chosen him for his own, as a captain of the tribes had to do if he wanted to keep his honor and rank. He raced up to the man, wheeling his hammer in anticipation—but then had to rock wildly in the saddle to avoid a leaping sword blow from the northerner.

The man was no longer young, but he was quick, and had very nearly been deadly. Aziz, going past, turning his horse, saw the tribesman behind him fall to a second slash of the same sword. The Jaddite commander, a dark, tall man, shoved the tribesman from the saddle and swung himself up on the horse in the same motion. The two leaders faced each other. Aziz smiled. This was life, this was what a man lived for.

The Valledan screamed something suddenly, and brandished his sword high. It was too flamboyant, he was too far away. A distraction.

Aziz turned, instinctively, and saw the boy with a blade coming towards him from behind. If his horse had been stabbed Aziz might have been in peril, but the boy disdained such tactics, swinging upwards for the Muwardi's ribs. Aziz blocked the blow and then—something he had done a hundred times, at least—brought his hammer across and down, through the feeble parrying of that sword. He smashed the boy's skull, felt it break like the shell of an egg.

"Diego!" the Valledan leader cried.

Aziz laughed aloud. The dark Valledan drove his seized mount forward and chopped at the neck of Aziz's horse. The sword bit deep. The animal screamed, rearing wildly on its hind legs. Aziz fought to keep his seat, felt himself sliding, and saw the northerner's long sword coming.

Had Aziz ibn Dabir been a lesser man he would have died then. He was a Muwardi though, of the Zuhrites, hand-picked to come to Al-Rassan. He hurled his body from the saddle, away from the sweeping blade, and hit the ground on the far side of his horse.

He came up with his left shoulder hurting but his hammer ready. It wasn't necessary. Aziz saw that the Valledan had been dispatched from behind by two of the tribesmen. One sword had gone in so far it had come out through the man's breast where he lay on the ground.

Aware that he had lost more than dignity in this encounter, Aziz strode over and seized the sword from the second tribesman. Enraged, he severed the dead man's head with a blow. He spoke a command, breathing hard. One of his men leaped from his horse and pulled down the lower clothing of the dead man. Aziz, not troubling to be neat about it, castrated the Valledan. Then he seized the dead boy, flipped him on his belly, and dragged the headless, emasculated captain on top of him, as if they had been lovers butchered in congress.

It was all a matter of sending a message. Making the Jaddites brutally aware of what they faced if they remained in the lands of Ashar so far from their pastures in the north.

Aziz looked up. An outrider was racing towards them from the eastern edge of the hamlet.

"More of them!" he shouted. "Riding from Fezana."

"How many?"

"Fifty. Maybe more."

Aziz scowled. He badly wanted to stay and defeat these men as well, especially since his own disgrace, but surprise was gone now, and the new Valledans would be mounted and ready. His orders had been clear, and he understood them too well to disobey, whatever pride might desire.

He ordered the withdrawal. Dead Valledans were strewn through the camp. The food and the supply wagons were burning. They rode out to the north and crossed the river by the narrow bridge. The last men chopped it down, just to be sure.

They raced back to Fezana without incident, were known and admitted at the southern gate. Aziz made his report to the governor. Then he and his men were immediately detailed to join others in fighting the fires that had begun in their absence. It appeared that someone had chosen a poor moment to perform an entirely proper act: dealing with the Kindath of the city.

It was mid-morning before Aziz ibn Dabir fell, exhausted, into bed. His shoulder had begun to hurt quite badly during the labors of the long night. He dozed fitfully, despite his fatigue, knowing that word would be travelling south across Al-Rassan and then the straits to the desert all too soon.

Word of how Aziz ibn Dabir had been on the very brink of defeat in combat with a single Valledan and had only been saved by the intercession of men he led. Aziz was painfully aware that the extent of his own contribution to the ambush at Orvilla had been to kill a child and then mutilate a man others had slain for him—which, among the tribes, was woman's work. Yazir might tolerate this, in a captain of experience, but his brother Ghalib, who commanded the armies of the Majriti for him, was less likely to do so.

And Aziz happened to be one of those who knew the origins of the extremely unusual thong Ghalib ibn Q'arif wore about his neck.

He could not remember feeling so pure a terror in all his life. His heart was pounding uncontrollably as he raced over the plain; he thought he might actually lose control of himself, fall off the horse, be trampled to death by those who followed in his wake.

That might be, thought Rodrigo Belmonte, a blessing, the way shooting a horse or a hunting dog with a broken leg was a gift of mercy.

He was a horse or a dog like that.

He was a father trying to outrun the arc of time to his son. Terror was in him, defined him, made his mind a blank of dread.

Nothing like this, ever before. Fear, yes. No honest soldier could truly say he had never known fear. Courage lay in fighting past that, through it, rising above it to do what one had to do. He had faced his own death many times, and feared it, and dealt with that fear. He had never felt what he was experiencing now, in this night of Al-Rassan, hurtling towards Orvilla for the second time in less than a year.

And with that thought, Rodrigo saw the fires burning ahead of him and knew—a soldier, a trained soldier—that he was too late.

He heard a sound in the night. A name, his own voice crying, over and over, the one name. His child's. It was dark. It was dark under the stars, and there were fires ahead.

The Muwardis—it would have been Muwardi warriors, of course—had left by the time he came racing up to the low stockade and leaped it and flung himself from his horse amid burning wagons and tents and slain, mutilated men he knew.

He found Ibero first. He had no comprehension of how the man had come to be here. The little cleric lay in a pool of his own blood, black in the light of the fires. His hands and feet had been cut off. They lay a little distance from his body, pieces of a child's torn doll.

Rodrigo smelled burning flesh. Some of their people had been thrown on the cooking fires. He stumbled towards the central green, remembering it from the summer before. Hope gone now, but with no defenses in him against this, he saw the severed head of Gonzalez de Rada and, beside it, the body of the constable, leggings torn off, sprawled obscenely atop the small, face-down figure of a boy.

Rodrigo heard himself make a sound again.

A wordless plea. For mercy, for kindness, for time to run backwards and let him be here soon enough. In time to save his child, or die with Diego if nothing else were allowed.

Sounds, sights, the smell of flesh burning faded away into a distance. He walked over to the two bodies lying there.

As in a dream, his movements impossibly slow, he knelt down and rolled Gonzalez de Rada's body off the prone figure of his son. He saw then—dreamlike, unbelieving—what else had been done to the constable of Valledo.

Then, gently, gently, as in a dream, he turned Diego over on the blood-soaked ground and saw the blow that had broken his head. He began to weep then, rocking back and forth, for the child in his arms who had gone away.

He heard, as from a distance, others coming up now. Horses. Footsteps. Running, then walking. They stopped. Somehow a thought came to him. Not looking up, unable to look up, he said, to whoever was near, "Fernan. Stop Fernan. Don't let him see this."

"It is me, Papa. Oh, Papa, is he dead?"

He looked up then. He forced himself. He had a living child. Twin to this one. Bonded souls. Different all their lives, but one birth, one face. Together, always, against what the world had brought them. Not any more. Fernan would be feeling a nakedness now, Rodrigo thought, an icy wind blowing right through him in the place where his brother had been.

By the light of burning wagons he saw Fernan's face. And Rodrigo Belmonte knew, in that moment, that the boy would never entirely move past this image of seeing his dead brother in his father's arms. It would shape him and define his life to come and there was nothing Rodrigo could do to alter that.

He had to stop weeping, though. He had to try.

Ammar ibn Khairan was here, just behind Fernan. His had been the warning, immediate but too late. He, too, would have seen slaughters like this in his time. Killings and desecrations meant to convey a message, a warning. Rodrigo remembered, suddenly, the Day of the Moat and what ibn Khairan had done to the king of Cartada in the aftermath of that. Killing. An answer, of a kind.

He realized that he was close to losing all control. "Ammar, please take him away," he whispered. "He ought not to be seeing this. Go with this man, Fernan. Please."

"Is he dead?" Fernan asked again, ignoring or unable to register the mute, terrible evidence of the shattered and bleeding skull.

"Come, Fernan," said ibn Khairan gently, a poet's voice. "Let us walk over to the river and sit a moment. Perhaps we can each pray, after our own fashion. Will you do that with me?"

In the distant, muffled place to which he seemed to have come, Rodrigo watched his son walk away with Ammar ibn Khairan of Aljais. An Asharite. An enemy. Guard him, he wanted to say to Ammar, but there was no need now, and it was too late. The damage had been done.

He looked down again at the child he was holding. Diego. Little one. Poets everywhere wrote about hearts breaking for love. He wondered if they really knew. He felt, absurdly, as if there was an actual crack running straight down through his own heart and that crack would never be mended, never become healed and whole. The world had entered in and broken him past repair.

There was an army here, with the king. An army in Al-Rassan. He wondered, vaguely, how much killing he was about to undertake, in an effort—hopeless before it ever began—to avenge and assuage this moment. This small, limp figure in his arms. Diego.

He wondered if anything would ever reach through to him again.

"Oh, dear Jad," he heard someone say sharply. Ramiro, the king of Valledo. "Oh, not this, in the name of what is holy!"

Rodrigo looked over. Something in the king's voice.

New torches, more riders approaching. From the north. Not the king's party that had met them by the river and the walls. The other direction. Valledan banners, lit by flames.

They came nearer and stopped. He saw the queen of Valledo, Ines.

He saw his wife dismount to stand there, looking straight towards him, motionless. Without defense.

He had no idea why Miranda was here. Why any of them were here. He had to move, though, to try to spare her a small part of this, at least. If he could.

Gently, gently, he laid Diego down again on the cold ground and rose, stumbling, blood soaking his clothing, and went towards Miranda between the fires and slain men.

He rubbed at his eyes, his face. His hands seemed to belong to someone else. There were words needed now, but he didn't have them. It was a dream. He would never wake from this.

"Please tell me he is only hurt," his wife said very quietly. "Rodrigo, please say he is only hurt."

He opened his mouth and closed it. He shook his head.

Miranda screamed then. The name. Only the name. The same as he had done. It went into him the way a spear enters.

He reached out to take her in his arms. She went past him, running, to where Diego lay. There were other people around him now, Rodrigo saw, turning. Jehane had come up. She was kneeling beside his son. Another man from the queen's party, someone he didn't recognize, was on the other side. Miranda stopped beside them.

"Oh, please?" she said, in a small voice he had never heard before. "Please?"

She knelt beside Jehane and gathered Diego's hands between her own.

He saw Fernan coming back from the river with ibn Khairan. He would have heard his mother scream. Fernan was crying now, his face distorted. A wind, blowing right through him.

Only this morning, riding towards Fezana, Rodrigo Belmonte would have said, if asked, that the world was a hard place but an interesting one, and he would have named himself a man blessed beyond his worth by the god, with love and companionship and tasks worthy of a man.

He'd had two sons this morning, though.

He came back to where Diego lay. Someone—the king, it appeared—had placed his own cloak over the mutilated body of Gonzalez de Rada nearby. Fernan was standing behind his mother. He was not asking for comfort, Rodrigo saw. He was keeping very still, weeping, with a hand on Miranda's shoulder, looking down at his brother. He was thirteen years old.

Jehane finished what she was doing. She looked up at Rodrigo. "He isn't dead but I'm afraid he's dying." Her face was white. Her clothing was still wet from the river, he saw. It was all so dreamlike. "Rodrigo, I'm so sorry. The blow has broken his head, here. There is too much pressure. He will not wake up. It will not be long." She looked at the other woman beside her, the child's hands in hers. "He is ... he is not in pain now, my lady."

He'd had a dream once in Ragosa, such a strange one, of the two of them—Miranda and Jehane—standing at sunset somewhere. Not speaking, no clear details, only standing together at the end of a day.

It was dark here, however, and they were kneeling on the ground. Miranda said nothing at all, made no movement, eyes on her child. Then she did move, freeing one of her hands and laying it, so softly, against the broken place on Diego's head.

Jehane looked up at him again, and Rodrigo saw the sorrow in her eyes, and the rage. The physician's rage at what they could not defeat, the things that claimed human lives too soon, leaving doctors helpless. She looked across Diego's body at the other man.

"You are a doctor?" she asked.

He nodded. "To the queen, formerly with the army."

"I will aid you here, then," she said quietly. "There may be others who need our services. Surely they are not all dead. There may be some we can save."

"You would do this?" the man asked. "For a Jaddite army?"

A spasm of impatience crossed Jehane's face. "As to that," she said, "I am physician to the company of Rodrigo Belmonte. After tonight, I have no idea, but for the moment I am yours to command."

"May I hold him?" Miranda, whispering, to Jehane. As if no one else had spoken.

Rodrigo took another step forward, helplessly.

"You can do no harm to him at all, my lady." Jehane's voice was as gentle as he had ever heard it. "Of course you may hold him." She hesitated, then repeated, "He is not in pain."

She made as if to rise.

"Jehane, wait." Another voice, from behind them. A woman's voice. Rodrigo turned, very slowly. "Your father wishes to examine the boy," said Eliane bet Danel.

In Al-Rassan, in Esperana, Ferrieres, Karch, Batiara—even, in time, in the far-off eastern homelands of the Asharites—what happened that night in a burning hamlet near Fezana became legend, told so often among physicians, courts, military companies, in universities, taverns, places of worship, that it became imbued with the aura of magic and the supernatural.

It was not, of course, supernatural. What Ishak ben Yonannon did—blind under the white moon and stars and the torches brought for those who assisted him—was as precise and carefully worked out as what he had done five years before in Cartada, delivering the last child of Almalik I, and it was as wondrous as that.

Indeed, it was more than that had been. Sightless, unable to communicate except through his wife who understood every mangled syllable he spoke, handling a surgeon's blades and implements for the first time since his blinding, working by touch and memory and instinct, ben Yonannon did something even Galinus had only hinted might possibly be done.

He carved an opening in the skull of Diego Belmonte, around the place where the Muwardi blow had broken the boy's head, and he drew forth the shattered bone that had been driven down into what was shockingly exposed beneath the peeled-back scalp and the opened skull. The intruded fragment of bone that would have killed Rodrigo"s son before the blue moon joined the white one in the sky.

Trepanning, it was called in the text of Galinus. Jehane knew that, and so, it appeared, did Bernart d'Inigo, the Jaddite physician assisting them. And they both knew, as well, that it had never been done.

She would have never even tried, Jehane was aware, all through what happened. Never have thought to try, or dreamed it was possible. With awe, fighting back the desire to cry all the time, she watched her father's sure, steady hands probe and define the wound, circumscribe it, then wield the small saw and chisel with which he cut a hole in Diego Belmonte's head.

He gave them instructions when he needed to; her mother, standing above them, under a torch held by the king of Valledo himself, translated his words. Jehane or Bernart moved, as ordered, to offer a blade, a saw, a clamp, to sponge away the heavily flowing blood where Ishak had peeled back the skin of the boy's scalp. Diego was being held in a sitting position, that the blood might drain away and not into the wound.

It was his father who was holding him.

Rodrigo's eyes were closed most of the time, concentrating on keeping utterly still, which Ishak, through Eliane, had said was imperative. Perhaps he was praying. Jehane didn't know. She did know, moved beyond words, that Diego never budged. Rodrigo held his child rock-steady, without shifting his position once through the whole of that impossible, blind surgery on the plain.

Jehane had a strange illusion at one point: that Rodrigo could have sat like this with his child in his arms forever if need be. That he might almost want to do that. A stone, a statue, a father doing the one thing left for him to do, and allowed.

The shattered bone of the skull came out in one ugly, jagged piece. Ishak had Jehane probe the open wound to be sure he had it all. She found two small fragments and removed them with pincers d'Inigo handed her. Then she and the Valledan doctor sutured the flaps of skin and bandaged the wound and when that was done they remained, on their knees, on either side of the boy.

They laid Diego down then, Rodrigo moving to stand silently above him beside Miranda. The brother—Fernan—was behind his mother. To Jehane's eyes he had an obvious need for something to make him sleep. She doubted he would accept it.

The white moon was directly overhead by then, the blue climbing in the eastern sky. The fires had been put out. Other doctors had come, summoned from the body of the army north of them. They were dealing with the survivors. There didn't appear to be very many of those.

A great deal of time seemed to have passed, Jehane realized. Ishak, guided by Eliane and Ammar, had moved a little apart, to a camp stool provided for him.

Jehane and the Jaddite doctor, d'Inigo, looked at each other across the body of the boy. D'Inigo had an unfortunate face but kind eyes, Jehane thought. He had been calmly competent all through what had just been done. She hadn't expected that of a Valledan physician.

He cleared his throat, struggling with fatigue and emotion.

"Whatever ... " he began, and then stopped. He swallowed. "Whatever happens to me, whatever else I do, this will always be the proudest moment of my life as a doctor. To have been a small part of this. With your father, who is my ... who I respect so much. In his writings, and ... " He stopped, overcome.

Jehane discovered that she was overwhelmingly tired. Her father must be exhausted. It hadn't shown. If she wasn't careful she would begin remembering what had happened in Fezana, before all this, and that wouldn't do. Not yet. She had to stay in control.

She said, "He may not survive. You know that."

D'Inigo shook his head. "He will. He will survive! That is the wonder of it. You saw what was done as well as I. The bone came out! It was flawless."

"And we have no idea whether anyone can live through an opening up of their skull like that."

"Galinus said—"

"Galinus never did it! It was sacrilege to him. To the Asharites, the Kindath. To all of us. You know that!" She hadn't meant to raise her voice. People looked over at them.

Jehane gazed back down at the unconscious boy. He was lying now on a pallet and pillow, covered in blankets. He was utterly white, from the loss of so much blood. That was one of the dangers now. One of them. Jehane laid her fingers against his throat. The pulse was steady, if too fast. But even as she did this and studied Diego's face, Jehane realized that she, too, was certain he would live. It was unprofessional, hopelessly emotional.

It was an absolute conviction.

She looked up, at Rodrigo, and the wife he loved, the mother of this child, and she nodded her head. "He is doing well. As well as we could hope," she said. Then she rose and went to where her father and mother were. Ammar was with them, which was good. It was very good.

Jehane knelt at Ishak's feet and laid her head in his lap, the way she used to when she was a child, and she felt her father's hands—his strong, calm, steady hands—come to rest upon her head.

After a time she stood up—because she was not, in truth, a little girl any more, dwelling in her parents' house—and she turned to the man she loved among all others in the world and Ammar opened his arms for her and she let him draw away a little of what had happened to her people in the city that night, with his touch.

Seventeen

After holding a steady torch over Diego Belmonte in the dark of that night, Alvar de Pellino watched Jehane's father walk wearily with his wife to the edge of the village and then stumble alone through the eastern gate out into the grass. There he knelt down and, rocking slowly back and forth on his knees, began to pray.

It was Husari, coming to stand with Alvar, stained with blood and ash and sweat—as Alvar knew himself to be—who murmured, softly, "This will be the Kindath lament. Under both moons. For the dead."

"In Fezana?"

"Of course. But if I know this man he is offering a part of it for Velaz."

Alvar winced. He looked back out at the shape of the man on his knees in darkness. He had, shamefully, forgotten about Velaz. Jehane's parents would only have heard those tidings tonight. Watching the old physician rocking slowly back and forth, Alvar felt an unexpected renewal, quiet and sure, of what he had begun to realize on the ride west: he was not going to be a soldier, after all.

He could kill, well enough it seemed, lacking neither in courage nor calm nor skill, but he had no heart for the butchery of war. He could not name it as the singers did: a pageantry, a contest, a glorious field whereon men could search out and find their honor.

He had no idea what the alternatives were or might be, but he knew that this wasn't the night to sort through that. He heard a sound from behind and turned. Rodrigo walked up to them.

"Alvar, I'd be grateful if you'd come with me." His tone was grave; there was a bone-weariness at the bottom of it. Diego was still unconscious; Jehane had said he would probably be so all night and into the morning. "I think I want a witness for what happens next. Are you all right?"

"Of course," Alvar said quickly. "But what is ... ?"

"The king has asked to speak with me."

Alvar swallowed. "And you want me to ... "

"I do. I need one of my men." Rodrigo flashed the faint ghost of a smile. "Unless you have a need to urinate?"

Memory, vivid as a shaft of light.

He walked over with Rodrigo to where the king stood, conferring with outriders. Ramiro saw them approaching, raised his eyebrows briefly at Alvar.

"You wish a third man with us?" he asked.

"If you do not object, my lord. Do you know Pellino de Damon's son? One of my most trusted men." There was—Alvar heard it—an edge to Rodrigo's voice now.

"I do not," said his king, "but if you value him so highly, I hope to know him well in days to come."

Alvar bowed. "Thank you, my lord." He was conscious that he must look a fearsome sight. Like a fighting man.

Ramiro dismissed the outriders and the three of them walked towards the northern fence of the hamlet and then, as Alvar opened a gate, out onto the plain.

A wind was blowing. They carried no torches. The fires were behind them and had mostly died. The moons and the stars shone above the wide land all around them. It was too dark for Alvar to read the expressions of the other two men. He kept silent. A witness. To what, he knew not.

"I am pleased you are back. You will have questions. Ask me," said Ramiro of Valledo. "Then I will tell you some other things you do not know."

Rodrigo said coldly, "Very well. Start with my sons. How came they here? You may not be glad of my presence for long, my lord king, depending on the answers."

"Your cleric wrote a letter to Geraud de Chervalles, a High Cleric from Ferrieres, wintering with us on his pilgrimage to Vasca's Isle. He was preaching a holy war, along with his fellows in Eschalou and Orvedo. You know the army in Batiara has sailed?"

"I do. What sort of letter?"

"Explaining about your son's gift. Suggesting it might be of aid to us in a war against the infidels."

"Ibero did that?"

"I will show you the letter, Ser Rodrigo. Was it a betrayal?"

"It was."

The king said, "He has been punished."

"Not by me."

"Does it matter? He was a holy man. Jad will judge him."

There was a silence.

"Go on. The letter arrived in Esteren?"

"And de Chervalles asked my permission to send for the boy. This was after what had happened at Carcasia. You heard about that?"

Rodrigo nodded. "A little."

The king said, "In the wake of those events, I ordered the army to assemble and I sent men to fetch your son. His brother insisted on coming. Your lady wife followed, joining the queen. Am I, also, to be punished, Ser Rodrigo?"

The tone of both men was cold, precise. In the darkness, in that keen wind, Alvar had a sense that he was listening to the first notes of an exchange that had been waiting to happen for a long time.

"I don't know yet," said Rodrigo Belmonte flatly. Alvar blinked. The Captain was speaking to his anointed monarch. "What happened at Carcasia? You had best tell me about that."

"I intended to. Almalik II used a spy at the court of my brother of Ruenda to try to kill the queen. His purpose was subtle and nearly succeeded. If the queen had died and I blamed Sanchez it would have shattered any alliance and sent us to war against each other. I nearly rode against Ruenda. I would have, had she died."

"But?"

"The physician, d'Inigo—who assisted with your boy tonight—was able to save the queen where her own doctors could not. He realized, from the nature of the wound, that there had been poison on the arrow, and provided the remedy."

"We owe him a great deal, then," said Rodrigo.

"We do. He said he learned of that poison from the writings of a certain Kindath physician in Fezana."

Another silence. Alvar saw a star fall across the sky in the west. A birth, a death. One or the other, in the folk tales at home. He was far from home.

"I see. I had intended to ask you," said Rodrigo, "whatever else happens, to look to the well-being of Ser Ishak and his family."

"You need not ask," said the king. "It is done. For the queen's sake, and your son's. Whatever else happens."

Alvar saw Rodrigo incline his head in the moonlight. A cloud drifted across the face of the white moon, deepening the darkness.

"D'Inigo also told me something else," the king said quietly. "He said the poison used was one known only in Al-Rassan. The Ruendans would have had no ready access to it, or knowledge of it."

"I see." Rodrigo's tone changed. "You wrote to your brother of Ruenda?"

"I did. I told him what we had learned. He had fled the meeting, fearing we might attack them. As I said, I nearly did, Ser Rodrigo. If the queen had died ... "

"I believe I can understand that, my lord."

"Sanchez wrote back. They had unmasked the Cartadan spy and found arrows in his home with the same poison. My brother was grateful."

"Of course. Insofar as he can be." The tone was dry.

"It went far enough. He agreed to come south at the same time I did. He is riding for Salos even now."

This was news. Alvar could see Rodrigo absorbing it.

"And Jalofia?" he asked softly. "Your uncle?"

"Is driving towards Ragosa and Fibaz. It is happening. The clerics have their holy war, after all, Ser Rodrigo."

Rodrigo shook his head. "Three wars of conquest, it would seem to me."

"Of course." The king's turn to sound wry. "But the clergy ride with us, and so far as I trust my uncle and brother not to turn back and attack Valledo, it is because of them."

"And because of them my son was brought here?"

"He was summoned because in my anger I allowed an offered weapon to be brought to me."

"He is a child, not a weapon, my lord."

"He is both, Ser Rodrigo. With respect. And our country is at war. How old were you when you first rode in my father's army beside Raimundo?"

No answer. Wind in the tall grass.

"That is my tale. Am I still to be punished?" King Ramiro asked softly. "I hope not so. I need you, Ser Rodrigo. Valledo has no constable tonight, no war leader, and we stand in Al-Rassan."

Alvar sucked in his breath sharply. Neither of the other men so much as glanced at him. He might not even have been here in the darkness with them.

"You mentioned the name," said Rodrigo, his voice suddenly no more than a whisper, "of your late brother."

Alvar shivered suddenly. He was very tired, and the night breeze was growing colder, and he had begun to feel the places where he'd been wounded, but none of these were the reason.

"I always thought," said King Ramiro, "that we would have to arrive here eventually, you and I."

He stopped, and after a moment Alvar realized that the king was looking at him, evaluating. It was for this, Alvar understood, that the Captain had wanted him here.

The king spoke again, finally, in a very different tone. "You genuinely loved him, didn't you? I could not ... I could never understand why everyone loved Raimundo so much. Even our father. Obviously. Even he was seduced by my brother. He gave him Valledo. Tell me, Ser Rodrigo, answer a question for me this time: do you truly think Raimundo would have been a better king, had he lived, than I have been?"

"Doesn't matter," Rodrigo said, in that same stiff, difficult whisper.

"It does matter. Answer me."

Silence. Wind, and swift clouds overhead. Alvar heard an animal cry out far off on the plain. He looked at the Captain in the moonlight. He is afraid, he thought.

Rodrigo said, "I can't answer that question. He died too young. We can't know what he would have grown into. I know what you want me to say. That he had more charm than strength. That he was selfish and reckless and even cruel. He was. All of these things, at times. But, as Jad will judge my life when I make my end, I have only known one other man, ever, who came even close to making ... the act of living through days and nights so full of richness and delight. You have been a far-sighted and a strong king, my lord. I grant you that freely. But I did love your brother, yes. We were young—exiled together and then home together in triumph—and I have always believed he was killed."

"He was," said King Ramiro.

Alvar swallowed, hard.

Rodrigo brought one hand up, involuntarily, and touched his forehead. He stayed thus a moment, then lowered his arm. "And who was it who killed him?" His voice actually cracked on the question.

"Garcia de Rada." The king's words were flat, uninflected. "You always thought so, didn't you?"

Alvar had another memory then, torchlit. This same hamlet. Rodrigo's whip lashing out, catching Garcia de Rada on the face, ripping his cheek open. Lain Nunez struggling to control the Captain's black rage. The cold, ferocious words spoken—accusation of a king's murder.

He heard Rodrigo slowly release his breath. He couldn't make out his features clearly but he saw the Captain cross his arms on his breast, as if holding tightly to something there.

"Garcia was—what?—seventeen, eighteen that year?" Rodrigo said. "He acted on his brother's orders?"

Ramiro hesitated. "I am speaking truth, Ser Rodrigo, believe it. The answer is, I do not know. Even tonight, with Gonzalez dead, I do not know for certain. My thought has always been, he did not. I believe Count Gonzalez innocent of my brother's blood."

"I do not share your belief, I fear. Would an eighteen-year-old have killed his king, unprompted?"

"I don't know," said King Ramiro again. He paused. "Should I point out that Gonzalez de Rada died terribly tonight because he would not leave Diego's side from the time your boys joined this army?"

Rodrigo was unmoved. "He swore an oath to me last year. He valued his family honor."

"Then would he have murdered his king?"

"He valued many other things, my lord. Power and wealth among them. He, too, was younger then. He might have done so, yes. I thought you could tell me."

"I have given you my belief."

"You have. Which leaves us with only the last question, doesn't it? You know what it is, my lord."

Alvar knew it as well, by now. The last question. What followed the last question? He wished he were somewhere else.

The king said, quietly, "I had no love for Raimundo. Or Sanchez, for that matter. Nor they for me. It was no secret, Jad knows. Our father chose a certain way to raise his three sons. But I knew I could do more for Valledo, and perhaps all of Esperana one day, than either of my brothers ever could. I knew it. In my own time of exile here in Al-Rassan, when men came south to speak with me, I will not deny that I voiced anger that Valledo was probably going to be given to Raimundo when our father died. Which is what happened, of course."

The king stopped. Alvar heard the animal call out again, far off in darkness. King Ramiro said, "It is ... very possible ... that someone listening to me in a tavern or wine shop here might have concluded that were Raimundo to die ... unexpectedly, I would not be displeased."

Clouds slid from the white moon. Alvar saw the king look at Rodrigo in the doubled moonlight. "I would not have been displeased. I was not, in the event. I will not lie about this. But before Jad, and on the life of my queen, and by whatever else you would wish me to swear, I did not command his murder, nor do I know how it was achieved."

"Then how," Rodrigo asked, implacable, "do you know it was Garcia?"

"He told me. He wanted to tell me more. I stopped him."

Rodrigo's hands were fists at his sides. "And that is all you did? Stop him from telling you? Shall I believe this? No punishment, no exposure? For the killing of a king? You made his brother constable of Valledo. You let Garcia live as he chose, doing what he wished all these years, until he nearly killed my wife and my boys?"

"I did," said Ramiro quietly. "I let him live his life. Gonzalez de Rada became constable because he was worthy of the post—do not deny that—and because you would not serve me after Raimundo died."

"After he was murdered!"

The king made a small movement of hands and shoulders. "After he was murdered. Garcia was never given rank, status, office, power ... none of these things. You might consider that a moment, given what he could have expected from his birth. I thought of having him killed, frankly, because he was a risk and an embarrassment, and because I loathed the man. But I was ... aware that Raimundo had been killed by him because he thought I would approve and because he had ... enough reason to think so. I would not kill a man for that. Yes, I let him live. I kept the secret. I allowed Gonzalez to serve me and Valledo. Honorably. You had been my brother's man. I would not beg you for aid or approval, Ser Rodrigo, at my ascension, or after. I will not do so now. I think you were one of those blind to what Raimundo really was, and that your youth excused this, then."

Alvar heard the king's voice change. "It is no excuse now. Not any more. We are no longer young, Rodrigo Belmonte, and all these events are done with, in the past. Though I will not beg, I will ask. What I have told you tonight is truth. It is all truth. Will you be my constable? Will you command this army for me?"

Rodrigo Belmonte had a quality, Alvar had long ago observed, of being able to hold himself utterly, disconcertingly still. He was like that now, for what seemed a very long time.

"I don't think," he murmured finally, "that the past is ever really done with us." But then, in a firmer voice he asked, "Command the army to achieve what end, my lord king?"

"To take Fezana. And Cartada. And Silvenes. Lonza. Aljais. Elvira. Everything I can." The answer was decisive.

Alvar discovered that he was shivering again.

"And then?"

"And then," said King Ramiro, as bluntly as before, "I intend to occupy my uncle's kingdom of Jalona. And then my brother's Ruenda. As you said, this campaign is a holy war in name alone. I want Esperana back, Ser Rodrigo, and not only the land my father ruled under the khalifs' sufferance. I want all of this peninsula. Before I die, I intend to ride my horse into the seas to south and west and north, and up into the mountains to look down upon Ferrieres—and know that all the lands through which I rode were Esperana."

"And then?" An odd question, in a way.

"And then," said King Ramiro, more softly, almost amused, "I will probably rest. And try to make a belated peace with Jad for all my transgressions beneath his light."

Alvar de Pellino, having struggled through a long year and a terrible day and night towards a new awareness of himself, realized that he was thrilled by this—beyond words or clear thought. His skin was tingling, the hairs on the nape of his neck standing up.

It was the sheer grandeur of the vision. Lost and conquered Esperana made whole again, one Jaddite kingdom in all the wide peninsula, with Valledo and its Horsemen at the heart of it. Alvar longed to be a part of this, to see it come to be, to ride his own horse into those oceans and up that mountain with his king. Yet, even as his heart heard this call to glory, he was aware of slaughter embedded in the sweep of the king's dream, or swooping above it like the carrion birds that followed the battlefields of men.

Will I ever, he thought, with a knifing of despair, be at peace between these things?

He heard Rodrigo Belmonte say then, very calmly, "You might have told me about Garcia a long time ago, my lord. I think I should have believed you. I do believe you now. I am your man, since you want me."

And he knelt before the king and held up his hands together, palms touching. Ramiro looked down upon him, unspeaking for a moment.

"You would not have believed," he said. "You would always have doubted. We needed to grow older, you and I, for me to say this and you to hear it. I wonder if your young soldier can possibly understand that."

Alvar flushed in the darkness, then heard the Captain say, "You might be surprised, my lord. He's more than a soldier, though I will tell you later what he did in Fezana this evening. If I am to be your constable I have my first request: I would ask that Alvar de Pellino be named my herald, to bear Valledo's staff and carry our words to the Star-born."

"It is an honor," the king said. "He is very young. It is also a dangerous post in this war." He motioned towards the hamlet behind them. "The Asharites may not observe the laws of heralds and their codes."

Rodrigo shook his head. "They will. That much I know. They value their own honor as much as we do ours. Even the Muwardis. In a way, especially the Muwardis. And Alvar will acquit himself."

Ramiro looked at Alvar, that appraising glance in the moonlight. "You wish this for yourself?" he asked. "There is less glory than might be found in battle by a courageous young man."

Alvar knelt beside Rodrigo Belmonte and lifted his joined palms. "I wish for this," he replied, discovering as he spoke that he did; that it was exactly what he wanted. "I, too, am your sworn man if you will have me, my lord."

The king placed his hands around those of Rodrigo, and then he touched Alvar's the same way. He said, "Let us go forward from this place and begin to reclaim our lost land."

He looked as if he would say more, but did not. They rose then, and began walking back to Orvilla. But Alvar, unable to stop the thought from coming—even now—found himself saying, inwardly, And whose land will be broken and lost in that claiming?

He knew the answer. It wasn't a real question. In the newest royal herald of Valledo, pride and bone-cold apprehension came together and warred for dominion.

Then, nearing the hamlet, he saw Jehane. She was standing by the northern gate waiting for them with Ammar ibn Khairan beside her. And looking at her small, straight-backed figure in the mingled light of the moons, Alvar felt love come back, too, bittersweet among the weapons and shed blood, tonight and yet to come.

She saw them both kneel: Rodrigo first, and then Alvar.

Beside her, Ammar said softly, "He is being made constable now." And then, as she looked quickly up at him, "It is best for both of them, Rodrigo and the king. He ought to have been, all these years."

She took his hand. Smoke drifted behind them, though the fires were mostly out. Husari was with her parents and the two children they had saved from the Kindath Quarter. The queen of Valledo had come to them. She had said that Ishak and his family were her guests and would be, for so long as they desired. She had been gracious and well-spoken, but it was evident—to Jehane, at least—that Queen Ines had never met or talked with a Kindath before and didn't quite know how to deal with that.

That shouldn't have bothered her, perhaps, but tonight it did. She had almost wanted to ask Ines of Valledo if there were any plump babies around, to cook for a proper Kindath breakfast, but too many children had died that evening, and Jehane had nothing left in her for the force of real anger. She was very tired.

It was Bernart d'Inigo, the doctor from the tagra forts, who had readied this welcome for them, she understood. It seemed he had saved the life of the queen using knowledge gained from reading Ishak's writings. He had taught himself Asharic and Kindath years ago, he confided to Jehane. The lanky, sad-faced man was a good physician, there was no denying it.

Why shouldn't he be? Jehane had thought. If he's bothered to learn from us ...

Not a fair thought, really, but tonight she wasn't putting much stress on trying to be fair. D'Inigo had volunteered to take the first watch beside Rodrigo's son. Diego's mother and brother were with him as well. Jehane wasn't needed. Valledan doctors were tending to the handful of people who had survived the assault. Only a handful; the rest were dead, butchered hideously.

They come from the desert, Jehane remembered, seeing the chopped-up bodies, smelling charred human flesh. Her father's words, from so long ago. If you would understand the Star-born of Ashar .

"Who are my enemies?" Jehane had said then, aloud, looking around the hamlet.

There must have been something in her voice; a hint of vanishing control. Ammar, without speaking, had placed an arm about her shoulders and guided her away. They had walked around the perimeter of Orvilla but Jehane, unable to be eased, had found herself both looking back at dying fires and remembering them.

Who are my enemies? The citizens of Fezana? The Muwardis here? The soldiers of a Jaddite holy army who had run wild through Sorenica? The Valledans who burned this hamlet last summer? She wanted to weep, but was afraid to let herself.

Ammar had a gash on one arm, which she examined by torchlight; it wasn't serious. He'd told her that, but she'd needed to look. She led him down to the river and cleaned the cut and bandaged it. A thing to do. On her knees, she dipped a cloth in the cold water and washed her face, looking down at the rippling lines of moonlight in the Tavares. She took a deep breath of the night air.

They had walked again, following the perimeter fence to the north. And there they saw King Ramiro with Rodrigo and Alvar out among the grasses, the dark, wide emptiness beyond them. At one point, watching, Jehane saw Rodrigo cross his arms tightly over his breast. It was very late. A wind was blowing in the night.

Whichever way the wind blows.

Then they saw Rodrigo and Alvar kneel before the king and then rise.

"Who are my enemies?" Jehane asked, at length.

"Mine, I hope," said Ammar.

"And yours are?"

"We'll know more of that soon enough, my love. Watch and listen. I will likely be made a handsome offer soon."

His tone had a coolness now, but that was as much a defense as anything else, she knew. More than anyone in the world, perhaps, she had a sense of what had come, however improbably, to bind Ammar ibn Khairan and Rodrigo Belmonte, each to the other.

There was an anticipation of partings in her now, Jehane realized: endings had come upon them tonight. As much as anything else, that was what made her want to weep.

They waited. The three men came over the dark grass and approached them by the gate. She saw that Alvar, too, was wounded. There was blood on his shoulder. Without speaking she went over to him and began carefully tearing at his loose shirt to expose the gash below. He looked at her and then away, standing quietly as she examined the cut.

"Ammar. I was hoping to find you," Rodrigo said quietly. "Have you a moment to speak?" He spoke in Esperanan.

"With you, always," ibn Khairan said gravely, in the same tongue.

"The king of Valledo has done me the honor of asking me to be his constable."

Jehane looked over at him. Ammar inclined his head. "He is equally honored if you have accepted."

"I have."

Ammar smiled thinly. "Badir of Ragosa will be distressed."

"I imagine so. I propose to give him, unfortunately, even greater cause for regret."

"How so?"

It was like a dance, Jehane thought, this formality screening things so much deeper than words could go. She stood by young Alvar, listening, and stopped even pretending to examine his shoulder. It was too dark here, in any case.

"I believe I have sufficient authority to make you a proposal on behalf of the king of Valledo."

He was right, Jehane thought. How had Ammar known, so surely? No answer to that, except to remember who and what he was. What they both were. In the wind from the north she could feel something swiftly approaching its end.

Ammar said, "I am always interested in proposals. And yours have ever been intriguing."

Rodrigo hesitated, choosing words. "As we stand here, King Sanchez of Ruenda is riding for Salos downriver, and the army of Jalofia is approaching Ragosa."

"Ah! Jalofia rides! Queen Fruela comes to avenge her dead captain?"

King Ramiro's mouth quirked sideways at that.

"Something of the sort," Rodrigo said, unsmiling. "There have been a great many dead captains over the years."

"Alas, it is true. 'War feeds like a wild dog upon the hearts of brave men.' "

"I know that," said the king of Valledo suddenly. "That was written by ibn Khairan of Aljais."

Ammar turned to him and Jehane knew he was surprised, however he might try to conceal it. "At your service, my lord. The line scans better in Asharic."

The king's turn to betray astonishment. He looked sharply at Rodrigo and then back to Ammar. "I had not ... you are ... ?" He turned to Rodrigo again, eyebrows arched.

Calmly, Rodrigo said, "We were exiled at the same time last year in Ragosa. We have been companions since. He came here, despite a death sentence in Cartadan lands, to bring Ishak ben Yonannon and his wife out of Fezana. Jehane bet Ishak who stands here is physician to my company. Ibn Khairan would have been killed by the Muwardis had they known he was in the city."

"I daresay there is no love shared there," King Ramiro murmured. He was a tall, handsome man. He had also recognized a line from a poem by Ammar. "Is there any shared here?" he asked.

"I am attempting to find out," Rodrigo said. "Ammar, we have always thought that if this army and the other two moved south, Yazir ibn Q'arif would probably be in the peninsula by summer's end or next spring. Al-Rassan, as it has been, is coming to an end."

"Sorrowfully, I believe that," Jehane heard the man she loved say quietly. "Tell me, who will remember the gardens of the Al-Fontina in time to come? Or the ivories in the holy places of Ragosa?"

"I cannot answer that," Rodrigo replied. "Perhaps you will help us all remember, I do not know. I have more immediate concerns. The king has instructed me that this is to be a Valledan campaign of conquest, not a holy war, though there are clerics with us and it might appear otherwise."

"Oh, good!" Ammar said, too brightly. "Does that mean only those who resist you are nailed to wood or burned alive while the clerics sing paeans to Jad?"

"Something of the sort," Rodrigo said levelly.

"Almalik of Cartada is a dead man," King Ramiro interjected quietly, "for what he tried to do to the queen. And the Muwardis, when we find them, will be offered no kindness by me. Not after tonight. But my heart is not set on slaughter, either for its own sake or to make the clerics happy."

"Ah," said Ammar in his most sardonic voice, "a gentle conquest. Horsemen of Jad waving to happy Asharite farmers as they trot by. And to keep your brave soldiers content—what? Chop up a few Kindath on the way? No one will miss them, will they?"

Rodrigo refused to rise to the bait. "This is warfare, Ammar. Neither of us are children. It is still Ashar and Jad and there will be ugliness. After several hundred years and with that other army sailing for Soriyya there will be worse than ugliness."

"What, I wonder, is worse than ugliness?"

"You do not really mean that," Rodrigo said. "I have part of an answer, though. Worse, is when what little space there is for men to move back and forth between worlds disappears because the worlds are lost to hatred. That may happen to us yet." He hesitated. "It probably will, Ammar. I have no more illusions than you do. There will be no happy farmers where this army passes. We will conquer if we can, and do what we must do, and then we will try to govern here, as the khalifs and the city-kings have governed the Jaddites and Kindath among you."

"How ... pragmatic of you," Ammar said, with an icy smile. He was angry, Jehane saw, and not trying to hide it.

Rodrigo saw it too. He said, "Are we the proper targets for your feelings right now?"

"You are adequate, failing something better."

"What would you have me do?" Rodrigo cried suddenly. In the silence that followed, Jehane had a sense, as once before in Ragosa, that for these two men, staring fixedly at each other now, no one else was in the world, just for a moment.

The moment came, and was briefly held, and then it passed. Jehane felt as if she could almost see it happen: something receding from the two of them, faster than any horses could run, into the dark.

"What would I have you do?" Ammar's voice had softened. He spoke Asharic now. "What you cannot do, I suppose. Go home. Breed horses, raise your sons, love your wife." He turned to the king of Valledo. "Make your country—all of Esperana if you can unite it—into a land that understands more than only war and righteous piety. Allow space in your lives for more than battle chants to inspire soldiers. Teach your people to ... understand a garden, the reason for a fountain, music."

The wind blew past them. Ibn Khairan shook his head. "Forgive me. I am being extremely foolish. I am tired and I know you are as well. These tidings you bring are not unexpected, but they do mark the death of something I have ... held dear."

"I know this." Rodrigo's voice was rock-steady. "I would like you to help keep some part of Al-Rassan alive. I said I had a proposal. If the king does not disagree, I would offer you certain offices in Al-Rassan and ultimately the rank of constable of Valledo, shared with myself."

Jehane heard Alvar de Pellino gasp and saw the king make an abrupt, uncontrolled movement. Rodrigo had just proposed to cut his own position in half and give it to an Asharite.

Ammar laughed softly. He looked at the king and then back to Rodrigo. "You do enjoy surprising people, don't you? I thought that was my vice."

Again, Rodrigo did not smile. "It seems simple enough to me. We haven't nearly enough people to take and settle Al-Rassan. We need the Star-born—and the Kindath—to stay here, farm the land, conduct their business, pay taxes ... perhaps one day become Jaddites in the same way our people have turned to Ashar here over the centuries. If this campaign succeeds, we will be a very few people in a large land. To keep the sons and daughters of Ashar calm and well-governed we need men of their own faith. A great many of them eventually, but at the moment there is only one man I trust to wield so much power and strive towards this balancing and you are that man. Will you help govern Al-Rassan for us? So much of it as we control?"

Ammar turned to the king again. "He is eloquent when he chooses to be, is he not? Does he persuade you?" The cutting edge of irony was in his voice again. "Does it sound simple enough to you?"

The horses were running away in the night. Jehane could almost see them, so vivid was the image for her—manes lifting with their speed under the moons and the racing clouds.

"He has surprised me," said King Ramiro carefully. "Though not more than I am surprised to discover you in my camp. But yes, Ser Rodrigo speaks simple truths and I can hear those as well as any man, I hope. Speaking for myself, I also prefer a palace or a chapel with some grace to one that merely keeps out wind and rain. I am not unaware of what Al-Rassan has been. I have read your verses, and that of other poets here. There are those among us who might be hoping for bonfires of flesh as we move south. I would prefer to disappoint their expectations."

"And your brother? And your uncle?"

King Ramiro's mouth twitched again. "I would prefer," he murmured, "to disappoint their expectations as well."

Ammar laughed aloud. Again Rodrigo did not smile. Absolutely self-contained, he was waiting for his answer, Jehane understood. And he wanted this. She thought she understood that too. His son had nearly died tonight. Might yet die. Rodrigo Belmonte did not want to endure another loss now.

Ammar's laughter stopped. Unexpectedly he looked over at her. She held his gaze, but it was difficult to read expressions in the moonlight. He turned back to Rodrigo.

"I can't," he said, with finality. In Jehane's mind the horses were gone now, out of sight.

"It will be the Muwardis," Rodrigo said quickly. "You know it, Ammar! Ragosa cannot even hold against Jalona with half its army mercenaries from Jaddite lands. When High Clerics appear outside the walls and speak of holy war—

"I know this!"

"And Fezana falls to us. You know that, too! Before summer's end."

"I know this city," King Ramiro interposed quietly. "I was in exile here in my youth. I observed certain things. Unless the defenses are greatly altered, I believe I can take Fezana, even with its new garrison."

"It is possible."

Rodrigo continued, with a note of desperation. "And then Yazir and Ghalib come across the straits to meet us. Al-Rassan is theirs, or it is ours, Ammar. By my god and yours, you must see that! Cartada, Ragosa, your memory of Silvenes ... they cannot be saved. Even you cannot dance that dance between fires. And surely, Ammar, surely you know—"

"I have to try."

"What?"

"Rodrigo, I have to try. To dance that dance."

Rodrigo stopped, breathing hard, like a horse reined up too harshly.

"Your faith means so much to you?" King Ramiro's voice was thoughtful. "I had heard tales otherwise. It means so much that you would serve the veiled ones of the desert, knowing their ways and what they will bring to your land?"

"My faith? I would put it differently, my lord. I would say, my history. Not just Al-Rassan, but Ammuz, Soriyya ... Ashar in the desert of the homelands under stars. Our sages, our singers, the khalifs of the eastern world." Ammar shrugged his shoulders. "The Muwardis? They are a part of that. Every people has its zealots. They come, and change, and come again in a new guise. Forgive me for saying this, but if a king of Valledo can be as reflective as you, my lord—a descendant of Queen Vasca of blessed name!—shall I be the one to deny the possibility of like grace descending upon a veiled son of the sands? Perhaps among the seductive fountains, the flowing rivers of Al-Rassan ... ?"

"You would rather be with them." Jehane heard the bitterness in Rodrigo's voice.

Ammar looked at him. "As companions? Friends? Am I mad? Rodrigo, do I look mad?" He shook his head. "But the Muwardis, what are they? Exactly the same as Queen Vasca was, as most of the people of your north still are today. Righteous, convinced, unforgiving. Terrified of anything beyond their understanding of the world. The tribes are uncivilized? I think so. But I confess I find little of value in the cities of Esperana either. The desert is a hard place, harder even than your northlands in winter. Ashar knows, I have no bonding of spirit with the veiled ones, but I share even less with those who make pilgrimage on their knees to Vasca's Isle. Would I rather be with the tribesmen? Again, put it a little differently, and then leave it, Rodrigo, as my last words, lest we quarrel before we part. I suppose I would rather, if Al-Rassan is to be lost, herd camels in the Majriti than be a shepherd in Esperana."

"No! That cannot be a last word, Ammar!" Rodrigo shook his head vehemently. "How do I let you ride to them? Do you know what they will do to you?"

Ammar smiled again, wryly this time. "What will they do? Take away my ink and paper? For a start, I will almost certainly be named ka'id of all Cartada's armies by Almalik II. I expect Ghalib ibn Q'arif and I will one day have a disagreement over who leads our conjoined forces, and I will politely defer to him. I am reliably informed he wears a neck thong made of the foreskins of those who do not defer to him." He let the smile fade. "After that, I truly do not know. It may come to camel herding, after all. Leave it, Rodrigo, please." He paused. "There is a question about Jehane, however."

"No there isn't."

She had actually been expecting this and she was ready when it came. The four men turned to her. "Ammar, if I can have some assurance that my parents are safe with Rodrigo and the king, then I'm afraid you must let me come with you—or I'll kill you before you leave this camp."

She saw Rodrigo Belmonte smile then for the first time that night, the remembered look softening his face. "Ah. You've met my wife, then?" he said.

Jehane turned to him. "I have. The lady Miranda is as gracious and as beautiful as I was told—by others—she would be. Would she let you leave her behind in such a circumstance as this, Ser Rodrigo?"

Ammar said quickly, "It is not the—

"It is the same. Enough so as to make no difference," Jehane snapped. She was afraid weariness would make her cry again, and she didn't want that at all.

"Well now," said the king of Valledo, "I do regret having to add my voice to what seems a matter of the heart, but I need to be told why I ought to allow the self-proclaimed future ka'id of my enemies to depart."

Jehane swallowed abruptly. Her heart thudded. She hadn't even thought of this.

"You must let him leave," Rodrigo said quietly.

King Ramiro looked sharply at him, and Jehane saw his temper, now being kept in check. What he had just said terrified her.

In truth, given the war that had begun, she could see no reason why he ought to let them go. Ammar had had his chance, his astonishing offer, and now ...

"I must?" said Ramiro of Valledo. "I am never happy with the word, Ser Rodrigo."

"My lord, forgive me," said Rodrigo calmly, "but I have—we have—one hundred and fifty men in the army of Ragosa. Trapped there. When word comes that you are in Al-Rassan and I am with you, and that the king of Jalona has come south as well, I believe Badir of Ragosa will receive counsel that he should eliminate my company before they are deployed against him."

Ammar's expression had grown sober. "You believe Mazur would propose this?"

Rodrigo said, "Ben Avren, or one of the others. Remember? Last autumn? Badir valued you at your named price—equal, in yourself, to me and all my company. By that measure, he does a lesser thing in destroying them than we would in killing you."

"You are playing with words. That isn't a true measure, Rodrigo."

"What is? In wartime? They are in mortal danger. I must try to deal with that. You are my best—at the moment my only way. The price of your freedom is this: you ensure, upon your oath and your honor, that my men are allowed to leave that army and come here."

"And if I cannot?"

It was the king who answered. His anger had passed. "You agree to return, on your oath and honor, and submit to my judgment. True measure, or not, if King Badir accepted such a value for your service, so will I."

It was monstrous, Jehane thought, monstrous, and somehow inevitable, as if the careless banter about mercenary wages that bright, autumn day in Ragosa had led straight to this moment on a dark plain. She heard sounds from the camp behind them, and the wind blowing.

"It is agreed," said Ammar quietly.

"You can free them and come back," Rodrigo added quickly. He was not a man who surrendered easily, if at all, Jehane realized. And he would not stand on pride. There was a plea in his voice.

Ammar, she saw, heard it too. He had to hear it. Again the two men looked at each other, but by now the horses were long gone, far apart in a too wide, too dark night. It was over.

Ammar said softly, "We refused to fight each other that day in Ragosa."

"I remember."

"It was an entertainment they proposed. It is a different place now, the world," said ibn Khairan, unwontedly awkward. "I ... deeply regret to say this. More than I can tell you. Rodrigo, I could wish ... " He thought for a moment, then spread his hands and fell silent.

"You have a choice," Rodrigo said. "You are making a choice tonight. You have had an offer from us."

Ammar shook his head, and when he spoke, for the first time there was something desperate in his voice, too. "Not really a choice," he said. "Not in this. I cannot turn my back on this land, now that it has come to such bitter grief. Don't you understand? Rodrigo, you of all men must surely understand." They heard his small, known, self-mocking laugh. "I'm the man who killed the last khalif of Al-Rassan."

And hearing those words, Rodrigo Belmonte bowed his neck, as if to accept the descent of a sword. Jehane saw Ammar lift a hand, as if he would touch the other man, but then he let his hand fall.

Beside her, she realized that Alvar de Pellino was weeping. She would remember that after, and love him for it.

Her parents were asleep, and the two children as well, in tents provided by the queen. Jehane looked in on them briefly, and then went, as promised, to relieve Bernart d'Inigo beside their patient. She ought to have been sleeping, during this time but it was not, evidently, to be a night for sleep. Not for her.

She was used to this. Doctors often had to deal with nights of vigil beside those who depended upon them to fight back the coming of final darkness. In another way, though, this night was unlike any she had known. It marked an ending, in a real sense, to everything she had ever known.

Bernart d'Inigo smiled tiredly at her as she walked up. He held a finger to his lips. Jehane saw that Fernan had fallen asleep on the ground beside his brother. So, too, on a pillow, covered by a small blanket, had his mother.

"Get some rest," Jehane whispered to the Jaddite doctor. "I'll do what's left of the night." D'Inigo nodded and rose. He stumbled a little as he went. They were all bone-weary.

She looked down at Diego. He lay on his back, head propped on folded blankets. The doctor in her began to assert control again. She knelt and took his wrist, and was immediately encouraged. His pulse was stronger and it had slowed.

She looked up and gestured. A soldier not far away came nearer with a torch. "Hold it close," she whispered.

She lifted the boy's closed eyelids and watched how the eyes contracted in the light: equally, and both were centered. Again, good. He was extremely pale, but that was to be expected. There was no fever. The dressing was secure.

He was doing wonderfully well. Despite everything else that had happened, Jehane could not suppress another shiver of pride and disbelief. This boy, by all rights, by everything known, ought to be dead.

He would have been, if Jehane had been his physician. If Bernart d'Inigo had; if any doctor she could name had been. He was alive, his pulse was firm and his breathing steady, because Ishak ben Yonannon was still—after five years in darkness—the most courageous and the most gifted surgeon alive. Who, after tonight, would deny it? Who would dare?

Jehane shook her head. False pride. Did such things matter so much, now? They didn't, and yet they did. In the presence of war, on the brink of so many deaths to come, Ishak had reclaimed a life that was lost. No physician—and certainly not his daughter—could be immune to the sense of a small, precious victory won back from the dark.

She nodded and the soldier withdrew with his torch. Jehane settled back beside the unconscious boy. She had ordered Ammar to snatch some rest before morning; she might be able to let herself doze, after all.

"He is all right?"

It was the mother. Rodrigo's wife. Jehane, looking across at her in the darkness, thought of all the elaborately bloodthirsty stories he had told of her. And now here was a small, very beautiful woman lying on the cold ground beside her child, speaking with fear in her voice.

"He is doing well. He might wake in the morning. He needs to sleep now."

Her eyes were adjusting to the dark again. She could make out the other woman a little more clearly, on the far side of Diego.

"D'Inigo told me ... that no one has ever done this surgery."

"That is true."

"Your father ... he was blinded for saving someone's life?"

"Mother and infant. In childbirth. He touched an Asharite woman to do so."

Miranda Belmonte shook her head. "How is it that we do these things to each other?"

"I have no answer for that, my lady."

There was a silence.

"Rodrigo mentioned you many times," Miranda said softly. "In his letters. He had nothing but praise for you. His Kindath physician." Jehane thought she saw the ghost of a smile. "I was jealous."

Jehane shook her head. "No one loved as much as you are should ever be jealous."

"I know that, actually," said Miranda Belmonte. "It is the great gift of my life. If Diego lives, because of your father, that will be two such gifts. It is too much. I am not worthy. It makes me afraid."

There was a longer silence. A moment later Jehane realized that the other woman had drifted to sleep again.

She sat beside the sleeping boy, leaning against a heavy sack of dried goods someone kind had placed nearby. She thought of deaths and births, sight and blindness, moons and sun and stars. Ashar and Jad at war, rain falling on the Kindath as they wandered the world. She thought of love and of one day bearing a child of her own.

She heard footsteps approaching and knew who it was. She had been certain, in fact, somewhere deep within herself, that this last conversation lay waiting in the night.

"How is he?" asked Rodrigo quietly, crouching beside her. He was looking down at his son. His face was in darkness.

"As well as we can hope. I told your wife he may wake in the morning."

"I'll want to be here."

"Of course."

Rodrigo stood up. "Walk with me?"

She had known. How had she known? How did the heart see what it did?

"Not far from him," she murmured, but rose and they walked a little apart, past the soldier with the torch. They stopped by the river, near a small hut Jehane remembered. One of the few that hadn't burned last year. Garcia de Rada's cousin had killed a woman here, and an unborn child. Her life seemed to have circled back to this place. She had met Rodrigo that night and Ammar that day. Both of them.

It was very quiet. They listened to the river. Rodrigo said, "You know your parents are safe with us. This is ... the best possible place for them right now."

"I believe that."

"Jehane. It is ... probably the best place for you, as well."

She had known he would say that. She shook her head. "Safest, perhaps. Not best." She left the deeper words unsaid, but with Rodrigo they didn't have to be spoken.

Another silence. The moons had swung west, and the slow stars. The river murmured below.

"I've asked Husari to stay with me. He has agreed. I told the king a small lie tonight."

"I guessed. You don't really think Lain and Martin will be unable to get the company out, do you?"

'"Not really. And Husari, in his way, may be as good a governor—in Fezana, or elsewhere—as Ammar would have been."

"Will he do it?"

"I believe so. He will not serve the Muwardis. And he, at least, trusts me, if Ammar does not."

She heard the bitterness. "It isn't a question of trust. You know that."

"I suppose." He looked at her. "I wanted to be sure he could leave, if he insisted, so I made up that story about my company trapped in Ragosa."

"I know that, Rodrigo."

"I didn't want him to go."

"I know that, too."

"I don't want you to go, Jehane. There is no place in Al-Rassan for you, for either of you, when the Muwardis come."

"We'll have to try to make a place," she said.

Stillness. He was waiting, she realized, and so she did say it, after all. "I will not leave him, Rodrigo."

She heard him release his breath.

In the darkness by the river's steady, murmurous flow, Jehane said, looking down at the water, not at the man beside her, "I was under your window at Carnival. I stood there a long time, looking at your light." She swallowed. "I almost came up to you."

She sensed him turning towards her. She kept her gaze fixed upon the river.

"Why didn't you?" His voice had altered.

"Because of what you told me that afternoon."

"I was buying paper, I remember. What did I tell you, Jehane?"

She did look at him then. It was dark, but she knew those features by heart now. They had ridden from this hamlet the summer before on the one horse. So little time ago, really.

"You told me how much you loved your wife."

"I see," he said.

Jehane looked away. She needed to look away. They had come to a place too hard for held glances. She said softly, to the river, to the dark, "Is it wrong, or impossible, for a woman to love two men?"

After what seemed to her a very long time, Rodrigo Belmonte said, "No more so than for a man."

Jehane closed her eyes.

"Thank you," she said. And then, after another moment, holding as tightly as she could to the thing suspended there, "Goodbye."

With her words the moment passed, the world moved on again: time, the flowing river, the moons. And the delicate thing that had been in the air between them—whatever it might have been named—fell, as it seemed to Jehane, softly to rest in the grass by the water.

"Goodbye," he said. "Be always blessed, on all the paths of your life. My dear." And then he said her name.

They did not touch. They walked back beside each other to the place where Diego and Fernan and Miranda Belmonte lay asleep and, after standing a long moment gazing down upon his family, Rodrigo Belmonte went towards the king's tent where the strategies of war were being devised.

She watched him go. She saw him lift the tent flap, to be lit briefly by the lanterns from inside, then disappear within as the tent closed after him.

Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.

Jehane saw Diego's eyes open in the greyness before sunrise.

He was weak, and in considerable pain, but he recognized his father and mother, and managed the beginnings of a smile. It was Fernan who knelt beside him, though, gripping both his hands. Bernart d'Inigo stood behind them all, grinning ferociously, then Ishak came out to see his patient, to take his pulse and feel the shape of the wound.

They had no need of her. Jehane used the moment to walk a little apart with her mother and tell her what she was about to do, and why. It did not greatly surprise her to discover that Eliane and Ishak had already learned most of this from Amman

It appeared he had been waiting outside their tent when they woke. She had a memory of him kneeling before Ishak the summer before. The two of them had known each other a long time, she'd realized that day, and Ammar ibn Khairan was not a man to ride away with their daughter without a word of his own spoken.

She wondered what had been said. What did surprise her was to encounter no protest. Her mother had never been hesitant with objections. Yet now Jehane was about to ride off through a land at war, with an Asharite, towards a future only the moons knew—and her mother was accepting that.

It was, Jehane thought, another measure of how much had changed.

Mother and daughter embraced. Neither wept, but Jehane did do so when her father held her in his arms just before she mounted the horse provided for her.

She looked at Alvar de Pellino standing silently nearby, his heart in his eyes, as ever. She looked at Husari. At Rodrigo.

She looked at Ammar ibn Khairan beside her on his mount and nodded her head and they rode away together. East towards Fezana and then past it, well north of the river, watching the plumes of smoke still coiling up from the city into the brightening sky.

She looked back only once, but Orvilla was already out of sight and she had stopped crying by then. She had set out on this same path a summer ago, riding with Alvar and Velaz. She had only one man with her now, but he was worth a hundred and fifty, by one measure.

He was worth infinitely more than that, by the measuring of her heart.

She moved her horse nearer to his, and held out a hand and he removed his glove and laced his fingers through hers. They rode through much of the morning like that as the clouds ahead of them slowly lifted and grey became blue towards the sun.

At one point, breaking the long silence, she said, comically, "A camel herder in the Majriti?" And was rewarded to hear his swift laughter fill the wide spaces around them.

Later, in a different voice, she asked him, "What did you say to my father? Did you ask his blessing?"

He shook his head. "Too much to ask. I told them I loved you, and then I asked their forgiveness."

She rode in silence, dealing with this. Finally, very quietly, she said, "How much time are we going to be allowed?"

And gravely he replied, "I truly don't know, love. I will do all I can to give us enough."

"It will never be enough, Ammar. Understand that. I will always need more time."

Their lovemaking each night, after they made camp, had an urgency Jehane had never known.

After ten days of riding they intercepted the army of Ragosa heading towards Cartada, and time, in Al-Rassan the Beloved, began to run, swift as horses, towards its end.

Eighteen

In a reaction to the protracted siege of his city, King Badir of Ragosa had ordered the northern-style wooden chairs removed from his private chambers in the palace. They had been replaced by additional pillows. The king had just lowered himself—with some care for his wine glass—into a nest of cushions by the fire.

Mazur ben Avren, his chancellor, did the same, not bothering to hide a wince of pain. Personally, he regarded the king's abjuring of northern furnishings as an entirely unnecessary gesture. Descending to the floor to recline seemed a more difficult exercise every time he did it.

Badir, watching him, looked amused. "You're younger than I am, my friend. You've let yourself grow soft. How does that happen during a siege?"

Mazur grimaced as he searched for an easier position. "A touch ... of something in my hip, my lord. It will ease when the rains let up."

"The rains are useful. They must be miserable out there in their tents."

"I do hope so," said ben Avren with fervor. There had been rumors of sickness in the Jalonan camp.

He lifted a hand and the nearest servant hastily brought him a glass of wine. From ben Avren's point of view, it was an extreme relief that his monarch's rejection of things northern had not extended to the better Jaddite wines. He saluted the king, still trying to find a comfortable position. Both men were silent for a time.

It was autumn and the eastern rains had arrived early. Ragosa had been under siege since early summer. It had not fallen, nor had the walls been breached. Under the prevailing circumstances this was remarkable.

Fezana had been taken by the Valledan army in the middle of summer, and recent tidings had come by carrier pigeon that the king of Ruenda had broken through the walls of Salos at the mouth of the Tavares and had put all the adult males to the sword. Women and infants had been burned, in the name of Jad, but the city itself had not been torched: King Sanchez of Ruenda was evidently proposing to winter there. A bad sign, and Badir and his chancellor knew it.

The Valledan army, more bold, had already pushed southeast over the hills towards Lonza. Rodrigo Belmonte, once a captain in Badir's own army, did not seem inclined to rest content with only the one major city taken before winter. The Valledans were said to be meeting with resistance in the hill country, but details, for obvious reasons, were hard to come by in besieged Ragosa.

Given these developments to the west and given the fact that they'd had to release almost half their own army or risk an internal uprising—many of the Jaddite mercenaries had promptly joined the Jalonans outside the walls—Ragosa's holding out was an achievement. A measure, as much as anything else, of the chancellor's prudent marshalling of food reserves and supplies, and the affection and confidence the people of the city vested in their king.

There were, however, limits. To food, to supplies. To support for a beleaguered monarch and his advisor. His Kindath advisor.

If they could last until winter they might survive. Or if Yazir came. There had been no word from the Majriti. They were waiting. Everyone in Al-Rassan was waiting that autumn—Jaddite, Asharite, Kindath. If the tribes came north across the straits everything in the peninsula would change.

Everything had already changed though, and both men knew it. The city they had built together—a smaller, quieter repository of some of the same graces Silvenes had embodied under the khalifs—was already finished, its brief flowering done. However this invasion ended, King Badir's city of music and ivory was lost.

The Jalonans or the Muwardis. One way lay a terrible burning, and the other way ... ?

It was very late. Rain was falling outside, a steady sound on the windows and the leaves. The two men were still in the habit of taking this last glass together; the depth and endurance of friendship marked as much in their silence as in the words.

"There was a report this morning they are building small boats now," Badir said. He sipped from his wine.

"I heard the same thing." Mazur shrugged. "They won't get in through the lake. They could never make craft large enough to carry sufficient men. We would annihilate them from the harbor towers."

"They might stop our fishing boats from going out."

The siege was failing in part because the small craft of Ragosa had been able to go out upon the lake, using care, covered by archers from the harbor walls as they came back in.

"I'd like to see Jaddites try to blockade this harbor in the autumn winds. I have swimmers who could sink any boat they send out there. I'm hoping they try."

"Swimmers? In autumn? You would send someone out with an auger?"

Mazur drank from his glass. "They would fall over themselves volunteering, my lord. We have a city disinclined to yield, I am pleased to say."

It helped that surrender wasn't really a possibility. They'd killed the king of Jalona and one of the High Clerics from Ferrieres even before the siege had begun.

That had been ibn Khairan's doing; his last act in Ragosan employ, just before he left them for Cartada.

He'd taken a dozen of the best men in the city and slipped out one moonless night in two small boats, heading east and north along the lake. The Jalonans, enthusiastically burning villages and farms as they came south around Lake Serrana, were too complacent, and it cost them.

Ibn Khairan and his men surprised a raiding party, which had been their intention. It was purest luck—he had always been said to be a lucky man—that the Jalonan party of thirty riders had included King Bermudo and the cleric.

At twilight on a spring evening ibn Khairan's men had come upon them at a fishing village. They'd waited down the beach, hidden by the boats. They'd had to watch villagers burned alive, and hear them scream as they were nailed to wooden beams. When the wine flasks had emerged among the raiding party the mood became wild and the northerners had turned to the women and young girls.

Thirteen men from Ragosa, acting in cold rage and with specific intent, had come up from the beach in the darkness. They were outnumbered but it didn't matter. Ibn Khairan moved through that burning village like a dark streak of lightning, his men said after, killing where he went.

They slew all thirty men in that raiding party.

The king of Jalona had been cut down by one of the Ragosans before his identity was known. They had wanted to throw him onto the nearest of the fires, but ibn Khairan, swearing like a fisherman when he saw who it was, made them carry King Bermudo's body back to the city. He would have been far more useful alive, but there were still things that could be done.

The cleric from Ferrieres was nailed to one of the wooden beams he had been instrumental in having raised. All of Esperana was coming south, it had by then become evident, and the Ferrieres clerics were stridently invoking a holy war. It was not a time for ransoms or the courtesies normally offered pious men.

There had been a brief flickering of hope in Ragosa that the shocking disappearance of their king might lead the enemy to withdraw. It was not to be.

Queen Fruela, who had insisted on accompanying the invading army, took control of the Jalonan forces with her eldest son, Benedo. By the time that army reached the walls of Ragosa, a great many farmers and fisherfolk had been captured on sweeps through the countryside. These had not been killed. Instead, the besieging army set about mutilating them, one by one, within sight of the city, at sunrise and sundown while the Jaddites prayed to their golden god of light.

After four days of this, it was King Badir who made the decision to show the body of King Bermudo from the city walls. It was indicated by a herald that the corpse would be desecrated if the torturing continued outside. Queen Fruela, afire with holy zeal, appeared inclined to continue nonetheless but her young son, the new king of Jalona, prevailed in this matter. The prisoners outside the walls were all killed the next morning, without ceremony. The body of King Bermudo was burned in Ragosa. The Jaddites, watching the smoke of that pyre rise up, took solace in knowing that since he had died in the midst of a war against the infidels, his soul was already dwelling with the god in light.

As a consequence of all this, it was understood from the beginning of the siege of Ragosa that a negotiated surrender was not an option. No one in the city was going to be permitted to live if it fell. In a way that made things simpler for those inside the walls. It removed an otherwise distracting possibility.

It had, in fact, been ibn Khairan who foretold this. "If it comes to an ending," he had said to Mazur ben Avren on the spring morning he rode back west with Jehane bet Ishak, "try, any way you can, to surrender to Valledo."

Unexpected words, and both the king and his chancellor saw them as such, but they became rather more explicable after the very different occupations of Fezana and Salos later that summer.

Unfortunately, there seemed no obvious way to negotiate such a surrender, and ibn Khairan himself—the ka'id of Cartada's armies now—was engaged in making life as miserable as he could for the Valledans as they approached Lonza. If King Ramiro had begun this invasion in a tolerant cast of mind, he might well be abandoning that attitude by now, under the deadly, morale-sapping raids of Cartada's brilliant commander, and with autumn and the rains coming on.

King Badir's servant built up the fire again and then deftly refilled the glasses of both men. They could still hear the rain outside. A companionable silence descended.

The chancellor felt his thoughts drifting. He found himself taking note of the trappings of this, the king's most private room. He looked, as if for the first time, at the fireplace with its mantel carved in a pattern of grapes and leaves. He gazed at the wine itself, and the beautifully worked goblets, at the white candles in their gold sconces, the tapestries from Elvira, the carved ivory figures on sideboard and mantelpiece. He smelled the incense imported from Soriyya, burning in a copper dish, observed the etched windows over the garden, the gilt-edged mirror on the opposite wall, the intricately woven carpets ...

In a way, Mazur ben Avren thought, all these delicate things were bulwarks, the innermost defenses of civilized man against the rain and dark, and ignorance.

The Jaddites outside the walls did not understand that. Neither, to an even greater degree, did the veiled ones from the desert—the longed-for saviors of everyone's prayers.

It was too bitter a truth even for irony. These things in Badir's room—these measures of having found the space to strive for and value beauty in the world—were seen by those to north and south as the markers of corruption, decadence, frivolity. Impiety. Dangerous earthly distractions from a properly humble, cringing appeasement of a blazing god of the sun, or a far, cold deity behind the stars.

"The lady Zabira," he said, shifting position to ease his hip, "has offered to present herself as a gift to the young king of Jalona."

Badir looked up. He had been gazing into the fire.

"She believes she might be able to kill him," ben Avren added, by way of explanation.

King Badir shook his head. "No point. A brave offer, but that young man means little to his army. What is he, sixteen? And his mother would have Zabira torn apart before she came anywhere near the boy."

"My thought as well, my lord. I thanked her and declined, on your behalf." He smiled. "I told her she could present herself to you, instead, but that I needed her more with winter coming."

The king returned the smile, briefly.

"Do we make it to the winter?" he asked.

Ben Avren sipped his wine before answering. He had been hoping this would not be asked. "I would rather we didn't have to, to be honest. It will be a near thing. We need an army from the desert to at least land in Al-Rassan, to put the Jalonans on warning that they are at risk of being trapped outside walls and shelter. They might withdraw then."

"They should have taken Fibaz before besieging us."

"Of course they should have. Give thanks to Ashar and I'll offer a libation to the moons."

The king didn't smile this time. "And if the Muwardis don't land?"

Ben Avren shrugged. "What can I say, my lord? No city is ever safe from betrayal. Especially as supplies begin to dwindle. And you do have a principal advisor who is one of the hated, evil Kindath. If the Jalonans ever offer a measure of clemency ... "

"They will not."

"But if they did? If we then had something to offer back to them, in partial redress of their king's death ... ?"

Badir scowled. "We have been through this. Do not vex me again. I will not accept your resignation, your departure, your sacrifice ... none of these things. What am I clinging to, so desperately, that I would allow myself to lose you?"

"Life? The lives of your people?"

Badir shook his head. "I am too old to clutch like that. If the veiled ones come, my people may survive ... after a fashion. This city—as we built it—will not."

He gestured around the room. "We made this together, my friend. If it goes, one way or another, I will make an end drinking my wine with you. Do not speak of this again. I regard the subject as a ... betrayal."

Ben Avren's expression was grave. "It is not that, my lord."

"It is. We find a way out together, or we do not. Are you not proud of what we have achieved, we two? Is it not a denial of our very lives to speak as you are speaking now? I will not cling to some miserable form of existence at the price of all we have been."

His chancellor said nothing. The king, after a pause, said, "Mazur, are there not some things we have made here, some things we have done, that are worthy to have been in Silvenes, even in the golden age?"

And Mazur ben Avren, with rare emotion in the deep voice, replied, "There has been a king here, at the least, my lord, more than worthy to have been a khalif in the Al-Fontina in those most shining days."

Another silence. King Badir said, at length, very softly, "Then speak no more, old friend, of my losing you. I cannot."

Ben Avren inclined his head. "I will speak of it no more," he said. "My lord."

They finished their wine. The chancellor rose, with some difficulty, and bade his king good night. He went down the long palace corridors, his slippers silent on the marble floors, walking under torches and past tapestries, listening to the rain.

Zabira was asleep. She had left one candle burning on a table with a flask of wine and another of water, and a glass for him, already filled. He smiled, looking down upon her—as beautiful in sleep as she was awake.

The northerners, he thought, the desert tribes: how could they even comprehend a place and time—a world—that had produced a woman such as this? She would be a symbol of corruption for them both. They would kill her or degrade her, he knew. They would have no idea what else to do with Zabira of Cartada or the music that she made, moving in the world.

He sat down with a sigh in the carved, deep-cushioned wooden chair he'd commissioned from a Jaddite craftsman in the city. He drank a glass of wine, and then, eventually, another, not really sleepy, deep in thought.

No real regrets, he told himself. And realized it was true.

Before he undressed for bed he went to the inner window and opened it and looked out, breathing the night air. The rain had stopped. Water dripped from the leaves of the trees to the garden below.

A long way to the south and west another man was awake that same night, beneath a very different sky.

Past the peaks of the Serrana; past Lonza, huddled and afraid behind its walls, waiting for the Valledans to come; past Ronizza whose lacework was known through all the world; past arrogant Cartada in the valley of its power where the red dye was made; past Aljais and the canals of Elvira, and Silvenes where ghosts and ghostly music were said still to drift among the ruins; past, even, Tudesca at the mouth of the Guadiara, where ships put out to sea with the wealth of Al-Rassan and brought eastern treasures home.

Past all of these and beyond the waters of the straits, outside the walls of Abirab at the northern tip of the Majriti sands, Yazir ibn Q'arif, lord of the tribes of the desert, Sword of Ashar in the West, breathed the salt air from the sea and, sitting alone on an outspread cloak, looked up at a clear sky strewn with the stars of his god.

The Zuhrites had been taught by the sage who had come to them that there were as many stars as there were sands in the desert. Twenty years ago, new to belief, Yazir used to try to comprehend what that meant. He would run grains of sand through his hand while gazing at the heavens.

He was beyond such testing now. Understanding of the god was only for one such as Ashar, worthy of the gift of vision. What could a simple warrior do but bow his head and worship before such unimaginable vastness?

Stars of the heavens like the sands of the desert? What could any man do but humble himself and serve, praying by day and night for mercy and grace, understanding that he was only a part—less than a grain in the drifting sands—of the larger, unheard purpose of the god.

How could men grow swollen with pride, nourish delusions of their worth or the worth of the frail, vain things they made, if they truly believed in Ashar and the stars? That, Yazir ibn Q'arif thought, was a question he would like to ask the kings of Al-Rassan.

The night was mild, though Yazir could sense a hint of winter to come in the wind from the sea. Not long now. Two moons were riding among the stars, the blue one waxing and the white one a waning crescent in the west beyond the last of the land.

Looking at the moons, he was thinking about the Kindath, as it happened.

He had only met one of them in all his life, a barefoot wanderer in a belted robe who had come ashore years ago at a trading station on the coast east of Abeneven. The man had asked to meet the leader of the tribes and had been brought, eventually, to Yazir.

The Kindath had not been a man as most men were; he was not even typical of his own people. He had said as much to Yazir at their first meeting on the sands. Hardened by years of travel, his skin burnt dark and weathered by wind and sun, he reminded Yazir of no one so much as ibn Rashid, the wadji who had come to the Zuhrites long ago—heretical as such a thought might have been. He had the same long, untended white beard, the same clear eyes that seemed to look at something behind or beyond what other men saw.

He was journeying through many lands, the Kindath said, writing of his travels, recording the glorious places of creation, speaking with men of all faiths and beliefs. Not to preach or cajole as the wadjis did, but to deepen his own sense of wonder at the splendor of the world. He laughed often, that Kindath traveler, frequently at himself, telling tales of his own ignorance and helplessness in countries of which Yazir had not even known the names.

He spoke, during his sojourn with Yazir's people, of the world as having been made by more than one god, and as only one dwelling place among many for the children of creation. This was heresy beyond comprehension. Yazir remembered wondering if even to hear it condemned him to the darkness far from Paradise when he died.

It appeared that there was a sect of the Kindath, an ancient tribe, that taught of these other worlds scattered among the stars, far beyond the moons that wandered the night.

Ashar's starry visions had been right, the traveller confided to Yazir, but so were the wiser prophets of Jad, and so, in truth, were the Kindath sages who had seen goddesses in the moons. All these teachings revealed a part—but only a part—of the mystery.

There were other deities, other worlds. There was one god above all, ruler of stars and sun and moons, of all the worlds. No man knew the name of this most high lord. Only in the world that had been made first, the world all others—including their own—had followed into Time was that name known and spoken.

Only there did the Supreme One allow knowledge of himself, and there the gods did him homage.

They had broken bread together for several mornings and nights, and spoken of many things. Then the Kindath traveller had begged leave to go alone from Yazir's camp that he might travel the vast and mighty Majriti desert and worship the splendor thereof.

Ghalib, who had been listening to some of what had been said over the past days, had asked Yazir's permission—unusual, for him—to follow and kill the man because of his impieties. Yazir, torn by the burden of a host towards a guest and the spiritual duties of a leader to his people, had given his consent, reluctantly. One more transgression for which Ashar would have to grant forgiveness when Yazir's time came to be judged.

That strange man had been the only one of the Kindath he'd ever met.

Two days ago a letter had come, delivered by a tribesman crossing back to the desert from Tudesca. It had been carried before that by messengers across most of Al-Rassan. It had begun as a note tied to a pigeon's leg, carried out from besieged Ragosa.

It was from the sorcerer himself, Mazur ben Avren.

After it had been read to him, three times, by a scribe, Yazir had walked from his tent and mounted a camel and ridden into the desert alone to think.

He was still thinking, tonight under the stars. He had a decision to make—one that might shape the destiny of his people—and no more time for delay. To delay further was to decide.

Ghalib was ready to cross to Al-Rassan, Yazir knew that. Ghalib wanted to go where there was already war, to test himself and his tribesmen. To die, if it came to that, with a red sword in his hand, battling in Ashar's name. The surest path to Paradise.

The Kindath traveller, years ago, hadn't named that first world where the one true god reigned. He'd said the name was another mystery. Yazir wished he'd never heard the tale. It refused to leave him, still.

Ragosa will not hold out until winter, as matters now stand, Mazur ben Avren had written. But if you so much as land at Tudesca, and come no further this autumn than Aljais or Cartada, the Jalarans here will be greatly afraid and our people will take heart. I believe we can endure if this happens, and in spring we may turn them back.

Ghalib had said the same thing. He wanted to land before winter, to let the Jaddites fear their presence and push forward no further. Yazir had been inclined to wait—for more ships, more men, and most of all, for tidings from Soriyya, towards which a Jaddite army was sailing even now.

What did a pious man do when he was asked, desperately, for aid in two different fields of holy war?

It has come to me as a thought, Mazur ben Avren's letter went on, that one reason you hesitate to relieve us from this peril is my own presence in Ragosa. King Badir is a good man and a wise king, beloved of his people. If it will ease the burden of decision that lies upon you, know that I am ready to leave this city should you send word.

Leave the city? One did not leave besieged cities. Unless ...

I will walk into the Jaddite camp so soon as word comes from you that you have elected to cross to Al-Rassan and cleanse it of those who must be driven back lest this land be lost to Ashar and the Star-born.

It was a Kindath saying this, offering this.

Yazir imagined his reply being carried north and east, one rider after another, city to city, and then a carrier bird loosed from hills near Ragosa. He imagined that bird landing in the city, his scribe-crafted note carried to the sorcerer. Yazir pictured him reading it.

Strange, strangest thing of all: he never doubted for a moment that the man would do what he said.

The king will not take happily to my presuming to send this letter, and I beg your own forgiveness for my impertinence. Should you agree with my unworthy thoughts, O Sword of Ashar, leader of all the tribes, send only the words "It shall be as has been written," and I alone will understand and offer thanks to you and act as I have said. May whatever sins Ragosa holds in Ashar's sight and your own be deemed to rest upon my head as I walk out. My own people in this city honor their Asharite king and know their proper place. If there has been arrogance and presumption it has been my own, and I am prepared to make atonement.

The crescent of the white moon lay almost upon the sea. Yazir watched as it slipped down and out of sight. The innumerable stars were everywhere in the sky and the innumerable sands were about him.

He heard a footfall, and knew it.

"You asked me to come at white moonset," his brother said softly, crouching on his haunches beside Yazir's spread cloak. "Do we cross? Do we wait? Do we sail for the homelands?"

Yazir drew a breath. There were deaths and deaths to come. Man was born into this world to die. Best do it in the service of Ashar, essaying those things that could truly be done.

"Soriyya is too far," he said. "I do not think either of us are destined to see the homelands, my brother."

Ghalib said nothing, waiting.

"I would be happier in spring," Yazir said.

His brother's teeth showed in the darkness. "You are never happy," Ghalib said.

Yazir looked away. It was true, of late. He had been happy once, as a young man, without any great cares, in the Zuhrite lands south of where they were tonight. Before his feet had been placed on a path of righteousness carved in blood.

"We will cross the straits," he said. "Beginning tomorrow. We will not allow the Sons of Jad to burn any more of the Star-born, or take any more cities, however far our people may have strayed from Ashar's path. We will lead them back. It comes to me that if the city-kings lose Al-Rassan to the Jaddites, we are the ones who will be answerable before the god."

Ghalib rose to his feet. "I am pleased," he said.

Yazir saw that his brother's eyes were gleaming, like those of a cat. "And the Kindath sorcerer?" Ghalib added. "The letter that came?"

"Go to my scribe," Yazir said. "Wake him. Have him write a reply and have it carried across the water—tonight, before the rest of us depart."

"What reply, brother?"

Yazir looked up at him. "It shall be as has been written."

"That is all?"

"That is all."

Ghalib turned and walked back to his camel. He made it kneel and then he mounted up and rode. Yazir remained where he was. So many stars, so many, many sands, the blue moon high in the clear night.

He could still see his message crossing the straits, men riding, a bird flying. A hidden opening in the walls of Ragosa, perhaps in the grey hour before dawn. A man walking out, alone, towards the watchfires of his enemies.

Slowly, he nodded his head, picturing all this in the eye of his mind. It was Ashar's will, Ashar's law: no Kindath was to hold sway over the Star-born. It had been written. And that sorcerer in Ragosa would not be the first, nor would he be the last man—brave or otherwise—to die in the days of blood to come.

The autumn seas were mild and generous the next morning and the next as the children of the desert, veiled before the wonder of the god's creation, knelt in holy prayer and then sailed on an unfamiliar element to the redeeming of Al-Rassan.

A little less than a year later two women stood, late on a windy summer's day on a hilltop near the sad ruins of Silvenes, in the moments before the ending of the world they both had known.

White clouds hurried overhead and laced the western horizon where the sun was low. Banners snapping and blowing, two armies lay beneath them north of the swift and gleaming Guadiara.

The forces of Ashar and Jad had finally come together after a summer and autumn and then a spring of siege and skirmish, bracketing a harsh winter with its enforced inactivity. A great many people had died that winter, of hunger and cold and the illnesses that followed on the heels of hardship and war. It had snowed as far south as Lonza and Ronizza, and Ardeno in the west.

All three cities were Jaddite now.

Rodrigo Belmonte, commanding the joined armies of Ruenda and Valledo and Jalona, had taken them this spring. At Ardeno—first of the three to fall—he'd led the western part of the Esperanan army himself in a first engagement with the tribesmen, and he had killed Ghalib ibn Q'arif.

No man had so much as wounded Ghalib in combat since he'd ridden east beside his brother more than twenty years ago. Men had lost count of the times he had championed the Zuhrites and Ashar's visions against the best man of another tribe in the ritual combat before a battle began. There had been no such rituals at Ardeno. Rodrigo Belmonte had singled him out, though, on the difficult side-slipping ground east of the city, and he had broken Ghalib's helm and shield with a blow, and thrown him from his horse, and then, leaping down, had gashed his thigh to the bone and almost severed one arm before killing him with a swordstroke down through neck and collarbone.

No one in either army had ever seen a man fight like that.

It was understood that Ser Rodrigo's son had very nearly died in a Muwardi ambush the summer before. It was pointed out that Ardeno marked the first time the new constable of Valledo had been able to confront an army of the veiled ones on open ground.

Leaving the citizens of Ardeno, for the moment, to their fate, the Muwardis had retreated south, though in good order and doing damage to those who pursued too rashly.

They had fallen back towards Silvenes, where Yazir and the bulk of his forces—both those of Al-Rassan, and newly arriving tribesmen—were assembling.

Rodrigo Belmonte had left the king of Ruenda with the western army to pin down the Asharites there. With only his own band of one hundred and fifty men he had raced east towards Lonza and King Ramiro.

The walls of that small city were breached fifteen days after he arrived. Further east, Ronizza on the River Larrios, under siege from Jalonan forces that had bypassed still-unconquered Ragosa, surrendered immediately when word of the fall of Lonza came.

Ronizza's gates were not opened, however, until Ser Rodrigo's own herald arrived with a company of Valledans to accept their surrender. There had been lessons learned from the occupations of Fezana and Salos the year before.

The northern armies left a garrison and a governor in each city. A number of people were executed to promote order but, for the moment, the transitions were calm. There were no burnings. King Ramiro and his constable had firm control of the northern forces now. The armies of Jalona and Valledo joined ranks and doubled back west to merge with the Ruendans north of Silvenes.

What was left of the Ruendans, that is.

The strong army on its high ground that Belmonte had left behind had been chopped to pieces by a beaten foe.

Yazir ibn Q'arif—visibly shaken by his brother's death, wearing a grey veil of mourning now—had wasted no time in naming the new leader of the Asharite forces in Al-Rassan. It was not a popular choice among the tribesmen, but Yazir had had a winter and spring to learn the way of things in this peninsula—who knew how to lead, who could be trusted, who needed to be watched—and he did not hesitate once the rites for his brother were done.

Ammar ibn Khairan, the newly named ka'id, had regrouped the Muwardis, linked to them a fresh contingent of soldiers from Cartada, and surprised the Ruendans with a two-pronged attack from south and east. The timing, on difficult ground, had had to be flawless, and it was. He had chased the northerners all the way back into Ardefio.

The Muwardis, grieving for Ghalib, had been impossible to control in that pursuit. Prisoners weren't being taken anywhere in this war, but the captured Ruendans were savagely abused before and after they were killed. When the surviving northerners were safely within the walls of Ardefio, they promptly began nailing men and women to wood and burning them, by way of response.

Rodrigo Belmonte came back west. The Asharites withdrew towards Silvenes again and reinforcements came to them from Cartada and Tudesca and up from Elvira on the coast.

Five hundred men also arrived from the fortress of Arbastro—led by Tarif ibn Hassan himself. The outlaw and his sons had stopped at Cartada to receive formal pardons from the new king. Almalik II, the parricide, had been executed by Yazir—one of his first actions upon arriving the autumn before. His brother Hazem, called One-hand, had been installed in Cartada.

The Ruendan army, what was left of it, emerged from Ardefio again and moved cautiously south, joining the rest of the Esperansan forces near Silvenes.

Silvenes. It seemed that here the seasons of war were to come to an end. Either Yazir and his army of rescue, here in response to the importunities of fleeing kings and panic-stricken wadjis, would bring Ashar back in triumph to this land, or ... or the Khalifate's fall a generation ago would be as nothing compared to what came now. The necklace of Al-Rassan had been broken then, the pearls scattering. Now they could be lost.

Heralds met on the ground between two armies.

Yazir ibn Q'arif, weighing possibilities, accustomed to swift decisions, instructed his herald to make a proposal. The representative of King Ramiro, a man clearly too young for his task—he was white-faced with what he heard—carried that message back to Ramiro and his constable.

A short time later, grim and precise, the same young herald rode back and met his counterpart again, bearing a reply.

It was as had been expected.

There had been, in truth, no way to refuse. Not in honor, not in pride, not before a battle such as this one was to be. The weight of centuries had come down.

Waking in the morning before Ammar, Jehane lay quietly, looking at him, trying to comprehend how time and the gods had brought them to this. From outside the tent, she heard the sounds of men beginning to stir in the camp; the first prayers of the morning would soon begin.

Her last dream before waking had been of Mazur. Prince of the Kindath. Dead now, half a year ago. She was still unable to stop herself from picturing him emerging from the walls of Ragosa and walking to the Jaddite camp. Where did men find it in themselves to do such things?

The Muwardis had landed in Al-Rassan that same season. Later, in winter, they had learned how those two crossings—ben Avren through the walls to his death and Yazir ibn Q'arif across the straits—were linked to each other. Lines of movement, so far apart, joined at their source. Mazur's last gift to his king and Ragosa.

There had been terrible stories of what Queen Fruela had ordered done to the grey-haired Kindath chancellor after he had walked, unarmed, into her camp. Jehane knew that the worst of them would be true. She also knew, bitter and grieving, that the Muwardis would have done much the same, had they been the ones outside Ragosa's walls.

Who are my enemies?

How did one rise above hatred at these times?

Ammar slept still. It amazed her that he could. She was tempted to trace his features with a hand—eyes, mouth, ears, the straight nose—like a blind woman, to memorize him. She shook her head, pushing the thought away. His breathing was quiet and slow. One arm lay across his chest, oddly childlike.

He could die today. If he did not, Rodrigo would.

It had come to this. Were mortals only playthings for the gods they worshipped, to be tormented in their dying?

It had been agreed between the heralds of Ashar and Jad that leaders of each army would fight before battle, to invoke the will and the power of their gods. One of the oldest rituals of men at war.

Had they somehow guessed that this day might come, the two of them? Had that been the terrible foreknowing that lay beneath the last words they had spoken in the darkness of Orvilla? Or even earlier: in Ragosa, staring at each other that first morning in the brightness of the king's garden with the stream running through it? They had refused to fight each other. There, they could refuse. There, they could fight side by side.

Jehane made herself a promise at that moment, watching her lover sleep, hearing the camp coming awake outside: she would do all she could not to weep. Tears were an easy refuge. What was to happen today demanded more of her.

Ammar's eyes opened without warning, vivid and blue, the same color as her own. He looked at her. She watched him settle into an awareness of the day, what morning it was.

He said, first words, "Jehane, if I fall, you must go with Alvar. He can take you to your parents. There will be nowhere else, my love."

She nodded her head, not speaking. She didn't trust herself to speak. She leaned across and kissed him on the lips. Then she laid her head down on his chest, listening to the beating of his heart. When they spoke afterwards, outside, it was about inconsequential things. The absurd pretense that the world was a normal place that day.

There will be nowhere else, my love.

Alternately hot and cold as the setting sun slipped behind and then out from the swift clouds in the west, Jehane stood on a windy height beside Miranda Belmonte d'Alveda, looking down on a plain between armies.

Alvar de Pellino, a herald of Valledo, garbed in white and gold, was with them as escort to Miranda. So was Husari—granted leave by King Ramiro to accompany his herald.

Husari was the governor of Fezana now, serving Valledo. Jehane did not begrudge him that. He had chosen Ramiro over the Muwardis, making his choice of evils in a time that forced such choices upon all of them. Ziri had decided otherwise, it seemed. He had not left Ragosa with Rodrigo's men. Jehane understood. He would not fight under the banners of the god whose followers had killed his parents. She had no idea what had happened to him. You lost people in war.

She looked down. The armies below were roughly balanced. The ground was even. Neither leader would have been here with his forces had it been otherwise.

The temporarily united Jaddite troops could not remain in the field another winter, and the tribesmen had no disposition for a war of siege and attrition so far from their sands. Tomorrow would see a battle on open ground. A rare thing. There might even be a decisive result, or this could go on and on. Slow, bitter years of fire and sword, disease and hunger and cold, in the breaking of a world.

But before tomorrow could come, with its armies in that plain beneath banners of blue-and-gold or silver-on-black, there had first to be this evening's sunset. Jehane reminded herself that she had vowed not to weep.

Ceremonial battles between Ashar and Jad took place at dawn or at day's end, in the balancing moments between sun and stars. There was one moon in the eastern sky—the white one, nearly full. It was, Jehane thought bitterly, irrelevant to the duality so harmoniously shaped and decreed.

A handful of soldiers from each army were on opposite sides of the slope below them. She knew the Jaddites. Rodrigo's men: Lain, Martin, Ludus. They were not really needed as guards, for Alvar was on the hill and the traditions of heralds were being honored in this campaign.

Men were like that, Jehane thought, unable to check the bitterness from rising again. This was warfare as savage as could be imagined, but the soldiers—even the Muwardis—would defer to the herald's banner and staff.

And they would watch now like boys—enraptured, overawed by the ancient symbolism—what was to happen on the plain between armies. A challenge of gods! Each faith with its great champion, its holy lion of the battlefield! Poets would write verses and songs, chant them at feasts or in taverns or in the dark under desert stars.

"Will there ever be a time when it is not a curse to be born a woman?" Miranda had spoken without turning her head. "When we can do more," she added, staring down at the plain, "than stand by and be extremely brave and watch them die?"

Jehane said nothing. She could think of no answer that was adequate. She would not, before today, have called her own womanhood a burden, aware that she'd been luckier than most—in her family, friends, in her profession. She didn't feel very fortunate today. Today she thought she could agree with Miranda Belmonte. Standing on this windy height, it was easy to agree.

There came a new sound below them. Both armies reacting to something. Loud cries, a banging of swords on shields.

From opposite directions, north and south, two men were riding towards each other across the ground west of Silvenes.

No one escorted either man, so no one knew what it was that Rodrigo Belmonte and Ammar ibn Khairan said to each other when they stopped their horses a little distance apart, alone in the world.

Each man dismounted, however, after a moment, and each turned his horse and sent it cantering back the way he had come across the grass. Then they faced each other again and Jehane could see Ammar say one last thing, and Rodrigo reply. Then they lowered their helms.

On that watching height at day's windy end, she saw each of them take a round shield from where it hung upon his back and then each of them drew his sword.

There would be an eagle on Rodrigo's helm; Ammar's had a pattern of vine leaves. These were things she knew but could not see: she was too far away on this hill and the sun was wrong, behind the two men, and low. They were almost silhouettes against the light, standing alone. Even the horses had finished running away from them.

Is it wrong to love two men, she had asked the summer before, in darkness by the river.

Without taking her eyes from the plain below, Miranda crossed her arms over her breast as if holding tightly to something there. Jehane had seen Rodrigo use that same gesture, exactly, in the moonlight of Orvilla a year ago. She wondered, if she and Ammar were granted enough time, would they, too, come to share gestures like that? And would they ever make a child to be loved as much as the woman beside her and the man below loved their sons?

There will never be enough time, she had said to Ammar.

Looking towards the sun, she saw Rodrigo feint and then swing his blade, hard, back the other way and she watched Ammar parry that blow with a movement of his own sword, smooth as Husari's silk, as a line of verse, as a good wine tasted at the end of day. He turned the parry, seamlessly, into a driving thrust, low, and Rodrigo—fast as a dream of a hunting cat—pushed down his shield and blocked it.

The two men stepped back. They stood looking at each other from beneath their helms, motionless. It had begun. Jehane closed her eyes.

A heavy sound arose from the armies: hungry, needing, enthralled.

Opening her eyes again, Jehane saw that Husari had come to stand beside her. He was crying, without concealment or pretense.

She looked at him, and then away, without speaking. She was afraid to attempt to say anything. She had made a promise to herself. Had sworn she would not weep. Until it was over. Until time had run away from them like those horses on the plain.

They were a match. Both of them had always known it. In a way, the desperate exigencies required to stay alive now were a good thing: they made it harder for the heart to intervene and cripple with its sorrow.

There were reasons for staying alive. There was a woman on a hilltop east of them. There was love. He blocked a low thrust, barely, cut forward with the motion—a difficult thing—and was parried, elegantly. Never a swordsman like this before. Never a match. Could it be called a dance? Should they embrace? Were they not?

One let the body rule here, faster than thought; movements not even imagined, a blurring engaged by the same when blades met. The mind floating just above, out of the way except when it noticed something. A weakness, a faltering.

No faltering here at red sunset. He hadn't thought there would be.

On that hilltop to the east there was love.

Once, during their campaign for Ragosa, when they'd lured the old bandit ibn Hassan into ambushing the parias party for them, Jehane had joined the company by the fire one night, and had offered a Kindath song.

Who knows love?

Who says he knows love?

What is love, tell me.

"I know love,"

Says the littlest one.

"Love is like a tall oak tree."

"Why is love a tall oak tree? Little one tell me."

"Love is a tree

For the shelter it gives

In sunshine or in storm."

He stumbled unexpectedly as an attack pushed him back; swore as he felt himself falling. Too careless, distracted. He had seen that rock, had thought of using it.

Twisting desperately, he released his shield—behind him, the grip upwards—and blocked his fall with his freed left arm, palm braced hard on the grass, sword sweeping into position to take the other man's descending blade and turn it away.

He let himself roll with the weight of that blow to the necessary place, reclaimed the shield and was up again—all in the same smooth motion. In time to blunt the swift second stroke. Dropped to a knee then and slashed across, faster than he should have been able to. Almost got through with that one; almost buried his sword. Didn't. They were a match. Both of them had known. From first meeting in Ragosa. That garden with the tame stream.

Who knows love?

Who says he knows love?

What is love, tell me.

"I know love," Says the littlest one. "Love is like a flower."

"Why is love a flower? Little one tell me."

"Love is a flower

For the sweetness it gives

Before it dies away."

It would have been pleasant, the thought came to him, to be able to lay down their weapons on the darkening grass. To walk away from this place, from what they were being made to do, past the ruins, along the river and into the woods beyond. To find a forest pool, wash their wounds and drink from the cool water and then sit beneath the trees, out of the wind, silent as the summer night came down.

Not in this life.

He thought, then, of something he could do with his shield.

It would have been so much better had she been able to hate the man trying to kill Rodrigo. It was this man, though, who had given the warning that saved Diego's life. He hadn't had to do that. He was Asharite. He was now the commander of their army, the ka'id.

But she had never, ever heard Rodrigo speak of another man—not even Raimundo, who had died so long ago—the way he'd talked about Ammar ibn Khairan during the long, waiting winter just past. The way the man sat a horse, handled a blade, a bow, devised strategies, jested, spoke of history, geography, the properties of good wine. Even the way he wrote poetry.

"Poetry?" Miranda could remember saying to this last, in the voice she reserved for her most withering sarcasm.

Rodrigo had a liking for verse, an ear for what he heard. She did not, and he knew it. He used to torment her with snatches of lyrics in bed. She'd cover her head with pillows.

"Are you in love with this man?" she'd asked her husband once in Fezana that winter—more than half jealous, if truth were told.

"I suppose I am, in a way," Rodrigo had replied after a moment. "Isn't it odd?"

It wasn't, really, Miranda thought, on that hill by Silvenes. The low sun was making it difficult to see the two of them now. There were moments when she found it impossible to tell them apart. She would have thought she'd know Rodrigo beside any man on earth, but he was in armor now, and far away, a moving shadow against red light, and the two men would come together, circle and turn, very close, before disengaging. It was easy to confuse them in these movements leading to a death.

She wasn't ready to lose him. To be alone.

It was the wind that was bringing tears to her eyes. She wiped at them with the back of a hand, glancing sidelong at the other woman. Jehane bet Ishak stood dry-eyed, white-faced, never moving her gaze from what was happening below. Miranda thought suddenly: We have had our years. I know what it is I will lose. She hasn't even had time to gather memories against the dark.

Which was the harder loss to bear? Were there measurements for such things? Did it matter?

"Oh, love," she whispered aloud. And then, to herself, a prayer, "Do not leave me now."

In that moment she saw one of them throw his shield.

She would never have thought there could be beauty in something so purely terrifying, but she ought to have known, remembering what they could do. Both of them.

She had seen them fight—that challenge in Ragosa, the Emin ha'Nazar, the Kindath Quarter in Fezana. She ought to have expected this.

Most of the time, eyes narrowed against the sun, Jehane could tell them apart. Not always, though, as they overlapped and merged and broke apart. They were silhouettes now, no more than that, against the last red disk of light.

She suddenly remembered, as if the thought had somehow been given to her, a cold night during that campaign in the east for Mazur and King Badir. She'd heard the company singing by one of the campfires, to the sound of Martin's guitar. She had come out from her tent, half asleep, wrapped in a cloak. They had made a place for her near the fire. Eventually she had sung a tune her mother used to sing to her in childhood, as Eliane's own mother had sung it for her. It was such an old song.

Both men had been watching her from across the fire that night, Jehane remembered. A strange memory now, but it had come. She remembered the night, the fire, the song.

"Love is a flower

For the sweetness it gives

Before it dies away."

The sun, red as a flame, dropped below the western bank of clouds, underlighting them, hanging on the rim of the world. The two men were shadow-figures against it. They circled, came together, circled. She could truly not distinguish them now, the movements were so much the same.

One of them threw his shield.

Hurled it flat like a discus, wrong-handed, straight at the other's knees. The other man leaped to evade, almost did, was hit, fell awkwardly. Jehane caught her breath. The first one drove straight forward, hard, and they were locked again, entangled.

"Rodrigo," said Miranda suddenly.

The man without a shield was above the other, who had fought to his knees. The one on the ground blocked the descent of a sword, was thrown back. Hurled himself completely over and away on the grass, letting fall his own shield to do it. They engaged, without defenses now, blades whipping and parrying. One body, almost. A creature of myth, some lost, fabulous beast of long ago. They pushed apart. Two figures again, against the sun's disk.

Jehane's hands were up before her mouth. One of the two men threw himself against the other again. Half the sun was gone now, at the end of the world. She could see the shields where they had fallen.

Someone hammered downwards, was blocked. He broke free, feinted a thrust, slashed across.

And was not parried. Not this time.

The long blade sank in. They could see it from on the hill. Jehane began to cry. The wounded man pulled free and back, somehow deflected another driving blow. Then he twisted suddenly, one arm held tight against his ribs. Jehane saw him take a quick step to the side and grip his sword in both hands. It was upon them.

Who knows love?

Who says he knows love?

What is love, tell me.

An old song. A child's song.

And so, at the last, from far away, against the red and failing light, she saw a good man raise his sword and she saw a good man fall.

There came a vast roaring sound from the armies. But though she was aware of this it seemed already distant to Jehane, and moving away, as if a silence was descending to cover the world.

The man who yet stood upright on the plain turned towards the hill where the women were. He let fall his own blade onto the dark, trampled grass. Holding a palm again to his wounded side, he made a gesture—a small, helpless movement—with his free hand.

Then he turned away from them to the man lying on the ground and he sank to his knees beside him as the sun went down.

Soon after that the clouds began rolling in from the west, blanketing the sky.

No sun, no moon, no stars over Al-Rassan.