Requiem for the Sun

1 Red

The members of Lord Gwydion’s advisory council had reconvened in Haguefort’s richly appointed library and were grouped in pairs and triads in various parts of the voluminous room, examining papers or talking quietly among themselves. To a one they rose from their seats and fell into a pleasant, welcoming silence as the lord and lady entered.

First to greet the returning lady was Tristan Steward, the Prince of Bethany, the most powerful of the provinces of Roland. He had been hovering near the doorway by himself, away from the other councilors, and stepped quickly into Rhapsody’s path, bowing politely over the ring on her left hand.

“Welcome home, m’lady,” he said in a thick voice, oiled with the fine brandy of Haguefort’s cellars. The light from the library’s lanterns pooled in his auburn curls, making them gleam darkly in red-gold hues similar to those in Ashe’s hair, though not with the same odd, metallic sheen that the Lord Cymrian’s dragon heritage bequeathed him.

Rhapsody kissed the prince on cheek as he stood erect again. “Hello, Tristan,” she said pleasantly, extricating her hand from his grasp. “I trust Lady Madeleine and young Malcolm are well?”

Tristan Steward’s eyes, green-blue in the tradition of the Cymrian royal line, blinked as they looked down at her.

“Yes, quite well, thank you, m’lady,” he said solemnly after a moment. “Madeleine will be honored to know you asked after her.”

“Young master Malcolm must be getting ready to take his first steps,” Rhapsody said as she continued into the library, her hand resting on Ashe’s forearm.

“Any day now. How kind of m’lady to remember.”

“I remember every child at whose naming ceremony I have sung. Good evening, Martin,” Rhapsody greeted Ivenstrand, the Duke of Avonderre, who smiled and bowed deferentially; she nodded to each of the other councilors and slipped hurriedly into an empty seat at the long table of polished wood where Ashe and his advisors had been meeting. The dukes of Roland and the ambassadors from Manosse and Gaematria, the Isle of the Sea Mages, all member nations of the Cymrian Alliance, took their seats as well, following the lead of the Lord Cymrian.

“I can see you’ve been keeping these good councilors far too long and far too late into the night in my absence,” Rhapsody said to her husband as she gingerly moved aside a half-eaten turkey leg that lay oh a plate amid crumpled sheets of parchment and empty cordial glasses on the table before her, eyeing the refuse that was clumped in piles around the rest of the table and other parts of the library.

Ashe rolled his eyes and sighed dramatically. “Revisions to the Orlandan tariff structure,” he said with mock angst.

“Ah. Well, that explains it.” She turned to young Gwydion Navarne, seated to her left. “Where were you in your discussions when I interrupted, Gwydion?”

“The impasse seems to have occurred in the discussion of the exemption that the province of Yarim has requested on foodstuffs, owing to the drought conditions of the last two growing seasons,” the young man said.

“Indeed,” Ashe agreed. “Canderre, Avonderre, and Bethany oppose the waiver of such tariffs, while Bethe Corbair agrees.”

“Bethe Corbair shares a border with Yarim, and does not have the cost of transportation of goods that Avonderre has,” protested Martin Ivenstrand, whose coastal province was the most distant from Yarim.

“Nor do I remember Yarim agreeing to reduce tariffs on their opals or their salt in the past when restrictions on sea trade threatened our revenues,” said Cedric Canderre, the older man who was the duke of the province that bore his name, known for its production of luxury goods, fine wines, and rich delicacies. “I am unclear as to why this drought is any different than the obstacles Canderre or the other provinces of Roland have faced.”

“Because this drought is beggaring my province, you imbecile,” growled Ihrman Karsrick, the Duke of Yarim. “Those so-called obstacles did not make even a nail’s worth of a dent in your fat treasury, and you know it. Yarim, on the other hand, is facing mass starvation.”

Rhapsody leaned back in her chair and looked to Tristan Steward. “And what is Bethany’s position, Tristan?”

“We are certainly sympathetic to Yarim’s plight,” said the prince smoothly. “As such, we are more than willing to extend them generous extensions on their tariff payments.”

Amusement sparkled in Rhapsody’s green eyes, but her face and voice remained passive. “How kind of you.”

The mild look on Tristan Steward’s face hardened a little. “More than that, m’lady, Bethany is concerned that this matter was brought up for discussion at the level of the Cymrian Alliance at all,” he said, a terse note entering his otherwise warm voice. “Hithertofore each province of Roland has always had the right to set its own tariff rates, as it deemed fit, without interference from any—er, higher authority.” His eyes met Ashe’s. “At the Council that named you Cymrian lord and lady, we had been assured that the sovereignty of the realms within the Alliance would be respected.”

“Yes, that assurance was given, and it has not changed,” said Rhapsody quickly, noting the darkening of her husband’s expression. She turned again to the young man who would soon take a place at this table as the Duke of Navarne. “What is your opinion of this, Gwydion?”

Gwydion Navarne shifted in his chair, then sat forward.

“I believe that, while the sovereignty of provincial tariff rights is important to observe, there are some things that transcend tariff,” he said simply, his young voice husky with change, “emergency foodstuffs being one of those things. Why should those of us blessed with more fertile lands and plentiful food profit excessively from the suffering of a fellow Orlandan province, rather than going to its aid in a time of need?”

The Lord Cymrian smiled slightly. “Your father would have proffered the same solution,” he said to Gwydion Navarne, while keeping his eyes locked with Tristan’s. “You are a compassionate man, as he was.”

“Well, I am sorry to intrude at what is clearly a sensitive stage of the talks, but if you will allow me, I believe I may be able to proffer an alternative solution to the tariff quandary,” Rhapsody said, squeezing Ashe’s hand.

“By all means, do tell, m’lady,” said Quentin Baldasarre, the Duke of Bethe Corbair.

“Yarim needs water.” Rhapsody folded her hands.

The councilors looked to one another blankly, then stared in turn at the table, amid the occasional clearing of throats. Ihrman Karsrick’s brow furrowed, barely containing his annoyance.

“Does m’lady have a way of beseeching the clouds for rain, skysinger that she is? Or are you merely stating the obvious for amusement at my expense?”

“I would never taunt you on so grave a matter for amusement, m’lord, that would be cruel,” Rhapsody said hastily, pushing down on Ashe’s arm to guide him back into his seat as he began to rise. “But Yarim has a great source of water in its midst, a source which you do not currently make use of, and which would doubtless spare you from some of the effects of the drought.”

Karsrick’s expression resolved from anger into confusion. “M’lady does understand that the Erim Rus has run dry, and that even when it was still flowing in spring, it was contaminated with the Blood Fever?”

“Yes.”

“And that the Shanouin well-diggers are finding surface veins of water less and less often?”

“Yes,” Rhapsody said again. “I was referring to Entudenin.”

Silence fell over the dark library, the lanternlight dimming as the oil reserves began to run dry, the firelight on the hearth burning strong and steady, casting bright shadows on the faces of the bewildered councilors.

Entudenin in its time had been a towering geyser, a miracle of shining water spraying forth from a multicolored obelisk of mineral deposits sprouting from the red clay of Yarim, in cycles roughly akin to the phases of the moon. For twenty days out of every moon cycle it showered the dry earth with sweet water, water that made the dusty realm bloom like a flower in the desert. In its time it had gifted the province with liquid life, allowing the capital city of Yarim Paar to be built, a jewel in a vast wasteland at the northern foothills of the Teeth, and had nourished the outlying mining camps and farming settlements as well.

But its time had come to an end several centuries before, when one day, without explanation or warning, the marvelous artery of life-giving water dried to a shriveled shell, never to give forth water again. Centuries had passed; the obelisk withered in the heat, dissipating into a shrunken formation of mono-colored rock, unnoticed every day by hundreds of oblivious passersby in the town square of Yarim Paar.

“Entudenin has been dead for centuries, m’lady,” said Ihrman Karsrick as pleasantly as he was able.

“Perhaps. Or perhaps it is merely sleeping.” Rhapsody leaned forward, the fireshadows gleaming in her eyes, which sparkled with interest.

“And does m’lady have a song of some sort with which to awaken Entudenin from its sleep of three hundred years?” Karsrick was struggling to maintain his patience.

“Perhaps. It’s the song of the drill.” Rhapsody folded her hands. “And I am not the singer to make use of this song, but within the Cymrian Alliance there are such singers.”

“Please elaborate,” Ashe said, noting the looks of bewilderment on the faces of the councilors.

Rhapsody sat back in her chair. “Entudenin was the embodiment of a miracle; fresh water in the middle of the dry clay of Yarim, heralded as a gift from the All-God, and the gods that the indigenous population worshipped before the Cymrians came. As such, when Entudenin went silent, it was assumed to be some kind of divine punishment. What if, in fact, it is not?”

The silence that answered her was broken only by the crackle of the hearth-fire.

“Please go on,” Tristan Steward said.

“It is possible the water that flowed from Entudenin in its lifetime came from the sea,” Rhapsody said. “That would explain its lunar cycle—the phases of the moon have similar effects on ocean currents and tides. I have just recently been to the lava cliffs along the southern coastline of the lands of the sea Lirin, similar to the ones that line the coasts near Avonderre. There are thousands of crannies and caves in those cliffs, some of which are quite shallow, others of which go on for miles.

“It made me wonder about the source of the water for Entudenin. It is possible that an inlet there or even more northward fed water through an underground riverbed or tunnel of some sort all the way to Yarim. The complexities of the strata that make up the earth are immeasurable.” Rhapsody inhaled deeply, having traveled through such strata long ago. “It is possible that the right combination of underground hills and valleys, riverbeds, inlets, and filtering sand led to this sweet-water geyser a thousand miles from the sea, swelling and ebbing with the cycle of the moon and the tides. If all this is possible, it is also possible that this pathway became clogged, closed somehow. If it could be opened again, the water might return.”

“M’lady, how would anyone know?” Quentin Baldasarre asked incredulously. “If, as you suggest, a blockage occurred somewhere along a thousand miles of subterranean tunnel, how could one ever find it?”

Rhapsody sat forward. “One would ask those who know the subterranean maps of the Earth, who walk such corridors in daily life, and have the tools to mine them.”

Realization began to spread through the features of the councilors, leaving unpleasant expressions on the faces of the dukes of Roland.

“Please tell me that you are referring to the Nain,” Martin Ivenstrand said.

“I am referring to the Bolg, of course,” Rhapsody replied testily. “And I do not appreciate your tone or your implication. The Nain want as little contact with the Cymrian Alliance as is necessary to maintain good standing. The Bolg are full participants in its trade and support.” She turned to Ihrman Karsrick, whose face had gone an unhealthy shade of purple. “You seem suddenly unwell, Ihrman. I would think that this opportunity would bring you great joy and anticipation, not indigestion.” She glanced at the turkey leg again. “Though I am not surprised if you are suffering from that, too.”

The Duke of Yarim coughed dryly. “Surely m’lady does not believe me so daft as to want to enter into dealings of some sort with the Bolg?”

The expression on the Lady Cymrian’s face resolved into one of sharp observation.

“Why ever not, Ihrman? There has been a trade agreement between Roland and Ylorc for four years now. You sell them salt, you buy their weapons, they are members of the Cymrian Alliance—why would you not seek their expertise in solving your greatest problem?”

“Because I have no desire to be beholden to the Firbolg king, that’s why.” snapped Karsrick. “We share a common border. I do not wish to have him feel he can cross that border and take remuneration from Yarim at any time he wishes.”

“I would never think that you would put yourself in such a position,” Rhapsody replied. “His doing so would not be tolerated. My suggestion is that you contract for the services of his artisans, just as you do with those of Roland, Sorbold, and even from as far away as Manosse. Do you have some objection to making use of the talents of Firbolg artisans?”

“I do not wish to invite hordes of Bolg—artisans into Yarim, no, I don’t, m’lady,” Karsrick retorted. “The possible repercussions hold great horror for me.”

“Surely that is not an unreasonable stance,” interjected Tristan Steward. “King Achmed does not look happily on Orlandan workers coming into his realm. The handful of them that have been invited to work on the rebuilding of Canrif have been subjected to unbelievably intense scrutiny, and even then only one or two have been hired. Why should we issue invitations to his people when he has not been particularly welcoming to ours?”

“Perhaps the reason for King Achmed’s lack of hospitality may be that the last time your people came into his lands they were carrying torches and clubs, Tristan,” Ashe commented. He had been sitting back in his chair, hands folded in front of his chin, watching Rhapsody press her argument. “It will take some time for the Bolg to get over the annual Spring Cleaning ritual that was practiced, at their grievous expense, for so many centuries.”

“If I recall, you took part in one of those raids yourself when you were a young man training with the army, Gwydion,” said Tristan Steward darkly. “We rode in the same regiment.”

“Regardless, you are missing the point,” Rhapsody said. “The Bolg may be able to help restore water to Yarim, sparing it from the drought that now threatens your people. If there is any possible chance that they can, do you not have an obligation to seek their assistance?”

“Do I not have an obligation to the safety of those people as well, m’lady?” asked Karsrick, a note of desperation in his voice.

“Yes, you do,” Rhapsody replied, “and so do I. Therefore, I offer to take full responsibility for the comportment of whatever Bolg craftsmen, miners, or artisans come to Yarim to examine Entudenin, and for whatever work they do. I am well aware that this is, at least historically, a holy relic, and that you are greatly concerned with preserving it.”

“Yes.”

“So again, let it be on my head. I will take full blame for anything that should occur in this undertaking.”

The Duke of Yarim threw his hands up mutely, then sat back in his chair with a dull thud. The other members of the council looked at each other in bewilderment. Finally Karsrick sighed in resignation.

“Very well, m’lady.”

Rhapsody smiled brightly as she rose from the table. “Good! Thank you. We will meet King Achmed and his contingent four weeks hence in Yarim Paar at the foot of Entudenin.” She looked around at the blank faces staring back at her. “Well, good councilors, if you do not have anything else pressing that needs to be attended to this evening, I think I shall commandeer my husband and leave you all to get some rest.”

Ashe was on his feet in an instant. “Yes, indeed, thank you for your patience. I shall see to it that you are all able to sleep in late tomorrow; we will not be convening until the day after. At least. Good night, Gwydion.” He pushed the chair back under the table, bowed to his councilors, and his namesake hastily accompanied Rhapsody out of the library. On the way across the room he leaned down to her ear and spoke softly.

“Well, darling, welcome home. It’s good to see that causing strife among the members of the council is still a family trait.”

As they passed the large open hearth the flames of the fire roared in greeting, then settled into a quiet burn again. Rhapsody stopped and looked quickly over her shoulder.

She stared into the fireshadows dancing on the colorful threads of the intricately woven carpet, then looked up to the balcony doors on the other side of the library, where raindrops dashed intermittently against the glass.

“Did—did someone just come into the room?” she asked Ashe softly.

The Lord Cymrian stopped beside her. His dragonesque eyes narrowed slightly as he concentrated, reaching out with his dragon sense to the corners of the vast library. His awareness expanded between two beats of his heart. Every fiber of carpet, every candleflame, each page in each book, the breath of each member of the council, each drop of rain outside the keep was suddenly known to him in detail.

He detected nothing different. But now his blood ran colder.

“No,” he said finally. “Did you feel something disturbing?”

Rhapsody exhaled, then shook her head. “Nothing tangible.” She slipped her hand into her husband’s palm. “Perhaps I am just eager to quit this place and be alone with you.”

Ashe smiled and kissed her hand.

“As always, m’lady, I defer to your wisdom.”

In a remarkable show of restraint, he waited until the doors of the library had closed securely behind them before sweeping Rhapsody off her feet and carrying her, in a few bounding steps, to their tower chambers.

Inside the library, the damask curtains that lined the glass door to the balcony overlooking the Cymrian museum in the courtyard below fluttered gently, unnoticed by the councilors, who had immediately returned to their arguments, oblivious of the howling storm outside the library windows.

A heartbeat later, they hung motionless, still as death, once more.

2 Orange

The night rain fell in black sheets, twisting into showers of dark needles on the wind before it spattered the muddy cobblestones of the streets leading to the Hall of Virtue, the towering stone edifice that housed the Judiciary of Argaut.

The seneschal paused for a moment at the top of the marble steps of the hall, listening as if to distant voices in the turbulent wind.

The streets of the city were silent, muted no doubt by the frigid wind and insistent rain. Even the wharfside taverns and brothels had doused their lamps, closing their shutters tight against the gale that blew in off the waterfront.

The seneschal stared out over the harbor, to the far end of the cove where the lighttowers burned, even in the downpour, serving as guide to the ships at sea, their hulls battered by the pounding storm. We well may lose one tonight, the seneschal thought, pondering the signals from the tower; the light was flashing in broken beams, gleaming with increasing brightness as more oil was added to the flame. He inhaled deeply. When death hovered in the sea winds, it was invigorating to the lungs.

He closed his eyes for a moment and turned his face up to the black sky above him, letting the icy wind buffet his eyelids, allowing the rain to sting his skin. Then he opened his eyes once more, shook the water from his face and cloak, and climbed the last few steps into the Hall of Virtue.

The great iron doors of the hall had been bolted against the night and the storm. The seneschal shifted the small burlap sack he carried to his lesser hand, grasped the knocker, and pounded; the sound thudded like a bell tolling a death knell, echoing for a moment, then was swallowed by the howl of the wind.

With a metallic scream the enormous door was pulled open, flooding the opening with dim light. The guard stepped quickly aside; the seneschal patted the man’s shoulder as he passed from the fury of the storm to the warmth of the echoing quiet in the palace’s vast foyer.

“Good evening, Your Honor,” the guard said as he closed the heavy iron door behind the seneschal.

“Has my lord sent for me?”

“No, sir. All is quiet.”

The exchange was the same as it was each night, the soldier thought as the seneschal handed him his dripping cloak and tricornered judge’s hat. The lord never sent for the seneschal; he never sent for anyone, in fact. The Baron of Argaut was a hermit, living in an isolated tower, and tended to in gravest secret by only a trusted handful of advisors, chief among them the seneschal. The soldier had been standing guard duty in the Hall of Virtue for more than four years, and had never seen the baron even once.

“Good. A pleasant evening to you, then,” said the seneschal. The guard nodded, and returned to his post by the door. He listened to the fading click of the seneschal’s boots as he crossed the polished marble foyer and made his way down the long hallway into the judiciary chambers. When the last echo had died away, the soldier allowed himself the luxury of breathing once more.

The candleflames in the wall sconces that lined the long hallway to the Chamber of Justice flickered as the seneschal walked past, causing the light that pooled intermittently on the dusky slate floor to dance frenetically, then settle back into a gently pulsing glow again.

At the end of the long central corridor he opened the door to the dark courtroom and stepped inside, his eyes adjusting quickly in the absence of light, then quietly closed the door behind him.

The seneschal’s eyes burned at the edges as he gazed lovingly about the place where so many judgments were handed down, where so many men and women stood accused, then condemned. The prisoner’s docket, the barrister’s podium, stood silent now in the dark, the echoes of the wailing that had occurred here today, and every day before today, vibrating invisibly in the air, leaving behind a delicious hum of agony.

The seneschal strode quickly across the floor of the shadowy chamber, past the empty witness gallery, pausing for a moment at the clerk’s desk, a two-compartmented, cagelike table with wooden slats above it. Draped over the slats was a long piece of parchment curled at the ends, stretched out to allow the ink to dry. Many names were neatly inscribed on the document, tomorrow’s court agenda, a list of condemned souls who did not know that their fate had been decided long before they had even been accused. The seneschal fingered the parchment with an air of bemused melancholy. No time for this. Ah, well.

His mind wandered to the street wench he had killed earlier this night beneath the pier, her body doubtless being battered now against the pylons by the raging surf of the storm. His thoughts then shifted to the sailor who would burn for the crime tomorrow, at this moment sleeping off his evening’s rum, oblivious in his drunkenness, the blood of a woman he had never seen drenching his clothes, clotting in dark, sticky pools. It was bound to be an exciting trial, and an even more exciting bonfire, especially if the rum vapors were still fresh on the bewildered man’s breath.

Such a shame that he would not be here to appreciate it.

The seneschal exhaled sharply, refocusing, silencing the building din of dark voices calling in the depth of his ears.

A slight movement in the burlap sack he carried brought him back to the task at hand.

Framing the bench where he sat daily in judgment was a red curtain, heavy damask that smelled of mildew and earth hanging behind his chair. The seneschal climbed the steps to the bench, then drew the curtain aside, revealing the stone wall behind it. He ran a finger over an all-but-unseen crack, felt for the handhold, then turned the doorway aside and stepped into the darkness of the tunnel behind the wall, closing it carefully behind him.

Down the familiar passageway he descended, his feet finding their way automatically in the blackness. A left turn, then three more to the right; his eyes closed to slits.

His body flooded with warmth when the greenish glow in the distance became visible. His steps quickened as he called into the darkness.

“Faron?”

From the floor of the catacomb steam began to rise, thin tendrils of twisting vapor hovering over the glowing pool.

The seneschal smiled, feeling the heat rise inside his own body.

“Come forth, my child,” he whispered.

The gleaming mist thickened, writhing in waves that reached outward, above, into the blackness that surrounded it.

The seneschal peered into the vapor.

Finally, from within the glowing pool bubbles of air crested the surface of the incandescent water. The meniscus roiled, then broke open, causing the ghostly mist to swirl and vanish.

From the center of the pool a head emerged, human in shape though not appearance. Wide, fishlike eyes occluded with milky cataracts blinked as they came into sight from below the surface, followed by a flat, bridgeless nose; then the creature’s mouth, or near lack thereof, appeared, lips fused in the front, open over the molars, black horizontal slits through which small streams of water gushed. Its skin, golden, sallow, appeared almost a part of the pool from which it had been summoned.

The gleaming water surged as the creature, with great effort, pulled itself up on forearms that curled and bent under the weight of its torso, its limbs misshapen and mutable, as though they were formed not of bone but only of cartilage. The silky garment that draped its body bulged slightly in spots to cover both nascent male and female bodily traits, set in a slight, buckling skeletal frame, grotesquely twisted and soft.

A fond look came into the eyes of the seneschal, eyes that burned red at the edges in excitement. The demon spirit that clung to his physical form, recognizing the presence of its own, crowed in excitement, scratching at his ribs.

“Good evening, little one,” he said softly. “I’ve brought your supper.”

The creature’s cloudy eyes burned red at the edges in response. With a forward movement of its twisted arms it drew nearer, its lower body hovering in the shining green water of the pool.

The seneschal drew forth the blade he wore at his side and opened the cloth sack. Reaching inside, he pulled out two marinus eels, blind, oily creatures, black of flesh and thick of heft, that bit wildly at his forearm, lashing about as they dangled over the pool. He tore the heads off and tossed them into the darkness, chuckling as the creature’s eyes widened hungrily.

Then, with exquisite care, he sliced the still-twitching bodies into thin slivers and tenderly fed them to the creature through the side openings in its mouth, eliciting grisly popping and slurping sounds as the soft teeth ground the flesh to bits.

When the creature had consumed the eels it backed away from the pool’s edge and began to sink slowly into the green water again.

The seneschal’s hand shot out and caught its head gently under the chin; the layers of loose, wrinkled skin reverberated, sending ripples through the glowing pool.

“No, Faron, tarry.”

He stared down at this child of his creation, the end result of one of his favorite and most brutal conquests, an Ancient Seren woman who fell quite literally into his hands a thousand years before. The atrocities he had committed upon her still made his blood burn hot with pleasure; impregnating her had been well worth the diminution of power that he had suffered as a result. The innate magic she and all those of her race possessed—the element of ether left over from Creation when the Earth had been nothing more than a flaming piece of a star streaking across the void of the universe—burned in Faron’s blood, just as the fire from which his own demonic side had come did. There was a perverse beauty in their misshapen offspring, this denatured entity, its features at the same time old and young, all but boneless in its deformity, yet still his child, and his alone.

The creature’s enormous eyes fixed on his face unblinkingly. “I have need of your gift,” the seneschal said.

Faron stared at him a moment longer, then nodded.

The seneschal released the mute creature’s face, caressing it gently as he did. Then from an inner pocket of his robe he brought forth a square of folded velvet and opened it carefully, almost reverently.

Beneath the folds of cloth lay a lock of hair, brittle and dry like straw, hair that once was golden as wheat in a summer field, now yellow-white with years, tied with a black velvet ribbon that had decayed almost into threads of dust. He offered it to the creature floating in the pool of soft green light and watery mist.

“Can you see her?” he whispered.

The creature stared at him a moment longer, as if gauging his weakness; the seneschal could feel it searching his face, wondering what had come over him. He contemplated the same thing himself; his hands were shaking with anticipation, his voice carried a husky note of excited dread that he could not remember it having before.

Probably because he had not considered the possibility in more than half again a thousand years that she might still be alive.

Until this night.

The creature apparently found whatever it was looking for in his face; it took the lock of ancient hair, then nodded again and slipped beneath the surface of the pool, reappearing a moment later.

In one of its grotesquely gnarled hands it carried a thin blue oval with tattered edges that gleamed iridescently in the reflected light of the pool water. Each side of the object’s surface bore an etching; it was the image of an eye, obscured by clouds on one side, clear of them on the other, the engraving worn almost to invisibility by time.

The seneschal smiled broadly. There was something so pleasing about seeing the scale in the hands of his child that he could barely contain his delight. Faron’s mother had been the last in a long line of Ancient Seren seers to possess some of the scales, and her power to read them had passed through her blood into Faron’s. Imagining the horror she must be suffering in the Afterlife made the demon that clung to his soul shout with joy.

He watched reverently as Faron plunged the ancient scale beneath the surface of the gleaming green pool. Clouds of steam from the heat of the fire that burned naturally in Faron’s blood began to rise, white vapor that filled the air like ghosts hovering above, longing for a view.

Earth, present in the scale itself, the seneschal mused, staring through the billowing mist. Fire and ether, ever-present in Faron’s blood, water from the pool. The cycle of the elements was complete but for one. Given the distance over which he wished Faron to see, great power would be needed.

Slowly he took hold of the hilt protruding from the scabbard at his side, and with great care drew Tysterisk. A rush of wind whipped through the catacomb, stirring clouds of mold spores from the floor as the blade came forth from its sheath, invisible except for a shower of sparks of flame as if from a brushfire in a high breeze,

A deep tug resonated through both his human flesh and his demonic spirit, the bond of connection to the elemental sword of air within him blazing as it always did when the weapon was drawn. Holding Tysterisk in his hands was the most powerful pleasure of the flesh he had ever experienced, an orgiastic sensation that dwarfed all others his body had felt. He held it over the glowing green pool, sending waves crashing over Faron where a moment before there had only been gentle ripples.

The elemental circle was complete. Beneath the surface of the green water the scale glowed. The clouds in Faron’s occluded eyes cleared; their bright blue irises shone like stars in the reflected brilliance of the pool. The seneschal noted the change, the demon within him crowing with excitement.

“Can you see her?” he asked the ancient malformed child again, struggling to keep his voice steady.

The gnarled creature stared into the windy water, blinking in the dark, then shook its head, the hanging folds of skin beneath its chin quivering.

Impatiently the seneschal fumbled in the bag that had contained the eels and withdrew a soft tallow candle, formed from caustic lye and human fat rendered from sickly old people and children, the useless booty of privateered ships that had been picked clean of more valuable captives and treasure. He tapped the wick with his finger, calling forth the black fire from within his demonic soul, his very essence, and sparked the flame. When the taper began to glow he held it up over the pool, casting more illumination over the submerged scale.

“Can you see her?” he demanded again; the fire burned in his voice, dark with threat.

Faron squinted, studying the scrying scale. A moment later the monstrous face turned up to meet the wild blue eyes of its father, and nodded.

Blazing excitement, replaced a moment later with impatience, roared through the seneschal.

“What do you see? Tell me more.”

The mute creature stared at him helplessly.

“What is she doing? Is she alone?”

The creature shook its head.

The fiery excitement soured to blinding fury.

“No? She is not alone? Who is with her? Who?”

The creature shrugged.

The wild storm in the seneschal’s eyes broke, like the wind-whipped waves in the gale.

He plunged both his hands up to the last joints of the fingers into the misshapen creature’s soft skull, twisting them as its fishlike mouth dropped open at the sides in agony, a silent scream bursting in waves of gushing air exiting its quivering lips.

As Faron’s body went rigid with shock, the seneschal closed his eyes and concentrated. Intently he focused his concentration inward, untying the metaphysical bonds by which his immortal demonic nature clung to his corporeal form, seeking the vibrations in Faron’s blood that matched those of his own. He found them easily.

Like threads of spun steel, the tiny tethers of power stretched between his body and his soul. Meticulously he unhooked them one by one and retied each one to the misshapen mass of human flesh writhing in his hands, whose blood burned with his own.

As the fire of his essence slipped into Faron’s body, his own corporeal form cooled, withered and sank into itself, shriveling like a mummified skeleton. It clung to Faron, its ossified fingers still protruding from the child’s head.

Faron’s twisted form, now the vessel, the host of the immortal soul of the demon, straightened and grew substantial, the cartilage hardening into bone. The demon peered out through Faron’s clear blue eyes.

He stared into the blue waves of light reflecting in the scale just below the surface of the glowing green water.

At first he saw nothing but a distant shadow. Then, a movement, and his bearing sharpened.

In the rippling waves of the pool he could make out the watery image of a face, both alien and innately familiar to him. It was a face he had studied at great length a lifetime ago, stared at in portraits, gazed at intently when in close proximity. He knew every line, every angle, though in the clouds of steam it was not exactly as he remembered it.

Perhaps it was the expression that was confusing him. The face he had known was a guarded one, one that rarely smiled, and when it did, that expression was wry. The emerald eyes within the face had burned with contempt, coolly disguised beneath an aspect of disinterest, especially when fixed on him.

Now, though, in whatever blue light through which it passed half a world away, this familiar, unknown face was wreathed in an expression he did not recognize.

There was laughter in her eyes, caught in this moment of time, and some thing more, an expression he could not place, but did not like, whatever it was. Her face was shining in the reflected glow of candleflame, but more—it was generating its own light.

She was talking to someone.

More than one person, it seemed, from the way her head moved, someone whose face was at an equal height to her own to the left, and another who was taller to the right. When she looked in the latter direction, her eyes took on an element of excitement that burned like elemental fire, pure and hot from the heart of the Earth. There was something so inviting, so compelling, about this face that involuntarily he reached into the glowing water and touched the back of her neck, where the golden hair he had dreamed about for more than a thousand years hung in a silken fall. He drew Faron’s gnarled finger through the ripples in an awkward caress.

Half a world away, she froze. A look of revulsion, or perhaps fear, washed the smile from her face, leaving it blank, pale. She glanced over her shoulder, then put her hand to her throat, as if shielding it from a bitter wind, or the maw of a wolf.

His touch had made her recoil.

Again.

Whore, he whispered in his mind. Miserable, rutting whore.

His anger exploded, causing Faron’s body to jerk and quiver with the physical manifestations of rage. With a furious sweep of his squamous hand he slapped the surface of the water, sending the scale spinning out of the pool and into the dank darkness of the catacomb.

He breathed shallowly, trying to regain his focus.

When reason returned, he closed his sky-blue eyes, concentrating on the metaphysical threads that bound him to Faron’s human form, loosing and relying them once more.

As the demonic essence rushed back into the seneschal’s body, the withered mummy swelled with life again, the angry light returning to his dried-out eye sockets. Faron’s body, by contrast, grew supple and twisted again until it collapsed under its own weight.

The seneschal breathed shallowly as he pulled his remaining fingers from the soft skull of his child, stanching the blood that dripped from the holes. Tenderly he gathered Faron, who wept silently, deformed mouth gasping at the edges, into his arms and caressed the wisps of hair, the quivering folds of skin, gently kissing the creature’s head.

“I am sorry, Faron,” he whispered softly. “Forgive me.”

When the creature’s soundless moans resolved into light panting, the seneschal cupped its face in his hand and turned it so that he was staring into its eyes, now cloudy again, though still the same blue as his own.

“I have wondrous news for you, Faron,” he said, stroking its flaccid cheeks with his fingers. “I am going on a long voyage, far across the sea—” He pressed his forefinger to the creature’s fused lips as panic came into its eyes.

“And I am taking you with me.”

The dark staircase that led to the Baron of Argaut’s tower was built, except for the last few steps, of polished gray marble veined in black and white. The stairs, like the passageway itself, were narrow; the noise of footsteps ascending or descending was reduced to soft, ominous clicks instead of the echoing cadence that walking through the other corridors in the Hall of Virtue produced.

At the top of the staircase the last few steps were hewn from blood coral, a stinging calcified sea plant—a living creature when in the sea, it was said—that formed poisonous reefs thousands of miles long near the Fiery Rim, many ocean leagues away. It blended with the marble of the steps, forming a deadly barrier to anyone not immune to the bite of fire, the sting of venom.

The seneschal climbed the last stair and stopped before the black walnut door bound in steel. He knocked deferentially, then opened the door slowly.

A rush of dank wind and consuming darkness greeted him.

He stepped quickly into the chamber and closed the door behind him.

“Good evening, m’lord,” he said.

At first no sound replied except the skittering movements of mice and the flutter of bat wings in the eaves above.

Then, deep within his brain, he heard the voice, words burning his mind like dark fire.

Good evening.

The seneschal cleared his throat, casting his eyes around the black tower room, the darkness impenetrable. “All is progressing well in Argaut. We had another successful day in the Judiciary.”

Very good.

He cleared his throat again. “I will be leaving tonight on an extended voyage. Is there anything m’lord requires before I go?”

The silence swelled around him in the dark. When the voice spoke again, it burned with menace, stinging his ears and the inside of his brain.

An explanation, to begin with.

The seneschal inhaled deeply. “I’ve had some news today that someone who owes me a very great debt, an oath struck on the Island of Serendair before the Great Cataclysm, survived the awakening of the Sleeping Child and is alive.” He let his breath out with the words. “I need to collect on that debt.”

Why? the burning voice demanded. Send a, lackey.

Wisely the seneschal swallowed the retort that rose, unbidden, to his lips. It was not prudent to enflame the baron.

“That is not possible, m’lord,” he said in a measured, respectful tone. “This is something to which I must attend personally. I assure you, however, the prize with which I will return will be more than worth my absence.”

In your estimation, perhaps. But mayhap not in mine. The anger in the voice seared the inside of the seneschal’s head. If you have, who will procure the slaves? Maintain the terror? Who will sit in the judiciary? Attend to the burnings? Who will fulfill the law?

The seneschal’s eyes burned red at the edges in response as he struggled against his own wild ire.

“The infrastructure is well in place, m’lord. All of that will be done, and more.” Impulsively he dropped to one knee and bowed his head. When he spoke, his voice carried an excitement that the expansive darkness of the room could barely contain. “But to please m’lord, before I go I will attend to your will. I will accomplish a rash of burnings sufficient to light the sky to a crimson glow that will linger for days! I will move up the dockets, deploy the fleet, set in motion whatever m’lord desires. But I must leave with the tide before morning; I have a contract to enforce.” He raised his eyes to the darkness again. “An oath to make someone uphold.”

The silence echoed around him. The seneschal stared into the endless darkness, waiting.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the voice spoke. It was filled with reluctance, a disappointment that was palpable.

Very well. But be certain to return as soon as you have claimed whatever is owed to you.

The seneschal rose quickly and bowed from the waist. “I will, m’lord. Thank you.”

The dark voice spoke softly, the tone in its words fading into the blackness again.

You may go now.

The seneschal bowed once more. He backed away in the darkness, feeling for the handle of the door. Once he found it, he opened it, stepped through quickly, and closed the door behind him, taking his leave. Of a completely empty room.

3 Yellow

It never failed to amaze Slith how much power could reside in a single word, a word that was merely someone’s name.

Particularly Esten’s name.

Now as he followed Bonnard’s quivering form, the rolls of flesh vibrating with each step along the cobbled alleys of the Market of Thieves through which they were traveling, he pondered whether invoking that name had been wise or not.

Bonnard’s sneer, upon finding him shirking his duties in the privy, had melted quickly into an expression that straddled the border between consternation and fear when he had uttered his need to be taken to the guildmistress. Slith cast his eyes down at the dusty red cobblestones and smiled to himself, remembering their exchange.

What—what would the likes of you need to see Esten about’?

Certain you wish to know, Bonnard? That will make you the only other one besides me.

The journeyman had considered the question for the span of ten heartbeats, then scowled, shook his great jowled head quickly, and motioned for Slith to follow him.

Now, as they traveled deeper into the Market of Thieves, Slith wondered whether invoking that name had been the most foolish thing he had ever done.

As a young child he had once ventured as far as the Outer Market, the bazaar of merchants and goodsellers from all over the known world, and undoubtedly parts of the unknown world as well. He had found it to be a place of open-air shops and street booths, of exotic animals prowling the areas near shopkeepers’ wares, of brightly colored silks and bags of pungent spice, the scent of incense and perfume mixed with the slick, heavy odor of the peat fires over which meat was roasting. His mother had brought him along with her in a vain search for a tonic to heal his ailing father; after seeing her pay every coin she had for a bottle of glittering liquid that had proved completely ineffective, Slith understood on an innate level at the age of six how the market had gotten its name.

Never, however, had he been this deep in, this close to the poisonous danger of the Inner Market. He could feel the threat in the air around him; it was somehow heavier here in these back streets, these dark alleys, where the color and pageantry gave way to hidden alcoves and shadowy porticos. The mud-brick buildings, dried to the color of blood, as all of Yarim was, the kiosks of straw and sheets of oilcloth dotting the streets, teemed with secrets.

Gone were the merchants loudly hawking their wares, the chanters and the singers and the screaming carnival barkers. The Inner Market was a place of thick silence, furtive glances, where hidden eyes followed every move.

Slith kept his eyes downcast, as instructed, watching the heels of Bonnard’s hobnail boots. He could feel the gaze of what seemed like a thousand of those hidden eyes on him, but knew that attempting to meet that gaze could be fatal.

Finally Bonnard stopped. Slith looked up.

Before him loomed a tall, wide, one-story mudbrick building, dark from the coal dust that had been mixed with the red Yarimese clay when it was fired. Like most of the buildings in Yarim it was in a state of advanced decay, the coal dust clay flaking off the building’s edifice ominously, signaling a deeper rot. The inconsistent patches made the building look like it was bleeding.

On the door was a crest, the sign of a raven clutching a gilt coin. Slith suppressed a shudder; he had seen the guildmark before, on the day of his indenture, when his mother brought him to the counting house of the Raven’s Guild to be inspected by Esten. The Raven’s Guild in the city center of Yarim Paar was a grand building, housing the largest trade association in the province, a confederation of tile artisans, ceramicists, and glassblowers, as well as smiths of all sorts. The guild also provided an intraprovince messenger service. It was the worst-kept secret in Yarim that they were a formidable coterie of professional thieves, thugs, and highwaymen who ruled the dark hours of Yarim.

And Esten was their undisputed leader.

Cold beads of sweat trickled down his neck as Bonnard opened the door and motioned him impatiently inside. He followed the journeyman’s gesture to an alcove to the left of the door, and watched nervously as Bonnard disappeared into the darkness before him.

Slith blinked rapidly, trying to force his eyes to adjust quickly in the absence of light. The room seemed to have no visible boundaries; the space before him melted into the farthest reaches of his vision. A battered table, rough-hewn from ragged wood, stood a few yards from the door to his right; at least that was what it appeared to be by shape. Around it were mismatched chairs of various heights and styles. He thought he could see a cold fireplace behind the table. The harsh odor of coal and rancid fat hung thickly in the stagnant air.

“You wanted to speak to me?”

Slith reared back in shock, a numbing cold sweeping through him.

Almost as close to him as the air he was breathing was a face, its pale contours blending into the darkness. It appeared disembodied, dark eyes staring directly into his own.

Slith swallowed, then nodded wordlessly, his mouth too dry to form sounds.

The black eyes twinkled as if in amusement.

“Then speak.”

Slith opened his mouth, but no sound came out. The eyes in the darkness narrowed slightly as a look of annoyance entered them. He cleared his throat and forced the words out.

“I found something. I thought you should see it.”

The face inclined at a slight angle.

“Very well. Show me.”

Slith fumbled inside his shirt pocket and pulled forth the roll of rags in which he had wrapped the blue-black disk. Before he could reach out to hand it over the roll of cloth disappeared from his grasp.

The dark eyes cast their gaze downward; then the face turned and vanished.

In the distance a glow of light pulsed, then brightened into a ring, as one by one a circle of lanterns was unhooded.

As the room was illuminated Slith saw that it was much smaller than he had imagined when the darkness still reigned unchallenged. In the far corners several grizzled men were watching him as they brought the room to light with the lanterns.

Esten stood before him, turning the blue-black disk carefully over in her long, delicate hands, her face, unlike those of most Yarimese women, unveiled. In the half-light he could see that she was no taller than he, with long raven hair and garments the color of a starless night that had blended perfectly into the darkness a moment before. Her tresses were bound back in a braid that was knotted at the nape of her neck, further accentuating the sharp angles of her face. Slith imagined she must be of mixed blood, her face possessing some but not all of the characteristics of Yarimese faces. He pondered where she might be from for a moment, but the thought disappeared as she leveled her dark gaze into his own.

“You are one of Bonnard’s apprentices?”

Slith’s father had imparted few words of wisdom that he remembered, but one oft-repeated phrase stood out in his mind: Look every man in the eye, friend or foe. Your friends deserve the respect, your enemies warrant it even more. He returned her stare as respectfully yet directly as he could.

“Yes.”

Esten nodded. “Your name?”

“Slith.”

“What year are you?”

“Fourth.”

She nodded again. “So you are, what—eleven? Twelve?”

“Thirteen.”

A look of interest came into her eye. “Hmm. I took you on rather old, then, didn’t I?”

Slith swallowed, determined to hold his ground, and shrugged.

Esten’s expression of amusement widened. “I like this one, Dranth. He has steel in his viscera. Make sure he is getting enough to eat.” The blue-black blade appeared between her long, thin fingers. “Where did you get this?”

“I found it in a greenware jar on the back storage rack in the firing room.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“No,” said Slith. He watched as Esten’s gaze returned to the disk. “Do you?”

Shock washed over her face at his impertinence, as if he had attacked her. Within a breath she had recovered in time to gesture to the men behind her, staying their hands, and leveled her shining gaze at him again.

“No, Slith, I don’t know what it is,” she said evenly, holding the disk up to the streaks of light pulsing from within the hooded lanterns. “But you may sleep in deepest peace tonight, assured in the certainty that I will find out.”

“At first I thought it was a seam scraper of some sort,” Slith said, watching the firelight ripple over the surface of the disk in her hands. “But it occurred to me that it has probably been in that jar a long time.”

When Slith looked at her again, her eyes were glittering with cruel excitement, looking past him.

“You may be right,” she said softly. “Maybe for as long as three years.” She turned to one of the men in the corner. “Yabrith—give Slith here a reward of ten gold crowns for his sharp eyes, and a good meal; tell Bonnard he will be ready to return to the foundry after he has supped.” She looked at Slith once more. “Your attention has served both of us well. It would be a good habit to cultivate. Tell no one what has transpired.”

Slith nodded, then followed the sullen man who gestured to him.

Dranth, the guild scion, watched as the boy had left, then turned to the guildmistress.

“Do you wish him removed?”

Esten shook her head as she turned the disk over in her hands again. “Not until we discover what this is. It would be a shame to toss away four years of good training if it merely is a seam scraper.”

Dranth’s eyelids twitched nervously in the lanternlight. “And if it is more? If it is indeed something we missed, something left behind from—that night?”

Esten held the disk up to the light, ripples of blue reflecting against the dark irises of her eyes.

“Bonnard knows where the boy sleeps. And you know where Bonnard sleeps.”

She finally broke her gaze away and nodded to the remaining men, who slipped out the back and disappeared into the darkest part of the Inner Market.

All but one of the lanterns had been extinguished and night held sway within the walls of the guildhall when the men returned with Mother Julia.

Esten smiled wryly as she watched the wizened crone enter the antechamber of the hall. She was a withered old prune, hunched and shrouded in myriad colorful shawls, the second most powerful woman in the Market, accustomed to receiving those who wanted information from her in her own lair, on her own terms. Being summoned in the middle of the night and hauled into the depths of the Inner Market undoubtedly did little to improve her normally crotchety and imperious disposition but, like everyone else in the realm of thieves, she could not refuse Esten, or show any sign of annoyance.

A false smile, minus more than a few teeth, spread across the wrinkled face.

“Good evening, Guildmistress. May Fortune bless you.”

“You as well, Mother.”

“What may I do to be of help to you, then?”

Esten studied the weathered face, its aged features a deceptive setting for the bright, quick eyes that stared back at her. Mother Julia was by trade a soothsayer, a fortune-teller who procured an extremely comfortable living from the fools who sought her advice. Although her ability to predict the future was no better than anyone else’s, she was a source of generally reliable information about the past and, even more so, the present, largely owing to her extensive network of spies, which was centered in Yarim but also crossed provincial and even national borders, the majority of them members of her own family. She had seventeen living children at last count, Esten knew, having been the agent by which that tally had been diminished by one, and more grandchildren, cousins, and relations by marriage than the stars in the night sky.

She was anxious, Esten knew as well. The wrinkled face was placid, but the dark eyes within it burned with nervous light. Usually Mother Julia played the information gambit better than anyone in the Market, but she had led too early, had tried in her second breath to entangle Esten into indebtedness. She’s losing her touch, the guildmistress thought, tucking the observation away as she did all information. She turned away and walked toward the fire, denying Mother Julia a clear look at her face.

“Nothing at all, Mother.”

The crone coughed, a consumptive sound of rattling phlegm and fear. “Oh?”

Esten smiled inwardly, then set her face into a serious mask and turned to face the old woman.

“I have been singularly disappointed in your lack of response to the one question about which I did seek your help.”

An arthritic claw went to the soothsayer’s throat. “I—I have—have been scrying diligently, Guildmistress, peering through the—the red sands of Time to try and discover—” Her words choked off and she sank into silence when Esten raised her hand.

“Spare me your prestidigitation and claptrap; I am not one of the imbeciles who seek it from you. You have had more than three years to bring me an answer to a simple question, Mother—who destroyed my tunnel, stole my slaves, killed my journeymen? Who snatched the sleeping water of Entudenin out of my hands, leaving Yarim to wither in thirst and depriving me of the wealth and power it would have brought? This should be an easy thing to find at least one clue to, and yet, yet you have brought me nothing, nothing at all.”

“I swear to you, Guildmistress, I have searched diligently, night into day following night, but there is no trace!” the crone stammered, her voice quavering. “No one in all of Yarim knows anything. Outside the Market, not one soul even knew of the tunnel. The destruction must have been the work of evil gods—how else except through the hand of a demon could all that slip be fired into hardened clay, when all your ovens together could not have done it?”

A blur of movement, and Esten’s eyes were locked on the crone’s from a breath away, a gleaming blade at her throat, pressed so lightly and yet so close that tiny droplets of blood were spattering the air with each of the old woman’s nervous tremors.

“You old fool,” Esten growled in a low voice. “Gods? Is that the best that you have for me after all this time?” She lashed out violently, contemptuously, and shoved Mother Julia into the table behind her, causing the old woman to stagger and crumple against the table board with a moan of pain. “There are no gods, Mother Julia, no demons. Certainly a charlatan of your caliber, who finagles idiots out of their precious coin in return for bursts of colored smoke and disembodied voices, must be aware of that, or you’d already be burning in the Vault of the Underworld.”

“No, no,” the woman moaned, struggling to stand but only managing to clutch the table before falling to the dirt floor. “I give homage to the All-God, the Creator who made me.” She made a countersign on her heart and ears, her arms trembling.

Esten exhaled, then strode to where the woman was cowering on the floor, seized her arm, and pushed her into the chair.

“The gods do not make us, Mother Julia; we make the gods. If you understood this, you would be a much more powerful and respected woman, instead of just a pathetic impostor who swindles the naive and vies with Manwyn for the idiot trade.”

At the sound of the Oracle of the Future’s name, the old woman made her countersign again, her eyes wide in terror. “Don’t invoke her,” she whispered. “Please, Guildmistress.”

Esten snorted contemptuously. “Too late to fear that now. Manwyn only sees the Future. She knew what you were going to hear a moment ago before I said it; she can no longer remember it now.” She crouched before the frightened soothsayer, moving slowly, deliberately, like a spider stalking a victim. “All she knows is what lies ahead for you.” She cocked her head to the side, dark eyes gleaming. “Do you think she is afraid on your behalf?”

“Please-”

“Please? You are asking me for favors now?” Esten leaned closer, her limbs moving in a deadly dance. “Did you think your time was infinite, my patience endless? You are an even bigger fool than those pathetic vermin who seek you out for answers to their insignificant questions.” She stopped within a hairs-breadth of the trembling crone, and the glint in her eyes grew harder, like greenware firing in the kiln into bisque.

“I employ you because your network, your leprotic clan, has so many eyes,” she said steadily, her voice low and deadly. “Those hundreds of eyes must all be blind, then, to have been unable to find even one clue in three years, wouldn’t you say, Mother?” A terrifying smile spread slowly over her delicate face. “Perhaps they no longer need the use of those eyes.” She turned to the guild scion. “Dranth, issue an order to the Raven’s Guild: from here forth, any member of this simpleton’s family that they come across is to have its eyes put out immediately, including her wretched grandchildren who prowl the street, spreading filth and breathing the air reserved for others who have some actual worth.”

“Mercy,” the old woman whispered, her arthritic hands clasped in front of her. “Please, Guildmistress, I implore you—

Esten settled back on her haunches and regarded Mother Julia, whose face was gray and covered in beads of sweat.

“Mercy? Well, I suppose I can consider your entreaty, can offer you one last chance to redeem your sorry family. But if I do, and you fail me again, all the world will regard your clan as monsters, because that which is useless on their heads—eyes, ears, and tongue—will be removed from them and cast into the alleys to feed my dogs. Do you understand me, Mother?”

The crone could only bring herself to nod feebly.

“Good.”

From within her garments Esten pulled forth the bundle of rags Slith had given her. With great care she moved the layers aside and revealed the blue-black steel of the whisper-thin disk; it gleamed in the inconstant light of the lantern.

“Do you know what this is?”

Mother Julia shook her head.

Esten exhaled. “Study it well, Mother Julia—use your eyes for what may be the last time. Within one cycle of the moon I want the word spread within your clan alone as far as your miserable influence extends; I want to know what this is. And more importantly, I want to know to whom it belongs. Bring me that information, and I will keep you within my protection. Fail me, and-”

“I will not fail,” the crone said softly. “Thank you, Guildmistress.”

Esten patted the woman’s wrinkled cheek gently. “Good. I know you will not, Mother.” She reached into the folds of cloth that formed the trousers of her garments and pulled forth a gold coin minted with the head of the Lord Cymrian on one side, the crest of the Alliance on the other. “Take this gold crown for your newborn grandson—what was he named?”

“Ignacio.”

“Ignacio—what a lovely name. Give this to Ignacio’s mother for him, please, and extend my warmest wishes to her upon his birth.”

The old woman nodded shakily as two of Esten’s men took her arms and raised her to her feet.

“See to it Mother Julia gets home safely, please,” Esten instructed as they led her to the door. “I would not want anything untoward to befall this dear lady.”

She waited until the door had closed soundly, then sat down before the lantern, watching the watery patterns of light ripple across the smooth surface of the disk and off the razor edges, like bright waves rushing headlong over a shining cliff to a dark sea.

Soon, she thought. ,I will find you soon.

4 Green

Even if he did not have the kingly sense that allowed him to perceive the movements and changes within his mountains, Achmed would still have known that Grunthor had returned to the Cauldron.

Centuries before, in the old life, Achmed had traversed a fjord near the Fiery Rim, a desolate inlet of churning sea currents between towering black basalt cliffs. In the thick woods atop those cliffs, teeming with wildlife but uninhabited by humans, dwelt Firewyrms—giant, chameleon-skinned beasts akin to dragons, which legends claimed were formed from living lava with teeth of brimstone. Dormant much of the time, the serpents, when hunting, prowled through the undergrowth below the forest canopy in relative silence, and yet it was always obvious to him when they were approaching, because the fauna would disappear utterly; the incessant birdsong that rattled over his ultrasensitive skin would suddenly cease, as if the forest was holding its breath, hoping the predators would pass.

It was much the same in Ylorc whenever Grunthor returned.

Achmed had never been able to divine exactly what it was about the Sergeant-Major’s training that enabled him to strike such abject fear into the hearts of the Firbolg soldiers in his command, but whatever it was, it had needed to be applied only once.

From the moment he was sighted, still three or more leagues away, the corridors and mountain passes of Ylorc scrambled to attention, clearing away any tomfoolery in favor of regulation dress and behavior. The Firbolg could sense his approach from great distances, like the birds and creatures of the fjord hiding from the Firewyrms, and, like them, took great pains not to draw his notice.

Despite their obvious fear of their commander, a fear he cultivated continually, the Firbolg army was devoted to Grunthor in a way that Bolg had never been. It was a source of amusement to Achmed how in little more than four years’ time the primitive nomads they had discovered when he, Grunthor, and Rhapsody had first come to this place had learned to hold watch as well as any soldier in Roland, Sorbold, or Tyrian, and were better trained in tactics and weapons use. Such skills were only partially imparted by training. Most of them came from pure loyalty.

Grunthor’s impending arrival this day, however, seemed to be generating more than its usual consternation. Rather than snapping to attention, as the Firbolg soldiers generally did when word came down that the Sergeant was within range, the Bolg were scattering before the scouts that heralded his arrival.

This did not bode well as to whatever Grunthor had found on his border check.

A few moments later Achmed’s foreboding was borne out. Over the rim of the steppes that led up to the foothills of the Manteids, as the Teeth were officially called by cartographers, rode a party of eight horses, one enormous, heavy war horse in the lead. Achmed’s extraordinary vision could make out the Sergeant-Major, the many hilts of his weapons collection jutting from behind his back, urgently spurring Rockslide, cresting the battlements and riding through the gates in the recently erected walls of baked brick and bitumen.

The Bolg king jogged over to the quartermaster, who was standing ready to take the Sergeant’s mount, and waited.

The ground beneath his feet rumbled ominously with the party’s approach, the dust of the steps and rocky terrain rising like smoke from bursts of fire around them. There was a look in Grunthor’s eyes that Achmed could see even from a great distance and didn’t like; those amber eyes had seen more than their share of death and devastation, had faced foes of human and demonic nature, and always maintained a steady gaze. What he saw now was confusion, something Grunthor rarely exhibited.

“What’s happened?” he shouted into the mountain wind as the Sergeant brought his mare to a halt and tossed the reins to the quartermaster.

The giant Bolg stared down at the king, then shook his head. “Oi was about to ask you the same question, sir,” he said as he dismounted. “Oi ’alf expected to find the place in flames.” He dismounted with an earthshaking thud.

Achmed watched until the quartermaster led the war-mare away. “What has you so worried?”

Grunthor bent down and laid his hand reverently on the ground. The earth, the entity to which he was tied on an elemental level, no longer wailed in fear, but was quiet.

“Somethin’ was wrong at the pass, somethin’ terrible,” he muttered, running his thick fingers through the dust and pebbles on the ground.

The Bolg king watched silently as the Sergeant stood and turned around several times, then shrugged.

“Twas like there was a rip, a gouge of some sort,” he said, more to himself than aloud. “Can’t explain it past that. Like the Earth was bleeding to death.”

“Is it still there?”

The giant shook his head. “Naw. Everything’s quiet now.”

Achmed nodded. “Any guesses as to what it was?”

Grunthor inhaled and let his breath out slowly, feeling the heartbeat of the Earth pounding in his own blood. His union with the element had come to him during the trek he, Achmed, and Rhapsody had once made, refugees from their doomed homeland, crawling through the depths of the world along the roots of Sagia, the World Tree. In the course of that seemingly endless journey across time, he had absorbed its ancient rhythms, breathed in the secrets that lay dormant in its depths, had come to know it intimately, innately, though he could never give voice to what he had learned.

Grunthor, strong and reliable as the Earth itself, Rhapsody had Named him in the moments after walking through the purifying fire at the Earth’s heart. The name had come to embody his bond to the element. Being above ground now made him feel somehow bereft, away from the comforting warmth of the Earth.

So the wound the Earth had sustained, whatever had caused it to scream in fear, had reverberated in his soul, leaving him frightened, a feeling he had rarely experienced in his life.

He shook his head again. “Naw.”

Achmed glanced through the gate over the battlements to the steppes below. Dawn was coming, wrapping the world in cold light; the wind whipped across the desolate plain, making the grass bow low in supplication, unbroken waves of vegetation that covered the bulwark of hidden battlements, ditches, and tunnels that formed the Firbolg first line of defense. There was something ominous in its passage.

When he looked back his eyes met Grunthor’s, and an unspoken thought was passed between them.

Together they hurried into the Cauldron.

Achmed carefully checked the corridor outside his bedchamber before locking and bolting its door. He nodded to Grunthor, who carefully removed the intricate traps and opened the many locks on the heavy chest at the foot of the Bolg king’s bed, finally lifting the top to reveal a dark portal. He climbed inside, followed a moment later by Achmed, closing the lid of the chest behind him.

They traveled the dim corridor in silence, the rough-hewn walls of basalt swallowing all sound of their passage. The air of the upworld, clear with the relative freshness of morning, quickly flattened and became stolid, dank, as they traveled deeper into the mountain.

The farther in they went, the harder it became to breathe. The heavy odor of destruction, smoke-stained air that hung heavy with grit, still remained, three years later; the fire that had raged deep in the belly of the mountain had long since burned out, leaving behind acrid soot and bitter dust that stung the eyes and the lungs.

Neither Bolg spoke as they traversed the tunnel Grunthor had built to the Loritorium. There were ghosts in these passages; specters of people and dreams, both of which had died horribly. They concentrated instead on avoiding the traps Grunthor had set, which would seal the tunnel in the event it was broached by anyone other than the two of them or Rhapsody, who came once a year to tend to the Child.

Deep within the mountain, at the bottom of the tunnel, a hill of rubble rose, ominous, in the dark, a moraine of stones and broken basalt that served as a bulwark, a last barrier before the Loritorium. Achmed paused for a moment and hung back, waiting for Grunthor to open a passage in the mound of stony wreckage.

While he was waiting, he looked up at the ceiling above him, stretching into the darkness of the Loritorium’s dome. Seeing this place never ceased to cause him to reflect sadly on the overwhelming loss of it all, the ruin of what had once been a masterpiece, a deeply hidden city of scholarship, once a shining example of the genius of Gwylliam, the Cymrian king who had fashioned Canrif and the lands around it many centuries before. Now it was but a metaphor to the destruction that comes when vision gives way to ambition, and ambition to the avaricious hunger for power.

Bugger it, he thought, anger burning in the back of his throat. I can only rebuild so much of what that idiot destroyed.

Even as the thought formed, it dissipated. There was no end to what he could, and would, build and rebuild in these mountains, because ultimately it was not the outcome of the construction that was his purpose, but the process. The renovation of Canrif, and the additional projects he was fomenting, were all undertaken with one motive in mind: the building up of the Bolg, his unknown father’s race, from scattered tribes of primitive, demi-human, nomadic cave dwellers into a real society—a warlike, austere society to be certain, but nonetheless a culture with value, a contribution to be added to history.

And he had an immortal lifetime to spend on that undertaking. How else was he to spend forever?

But not this place, he thought. Never this place. This remains as it is, undisturbed.

He took stock of the hidden measures he had set in place to insure the sacrosanctity of the place in the event something happened to either of them, musing idly for a moment about the devices attuned to their heartbeats, their own innate vibrations, set to seal the tunnel in the presence of any intruder.

If Grunthor were to die, I would have to bring in a score of work crews to open and char the tunnel and then kill them afterward, he thought. Such an unfortunate loss of manpower.

An orange-red glimmer caught his eye; he turned to see the wall of shale and dust gleam like molten lava around Grunthor’s hands, which were outstretched, forming an entryway in the mound, leaving a tunnel with walls as slick as glass. Achmed blinked away his musings and followed the giant Bolg through the opening.

On the other side of the mound was what remained of the Loritorium, silent now. A haze of old smoke snaked heavily through the space beneath the overarching dome, disturbed perhaps by the vibrations of their movements and the introduction of the air from the world above.

In the center of what remained of the courtyard the altar of Living Stone appeared undisturbed; the Sleeping Child, formed of the same elemental earth, lying supine upon it.

Achmed and Grunthor approached the altar quietly, careful not to disturb the Earthchild. The chamber in which she had once rested before its destruction had borne a warning inscribed in towering letters:

The two Bolg had long paid heed to that warning, having seen the threat to which it referred, a far more deadly Sleeping Child, with their own eyes during their travels through the center of the Earth.

The child still rested as she had when they had first found her, her eyes closed in eternal slumber. Like the altar on which she slept, her skin was a polished gray surface, translucent, beneath which veins of colored strands of clay in hues of purple and green, dark red, brown and vermilion could be seen. Her body, tall as that of an adult human, seemed at odds with the sweet young face atop it, a face with features that were at the same time coarse and smooth, roughly hewn but smoothly glossed; she was like a living statue of a human child sculpted by a being that had never really seen one in close proximity, without any sense of perspective.

The hair of the child was long and coarse, green as spring grass, matching the lashes of her eyelids. Those eyelids twitched intermittently but remained closed, as did her heavy lips.

Mutually the Bolg sighed, unspoken relief evident in the relaxation of their stances. They drew closer to the altar.

“Does she look—smaller to you, sir?” Grunthor asked after a long moment.

Achmed squinted, examining die outline of her form on the altar. There was no shadow, no visible indication that her body had lost any of its size; still, there was something different, a frailer air to her that he couldn’t place, and didn’t like.

Finally he shrugged. Grunthor crossed his arms, staring down at the Earth-child intently. Finally he shrugged also.

“Oi think she’s lost some of ’er, but it must be a very small amount,” he said, his heavy forehead wrinkling in worry. He tucked the eiderdown blanket beneath which she slept around her tightly, then gently caressed her hand.

“Don’t ya worry, darlin’,” he said softly. “We got yer back.”

“She doesn’t seem ill, or hurt?”

“Naw.”

Achmed exhaled. Grunthor’s description of the wound he had felt in the Earth had unnerved him, had made him fear that the Earthchild might have been compromised or injured, or worse. It was an unending worry anyway; she was, to his knowledge, the last living Child of Earth, a being formed long ago from the pure element and sparked into life by an unknown dragon.

The rib of her body was a Living Stone key that could open the Vault of the Underworld, where in the Before-Time the demons of elemental fire, the F’dor, had been imprisoned. It was the blood oath of the Dhracians, his mother’s race, to guard that vault, to keep the F’dor locked away for all time, to hunt down and destroy any that might have escaped. Likewise, it was the endless quest of upworld F’dor to find a way to free their brethren from the Vault, unleashing the chaos and destruction of the world that they, children of fire, craved incessantly. The Earthchild, therefore, was the fuse, the catalyst that could light a sequence of events that could not be undone. The fate of the Earth was dependent on her safety, and he, as a result, was sworn to an eternity of guardianship to see that she remained unharmed, hidden here, away, in the dark vault that once was to have been a shining city of scholarship and lore.

It was a small enough price to pay, though not an easy one.

“Sleep in peace,” he said quietly to the Earthchild, then nodded toward the passageway.

As they passed through the tunnel Grunthor had made in the moraine, Achmed looked up one last time at the firmament of the dome that towered into the blackness above the Loritorium and, finding that it appeared sound, glanced back at the altar of Living Stone.

The Earthchild slumbered on, oblivious, it seemed, of the world around her, and of whatever might have threatened it.

The Firbolg king watched her for a moment, then turned and walked back through the tunnel ahead of Grunthor, who closed the hole in the moraine behind them, his black robes whispering around him.

“What do ya think did that, then, caused the Earth to scream that way?” the Bolg Sergeant asked, glancing one last time over his shoulder before turning to follow the king up the corridor.

“I have no idea,” Achmed replied, his voice echoing strangely off the irregular walls of the ascending tunnel. “And there’s little more we can do, other than prepare, because sooner or later whatever it is will no doubt find me. Let’s make our way from one ruined landmark to another.” Grunthor nodded and caught up with him, traversing the rest of the corridor to the upworld in companionable silence.

They were on the other side of the moraine, halfway home, and so were unable to see the single muddy tear slip down the Earthchild’s face in the darkness of her sepulcher.

Grunthor stepped gingerly over the scattered shards of colored glass and looked up into the thin, towering dome hollowed into the mountain peak Gurgus, the Bolgish word for talon. The levels of scaffolding that ringed the interior of the structure were silent now, the artisans gone, leaving only the king and himself.

And an increasingly large pile of broken glass.

“Not going particularly well, I take it?” he said humorously, kicking aside the debris. He reached down and picked up a crumpled piece of parchment lying beneath the detritus that bore the markings of an architectural plan.

“Don’t open it,” Achmed advised sourly. “It’s full of spit. I encouraged everyone to take a turn at it after a particularly trying day early last week. You might want to stay away from any other wads, too; as the week wore on, the bodily fluids we applied to the plans reflected our progress, or lack thereof. You can imagine where we ended up.”

Grunthor grinned, his neatly polished tusks gleaming in the half-light, and tossed the wad of parchment back into the pile.

“Why ya driving yerself mad with this, sir?” he asked, his tone at once light and serious. “If you really feel the need to be irritated to the point o’ going insane, why don’t we just send for the Duchess? She generally ’as that same effect on you, and she costs less than rebuilding the dome of a mountain, at least if you pay by the hour.”

Achmed chuckled. “Now, now, let’s not reference our beloved Lady Cymrian’s sordid past. We’ll be seeing her soon enough. I heard from her last night by avian messenger; she wants us to meet her four weeks hence in Yarim.”

“Oh, goody,” the giant replied, staring up into the tower again. “What now?”

“She wants our assistance—your assistance, actually—in bringing Entudenin, that dead geyser obelisk, back to life.”

Grunthor nodded, arranging the piles of colored glass with the toe of his boot.

“Oi told ’er a long time ago’twas probably a blockage o’ some sort in the strata. She got ’em to agree to let us drill?”

“Apparently.”

“And you’re willing to drop everything and leave at ’er request?”

Achmed shrugged, then went back to the pile of colored rubble.

The giant raised an eyebrow, but said nothing, returning his attention to the tower.

When Gwylliam founded Canrif he seemed to have a penchant for hollowing out mountain peaks. The Teeth were full of them, jagged summits that stretched into the clouds, multicolored, threatening, dark with beauty and secrets. They must have posed a challenge to the arrogant Cymrian king, because he spent a good deal of his time reinforcing them while chipping away at the mountain strata inside diem, filling them with needless rooms and grand domes. Grunthor, tied to the earth as he was, found the practice repulsive to the point of feeling violated.

When he, Achmed, and Rhapsody had come to Ylorc, they had found and restored a ruined guard-tower post in the western peak of Griwen, attached to a fortress and barracks that housed more than two thousand Bolg soldiers, and a towering observatory above the Great Hall, from which thirty miles of the Krevensfield Plain could be seen in all directions save east.

He, as a military man, understood the need for these renovations. He could even grudgingly abide the rebuilding of the inner mountain cities and the restoration of the art and statuary, things he had little use for. But none of the reconstruction projects had taken on the import, or produced the aggravation, that the Bolg king’s current undertaking had, and for the life of him, he had no idea why.

The Sergeant squinted as he looked up into the pinnacle of the broken tower, trying to discern what it was about this Cymrian artifact, this particular hollowed-out mountain peak, that so captivated Achmed’s attention. Each time he returned from maneuvers the king’s mood was blacker; now it had taken on approximately the same hue as pitch.

There were endless opportunities for renovation in the Bolglands. The place had once been almost a country, a multiracial settlement nestled in the protective arms of the mountains, inside the earth and in the open-air realm beyond the canyon, housing the greatest minds of the times, undisturbed for three hundred years, allowing great advances in every aspect of science and art to germinate and grow, unfettered. Even the seven hundred years of war that followed had not destroyed those engineering feats and architectural marvels completely. Besides, Grunthor reasoned, Achmed had all the time in the world to build them back up again.

All the time in the world.

“What is it about this thing that has ya so bollixed up?” he asked finally, gesturing at the tower. “Oi think it might be a good idea to ’ead off ta Yarim just ta get you away from this place. It’s enslaved your mind. Ya look downright awful.”

“I’m Dhracian. I always look downright awful.”

“More awful than usual, sir.”

“You can tell that even behind the veils?”

“Yup. Yer eyes’re all yella and red. Thought for a moment ya might ’ave gone F’dor on me while I was away.”

“Now that would be interesting; a Dhracian F’dor. I wonder what would happen if a demon tried to possess me. My guess is that I would explode or dissolve, so diametrically opposed are the two races, which might be worth it; at least I would take one of them with me. But no, I’m not possessed; we have merely been meeting with failure at each turn here. The domed ceiling is defying me, and I hate being defied by glass.” Achmed sighed and crouched down, running his gloved hands through the colored sand and shards. “Omet says we need to find a glass artisan of a much higher level of expertise, a sealed master.”

“Well, ’e would know.”

“Yes, and he has even acknowledged that the place to find one is Yarim.”

Grunthor whistled. “ ’E must really be growing desperate.”

“Or he knows that I am.” The two friends exchanged a smile; Omet’s terror of Yarim and his sensitivity even to the mention of the place had made for many entertaining moments over the last three years. It was a source of great amusement among the Bolg to see the calm young man who lived casually among them and was rarely at a loss for a wry comeback become instantly flummoxed at any reference to the province, going white and trembling violently. The guildmistress he had served there, whose name he had only mentioned once, must have been formidable; Omet had whispered to him, back when he was still a bald teenager they had rescued from the ceramics works, that evil in a purer form did not exist.

But of course, Omet had seen nothing of the world. Achmed knew that no matter how terrifying the guildmistress was, evil had a whole array of purer forms it could assume.

He had met a number of them personally.

“So I suppose that means we’re going,” Grunthor said.

“Yes, unless you can’t spare the time away.”

“Naw,” the giant said, stepping over the debris and going to stand directly under the tower. “Hagraith and the others can ’andle it while Oi’m gone for a bit. An’ it’ll be wonderful ta see the Duchess again; been too long.”

“Indeed,” Achmed agreed.

“Is that really why you’re going, sir?” Grunthor said, avoiding the king’s gaze. “It’s been fair on to impossible to break you away from this secret glass-tower project.”

Achmed exhaled shallowly, then went to the draftsman’s table and drew forth a sheaf of vellum pages, weathered with age, from a box beneath it.

“These are the plans I could find for this place,” he said, his voice soft, as if speaking more to himself than to the Sergeant. “They are incomplete, unintelligible in places, written in code or ancient languages in others. I can follow the basic diagram, but there is so much missing that I can’t find in Gwylliam’s library or the vault underneath it. I know that the dome is supposed to be formed from colored glass—it says thus in Gwylliam’s notes, and there were seven glass test blocks buried in the vault, one of each color, to use as a gauge—but which colors are arrayed where is not clearly spelled out. There is one manuscript—this one”—he separated out a ragged page—“that seems to make reference to the tower, but I can’t decode it. Perhaps Rhapsody can. Besides reading Serenne, as a Namer she is knowledgeable about the science of the vibrational scale. Some of the notations in the manuscript look like musical script of a sort.”

“Ah,” Grunthor nodded. “Oi knew there ’ad to be a connection between this and Yarim for you to be willin’ ta go, even more than the chance to see ’Er Ladyship again.” He sighed as Achmed held the ratty diagrams close to his eyes. “Perhaps could you finally break down and tell me what is so all-fired important about rebuildin’ this tower, sir?”

Achmed blinked. “What?”

“You’re obsessed, if ya forgive me for sayin’ so. An’ I can’t fathom why.” The Sergeant crossed his arms. “Ain’t never seen ya like this except when you’re huntin’. The troops are fully trained, the borders secure; the Alliance seems ta be goin’ well, from what an ’umble soldier like me can tell. We got plenty o’ battlements, outposts, lookouts. So why does this one ’ave you in its grip?”

The Bolg king’s olive complexion darkened as he contemplated the question.

Grunthor waited patiently until he was able to sort out his thoughts enough to give voice to them.

“When Gwylliam and Anwyn battled during the Cymrian War, it took her five hundred years to make it from the western coast to the Teeth,” he said finally. “Their sons had been divided against their wills, pressed into service by each parent, so as a result, Anwyn couldn’t even approach the Teeth to assault them for most of the war. Anborn held back his mother’s armies for his father with tremendous success. All across the continent there was zero-sum warfare; Llauron would take a town or a province for Anwyn, Anborn would take it back for Gwylliam. As long as the brothers were the generals, it was hardly a real conflict; you can tell they were not prosecuting the war too enthusiastically by the length of time over which nothing of any note was accomplished. That is not surprising, given that neither of them really wanted to be participating in it the first place.”

Grunthor nodded, having studied the battle records.

“But when Anwyn finally did return to the Teeth, what was her first objective?”

The giant exhaled. “Gurgus,” he said.

“Right. This peak, this tower was the first thing she attacked—why?” The Firbolg king began to pace, leaving little or no trail through the colored dust on the floor. “She didn’t bother to secure her perimeter, to advance her borders. She ignored Griwen and Xaith and the westernmost outposts, left her army well behind the line of engagement, and instead sent a stealth brigade, three cohorts of her best troops, into the depths of the Teeth, knowing none of them would ever return, specifically to destroy this tower. But why? It had no weapons, no battlements, nothing but a ceiling of rainbow-colored stained glass and some sort of metal support piping and a wheel. What could possibly have been so important about this tower that Anwyn would compromise her position, sacrifice her best-trained soldiers, to destroy it before engaging Gwylliam?”

“Dunno,” Grunthor said, shaking his head. ” Twas a long time past, that war; damned thing ended four ’undred years ago. You met ’er at the Cymrian Council; she was off ’er flippin’ track. Maybe she was just crazy then, too. ’Avin’ seen ’er in action, Oi’d say there was probably a stupid reason, like she ’ated the colors of the roof windows or ol’ Gwylliam ’ad once said ’e liked it. These people were fools. Now they’re both dead, an’ we’re all better off for it.”

He stood straighter, casting an enormous dark shadow across the room. “But you, sir, you’re no fool, and neither am Oi. So why don’t you tell me the real reason you’re bent on rebuilding something, when ya don’t even know what it is?”

Achmed’s mismatched eyes studied his longtime friend for a moment, then looked away.

“I’ve seen an instrumentality like it before,” he said. His voice was distant, a world away. “Same cylindrical tower; same piping. Same colored glass ceiling. Same wheel.”

Grunthor waited in silence until it became too heavy to bear. “Where?” he said finally.

“In the old world. Someone in Serendair had one.”

“’Oo?”

The Bolg king let his breath out slowly, as if trying to hang on to the word for as long as possible.

“Glyngaris,” he said at last.

It was a name that he had only uttered once before in Grunthor’s hearing, and never in the new world.

The Sergeant stood still for a long moment, then shook his head, as if shaking off sleep, and nodded.

“If that’s all, sir, Oi’m going to go and see about settin’ up to leave in a few weeks.”

Achmed said nothing, standing still as death, as the Sergeant left the room.

5 Blue

The rush of wind and sun that blew the tower window open awakened Ashe, filling his eyes and causing him to turn for a moment away from the warmth beside him, shielding his forehead from the brightness of morning invading his chambers and his sleep. He muttered vulgar, muted curses that he didn’t particularly mean in a variety of tongues, some common, some obscure, then rolled back over and stared down at Rhapsody, sleeping deeply, undisturbed in the filtered light.

His good mood returned upon beholding her again. The lacy curtains at the window, fluttering on the wind of dawn, cast moving patterns on her delicate face, striping her cheekbones and brow with fleeting shadows that darted a moment later over her hair, which spread in silken waves over the pillow and white bedlinens like a golden sea.

Within his dichotomous soul, he could feel the swell of divided emotion, the love the man felt for her vying for dominance with the satisfaction in her safe return that was appreciated by the dragon side of him. It was an interesting disparity; his draconic, covetous nature counted her as treasure, struggling with jealousy and bereft despair when she was gone from his sphere of awareness, juxtaposed with the simple, uncomplicated adoration his human side accorded her as the other half of his soul.

Either way, he was wholly glad she was finally home.

He reined in his breathing and moved away slightly so as not to awaken her, settling back against the pillows to study her face while she slept.

With her eyes closed in unconsciousness, she appeared younger, slighter than she did when awake, almost childlike. The heat of the element of pure fire that she had absorbed long ago during her trek through the Earth from her island homeland to this place on the other side of the world burned latent in her cheeks, much dimmer than it did in her eyes, where it could be seen most clearly when she was awake. That elemental magic living within her had a powerful effect on the people who beheld her; it caused some to stare at her as if hypnotized, others to cower in fear as they would in the presence of a roaring inferno. It was an aspect that was misperceived by the masses as an intimidating beauty, because they were unfamiliar with the power behind it.

He, unlike them, was not bespelled by that beauty, but recognized it for what it was, because his dragon nature could sense the power within her, could almost see it. Indeed, because he was tied as powerfully to the element of water as she was to that of fire, he understood on the deepest possible level the gift and curse of such an elemental bond. As a result there was a perfect balance between them, an opposition and a commonality that had made him fall inescapably into enchantment with her even before he had ever seen her; just being within a few miles of her had been enough for the dragon to sense her magic and succumb inexorably to it.

The man, on the other hand, living himself with immense natural powers but imperfect in his humanity, could see beyond that magic, that beauty, to the imperfect woman beneath it. What his human heart felt for her was the love any man had for the woman who completed him, whom he in turn completed, flaws and strengths endured and appreciated, arguments and petty annoyances fought over and forgiven in the course of weaving the tapestry that was a shared life. Being of the lineage from which he came, with its vast powers and terrible history, it was this ordinary love, this common, perfectly imperfect union that he treasured above all else, the sense of normalcy and reality she brought to him.

And she was home.

From the moment he had laid her carefully on their marital bed the night before, as she extinguished the bedside lamp with a simple gesture toward it, there had been no words between them; no words were ever necessary. The fireshadows on the hearth across the room had leapt and danced in time with their lovemaking, the flames roaring with abandon, diminishing down to glowing coals as their passion was sated, dissolving into the contented sleep of lovers blissfully reunited.

And now she slept still, pale, undisturbed by the morning wind rippling through her hair, as he watched her, content with his world.

Finally, when the sun had risen fully above the rim of the horizon and the window ledge, flooding the bedchamber with light, she stirred, then opened her deep green eyes and smiled at him.

“You’re awake?”

“Yes.”

“You’re awake.”

“Apparently.”

“You’re never awake before me.”

“Now, that’s an insulting overgeneralization.”

Rhapsody rolled over and stretched, then slid her small, callused hand into his. “Very well, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you awake before me until this morning. You are usually deep in the sleep of a hibernating dragon and almost impossible to rouse with anything short of the overpowering stench of that nasty coffee you like so much.”

Ashe drew her into his arms and rested his nose against hers. “I dispute that utterly. It is remarkable how easily I am roused when you are here, m’lady. If you are complaining, I insist on the opportunity to prove my point.”

“You’ll get no complaint from me,” Rhapsody said. “On the contrary, I am impressed at your prowess, as always, even more so after last night. You must have been practicing in my absence. I hope you were alone.” She laughed as Ashe’s face colored, then kissed him warmly.

“Well, I am happy to hear that you were not disappointed after traveling all that way to come home.” He pulled her against his chest and lay back on the pillows with a contented sigh, reveling in the contrast of the warmth beneath the down coverlet and the cool sting of the wind above it. “Did you manage to attend to all your affairs of state in Tyrian?”

“Yes.”

“Good; glad to hear it, because I don’t intend to let them have you back any time in the foreseeable future. And as you know, dragons can foresee quite a way into said future, so I hope Rial obtained your signature on whatever he needed for the next several years.”

Rhapsody chuckled, then sat up and regarded Ashe with a thoughtful expression. “I did indeed make certain that all of Tyrian’s business requiring my attention received it duly, because I now hope to undertake a project that would have me here in Navarne for an extended period of time. After the excursion to Yarim to rejuvenate Entudenin, that is.”

Ashe sat up as well. “Oh, really? I’m intrigued. What project might that be?”

“The care and education of a child.”

“You adopted another honorary grandchild? How many does this make now? Are you over one hundred yet?”

Rhapsody shook her head, her green eyes kindling to a darker emerald shade. “No, only thirty-seven. And that is not what I meant.”

“Oh?” Ashe felt a slight chill hum through his skin at the tone in her voice. “What did you mean, then, Aria?”

The coals on the fireplace, a moment before nothing but cooling gray ash, gleamed red again, matching the blush in her cheeks.

“I think it’s time we had one of our own,” she said, her voice steady, though Ashe could feel a slight tremor in her hand.

He stared at her, trying to force the words that she had spoken to pass from his ears into his mind, until he saw her wince in pain; quickly he released her fingers, which he had unconsciously clutched to the point of unwelcome tension.

Slowly he sat up more fully, swung his legs over the edge of the bed, and leaned forward, bringing his chin to rest on his folded hands. He could tell by the change in her heart rate, her shallow, rapid intake of breath, and a dozen other physiological signs his dragon sense was aware of that his reaction was distressing her, but he was too upset by her words to do anything to relieve her anxiety. Instead he concentrated inward, trying to beat back the jumble of words from the past that were echoing in his mind.

In a sudden swirl of muscle and bedsheets Ashe rose and went to the wardrobe, trying not to see the look of astonishment and hurt on his wife’s face. He pulled on a shirt and trousers, then turned finally, not meeting her eyes.

“I must return to my meetings with the councilors,” he said flatly. “I am sorry to have wakened you; I should have let you rest longer after your long journey.”

“Ashe-”

He strode rapidly across the room and took hold of the door handle. “Go back to sleep, Aria,” he said gently. “I will have them bring you a tray in an hour or so.”

“You told them you would not be meeting today.”

“That was inconsiderate of me. They have been held captive here for weeks; they doubtless want to finish and return to their provinces.”

Rhapsody tossed back the coverlet and rose from the bed, pulling on her dressing gown.

“Don’t be a coward,” she said evenly but without rancor. “Tell me what has you so frightened.”

The vertical pupils of Ashe’s eyes expanded, as if drawing in the light and her words. He met her gaze for a moment, then opened the bedchamber door.

“Rest,” he said simply.

He closed the door quickly and silently behind him.

She found him later that afternoon at the top of one of the carillon towers that flanked the main gate of Haguefort.

Rhapsody knew her husband was aware of her presence, would have felt her coming from a great distance away, so she assumed he was willing to be found. She waited in the doorway at the top of the tower stairs, following his gaze over the rolling hills of Navarne, where the sun was painting the highgrass in swaths of yellow light and deep, cool green. Finally, when she saw his shoulders rise and fall as he exhaled deeply, she spoke, breaking the silence that heretofore had been interrupted only by the occasional whistling breeze.

“Is it Manwyn’s ranting? Is that why you are afraid?”

Ashe said nothing, but continued to stare over the foothills toward the Krevensfield Plain. Rhapsody stepped through the doorway and stood beside him, resting her hands on the smooth stone crenellations of the parapet, newly rebuilt after being destroyed in rank fire and burning pitch three years before. She waited in silence, breathing in the sweet summer air, following his gaze over the hills.

Finally, when he spoke, his eyes were still fixed on the seemingly endless sea of green meadow beyond the walls of the keep.

“Stephen and I used to roam these fields endlessly in childhood,” he said quietly. “Sometimes it is as if I can see him there still, chasing imaginary warriors, flying kites, lying on his back staring at the clouds and reading the future in them.” He shook his head, as if shaking off a chill, then turned and regarded her seriously. “Did you know his mother, like mine, died when he was young?”

“No.”

Ashe nodded, then looked back over the Plain. “Consumption. It withered her away from the inside. His father was never the same afterward—took his spirit with her when she left. Stephen barely remembered her. Just like Melisande doesn’t remember Lydia.”

Rhapsody sighed. “I am not going to die, Sam,” she said, using the name she had once given him long before, in their own youth when they had met on the other side of Time. “Manwyn told you that as well. She said so directly, in fact—‘Gwydion ap Llauron, thy mother died in giving birth to thee, but thy children’s mother shall not die giving birth to them.’”

Ashe shook his head slightly in the vain attempt to silence the words in his mind, recounted in excruciating detail by the dragon in his blood. It had been more than three years since he stood in the dark temple of the Oracle of Yarim, Manwyn, the mad Seer of the Future, who by a curse of birth was also his great-aunt, and shuddered at the odd inflection in her voice as she pronounced a prediction she had not been asked for.

I see an unnatural child born of an unnatural act. Rhapsody, you should beware of childbirth: the mother shall die, but the child shall live.

Rhapsody’s hand came to rest gently on his bare shoulder but he shrugged it off, trying to break the grip of other words in his mind, spoken in his father’s voice.

I assume you are aware of what happened to your own mother upon giving birth to the child of a partial dragon? I have spared you the details up until now—shall I give them to you? Do you crave to know what it is like to watch a woman, not to mention one that you happen to love, die in agony trying to bring forth your child, hmmm? Let me describe it for you. Since the dragonling instinctually needs to break the eggshell, clawing through, to emerge, the infant-Stop.

Your child will be even more of a dragon than you were, so the chances of the mother’s survival are not good. If your own mother could not give birth to you and live, what will happen, do you think, to your mate?

Without looking at his wife he shook his head again, concentrating on the waving green sea of highgrass below him.

“I have seen too much death to risk it, Aria; I have known too many divinations that have been misheard, misunderstood. With the very last words of advice my father gave me he warned me that I should not trust prophecies, that their meaning is not always as it seems.”

“If you are discounting prophecies, then why does the first one worry you at all?” Rhapsody said, taking his hand. “It seems to me that you are giving credence to those that would prevent us from living our lives as we see fit, in order to avoid peril, but shun those that nullify those dire warnings. Either accept both, or neither, but do not choose to fear one and refuse comfort in the other.”

Ashe’s skin darkened in the light of the afternoon sun. “There are so many children in your life, Rhapsody, in our lives. Anywhere you go, from this very keep you live in to the mountains of Ylorc, from the Lirin forest to the Hintervold, you have ‘grandchildren’ to love and look after. I don’t think it is wise to tempt Fate by risking your life giving birth to the child of wyrmkin, an infant with dragon’s blood in its veins. There are enough motherless children to tend to without bringing another into the world.” His voice carried a bitter sting.

Rhapsody took him by the arms and turned him around, slipping into his embrace.

“I refuse to make my choices based on the maniacal rantings of your aunt,” she said humorously, “which is why I never use the hideous brocade table linens she sent us as a wedding gift.” Her tone grew more serious, and she caressed his cheek tenderly. “I want to make the life with you that we planned, Sam; I want to mix my blood with yours, to carry your children within me, to raise a family of your line and mine that is entirely our own. I thought this is what you wanted as well.”

Ashe did not break his gaze away from the windy plain. More than you can know, he thought.

“If there is good reason not to have children, I will yield the idea in a heartbeat, but in the face of two conflicting prophecies, I see no need to live in terror of something that she has told you will not happen. Besides, the prophecy you fear has already been fulfilled; it was not directed at me, but at the mother of the last child fathered by the F’dor we destroyed.” Her eyes darkened at the memory. “I witnessed the birth, and the death. The mother died. The child lived. It’s over. The prophecy was fulfilled.”

“You don’t know that for certain, Rhapsody.”

She threw up her hands in exasperation and turned away from him. “What do we ever know for certain, Ashe? Moment to moment, life is unsure—you can’t live in fear of it.” Another thought occurred and she turned back. “Man-wyn cannot lie, can she?”

“Not directly, but she can obfuscate and evade, and she knows the distant future as well as the immediate, so she can give an answer to a question that qualifies as truthful, but may not be pertinent for a thousand years. She is not to be trusted.”

“But if she answers directly, yes or no, that cannot be false, can it?”

Ashe shook his head. “Supposedly not.”

“Well, then, since I am headed to Yarim in the next few days, and Manwyn’s temple is in Yarim, I will have ample opportunity to ask her directly, yes or no, if giving birth to your children will cause my death or permanent infirmity. Perhaps she can lay this ambiguity to rest then and there.”

Ashe’s face went pale, then red. “A moment ago I was grateful beyond measure that you had returned home,” he said stonily. “Now I wish you had remained in Tyrian, where at least you would be safe from your own foolhardiness. Rhapsody, didn’t you learn the last time we addressed Manwyn in her temple that it was an experience not to be repeated?”

“Apparently not,” she snapped, pulling away and turning back to the tower doorway. “Apparently I’ve also been wrong in assuming you shared my desire to have a child; if you did, you would not be deterred by so flimsy an excuse.” She started down the stairs, only to be caught by the arm and turned around.

Ashe stared down at her for a long moment. Rhapsody’s anger, white-hot a split second before, cooled at the sight of the pain in his dragonesque eyes, the depth of the agony she knew he had suffered, and the love that ran even deeper. Inwardly she cursed herself for the pain she was causing him now, the fear her selfishness had rekindled. She opened her mouth to recant but was stopped when he rested his forefinger on her lips.

“We will go together,” he said, cupping her face gently. “We will put the question before her, and I will try and live with her answer. It’s the only way to reclaim control of our lives.”

“Are you certain you want to do that?” she said, arching an eyebrow. “If memory serves, you were the one she attacked last time we were there. She didn’t give me any difficulty.”

“Well, she and I are family, after all,” Ashe replied, a hint of humor returning to his eyes. “If you can’t fight with family, with whom can you fight? Look at my grandparents. Their marital spat led to a war that took down an entire empire.”

“Hmmm. Perhaps we should reconsider adding to our family after all,” Rhapsody said. She looked off across the whipping highgrass and smiled as a brightly colored kite in the shape of a copper dragon caught the wind, streaking suddenly higher on a strong updraft. She waved to the tiny figure in the distance, and Melisande waved back.

Ashe exhaled. “No, you’re right,” he said at last. “If it is at all possible, I would dearly love to see the children of the House of Navarne and those of the lines of Gwylliam and Manosse playing in these fields once more.”

“Well, in a sense that decision is entirely up to you.” Rhapsody spoke the words gently, knowing that to do so heavily would sting; as a descendant of a Firstborn race, Ashe had to make a conscious decision to procreate. “But once you decide in favor of it, whenever that may be, I promise to make that decision worth your while.”

Ashe laughed and kissed her hand, then went back to watching Stephen’s daughter draw pictures in the sky with her dragon kite, lost in memory.

The darkness of the inner sanctum of Manwyn’s temple was broken intermittently by fires burning in decaying receptacles and the tiny flames of countless candles, thick with the stench of burning fat barely masked by pungent incense.

Mother Julia stared across the jagged well in the floor to the dais suspended above it, trying to hold the Seer’s gaze and failing; the eyes of the mad prophetess were perfect mirrors of quicksilver, devoid of any iris, pupil or sclera. They reflected the myriad flames, making Mother Julia’s head spin crazily.

“How—how long will I live?” she whispered, dotting her gray forehead with the colorful fringe of her shawl.

The Seer laughed, a maniacal, piercing sound, then rolled suddenly onto her back, pointing the ancient sextant in her hand at the black dome of the temple above. She began to swing the dais wildly over the jagged pit beneath her, singing in mad, toneless words.

Finally she righted herself and leaned over the edge of the platform, fixing her reflective gaze on the trembling crone.

“Until your heart stops beating,” she proclaimed smugly. She waved a dis missive hand at Mother Julia, her rosy golden skin, scored with tiny lines of scales, gleaming in the half-light.

“Wait,” the old woman protested as the doors to the inner sanctum opened. “That is no answer! I made a generous offering, and you have told me nothing!”

A blank look of confusion crossed the Seer’s face. Mother Julia turned away from the guards gesturing at her, realizing that she had phrased her objection incorrectly; Manwyn could not comprehend the Past, only the Future and enough of the Present to allow her a stepping-stone in Time. With a trembling hand she reached into the folds of her garments and extracted her last gold crown. She held it up; the light caught the surface and reflected in the prophetess’s eyes.

“You are not telling me anything. You will cheat me for Eternity if you do not provide me more of an answer. I will be forever a bad debt of yours.”

Manwyn cocked her head to one side, her tangled mane of flame-colored hair billowing in the updraft from the dark well; its metallic silver streaks caught the reflection of the candlelight for a moment and flashed, causing Mother Julia to wince in pain. Her lips pursed as she considered, then nodded briskly like a child.

“Very well. One more question. Consider carefully; I shall answer no more for you in this lifetime.”

The old woman shuddered, racking her brain to combine her questions into one which would suffice while the ancient Seer spun the wheel on the sextant beneath her fingers, humming tunelessly. Finally Mother Julia took a deep, ragged breath and squared her shoulders.

“Who shall tell me what the disk of blue-black steel is?” she stammered.

The prophetess looked into the sextant, then up at the crone again. When she spoke, her voice was plain and clear of madness or singsong.

“Your son Thait will tell you what you have been commanded to discover,” she said simply. “Five weeks and two days hence this night.”

From the depths of her belly the old woman sighed, relief glistening in her eyes and on her brow. She bowed to Manwyn, tossed the coin into the well, muttered her thanks, and hurried out through the heavily carved cedar door past the guards, eager to quit the temple as quickly as possible.

As the cedar door closed behind the woman, Manwyn looked up as if startled. She nodded to herself, then called softly into the darkness in the distance.

“He will whisper it to you through his tears as he sits beside your grave, arranging the stones.”

6 Indigo

The scent of fire in the wind was always an exciting thing, the seneschal thought, inhaling deeply. Pungent ash mixed with the tang of salt sea air was like a perfume to him, especially in the aftermath of morning, when the white smoke of the infernos gave way to the stolid gray miasma that hung like dirty wool in the wind above the smoldering coals, the dingy causatum of so much glorious flame the night before. It was an odor he had loved all his life, but in the last thousand years or so it had taken on a special appeal, particularly when laced with the olfactory undertones of human flesh, which added a pleasant causticity to it.

The previous night he had stood in the darkness of the reviewing stands, watching the burning pyres be lighted like signal flames along a giant battle wall. It had been an unprecedented inferno; the chorus of wailing, rising and falling on the summer wind, had been especially melodic, a symphony of pain that enflamed his soul with excitement.

The thrill had still not worn off, even in the bitter light of dawn observed now from the rolling deck of the Basquela on which he stood. The bonfires had burned down to seething ash, cooling, waiting for the farmers of the Inner Crescent to come and haul the detritus away, sowing it into their fields to enrich them.

The seneschal ruminated on that for a moment, the beneficial balance he had achieved since coming to power. The shipping lanes had never been so profitable; Argaut’s fleet was one of the most commanding and respected in maritime trade throughout the civilized world, plying the seas in extended cycles, braving some of the most dangerous coastlines in the process—the rocky archipelago of the Fiery Rim; the shark-infested waters of Iridu and the Great Overward, where the predatory fish could reach a hundred feet in length; the burning swells that still foamed over the watery grave of the sunken Island of Serendair in the south seas, its former mountaintops of Briala, Balatron, and Querel now making for treacherous pocketed reefs of boiling volcanic blasts.

The real danger in those places was not the natural phenomena that existed there, but the pirates who used them as hunting grounds. Privateers from deadly, centuries-old familial lines, their ships, swift and silent, plied the shoals and crosscurrents as if immune to the perils of the sea, mastering the wind with merciless efficiency. The remains of the vessels they plundered were never found, the able-bodied among the crew and passengers sold as slaves in a variety of ports around the world, most especially in the diamond fields of lower Heraat in the Great Overward, and the gladiatorial arenas of Sorbold. The old, the sick, and the weak were used as chum for the sharks.

The Brigands of the Sea Wind, as the pirates like to call themselves, were the scourge of the shipping lanes, the terror of the seas, and made the passage of travelers and the plying of trade hazardous at best. Even the nations that supplied military forces to escort their merchant vessels watched in hope that turned frequently to dismay for their return. Owning a strong, reliable fleet of swift ships that could run the privateers’ blockades, outsail them, and escape with their crew and contents intact was one of the greatest assets any merchant guild or nation could have. Argaut’s merchant fleet and navy were without peer in the world.

Because the Baron of Argaut, who owned the fleet, also owned the pirates.

It made for a perfect cycle, a very profitable way to suppress competition. The seneschal was extremely proud of the beautiful simplicity and interconnectivity of it all. The Brigands occasionally attacked ships in the waters near Northland, but by and large stayed far enough away from port to avoid suspicion. The slave trade fostered friendship in places like Druverille, the frozen wasteland to the north of Manosse, and Sorbold, a key nation in the western continent on the southern border of the Wyrmlands. The northern continental coastline of the Wyrmlands had been held in protection for thousands of years by the dragon Elynsynos, who allowed no ship to broach the misty shores. The slave traders of Sorbold were Argaut’s favorite trading partners, paying a high premium for captives who could serve in their famed gladiatorial arenas.

And so the cycle had continued, year after year, century after century. The shipping lanes filled Argaut’s coffers with the bounty of respectable trade by the merchant fleet and the booty of privateering by the Brigands. The slave trade provided an easy dumping ground for any victims of piracy who would have survived to tell the tale; the less valuable captives were accused, along with the occasional local upstart, of being the pirates themselves and were burned in great bonfires that lighted the night sky, sating the righteous indignation of the population while convincing them of the efficiency of their government. The remains of the unfortunates were sown into the fields to produce a bountiful harvest, or rendered as fat for tallow candles, both of which in turn provided more products for the shipping trade.

And, above all else, they satisfied the bloodlust of the seneschal and the baron, both of whom craved the thrill of the fire.

Indeed; I have no wish to abandon this.

The seneschal whirled, caught off guard by the baron’s voice.

“M’lord-”

Disembark. We are not leaving.

The pleasant musings vanished, leaving the sensation of acid burning in the seneschal’s eyes.

“Forgive me, m’lord, but we are.” Involuntarily he winced at the stabbing pain in his head.

The voice, when it whispered again, was low and soft; the seneschal could barely make out the words over the waves of nauseating thrum in his head and the crying of the gulls.

In sixteen centuries you have only dared defy me once; remember what you wrought.

“Twice,” the seneschal corrected. He clutched his brow in agony, shaking his head like a boar shaking off the hunting dogs beset upon its neck. He glanced woozily in the direction of the dark hold where Faron waited, frightened, in his transplanted pool of gleaming green water. He had been secreted aboard in the middle of the night, carried in soft blankets, while the fires were burning down and the sea winds tugged at the moorings. The terror in the child’s eyes haunted at him again, and feelings of protective rage rose inside his breast. “And what I wrought is a lifeline for you; remember that.”

The threat in the reply was unmistakable.

You remember it as well.

“Yer Honor? Sea-shakes got hold o’ ya already? We haven’t even cast off yet.”

The seneschal struck violently at the air behind him, knocking the man flat with a gesture.

“Leave me in peace.”

The sailor, long accustomed to the strong arm of command, rose quickly from the deck and slipped away. When the sailor had gone, the seneschal focused his attention again on the voice in his mind, the demon that shared his soul.

“I will not be questioned by you in this,” he said in a low voice, fighting the grip behind his eyes.

You are taking us away from our place of power, where our dominion rests, unchallenged. Why?

The seneschal stood a little straighter.

“A debt is owed me, a debt I had written off a lifetime ago and a world away.”

So if you decried this debt a lifetime ago, why pursue it now?

The seneschal ran his fingers angrily through his hair, as if seeking to gouge the nagging voice from his scalp.

“Primarily,” he spat, “because I choose to. And I do not wish to answer to you about it.”

The dark fire of F’dor spirit that clung to his essence burned blacker within him, making him nauseous.

I can see we have a misunderstanding of roles here.

“Yes,” the seneschal agreed, “though I am certain we have differing opinions on who is transgressing on the terms under which we have agreed to associate with one another.”

The voice of the demon was silent for a moment, leaving only the sound of the wind and the sea, the cry of the gulls, and the distant noise of the port growing busy as morning came. When it spoke there was a crackling sound in its tone, like a fire, the flames calm but seething underneath in the coals.

I have allowed you far more autonomy, far more independence, than most with our arrangement would have.

The seneschal exhaled sharply.

“Perhaps that is because I took you on voluntarily, if you recall,” he said. “You have benefited greatly from my strength, from retaining my independence. If you wanted a passive host whose life essence you could suck out, use as a parasitic moss uses a tree, surely there were thousands of sickly, pathetic rabble after the Seren War ended that you could have taken on; a flower-seller, perhaps; a fishwife, an infant? You chose me because I offered you a host healthy of body and mind, a soldier, a leader of men, with power of my own that you could share, but it was never part of the bargain that you would possess that power outright. If you had wanted a servile lackey, you should have chosen a host within your ability to subdue, with strength less than your own, one you could conquer, could make your own unwillingly, could hollow out and feed off of until you moved on to someone better. You would never have been able to take me on then, never would have conquered me against my will.” He paused, feeling the ebb and flow of the demon’s spirit coursing through his veins. “You cannot do it now.”

The sea wind gusted again, snapping the mains’l violently, then settling into a calm breeze again. The seneschal felt the heat within him dim as the demon considered his words.

You have not done poorly in this bargain yourself, the voice said when finally it spoke again. You wanted life unending. You have had it.

“Yes,” the seneschal acknowledged, “yes, I have. And so have you. I might point out that when I came to you your host was dying, alone, unable to drag the sorry remains of his crumbling body out of the water that was filling the dungeon in which you were held captive. I saved your sorry life, have brought untold glory to you, the power of elemental wind to mix with your fire—”

In return for immortality.

“Yes. A fair trade. And all in all, it has been a beneficial, in fact, inspired pairing.” The seneschal clutched the railing, prepared for another onslaught of demonic rage. “Except on those occasions when you forget that I have the final decision as to where we go, what we undertake. You, sadly, have no choice but to come along. Unless you wish to leave now.”

The demon chuckled; it was a harsh, rasping sound that scratched against the seneschal’s ears. You always were foolhardy. Think which of us will have the worse of the bargain if I should decide to do that.

“My wager is on you,” the seneschal said as the sun crested the horizon, splashing the ocean with golden light. “After sixteen centuries of unquestioned dominion, feeding your hunger for fire and ruin, I think it would be amusing to see how you fare as a cabin boy or a whore strolling the docks. Look around you; is there anyone in particular that you crave to move on to? Perhaps there is a tavern wench you might like to have as your host? Then perhaps you too can know the feeling of being fornicated over and over again, as I do when you try to assert yourself.”

The voice of the demon cackled.

It might be interesting to take you up on that. Were we to part company in the next beat of your heart, I would not die; I would be weaker, ’tis true, but when one is immortal, a setback in merely a delay, not an ending. It would almost be worth the loss of stature and power to take up residence in another, any other, just to watch your body shrivel to dust and blow away in the wind before my eyes. The fire returned, soaking into the internal edges of the seneschal’s consciousness. You do know that is what would happen, do you not? Without my essence you would not only be a dead man, but one who owes Time a dear debt he has no means to repay.

“Go then,” the seneschal snarled. “Cast yourself out. Better still, allow me to do it for you.”

Your rashness will be your undoing, if not now, then later, the demon said solemnly.

Again the voice fell silent, and the seneschal gripped the deck railing. The demon was the embodiment of chaos, of destructive impetuosity. He prepared himself for battle, or being tossed into the sea, or into oblivion.

You are in pursuit of a woman, once again.

The seneschal clenched his teeth, seeking to bar the F’dor spirit from the inner reaches of his mind, but it was like trying to hold back the sea; the hot fingers in his brain probed mercilessly, unyieldingly, violating what little space was left to him. He could feel it searching the hidden realms within his head, finally coming upon the thoughts he had sheltered from it, grasping them, digging them out like a root from the dirt.

Have you learned nothing? the demon chided angrily. Do you not recall what happened the last time you let your lust get the better of us?

“Yes,” the seneschal said bitterly. “I recall it well, and would change nothing about it, given the chance. It gave both you and me a night of unmitigated joy in the glorious suffering of an Ancient Seren, and the boon of a bloodline in the child that was born of that night.”

A useless freak. A monster.

“Nonesuch!” The seneschal’s voice, low and guttural to avoid calling attention to himself, ground against his throat as if against shards of glass. “Faron is a beautiful creation, unique, with powers only beginning to be realized. And should either of us ever be in need of a vessel in which to seek refuge, Faron is perfect.”

Thank you, no. I have higher expectations of a host than that. I have no desire to share my life’s essence with what is essentially a human fish, blind in daylight, boneless, timid—

Violently the seneschal raked his nails down the sides of his head, gashing stripes of blood across his cheeks.

“Enough of this! If you wish to move to another host, do so now, or submit to my will! I will brook no more of this nonsense!” In his rage the seneschal closed his eyes, concentrating on the spiritual tethers that bound the demon to him, hooks in the core of his essence that he had untied the night before, to allow their combined spirits to inhabit Faron. All thought of self-preservation vanished; he quickly found one metaphysical tie and in his mind seized upon it, preparing to cast off from the demon as the ship soon would from the dock.

Stop. The scathing voice quavered.

Silence returned to his mind. The clouds that had blanketed the sun as it rose thinned and broke open, causing the morning light to shimmer in dusty streams across the water. The seneschal held his breath, waiting for the demon’s reply, longing for the cool darkness belowdecks where Faron waited. He wondered whether the monster he had carried voluntarily, its metaphysical talons embedded in his soul, would make good on its threats. There was nothing he could do but wait.

Finally, when the voice spoke again, it was subdued.

Tell me of this woman, and why this is so important to you.

The seneschal inhaled, allowing the salty air to fill his lungs to their depths. He allowed his mind to wander back over ancient fields of summer grass, the Wide Meadows of the Island of Serendair, now nothing more than seagrass in the sand beneath the boiling waves of the sea. He concentrated on the memories he had made there.

“Her name is Rhapsody,” he whispered, struggling to keep the word light on the air, reverent, like a psalm, a holy laud, though he knew it was far past impossible for his profane mouth to ever utter such a prayer. “I knew her in Serendair, before the cataclysm. She is beautiful; eyes green as the emerald forest, hair of gold like ripened sheaves of wheat. But that is not why.”

Then why?

The seneschal tried to form thoughts, words around the memory. “She is spirited, alive; passionate.” The thought of the disdain he had routinely seen in her eyes many centuries before rose up like bile in his throat, stung his pride all over again now as it had then. “Stubborn, surly, defiant, argumentative. Foolish.” And she loved me, he thought, allowing himself a fraction of a second to bask in the rumination, then driving it from his mind before the demon could seize upon it.

The knowledge that she had sworn her fealty to him had salved many a difficult moment, had kept him warm through a thousand dark nights in the time before the demon, when he was a mortal man in the vanguard of a coming war. He could still summon up the memory of the oath she swore to him before he had left her for the last time, a memory he had consigned to the dark vault of loss long before, too painful to think about without going mad.

I swear by the Star that my heart will love no other man until this world comes to an end.

The fact that he had forced her into the pledge, had made her promise it, knowing that she was unable to lie, as he held the life of a young girl in his hands before her eyes, had dissipated in his recollection long ago. She had given her word, and Lirin had rules about such things inbred in their blood.

If she had said she loved him, it must have been the truth.

The loss he felt when the word had come to him as he was embroiled in the early battles of the Seren War that she had vanished, when he was within a hairsbreadth of reclaiming her, had almost killed him. She had been stolen by the Brother, the Dhracian assassin known as the most proficient killer the Island had ever seen, even more proficient than he himself had been. There was no trace of her to be found, and so he had assumed that the Brother had killed her and tossed her body into the sea, as the Dhracian’s disinterest in temptations of the flesh was renowned. He had wept, for the first time in his memory, tears that rained like acid and had driven him into even greater fits of destruction, sacking villages and torching the Wide Meadows in the vain hope that the wildfires he ignited would help purge his soul of the despair he felt at her loss.

And now he had come to find that she was alive, had survived the destruction of the Island just as he had, had undoubtedly sailed away before the cataclysm with the other Cymrian refugees who had made their way across the world to the Wyrmlands and had taken shelter there. She, like he, had cheated Time, had robbed Death of a conquest, had obtained the same immortality that the other Cymrians and their descendants had obtained.

And she had married. Word had come via the shipping lanes of a royal marriage in Roland, but he had paid it no mind, until the name Rhapsody had come to his ears again, after sixteen centuries of silence.

It was then that the jealousy had begun to brew. He took to walking the docks at night, passing by dock wenches and drunken sailors that otherwise would have been easy prey, wondering if the Rhapsody he had known and this new queen that he had heard tell of could possibly be one and the same. When the curiosity turned to obsession he had summoned Quinn, one of the sailors who was his unwitting thrall, and sent him on a mission to discover if by the smallest stroke of Fate it might be the woman who had pledged herself to him. Until last night, it had seemed almost impossible to believe that it might be true.

And then Quinn returned, confirming his greatest hope, and his greatest dread.

She was alive.

After all these centuries, the death of the Island in volcanic fire, a journey that had taken the lives of many of the refugees, and the war that followed, she was still alive, half a world away. Still wearing the locket she had worn when he knew her. She was alive. And married. And happy.

His thoughts blackened as the rage returned. She had lied to him. She had broken her oath.

She needed to be taught the consequences of such actions. “Why?” he said aloud, his voice beginning to shake in the effort to suppress his fury. “Because she is the single best knob I have ever experienced; a bed-wench of limitless charms. A talented slut, a rutting whore who broke an oath to me. I seek to reclaim what I lost when that happened.”

The voice of the demon was weak, like the graying ash of a long-burning fire that had expended much of its fuel.

Not again. Let us not do this again. Remember the consequences: remember how weak we were left the last time you gave in to the desire to knob a woman. Each child you father breaks of my essence, our essence, leaving us diminished. Sate your lust in blood and fire, not between a woman’s legs. What you leave behind there—“I will leave no seed behind this time,” the seneschal retorted, gripping the railing as the light from the rising sun flattened over the sea. “When Faron was conceived I was still human, my blood only slightly tainted by your essence, because you were still so weak from the transfer of hosts. Now I am F’dor, having carried you for sixteen hundred years. There is very little, if any, human blood left in me. And F’dor, like all other Firstborn races, choose whether or not to break open their souls in the act of procreation. Believe me, I have no intention of doing that again; I want nothing between Rhapsody’s legs but me. I plan to spend a goodly amount of time there, making up for all the time she owes me. So rest easy; your power is safe.”

There was another long silence while the demon considered, peppered now by the increasing noise from the docks, the cacophony of activity as the harbor swelled with life and traffic. Finally the voice within his mind spoke; it was soft, as though tired, resigned, but still bore a resolute tone.

Very well. Let us be off, but with the intent on returning as soon as you have retrieved that which is owed to you. I wish to get back to the terror, the burnings, the mad beauty of the destruction we have wrought here.

The seneschal absently fingered the hilt of Tysterisk as he thought back for one last moment to the image of Rhapsody’s face as she swore her pledge to him; she had called him by a name he had long forgotten until now. There; is that enough for you now, Michael?

Michael, he had been called in that other life. He had all but lost the memory of it.

Michael, the Wind of Death.

“Believe me,” he said again, “where we are bound, there will be more than ample opportunity for terror, for burnings. I promise you, the mad beauty of the destruction we have wrought here will pale beside what is to come when we make landfall on her shores.”

7 Violet

The master of the range flashed the signs from one hundred fifty yards—twelve centers, two inner ring, nine outer ring, one perfect alignment.

Gwydion Navarne sighed, then signaled for the targets to be moved back. While the rangekeepers dragged the haybutts about in the distance he gave his longbow a shake, then gently ran his fingers up the grip. He had spent more than a year in its making, had carefully blended wood, horn, and sinew, cured it lovingly. It was a weapon of which he was greatly proud, even if it was still not a masterpiece; it, like he, was in training, learning, stretching to its potential.

This afternoon he was not proving worthy of it.

He was so focused on trying to sort out the problem with his angle of flight that he did not hear the approach of the hoofbeats until Anborn was already upon him.

“You disappoint me, lad.”

The snort of the black stallion shook Gwydion from his concentration, and he looked up into the face of the Lord Marshal, the ancient general of the Cymrian army, who was staring down at him from his high-backed saddle, watching him as intently as a bird of prey watches a mouse. Gwydion shook the bow again.

“My apologies, Lord Marshal. I’m working on my free-flights, albeit dismally this afternoon.” He nodded to Anborn’s man-at-arms, an older First Generation Cymrian with gray hair and a deeply lined face, weathered from the sun, who always traveled on horseback with a pair of crossbows drawn. “Well met, Shrike.” The soldier nodded in return, dismounting.

The general snorted in the same timbre as his war horse, then reached behind him and unstrapped his crutches from their saddle bindings.

“I’m not disappointed in your accuracy, boy, but in your choice of projectiles. I see you have a fondness for those flimsy Lirin sticks.” Anborn sighed dramatically. “I should have had a long talk with you before your adopted grandmother moved in here and destroyed your sense of arrow flight with her Lirin preferences.”

Gwydion laughed, then took the reins as the Lord Marshal dismounted slowly, Shrike standing ready, as always, to support him should he lose his balance. In the three years since Anborn’s crippling, Gwydion had never seen it happen.

“Actually Rhapsody has little preference for arrows, and not too much interest in archery anymore,” he said. “She brings me back the long whitewoods whenever she goes to Tyrian if she can.”

Anborn steadied himself on the two specially made canes and stared at Gwydion in mock disgust. “So you came to this tendency on your own? Appalling.”

“I am still studying the crossbow as well, Lord Marshal.”

“Well, then at least you shouldn’t be taken out and fed to the weasels yet.”

Gwydion Navarne laughed. “Perhaps someday you can enlighten me as to why your family is so fascinated with the feeding of incompetents to weasels,” he said, glancing at the squire who was approaching with the general’s chair. “If I recall correctly, your brother, Edwyn Griffyth, declared the same fate should befall Tristan Steward at the Cymrian Council.”

“Being devoured by weasels is far too good a fate for Tristan Steward,” Anborn said contemptuously. “In addition, it would be cruel to the weasels.” He observed the gesture of the rangekeeper. “They are ready for you, lad.”

“So what have you been occupying yourself with, Lord Marshal?” Gwydion Navarne asked as he nocked his arrow. “Rhapsody said you had gone south to the Skeleton Coast of Sorbold.”

“Indeed.” The Lord Marshal allowed Shrike to assist him into the wheeled chair, then laid the crutches across his now-useless legs.

Gwydion Navarne watched the general thoughtfully as he settled himself. He had met the legendary soldier as a child of seven at his mother’s funeral, and had been terrified by the experience. He was too young to have yet heard of the general’s cantankerous reputation, so Anborn’s very appearance was intimidating to him; the broad, menacing musculature of back and shoulders, gleaming azure eyes set within a face dark with terrible memories, black hair streaked with white flowing angrily to his shoulders—everything about the general was sufficient to make him want to hide behind his father, who had understood his fear innately and did not require him to come out and shake hands until the general was ready to leave.

And now, since the council held in the wake of the great battle three years ago, he had come to know and admire the man, to love him much the way his godfather, Gwydion of Manosse, did—respectfully and from a safe distance.

There was something in the general’s eyes that Gwydion Navarne didn’t grasp. He recognized, in the incomplete wisdom of youth, that there were thoughts, emotions, and insights in the head of someone who had lived for as many centuries as Anborn had, seen as many horrors as Anborn had, and contemplated life in ways that Anborn had that he himself could not comprehend now, if ever.

Gwydion Navarne drew back and let fly; the arrow’s arc was slighted a hint to the lee; it struck the hay target at one hundred sixty yards and glanced off.

“Drat!”

The Lord Marshal stared at him as if thunderstruck.

“Drat?” he said disdainfully. “Drat? Dear All-God, what has my useless nephew been teaching you? Is that the best oath you can muster, lad? After you finish here we will go directly into Navarne City and find a suitable tavern, where we will tend immediately to your proper education in the essential things—drinking, wenching, and swearing properly.”

“Oh, I do know how to swear fairly well, Lord Marshal,” Gwydion Navarne said pleasantly. “I just didn’t want to offend your ears, knowing you to be the frail and discreet gentleman that you are.”

Anborn chuckled as Gwydion Navarne drew back again. “Well, I would certainly hope so. My nephew, your namesake, has been schooled by the best—that would be me—in the finest curses ever wrought of the dragon tongue, which is the preeminent language in which to swear. You don’t have the physiology for that, alas—without the serpentine aperture of the throat you could never manage the double glottal stop—but certainly you should have acquired an impressively vulgar vocabulary after living with him for a few years. And your ‘grandmother’—well, a Namer of her power should have access to some utterly splendid oaths.”

“Oh, she does.” Gwydion Navarne let fly, piercing the inner edge of the outer ring, then kicked the ground in annoyance. “Hrekin”

“Ah, a Bolgish profanity, if an uninspired one. Not bad.” The general’s face twisted in amusement. “Can’t imagine who you caught that one from.”

“Well, when you and I served with Sergeant-Major Grunthor as honor guard at Rhapsody’s coronation in Tyrian, he taught me many useful things, such as nit removal from private skin folds and how to clear the nasal passages of blockage while rendering an assailant momentarily sightless at the same time.”

“Ah.” Anborn cleared his throat as Shrike looked askance at the young duke-to-be. “Well, one can never have too many weapons in one’s arsenal, though that one was unknown to me until just now.”

Gwydion Navarne unstrung the weapon, allowing the bowstring to relax. “So are you going to share with me where you have been? Or am I committing a social misstep inquiring?”

“Both.” The ancient warrior looked him up and down, but with a different expression in his eyes than before; there was a sharper intensity in his glance that was tempered with another, deeper emotion, one that the boy did not see this time as he turned back to his bow. “I was looking for a Kinsman on the Skeleton Coast.”

Gwydion Navarne did not look up as he strung the bow again. “Oh?” He gave the bowstring a perfunctory pluck and, satisfied with the draw, glanced up finally. The serious expressions on both men’s faces made him blink. “Was this a kinsmen on your father Gwylliam’s line, or from your mother Anwyn’s family?”

Anborn exhaled deeply and looked out over the meadow, his eyes unfocused, as if seeing into another time.

“Neither. I don’t mean a kinsman who is merely a blood relation. I am speaking rather of an ancient society of men, a fraternity forged in the old world, from another time; brothers. Warriors. Dedicated soldiers who mastered the craft of fighting over a lifetime’s devotion to it, at the expense of self. Kinsmen were sworn to the wind and Seren, the star which shone over the Island of Serendair, resting now below the waves on the other side of the world. And to each other. Always to each other.”

Gwydion Navarne brought his hands to rest atop the bow respectfully, waiting to hear the rest of what the Lord Marshal, usually a man of few words, was saying.

He felt Shrike’s eyes on him, but he didn’t turn to meet the glance of Anborn’s man-at-arms. The intensity he felt in their stare told him that what the general was sharing was something he was imparting carefully, with great import. He resolved to be worthy of the telling.

Anborn looked out over the rolling hills to the high wall that surrounded the fields beyond Haguefort; atop the rampart guardsmen walked, patrolling the battlement, their shadows long and spindly in the afternoon sun.

“To some extent, all soldiers are brothers of a kind, relying on one another for their very lives. This kind of life forges bonds that can’t be formed any other way, not by birth, nor by the mere desire to do so—it is a commitment of the soul that transcends any other; the willingness to die to save a comrade, the participation in a cause greater than oneself.

“After a lifetime of such soldiering, two kinds of men remain—those that are grateful to have survived the experience, and those that are grateful that the experience survives.

“The first kind gathers his belongings and whatever pieces are left of himself at the end of his service and goes home to farm and family, knowing that no matter what befalls him thereafter in life, he was part of something that will never leave him, tying him to others he may never see again, but who remain a part of him until death takes him.”

He cleared his throat and looked back at Gwydion Navarne, studying him for a moment. “The latter kind never goes home, because to him, home is the wind. The wind is never in the same place for more than a moment, but is always there, around him, wherever he is; it is both ephemeral and stalwart; he learns to be the same way. And the more like the wind one becomes, the more one loses a sense of self. Of course, any soldier who serves, any man-at-arms who puts his life at risk daily for not only his comrades and his leader but for those he never sees, has little sense of self anyway.

“Kinsmen were the elite of men who lived this way. They were accepted into the brotherhood for two things: incredible skill forged over a lifetime of soldiering, or a selfless act of service to others, protecting an innocent at threat of one’s own life.”

He took the bow from the young man’s hand and turned it over, making adjustments to the grip and examining the string. “Your nocking point is too high,” he said. He made a motion with his hand toward Shrike, who wordlessly plucked a white longflight from Gwydion Navarne’s standing quiver and handed it to him. The general flexed the wood of the shaft, then raised his eyebrows.

“Good spine,” he said with grudging admiration. He nocked the arrow, then handed the bow back to the young man.

Gwydion nodded silently.

“When one has achieved the right to become a Kinsman, it is the wind itself that selects him,” Anborn continued, watching him closely. “Air, like fire, earth, water, and ether, is a primordial element, one of the five that make up the world, but it is often overlooked. Its strength is always underestimated, rarely seen, but formidable. In its purest form, air has life, and it knows its own: Kinsmen, who were also called Brothers of the Wind. Serendair was a highly magical place; the wind blew freely there, and strong. Alas, the birthplace of the element, Northland, is on the other side of the world from here, so wind is not as strong in this land as it was there.

“When a man becomes a Kinsman, whether he has earned the title through a lifetime of service or a moment of selfless sacrifice, he hears the wind in his ear, whispering to his heart, telling him its secrets. He can use those secrets to hide within it, to travel by means of it, to call for help on it. The Kinsman call is the most compelling summoning a man can ever hear; it ensnares the soul, reaches deeply into the heart, demanding to be answered. It is used only in the direst of circumstance, when the Kinsman uttering it feels he is on the threshold of death, when his death will have impact beyond itself. And any Kinsman hearing it would never think of ignoring such a summons; to do so would leave him haunted unto insanity for the rest of his days.”

“And you heard the Kinsman call from the Skeleton Coast.” Gwydion Navarne tried to keep his voice low and respectful, but the excitement in it boiled over, breaking the solemn mood in the meadow.

Shrike stared sharply at him, but Anborn merely nodded.

“Did you find him? This Kinsman, was he there?”

Anborn exhaled, remembering the sound of the waves crashing against the black sand, the steaming mist from the sea swirling around the wreckage of ships from the old world, broken fourteen centuries in the timeless sand. The wind had fought for dominance with the sound of the sea, had faltered and drowned in its roar.

“No,” he said.

Gwydion Navarne lapsed into silence again. He turned away from the Cymrian soldiers and drew back, then loosed his arrow at the popinjay suspended from a pole at one hundred and fifty yards. The straw bird snapped back at the force of the impact, then swung wildly, eliciting subtle sounds of approval from the two men.

Feeling somewhat vindicated, the young duke-to-be turned back to them.

“Perhaps he was answered by another Kinsman,” he suggested.

“Doubtful,” Anborn growled. “Kinsmen were rare in the old land; in this world they are all but imaginary. I have met but two in the last seven hundred years. One was Oelendra, the Lirin Champion, who led the First Fleet of refugees from the Island itself, and passed from this life after the royal wedding. The other—” His words broke off and he smiled slightly to himself.

“Who, Lord Marshal?” Gwydion Navarne could not contain his curiosity. “Who was the other?”

The two soldiers exchanged a glance, and Anborn’s smile broadened.

“Perhaps you should ask your ‘grandmother’ the answer to that question,” he said.

“Rhapsody?” Gwydion Navarne’s brows drew together above an incredulous expression. “Rhapsody is a Kinsman?

“Perhaps I neglected to mention that Kinsmen come in all shapes and sizes, lad,” he said, echoing the words she had once used on him in the same incredulous state. “They come in all walks of life—some of them even are Singers, Namers.”

“Women can be Kinsmen?”

“Both the Kinsmen I have just mentioned were women. You think only men are willing to sacrifice for a greater cause?”

“I’d like to have one sacrifice a few hours, a few scrapes on her knees, and a sour taste tomorrow morning for the greater cause of my satisfaction,” muttered Shrike. “Are you finished here, Anborn?”

Gwydion Navarne ran a hand through his mahogany-colored hair. “This has been a curious day,” he murmured. He looked up at Anborn’s man-at-arms. “Are you a Kinsman, Shrike?”

The elderly Cymrian snorted. “When you are one yourself, then you may ask me that,” he snapped. “Not until.”

“Sorry,” Gwydion said, but already Anborn was nodding in the direction of the black stallion. Shrike, obviously relieved to be quitting the conversation, wheeled the chair quickly over to the horse and took Anborn’s canes, strapping them quickly to the saddle again.

“You really should reconsider the longbow, lad,” Anborn said as Shrike prepared him to mount. “A crossbow or stonebow penetrates better and is more flexible in war.”

“Yes, but we are at peace, and have been since the lord and lady ascended the throne,” Gwydion replied, looking at the ground as the man-at-arms lifted the ancient general with his shoulder from the wheeled chair and boosted him like a child into the saddle. “I don’t expect to see war anytime soon, Lord Marshal. For now as an archer I only need to be proficient enough to penetrate a haybutt.”

The general paused in his ascent and stared down at him. “Only a fool thinks so, lad,” he said shortly. “Peacetime is good for but one thing: practicing skills to be ready for the next war. Your father knew this; you can tell by that wall he built. Woe unto your province if you don’t know it as well.”

When the Lord Marshal had been hoisted back onto his mount, he gestured for Gwydion Navarne to bring him the longbow. The youth complied, fascinated, as the Cymrian general closed his eyes, drew the bow easily back to an anchor point well behind his ear, a draw length Gwydion had never seen on the bow before, and fired.

The arrow whistled past him; the wind on which it sailed tousled the young man’s hair, blowing it into his eyes, but not before he saw the arrow slam into the direct center of the hay target, vibrating rigidly in waves he could feel in his teeth from one hundred sixty yards away.

Anborn opened his eyes.

“Did you hear it?” he demanded.

“The wind? Yes. It whistled like a teakettle.”

The general tossed him the bow impatiently.

“That was the arrow.,” he said curtly. “Did you hear the wind*?”

Gwydion Navarne considered, then shook his head.

“No.”

Anborn exhaled sharply. “Pity,” he said as he lifted the reins and Shrike mounted his own horse. “Perhaps you are not meant to, then.”

“Why did you tell me this?” Gwydion Navarne called as they turned to leave.

Anborn came alongside the young duke and leaned down as far as his fused vertebrae would allow him, steadying himself against his high-backed saddle.

“Because soon there will be no more Kinsmen,” he said quietly. “The brotherhood all but perished when the Island was swallowed by the sea. MacQuieth, probably the greatest of all Kinsmen, died soon after that; he led the Second Fleet to safety in Manosse, then waded into the sea, standing vigil for the death of the Island. When the cataclysm came, he walked into waves and drowned. What few remained in this place—Oelendra, Talumnan—all have passed from this life now. One day the legendary Kinsmen will be nothing more than that; a legend. I thought you might want to hear the lore while there was still someone qualified to tell you, lad.” He took up the reins. “I am sorry if I was mistaken. And if I was mistaken, then you, too, are sorry.”

“I am honored that you chose to tell me, Lord Marshal,” Gwydion said hastily as Anborn nodded to Shrike, preparing to depart. “But what about Rhapsody? She is a First Generation Cymrian, and therefore should be unaffected by the passage of time. As long as she lives, won’t there always be Kinsmen?”

Anborn sighed. “Apparently you don’t understand the meaning of the word,” he said, a touch of melancholy in his voice. “One cannot be a Kinsman alone.”

He clicked to his stallion, and cantered off over the glossy fields of highgrass bending in supplication before the late-afternoon sun.