Shadowplay

15. The Boy in the Mirror

The wind had blown the clouds into tatters, and although what remained was enough to keep the sun dodging in and out, for once the skies were dry. All over the castle people were emerging, eager to feel something other than rain on their faces.

A dozen young women came out into the garden of the royal residence. Matt Tinwright, who had been feeling sorry for himself and searching fruitlessly for something that rhymed with “misunderstood,” stood and straightened his jerkin. His mood had suddenly improved, and not only because he could show his well-turned legs and new beard to some pretty girls: their arrival, bright and lively as a flock of migrating birds, felt like a harbinger of spring, although winter still had weeks to run. As he watched them scatter across the formal garden, some wiping the benches dry so they could sit, others forming a circle on the central lawn to toss a ball of feather-stuffed cloth, Tinwright could almost believe that things in Southmarch might again become ordinary, despite all evidence to the contrary.

He took off his soft hat and ran his fingers through his hair, wondering whether it would be more enjoyable to insert himself into the proceedings directly or wait a while, watching the play and smiling in a friendly but slightly superior manner. A moment later all thought of the ball game fled his mind.

She walked slowly, like a much older woman, and with the young maid beside her she might have been someone’s dowager aunt—especially since on this day, when everyone else had chosen to wear something with a little color in it, she was still dressed head to foot in funeral black. But there was no mistaking that pale, resolute face, the fine, slightly sharp chin, the long fingers twined in prayer beads. At least she had left off her veil today.

What would have been quite sufficient for a casual game of ball and some seemingly accidental contact with the players was no longer enough to pass muster. Tinwright paused and pulled up his stockings, brushed a few crumbs from his chest—he had been eating bread and hard cheese while contemplating the unfairness of life—then made his way down the path looking only at plants, as if too taken by the harsh beauty of the winter garden to notice the arrival of several nubile young women showing more skin around the neck and bosom than they had in months. He wound in and out among the box hedges by a path so circuitous he might have been a foraging ant, crunching along gravel paths unraked since late autumn, until at last he approached the bench where the object of his garden quest sat with her maid.

Elan M’Cory was sewing something stretched on a wooden hoop; her eyes did not lift even when he stopped and stood for long moments, waiting. At last, his courage dying quickly, he coughed a little. “Lady Elan,” he said. “I bid you good afternoon.”

She finally looked up, but with such an unseeing, uncaring gaze that he found himself wondering against all sense whether he had approached the wrong woman, whether Elan M’Cory might have a blind or idiot sister. Then something like ordinary humanity came into her eyes. An expression that was not quite a smile, but almost, tugged at her lips.

“Ah, the poet. Master...Tinwright, was it?”

She remembered him! He could almost hear trumpets, as if the royal heralds had been called out to celebrate his now unmistakable and confirmed existence. “That is right, lady. You honor me.”

Her gaze dropped to her sewing. “And are you enjoying the afternoon, Master Tinwright?”

“Much more for your presence, my lady.”

Now she looked at him again, amused but still distant. “Ah. Because I am a vision of loveliness in my spring finery? Or perhaps because of the cloud of good cheer that surrounds me like a Xandian perfume?”

He laughed, but not confidently. She had wit. He wasn’t certain how he felt about that. He didn’t generally get on very well with women of that sort. On those occasions when he received compliments he wanted to be sure he understood them and that they were sincere. Still, there was something about her that pulled at him, just like the flameloving moth he had so often cited in his poetry. So this was what it felt like! All poets should be forced to feel all the things they wrote about, Tinwright decided. It was a most novel way to understand the figures of poetry. It might change the craft entirely.

“Have I lost you, good sir? You were going to explain the subtle charm that draws you to me.”

He started, ashamed at his own foolishness, standing slack-jawed when he had been asked a question, however sardonic. “Because you are beautiful and sad, Lady Elan,” he said, uncertain whether he might not be overstepping the boundaries of propriety. He shrugged: too late—it had been said. “I wish there were something I could do to make you less so.”

“Less beautiful?” she said, lifting an eyebrow, but there was something underneath the gibing that hurt him to hear— something naked and miserable.

“My lady points out rightly that I have made a fool of myself with my clumsy talk.” He bowed. “I should go and leave you to your work.”

“I hate my work. I sew like a farm laborer. I am more of an executioner than a chirurgeon when it comes to handcraft.”

He didn’t know what that meant, but she hadn’t agreed he should go away. He felt a surge of joy but tried to hide it. “I am sure you underestimate yourself, lady.”

She stared at him for a long moment. “I only like you when you tell the truth, Tinwright. Can you do that? If not, you may continue on you way.”

What was she asking? He swallowed—discreetly, he hoped—and said, “Only the truth then, my lady.”

“Promise?”

“On Zosim, my patron.”

“Ah, the drunkard godling—and patron of criminals, too, I believe. A good enough choice, I suppose, and certainly appropriate for any conversation with me.” She turned to the young maid beside her, who had been listening to them and watching openmouthed. “Lida, you go,” she said. “Play with the other girls.”

“But, Mistress...!”

“I will be fine. I will sit right here. Master Tinwright will protect me from any danger. It is well known that poets fear nothing. Is that not right, Master Matthias?”

Tinwright smiled. “Known only to poets, perhaps, and not to this one. But I do not think your mistress will be in any danger, child.”

Lida, who was all of eight or nine years old, frowned at being called a child, but gathered her skirts and rose from the bench, a miniature of dignity. She spoiled the effect a little by sullenly scuffing her feet all the way down the path.

“She is a good girl,” Elan said. “She came with me from home.”

“Summerfield?”

“No. My own family lives miles from the city. Our estate is called Willowburn.”

“Ah. So you are a country girl?”

She looked at him, her expression suddenly flat once more. “Do not flirt with me, Master Tinwright. I was about to ask you to sit down. Am I to regret my decision?”

He hung his head. “I meant no offense, Lady Elan. I only wondered. I was raised in the city and I’ve often wondered what it would mean to smell country air every day.”

“Really? Well, sometimes it smells wonderful, and sometimes it is just as bad as anything to be found in the worst stews of a city. If you have not spent much time around pigs, Master Tinwright, you haven’t missed a great deal.”

He laughed. She might have more wit than was fitting in a woman, but she also spoke more engagingly than most of the women he knew—or the men either, for that matter. “Point taken, my lady. I will try not to over-burnish the joys of country living.”

“So you grew up in a city. Where?”

“Here. Well, across the bay, to be precise, in the outer city. A place called Wharfside. Not a very nice place.”

“Ah. So your family was poor, then?”

He hesitated. He wanted to agree, to make himself seem as admirable as possible. Since he couldn’t pass for nobility, he could at least be the opposite, someone who had lifted himself up from dire misery by bravery and brilliance.

“Truth,” she reminded, seeing him hesitate. “Most in Wharfside are poor, yes, but we were better off than the largest part of them. My father was a tutor to the children of some of the merchants. We could have lived better, but my father was...he wasn’t good with money.” But good with spending it on drink, and a little too forthcoming in his opinions as far as some of his employers thought, Tinwright recalled, not without some bitterness even with the old man now years dead. “But we always had food on the table. My father studied at EastmarchUniversity. He taught me to love words.”

Which was not exactly the strict truth, as promised—what Kearn Tinwright had actually taught him was to love words enough to be able to talk yourself out of bad situations and into good ones.

“Ah, yes, words,” said Elan M’Cory, musingly. “I used to believe in them. Now I do not.”

Tinwright wasn’t sure he’d understood her. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing. I mean nothing.” She shook her head; for a moment the brittle look of ordinary social cheerfulness crumbled. She looked down at her needlepoint work for the span of several breaths. “I have kept you too long,” she said at last. “You must get on with your day and I must get on with ruining my sewing.”

He recognized a dismissal, and for once was too gratified to try to tug loose a little more of something he coveted. “I enjoyed speaking with you, my lady,” he said, and meant it. “May I hope to have the pleasure of doing it again sometime?”

The shrieks of the girls playing ball rose up and filled the long silence. She looked at him carefully, and this time it was as though she had retreated behind a high wall and peered down at him from the battlements. “Perhaps,” she said at last. “If you do not hope too much. My company is nothing to hope for.”

“Now it is you who does not tell the truth, my lady.” She frowned, but thinking, not disagreeing. “It is possible that some afternoons, when it does not rain, you may find me here, in this garden, at about this time of the day.”

He stood, and bowed. “I will look forward to such days.” She smiled her sad smile. “Go on and join the living, Matt Tinwright. Perhaps we will meet, as you say. Perhaps we shall.”

He bowed again and walked away. It took all his strength not to look back, or at least not to do so immediately. When he did, the bench where she had sat was empty.

Duchess Merolanna hesitated at the bottom of the tower steps as the door creaked shut behind them. “Oh, I’m a fool.”

The creak ended in a low, shuddering thump as the door swung closed. The breeze set the torches fluttering in their brackets. “What do you mean, Your Grace?”

“I have brought us here without a single guard. What if these are murderers?”

“But you wished this kept a secret. Don’t worry yourself too much, Duchess—I am reasonably fit, and I can use one of these torches to defend you, if necessary.” Utta stretched up to lift one from its socket. “Even a murderer will not relish being struck in the face with this.”

Merolanna laughed. “I was worrying about you, good Sister Utta, rather than myself. You do not deserve to be harmed because of these strange games I find myself playing. I care not what happens to me. I am old, and all my chicks are dead or fled or lost...” For a moment her face became painfully sober and her lip trembled. “Ah, well. Ah, well.” The duchess took a breath and straightened, swelling her sizable bosom so that she seemed suddenly a small but daunting ship of war. “It does us no good to stand here whispering like frightened girls. Come, Utta. You have the torch. Lead the way.”

They made their way up the winding staircase. The first floor was unoccupied. The single, undivided chamber contained several large tables bearing plaster models of the castle, some true to life and others showing possible improvements, the fruits of one of King Olin’s enthusiasms now as forgotten as the dusty, mummified corpse of a mouse that lay in the middle of the doorway.

Merolanna eyed the tiny body with distaste. “Somebody should do something. What use is it having cats if they do not eat the mice instead of leaving them around to rot?”

“Cats don’t always eat their prey, Your Grace,” Utta said. “Sometimes they only play with them and then kill them for sport.”

“Nasty creatures. I never did like cats. Give me a hound any day. Stupid but honest.” Merolanna looked around for eavesdroppers—a reflex because they were quite alone. Still, when she spoke again it was in a low voice. “That’s why I preferred Gailon Tolly, for all his faults, to his brothers. Hendon is a cat if ever there was one. You can see the cruelty—he wears it like a fancy outfit, with pride.”

Utta nodded as they returned to the stairs, leaving the cobwebbed models behind. Even Zoria herself, she felt sure, would have found it hard to feel charitable toward Hendon Tolly.

The doors on the second and third floors were smaller, and locked. She guessed that at least the upper one contained part of King Olin’s famous library. This tower had always been his private sanctuary, and even with him gone so long she felt disrespectful poking around without royal permission.

But I am with Merolanna—the king’s own aunt, she reminded herself. If that is not permission enough, what is?

The door to the chamber which took up the entire top floor was open, although Utta felt oddly sure that in any ordinary circumstances it would be locked just like the floors below it. No light burned inside, and from where the two women stood on the landing at the top of the stairs, their torch barely threw light past the doorway. As Utta moved closer the shadows inside bent and stretched. Suddenly she felt short of breath. Zoria, preserve me from dangers known and unknown, she prayed, from peril of the body and peril of the soul. “Your Grace?”

Merolanna frowned as if irritated at herself. She had not left the top of the stairs. “Very well. I’m coming.” She hesitated a moment longer, then walked forward to stand at Utta’s side. Together they stepped into the doorway, both of them holding their breath. Utta lifted the torch.

If the room full of plaster models at the bottom of the tower had seemed cluttered, this was something else again. Books had been stacked everywhere across the floor in unsteady-looking towers, and across every surface, many of them open, covering the two long tables in heedless piles. More than a few of the volumes lay bent-backed, perched like clumsy nesting birds on tabletop or pile, in positions that likely had not changed since the king’s disappearance. Many had lost pages: a mulch of creased parchments covered the floor like drifts of leaves. For Zoria, tutored in the thrifty ways of the Zorian sisterhood, where books were a precious, expensive resource and could be read only with the permission of the adelfa, the mistress of the shrine’s sisterhood, this careless plenitude was both exhilarating and shocking.

“What a dreadful clutter!” said Merolanna. “And it’s frightfully cold in here, too. I’m shivering, Utta. Would you see if there’s any wood, and light a fire?”

“Light not any fires, great ladies!” a tiny voice piped. “I beg ’ee, or tha will scorch my own sweet mistress most cracklingly!”

Utta jumped and dropped the torch, which with great good fortune landed in one of the few places on the floor not covered with sheets of book paper. She snatched it up again, breathing thanks she had not set the entire tower aflame. “What was...?”

Merolanna had given a little screech at the mysterious words, and now reached out and clutched Utta’s shoulder so fiercely that the Zorian sister could barely restrain a cry of her own. “It was here! In this very room!” the duchess whispered. She made the sign of the Three. “Who speaks?” she demanded aloud, her voice cracked and quavering. “Are you a ghost? A demon spirit?”

“No, great ladies, no ghost. I will show myself presently.” The faint, shrill voice might almost have come from the phantom of the dead mouse downstairs. A moment later, Utta saw something stirring on the tabletop. A minuscule, four-limbed shape crawled out from between two closeleaning piles of books. When it stood up, and was revealed to be a man no taller than Utta’s finger, she nearly dropped the torch again.

“Oh, merciful daughter of Perin,” Utta said. “It is a little man.”

“No mere man,” the stranger chirped, “but a Gutter-Scout of the Rooftoppers.” He bowed. “Beetledown the Bowman, I hight. Beg pardon for affrighting thee.”

“You see this too,” Merolanna said, tightening her grip on Utta again until the other woman squirmed. “Sister Utta, you see it. I am not mad, am I?”

“I see it,” was all she could say. At this moment Utta was not entirely certain of her own sanity. “Who are you?” she asked the tiny man. “I mean, what are you?”

“He said he was a Rooftopper,” Merolanna said. “That’s plain enough.”

“A...Rooftopper?”

“Don’t you know the stories? Ah, but you’re from the Vuttish islands, aren’t you?” Merolanna stared at Utta for a moment, then suddenly remembered what they were talking about and turned back to the astonishing little apparition on the table. “What do you want? Are you the one who...did you put that letter in my chamber?”

Beetledown bowed. It was hard to tell, he was so small, but he might have been a little shame-faced. “That were my folk, yes, and Beetledown played some part, ’tis also true. We took the letter and we brought it back. Any more, though, be not mine to tell. You must wait.”

“Wait?” Merolanna’s laugh was more than a little shaky. Utta half feared that the duchess would faint or run screaming, but Merolanna seemed determined to prove she was made of bolder stuff. “Wait for what? The goblins to come and play us a tune? The fairy-king to lead us to his hoard of gold? By the Holy Trigon, are all the stories coming to life?”

“Again, this one cannot say, great lady. But un comes who can.” He cocked his head. “Ah. I hear her.”

He pointed to the great, long-unused fireplace. A line of figures had begun to file out from behind a pile of books beside the hearth—tiny men like Beetledown, dressed in fantastical armor made of nut husks and rodent skeletons, carrying equally tiny swords and spears. The miniature troop marched silently across the floor (although not without a few nervous glances upward at Utta and Merolanna) and lined up before the fireplace. A platform descended slowly out of the flue and into the opening of the fireplace, winched down on threads with a feathery squeak like the cry of baby birds. When it was a half-foot above the ash-covered andiron, it stopped, swaying slightly. At the center of the platform, on a beautiful throne constructed in part from what appeared to be a gilded pinecone, sat a finger-sized woman with red hair and a little crown of gold wire. She regarded her two large guests with calm interest, then smiled.

“Her Sublime and Inextricable Majesty, Queen Upsteeplebat,” announced Beetledown with considerable fervor.

“We owe you an explanation, Duchess Merolanna and Sister Utta,” said the little queen. The stones of the fireplace, like the shape of a theater or temple, made her high voice easier to hear than the little man’s had been. “We have information that we think you will find valuable, and in turn, we ask you to aid us in the great matters that are upon us all.”

“Aid you?” Merolanna shook her head. The duchess was looking her age now, confused and even a little weary. “By the gods, I swear I understand none of this. Tiny people out of an old tale. What could we do to help you? And what information could you give us?”

“For one thing, Duchess,” said the queen gently, as if to a restless child instead of to a woman many, many times her size, “we believe we can tell you what happened to your son.”

“Are you sure?” Opal asked. “Perhaps you’re still too tired.” His wife, Chert noted, seemed to be having second thoughts.

“No, Mistress,” Chaven protested, “I am much recovered. In fact, I am ashamed at having let myself go so far last night.” He did indeed look rather embarrassed. “I count you even better friends for your kindness, indulging me at a bad time.”

“But, are you truly...?” Opal looked at the physician, then at her husband, as though she wanted him to intervene. Chert was quite happy to sit with a sour smile on his face. This messing about with mirrors had been her idea, after all. “Will you really do it here? In our home?”

Chaven smiled. “Mistress Opal, this is not some great, dangerous experiment I will perform, only the mildest bit of captromancy. Nothing will damage your son or your house.”

Son. Chert still wasn’t sure how he felt about that, but kept his thoughts to himself. Just in the months since Flint had come to them, the boy had grown another handspan, and now he towered over Chert. How could you consider someone your son who first of all didn’t belong to you, whose mother and father might be alive and living nearby, and who in a few years would be twice your own size?

Ah, I suppose it isn’t the height but the heart, he thought. He looked at the boy, sitting sleepy-eyed and faintly distrustful, curled in his blanket in the corner he had made his own. At least he’s out of his bed. These days Flint was like some ancient relative—asleep most of the day, barely speaking. The boy had never been talkative, of course, but until the moment he had woken up from his weird adventure in the Mysteries the vigor had practically sprayed off him like a dog shaking a wet coat.

“What do you need, Doctor?” Chert couldn’t help being a little curious. “Special herbs? Opal could go to the market.”

“You could go to the market, you old hedgehog,” she said, but her heart wasn’t in it.

“No, no.” The physician waved his hand. He looked a bit better for a night’s sleep, but Chert knew him well enough to see the hollowness behind the façade of the ordinary. Chaven Makaros was not a happy man, not remotely, which made Chert even more anxious. “No, I need only Mistress Opal’s mirror and a candle, and...” Chaven frowned. “Can you make this place dark?”

Chert laughed. “Can we? You forget, you are a guest in FunderlingTown now. Even what we usually walk about in would seem like deep dark to you, and what you think is ordinary light makes my head ache.”

Chaven looked stricken. “Is that true? Have you been suffering because of me?”

He shook his head. “I exaggerate. But yes, of course, we can make it dark.”

As Chert stood on a stool to douse the lantern burning high in the alcove above the fire, Opal left the room and returned with a single candle in a dish which she set on the table next to Chaven. Already the exchange of the lantern for this single small light had turned the morning into something else, into eerie, timeless twilight, and Chert could not help remembering the murk of Southmarch city across the bay, the ceaseless dripping of water, those armored...things stepping out of the shadows. He had dismissed Opal’s worries about doing this in the house, thinking that she was concerned only about a mess on her immaculate floors, but realized now that something deeper troubled her: by this one act, the lighting of a candle, and the knowledge that more was to come, the day and their house itself had been transformed into something quite different, almost frightening.

“Now,” said Chaven, “I will need something to prop this mirror—ah, the cup should do nicely. And I want to put the candle here, where it will reflect without being directly in front of him. Flint, that is the boy’s name, yes? Flint, come and sit here at the table. On this bench, yes.”

The straw-haired boy rose and came forward, looking not so much apprehensive now as confused—and why not, Chert thought: it was an odd thing for parents of any kind to do, foster-folk or not, handing their child over to a strange, bespectacled fellow like this one, a man who might be small among his own kind but here was too big for any of the furniture, then letting him do the Elders knew what to the boy.

“It’s all right, son,” Chert said abruptly. Flint looked at him, then seated himself.

“Now, child, I want you to move a little so you can see nothing but the candle.” The boy tilted a bit to the side, then moved the rest of his body at the physician’s gentle direction. Chaven stood behind him.

“Perhaps you two should move to where he cannot see you,” the physician said to Chert and Opal. “Just stand behind me.”

“Will this hurt him?” Opal asked suddenly. The boy flinched.

“No, no, and again, no. No pain, nothing dangerous, only a few questions, a little...conversation.”

When Opal had taken her place, gripping Chert’s hand tighter than he could remember her doing for some time, Chaven began quietly to speak. “Now, look in the mirror, lad.” It was strange to think this same fellow, so soothing now, had been shrieking like a man caught under a rockslide only a few hours earlier. “Do you see the candle flame? You do. It is there before you, the only bright thing. Look at it. Do not watch anything else, only the flame. See how it moves? See how it glows? The darkness on either side of it is spreading, but the light only grows brighter...”

Chert couldn’t see Flint’s face, of course—the angle of the mirror didn’t permit it—but he could see the boy’s posture beginning to ease. The bony shoulders, which had been hunched as though against a cold wind, now drooped, and the head tilted forward toward the mirror-candle that Flint could see but Chert could not.

Chaven continued to talk in this soft, serious way, speaking of the candle and the darkness around it until Chert felt that he was falling into some kind of spell himself, until the pool of light on the tabletop, the candle and Flint and the mirror, all seemed to float in a shadowy void. The physician let his voice trail off into silence.

“Now,” Chaven said after a pause, “we are going to take a journey together, you and I. Fear nothing that you see because I will be with you. Nothing that you see can see you, or harm you in any way. Do not be afraid.”

Opal squeezed Chert’s hand so hard he had to wriggle his fingers free. He put his own hand on her arm to let her know he was still there, and also to try to stave off any sudden urges on her part to crush his fingers again.

“You are a boy again, just a very small boy—a baby, perhaps still in swaddling, and you can barely walk,” Chaven said. “Where are you? What do you see?”

A long pause was followed by a strange sound—Flint’s voice, but a new one Chert hadn’t yet heard, not the preternatural maturity of the nearly wild boy they had brought home, or the anxious sullenness that had come on him since his journey through the mysteries. This Flint sounded almost exactly like what Chaven had described— a very small child, only just up on his legs.

“See trees. See my mam.”

Opal got hold of his hand despite Chert’s best efforts and this time he didn’t have the heart to pull away, despite her desperate grip.

“And your father? Is he there?” “Han’t got un.”

“Ah. And what is your name?”

He waited another long moment before answering. “Boy. Mam calls me boy.”

“And do you know her name?” “Mam. Ma-ma.”

There was another spell of silence while Chaven considered. “Very well. You are a little older now. Where do you live?”

“In my house. Near the wood.” “Do you know its name, this wood?” “No. Only know I mustn’t go there.”

“And when other people speak to your mother, what do they call her?”

“Don’t. Don’t none come. Except the city-man. He comes with the money. Four silver seashells each time. She likes it when he comes.”

Chaven turned and gave Chert and Opal a look that Chert could not identify. “And what does he call her?”

“Mistress, or goodwife. Once he called her Dame Nursewife.”

Chaven sighed. “Enough, then. You are now...”

“She’s not well,” Flint said abruptly, his voice tremulous. “She said, don’t go out, and I don’t. But she’s sleeping and the clouds are coming along the ground.”

“He’s frightened!” said Opal. Chert had to hold her back, wondering even as he did so whether it was the right thing to do. “Let go of me, old man—can’t you hear him? Flint! Flint, I’m here!”

“I assure you, good Mistress Opal, he cannot hear you.” Something odd and hard had entered Chaven’s voice—a tone Chert hadn’t heard from him before. “My master Kaspar Dyelos taught this working to me and I learned it well. I assure you, he hears no voice but mine.”

“But he’s frightened!”

“Then you must be quiet and let me speak to him,” Chaven said. “Boy, listen to me.”

“The trees!” Flint said, his voice rising. “The trees are... moving. They have fingers. They’re all around the house, and the clouds are all around too!”

“You are safe,” the physician said. “You are safe, boy. Nothing you can see can hurt you.”

“I don’t want to go out. Ma said not to! But the door’s open and the clouds are in the house...!”

“Boy...”

Flint’s desperate words came out in little bursts, as though he were running hard. “Not...the...don’t want...” He was swaying on the bench now, boneless as a doll, his head rolling on his neck as though someone were shaking him by the shoulders. “The eyes are all staring! Where’s my ma? Where’s the sky?” He was weeping now. “Where’s my house?”

“Stop this!” Opal shrieked. “You’re hurting him with your horrible spell!”

“I assure you,” Chaven said, a little breathless himself, “that while he may be remembering things that frightened him, he’s in no danger...”

Flint suddenly went rigid on the bench. “He’s not in the stone anymore,” he said in a harsh whisper, throat as tight as if someone squeezed it in strong hands. “He’s not just in the stone—he’s...in...me!” The child fell silent, still stiff as a post.

“We are done now, boy,” Chaven said after a long moment of stunned silence. “Come back to your home. Come back here, to the candle, and the mirror, come back to Opal and Chert...”

Flint stood up so suddenly that he tipped the heavy bench over. It crashed onto Chaven’s foot and the physician hopped back on one leg, cursing unintelligibly, then fell over.

“No!” Flint shouted, and his voice filled the small room, rattled from the stone walls. “The queen’s heart! The queen’s heart! It’s a hole, and he’s crawling through it...!”

And then he went limp and fell to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.

“He only sleeps.” Chaven spoke gently, an unspoken apology behind the words, but Opal was having nothing of it; the look on her face could have crumbled limestone. She angrily waved Chaven and her husband from the sleeping room so she could continue dabbing the boy’s forehead with a wet cloth, as if the mere fact of their presence would compromise her healing abilities—or, as Chert thought more likely, as though the very sight of two such useless men made her feel ill.

“I do not know what happened,” Chaven said to Chert as they turned the bench right-side-up and sat on it. Chert poured them both a mug of mossbrew out of a jug. “Never before...” He frowned. “Something has been done to that boy. Behind the Shadowline, perhaps.”

Chert laughed, but it was not one of the pleasant kind. “We did not need any mirror-magic to know that.”

“Yes, yes, but there is more here than I ever thought. You heard him. He did not merely wander across the Shadowline—he was taken. Something strange was done to him there, I have no doubt.”

Chert thought of the boy as he had found him just days before, lying at the foot of the Shining Man at the very center of the Funderling Mysteries, with the little mirror clutched in his fingers. And then that terrifying fairy-woman had taken the mirror from Chert in turn. What was it all about? Was she the queen the boy was shouting about? He had said something about a hole, and Chert could see how a heart with a hole in it might describe her.

“I don’t understand,” Chaven said. “Not any of it. But I cannot help feeling that I need to.”

“Well enough.” Chert stood, wincing at the ache in his knees. “Me, I have more pressing things to worry about, like where we are going to go and how we are going to find something to eat without anyone noticing you.” “What are you talking about?” Chaven asked.

“Because not only isn’t Opal going to feed us today,” Chert told him, “I think it’s pretty plain that you and I will be a lot healthier if we’re not sitting here when she comes out.”

“Ah,” said the physician, and hastily drained his mug. “Yes, I see what you mean. Let us be going.”

16. Night Fires

After so many centuries, it was hard for Yasammez to accustom herself to true daylight again. Even this shy, cloud-blanketed winter sun seemed to blaze into her eyes from the moment it rose until it slid down behind the hills. She disliked it, but also felt a sort of wonder: had it really been like this once, walking in these southern lands, moving beneath Whitefire’s orb every day in light so bright that it turned shadows into stark black stripes? She could scarcely remember it.

She had taken the mortals’ city, but it was meaningless without the castle—worse than meaningless, because time was against her. Yasammez had prepared herself for fire and blood, for her own long-forestalled death, for meaningless victory or the finality of defeat, but she could never have prepared herself for this...waiting. The dragging stalemate was beginning to feel as though it might last until the unfamiliar sun burned out and the world went dark. She cursed the Pact of the Glass and her own foolishness for agreeing—she should never have let her hands be tied. Even if it worked, it would buy the one she loved only a few more moons of life and make the eventual loss even more heartbreaking.

As usual, the traitor was waiting for her on the steps outside the great hall she had taken for her own, a market hall or court where the mortals had once performed the meaningless routines of their short, busy lives. The one the sunlanders had called Gil-the-potboy looked up as she approached and smiled his slow, sad smile. His face, so human now she could scarcely recognize what he had once been, seemed as unmoving and opaque as dough.

“Good morning, my lady,” he said. “Will you kill me today?” “Did you have other plans, Kayyin?”

Something that the King had done to him still prevented her speaking to him mind to mind, so they had fallen back on the court speech of Qul-na-Qar, the common tongue of a hundred different kinds of folk. Yasammez, never one to waste even silent words, could not help feeling that here was another way that blind Ynnir was thwarting her, robbing her mind of rest.

Kayyin rose to follow her inside, hands hidden in his robe. Two of the guards looked at her, waiting for her to order this strange creature kept out, but she made no gesture as he trailed her through the door.

“I do not wish to speak to you today,” she warned him. “Then I will not speak, my lady.”

Their footsteps echoed through the hall. Other than two or three of her silent, dark-clad servants waiting in the gallery above, the tall, wood-timbered room was empty. Yasammez preferred it so. Her army had the whole of a city in which to nest. This place was hers, which made the presence of the traitor even more galling.

Yasammez the Porcupine curled herself into her hard, highbacked chair. Her unwelcome guest seated himself crosslegged at her feet. One of her servants from Shehen appeared as if stepping out of nowhere, and waited until Yasammez flicked her fingers in dismissal. She wanted nothing. Nothing was what she had. She had been outmaneuvered and now she was paying the price.

“I will not kill you today, Kayyin,” she said at last. “No matter how you plague me. Go away.”

“It is...interesting,” he said, as if he had not heard the last part of what she said. “That name still does not seem entirely real to me, although it was how I thought of myself for centuries. But while living in the mortal lands I truly became Gil, and although in some ways I slept through those years, it is like trying to shake off a powerful dream.”

“So first you betray me, now you would renounce your people entirely?”

He smiled, doubtless because he had lured her into conversation. Even when they had been close, when he had been allowed as near to her as Yasammez allowed anyone, he had always enjoyed the sport of making her talk. No one left alive cared about such things at all. It was one of the reasons the sight of his altered, now-alien face filled her with such disquiet. “I renounce nothing, my lady, and you know it. I have been a catspaw—first yours, then the King’s —and cannot be faulted for insufficient loyalty. I did not even remember who I truly was until one moon ago. How does that make me a traitor?”

“You know. I trusted you.”

“Trusted me, you say? You are still cruel, my lady, whatever else time has done.” He smiled, but the mockery was mixed with true sorrow. “The King was wiser than you guessed. And stronger. He made me his. He sent me to live among the mortals. And it has borne fruit, has it not? For the moment, no one is dying.”

“It would only have been sunlanders dying. We had won.” “Won what? A more glorious death for all the People? The King, apparently, has other ambitions.”

“He is a fool.”

Kayyin lifted his hand. “I do not seek to arbitrate the quarrels of the highest. Even when you lifted me up, you did not lift me far enough for that.” He peered at her from the corner of his eye, perhaps wondering whether this little gibe had shamed her, but Yasammez showed him nothing but stone, cold stone. She had been old already when Kayyin’s father had fought with her against Umadi Sva’s bastard offspring, and she had held him as he died in the agony of his burns on the Shivering Plain. If it had been in her to weep at someone’s death, she would have wept then. No, she had no shame in her—not about anything to do with Kayyin, at any rate.

After a long silence, the traitor laughed. “You know, it was strange, living among the sunlanders. They are not so different from us as you might think.”

She did not honor such filth with a reply. “I have considered it a great deal in the days since I returned to you, my lady, and I think I understand a part of the King’s thinking. Perhaps he is less willing than you to destroy the mortals because he thinks that they are not entirely to blame.”

She stared at him.

“It could even be that our king, in his labyrinthine wisdom, buttressed with the voices of his ancestors—your ancestors, too, of course—has come to believe that we may have helped to bring our woeful situation upon ourselves.”

Yasammez rose from the chair in a blind rage, her aspect abruptly juddering about her, shadow-spikes flaring. Kayyin came closer to his promised death at that moment than ever before. Instead, she raised a trembling, ice-cold finger and pointed to the door.

He stood and bowed. “Yes, my lady. You need solitude, of course, and with the burdens you bear, you deserve it. I await our next conversation.”

As he walked out the room behind him came to life with flickering shadows.

The strange, glaring sun had long since set. Yasammez sat in darkness.

A soft voice bloomed inside her head. “May I speak with you, Lady?”

She gave permission.

The far door opened. The visitor glided in like a leaf carried on a stream. She was tall, almost as tall as Yasammez herself, and slender as a young willow. Her white, hooded robe seemed to move too slowly for her progress, billowing like something underwater.

“Have things changed, Aesi’uah?” Yasammez asked. The woman stopped before the chair and made a ritual obeisance of spread hands as her strange, still face lifted to Yasammez. Her pale blue eyes gleamed like sunlight through stained glass, giving the face a little animation: but for that effulgent stare she might have been an ancient statue. “Lady, things have, but only slightly. Still, I thought you should be told.”

Someone other than Yasammez, someone other than the famously imperturbable Lady Porcupine, might have sighed. Instead she only nodded.

Her chief eremite spread her arms again, this time in the posture of bringing-the-truth. Aesi’uah was of Dreamless blood, and although that blood had been diluted by her Qar heritage, she had inherited at least one trait beside her moonstone gaze from those ancient forebears: she had an extreme disinterest in lies or politic speech, which was why she had become Yasammez’ favorite of all her eremite order. “The touch of the King’s glass has made him restless.”

“Is he awakening already?”

“No, Mistress.” The face was placid but the words were not. “But he is stirring, and something is different, although I cannot say what. He is like one fevered—restless, full of unsettling dreams.”

Yasammez would have scowled at that, but she had lost the habit of showing emotion in such a naked way. “We know nothing of his dreams.”

“Just so.” Aesi’uah bowed her head. “But his sleep seems to be that sort of sleep, and what is just as important, his restlessness makes the other sleepers uneasy, too.”

She was just about to ask the chief eremite how much longer before everything ended for good and all when another voice spoke in her head, faint as a dying wind.

Where are you...do you hear me? Do you...know me?

Of course I know you, my heart. A claw of terror gripped Yasammez, but she tried to keep it from her thoughts. How could you doubt it?

Her beloved one was gone for a moment, then returned, sighing, tattered. So...cold. So dark.

Yasammez made the sign for “audience ended.” Aesi’uah did not change expression. She spread her hands, then glided out of the chamber like a phantom ship sailing beneath the moon.

Speak to me, my heart, said Yasammez. I fear...I am going soon into...that greater sleep... No. Strength is coming to you. I have sent the glass. Where is it? I fear it will never come. The thoughts were timid, simple as a child’s. To Yasammez that was the worst torment of all.

Gyir brings it, she promised. He is young and strong and his thoughts are clear. He will find his way to you in time.

But what...what if he does not...?

Do not even think it. Yasammez put every bit of strength she could behind the thought. He will come and you will be strong again. I will bring the scorched stones of the sunlanders’ cities to make you a necklace.

But even so...even so...!

Quiet, my heart. Not even the gods themselves can unmake that which is. Rest. I will stay with you until you sleep—not the greater sleep, but only the lesser. Fear not. Gyir will come.

She held on, then, to that faint wisp of thought and gave it comfort, though it fluttered against the darkness like a dying bird, by turns terrified and exhausted. The shadows flickered again in the hall, moving and stretching all through the true night as she took her aspect upon her once more, but this time they were softer—not spikes but tendrils, not the black, reaching claws of death but the fingers of soft, nurturing hands, as Lady Porcupine struggled to soothe the only living being she had ever truly loved.

The day was cold and gray, seasoned with drifts of rain, and although the doors to Effir dan-Mozan’s front room were open to the courtyard as usual, a large brazier had been lit to provide warmth. As Briony came in the merchant was bending forward—not an easy task over his rich-man’s belly—and warming his small, beringed hands at the coals.

“Ah, Briony-zisaya,” he said. “You have not left your meal too soon? I did not want to interrupt you.”

“I was finished, Master dan...Effir. Thank you. The servant said you and Shaso wished to speak with me.”

“Yes, but Lord dan-Heza is not here yet. Please, make yourself comfortable.” He gestured to one of the chairs arranged in a semicircle around the brazier. “It is a filthy day but I cannot bear to have the doors closed.” He laughed. “I like to see the sky. When I look at it, I might be at home.” The smile soured a little. “Well, not today. We do not have skies like this in Tuan. When the rains come, we go to our temples and give thanks. Here, I should suspect it is the reverse.”

Briony smiled. “I have never seen a house like this one, so low, with the garden in the center. Do people live like this in Tuan?”

“More or less. The nicer houses, yes. Although I wish I could have shown you my family home in Dagardar. Much larger, much more finely furnished—until it was pillaged and then burned by the old autarch’s soldiers. Still, I cannot complain. The March Kingdoms have been good to an exile.”

“It is still a very nice house.”

“You are kind. What you politely do not ask is why a rich man would dwell in such an unsalubrious part of LandersPort.”

She colored a little. She had wondered just that many times. “They do seem to have better...views from higher up on the hill.”

“Ah, yes, Princess. And they are jealous of them, too. A man like me can build himself a fine house here among the other dark-skinned folk and no one is too upset. But I promise you that were I to have built it somewhere that a lord like Iomer M’Sivon or the native merchant-folk had to look on me and my home every day, I would soon find that neighborhood even less pleasant than this one.” His smile had a bit of a twist to it. “The important thing in this life is to know not just who you are but where you are.”

Shaso came in, dressed as though he had been outside, his face hidden by scarf and drooping hat. He shook the rain off his cloak and draped it across a chair. Effir danMozan did not look pleased to have water sprinkled across his carpeted floors.

Shaso took off his hat and sat down. “A ship came in from Hierosol,” he said by way of explanation. “The sailors were drinking. And talking. I was listening.”

“And what did you learn, Lord?” asked Effir, who had regained his equanimity.

“Hierosol is preparing. Several dromons—that is what they call their warships, Princess—that were awaiting repairs are being rushed through dry-dock. Drakava has also called back his captains, who were punishing reluctant taxpayers along the Kracian border. He seems to expect a siege.”

“And my father?”

Shaso shook his head. “These tidings come from sailors, Highness. They know little and care less about politics or prisoners. No news, as they say, is doubtless good news. The only concern is what will happen when Drakava realizes he will get no ransom out of Southmarch now.”

“What do you mean?” she said hotly, then realized a moment later that Shaso was right: the last thing Hendon Tolly wanted now was for King Olin to return. “Oh, those... swine! Will Ludis Drakava hurt him?”

“I cannot imagine he would.” Shaso shook his head but wouldn’t meet her eye. He was unpracticed at deception and did not do it well. “There is nothing to gain from it and much to lose—like any chance of help from the northern countries if he is attacked by Xis.”

As if sensing Briony’s doubt and fear, Effir suddenly clapped his hands. “Come, let us have something hot to drink! A chilly day like this gets into your bones if you are not careful. Tal! Ah, no, wait, he is not at home today—off on some errand of his own.” He clapped again, and at last one of his older and more doddering servitors meandered in. When the ancient had been dispatched for mulled wine, Effir rubbed his hands and began talking, perhaps making sure the conversation did not wander back onto the uncertain ground of a few moments earlier. “We brought you here because the time has come to make plans, Princess.”

“What plans?”

“Just so, just so.” Effir turned to Shaso. “My lord?” “You and I cannot stay here forever,” the old Tuani said. “You have told me so yourself, Highness.”

“Where will we go?” Her heart seemed to swell and grow lighter. “To my father?”

“No.” The scowl turned his face into a mask. “No and no, Briony. I have told you, there is little we could do for him, and it would be even worse foolishness now that the autarch seems to be considering an attack on Hierosol. What we need are allies, but there are very few people we can trust.”

“Surely there must be someone left who believes in honor.” Briony balled her fists. “By the holy Trigon, will they all simply stand by and see our throne stolen? What about Brenland, or Settland—we’ve sent help to them more times than I can count!”

“Your fellow rulers will do what suits them—and their people. I would advise you no differently myself.” He raised a hand to forestall her indignant objection. “That is not so bad as it sounds, Highness. Any alliances we can make will be more straightforward if we do not clutter them with ideas like ‘honor.’ As long as we can bring our new ally some benefit, he will remain our ally—a simple, clean arrangement. And things are not so helpless as I may have painted them earlier. We do not necessarily need an entire army to reclaim Southmarch. All we need is enough strength to prevent Tolly getting his hands on you and killing you outright or pronouncing you an impostor—we could get by with a fairly small force. Then, if we can avoid being overwhelmed immediately, we will be able to reveal you to the people of Southmarch and denounce the Tollys as murderers and usurpers. That is the first step.”

Briony frowned. “Why is that only the first step? Surely if we could engineer such a thing that would solve the whole problem.”

Shaso clicked his tongue at her. “Think, Highness! Do you believe that even if he is revealed as the worst sort of usurper, Hendon Tolly will simply surrender? No. He and his brother Caradon will know they must hold what they have stolen or die on a traitor’s gibbet. Hendon will go to ground in Southmarch like a badger in a hole and Caradon will reinforce him. Anyone trying to force Hendon out will find himself trapped between the castle walls and the army of Summerfield.”

“So we don’t need an army, but we need an army? You’re not making sense.”

“Think on it carefully, Highness,” Shaso told her.

She hated it when her elders talked that way. What it meant was, I already know the answer because I’m grown and I know things, but you need to learn how to think, and then you can be wise and wonderful like me. “I don’t know.”

“What is our true need—no more, no less?”

Effir dan-Mozan, meanwhile, was watching the exchange with bright-eyed interest, as though he were a spectator at some particularly fascinating contest. That reminded Briony of something. “What is it my father always says when he’s playing King’s Square?” she asked Shaso. “Something from one of those old philosophers, I think.”

“Ah, yes. ‘Errors of caution are more likely to be considered at leisure than errors of boldness—but less likely to be considered after a victory.’ In other words, if you are too careful, you are more likely to live, but less likely to win. It is one of his favorite epigrams—and one of the reasons I admire him.”

“It is?” She was so pleased to hear someone, especially Shaso, talk about her father as a living person instead of as though he were already dead that she forgave the old man his lecturing ways.

“Yes. He is one of the most thoughtful men I have ever met, but he is not afraid to move swiftly and boldly when necessary—to take risks. It is how he beat me at Hierosol, you know.” “Tell me.”

“Not now. We need to consider our present situation, not review ancient battles.” Was that the hint of a smile? “Now think. What do we truly need?”

“To do something bold, I suppose. To get our castle back.”

“Yes, and you will only get it with the Tollys out, or dead. But as I said, we do not necessarily need an army. We can raise that from the March Kingdoms and even within the walls of Southmarch itself, if we can keep you alive long enough.”

“So we need an ally with at least a small force of soldiers.” She thought. “But who? You’ve said we don’t know who to trust.”

“We must make trust—we must find an ally who wants to bargain with us. And we must do something bold to find that ally. Hendon has no doubt filled the roads to Brenland and Settland with spies and assassins. I do not doubt he has people in the courts of all the March Kingdoms as well, probably under the guise of being emissaries from the court of the infant prince.”

“I’m going to kill him.”

“Beware your own anger, Highness. But I think we must make a move Hendon does not suspect. As I said, I doubt any of your fellow rulers will do something for you out of the good of their hearts.

“Syan is our best hope, I think. To begin with, King Enander has no love for Summerfield Court , going back to the days when Lindon Tolly, the old duke, was trying to marry his sister to your father. When your father chose your mother instead, Lindon was so determined to build a link to the throne of the March Kingdoms that he snubbed one of King Enander’s own nephews and married his sister Ethna to your father’s younger brother, Hardis...”

Briony shook her head. “Gods give us strength, you remember more of this family lore than I do.”

Shaso gave her a stern look. “This is not ‘family lore,’ as you know very well—this is the stuff of alliances...and betrayals.” He frowned, thinking. “In any case, Enander of Syan might be sympathetic to your cause—he has never quite forgiven the Tollys—but he will exact a price.”

“A price? What sort of price? By the gods, does the Treaty of Coldgray Moor mean nothing? Anglin saved them all, and Syan and the others promised they would always come to our aid.” She bit back several unladylike words: Shaso had heard her worst while training her, but she felt shy about cursing in front of Effir dan-Mozan. “Besides, until we take Southmarch back we have nothing to give these greedy people...”

“Enander of Syan is not particularly greedy, but that treaty is centuries old, however much it is revered in the March Kingdoms. It could be he will settle for gold when we have your throne back, but I believe he also has a marriageable son, who is said to be a goodly man...”

“So I must sell myself to get my throne back?” She felt so hot in the face that she pushed herself back from the brazier. “I might as well marry Ludis Drakava!”

“I think you would find the Syannese prince a much more pleasant husband, but let us hope there is some other way.” Shaso frowned, then nodded. “In fact, if you will excuse us, Highness, perhaps Effir and I can begin inquiries in Syan. Whatever we do, it should be soon.”

Briony stood, angry and miserable but struggling not to show it. “I will marry to save my family’s throne, of course... if it is the only way.”

“I understand, Highness.” Shaso looked at her with what could almost pass for fatherly fondness, if she had not known the old man to avoid it like an itching rash. “I will not sell your freedom if I can avoid it, having fought so hard in my life to keep my own.”

Sad and confused, Briony had more than her usual small share of the sweet wine that Idite and the others liked so much. As a result, when she woke in the dark her head was heavy and it took long moments to make sense of where she was, much less what was going on.

One of the younger girls, wrapped head to toe in a blanket so that she looked like a desert nomad, was standing in the doorway.

“Mistress Idite, there are men at the gate, demanding to be let in!” she cried. “Your husband the Dan-Mozan, he is arguing with them, but they say they will break it down if he does not let them in!”

“By the Great Mother, who are they? Robbers?” Idite, although obviously frightened, was keeping her voice almost as level as she did during their evenings of storytelling.

The girl in the doorway swayed. “They say they are Baron Iomer’s men. They say we are harboring a dangerous fugitive!”

Briony, who had just clambered out of bed, went wobbly in the knees and almost tumbled to the floor. A fugitive—who else could that be but herself? And Shaso, too, she remembered. He would still be called a murderer.

“Dress, girls—all of you.” Idite raised her voice in an attempt to quiet the frightened murmuring. “We must be prepared for trouble, and at the very least we must be decently dressed if strangers burst in.”

Briony was not so much concerned with being decent as being able to defend herself. She hesitated for only a moment before pulling on the loose tunic and breeches borrowed from Effir’s nephew, then grabbed the one pair of practical shoes Idite had given her, leather slippers that would at least allow her to run or fight if she had to. She tucked her Yisti knives into the cloth belt of the tunic and then pulled her robe around herself to hide the male clothing and the knives, giving herself at least a chance to blend in with the other women.

As the sound of raised, angry voices came echoing through the house, Briony saw that Idite intended to keep the women hidden in the hopes that everything would be happily resolved without them ever having to come into contact with the baron’s men. Briony was not willing to passively await her doom. The women’s chambers had few exits, and if things turned bad she would be trapped like a rat in a barrel.

She pushed past young Fanu, who grabbed ineffectually at her arm as Briony stepped out into the corridor.

“Come back!” Idite shouted. “Br...Lady!”

As she ran toward the front of the hadar, Briony silently thanked Idite for having the good sense not to call out her name. The hallways were full of clamorous voices and flickering light, and for a dizzying moment it was as though she had stumbled into some eddy of time, as if she had circled back to the terrible night in the residence when Kendrick had been murdered.

She staggered a little as she reached the main chamber, stopping to steady herself on the doorframe. The smoke was thick here and the voices louder, men’s harsh voices arguing. She peered into the weirdly crowded chamber and saw at least a dozen men in armor were shoving and shouting at perhaps half that number of Effir dan-Mozan’s robed servants, bellowing at them as though they could force the men to understand an unfamiliar language by sheer force. Several robed bodies already lay on the floor at the soldiers’ feet.

As Briony stared in horror, trying to see if one of them was Shaso, an armor-clad man kicked over a brazier, scattering burning coals everywhere. The barefooted servants shrieked and capered to avoid them even as they cringed from the soldiers’ weapons.

“If you won’t talk,” shouted one bearded soldier, “we’ll burn out this entire nest of traitors!” He stooped and lifted a torch that had been smoldering on an expensive carpet and held it to one of the wall-hangings. The servants moaned and wailed as the flames shimmered up the ancient hanging and began licking at the wooden rafters.

Briony was digging beneath her robe for her knife, although she had no idea what she could do, when someone grabbed the belt of her robe and yanked her away from the door, back into the corridor.

Her heart plunged—trapped! Caught without even a weapon ready to fight back! But it was not another of the baron’s soldiers.

“What are you doing?” hissed Effir’s nephew Talibo. “I have looked everywhere for you! Why did you leave the women’s quarters?” He grabbed at her arm before she could answer and began to drag her away down the hallway toward the back of the house.

“Let go of me! Didn’t you see—they’re killing the servants!”

“That is what servants are for, stupid woman!” The hall was rapidly filling with smoke; after only a few steps he doubled up coughing, but before she could pull away he recovered his breath and began tugging at her again.

“No!” She managed to wrench her arm free. “I have to find Shaso!”

“You fool, who do you think sent me?” Tal’s face was so suffused with both rage and fear that it looked as though he might burst into tears or simply rip into pieces. “The house is full of soldiers. He wants me to hide you.”

“Where is he?” She hesitated, but the shrieks of unarmed men being slaughtered like barnyard animals behind her were terrifying.

“He will come to you, I am sure—hurry! The soldiers must not find you!”

She allowed herself to be drawn away up the corridor. Almost as terrifying as the servants’ screams was the low, hungry roar of the spreading fire.

She pulled away from him again as they reached the part of the residence across the garden from the main chamber. “What of your aunt and the other women?”

“The servants will lead them out! Curse you, girl, do you never do what you are told? Shaso is waiting for you!” He stepped behind her and grabbed both her elbows, shoving her forward at an awkward stumble, another dozen steps down the corridor and then out a door into the open yard at the back of the house, site of the donkey stables, the vegetable garden, and the kitchen midden. He pushed her toward the stable and had almost forced her through the doorway when she threw out her arms and caught herself. She stepped to the side so the front wall and not the open door was behind her, and put her hand into her robe.

“What are you doing?” Talibo was almost screaming, his handsome, slightly childish face as exaggerated as a festival mask. Briony could see flames now on top of the house, greedily at work in the roof. On the far side of Effir dan-Mozan’s walls, torches and lanterns were being lit in the surrounding houses as the neighborhood woke up to the terror in their midst.

“You said Shaso was waiting for me. But first you said he would come to meet me. Where is he? I think you are lying.”

He looked at her with a strange, wounded fury, as though she had gone out of her way to spoil some pleasant surprise he had planned for her. “Ah? Do you think so?”

“Yes, I do. I think...” But she did not finish because Talibo put both hands on her breasts and shoved her, bouncing her off the wall and into the doorway, then pushed her again, sending her stumbling backward to fall down in the mire of the stable.

“Close your mouth, whore!” he shouted. “Do what you are told! I will be back!”

But even as he scrambled for the door, Briony was sliding across the damp ground toward him. She grabbed at his leg and pulled herself upright, and when he turned, she shoved herself against him, forcing him back against the rough wattle of the stable wall, and pressed the curved blade of the Yisti knife against his throat. Close enough to kiss, Shaso had taught her, close enough to kill.

“You will never touch me again, do you hear?” she breathed into his face. “And you will tell me everything Shaso said to you, everything that has happened and that you saw. If you lie I will slash your throat and leave you to bleed to death right here in the shit and the mud.”

Tal’s long-lashed eyes widened. He had gone pale, she could see that even in the dim light of the single candle that someone had lit here in the stable—in preparation for her arrival?—and when he sagged Briony let her own muscles go a little slack. Where was Shaso? Was Effir’s nephew really lying? How could they escape with soldiers everywhere—and how had the soldiers found out...?

Talibo’s hand was open, but his sudden blow to her face was still so hard and so unexpected that Briony flew backward, her knife spinning away into the darkness. For a moment she could do nothing but gasp in helpless anger and gurgle as blood filled her mouth. She spat, and spat again, but every drop in her body seemed to be streaming from her nose and lips. She scrabbled for the lost knife as the merchant’s nephew approached but it was beyond her reach, beyond her sight—lost, just as she was... “Bitch,” he snarled. “She-demon. Put a knife to my throat. I should...I will...” He spat at her feet. “You will spend a month begging me to forgive you for that—a year!”

She tried to say something, but it felt as though her jaw had been broken and she could only murmur and spit blood again. She slid her hand down her leg and reached into her boot, but the sheath was empty—the other dagger had fallen out somewhere during the scuffle. Her gut went cold. She had no weapon.

“Shaso, your mighty Shaso, he is dead,” said Talibo. “I saw the soldiers kill him—surrounded him like a wild pig, spearing, spearing. I told them where to find him, of course.”

She coughed, rubbed at her broken mouth with the back of her hand. “Y-You...?”

“And my uncle, too. Him I did myself. He will never again call me names—spoiled, lazy. Ha! He will rot in the shadows of the land of the dead and I will be the master here. My ships, my merchants, my house...!”

“You betrayed...?” It hurt to speak, but the thought of Shaso murdered blazed in her like a fire, like one of the coals that had bounced across Effir dan-Mozan’s chamber floor only moments ago, lifetimes ago. It couldn’t be true—the gods could not be so cruel! “Betrayed us...all?”

“Not you, bitch, although now I wish I had. But I will keep you for my own and you will learn to treat me with respect.” Panting, he took a few steps toward her and leaned over, keeping well out of reach, even though she had lost the curved blade. Briony took a certain grim pleasure in that, anyway: he craved respect, but it was he, Talibo the traitor, who had learned to respect her. His face was ridiculously young for the emotions that played across it in the candlelight, greed and lust and exultation in his own cruelty. “And if you had been a proper woman you would have been safe here until it was all over. Now, I will have to break you like a horse. I will teach you to behave...!”

Briony hooked his ankle with her foot, sending him crashing to the ground. Instead of running away, she threw herself onto him even as he thrashed on the slippery ground, struggling to get his feet under him. She knocked him back but he curled his hands around her throat. Something hard was pressing painfully into her back, but she scarcely noticed it. The merchant’s nephew was slender but strong —stronger than she was—and within instants, as his fingers tightened, the light of the single candle began to waver, then to burst into flowers of radiance like the fireworks that had scorched the sky over Southmarch to celebrate her father’s marriage to Anissa. Her hand found the thing that was digging into her back.

Talibo’s grip was so powerful that it did not slacken immediately even after she had pulled the second, smaller Yisti dagger out from underneath her and rammed it up under his jaw with all her might. Talibo straightened, shuddering and wriggling like an eel in the bottom of a fisherman’s boat, so that for a moment it seemed his death throes might break her in half, then at last his hands fell away.

She lay where she was for a long time, fighting for breath, coughing and sputtering. When at last her throat seemed to be open again she stood up. Swaying, legs trembling, she bent over the merchant’s nephew cautiously, in case he might be shamming, but he was dead: he did not even twitch when she pulled the blade out of his throat, freeing a gush of dark blood. She spat on his handsome, youthful face—a gob that was red with her own blood—and then turned and went to look for her other knife.

When she emerged from the stable Effir dan-Mozan’s entire house was in flames. Briony stared for long empty moments, as if she had turned to stone, then she limped across the open yard into the shadows by the wall. She found a place she could mount and climbed with quivering, exhausted muscles over the top, then she let herself drop into the cool, stinking darkness of a refuse heap.

When morning came, Briony found a bucket of icy water and did her best to wash the blood from her throbbing, aching face, then pulled her robe tight around her boy’s clothes—the clothes of the boy whom she had killed, she reflected with little emotion. She dragged her hood down low and joined the crowd that had gathered outside the smoldering remains of Effir dan Mozan’s house. Some of the baron’s soldiers were still standing guard over the ruins, so she did not dare go too close, and many of the crowd spoke Xandian languages, since this was the poorest part of Landers Port, but she heard enough to learn that the women of the house, at least, had managed to escape, and were sheltering with one of the other well-known Tuani families. She thought briefly of going to Idite, but knew it was a foolish idea: they had lost everything because of her already—why put them in danger again? Nobody seemed to know for certain exactly what had happened, but many had heard that some important criminal had been captured or killed, that Dan-Mozan had been harboring him and had died trying to defend his secret.

Only one male member of the household had lived to escape. For a moment, hearing that, Briony felt a rush of hope, but then someone pointed out the survivor—a small, bowed old servant that she recognized but whose name she did not remember. He stood apart from the others, staring at the smoking, blackened timbers of what had been his home. Alone in the crowd, he looked the way Briony imagined she did beneath her hood, shocked, confused, empty.

There was nothing here for her anymore except danger and quite possibly death. The baron’s men did not seem to have tried very hard to take Shaso alive, and he had been nowhere near as dangerous to the Tollys as she was. Briony felt certain that Hendon Tolly’s hand was somewhere in all this—why else would Iomer, a man who cared little for politics, have struck in such a swift and deadly way?

She screwed up her courage and joined the crowd of people walking out the city gates for the day and stared at the ground as she walked, meeting no one’s eye. It seemed to work: she was not challenged, and within an hour she was alone on the cliff road below Landers Port. Briony walked until she reached a place where the woods were thick beside the road, then staggered off into the trees. She found a hidden spot surrounded by undergrowth and curled herself up in the wet leaves at the base of a mostly naked oak, well out of sight of the road, and then wept until she fell asleep.

17. Bastard Gods

Ferras Vansen and his companions were not the beak-faced Longskulls’ only prisoners, as they discovered when they reached the creatures’ camp after an exhausting trudge through the dark woods. The Longskulls seemed almost uninterested in them, despite the dozen or so of their number Vansen and the others had killed, most of them victims of the Storm Lantern’s blade. If a prisoner strayed out of the line one of the snouted warders honked at him or even jabbed at exposed skin with a sharpened stick, but otherwise left them alone.

Despite being our ally, Gyir has shown more hatred toward me and the other mortals than these things do toward us, Vansen thought. Why did they take us if they care so little about us?

He quietly asked Barrick about it. The prince asked Gyir and passed on his words: “The Longskulls are more like animals than people, as we would see it. They are doing what they are trained to do, no more. If we hurt one it may well hurt us in return, but otherwise they are taught only to bring us back to their master.” Their master was Jikuyin, the one the raven had called Jack Chain—a disturbing name then, even more ominous now.

“What does this Chain want with us?”

Barrick paused, listening again, then shrugged. Gyir’s eyes were red slits. “He says we will not know until they bring us to him,” Barrick said. “But we will not like it.”

The Longskulls’ hunting camp looked like something out of an ancient Hierosoline temple-carving—the antechamber of the underworld, perhaps, or the midden heap of the gods. Certainly there seemed to be at least one of every misshapen creature Ferras Vansen could have imagined in his wildest night-terrors—squint-eyed, sharp-toothed goblins; apish Followers; and even tiny, misshapen men called Drows that looked like ill-made Funderlings. There was also an entire menagerie of animal-headed creatures with disturbingly manlike bodies, things that crawled and things that stood upright, even some that crouched in the shadows singing sad songs and weeping what looked to be tears of blood. Vansen could not help shivering, as much to see the misery of his fellow prisoners as their strangeness. Many had their arms or legs shackled, some their wings cruelly tied, a few with no more restraint than a leather sack over their heads, as though nothing else was needed to keep them from escaping.

“Perin’s great hammer!” he whispered hoarsely. “What are all these horrors?”

“Shadlowlanders,” Barrick told him, then, after cocking his head toward Gyir for a moment, “Slaves.”

“Slaves to what? Who is this Jack Chain?”

Gyir, who could understand Vansen even though he could not speak to him directly, bleakly spread his long-fingered hands as if trying to demonstrate something of improbable size and power, but then shook his head and let his hands drop.

“A god, he calls him,” said the prince. “No, a god’s bastard. A bastard god.” Barrick let his head droop. “I do not know —I can’t remember everything he said. I’m tired.”

They were shoved off to a place in the center of the camp by themselves, for which Vansen was as grateful as he could be under the circumstances, and where they huddled under a sky the color of wet stone. Vansen and Barrick sat close to each other on the damp, leaf-carpeted ground, for the warmth and—at least in Vansen’s case—the human companionship. The weird army of prisoners that surrounded them, dozens and dozens all told, seemed strangely quiet: only an occasional bleating noise or a spatter of unfamiliar, clicking speech broke the silence. Vansen could not help noticing that they behaved like animals who sensed that the hour for slaughter had come round.

He leaned close to the prince’s ear. “We must escape, Highness. And when we do, we must try to make our way back to mortal men’s country again. If we stay any longer in this never-ending evening, surrounded by godless things like these, we shall go mad.”

Barrick sighed. “You shall, perhaps. I think I went mad a long time ago, Captain.”

“Don’t say such things, Highness...”

“Please!” The prince turned on him, his weariness forgotten for a moment. “Spare me these...pleasant little thoughts, Captain. ‘Should not...’—as though I might bring something bad down on myself. Look at me, Vansen! Why do you think I am here? Why do you think I came with the army in the first place? Because there is a canker in my brain and it is eating me alive!”

“What...what do you mean?”

“Never mind. It is not your fault. I could have wished you would have made a busybody of yourself somewhere else, though.” Barrick lifted his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around them.

“Do you know why I followed you, Highness?” The bleak surroundings seemed to be getting into Vansen’s blood and his thoughts like a cold fog. Soon I shall be as mournful and mad as this prince. “Because your sister asked me—no, begged me to do so. She begged me to keep you safe.”

Now Barrick showed fire again. “What, does she think I am helpless? A child?”

“No. She loves you, Prince Barrick, whether you love yourself or not.” He swallowed. “And you are all she has left, I suppose.”

“What do you know of it—a mere soldier?” Barrick looked as though he wanted to hit him, despite the shackles on his arms. Gyir, sitting a few paces away, turned to watch them.

“Nothing, Highness. I know nothing of what it is like to be a prince, or to suffer because of it. But I do know what it is like to lose a father and others of my blood. Of five other children in our family, I have only two sisters left now, and my mother and father both are years in the grave. I have lost friends among the guard as well, one of them swallowed by a demon-beast in these lands the first time I came here. I know enough about it to say that sometimes carelessness with your own life is selfishness.”

Barrick seemed startled now, both angry and darkly amused. “Are you calling me selfish?”

“At your age, Highness, you would be odd if you were not. But I saw your sister before we rode out, saw her face as she begged me to keep you safe and told me what it would mean to her if she lost you too. You call me ‘a mere soldier,’ Prince Barrick, but I would be the lowest sort of villain indeed if I did not urge you to take care of yourself, if only for her sake. That is no burden, from where I see it—it is a mighty and honorable charge.”

Barrick was silent for a long moment, anger and amusement both gone, absorbed into one of his inscrutable, cold-faced stares. “You care for her,” he said suddenly. “Don’t you, Vansen? Tell me the truth.”

Ferras realized that even here in the dark heart of the Twilight Lands, on the way to what was almost certain death, he was blushing. “Of course I do, Highness. She is... you are both my sovereigns.”

“Back home I could have you whipped for avoiding my question like that, Vansen. If I asked you whether we were being invaded, would you say, “Well, we’ll have more guests than we usually do at this time of the year?”

Vansen gaped, then laughed despite himself, something he had not done for so long that it was almost painful. Gyir twisted his featureless face in a way that might almost have been a frown, then turned away from them. “But, Highness, even...even if it were so, how could I speak of such a thing? Your sister!” He felt his own face grow stern. “But I can tell you this—I would give my life for her without hesitation.”

“Ah.” Barrick looked up. “They are going to feed us, it seems.”

“Pardon?”

The prince gestured with his good arm. “See, they are carrying around some kind of bucket. I’m sure it will be something rare and splendid.” He scowled and suddenly seemed little more than a youth of fourteen or fifteen summers again. “You realize, of course, that there isn’t a chance in the world it will ever come to anything?”

“What?”

“Stop pretending to be stupid, Captain. You know what I mean.”

Vansen took a breath. “Of course I do.”

“You like lost causes, don’t you? And thankless favors? I saw you help that disgusting bird to escape, as well.” Barrick smiled at him. It was quite nearly kind. “I see I’m not the only one who has learned to live with hopelessness. It makes an unsatisfying fare, doesn’t it? But after a while, you begin to take a sort of pride in it.” He looked up again. “And speaking of unsatisfying fare, here come our hosts.”

Two Longskulls stood over them, appearing to Vansen like nothing so much as gigantic grasshoppers, although there was something weirdly doglike about them, too. Their legs were similar to men’s, but the back of the foot and the heel were long and did not touch the ground, so that they perched on the front of their feet like upright rats. The eyes sunk deep in their loaf-shaped, bony heads did not exactly glisten with intelligence, but it was obvious they were not mere beasts, either. One made a little honking, gabbling noise and ladled something out of the bucket the other was holding. It pointed at Vansen’s hands, then honked again.

I am living in a world of firelight tales, Vansen thought suddenly, remembering his father’s old sea stories and his mother’s accounts of the fairies that lived in the hills. We are captives in some unhappy child’s dream.

He held out his arms, showing the guards his shackles. “I cannot hold anything,” he said. The Longskull merely turned the ladle upside down and let the mass of cold pottage drop into his hands. It did the same for Barrick, then moved on to the next group.

In the end, he found he could eat only by bracing the heavy shackles on the ground, then crouching over his own outstretched hands, lapping up the tasteless vegetable pulp like a dog eating from a bowl.

When all the prisoners had been fed the watery pottage, the Longskull guards returned to the fire to eat their own food, which had been roasting on spits. Vansen could not see what they ate, but when the prisoners were hauled to their feet a short time later and set to marching again, he noticed the Longskulls hanging some empty shackles back on the massive wagon that held the slavers’ simple belongings, and where they swung, clinking, as the wagon began to roll.

If Barrick had thought the Twilight Lands oppressive before, every miserable step of the forced march now seemed to take him into deeper and deeper gloom. It wasn’t simply that the pall of smoke they thought they had escaped grew thicker above them with every step, turning the land dark as midnight and making breathing a misery, or even the dull horror of their predicament. No something even beyond these things was afflicting him, although Barrick could not say exactly what it was. Every step they took, even when they reached an old road and the going became easier, seemed to plunge them deeper into a queer malevolence he could feel in his very bones.

He asked Gyir about it. The fairy-warrior, who seemed almost as despondent as his companions, said, Yes, I feel it, even despite the blindness my wounds have caused, but I do not know what causes it. Jikuyin is the source of some of it—but not all.

Barrick was struck by a thought. Will this blindness of yours get better? Will the illness or whatever it is leave you?

I do not know. It has never before happened to me. Gyir made a sign with his long, graceful fingers that Barrick did not recognize. In any case, I truthfully do not think we will live long enough to find out.

Why are we prisoners? Is Jikuyin at war with your king? Only in that he does not bow to him. Only in that Jikuyin is old and cruel and our king is less cruel. But we are prisoners, I think, only because we were captured. Look at those around us... He gestured to the slow-stepping band of prisoners on either side and stretching before and behind them farther than Barrick could throw a stone. We may be rare things here, Gyir told him in his wordless way, but these others are as common as the trees and stones. No, we are all being taken to the same place, but the more I consider, the less I think it is because we were singled out. He opened his eyes wide, something Barrick had come to recognize as a sign of determination. But I think these creatures’ master will take notice of us when he sees us. If nothing else, he will wonder what mortals are doing again in his lands.

Again? I have never heard of him.

Jikuyin first made this place his own long, long before mortals roamed this country and built Northmarch, but he was injured in a great battle, and so after the Years of Blood he slept for a long time, healing his wounds. His name was lost to most memories, except for a few old stories. We drove the mortals out of Northmarch before he returned. That was only a very short time ago by our count. After they had fled we called down the Mantle to keep your kind away thereafter, banishing them from these lands for good and all.

Why did you do that?

Why? Because you would have come creeping back into our country from all sides as you did before, like maggots! Gyir narrowed his eyes, making crimson slits. You had already killed most of us and stolen our ancient lands! Not me, Barrick told him. My kind, yes. But not me.

Gyir stared, then turned away. Your pardon. I forgot to whom I spoke.

The procession was just emerging from between two hills and into a shallow valley and a great stony shadow across the road—an immense, ruined gate.

“By The Holy Book of the Trigon!” Barrick breathed. No oaths like that—not here, Gyir warned him sharply. But...what is this?

The column of prisoners had shuffled to a weary halt. Those who still had the strength stared up at two massive pillars which flanked the road, lumps of vine-netted gray stone that despite being broken still loomed taller than the trees. Even the smaller lintel that stretched above their heads was as long as a tithing barn. Huge, overgrown walls, half standing, half tumbled, hemmed the crumbling gate like the wings of some god’s headdress.

It is worse than I feared. The fairy’s thoughts were suddenly faint as a superstitious whisper, hard for Barrick to grasp.

Jikuyin has left his lair in Northmarch and made himself a new home...in Greatdeeps itself. This is its outer gate.

“What is this new misery?” Ferras Vansen was clearly feeling the strangeness of the place too, not just its size and immense age but even the hidden something that pressed ever more intrusively into Barrick’s mind like cold, heavy fingers.

“Gyir says it was something called Greatdeeps, or at least the first gate.”

“Greatdeeps?” Vansen frowned. “I think I know that name. From when I was a child...”

The Longskulls came hissing angrily down the line, poking and prodding, and at last even the most reluctant prisoners let themselves be driven under the massive lintel. It was carved with strange, inhuman faces that looked down on them as they passed—some with too few eyes, some with too many, none of them pleasant to see.

What lay beyond was equally disturbing. The wide, brokencobbled road dipped down into a valley that lay almost hidden beneath a thick cloud of smoky fog as it wound between two rows of huge stone sculptures. Some of the stonework portrayed ordinary things cast in giant size, like anvils big as houses or hammers and other tools that a dozen mortals together could never have lifted. Other shapes were not quite so recognizable, queer representations of machinery Barrick had never seen and the uses of which he could not even guess. All the statues were old, cracked by wind and rain and the work of creepers and other plants. Many had fallen and been partially buried by dirt and leaves, so that the impression was that monstrous citizens who had once dwelled here had simply packed up one night and left, allowing the mighty road to fall to ruin after they were gone.

Despite the apparent emptiness, or perhaps because of it, Barrick’s sense of oppression grew as they trudged forward. Even the Longskull guards grew quiet, their gabbling little more than a murmur as they moved up and down the line of prisoners, goading them forward.

What is this place? he asked Gyir. What is Greatdeeps?

The place where the gods first broke the earth, searching... A tennight before this Barrick had not quite believed in the gods. Now, in a place like this, the mere word set his heart racing, brought clammy sweat to his skin. Searching for what?

Gyir shook his head. The weight that Barrick felt, the despairing thickness that seemed to lie on him like a net made of lead, seemed to weigh on the fairy even more heavily. Gyir’s head was bowed, his back bent. He walked like a man approaching the gallows, struggling to get the smoky air in and out of his lungs. The fairy’s thoughts were heavy, too, like stones—it made Barrick weary just to receive them. I cannot...speak to you now, Gyir told him. I must understand what all this means, why...I must think... Barrick turned to Ferras Vansen. “You said you thought you remembered, Captain. Do you know anything of this Greatdeeps?”

“A memory, and only a faint one. Something—a story we children told to frighten each other when I was young, I think...” He frowned miserably. “I cannot summon it. What does the fairy say?”

Barrick glanced quickly at the fairy, then back to Vansen.

“Something about the gods breaking the earth here, but I can make little sense of it and he won’t say more.” The prince rubbed at his face as if he could scour away the discomfort. “But it is a bad place. Can you feel it?”

Vansen nodded. “A heaviness, as if the air was poisoned —and by more than smoke. No, not poisoned, but bad, somehow, as you say—thick and unpleasant. It makes my heart quail, Highness, to speak the truth.”

“I’m glad it’s not just me,” Barrick said. “Or perhaps I’m not. What will happen to us? Where do you think we’re being taken?”

“We shall find that out sooner than we want to, I think. What we should consider instead is how we might get away.”

Barrick held up the shackles, which although not too large for an ordinary person his size, were cruelly heavy on his bad arm. “Do you have a chisel? If so, I think we’d have something to talk about.”

“They haven’t tied our feet, Highness,” the soldier said. “We can run, and worry about freeing our arms later.”

“Really? Just look at them.” Barrick gestured to the nearest pair of Longskulls pacing the line with their strange, springy gait. “I don’t think we’ll outrun those, even without our legs shackled.”

“Still, The Book of the Trigon bids us to live in hope, Prince Barrick.” Vansen looked curiously solemn as he said it—or maybe it was not so curious, under the circumstances. “Pray to the blessed oniri to speak for us in heaven—the gods may yet find a way to save us.”

“Speaking frankly,” Barrick said, “just at the moment, it is the gods themselves I fear most.”

The prince seemed a little more like his ordinary self again, which was the only hopeful thing Vansen had seen all day. Perhaps it was because Gyir the Storm Lantern had almost stopped talking to him.

Judging by the usual run of his luck and mine, he’ll come back to himself just in time to be executed by our captors, Vansen thought with bleak amusement. At least I’ll probably be killed, too. Anything would be better than to face Barrick’s sister with news of her brother’s death.

Where is she? he suddenly wondered. In the castle, perhaps under siege? There’s no chance that Gyir’s people would have beaten us so badly and then just stopped in the fields outside the city... He felt a moment of terror, worse than anything he had felt for himself, at the idea of Princess Briony being threatened by monstrous creatures like these, perhaps a prisoner herself. He could not let the thought run free in his head—it was too horrible.

Perhaps she fled, along with her advisers. Wherever she is, Perin grant she is safe. And who was it the princess herself had sworn by so often? Zoria—Perin’s merciful daughter. He had never thought to pray to the virgin deity before, but now he did his best to summon the memory of her kind, pale face. Yes, blessed Zoria, put your hand on her and keep her from harm.

Does Briony ever think of us? Of course, she must think of her brother all the time—but does she think of me at all? Does she even remember my name?

He forced such foolishness away. If there was anything more pitiable than mooning after an unobtainable princess, a young woman as high above him as the gods were above humanity, it was mooning while they were captives in the Twilight Lands, being marched toward the Three Brothers only knew what doom.

You think too much, Ferras Vansen. That’s what old Murroy told you, and he was right.

The sprawling avenue of broken stones and gigantic leaning statues had become even more desolate as they marched on, most of the plinths empty, the stones themselves few and far between, as though scavengers had carried them away. Even the trees had been cleared here; the valley floor, sloping up on either side, seemed as stubbly as the face of an unshaved corpse.

Vansen was also becoming more and more aware of a smell beyond that of the smoke, a strong, sulphurous odor that seemed to lie over the valley like a fog. The worst of it came from holes in the ground on either side of the road, and Vansen could not help wondering what could be under the ground that stank so badly.

“Mines,” said Barrick when Vansen voiced his question out loud. “Gyir said these are the first mines his people built, a long time ago, although the digging here began even earlier. They go down into the ground for miles.” “What did they mine here?”

“That’s all I know.” Barrick gestured with his good arm toward the faceless fairy. Gyir’s eyes were almost closed, as though he slept on his feet. “He’s still not talking.”

The road, which Vansen thought must once have been the path of an ancient streambed, began to rise as the valley floor rose. Even as they climbed the smoke remained thick in the air, turning the cheerless vista of tree stumps and broken stones into something even more dispiriting, if such was possible. They were nearing the far end of the valley, and even though the road continued to mount upward, it became clear that unless it ended in a ladder half a mile tall it would never climb high enough to take them over the jagged face of rock that hemmed the valley.

Barrick looked up at the looming peak in dismay. “There’s nowhere to go. Perhaps we’re not to be slaves after all. Perhaps they’re just going to kill us here.”

“It seems a long way to march us simply to do that, Highness,” Vansen reassured him. “Likely there is some secret pass ahead—a path through the heights.” But he also wondered, and fear began to poison him again. Soon they would be pressed against the stony cliffs with nowhere to go, the Longskulls hemming them in with sharp spears... If others had not been trudging through the growing dark ahead of him, Vansen would have tripped on the first impossibly wide, high step. As the prisoners in front clambered up, Vansen followed, turning to help the prince climb despite Barrick’s fiercely resentful looks. One massive step ran into the next, one wearying climb after another.

“It’s...a...cursed...staircase,” Barrick said, fighting for breath. They had been marching without a rest for hours, and each step was a formidable obstacle. “Like the one in front of the great temple back home—but monstrously big.” He fell silent except for his ragged breathing as he labored up two more steps behind Vansen. All around him the other prisoners were struggling at least as badly—some were simply too short to get up without help. The Longskulls clambered in and out of the procession, jabbing with their sticks and making irritated honking noises. “Gyir says that this is it,” Barrick reported at last.

“This is what, exactly?”

“Greatdeeps. The entrance to the ancient mine.” Barrick closed his eyes for a moment, listening to that silent voice. “He says we must hold hands, because to get separated here might be worse than death.”

“A cheery thought,” said Vansen as lightly as he could, but his own heart was like a stone. They continued up the great staircase, which seemed wider than the Lantern Broad in Tessis. At the top yawned a great doorway, high as a many-storied house. Compared to the twilight in the valley and on the stairs, its interior was dark as night.

“There will be a fight here, mark my words,” Vansen whispered to Barrick. It felt strangely natural to hold the boy’s hand, as though this topsy-turvy land had given him back one of his younger brothers. “No creature would let itself be driven into that without a struggle.”

But there was no struggle, or at least not much of one. As the prisoners bunched in the doorway, some moaning and slumping to the ground, some actively trying to turn back, the Longskulls charged. They had been prepared, and now they leaped up the stairs and onto the landing as a unified force, shoving, kicking, poking, and even biting until all those who could do so clambered to their feet and staggered through the door. Many were trampled, and as Vansen let himself and Barrick be drawn into the darkness, he wondered if in the long run those lying bloody and crushed on the top step might not be the lucky ones.

“Should we have tried to get away?” Barrick whispered. “Before they shoved us in here?”

“No, not unless your Gyir says we must. We do not know what is inside, but we might find a better chance for escape later on.” Vansen wished he believed that himself.

They allowed themselves to be dragged along in the river of captive creatures, out of the initial darkness into sloping, timbered tunnels lit with torches, then down, down into the heart of the mountain.

He did not notice it at first, but after a short time of trudging through the dank, hot corridors Vansen began to realize that some of the other prisoners were disappearing. The group in which they traveled was perhaps half the size now that it had been when they had first been driven through the great doors, and as he watched he saw two of the Longskulls roughly separate a group of perhaps a dozen captives—it was hard to tell in the flickering shadows, because the prisoners were of so many odd sizes and shapes—and drive them away down a cross corridor. He whispered this to Barrick, and saw the prince’s eyes widen in alarm.

“Is that because they mean something different for us? To kill us instead of making us slaves?”

“I think it’s more likely that they haven’t seen many of our kind before,” Vansen reassured him. “These Longskull things don’t seem the types to act without orders. They may want someone to tell them where we should be put.” He didn’t really want to talk—it was hard enough trying to keep some idea in his mind of what turns they’d taken, where they might be in relation to the original doorway. If there was a chance later for escape, he did not want to run blindly.

Soon there were only a few prisoners left beside themselves, a more or less manlike creature with wings like a dragonfly, taller than Vansen although much more slender, a pair of goblins with bright red skin, and one of the wizened mock-Funderlings—a Drow. This last walked just in front of Vansen, which gave him more chance to look at it the little manlike creature than he might have wanted: it had a huge, lopsided head, a stumpy body, and hands that were almost twice as big as Vansen’s, although the creature itself was far less than half his size.

The remaining Longskulls hurried the last prisoners along. Vansen had to trot, no easy feat with heavy shackles on his wrists, and also to help the prince when the boy stumbled, which was often. The pain in the prince’s withered arm from the restraints must be great, Vansen knew, although Barrick refused to mention it: it took no physician’s eye to see the boy’s pale skin, his creased, wincing eyes, or to interpret the silence that had fallen over him in the last hour.

They reached a wide place in the corridor where several other passages branched out. The guards forced them down one of those branches, and within just a few more paces they emerged into a large open space where they stopped before another massive doorway, this one guarded by lowering apelike things that might have been Followers, but grown to the size of men and dressed in dusty, mismatched bits of armor. The Longskulls gabbled at these sentries, then stepped forward and used their spears to tap on the door, which despite their deferential touch made a hollow, brazen clang with each knock. The door slowly swung open and the quietly honking guards shoved the prisoners inside.

Behind the door lay the most demented place Vansen had ever seen, a cavern as large as the interior of the Trigon Temple in Southmarch, but furnished by a madman. Broken bits and pieces of the statues that had once lined the valley stood all around the immense space—here half a warrior crouching in the middle of the cracked floor, there a single granite hand the size of a donkey-cart. Moss and little threadlike vines grew patchily on the sculptures, and in many places on the rough-hewn walls and floor as well, and the air was damp with mist from an actual waterfall that poured from a hole high on one side of the cavern and followed a splashing course downward over stone blocks to fill a great pool that took up half of the vast room.

Across the pool from the doorway stood another huge statue of a headless, seated warrior, tall as a castle wall. Enthroned on this stone warrior’s lap, with various creatures kneeling or lying at his feet like a living carpet, sat the biggest man—the biggest living thing—Vansen had ever seen. Two, no, three times the height of a normal man he loomed, massive and muscular as a blacksmith, and if it had not been so absolutely clear that this monstrosity was alive, Vansen would never for an instant have believed him anything but a statue. His hair was curly and hung to his shoulders, his beard to his waist, and he was as beautiful as any of the stone gods’ statues, as if he too had been carved by some master sculptor, except that one side of his gigantic face was a crumpled ruin, one eye gone and the skin of cheek and forehead a puckered crater in which his disarranged teeth could be seen like loose pearls in a jewelry box.

Somewhere deep beneath them, something boomed like a monstrous drumbeat, a concussion that punched at Vansen’s ears and made the entire rocky chamber shudder ever so briefly, but no one in the room even seemed to notice.

Chains of all sizes and thicknesses hung around the terrible god-thing’s waist and dangled from his neck and shoulders, so that if he wore some other garment it could not be seen at all. Hundreds of strange, round objects hung from the chains. As his eyes became used to the light, Vansen realized that every one of the hanging things was a severed head, some only naked skulls or mummified leather, some fresh, with ragged necks still dripping—heads of men, of fairies, even animals, heads of all descriptions.

The full childhood memory came back to Vansen suddenly, the taunt of older boys to scare the younger ones—“Jackin-Irons! Jack-in-Irons be coming from the great deeps to catch you! He’ll take your head!”

Jack in Irons. Jack Chain. He was real.

The apparition raised an arm big as a tree trunk, chains swaying and clanking, the heads dangling like charms on a lady’s bracelet. The bastard god grinned and his beautiful face seemed almost to split open as he displayed teeth as large as plates, as cracked and broken as the ruined stones.

“I AM JIKUYIN!” he roared, his voice so loud and so painful that Vansen fell to his knees and then slumped down to his belly with his hands over his ears in a fruitless attempt to protect himself from the deafening noise. It was not until the giant spoke again that Ferras Vansen realized he was hearing the words not with his ears, but echoing inside his mind.

All ordinary thought disappeared in the skull-thunder that followed.

“WELCOME, MORTALS—AH, AND ONE OF THE HIGH ONES, TOO, I SEE. WELCOME TO THE UNDERWORLD. I PROMISE I WILL GIVE YOU A USEFUL DEATH, AND AFTERWARD I MAY EVEN SHOW YOU THE MATCHLESS HONOR OF WEARING YOUR SMALL BUT SHAPELY HEADS!”

18. Questions with No Answers

Although she could not have said exactly why, Pelaya found herself spending more time in the garden than had been her habit, even on days like today when the weather was less than ideal, with heavy gray skies and a biting wind from the sea. It was partly because her father Count Perivos had been so busy lately, busier than she’d ever seen him, with no time at all to give to his children. Sometimes he stayed so late examining the city’s defenses that he even slept in the Documents Chamber and only came home to change his clothes. But much of her interest in the garden was simply her interest in the prisoner Olin— King Olin, however he might mockingly disclaim his title. On the occasions that he and Pelaya met each other she always enjoyed talking to him, although it was never quite as strange and exciting as it had been the first time, when he had been a complete stranger and her companions had watched with horror as she introduced herself to him, as though she had decided to leap off the city walls and swim to Xand.

Still, she enjoyed the grown-up way their conversations made her feel, and he seemed to enjoy them too, although he was always disappointed by how little news she could give him about his homeland. She knew that one of his sons had died, and his daughter and other son were missing, and that his country was in some kind of war. Sometimes when Olin spoke about his children he seemed to be hiding feelings so strong that it seemed he would burst into tears, but then only moments later he would be so coldly composed she wondered if she had imagined it. He was a strange man even for a king, very changeable, unfailingly polite but sometimes a little frightening to a girl like Pelaya, whose own father was, for all his intelligence, a simpler sort of man. She sometimes thought Olin Eddon’s true feelings were as painfully imprisoned as he was himself.

He was not allowed into the garden very often, only a few days in every tennight. Pelaya thought that unkind of the Lord Protector. She wondered if she dared speak to her father about it—he was steward of the entire stronghold, after all—but although there was nothing illicit in the friendship with the northern king, she didn’t want to draw attention to it. Count Perivos was a serious man; he didn’t think much of things that had no purpose and she doubted he’d ever understand the harmless attraction Olin’s company held for her. Her father had doubtless heard something about the odd friendship, but so far he hadn’t said anything to her about it, perhaps reassured by Teloni, who had decided the whole thing was a boring lark of Pelaya’s and had stopped fussing at her about it. It was probably best to leave things that way, Pelaya decided, and not tempt the gods.

She was pleased to find that King Olin was out in the garden today, looking across the walls from atop a jutting ornamental stone not far from the bench, the one place a person could climb high enough see between the towers of the stronghold over all the Kulloan Strait. He sat crosslegged on the stone with his chin propped on his hands, more like a boy than a grown man, let alone a monarch. She stood by the base of the stone waiting for him to realize she was there.

“Ah, good Mistress Akuanis,” he said with a smile. “You honor me with your company again. I was just sitting here wondering if a man could fashion wings like a gull’s—out of wood and feathers, perhaps, although I suspect each feather would have to be tied in place separately, which would make for a great deal of work—and so fly like a bird.” She frowned. “Why would someone want to do that?”

“Why?” He smiled. “I suppose the freedom of a gull on the wind has more meaning to me just now than to you.” He clambered down, landing lightly. “I muse, only—I see the birds fly and my mind begins to wander. I beg you not to tell your father of my interest in flight. I might lose the gift of this time in the garden.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” she said earnestly.

“Ah. You are kind.” He nodded, the subject concluded. “And how are you today, Mistress? Have the gods treated you well since I saw you last?”

“Well enough, I suppose. My tutor sets me the dreariest lessons you can imagine, and I will never, never be a seamstress, no matter how many years I try. Mother says my needlework looks like the web of a drunken spider.”

He chuckled. “Your mother sounds like a clever woman. That is not the first thing she has said that made me laugh. Perhaps that is where you come by your own wit and curiosity.”

“Me?” All she could think of were the lessons that Brother Lysas taught, reading at length from The Book of the Trigon, “...Beloved of the gods are the daughters and wives who make themselves humble, who seek only to serve Heaven...” “I’m not curious, am I?”

He smiled again. “Child, you are a fountain of questions. It is often all I can do not to unpack the entirety of my life and let you rifle through it like a trunk of clothes.”

“You must think I’m annoying, then. A child who cannot be still.” She hung her head.

“Not at all. Curiosity is a virtue. So is discretion, but that is usually learned at a later age. In fact, take your shawl—it is a bit cool—while I ask you something about that very subject.” He handed her the delicate Syannese cloth, but did not immediately let go. She was surprised, and started to say something. “Take it but do not unfold it,” he said quietly. “I have put a letter in it. Do not fear! It is nothing criminal. In fact, it is a letter for your own father. Give it to him, please?”

She took the shawl from him and felt the small, angular shape of the letter. “What...what is it?”

“As I said, nothing to fear. Some thoughts of mine about the danger of this threatened siege by the Autarch of Xis—yes, I have heard the rumors. I would have to be deaf not to. In any case, he may do as he wishes with my suggestions.”

“But why?” She put the folded shawl in her lap. “Why would you help us when we’re holding you prisoner?”

Olin smiled as if through something painful. “First, I am at risk also, of course. Second, we are all natural allies against the autarch, whatever Drakava may think, and I believe your father would recognize that. Last—well, it would not hurt to have a man like your father think well of me.”

Pelaya felt quite out of breath. A secret letter! Like something from one of the old tales of Silas or Lander Elfbane. “I will do it, if you promise there is no dishonor.”

He bowed his head. “I promise, good mistress.”

They talked a little while longer about less consequential things like her younger brother’s wretched temper or the dragging negotiations for Teloni’s marriage to a young nobleman from the country north of the city. This pained Pelaya because her father had said he would not find a husband for his younger daughter until the oldest was married, and she was anxious to be a grown woman, with a household of her own.

“Do not be in too much of a hurry,” Olin said kindly. “The married state is a holy one for a woman, but it can be full of woe and danger, too.” He looked down. “I lost my first wife in childbirth.”

“The gods must have needed her to be with them,” Pelaya said, then was irritated with herself for parroting the pious phrase her mother always used. “I’m sorry.”

“I sometimes think it has been harder on my children than on me,” he said quietly, then did not speak for a long moment. His eyes were roving somewhere beyond Pelaya’s shoulder, so that she thought he was watching the gulls again, dreaming of the walls of Hierosol dropping into the distance behind him.

“You were saying, King Olin?”

“What?” He forced himself to look at her. “Ah, I beg your pardon. I was...distracted. Look, please, and tell me—who is that girl?”

Feeling a prickle of something that she would only realize later was jealousy, Pelaya turned and looked across the garden but saw no one. “Who? My sister and the others have gone in.”

“There. There are two of them, carrying linens.” He pointed. “One slender, one less so. The thin one—there, see, the one whose hair has come loose from her scarf.”

“Do you mean...those washing women?”

“Yes, that is who I mean.” For a moment, and for the first time Pelaya could remember, he sounded angry with her. “Do they not exist because they are servants? They are the only girls in the yard beside yourself.”

She was hurt, but tried not to show it. “Who is she? How should I know? A washing woman—a girl, as you said, a servant. Why? Do you think she is pretty?” She looked closely at the slender young woman for the first time, saw that the girl was only a little older than herself. Her arms where they emerged from her billowing sleeves were brown, and her hair, which had spilled free from beneath her scarf as Olin had pointed out, was black except for a small, strange streak the color of fire. The girl’s features were attractive enough, but Pelaya could see little about the thin young girl that should have attracted the prisoner-king’s attention. “She looks like a Xandian to me. From the north, I’d say—they are darker below the desert. Lots of Xandian girls work here in the kitchens and the laundry.”

Olin watched the young woman and her stockier companion until they had vanished into the darkness of the covered passage. “She reminds me...she reminded me of someone.”

Now Pelaya definitely felt a pang. “You said that I reminded you of your daughter.”

He turned, as though seeing her for the first time since the servant girl had appeared. “You do, Mistress. As I said, there is a quality in you that truly reminds me of her, and your curiosity is part of it. No, that servant girl reminds me of someone else.” He frowned and shook his head. “A member of my family, long dead.”

“One of your relatives?” It seemed unlikely. Pelaya thought the captive king was ashamed to have been caught ogling a serving girl.

“Yes. My...” He trailed off, looking again at the place where the servant had disappeared. “That is very strange—and here, so far away...” He paused again, then said, “Could you bring her to me?”

“What?”

“Bring her to me. Here, in the garden.” His laugh was short and harsh. “I certainly cannot go to her. But I need to see her up close.” He looked at her and his eyes softened. “Please, good Mistress Akuanis. I swear I ask you a favor for no unworthy reason. Could you do that for me?”

“That makes two favors in one day.” She tired to make her voice stern. “I...I suppose I could. Perhaps.” She did not understand her own feelings and was not certain that she wanted to understand them. “I will try.”

“Thank you.” He stood up and bowed, his face suddenly distant. “Now I must go. I have much to think about and I have stolen enough of your time today.” He walked toward the archway leading back to his tower rooms—comfortable enough, he had told her, if you did not mind a door that had a barred window in it and was locked from the outside— without looking back.

Pelaya sat, feeling oddly as though she wanted to cry. For the first time since they had met each other Olin had left the garden first. The prisoner had gone back to his cell to be alone rather than share her company any longer.

She remained on the bench, trying to understand what had happened to her, until the first drops of rain forced her inside.

“Who could ever live in such a place?” Yazi asked, wideeyed. “You would tire yourself to fits just walking to the kitchen.”

“People who live in such places don’t walk to the kitchen,” said Qinnitan. “They have people like you and me bring their food to them.” She frowned, trying to remember which way they had turned on the inbound trip. Monarchs had been adding rooms and corridors and whole wings onto the citadel of Hierosol for so many centuries that the place was like the sea coral from one of her favorite poems by Baz’u Jev. Qinnitan entertained a brief fantasy that one day she would be able to take the boy Pigeon for a walk on the seashore without worrying she might be recognized, to see some of the mysteries that had so charmed the poet, the spiraling shells daintier than jewels, the stones polished smooth as statues. She had work to do, though, and even if she hadn’t, she couldn’t afford to loiter in the open that way.

“But look at us!” Yazi was from the Ellamish border country so she spoke fairly good Xixian, a good-hearted girl but a little slow and prone to mistakes. “We are lost already. Surely no one can find their way in such a big place. This must be the biggest house on earth!”

Qinnitan was tempted to say that she herself had once lived in the biggest house on earth, just to see Yazi’s expression, but even though she had already told Soryaza the laundrymistress she had been an acolyte of the Hive, there was no sense in telling everyone else, especially someone as innocently loose-lipped as Yazi. The fact that Qinnitan had once lived in the Royal Seclusion, where she had been one of the fortunate few who had their food brought to them by hurrying, silent servants, was certainly not going to be mentioned either, although the irony of the present conversation was not lost on her.

“I know it’s back this way,” she said instead. “Remember, we came down a long hall full of pictures just after we went through that garden?”

“What garden?”

“You didn’t...? Where you could see the ocean and everything?” She sighed. “Never mind.” Yazi was like a dog that way—the girl had been talking about something, a dream she had, or a dream she wanted to have, and hadn’t even noticed the garden, the one time today they had been out from under the castle roof. Qinnitan had noticed, of course. She had spent too much time kept like a nightingale in a wicker cage to ignore the glorious moments when she was free beneath the gods’ great sky. “Never mind,” she said again. “Just follow me.”

“Breasts of Surigali, where have you two been?” Soryaza stood with her hands on her hips, looking as though she might pick up one of the massive washing tubs and dump its scalding contents all over the truants. “You were just supposed to take those up to the upstairs ewery and come straight back.”

“We did come straight back,” Qinnitan said in Xixian. She could understand Hierosoline well enough now—the tongues were similar in many ways—or at least make out the sense of most things said to her, but she still did not feel comfortable with her own clumsy speech. “We got lost.”

“It’s so big!” Yazi said. “We didn’t do anything wrong, Mistress. On the Mother, we didn’t!”

Soryaza snorted her disbelief, then spat on the wet floor. “Well, get back to work. And speak Hierosoline, both of you. You aren’t in the south anymore!”

As the laundry-mistress stalked away several of the other women sidled over to find out what had happened. Qinnitan knew most of their names already, although two were new enough she had only seen them and not spoken to them.

“Is she always angry?” asked one of these new workers, an anxious, scrawny young thing with pink-tinged eyes and twitching nose—the others had already named her Rabbit.

“Always,” Yazi said. “Her feet hurt. And her back hurts too.”

“Pah!” said one of the other women. “She’s been saying that for years. Didn’t stop her from picking that boy Gregor up and throwing him out the door when she caught him sleeping in the drying room. Or from kicking over a tub or two when she’s in the mood.”

“Nira, someone said you were a priestess in Xis,” the girl called Rabbit suddenly said to Qinnitan. “Is that true?”

She was always a little slow to recognize her own false name, although she was getting better at it, and speaking Hierosoline slowed her down even more, so it took a moment for the question to sink in. When it did, she felt a chill. By the Dark Queen, does everyone know already? Curse this nest of busybodies, and curse Soryaza—she must have told someone.

Out loud, she said, “I...was not priestess. Just...” She searched for a word, but her command of the language was still weak. “Just helper.”

“In the Hive?” Rabbit asked. “Someone said it was in the Hive. I’ve heard of that place. Was it like they say—did the priests come in and...you know? With the priestesses?”

“Silence, girl,” said one of the other new workers, an old woman with a burn-scarred face and a mouth where dark holes outnumbered ruined teeth. She glared at Rabbit. “Don’t ask so many question. She does not want to talk, maybe.” Her command of Hierosoline was better than Qinnitan’s, but it was easy to hear that she too was a southerner.

“I only wanted to know...!” Rabbit squeaked.

“Tits of the Great Mother, what are you lazy bitches up to?” Soryaza’s voice thundered through the dank room. Her bulky form loomed up out of the washtub fog and the women scattered. “The next one I catch standing and talking might as well go down to the harbor and find a place to stand on Daneya Street with the other whores, because you won’t work for me another moment!”

“Yazi, why are there so many new people?” Qinnitan asked when they were standing over their washing tub again. New faces made her unhappy, and people asking about her history in Xis made her even more so.

“New?” The round-faced girl laughed. “You’ve only been here a tennight yourself.”

“But so many! Rabbit, and that old toothless woman, and the one with the fat legs...”

“Oh, listen to you! Not everyone’s a skinny little thing like you, Nira. As it happens, Soryaza told me she’s hiring more because of the war.”

“The war?”

“Don’t you listen to anybody? There’s a war coming, everyone says so. The autarch’s going to send ships. They’ll never break this place, of course—no one ever has. But the lord protector has called in troops from Krace and...and...and other places.” She flushed, her tone of authority momentarily compromised. “And so we’re going to be having more work.”

Qinnitan felt a sudden chill—touched by a ghost, her family had always called it. She had heard rumors but had not given them much credence—as the continent’s greatest seaport, Hierosol seemed to breathe rumors like air, to serve them as meat and drink. A new continent discovered in the western oceans, one said. So much gold discovered on an island near Ulos that the overladen boat sank on the way back. Fairy armies marching in the north. The Autarch of Xis preparing to conquer all Eion. Who was to know what was truth and what was fancy?

“The...autarch...?” she said now. Memories of his pale, mad eyes, never more than a moment away from her thoughts at the best of times, now pushed their way front and center. Is it me? she wondered. Is it to find me, to torture me for running away? It was silly, unbearably selfimportant, even to consider it, but she couldn’t shake off the idea: she had seen enough of Sulepis to know he was a man of incomprehensible whims.

No, she told herself. He and his father and his father’s father have wanted to set their heel on Eion for years, especially Hierosol. She had heard it talked of enough in the Seclusion. This is only more of the same, if it’s even true. And if he is coming, well, the walls will defeat him. And if they don’t... Then I will be gone. I escaped him once, I will escape him again. Despite her terror, she felt a stubborn little glow inside her, a heat like a burning coal. Or die. But one way or another, he won’t have me... “Nira?” Yazi was pulling at her sleeve. “Pay attention, girl! If Soryaza sees you staring at nothing that way, she’ll whip us both.”

Qinnitan bent to the washing, but it was hard to keep her thoughts on the sheets and soapy water.

As Qinnitan walked with Yazi at sunset across the wide space of the Echoing Mall, she had a sudden feeling of being observed, troubling as an insect flying too near her head. She looked back and at first saw only the other washerwomen and ordinary working folk of the citadel dispersing to the outer gates or their cramped quarters within the great fortress itself; then a movement at the corner of her eye, where the newly-lit torches lined one of the colonnades, made her turn all the way around. A smear of sideways movement, at odds with the rest of the crowd, arrested her attention. She felt sure someone had stepped back into the colonnade just as she looked. Still, did it mean something, even so?

“Nira, stop that,” said Yazi. “I’m so tired my feet are on fire. Keep walking, will you?”

Qinnitan walked forward, but after a dozen paces turned again. A man was walking along the edge of the colonnade, and although he was not looking at her she thought she saw him hesitate for an instant and almost break stride, as though he had just decided it was too late to step back out of sight again.

Qinnitan pointed up at the sky above the high walls of the Echoing Mall, shot red with the last light of the day, and said, “Isn’t it pretty, with all those colors!” While performing this bit of show, she examined the man as best she could. He wore shabby, unobtrusive clothes—the kind any of the menial laborers might wear—and had somewhat the look of a northerner, with hair of the lackluster brown shade Qinnitan had learned was almost as common north of Hierosol as black hair was in Xand. He was studiously avoiding her eyes as he walked, and so Qinnitan swung around again.

“What are you talking about, the sunset?” asked Yazi. “If your thoughts wandered any farther, girl, you’d have to put bells on them, like goats.”

When Qinnitan looked back the man was gone into the crowd. She didn’t know what to think. Even Yazi suddenly seemed capable of having secret depths.

Pigeon came bounding out to greet her when they reached the dormitory hall, excited as a puppy. He threw his arms around her, then grabbed her hand to pull her back to the bed they shared, waving his free arm excitedly. He had taught her some of the hand-language he had spoken with the other mute servants back in the Orchard Palace, but at times like this he didn’t bother trying to make his thoughts known in a more subtle way, nor did he need to. Some of the other women looked up as he dragged Qinnitan down the open space between the tiny wooden beds, a few with indulgent smiles, remembering brothers or children of their own, many others with the generalized irritation of someone who had just finished a long, hard day’s labor being forced to observe the endless energies of a child. It was strange, living with so many women again—almost a hundred in this dormitory alone, with several more buildings like it on this side of the citadel. The culture was oddly familiar, the same quick-blooming friendships and rivalries and even hatreds, as though someone had taken the wives of the autarch’s Seclusion, dressed them in dirty smocks and sweatstained dresses, then dumped them into this vast, depressing hall that had once been the royal stables for some long-dead king of Hierosol. These women were not so comely, and not so young—many of them were grandmothers—but otherwise there seemed little difference between this and her former home, or even the Hive where she had lived before.

Cages, she thought. Why do men fear us so that they must cage us all together and keep us apart from them?

Hierosol was better than Xis, but even here there were strict rules about keeping out men, even for those of the washerwomen who were married. Only Soryaza’s intervention with the dormitory mistress had gained a place here for Pigeon, and he was one of but a dozen or so children, most babes in arms who stayed behind during the day to be cared for in an offhand way by a pair of washerwomen now too old to work, two crones who each morning found the sunniest place in the dormitory and sat there like lizards, muttering to each other while the children more or less looked after themselves.

“Soryaza says she has work for you again,” Qinnitan told Pigeon, suddenly reminded. He had been banished to the dormitory for being underfoot—a crime worse than murder, to hear the laundry-mistress talk. “You’ll come in with me tomorrow.”

Pigeon seemed less interested in this news than in tugging her the last few steps toward their bed. In the middle of it, nested in a pile of wood chips and shavings like the legendary phoenix, sat a slightly irregular carving of a bird —a pigeon, she saw after a moment. Pigeon pointed to the sculpture, then dug the small knife he had stolen from Axamis Dorza’s house out of the chips and proudly displayed it, too.

“Did you make this bird? It’s very fine.” But she could not help frowning a little. “I do wish you hadn’t done it on the bed. I’ll be sleeping in slivers tonight.”

He looked at her with such hurt that she bent and picked up the carving to examine it. As she turned it over she saw that he had arduously carved her name (or at least his childish approximation of it) on the bottom of it in Xixian letters —“Qinatan.” A rush of love for the boy collided with a burst of fear to see her real name written on something, even a child’s rough carving. Yazi and Soryaza were not the only women here who could speak the language of Xis, and some of them might read it too. She already had enough problems with people asking questions.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered. “But you must remember my name here is Nira, not...not the other. And you are Nonem, remember?”

This time he did not look hurt so much as anguished at his own mistake, and she had to pull him to her and hug him tight. “No, it’s beautiful, it is. Let me just take it for a moment. And the knife, please.” She kissed him on top of his head, smelling the strange boy-smell of his sweat, then looked around. Several women on either side were watching. She smiled and showed them the bird, then took it with her and headed for the privies on the far side of the dormitory hall. She sat down in one of the small cubicles there, so like an animal’s stall that she felt sure they had once been just that, and, when she felt sure no one was looking, took the knife and quickly scraped the boy’s childish letters off the bottom of the bird.

On the way back she stopped off to borrow a looking-glass from one of the other serving-women. In return for the loan she gave the woman the round ball of soap she had assembled from discarded slivers in the laundry. The mirror was the size of Qinnitan’s hand, in a chipped frame of polished tortoiseshell.

“Mind you bring it back before bedtime,” the woman warned.

Qinnitan nodded. “Just...for hair,” she said in her fragmented Hierosoline. “Bring soon.”

When she reached her bed again she saw that Pigeon had done his best to clear away the remnants of his day’s carvings. She set the carved bird on the empty barrel she shared as a table with the next bed over, and borrowed a comb from the girl whose bed that was, and who luckily did not ask anything in trade.

Qinnitan set the mirror on her knee and stared at the reflection. To her despair, she saw that her unruly hair had escaped the scarf again right where the red streak emerged. As if she had not already left enough of a trail across the citadel! She no longer had access to the cosmetics and dyes the women had used in the Seclusion, so she had done her best to disguise the flame-colored patch with soot from the candles and the laundry fireplaces, but working in that damp, hot room ensured that the soot didn’t work for long. She would have to get a bigger scarf, or cut her hair off entirely. Some of the older women here wore their hair very short, especially if they were past childbearing age. Maybe no one would think it too odd if she did the same... “Nira, isn’t it?” a scratchy voice asked.

Startled, Qinnitan looked up, hurriedly tucking her hair back under the scarf. It was the old woman from the laundry, the one with the burned face and missing teeth who had only been working there a few days. “Yes?”

“It’s me, Losa. I thought that was you when I saw you across the room. And is this your little brother?”

Pigeon was looking at the old woman with mistrust, his usual expression with strangers. “Yes, his name is Nonem.”

“Ah, lovely. I didn’t mean to bother you, child, I was just...” At that moment, just to add to the madcap air of sudden festivity, Yazi approached, followed by a young girl in a very fine dress—the kind of dress the laundrywomen only saw when they were called upon to clean things from the upper apartments of the citadel.

“Nira, I just...” Yazi saw the old woman. “Losa! What are you doing here?”

The woman smiled, then quickly pulled her lips together to hide her ruined teeth. “Oh, I couldn’t get out the gate to get home. All kinds of soldiers coming in, and such a fuss! Wagons, oxen, people shouting. Someone said they were Sessians hired by the lord protector. I thought I’d ask if I could stay here.”

“We’ll talk to the dormitory mistress,” said Yazi, “but I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.” At any ordinary time Yazi would have pressed the old woman for details and it would have been the subject of the evening’s conversation all over the dormitory, but now something even more exciting was clearly pressing on her. “Nira, there’s someone here to see you.”

Qinnitan was beginning to feel quite overwhelmed. She turned to the very young girl in the beautiful blue dress and velvet petticoat. A crowd of women was beginning to gather as people came to see what had brought such an apparition into the dormitory.

“Yes?”

“I am to take you to my mistress,” the girl said. “You are... Nira?”

Qinnitan’s confusion quickly turned to panic, but she couldn’t very well deny it. She struggled to frame the Hierosoline words. “Who...who is your mistress?”

“She will tell you herself. Come with me, please.” Beneath the formal manners, the girl seemed a little anxious herself.

“Oh, that is too bad,” old Losa said. “I was looking forward to a chat.”

“You’d better go,” Yazi told Qinnitan. “Maybe a handsome prince saw you when we were wandering around lost today. Should I come with you, in case he has trouble making himself understood when he proposes to you?”

“Stop, Yazi.” Qinnitan just wanted everyone to go away and forget about this, but it was obviously going to be the talk of the dormitory, perhaps for days.

“She is to come alone,” said the girl in the blue dress. “But what about...my brother?” Qinnitan asked.

“I’ll watch him,” Yazi said. “We’ll have fun, won’t we, Nonem?”

Pigeon liked Yazi, but he clearly didn’t like the idea of letting Qinnitan go away with some stranger. Still, after a warning look from her, he nodded. Qinnitan rose, leaving the comb and mirror for Yazi to return to their owners, and followed the girl out of the dormitory into the cold, torchlit night.

She felt in the pocket of her smock for Pigeon’s carving knife and held it tightly as they walked back across the tiled immensity of the Echoing Mall.

“Who is your...mistress?” she asked the girl again.

“She will tell you what she wishes to tell you,” the little girl in the blue dress said, and would say no more. “

I am not happy,” said her father. Pelaya knew it was the truth. Count Perivos was not the sort of man who liked surprises, and all this had obviously come as just that. “Bad enough that a foreign prisoner should bribe my daughter to send messages to me when I already have so much else to worry on—using her as a...a go-between. But to find he also expects her to arrange some sort of assignation for him...!”

“It’s not an assignation and he didn’t bribe me.” Pelaya stroked his sleeve. The cuff needed mending, which made her heart ache a little—he worked so hard! “Please, Babba, don’t be difficult. Was there anything bad in his letter to you?”

Her father raised his eyebrow. “Babba? I haven’t heard that since the last time you wanted something. No, his thoughts are at least interesting, perhaps useful, and all he asks in return is any news I can give him about his home or his family. There’s nothing wrong with the letter, except that he knows too much. How could a foreign prisoner have so much to say about our castle defenses?”

“He told me he fought here twenty years ago against the Tuan pirates. That he was a guest of the Temple Council.”

“I remember those days, but he remembers where every tower stairway is and how many steps it has, I swear! He must have a memory like a mantisery library.” Count Perivos frowned. “Still, some of his warnings and suggestions show wisdom, and I am willing to believe he meant them in good faith. But what is this madness about a serving girl?”

“I don’t know, Babba. He said she reminded him of someone.” Pelaya spotted her servant coming across the garden with the dark-haired girl walking slowly behind her. “Look—here they come now.”

“Madness,” her father said, but sighed as if weak protest were all he was allowed.

Seeing the laundry maid up close, Pelaya was both relieved and confused. Relieved, without quite understanding why, to see that this girl was only a year or two older than she was, and that while she was by no means ugly, she was not astoundingly pretty, either. But something else about this laundry servant put her on edge, although Pelaya could not say what it was—something in the quality of the girl’s watchfulness, in the cool and measured way she looked around the torchlit garden, was not what the steward’s daughter expected from someone who spent every day up to her elbows in the citadel’s washing tubs.

Now the girl turned that dark-eyed gaze onto Pelaya and her father, examining them as carefully as she had the surroundings, which was strange in itself: should she not have been looking first at the nobles who had summoned her? Pelaya found the inspection a little unnerving.

“Your name is Nira, is it not?” she asked the girl. “Someone wants to meet you. Do you understand me?”

The girl nodded. “Yes, Nira. Understand.” Either she had not been in Hierosol long or she was far more stupid than she looked, because her accent was barbarous.

Not for the first time that day, Pelaya wondered what she had stumbled into. A simple friendship had become something larger and much less comfortable. She was reassured that her father and his bodyguard were here to ensure that nothing was passed between the prisoner and this servant girl and that no tricks were attempted.

Now Perivos stepped forward. He spent a moment examining the girl Nira as thoroughly as she herself had inspected everything and everyone else. “So this is her?”

“Yes, Father.”

“I wish Olin Eddon would hasten himself. I have better things to do...”

“Yes, Father. I know.” She took a breath. “Please, be kind to him.”

He turned on her with a look of surprise and annoyance. “What does that mean, Pelaya?”

“He is a kind man, Father. Babba. He has always been polite to me, proper in his speech, and always insists that his guards stay—and my maid as well. He says I remind him of his daughter.”

Her father gave a little snort of disbelief. “Many young women remind him of his daughter, it seems.”

“Father! Be kind. You know his daughter has disappeared and both his sons are dead.”

The count shook his head, but she could see him softening. More subtle than her sister, she had learned ways to bend him gently to her will, and sometimes he even seemed to collaborate in his own defeats. “Do not badger me,” he said. “I will grant him the respect of some privacy—he is a king, after all—but I do not like it. And if anything untoward occurs...”

“It won’t, Father. He’s not like that.” Pelaya Akuanis was far too ladylike to curse even to herself, and did not know any really useful curse words in any case, but Olin’s favor was costing her more than the prisoner could know. She could not besiege her father for favors like this very often: it would be long months before she could expect to get her way in anything important again. I hope it’s worth it for him, talking to some laundry trollop. But she knew even in her disgruntled state that wasn’t quite fair: there was unquestionably something more to this girl, this Nira, although Pelaya still could not guess what it might be.

Olin and his guards arrived even as a quiet rumble of thunder growled through the northern sky. A storm was on the way. Pelaya’s father stepped forward and bowed his head to the prisoner.

“King Olin, you are a persuasive man, or else we would not all be standing in this garden with the rains sweeping toward us and my supper waiting. My daughter has risked her father’s love to bring you and this young woman here.”

Olin smiled. “I think that might be an exaggeration, Count Perivos, from the things your daughter has said about you. I have a headstrong girl child myself, so I appreciate your position and I thank you for indulging me when you did not need to.” He lowered his voice so the bodyguard standing a dozen steps away could not hear. “Did you receive the letter? And is it any help to you?”

Pelaya’s father would not be so easily swayed. “Perhaps. We will talk about it at some other time. For now I will leave you to your conversation...if you will swear to me on your honor that it is nothing against the interests of Hierosol. It goes without saying that it is nothing lewd or immoral, either.”

“Yes, it goes without saying,” said Olin with a touch of asperity. “You have my word, Count Perivos.”

Her father bowed and withdrew himself a little way.

“Do not be frightened, child,” Olin said to the laundry girl. “Your name is Nira, I am told. Is that correct?”

She nodded, watching the bearded man with a different kind of attention than she had given to the garden or Pelaya or anything else, almost as if she recognized him—as if they had met before and the girl was trying to remember where and when. For a moment Pelaya felt a kind of chill. Had she done something truly wrong here after all? Was she unwittingly helping an escape plan, something that would cost her father his honor or maybe even his life?

“Yes,” the girl said slowly. “Nira.”

“All I want to know from you is a little about your family,” Olin said gently. “That red in your hair—I think it is rare in this part of the world, is it not?”

The girl only shrugged. Pelaya felt a need to say something, if only to remind the man that she was still sitting here, part of the gathering. “Not so rare,” she told him. “There have been northerners in Xand for years—mercenaries and folk of that sort. My father often talks about the autarch’s White Hounds. They are famous traitors to Eion.”

Olin nodded. “But still, I think such a shade is uncommon.” He smiled and turned to the laundry girl. “Are there mercenaries from Eion in your family, young Nira? Northerners with fair hair?”

The girl hesitated for a moment as she made sense of his question. Her fingers moved up to the place where another little curl of hair escaped her scarf and pushed it back beneath the stained homespun cloth. “No. All...like me.”

“I see something in you of a family that I know well, Nira. Be brave—you have done nothing wrong. Can you tell me if your family came from the north? Are there any family stories about such things?”

She looked at him a long time, as though trying to decide whether this entire conversation might be some kind of trick. “No. Always Xis.” She shrugged. “Think always Xis. Until me.”

“Until you, of course.” He nodded. “Someone told me that your parents died. I am very sorry to hear it. If I can do anything—not that I have much favor here, but I have made a couple of kind friends—let me know.”

She stared at him again, clearly puzzled by something. At last she nodded.

“Let her go now,” Olin said, straightening. “I am sure she hasn’t had her supper yet and I have no doubt she works hard all the day.” He stood. “Thank you, Pelaya, and thank you, Count Perivos. My curiosity is satisfied. Doubtless it was just a fluke of light and shadow that tricked me into seeing a resemblance that was not there—that could not be there.”

Pelaya’s little maid took Nira back to the servants’ dormitory, and Olin went with his guards back to his chambers. As she walked back across the garden toward their residence, a part of the citadel only a little less sumptuous than the lord protector’s own quarters, Pelaya took her father’s hand.

“Thank you, Babba,” she said. “You are the best, kindest father. You truly are.”

“But what in the name of the gods was that all about?” he said, scowling. “Has the man lost his wits? What connection could he be searching for with a laundry girl?”

“I don’t know,” Pelaya said. “But they both seem sad.”

Her father shook his head. “That is what you said about that stray cat, and now I awake every morning to the sound of that creature yowling for fish. Both your King Olin and his laundry girl have places to live. Do not think to bring them home.”

“No, Papa.” But she too wondered what had brought two such strange, different people together in a Hierosol garden.

The sky thundered again and the first drops of rain began to spatter down. Pelaya, her father, and the bodyguard all hurried to get out of the open air.

19. Voices in the Forest

Even with her injuries, Briony knew she should put as much distance as she could between herself and Landers Port, but instead she stayed close to the walls of the city in the two days after the attack, sheltering where she could and eavesdropping on the conversations of other travelers, trying to find out for certain what had happened to Shaso. The destructive fire that had taken the life of one of the city’s wealthiest merchants was on everyone’s lips, of course, and all seemed to agree that except for the one lone manservant she’d seen, only the women of DanMozan’s house had survived the night’s terrible events.

Her last unlikely hopes finally dashed, Briony realized that if the baron’s guards knew that more than one fugitive had taken refuge in the Dan-Mozan hadar, they would be looking for her. Young man’s clothing was an indifferent disguise, especially when it was a young Tuani man’s clothing and she no longer had the tools to make herself look like someone of that race. She daubed her face and hair with dirt, trying to make herself less noticeable, but she knew her disguise would not survive real scrutiny for more than a few moments. She had to leave Landers Port, that was all: if she was caught mooning around the town gates Shaso would have died for nothing—a bitter thought, but the only one that moved her when her own desires were muted by grief and rage. She missed the old man fiercely. Had Effir’s nephew Talibo stood before her again, she would gladly have killed the little traitor a second time.

Foolishly thinking she had already lost everything, Briony was learning daily that the gods could always take more from you if they wished.

She quickly discovered that she was not suited for life as an outlaw—in fact, all the tales of romantic banditry she had ever heard now began to seem like the cruelest lies imaginable. It was impossible to live out of doors in even as mild a winter as this, even with the gods-sent gift of the woolen cloak she had taken from the hadar when she ran; Briony spent a large part of each day’s travel just searching for unguarded barns or storehouses where she could sleep without freezing. Even so, after only a few nights she found herself with a wracking cough.

The cough and her sore mouth (still tender from where Talibo had struck her) made it difficult to eat, but she soaked bread in the little pot of wine so it would soften, then chewed very slowly and carefully so as not to pain her loosened teeth and split lips any more than necessary. Even so, her small cache of food was gone in a couple of days.

The only thing that saved her at first was the number of small towns and villages dotting the hillsides along the coast road west of Landers Port. She moved from one to the next, taking shelter where she could and finding an occasional scrap of untended food. She dared not attract attention when her enemies were doubtless searching for her, so she could not beg for help in public places. Despite her hunger, though, Briony did her best to avoid real theft— not for moral reasons so much as practical ones: what good to have escaped an attempt on her life only to be caught and imprisoned in some goatyard village in the middle of nowhere?

Still, within a few days the gnawing of her empty stomach began to overwhelm her. She had never been hungry for more than a short time in all her life and was painfully surprised to discover how it conquered everything else, drove out all other thoughts. Her cough was getting worse as well, wracking her body until she felt dizzy. Sometimes she stumbled and fell in the middle of the road for no reason other than weakness. She knew she could not go on much longer without becoming either a beggar or a thief. She decided she would rather risk the first—people didn’t get hanged for begging.

The first place she approached in search of alms, a steading on the outskirts of a nameless village along the Karalsway, the market road that wound south from the Coast Road, proved unsympathetic to beggars: before she could speak to the wild-haired man standing in the doorway of the cottage he stepped aside and let out a huge brindle dog. The creature ran at her like the Raging Beast that had fought Hiliometes, and Briony only just barely got back over the steading’s low wall before it caught her in its slavering jaws. As it was, she tore her lifesaving wool cloak on a stone, an injury which seemed as painful to her as if it had been her own flesh. She retreated into the woods, still sick and sore and hungry, and although she disliked herself for doing it, she wept.

She tried again with a little more success on the far side of the village—but not because of the qualities of godly mercy the mantis-priests liked to talk about so solemnly. The householder who owned this particular shambles of a cottage happened to be gone for the day, and although there was little of use inside the empty, smoke-darkened room but a bed made of leaves stuffed in a rough cloth sack, with a single threadbare blanket, she found an iron bowl half-full of cold pottage sitting underneath the table with a wooden plate set on top of it. She devoured it eagerly, and it was not until she had finished it—her stomach so full it seemed hung on her rather than connected to her—that she realized she had stolen, and stolen from one of her poorer subjects at that. For a moment, in an agony of guilt possible only because she had momentarily sated her hunger, she considered waiting until the cottage’s owner returned and offering to make restitution, but quickly realized that other than her clothes, her Yisti knives, and her virginity—none of which she was willing to give up—she had nothing to offer. Still, she felt bad enough that she discarded her earlier plan of stealing the blanket as well, and stumbled dry-eyed but miserable out into the dying light of afternoon and a sparkle of lightly falling snow.

The days since Shaso’s death turned into first one tennight, then another, and Briony crept west, stealing enough to stay alive when she could, almost always from those least able to protect what they had. Shame and hunger dogged her, whipsawing her back and forth, one growing less as the other grew greater. Her wounds and sore jaw had mostly healed, but her cough had become a constant thing, painful and frighteningly deep. And as things became harder for her, as hunger and illness made her thoughts difficult, the two other alternatives, surrender or death, began to seem more attractive.

Briony stared blearily at the bridge, at the dark, sluggish river and the empty lands on either side. The sky was like a bed of slates.

Orphanstide and the changing of the year have passed already. But they had been tolling the bells for Oni Zakkas’ Day only a few sunrises ago in the last town she had passed that was big enough to have a temple (more of a shrine, really, this far out in the country) so that meant Dimene was just arriving—the Gestrimadi festival had not even begun yet. That was a terrible thought—at least another two months of winter still, with the worst of it yet to come!

In her breathless exhaustion she had wandered far south down the Karalsway, still uncertain whether she should go to Hierosol or Syan, but knowing in her heart that in her present condition she would reach neither. The villages became more scarce the farther south she went—she had been chased out of the last one two days ago by a group of drunken men who hadn’t liked her look and had called her a plague-carrier—and there would be even fewer settlements in the empty lands between here and the Syannese border. She was beginning to feel truly desperate.

All through her childhood Briony had been prepared for a life of importance, but what had she truly learned? Nothing useful. She did not know how to start a fire on her own. She might have managed with a flint and iron, but she had spent the last coppers Shaso had given her on bread and cheese before realizing warmth would come to be even more important to her than filling her stomach. She did not know how to hunt or trap either, or which if any of the plants that grew wild might be eaten without poisoning her—things that even the most ignorant crofter’s son could easily manage. Instead, her tutors had taught her how to sing, and sew, and read, but the books she had been given were filled with romantic poetry, or useless knowledge about the great gods and their adventures, with parables of gentle Zoria and her blameless suffering.

She stood now in a nearly empty land, staring miserably at the bridge over the muddy Elusine. Learning about suffering was useless—experience came easily enough. Learning how not to suffer would have proved much more practical.

Briony could recall just enough of her brother’s lessons and things her father had told her to know that the territory on the other side of the Elusine was named the Weeping Moors. These marshy, treacherous lands stretched almost all the way south to the lakes of upper Syan, the mud cold and black, with no shelter from the vicious, freezing winds and gusting snows. She had wandered this far almost without thinking, and now she had nowhere to go but back to the towns she had already haunted with so little luck, or east to the Tollys’ home in Summerfield, or southward along this dwindling road through the fens, then around the lakes and over the mountains to distant Syan and even more distant Hierosol, praying to strike lucky in whatever human habitations she might stumble across in the great, empty waterlands ahead.

Briony sank to a crouch. For the moment, she could see nothing but the reeds that surrounded her, the windblown stalks rubbing and whispering. She coughed and spat. The gobbet was tinged with red. It was pointless even to think about Syan—she would never survive a journey across the moors and mountains to reach it.

Unless I go west... she thought slowly, and squinted toward what looked an endless smear of dark forest on the muddy western horizon. That, she knew, must be the northernmost tip of the Whitewood. If she managed to cross through it alive, she would reach Firstford on the far side, the largest city in Silverside. There was a famous temple at Firstford that fed poor people from all over the March Kingdoms, and even provided beds for the sick.

“Silverside” began sounding over and over in her thoughts as soothing as the word “heaven.”

But as the dull morning wore away and she still sat exhausted beside the bridge and the muddy, gurgling Elusine, she still could not make a decision. Singing about Silverside to herself was all well and good, but she was even more likely to die in the trees trying to get there than out on the open wrack of the Weeping Moors. The Whitewood was the second greatest forest in all of Eion, and in its depths lived wolves and bears and perhaps even some of the stranger creatures out of legend. After all, if the fairy folk could come down out of the misty north to invade the March Kingdoms, it stood to reason that goblins and ghouls could still be found in the depths of the Whitewood, just as the stories all told. No, it would be better to stay away from the almost certain death of either marsh or forest, to turn back instead and continue to haunt the fringes of Marrinswalk villages like a lost child. Better to stay where she was and pray for a miracle than to plunge into the forest and certain doom. Yes, she decided wearily, that made more sense. She would turn back.

It was very strange, then, that as the sun slipped down the sky toward evening Briony found herself wandering through the dense trees of the Whitewood, with the road and the bridge lost somewhere behind her and no real memory of how she had come there.

There’s sky above me. There—a little. Between the branches. That is sky, isn’t it? It’s still day, I can see, so there must be sky somewhere.

She lurched a few more steps toward a place where the trees seemed farther apart, where the branches would not pull at her. Already her cloak was in tatters.

Food. So hungry. What will I...?

Something had caught at the boyish trousers she wore. Brambles. She pulled herself free, only vaguely noticing new scratches on hands already crisscrossed with bloody little lines. Thank all the gods the cold was making her fingers numb! She wept to realize she had forgotten again which direction she had set herself to walk.

“Cloudy-eyed, line-handed,” she named herself, mangling the famous story—and not entirely on purpose. She tried to laugh but could only make a ragged hooting noise. Barrick would think that was funny, she decided. He hated learning those stories.

But it was about her, that story. Well, no, not about her, but about Zoria, and hadn’t that Matty Wringtight fellow, that poet, said that she was Zoria? A virgin princess? Wrongly stolen from her father’s house?

But I ran away. It was the house that was stolen.

It didn’t matter. She had always felt deeply about Zoria, the daughter of Perin. When she had been a little girl the tales of Perin and Siveda and Erivor and the others had interested her, but it was the tale of Zoria the merciful, Zoria the pure, brave shield-maiden, that had inspired her. Although she knew many of the old tales and romances, it was only the poems about Zoria she had learned by heart. She recited the line out loud—haltingly at first, then with more strength. It gave her a rhythm to push through the brambles, a marching cadence to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

“...Clear-eyed, lion-hearted, her mind turned toward the day when her honor will again be proclaimed, the Lady of the Doves walks out into the night, toward the fires of her family.”

Briony had little strength, and the words came out as scarcely more than a croaking murmur, but it was a pleasure to hear any voice, even if it was her own, so she said it again.

“...Clear-eyed, lion-hearted, her mind turned toward the day when her honor will again be proclaimed, the Lady of the Doves walks out into the night, toward the fires of her family.”

She had to stop for a moment while a coughing fit shook her. The next part of the tale was something about walking and singing. That seemed appropriate: she was walking right now, and she supposed she was singing, too, after a fashion. Branches slapped at her, wet leaves against her face like angry kisses, making it hard to think, but at last she came up with the next lines: “Walking, she sings, and singing, Perin’s virgin daughter is truly free, despite her terrible wound and unstanched blood.”

Briony felt better with something to think about, and it fit her mood of self-pity to think of how Zoria too had suffered. Merciful goddess, she prayed, think of me and help me through these days of sorrow. In Gregor of Syan’s famous romance, the ice and snow had seemed to fill the world. Briony could still think clearly enough to be grateful that there was no snow here under the trees, but it was still cold enough to make her shiver. The pattering rain was coming down harder now, drizzling heavily through open spaces in the cover. These little waterfalls became another obstacle to be avoided as she trudged on, along with the worst of the brambles and the fallen trees.

Somebody came to help Zoria, she remembered—one of the other gods. Wouldn’t that be fine, to be saved by a god! Except that god hadn’t really saved her, had he...?

“Zosim the Helper, grandson of old Kernios the Earth Master, hears Perin’s daughter’s tripping footfalls and offers to show her the way, but the night’s shadows are long and confusing even for the grandchild of the Lord of Owls, and the dark magic of Everfrost delays them.

“Thus the Moon King’s fate is marked and sealed by the mysteries of his own great house...”

Whatever that meant. Her voice trailed off.

A shadow seemed to jump from behind one tree to another at the top of the rise. Briony stopped, heart beating fast. She squinted but could make out nothing among the paperwhite birches except the columns of weak sunlight between the trunks, each one shot through with falling rain so that they looked like pillars of smoky glass and diamonds.

Could it be a wolf? She touched the hilt of the long Yisti knife sheathed in her belt. She knew she might be able to fight one wolf, perhaps even kill it if she was lucky—but they hunted in packs, didn’t they? For a moment she was overwhelmed by a dark vision of herself surrounded by wolves in a wet, lonely forest as darkness came on. She began to cry.

“Most beasts of forest and field are more afraid of you than you are of them,” her father had once told her, and she tried hard to believe it now. “They are right to fear us, of course—we men are more likely to be their death than the other way around.”

“That’s me!” she said aloud, as harshly as she could. “Your death!” Nothing moved, no sound except the rain broke the silence after her words had echoed away. Briony coughed again and shook her head, leaned in toward the slope and started to clamber up again, scratching her hands as she grabbed for roots and vines when the way was steep.

“When morning’s sun rises...”

she sang out, loud enough for the wolves to hear, trying to make her voice steady enough to scare them away, “...All father Perin rides with the gods of his house behind him, the lightnings in his hands and his eye full of fury. The shining towers of Everfrost loom above the icy earth, burning with a pallid gleam like twilight, like bone, and a moat of killing ice surrounds it.”

The story was making her feel cold again. She realized her hood had fallen back and her hair was getting soaked.

“Before his own door stood the Moonlord in shimmering armor of ivory and electrum, pale hair blowing, with his great sword Silverbeam in his hand.”

Just before she reached the top of the rise she saw the shape once more, a movement of darkness a score of paces ahead. Afraid to see it too closely, fearful that it was some predatory beast moving just ahead of her and that the sight of it would freeze her throat, she raised her scratchy voice even louder.

“‘Go away from my door, Cousin,’” speaks Khors. “‘You ride unasked in the Moon’s Land, on the sovereign road of Everfrost. You have no rights here. This is not vasty Xandos, citadel of the gods.’ “‘I have the right of a father,’” bellows Perin, ‘and you have stolen that right from me when you stole my daughter! Set her here before me, then never cross into my lands again, and I will let you live.’”

At the top of the rise Briony could make out only a deer track or old streambed at the base of the hill on the far side, a snaking line of reddish mud. It was nothing like a road, but at least it was a direction and she would not be pulling berry brambles from her feet at each step. She made her way down toward it with cautious speed, aware for the first time in some hours that if she stumbled or slipped and broke her leg she would certainly die here. When she reached the stripe of rust-colored mud she raised her voice again in a note of ragged triumph, a hymn to her newfound path.

When you are this badly beaten, she thought distractedly, climbing over a huge, damp trunk, terrified that it might start rolling downward while she was on it—when you are this badly beaten, you must take any victory you can find.

“No one orders me on my own lands,” Khors cries, “and least of all a braggart like you, Lord StormCloud, heavy with thunder like a tempest that blows and blows but does nothing more. She belongs to me now. The dove is mine.

“Thief! Liar!” shouts Perin. “Now you shall learn for yourself whether this storm is all wind, like the stables of Strivos, full of his godlike stallions of the blowing gale, or whether it brings lightning, too!”

She reached the bottom of the hill at last, muddy and panting until her lungs ached in her chest, but she had a clear track for walking now and she wanted to go as far as she could before the light failed.

And then what? a silent voice asked her—her own voice, the sensible part she thought she had lost somewhere on the road outside the forest. Then what? You cannot even make a fire, and in any case the wood is all wet. Will you sit on a damp rock all night and try to keep the wolves at bay with your knife? And the next night? And the next...?

No. Quiet! What else can I do? Go forward. Go forward.

She raised her voice again, just as Allfather Perin raised high his weapon against his daughter’s kidnapper. Run, wolves! Run, all you enemies!

“And with that he lifts his mighty hammer Oak Tree and rides at Khors and the world shakes at the sounds of his golden car, the very mountains swaying to the drumbeat of his horses’ hooves.

“Khors is fearful, but rides out himself on his white horse, brandishing Silverbeam his potent blade, swinging the great net his father Sveros had given him, in which once the old god had captured the stars of the sky.”

When the two meet it is as the shock of a thunderclap, so that all gods in both armies, who would have rushed at each other, must instead fight to keep their feet beneath them. Indeed, some like Yarnos of the Snows are thrown to the ground; Strivos is one, and as he lies there he is almost destroyed by Azinor of the Onyenai, always swift to strike and eager to slay his father’s enemies.

“Back and forth across the great icy field upon which stands Everfrost the gods give battle, the light unto the dark, Perin and his brothers against Khors and the spawn of Old Mother Night, and ever hangs the balance on the cast of a spear, the flight of an arrow, the thrust of a sword, even the blink of a bloodspattered eye.

“White-Handed Uvis is wounded by a blow of Kernios’ great spear, but Birin, Lord of the Evening Mist, meets his doom when the arrows of the Onyenai pierce his throat. The car of courageous Volios is thrown down by the bullish strength of Zmeos the horned one, and the war-god is trapped beneath it, his bones broken, his voice crying out to his uncles for vengeance. Even the great river Rimetrail is thrown from its banks by the force of their fighting, and flows brokenly in many directions.”

She was following the deer track now. It was wider than it had looked, as though not deer but herds of cattle had made it, just as they had scraped the wide drover’s roads across the valleys and hills of Southmarch from the farmlands into the city’s markets. The relative ease of passage lifted her heart, although the rain was still falling and her face and hands were still numb. If there were wolves near her, then her proclaiming of the Lay of Everfrost was keeping them well at bay.

“In the forest, virgin Zoria is lost in the snow,” Briony bellowed, but the wet trees swallowed most of the echoes, “the Almond Princess pulled away from the aiding hand of Zosim by the wrath of Old Winter, so that she cannot see her fingers before her eyes, and can hear only the shriek of the snowy winds. Only a short distance away her family fights and dies for her honor, and everywhere else the screams of gods overtop even the storm.

“Lost, her eyes shut against the wailing winds, her face bloodied by sleet, she stumbles. Lost, she wanders in howling darkness, and does not know that on the other side of the darkly sheltering, confounding wood, all is war, all is death, as her cousins murder her cousins and the endless snows cover all...”

Briony fell silent, not because she had forgotten the words, the touching words that described how Zoria began her long wandering even as the Great War of the Gods blazed in earnest, but because something was definitely moving on the path ahead of her. The late afternoon light was beginning to weaken, but she could think of nothing but that shape just at the edge of sight, something dark that walked upright.

She smothered her first impulse to shout to the figure for help. After all, who would live in such a place? A kind woodsman, who would take her to his cottage and give her soup, like something in the stories of her childhood? More likely it was some half-savage madman who would ravage her or worse. She drew the longer of her knives and held it in her hand. The shape was moving away from her, so perhaps whoever or whatever it was hadn’t heard her. But how could that be possible? She had been shouting loud enough to knock the leaves off the trees. Perhaps he was deaf.

A deaf madman. The prospects only get better and better, she thought sourly. Briony did not quite notice it, but something of her old self had come back to her as she stumbled through the trees crying old lines of poetry.

She walked a little faster, ignoring the ache in her legs, and she called out no more of Zoria’s tale. Gregor’s famous words may have kept her going but the time for them was over, at least for a while.

Another few hundred paces and she caught sight of the shape again, and this time could see it a little more clearly: it was manlike, walking on two legs, but seemed strangely bent, humped on its back beyond even the deformities of age, and she felt a thrill of superstitious fear run along her spine. What was it? Some half-human thing, part man, part animal? As the darkness came on would it tilt forward and run on all fours?

Despite her terror, she knew she must have food and shelter soon, even at risk that she was chasing some forest demon. She hurried on, moving as quickly and quietly as she could, trying to get a better look at whatever walked the path ahead of her.

At last, when she had closed the distance to only a hundred paces or so, she saw that the shape was not as unnatural as she’d feared: whatever walked before her in a dark cloak and hood carried a bundle of wood on its back. Her heart, which had been a stone in her chest, now lightened.

A person, at least—not something with teeth and claws.

She thought it might be good to call now, with enough room between them to allow an escape if the other seemed dangerous. She stopped and shouted, “Halloo! Halloo, there! Can you help me? I’m lost!”

The dark figure slowed and stopped, then turned. For a moment she saw a hint of the face in the deep hood, of white hair and bright eyes as the wood carrier stared back at her, then the shape turned back to the path and hurried on.

“Gods’ curses!” Briony screamed hoarsely. “I mean you no harm!” And she began to trot after the shape as fast as her tremblingly weary legs would carry her. But although the figure before her seemed to move no faster than she would expect of an aged woodcutter carrying a heavy burden, she could not seem to close the distance. She dug ahead as hard as she could, but still she could get no closer to the dark shape. “Wait! I don’t want to hurt you! I’m hungry and I’m lost!”

The wide path looped between the trees, rising and falling, and the figure appeared and disappeared in the growing shadows. Briony’s mind was full of old stories again, about malevolent fairies and will-o’-the-wisps who led travelers from their rightful path to their doom in the forest or marsh.

But I’m already lost! she thought miserably. Where would the glory be in that? She even shouted it, but the silent shape before her seemed to pay no attention.

At last, just before she was about to drop to her knees in surrender, give up on the mysterious figure and resign herself to another night alone in cold, rain-spattered despair, the dark-cloaked shape turned from the path— slowly, as if determined that Briony should take notice— and disappeared through the undergrowth into the thickest part of the wood. When she reached that spot on the path, Briony looked carefully but could see nothing unusual. If she had not seen the figure turn, she would have had no idea where it had gone.

Trap, a part of her warned, but that part was not strong enough to rule a mind so hungry and lonely and distraught. She turned off the track into the deep woods, her knife held out before her. Within a few steps she found herself on a steep slope, and after a few more paces stepped down out of the trees into a quiet, grassy dell. A campsite stood at the foot of the hollow—a rickety wagon, a sway-backed horse tied beside it cropping grass, and a fire. Standing beside the fire was the dark-cloaked shape she had trailed, the bundle of firewood lying on the ground at its feet.

The figure threw back the hood of the wet cloak, revealing a tangle of white hair and a face so old and so lined that at first Briony could not be sure if it was male or female.

“You took long enough, daughter,” the ancient creature said. The voice marked her as a woman, although just barely, a throaty rasp halfway between a chuckle and a growl. “I thought I would have to lie down and have a nap to give you time to catch up.”

Briony still had the knife out, but it seemed more important to bend double and keep her hands on her knees instead while she struggled to catch her breath. This was followed by a coughing fit that made her whimper at the pain in her chest. At last she straightened up. “I...couldn’t...catch you...”

The old, old woman shook her head. “I fear for the breed,” was all she said, then began laying new faggots on the fire. “Sit down, child. I can see you’re ill—I’ll have to do something about that. Are you hungry, too?”

“Who...who are you? I mean, yes—Oh, gods, yes, I’m starving.”

“Good. We’ll make you work for your supper, but I suppose you should rest and recover a bit first.” The old woman gave her a sharp look. It was like being stared at by a wild beast. Briony’s heart tripped again. The woman’s eyes were not blue or green or even brown, but black and shiny as volcano glass. “One thing we won’t ask you to do is sing. We’ve had quite enough of that tuneless caterwauling.”

Even in the midst of all these unexpected happenings, Briony was stung. “I was just trying to keep myself going.”

She slumped to the ground and tucked the knife back into its sheath, still finding it hard to get her breath. The old woman was scarcely as high as Briony’s own shoulder and looked to weigh no more than a roast Orphanstide duck.

“Maybe it was the song, then, daughter,” said the old woman as she bent to rummage in a sack that hung from the front of the wagon. “I’ve never cared much for that Gregor. Too full of himself, and a dreadful man for a stretched rhyme. I told him so, too.”

Briony, recovering her strength a little, shook her head. Perhaps this ancient was a little mad—surely she’d have to be, to live in the forest this way, by herself. “He’s been dead for two centuries.”

“Yes, he has, bless him, and not a moment too soon.” She straightened up. “Hmmm. If I’d known yesterday I would have company, I would have gathered more marsh marigold, and maybe some chestnuts. But I didn’t know until this morning.”

“This morning what?”

“That you’d be coming. It took you long enough.” She shrugged her thin shoulders, two bony points beneath the cloak. “It’s not just Gregor, though, it’s that song of his— more of it wrong than right, you know. Zosim the Helper— there’s a laugh. That snake-eyed trickster helped himself to a few things, but that’s all the helping he ever did. And the snow. Pure nonsense. Khors’ castle wasn’t made of ice or anything like that, it shone that way because of the elfglass it was covered with—fairy-shimmer, they used to call the stuff. And ‘Everfrost!’” She smacked her lips in disgust, as if she’d eaten something that tasted foul. “He just took the real story and mixed it up with that Caylor story about the Prince of Birds—and that was a mumbled-up porridge of the story of the Godswar in the first place!”

Briony blinked. She wished that the woman would stop talking and get cooking. Only the griping pain in her stomach was allowing her to remain upright. “You...sound like you know...a great deal about...about the War of the Gods.”

The old woman snickered, then the snicker became a full throated laugh. She laughed until she was wheezing and had to sit down beside Briony. “Yes, daughter, I do know a great deal about it.” She chuckled again and wiped her eyes. “I ought to, child. I was there.”

20. A Piece of the Moon’s House

It took sister Utta longer than she would have liked to clear away the books and rolls of parchment on the least cluttered chair, but when she had finished Merolanna sank into it gladly. Once she saw that the duchess was only light-headed—and no surprise; Utta was feeling a bit dizzy herself—she cleared herself a place to sit, too. This task was not made any easier by the fact that a pentecount of miniature soldiers standing at attention on the floor had been joined by at least that number of tiny courtiers, so that there was almost nowhere Sister Utta could put her foot or anything else down without first having to wait for fingerhigh people to clear the way. King Olin’s study now looked like the grandest and most elaborate game of dolls a little girl could ever imagine. At the center of it all, as poised and graceful as if she were the ordinary-sized one and Utta and the duchess were the inexplicable atomies, sat Queen Upsteeplebat on her hanging platform in the fireplace.

Merolanna fanned herself with a sheaf of parchments. “What did you mean, you can tell me about my son? What do you know about my son?”

Utta could make no sense of this: she had lived more than twenty years in the castle, and to the best of her knowledge Merolanna was childless. “Are you all right, Your Grace?”

Merolanna waved a hand at her. “Losing my mind, there is no doubt about that, but otherwise I am well enough. I am more grateful than I can say that you are here with me. You are seeing and hearing the same things I am, aren’t you?”

“Tiny people? Yes, I’m afraid I am.”

Upsteeplebat raised her arms in a gesture of support, or perhaps apology. “I am sorry if I shocked you, Duchess Merolanna. I cannot explain how we know about your son, but I can promise you it was not by deliberately intruding on your privacy.” The queen showed them a smile tinier than a baby’s fingernail. “Although I must confess we have been guilty of that in other circumstances with other folk. But I can tell you no more about any of it, because we are offering you a bargain.”

“What sort?” asked Utta.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Merolanna. “You don’t have to bargain with me. Tell me what you want and I’ll get it for you —food? You must live a dreadful, poor life hiding in the shadows if all the old stories now turn out to be true. Surely you can’t want money...”

The Rooftopper queen smiled again. “We eat better than you would suppose, Duchess. In fact, we could triple our numbers and still barely dent what is thrown away or ignored in this great household. But what we want is something a bit less obvious. And we do not want it for ourselves.”

“Please,” said Merolanna with an edge of anger in her voice, “do not play at games with me, madam. You tease me with the prospect of learning something about my son, which if you know of his existence at all, you must know I would do anything to achieve. Just tell me what you want.” “I cannot. We do not know.”

“What?” Merolanna began to stand and then fell back in the chair, fanning vigorously. “What madness—what cruel prank...?”

“Please, Your Grace, hear us out.” Upsteeplebat spoke kindly, but there was a note of authority in her own voice that Utta could not help remarking. “We do not play at games. Our Lord of the Peak, to whom we owe our very existence, has spoken, and told us what to do, and what to say to you.”

“Is that your Rooftopper king?” Utta rose from her own chair and went to stand by Merolanna’s. She set her hand on the duchess’ shoulder and could not help noticing how the woman was trembling.

Upsteeplebat shook her head. “Not in the sense you mean. No, I rule the Rooftoppers here among the living. But the Master of the Heights rules all living things and we are his servants.”

“Your god?”

She nodded her head. “You may call him thus. To us, he is simply the Lord.”

Merolanna took a long breath; Utta could feel her shudder. “What do you want? Just tell me, please.”

“You must come with us. You must hear what the Lord of the Peak has to say.”

“You would take us...to your god?” Utta wondered that a few moments ago she had thought things as strange as they could get.

“In a way. No harm will come to you.”

Merolanna looked at Utta, her expression a grimace somewhere between despair and hilarity. Her voice, when she finally spoke, shared the same air of resigned confusion. “Take us, then. To Rooftopper’s Heaven or wherever else. Why not?”

The tiny queen gestured toward a door in the wall at the back of the library, half-obscured by bookshelves and piles of loose books. “Please know that this is a rare honor. It has been centuries since we invited any of your kind into our sacred place.”

“Through that door? But it’s locked,” said Merolanna. “Olin always talked about how the storeroom here at the top of the tower hadn’t been opened since his grandfather’s day —that the key was lost and that nothing short of breaking it down would ever get it open.”

“Nor would it,” said Upsteeplebat with a tone of satisfaction. “It has been wedged on the far side in a thousand places and the key is indeed lost—at least to your folk. But now the Lord of the Peak has called for you, so my people have labored for two days to remove the wedges and other impediments.” She waved her hands and three of her tiny soldiers stepped out from their line along the base of the fireplace bricks. They lifted trumpets made of what looked like seashells and blew a long, shrill, tootling call. As if in reply, Utta heard a thin scraping noise, and then a metallic plink, as of a small hammer striking an equally small anvil.

“All praise to the Lord of Heights,” Upsteeplebat said, “the oil was sufficient to loosen the lock’s workings. It was the matter about which my council argued and argued. Now pull the door, please—but gently. My subjects will take some while to climb out of the way.”

“You do it,” Merolanna whispered to Utta. “Small things, oh, they make me jump so.”

Utta cleared the books piled on the floor, then did her best to move the book cabinets without tipping them—no easy task. The door resisted her pull for a moment—she wondered if the Rooftoppers had remembered to oil the hinges as well at the latch—but then, with a shriek that made her wince, it swung toward her.

“Carefully!” came Upsteeplebat’s piping cry, but there was no need. Utta had already taken a step back in dismay from what she took to be half a dozen huge spiders dangling in the doorway before she realized they were Rooftoppers hanging from ropes like steeplejacks, slowly climbing back up to the top of the doorframe.

Most of them looked at her with anxiety or even fear—and small wonder, since she was dozens of times their size, as tall in their eyes as the spire of a great temple—but one tiny climber who seemed barely more than a boy kicked his legs and gave her a sort of salute before he disappeared into the darkness above the door.

“Fare you well,” Utta whispered as the rest of the climbers also reached the safety of the doorframe. She turned to the queen, who still stood on her platform in the fireplace like an image of Zoria in a shrine. Utta could not help wondering if that was coincidence or more of the Rooftopper’s planning. “Your people are brave.”

“We fight the cat, the rat, the jay, the gull,” said the Rooftopper queen. “Our walls are full of spiders and centipedes. We must be brave to survive. You may enter now.”

Utta leaned forward into the doorway.

“What...what do you see?” Merolanna’s voice quivered a little, but she had been at court for most of a century and was good at masking her feelings even in the most extreme of situations. “Can we get on with this?”

“It’s dark—I’ll need the torch.”

“A candle only, if you please, Sister Utta,” said the queen. “And if you’ll be kind enough to take my good Beetledown on your shoulder, he will help you to walk carefully in our sacred place.”

The little man, who had been standing silently on the hearth, now bowed. Utta got a candle on a dish—they had been left everywhere around the room, as if Olin had liked to use dozens at a time—then lowered her hand and let the Rooftopper climb on.

Merolanna stood, not without a little huffing and wheezing. “I’m coming with you. Whatever it is, I want to see it.”

“I will join you inside.” The Rooftopper queen lifted her hand. The royal platform slowly began to rise upward, back into the fireplace flue.

“Do thee step careful, like un told thee,” said Beetledown. The voice so close to her ear made Utta itchy. She lifted the candle and led Merolanna through the open door.

The floor of the room beyond was scarcely half the size of the one in the king’s library, but the room itself extended farther upward: with candle lifted, Utta could see the rafters of the tower top itself, latticed with what she first took for spiderwebs, then realized were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of rope bridges, none any wider than her hand. Some were only a foot or so long, but a few stretched for a dozen feet or more in sagging parabolas braced with slender crosswires.

“Watch tha foot!” cried Beetledown. Utta looked down to see that she had nearly stepped on a ramp that led from the floor to an old rosewood chest no higher than the middle of her thigh. The lid was flung back and the hinges, badly rusted, had given way, so that the lid hung unevenly, half resting on the ground, but it was the inside of the chest that caught her eye. A row of tiny houses had been built inside it, along the back—half a dozen simple but beautifully constructed three-story houses.

“Merciful Zoria,” said Utta. “Is this where your people live?” “Nay,” said Beetledown, “only those as tend the Ears.” “Tend the ears?”

“Step careful, please. And watch tha head, too.”

Utta looked up just before walking into one of the hanging bridges. Up close, she could see it was much less simple than she had thought: the knot-work was regular and decorative, the wooden planks clearly finished by hand with love and care. She resolved to move even more slowly. Just the loss of one of these bridges to her clumsiness would be a shame.

“Did you ever imagine such a thing was here, under our noses?” she asked Merolanna.

“This castle has always been full of secrets,” the other woman said, sounding oddly mournful.

They moved deeper into what might have once been a simple storeroom but had long since become a weird, magical place of miniature bridges and ladders, of furniture turned into houses, with small wonders of fittings and drapery inside them that Utta could only glimpse, and tiny lanterns glowing in the windows like fireflies.

“Where are all your people?” she asked.

“There be only few of we folk who live in this place—only those who serve the Lord of the Peak direct and personal,” the little man explained. “Those stay inside, so as not to be trod on by giants.” He coughed, a sound like a bird sniffing. “Beggin’ tha pardon, ma’am.”

Utta smiled. “No, that sounds very sensible. How long have your people been here, hiding from us blundering giants?”

“Forever, ma’am. Long as remembered. The Lord of the Peak, he made us and gave us this place for our own. Well, not this place, ’haps—this room we took for ours in my great-grands’ day. But our lands, our walls, our roofs, we have had forever.”

“But then why is your god named the Lord of the Peak?” Utta asked. “If you have always been here, what mountain can you know?”

“Why, the great peak your folk do call Wolfstooth,” Beetledown said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world—which, to him, it doubtless was. “That is where the Lord lives.”

Utta shook her head, but gently, so as not to dislodge the little man. Wolfstooth Spire, the castle’s central tower, was the Rooftopper’s Xandos—the home of their god! What a world this was, both his and hers. What a strange, wonderful world.

The queen now appeared from a hidden door somewhere on the far side of the room, riding in a chariot drawn by a herd of white mice, with a small phalanx of soldiers behind her. She waved in an imperial sort of way, then led Utta and Merolanna a little farther down what was clearly the attic room’s main thoroughfare, between rows of chests and other furniture—each, Utta had no doubt, converted into temples or mantiseries or congregations of sisters, all in service to the god who they believed lived at the top of a nearby tower.

Upsteeplebat’s chariot drew to a halt at the end of the aisle; her mice settled on their haunches and began most unceremoniously to groom themselves. Against the wall, at the end of a sort of plaza a couple of yards across made when the furniture had been pushed back was a high dresser of the kind used by wealthy women. Its drawers had been pulled out, the bottommost the farthest, the topmost the least, and a fretwork of ladders and ramps connected the drawers together. More of the spidery steeplejacks were at work here, but it took a moment for her to make out what they were doing. A long bundle, almost like an insect wrapped in webbing by a spider, was being carefully lowered down from the topmost drawer to the floor.

“Could you kneel, please,” Upsteeplebat said in her high, calm voice. “We have delicate work to do, and all of us will be safer if you are sitting or kneeling.”

“Can we get on with things?” Merolanna grumbled. “This dress isn’t meant for such games. If you’d told me I’d be down on the floor like a child playing tops I’d have worn my nightclothes instead.”

Utta could not blame the dowager duchess for complaining. Though she herself was in good, healthy fettle, and much more conveniently garbed in a simple robe, her old bones did not particularly enjoy the exercise, either.

When they were seated, a small troop of soldiers and a trio of shaven-headed creatures (whose delicate features Utta guessed must be female) brought out a cushioned bed made from what had obviously once been a jewel case. The bundle from the uppermost drawer was lowered into it, then unwrapped to reveal a Rooftopper woman with dark hair and pale skin, dead or sleeping.

“I present to you the Glorious and Accurate Ears,” the queen said, “whose family has for centuries been our link to the Lord of the Peak, and who will today, for the first time, share the Lord’s words straightly with your folk.”

The trio of priestesses, if that was what they were, stepped forward to stand at the head and either arm of the Ears. They lit bowls of some stuff that smoked and waved them over her and then began to chant words too quiet to be heard. This went on for long moments; Utta could feel Merolanna shifting impatiently beside her. In the quiet room, the rucking and crinkling of the duchess’ dress sounded like distant thunder.

At last the priestesses stepped back and bowed their heads. The silence continued. Utta began to wonder if she or Merolanna were expected to ask a question, but then the woman in the bed began to move, first to twitch as in a fever-dream, then to thrash weakly. Suddenly she sat up. Her eyes opened wide, but she did not seem to be looking at anything in the room, not even the two giant women. She spoke in a surprisingly low voice, a slurry string of quiet sounds like bees buzzing. The priestesses swayed.

“What does she say?” demanded Merolanna.

“She says nothing,” the queen of the Rooftoppers corrected her. “It is the Lord of the Peak himself who speaks, and he says, ‘The end of these days comes on white wings, but it bears darkness like an egg. Old Night waits to be born, and unless the sea swallows all untimely, the stars themselves will rain down like flaming arrows.’ Those are the words of the Lord of High Places.”

Vague, apocalyptic prophecy was not what the dowager duchess had come to hear. “Ask about my son,” she said in a sharp whisper. But Utta could tell that a bargain was being struck, even if she did not yet know with whom they were bargaining—the Rooftoppers and their queen? Their god? Or simply this one Rooftopper oracle?

“We have been told that you know something of this woman’s son, O Lord of the Peak,” Utta said slowly and clearly, hoping that if the Rooftoppers spoke her language, so did their god. “Will you tell us of him?”

The woman thrashed again and almost fell from her bed. Two tiny, shaven-headed priestesses stepped forward to hold her as she mumbled and rasped again.

“‘The High Ones took him, fifty winters past,’” the queen said, translating or simply amplifying the Ears’ quiet mumble. “‘He was carried behind the cloud of unknowing mortals call the Shadowline. But he yet lives.’”

Merolanna let out a little shriek, swayed, and collapsed against Utta, who did her best to hold her upright: the duchess was of a size that she would destroy much of the Rooftoppers’ religious quarter if allowed to fall. “She will thank you for this news—but I think not today,” Utta said, a little out of breath. She bent closer to Queen Upsteeplebat. “Can your god not tell us more?” she whispered. “Is there a way to find her child?”

For long moments the Ears lay like a dead woman—much like Merolanna, who seemed to have fainted. Then the tiny shape stirred and spoke again, but so quietly that Utta could only see her lips move. Even the little queen had to lean against the rail of her chariot to hear.

“The Lord of High Places says, ‘The world’s need is great. Old Night pecks at its shell, yearning to breathe the air of Time. This castle’s priest of light and stars once owned a piece of the House of the Moon, ancient and powerful, but now it has been taken. Find where that stolen piece has gone and in return Heaven will speak more of this mortal woman’s son.”

With that the Ears fell into a deep, deathlike sleep. When it was clear she would speak the god’s words no longer, the priestesses wrapped her up again. This time the tiny soldiers moved in and carried the entire bed away into the shadows like a funeral bier.

Utta held Merolanna, who groaned like a woman in a bad dream, and wondered and wondered at the surpassing strangeness this day had brought.

The duchess stirred in her bed and sat up, hands clawing out as though something had been pulled away from her.

“Where are they? Did I dream?”

“You did not dream,” Utta told her. “Unless I dreamed the same dream.”

“But what else did that little creature say? I cannot remember!” Merolanna fumbled for the cup of watered wine on the chest by her bed, drank it so fast that a pinkish rivulet spilled and ran down her chin.

Utta told her the rest of the Ears’ pronouncement. “But I can make no sense of it.”

“My child!” Merolanna fell back against the pillows, her chest heaving. “I gave him away,” she moaned, “and now the fairies have him. Poor, poor boy!” In halting words, she told Utta of the child’s secret birth and disappearance. Utta was surprised, but not astonished—the Zorians did not believe humans could be perfected, only forgiven.

“If the little people’s oracle spoke correctly, that was almost fifty years gone, Your Grace,” she told Merolanna. “Still, we must try to understand the god’s words—if it really was a god who spoke. A piece of the Moon’s House, the little woman said. And that it belonged to the castle’s priest of light and stars.”

“Priest? Do they mean Father Timoid? But he is gone!” Merolanna tossed her head as if in a fever. “Why should some god send this message to torture me?”

“Perhaps they mean Hierarch Sisel.” Utta reached out to take the duchess’ hand, hoping to calm her. “He is the highest priest of all, so...”

“But he is gone too, to his house in the country. He told me he could not bear to see what the Tollys were doing.” Merolanna tried to calm herself. “Would he be the priest of light and stars, though? He is the great priest of the Trigon, and they are air, water, and earth...” She moaned again. “Ah, if only Chaven were here. He knows of such things—he studies the stars, and knows almost as much about the old tales of the gods as Sisel...”

“Wait,” said Utta. “Perhaps that is who it means. Chaven is a priest of sorts—a priest of logic and science. And his is the particular study of light and the stars, with those lenses of his. Perhaps Chaven had some powerful object that is now lost.”

“But Chaven is the one who’s lost!” said Merolanna. “He’s vanished! And that means my son is lost forever...!”

“No one simply disappears,” said Utta. “Unless the gods themselves take them. And the Rooftoppers’ god, at least, does not seem to know what’s happened to Chaven, so perhaps he is still alive.” She stood. “I will see what I can discover, Your Grace.”

“Be careful!” Merolanna cried as Utta moved to the door. She extended her arms again as though to draw the Zorian sister back. “You are all I have left!”

“We have the gods, Duchess. I will pray for my gracious lady Zoria’s help. You should do the same.”

Merolanna slumped back. “Gods, fairies...the world has run utterly mad.”

Utta called in the little maid Eilis. “See to your mistress,” she told the girl. “Take good care of her. She has had a shock.”

But who will see to me? she wondered as she left Merolanna’s chambers. Who will take care of me in this mad time when legends spring to life at our feet? Zoria, merciful goddess, I need your help now more than ever.

Even to Matty Tinwright, who had never found it easy to say no to a celebration or a feast, especially if someone else was paying the tally, it seemed a bit much. Surely with an invading force just across the river—an invading force of monsters and demons at that—all these fetes and fairs were a waste, if not worse?

Perhaps Lord Hendon is only trying to divert us from our troubles. If so, he had set himself a hard task, because troubles were plentiful. The creatures across the bay had not attacked the keep, but they had certainly cut off all supplies coming to the overfilled castle from the west, and the short, terrifying war had emptied the valleys to the west and south as well, so there were no cattle or sheep being driven in from Marrinswalk and Silverside and no wool or cheese from Settland, only such supplies as could be brought in by ships, which lay crammed in Southmarch harbor like driftwood against a seawall.

Despite all this, the merriment went on. Tonight, to celebrate the first evening of Gestrimadi, the festival in honor of the Mother of the Gods, there would be a public fair in Market Square and here in the castle a great supper and masked fete, with music and dancing.

And yet surely there has not been a darker Dimenemonth since the Twilight folk last marched on us, two hundred years gone?

It was strange, Tinwright thought, that a place as solemn and silent during the day as this should spring to life so feverishly at night, as though the chambers were tombs which discharged their occupants only after sunset, so that they could dance and flirt in imitation of the living.

It was a powerful image, and he thought suddenly that he should write it down. Surely there was a poem in it, the courtiers emerging from their stony dens at nightfall, wearing masks that hid everything but their too-bright eyes... But Hendon Tolly and his circle will not like it, and these days that is a very dangerous thing. Didn’t Lord Nynor disappear after being heard criticizing the Tollys’ rule?

Still, the lure of the idea was strong. He decided that he could write it and keep it hidden until better times, when his foresight would be recognized, and his brilliance (if not his courage) honored.

Poets are not made to be hanged, he reminded himself. They are made to admired. And even if I could only be admired for being hanged, I would choose obscurity, I think. No, he would stay alive. In any case, he had other things to live for, these days... “Oh, most effective, Master Tinwright!” said Puzzle approvingly. Now that he had been picked up by Hendon Tolly’s set, however mockingly, the old jester had developed a loud heartiness to his tone that Tinwright found irritating. Strangely, though, his wrinkled face suddenly crumpled into sadness. “You will captivate many a young heart tonight, that is certain.”

Tinwright looked down at the forest-green hose, which had a disturbing tendency to twist between ankle and crotch so that each leg’s seam looked more like a winding country road than a straight royal thoroughfare. The colors were pleasing, though no real traveling minstrel ever wore such peacockery as this. It was a party costume that had belonged to Puzzle’s dead friend Robben Hulligan, and the old man was actually weeping now to see him in it.

“He was fair of face and shapely of leg, my good old Robben.” Puzzle rubbed his eyes. He had dressed for the masked fete himself in a black mantis’ robe, and it suited him strangely, making his long, dour face seem for the first time to have found its proper setting. “He too loved the ladies, and the ladies loved him.”

Tinwright didn’t say anything. He had heard this Robbentalk before and knew the old man would have his say no matter what Tinwright did.

“He was murdered by bandits, poor fellow,” said Puzzle, shaking his head. Tinwright could have recited the rest of his speech with him, so many times had he heard it. “Taken by Kernios long before his time. Have I told you of him? Sweet singing Robben.”

Tinwright was even thinking of going to the temple for the services, just to avoid the rest of the old man’s maundering, but was saved that ignominious fate by the arrival of a small boy, a page, bearing a message to Puzzle from Hendon Tolly’s squire.

“Ah, it seems I am wanted!” the old man said with a pleasure he could barely contain. “The guardian wishes me to sit with him during the feast, so that I may entertain him.”

The guardian must be trying to keep himself from eating too much, Tinwright thought but of course did not say: he was fond of Puzzle, if a bit tired of spending so much time with him. The old fellow’s recent rise in favor had made him cheerful, but had made him a bit boastful as well, and Matt Tinwright’s more dubious fortunes made it hard sometimes to enjoy his friend’s triumphs. “Does it say anything about me?”

“I fear not,” said Puzzle. “Perhaps you could come with me, though. I could sing my lord one of your songs, and surely...”

Tinwright thought back on the disastrous and humiliating reception he had received the last time he had tagged after Puzzle. That made it much easier to remember something that was true, if not useful to a man in search of advancement: he had decided he truly disliked Hendon Tolly. No, more than that—Tinwright was terrified of him. “Fear not, good friend Puzzle,” he said aloud. “As you pointed out, there are doubtless many fair young faces and firm young bosoms that await my attention tonight. I hope you will have good fortune at the guardian’s table.” He could not help dispensing a little advice, though, since Puzzle these days seemed as innocently smitten of attention as a child. “Be careful of that man Havemore, though. He does not love anyone, and will go to subtle lengths to be cruel.”

“He is a good enough fellow in his way,” said Puzzle, quick to defend any of the wealthy, powerful men who had so unexpectedly taken him up. “When next you come with me, you will see and know him better.”

“Let’s hope not,” said Matt Tinwright under his breath. If Tolly was a predator, Tirnan Havemore was a scavenger, a graveyard dog that would snatch up whatever it could find and hold onto it with stinking jaws. “Be well and be merry, Uncle.”

He waved as Puzzle went out, and then realized he had forgotten to ask him whether Hulligan’s borrowed costume was buttoned correctly in the back. He wished he had a dressing-mirror, but only a rich man—or at least a man who made poems for rich men—could afford such a thing.

Ah, Princess Briony, where did you go? Your poet needs you. At least you appreciated my true quality, if scarcely anyone else did...or does... The castle was strung with parchment lanterns, and in every corner stood little altars to Madi Surazem covered with greenery, with pale hellebore blooms, firethorn, and holly surrounding white candles, each arrangement a silent prayer that the swelling within the belly of Moist Mother Earth would bear forth in another spring of healthy crops.

But what crops? Tinwright thought And who to harvest them? The fairies have laid waste to all the western and northern lands. It was strange that he should be the one fretting about such things. His father had once called him (exaggerating only slightly, Tinwright had to confess) the laziest and most self-centered youth on either side of Brenn’s Bay. Now he watched the courtiers in their masks and finery trip out into the garden and come back in, soaked from the rain and laughing, only to rush out again, and felt like a despairing parent himself. He wondered if his earlier idea, however poetic, might not be wrong: the dead could afford to make merry, having nothing to lose. The people around him seemed more like children, playing games beneath a teetering boulder.

Something bumped him and almost knocked him to the floor. “Sing us a song, minstrel!” shouted a drunken voice.

Swaying in front of him, wearing a mask with an obscenely long nose, was Durstin Crowel, one of Tolly’s closest followers, a red-faced young lord who would have looked more natural, Tinwright thought, on a platter at the center of a banquet with a quince stuffed in his mouth. Crowel stood in the middle of the corridor with four or five of his friends, none of whom looked any better for drink than the Baron of Graylock. He was soaking wet and wearing a dress. “Go on,” Crowel said, pointing an unsteady finger at Tinwright. “Sing something with some swiving in it!” His companions laughed but they did not move on. They had sensed an edge in Crowel’s tone that meant more interesting things might be coming.

“Go to, then!” one of them shouted. “You heard! Entertain us, minstrel!”

“It is a costume, only,” Tinwright said, backing away. At least they did not seem to have recognized him behind his bird mask. Sometimes it was good to be beneath the notice of the great.

“Ah, but my dagger is real.” Crowel pulled something with a long, slender blade from his bodice—the noble seemed to be dressed as a tavern maid. “To protect my dear virtue, you see...” He paused for the laugh, which his friends dutifully provided, “so I’m afraid you will sing—or I will make you sing.” He belched and his friends laughed again. “Minstrel.”

For a moment it seemed as if it would be easier simply to do it—to mop and mow a little for the benefit of these drunken arsewipes, to play the part and sing a sad song of love and let them mock him. He knew enough of Crowel to know the man had beaten at least one servant to death and crippled another, just in the time he had been living in the Tollys’ wing of the residence—surely it was better simply to give the man what he wanted.

But why should I think they will stop at mockery?

“My lord’s command,” he said aloud, and bent his knee in a bow. “I will be pleased to sing for you...another day.”

Tinwright turned and ran for the residence garden. He was out into the cold rain before Crowel and the others realized what had happened.

This was the part of the plan I didn’t think about as carefully as I might, Tinwright admitted to himself as he huddled soaking wet in the lee of a tall hedge. The wind was chill and sharp as a razor—he thought he could feel his skin beginning to turn to ice. Still, he was not ready to go back inside. He was fairly certain that Graylock hadn’t recognized him, so all he had to do was stay away from them just for tonight. He considered sneaking back to the room he shared with Puzzle, but if he didn’t go back through main halls of the residence he would have a long walk back in the biting, bitter wind.

Better just to wait until they drink themselves to sleep.

In any case, he was feeling more than a little sorry for himself when he realized he had not heard voices or seen movement in the garden for some time.

If they’re not looking for me out here, at least I could find somewhere a little more warm and dry to hide, he thought. He pulled the minstrel’s floppy cap down over his ears again—he had already nearly lost it to the wind several times—and wrapped the thin cape tight around his shoulders, wishing he had picked a more sensible disguise.

I could have been a monk with a hood—or a Vuttish reaver with a fur-lined helmet! But no, I wished to show my legs to the ladies in a minstrel’s hose. Fool.

He found one of the covered arbors at last; it was only when he had thrown himself down on the bench with a loud grunt of despair that he realized someone else was already sitting there.

“Oh! Your pardon, Lady...”

The woman in the dark dress looked up. Her eyes were red —she had been crying. An ivory-colored mask sat on her lap like a temple offering bowl. Tinwright’s heart jumped, and for a moment he could not speak. He leaped to his feet, bowed, then remembered to take off his mask.

“Master Tinwright.” She turned away and lifted her kerchief, drying her tears in a slow, deliberate fashion. Her voice was hard. “You find me at a disadvantage. Have you followed me, sir?”

“No, Lady Elan, I swear. I was only...”

“Wandering in the garden? Enjoying the weather?”

He laughed ruefully. “Yes, as you can see I have quite immersed myself in it. No, I was...well, I must be frank. The Baron of Graylock and some of his friends had taken it into their heads that I should entertain them, and it wasn’t clear how much I should have to suffer for my art.” He shrugged. “I decided that I would entertain them with a game of hide and seek instead.”

“Durstin Crowel?” Her voice grew harder still. “Ah, yes, dear Lord Crowel. Do you know, when I first came here, he asked Hendon if he could have me. ‘I’ll break her for you, Tolly,’ he said—as if I were a horse.”

“You mean he wanted to marry you?”

For the first time she turned to look at him, her face a mask of bitter amusement. “Marry me? Black heart of Kernios, no, he wanted to bed me only.” Her face twisted into something else, something truly disturbing. “He did not know that Hendon had other plans for me. But yes, I know Baron Durstin.” She composed herself, even tried to smile. “Very well, Master Tinwright, you are forgiven for your intrusion. And in fact, you may keep the arbor for yourself and I’ll tell no one where you are. I must go back inside now. Doubtless my lord and master is looking for me.”

She had risen, the mask halfway to her face, when Tinwright at last found the words.

“What is he to you?”

“Who?” She sounded startled. “Do you mean Hendon Tolly? I should think that was obvious, Master Tinwright. He owns me.”

“You are not his wife but his sister-in-law. Will he marry you?”

“Why should he? Why should he pay for a cow whose milk is already his?”

It sickened him to hear her speak so. He took a breath, tried to find calm words. “Does he at least treat you well, my lady?”

She laughed, a cracked, unpleasant sound, and put the white mask to her face so that she seemed a corpse or a ghost. “Oh, he is most attentive.” Her shoulders slumped and she turned away again. “Truly, I must go.”

Tinwright grabbed at the sleeve of her velvet gown. She tried to pull away and something tore. For a moment they both stood, half in, half out of the rain.

“I would kill him for causing you unhappiness,” he said, and realized in that moment it was true. “I would.”

She lowered the mask in surprise. “Gods help us, do not say such things! Do not even go near him. He...you do not know. You cannot guess what evil is in him.”

Tinwright still held her sleeve. “I...would not treat you so, Lady Elan. If you were mine, that is. I would love you. As it is, I think of you day and night.”

She stared at him. Tears welled in her eyes again. “Ah, but you are a boy, Master Tinwright.”

“I am grown!”

“In years. But your heart is still innocent. I am filthy and I would begrime you, too. I would stain you as I myself am stained, corrupted...”

“No. Please, do not say such things!”

“I must go.” She gently pulled free of his grip. “You are kind —you cannot know how kind—to say such things to me. But you must not think of me. I could not bear to have another’s soul on my conscience.”

Before she could turn away again he stepped forward and took her shoulders, felt her trembling. Could it be she had some feelings for him? She looked so startled at his touch, so frightened, as if she expected to be hit, that he did not kiss her mouth, although he wished to at this moment beyond any dream of riches or fame he had ever coveted. Instead he let his hands slide down her arms. As if his fingers stole her vitality where they passed, she let the mask drop clattering to the walkway. He took both her hands in his, lifted them to his lips, and kissed her cold fingers.

“I love you, Lady Elan. I cannot bear to see you, and to know you are in pain.”

Her cheeks were wet, her eyes bright and frightened. “Oh, Master Tinwright, it cannot be.”

“Matthias. My name is Matthias.”

She looked at him for a long moment, then pulled his hands up to her mouth and kissed them in turn. “Would you really help me? Truly?

He was soaking with rain, but he could feel her tears on his hands like streaks of hot lead. “I would do anything—I swear by all the gods. Ask me.”

She turned to look out into the darkness. When she turned back her face was strange. “Then bring me poison. Something that will cause a quick death.”

For a moment Matt Tinwright could not breathe. “You...you would kill Tolly?”

She let go of his hands and wiped at her eyes with her sleeve. “Are you mad? With my sister married to his brother Caradon? The Tollys would destroy her. They would burn my parents’ house to the ground and murder them both. Not to mention that Southmarch Castle would be left in the hands of Crowel and Havemore and others almost as blackhearted as Hendon, but not as clever. The March Kingdoms would be drowned in blood in half a year.” She took a breath. “No. I want the poison for myself.”

She pulled away from him again, bent and picked up her mask. When she stood, she was again a phantom. “If you love me, you will bring me that release. It is the only gift I can ever take from you, sweet Matthias.”

And then she was gone into the rain.

21. The Deathwatch Chamber

Vansen lay on his face, still trembling, unable to find the strings to make his limbs lift him again and uncertain that he wanted to. The terrible voice that had blasted through his head like a crack of thunder was still echoing, although whether that was inside or outside his skull, or both, he could not have said.

“DO MY WORDS PAIN YOU? OR IS IT THE WAY I SPEAK THEM?”

Vansen whimpered despite himself. He felt as though an ocean wave had picked him up and dashed him onto the rocks. He clung to the floor and wondered if he could hit his head hard enough on the stone flags to kill himself and end this throbbing, agonizing clamor.

When the voice rolled over and through him again, the words and the mocking laugh were quieter—painful but not crippling. “Well, then, I will speak more softly, for the comfort of my guests. Sometimes I forget what the voice of a god can do...”

“Half a god,” said a voice Vansen had never heard before, but which seemed somehow weirdly familiar. It was vastly less intrusive than the one-eyed monster’s, but it sounded inside Ferras Vansen’s head in the same way. “Half a god, half a monster.”

“Is there a difference?”

“Why do you take us from our lawful business, Old One?”

“To help me inmy lawful business,” the rumbling voice said. “But what brings one of the Encauled so close to my adopted kingdom? What is this lawful business of which you speak?”

“We are riding home to the House of the People, but were driven out of our way. Why should you interfere?”

Now that Jack Chain’s voice no longer rattled his bones with each utterance, Vansen slowly began to lift himself from the ground. He ached as if he had been beaten, but if he was going to die he would do his best to meet that death standing, as a soldier of Southmarch. The dusty stone beneath him was splotched with red; he lifted his hands to his face and realized his nose was streaming blood.

“Interfere? You trespass on my land, little hobgoblin, and then claim I have interfered with you?” The monstrous, one-eyed creature lolled on his statue-throne, his splayed legs longer than Vansen was tall, the handsome, ruined head as big as a temple bell. Jikuyin was smiling down at a small figure standing before him—Gyir the Storm Lantern.

“I am on the king’s business,” said Gyir’s voice.

By the Three, Vansen thought, I can understand him! He was as astonished by this as everything else that had happened to them. I can hear him in my head now, just as the prince can!

He turned to tell Barrick, but was horrified to see the boy lying on his side with blood running from his nose and ears. Vansen threw himself down beside him and was only slightly relieved to feel the rise and fall of Barrick’s chest.

“He is hurt!” Vansen shouted. “Help him, you god or whatever you are—it was your great barking voice that did this to him!”

Jikuyin laughed long and hard; the sound rolled and crashed in Vansen’s skull like untethered barrels slamming in the hold of a storm-tossed ship. “Help him! I like you, little mortal—you are very amusing! But like the fly on the horse’s back who tells his host which way to go, you have a flawed notion of your own importance.” He turned his single eye on Gyir. “As for you, slave of the Fireflower, I do not know how one of the Encauled could let himself be taken unawares—and by Longskulls, no less...!” The godthing chortled, and several of the other prisoners in the great room laughed, too, if not with the same heartiness as their master. “But it signifies nothing, in any case. You will be part of my great work.” Jikuyin grinned, showing the true horror of his ruined mouth and shattered teeth. He stroked the chains across his chest, making the severed heads sway. “And even if you cannot help me in any profound way, you will at least, as I promised, prove ornamental.”

The giant stood then for the first time, and even though Ferras Vansen had thought himself full to sickening with strange miracles, it was a horrible, astonishing sight: Jikuyin was so tall that his great head seemed to rise into the heights of the chamber like the pockfaced mooon, beyond the reach of the torches and lanterns, until much of it had passed into shadow and only the lower, broken half could be seen.

“Take them away,” he rumbled. A host of shapes scurried forward from the dark edges of the massive room—the guard-Followers, man-sized and heavier than the Longskulls, with stubs of sharp bone poking through their matted pelts and small piggy eyes glinting like coals. “Give them to the gray one and tell him to keep them safe until I need them.”

Gyir stood firm as the red-eyed things began to surround him, and clearly would have fought, but one of the apelike creatures had already stolen up behind him unseen. It hit Gyir in the back of the head with its massive fist and the Storm Lantern was pulled down and dragged away.

Vansen was too weak to resist. All he could do was try to keep a hand on Barrick’s unmoving form as they were carried out of Jikuyin’s throne room by the bristly, foulsmelling creatures. As they were roughly hurried down what seemed an endless succession of lightless tunnels he struggled against his heavy shackles, doing his best to cling to the prince so that they would not be separated, as a mother who has fallen into a river with her child will still keep a hand clenched on the infant’s garment even after death has stolen away her breath.

Even in the center of his own great house, the fortress that had been given to his family from the gods’ own hands, the blind king Ynnir dina’at sen-Qin, Guardian of the Fireflower, Lord of Winds and Thought, could not simply walk to the Deathwatch Chamber. First the Guard of Elementals must be supplicated, allowed to perform their warlike rites in his honor, and in honor of the one they were protecting—the Salute of the Bone Knife, the Song of the Owl’s Eye (blessedly shorter in these latter days, thanks to an edict by Ynnir’s own grandfather: once the chant would have lasted an entire day), and the Arrow Count. When all these duties were finished and the Guard-Commander of the Elementals had removed his helmet in salute—even without sight, Ynnir always found that part difficult—the king moved on.

The Celebrants of Mother Night did not perform official duties, but they had been allowed to make their camp of suffering outside the Deathwatch Chamber. Merely to move among them, to hear their moaning and weeping and feel the naked misery of their grief, was like walking through biting winds and needle-sharp sleet. Pale Daughter herself, fleeing her lover’s house with an infant godling in her belly, could have felt nothing more chillingly painful.

It was a relief, after a time that felt like days, to pass out of the chambers where the Celebrants shrieked and tore at themselves and into the silence of the final antechamber, to face Zsan-san-sis, the ancient chieftain of the Children of the Emerald Fire. Zsan-san-sis had returned from the underground pools in which he had spent more and more time as he aged; it was a measure of the crisis that he should appoint himself the final guardian of the Deathwatch Chamber when it was only one of his young grandnephews who stood watch outside the Hall of Mirrors itself.

“Moonlight and Sunlight,” said the king.

“And thus roll the days of the Great Defeat unto Time’s sleep,” said the other, completing the ceremonial greeting. “I bid Your Majesty welcome.” His tone seemed even more curt than usual, the glow from inside his ceremonial robe dim and noncommittal, so that his mask was almost invisible in the shadowed hood. The king had always had trouble reading the moods of Zsan-san-sis, as if his own sightlessness and the Emerald Fire chieftain’s silver mask were impediments as real to him as they would be to a mortal. The Children had long favored the queen’s cause, although the old chieftain had been the most conciliatory of his clan. In days past Ynnir had often wondered what would happen when Zsan-san-sis eventually sank to the bottom of his pool and did not surface again, a day when someone less willing to compromise might rise to lead the Emerald Fire Children. Now it no longer seemed to matter. “How is she today?”

“I have not gone in to her, Majesty. I feel her, but barely—a breath faint as a whisper from Silent Hill.” His thoughts and words both—for they came to the king as a single thing— were clouded with regret and resignation. “Even were we to triumph, Majesty, she could never travel now. She would die before we left our own lands.”

Ynnir brought his open hand to his chest, then spread his fingers, a gesture called Significance Incomplete. “We can only wait and be patient, old one, hard as that is. Many threads still remain unbroken.”

“I would not have spent my last seasons this way,” said Zsan-san-sis. “Holding together what is broken, knowing that my daughter’s daughter’s daughters will bear their young in pools without light.”

Ynnir shook his head. “We all do what we can. You have done more than most. This defeat was authored when Time began—all we do not know is the hour of its coming.” “Who could not say with certainty that it is upon us?”

“I could not.” Ynnir said it gently, letting it pass to the ancient guardian with an undertone of spring, of hope, of renewal even after death. “Neither should you. Do as you have always done—do as your broodsire raised you. We will face it bravely, and who knows? We may yet be surprised.”

Zsan-san-sis’ glow guttered for a moment, then burned more strongly. “You are more king than your father was, or his father before him,” he said.

“I am my father, and his father before him,” said the blind king. “But I thank you.”

He did not clasp the old chieftain’s hand—it would be unwise even for the king to touch one of the Children of the Emerald Fire—but he nodded his head so slowly it might almost have been a bow. He left the robed guardian in a posture of surprise as he walked into the Deathwatch Chamber.

The beetles on the walls shifted minutely as he entered and the movement of their iridescent wingcases sent a ripple of changing colors across the entire chamber. They settled again; the flickers of blue and pale green were replaced by an earthier tone that better reflected the gray and peach of the cloud-wreathed sunset outside the open window. Blind for centuries, Ynnir could smell the sea as powerfully as a drowning man could taste it, and he hoped that his sisterwife could smell it too, that it gave her a little relief in the growing dark.

He stood over the bed and looked at her, so wan, so still. It had been a full turning of the seasons since she could even bear to be sat up in Hall of Mirrors like some obscene, floppy icon. He was almost grateful that those humiliating days had passed, that she had slipped down into herself so far that she could not even be moved.

Even as he stared in silent contemplation he realized he saw no traces of life at all. Alarmed, he looked to her lips, the pink now paler than ever, almost white, and felt a moment of real fear. Always before, even on the worst days, she had greeted him before he spoke. So still...!

My queen, he called to her, shaping each word so clearly that he could imagine it as a stone dropped into a still pond, the ripples sending everything that swam beneath them scattering, until the stone itself struck into the softness at the bottom. Can you hear me? My twin?

Despite all that had gone between them, the fair and the foul, his heart leaped in his breast when he at last heard her words, as quiet as if they did indeed issue from beneath the mud at the bottom of a deep, deep pond.

Husband?

I am here, at your bedside. How are you today?

Weaker. I...I can barely hear you. I sent my words to Yasammez. She did not think the name, but rather a flutter of ideas—Grandmother’s Fierce Beautiful Sister of the Bloodletting Thorns and the Smoking Eye. I should not have done it, she told him, almost an apology. I did not have the...strength...but I was... Afraid she would use up what little of her music remained, he hastened to finish her thought. You were wondering if she had succeeded. And she told you she had.

Succeeded at your plan. Fulfilled the Pact. Not at what I wished... Which would have availed you nothing. Trust me, my sister, my wife. Many things have passed between us over all these years, but never lies. And it could yet be my own compromised plan, like the despised, bent tree in the corner of the orchard, that will bear fruit.

What would it matter? There is nothing that can be done now. All that we love will perish. Her thoughts were so full of blackness he could almost feel himself pulled down by them, like a man so fixed on the swirling clouds below his mountain path that he leans toward them and falls free... No. He pulled himself back, disentangling himself from her. Hope is the only strength left to us and I will not give it up.

What hope? For me? I...doubt it. And even if so, then what of you...? He sensed her amusement, that old, bitter mirth that sometimes over the long centuries had felt to him like a slow poison. What of you, Ynnirit-so?

I ask for nothing I cannot bear. And Yasammez has given the glass to her dearest, closest servitor, Gyir.

The Encauled One? But he is so young in years...!

He will bring it to us. He will stop for nothing—he knows its importance. Do not despair, my queen. Do not go down into the darkness yet. Things may change.

Things always change, she told him, that is the nature of things... but she was fading now, weary and in need of that deeper blackness that was her sleep, and which might last days. A last bubble of dark amusement drifted up to him.

Things always change, but never for the better. Are we not the People, and is that not the substance of all our story?

Then her thoughts were gone and he stood alone with her silent, coolly slumbering shell. The beetles shifted on the walls again, a quiet unfurling and resettling of wings that rippled sunset-colored lightning all around the chamber until they too settled down to sleep once more.

They were back.

The dark men, the faceless men, once more pursued him through burning halls, sliding in and out of the rippling shadows as though they were nothing but shadows themselves. Was it a nightmare? Another fever dream? Why couldn’t he wake up?

Where am I? The tapestries curled and smoked. Southmarch. He knew the look of its corridors as completely as he knew the sound and feel of his own blood rushing through his veins. So had all the rest been a dream? Those endless hours in the dripping forest behind the Shadowline? Gyir and Vansen, and that bellowing, oneeyed giant—had they all been fever-fancy?

He ran, gasping and clumsy, and the faceless men in black oozed behind him like something that had been melted and poured, losing bodily form as they flowed around corners and snaked along the walls in sideways drips and smears only to regain shape once more, a dozen shapes, and spring out after him, heads following his every movement, fingers spreading and reaching. But even as he ran for his life, even as the tapestries flamed and now even the roofbeams began to smolder, he felt his thoughts float free, light and insubstantial as the flakes of ash swirling around him on hot winds.

Who am I? What am I?

He was coming apart, fragmenting like a kori-doll on an Eril’s Night bonfire, his limbs flailing but useless, his head a thing of straw, dry tinder, full of sparks.

Who am I? What am I?

Something to hold—he needed something cool as a stone, thick and hard as bone, something real to keep himself from falling into flaming pieces. He ran and it was as though he grew smaller with every step. He was losing himself, all that made him up charring, disappearing. The rush and thump of the faceless men’s pursuit echoed in his head as if he were listening to his own blood coursing through the gutters of his body, his own filthy, corrupted blood.

I’m like Father—worse. It burns in me—it burns me up!

And it hurt like the most dreadful thing he could imagine, like needles under his skin, like white-hot metal in his marrow, and it shifted with every movement, driving bolts of pain from joint to joint, rushing up into his head like fire exploding from a cannon’s barrel. He wanted only to get away from it, but how? How could you run away from your own blood?

Briony. If Southmarch itself was no longer his home, if its passageways were full of fire and angry shadows and the galleries hung with leering, alien faces, his sister was something different. She would help him. She would hold him, remember him, know him. She would tell him his name —he missed it so much!—and put her cool hand on his head, and then he would sleep. If only he could find Briony the faceless men would not find him—they would give up and scuttle, slide, ooze back into the shadows, at least for a while. Briony. His twin. Where was she?

“Briony!” he shouted, then he screamed it: “Briony! Help me!”

Stumbling then, and falling; a bolt of pain shooting through him as he struck his injured arm—how could this be a dream when it felt so real? He scrabbled to lift himself from the hot stone, arm aching worse than even the burning of the skin on his hands. He could not stop, could not rest, not until he found his sister. If he stopped he would die, he knew that beyond doubt. The shadow-men would eat him from within.

He stood, even in this dream world forced to cradle his throbbing, aching arm, that thing he carried through his life like a sickly child, loving it and hating it. He looked around. A vast, empty room stretched away on all sides, dark but for a few slanting columns of light falling down from the high windows—the Portrait Hall, and it was empty but for him, he could feel it. The faceless men had not caught him yet, but he could smell smoke and sense the growing murmur of their pursuit. He could not stop here.

A picture hung before him, one he had seen before but seldom paid much attention to—some ancient queen whose name he could not remember. Briony would know. She always knew things like that, his beloved show-off sister. But there was something about the woman’s eyes, her cloud of hair, that caught his attention... The sound of his pursuers rose until it seemed they were just beyond the Portrait Hall door, but he stood transfixed, because it was not the face of some ancient Eddon pictured there, some long-dead queen of Southmarch, but his own, his features haggard with fear and terror.

A mirror, he thought. It’s been a mirror all this time. How often had he passed through this place and its ranks of frowning dead without realizing that here, in the center of the hall, hung a mirror?

Or is it a portrait...of me...? He stared into the hunted, haunted eyes of the sweating red-haired boy. The boy gazed back. Then the mirror began to dim as if clouds were forming on its surface, as if even from this distance he fogged it with his own hot, fretful breath.

The clouds dimmed and then dissolved. Now it was Briony who looked back at him. She wore a strange hooded white dress he had never seen before, something a Zorian sister would likelier wear than would a princess, but he knew her face better than his own—much better. She was unhappy, quietly but deeply, a look he had never seen so much as he had since first they had word their father had been betrayed and made a prisoner.

“Briony!” he shouted now, “I’m here!”

He could not reach her, and he knew that she was not hearing his words, but he thought she could at least feel him. It was glory to see her, cruelty to have so little of her. Even so, just the sight of her utterly familiar and perfect Briony-face reminded him of who he was: Barrick. He was Barrick Eddon, whatever might have happened to him, wherever he might be. Even if he had been dreaming this— even if he was dying and it had all been some strange illusion the gods had set for him on the doorstep of the next world—he had remembered who he was.

“Briony,” he said, but more quietly now as the clouds covered the face in the mirror. For a moment, just before it disappeared, he thought he saw a different face, a stranger’s face, astoundingly, a girl whose black hair was streaked with a red like his own. He could not understand what was happening—to go from that most familiar of all faces to one he had never seen before...!

“Why are you in my dreams?” she said in surprise, and her words pattered in his head like cooling rain. Then the black haired girl was gone too, and so was almost everything else—the faceless men gone, the Portrait Hall gone, the flames of the terrible conflagration grown as transparent as wet parchment and the castle itself going, going... As the terror lost its grip a little he was startled, frightened, confused, and even excited by the memory of that new face —seeing it had felt like cold water in a parched mouth—but he let it go for the moment so he could cling instead to what was more important: Briony had touched him, somehow, across all the cold world and more, and that great goodness had kept him in the world during a moment when he would otherwise have chosen to leave. He was still footless and confused by the dream he was in, but he understood that he had chosen to remain for now on the near side of Immon’s fateful gate, however wretched and painful living might be.

Like a man fighting upward from the bottom of deep water, Barrick Eddon began to thrash his despairing way back toward the light.

Vansen had just finished making a space for the prince and wrapping him in his own tattered, stained wool guardsman’s cloak when Barrick’s feverish murmuring quieted and the boy’s body, which had been as tight as a bowstring, suddenly went limp. Even as horror flooded through Vansen... I lost the prince! I let him die!

...The boy’s eyes snapped open. For a moment they rolled wildly, fixing on nothing, as if he tried to stare right through the stone of the long, low cavern cell in search of freedom. Then the young prince narrowed his gaze on Ferras Vansen. The soldier thought that the boy was going to say something to him—thank him, perhaps, for carrying him all this way, or curse him for the same reason, or perhaps just ask what day it was. Instead, the prince’s eyes abruptly welled with tears.

Sobbing, snuffling, Barrick thrashed his way out of both the cloak and Vansen’s restraining grasp, then crawled across the floor to an empty spot near the adjoining wall where he huddled with his face in his hands, weeping unrestrainedly. Several of the other prisoners turned to watch him, the expressions on their inhuman faces varying from mild interest to uncomprehending blankness. Vansen clambered to his feet to follow the prince.

I suspect he will not thank you. Gyir’s voice in his head was still a novelty, and not an entirely pleasant one—like a stranger making himself at home in your house without permission. Let the boy grieve.

“Grieve for what? We’re alive. There’s still hope.” Vansen spoke aloud—he didn’t know the trick of talking without words and did not care to learn. Already this place, this shadowland, was doing its best to take away all that made him who he was. He was not going to help speed the process.

Grieve for all he has realized he is losing. The same thing to which you also cling so tightly—his old idea of who he was.

“What do you...? Get out of my head, fairy!”

I do not dig into your thoughts, sunlander. Vansen could feel the irritation—no, it was something deeper—in Gyir’s words. The featureless face showed no more emotion at this moment than the prow of a boat, but the words came with pulses of anger, as though each thought hummed like an apple wasp. Even as diminished as I am, I cannot help knowing a little of your strongest feelings, Gyir said, speaking ideas that Vansen somehow understood as words. Any more than if you were sick or frightened someone could avoid smelling the stink in your sweat. Another wave of contempt came from him. And in truth I can do that as well, much to my sorrow. You sunlanders all smell like corruption and death.

Struck by curiosity, Vansen ignored the insult. “How is it I can understand you at all? I couldn’t before.”

I did not know you could until just now. In other, less dangerous circumstances, it would be quite an interesting puzzle to consider.

Vansen watched Prince Barrick as the boy’s sobbing grew weaker. A few of the smaller prisoners that had been driven off by Barrick’s sudden move had edged back into the area surrounding him, but they seemed to be regarding him with more fear than interest. “Will any harm come to him there?”

Gyir briefly turned his yellow eyes toward Barrick. I think not. Most of those in this room are afraid of me. They are right to be, even crippled as I am.

Vansen saw that the fairy spoke the truth: even in this large underground prison chamber, stuffed to overcrowding with scores of creatures of at least a dozen different types and sizes, some of which appeared quite fierce, the three of them were being given a great deal of room to themselves. “But they’re not afraid of you enough to let you go.”

The nearly faceless creature watched Vansen for a long moment, as though considering his existence for the first time. You too can speak to me without speaking aloud, Ferras Vansen. It was not his own name Vansen sensed in Gyir’s wordless speech so much as his face. It was unutterably strange to see himself both so clearly and so strangely, even to see his face suddenly pull into a scowl of frightened disgust—as if someone had put a looking glass inside his thoughts.

“Stop! I want nothing to do with such...black magic.”

You would refuse to stop talking aloud, even if it means that you are endangering the boy—your prince? We will never find a way to escape if half our conversation is spoken out loud. There are still folk in this land who understand the sunlander tongue, as the raven did. I do not doubt Jikuyin has a few among his slaves.

Ferras Vansen thought for a long time, then nodded, although the very idea of sharing the substance of himself with the faceless, inhuman creature made him feel queasy and terrified. “Well, then. Show me.”

It is simple, man of the hills. All you need to do is think that you are speaking the words—hear yourself speaking but keep the sounds locked inside you. I will guide you.

Strangely, the fairy was right—it was simple. Once he found the proper trick of imagining himself talking in just the right way, he discovered that Gyir could hear what he said as clearly as if he had formed it with air and tongue and lips. Had it been the power of the godling Jikuyin’s voice that had unlocked this skill? But then why had Barrick Eddon been able to do it from the first?

Why can I suddenly understand you? he asked the fairy. And what can we do to escape this place?

If I knew already how we might free ourselves, Gyir said with an undercurrent of something that felt a little like scorn, or perhaps was the bitter tang of self-dislike, I would not be conversing about the boy’s mood and how you gained the gift of true speech, but beginning to make a plan. Now Vansen could feel the fairy’s anger clearly, as a man in water would feel another man thrashing helplessly close by.

I dislike being a prisoner, too—perhaps more than you do. We will talk later about escape.

Then, with a considered effort that Vansen could feel like a gust of cooling air, Gyir swept away his own fury. For now, we must try to understand better why we are being held, he said, and it was as if the moment of rage had never happened. That is our first step—it will set the direction for all others. The fairy paused for a long time then, and Vansen felt the silence in a way he never had before. As for what has made you able to understand me, Gyir said at last, I said it was interesting because it seems to hint at an answer to a question my people have long debated—at least those in the Deep Libraries to whom such tasks are given. This came as a blur of ideas Vansen could only barely riddle out, and he was certain he was missing most of what the fairy intended. There is little we can do at this moment except... Interesting? I don’t understand you? He looked to Barrick again, who had recovered himself a little. The boy’s eyes were red and his cheeks still wet, but he seemed to be listening to Vansen’s conversation with Gyir. I don’t understand, he repeated.

Ah, but you do, and that is the crux. Gyir, who had been crouching, finally sat down and pushed his back against the sooty, rough-carved stone wall. Look around you. Do you see these creatures? Drows and bokkles and all manner of things even less savory? These are the Common Ones —all creatures of our lands, some even related to my folk, but they are not the trueblood People. Vansen could feel the emphasis with which Gyir spoke the word, as if it were a thing of power, something to conjure with. Most especially, they are not High Ones. Among the Twilight folk, only those called the High Ones have the gift of speaking with their hearts, as we say it—the True Speech, which cannot lie, the speech we are using now.

So why should I be able to do it? Vansen asked. He was fearful of what the answer might be—some taint in his family, some witchy blood, another mark of shame laid on his quiet, hard-working, abashed people.

Some say that all the sunlanders once could speak with us this way—that they, or at least some of them, were of the same great branch as the People, that they cameof the People and not just after them. Perhaps Jikuyin merely thrust the gift of True Speech upon you, somehow —his kind, the Old Ones, are grandchildren of the Formless and have many powers that are unknown. But also it may simply be that when he spoke to you the power of his voice cleared the channels of your heart as a great flood may scour clean riverbeds long filled with silt. It is possible he only gave back to you that which is the birthright of your kind.

But...but Prince Barrick... Vansen turned and saw the boy staring back at him with something in his eyes that looked almost like hatred. Shaken, it took him a moment to remember what he had been saying and to form the words in his mind. Prince Barrick could speak to you already, and understand you, long before we met this thing you call Jikuyin. Vansen could not approach the complexity of images which Gyir used when he “spoke” their captor’s name, but he felt certain just his horrified memory of the ogre’s massive, ravaged face would be enough.

Prince Barrick is different, Gyir said abruptly, otherwise he would have been dead long ago and you would not have followed him here. That is all I may say.

“Don’t talk about me.” The boy wiped angrily at his eyes. “Don’t.”

Why can’t I hear him—Barrick—in my head? asked Vansen.

It could be in time you will, Gyir replied. Or it could be that both of you can only speak with me.

Vansen wanted to go to the prince, to bring him back to sit with them, but something in the boy’s expression kept him seated where he was. Why are we here in this mine or prison or whatever it is? Why aren’t we dead? And what is the monster who’s captured us? Does he have any weaknesses? You said he was one of the Old Ones, a god or a god’s bastard.

Gyir looked at him for a few moments before answering. As to why we are not dead, I cannot say, Ferras Vansen, but it is clear that Jikuyin wants slaves more than he wants corpses. The fairy looked as though he was almost asleep, red eyes only half open. What he wants them for, I do not know, but this place has an old, grim reputation. As to what he is, I told you—a grandchild of the Formless.

This means nothing to me. I have never heard of such a god.

You have, but among your people the true lore is almost lost. Even here, in our own land, the stories have become children’s tales. You remember the raven’s little tale of Crooked and his great-grandmother, Emptiness? There were bones of truth buried in it, but the flesh was corrupt. The truth at its core is that the Formless begat both Emptiness and Light, and those two in turn begat gods and monsters. The One in Chains is such a one—a small monster, not a god but a demigod. Still, he is a great power.

And that’s whose prisoner we are? asked Vansen. His head was beginning to hurt from all this think-talking. Why have I never heard of them—of any of them?

“You have,” said Barrick. He sounded as though he had a mouthful of something bitter. “You know them all, Captain— Sva, the Void, and Zo, her mate, the First Light. All the rattling nonsense the priests talked...and it’s all real.” He seemed on the verge of tears again. “All of it! The gods are real and they will destroy us all, for not believing. We can no longer pretend it isn’t true.”

They will not destroy us, said Gyir, and although your kind and mine may well destroy each other, it will not be the gods’ doing. But he did not sound as certain as he had before, and Vansen wondered suddenly if it was really true that the True Speech could not lie. They are all gone from the earth now, long gone. Only a few of their lesser children like this crippled demigod remain.

Vansen had to take a breath, pained by such sacrilege from an inhuman creature—the gods gone? I still do not understand you. Sva and Zo? I have heard of them, but what of Perin and the Trigon? What of the gods we know, at whose temples we worship?

They are all one family, said Gyir. One family and one blood. And long before your folk or mine had even thought to clothe ourselves, they were spilling that blood.

“It’s pointless,” protested Barrick, putting his hands over his ears as though he could block out the soundless words that way. “This talking—any of this! It changes nothing.” His face reddened and seemed to crumple. The boy was crying again, rocking in place. “I thought it was all priest’s lies. Instead, I am being p-p-punished...punished for my miserable, flyblown, shit-stained pride!”

Vansen clambered to his feet and hurried to the prince’s side. “Your Highness, it is not your fault...”

“Leave me alone!” the boy shrieked. “Do not speak to me of things you know nothing about! What could you know of a curse like mine?” He threw himself down on his stomach and banged his forehead against the stone, like a man in a terrible hurry to pray.

“Prince Barrick...! Barrick, get up...” Vansen put his arms around the boy’s chest and tried to lift him, but the prince fought his way loose, and as he did so struck Vansen hard in the face.

Barrick did not even seem to notice. “No! Don’t you touch me!” he groaned. “I am filthy! On fire!” A froth of spittle hung at the corners of the boy’s mouth and on his lower lip. “The gods have chosen me for this suffering, this curse...!”

Vansen hesitated only a moment, then drew back and slapped the prince full in the face. Barrick stumbled and fell to his knees, shocked into silence. His hand slowly came up to his cheek. He drew it away and stared at it as though expecting to see blood, although Vansen had hit him only with his open hand. “You...you struck me!”

“I apologize, Your Highness,” Vansen said, “but you must calm yourself, for your own sake if nothing else. We cannot afford to bring down the guards, or start a fight with other prisoners. You may punish me for my crime as you wish if we make it home to Southmarch again. You may even have me put to death for it, if it pleases you...”

“Death?” said Barrick, and in an instant the flailing child was gone, his place taken by someone who looked like him but was eerily self-possessed. Barrick’s anger, hot a moment before, had suddenly turned icy. “You’re a fool if you think you’re going to get off that easily. If the impossible occurs and we return to Southmarch alive, I’m going to tell my sister how you feel about her and then order you to join her bodyguard, so you have to look at her every day and know that she is looking back at you with disgust, that she and all the other ladies of the court are marveling together at the sight of the most arrogantly foolish and pitiful idiot who ever lived.”

The prince turned away from him. Gyir seemed lost in his own secret thoughts. Ferras Vansen had no choice but to sit silently, holding his stomach as though he had been kicked.

22. A Meeting of the Guild

“I don’t like it,” Opal said. “No good can come of telling everyone.”

“I’m afraid this once I can’t agree with you.” Chert looked around the front room. Evidence of the distractions of the last days were everywhere—tools uncleaned, dust on the tabletop, unwashed bowls and cups. “I am no hero, old girl. I’ve come to the limit of what I can do.”

“No hero—is that what you say? You certainly have been acting like you thought you were one.”

“Not by choice. In all seriousness, my love, you must know that.”

She sniffed. “I’ll put the kettle on. Did you know the flue is blocked? We’ll be lucky if the smoke doesn’t kill us.”

Chert sighed and sank deeper in his chair. “I’ll see to the flue later. One thing at a time.”

He had been so tired that when the ringing began he did not at first realize what it was. Half in dream, he imagined it as the bells of the guildhall, that the great building was floating away on some underground river, being sucked down into the darkness below Funderling Town... “Is that our bell?” Opal shouted. “I’m making tea!” “Sorry, sorry!” Chert climbed onto his feet, trying to ignore the protesting twinges from his knees and ankles. No, he was definitely not a hero.

I should be settled back to carve soapstone and watch grandchildren play. But we never had children. He thought of Flint, strange Flint. Until now, I suppose.

Cinnabar’s bulky form filled the doorway. “Ho, Master Blue Quartz. I’ve come on my way back from quarry, as I promised.”

“Come in, Magister. It is kind of you.”

Opal was already waiting by the best chair with a cup of blueroot tea. “I am mortified to have visitors with the house in this state—especially you, Magister. You do us an honor.”

Cinnabar waved his hand. “Vistiting the most famous citizen of Funderling Town? Seems to me I’m the one being honored with an audience.” He took a small sip of the tea to test it, then blew on it.

“Famous...?” Chert frowned. Cinnabar had a rough and ready sense of humor, but the way he’d said it didn’t sound like a joke.

“First you find the boy himself, then when he runs away you bring him back with one of the Metamorphic Brothers holding the litter? Big folk visitors in and out? And I hear rumors even of the Rooftoppers, the little folk out of the old tales. Chert, if anyone in the town is not talking about you and Opal, they would have to be as ignorant as a blindshrew.”

“Oh. Oh, dear,” Opal said, although there was a strange undertone of something almost like pride in it. “Would you like some more tea, Magister?”

“No, I’ve still got supper waiting at home for me, Mistress Opal. It’s one thing to work late, but to come home to Quicksilver House without an appetite after my woman’s been in the kitchen all afternoon is just asking for trouble. Perhaps you could tell me what’s on your minds, if I’m not rushing you?”

Chert smiled. How different this fellow was from Chert’s own brother, who was also a Magister: Nodule Blue Quartz was not nearly so important as Cinnabar in Funderling Town, but you would never know it from the airs Nodule put on. But Cinnabar—you couldn’t fail to like a man who was so easy in himself, so uninterested in position or rank. Chert felt a little bad for what he was about to do.

“I’ll get to the point, then, Magister,” he said. “It’s about our visitor. I need your help.”

“Problems with the boy?” Cinnabar actually looked mildly concerned.

“Not the boy—or at least that’s not the visitor we mean.” He raised his voice. “You can come out now, Chaven!”

The physician had to bend at the waist to make his way through the doorway of the bedchamber, where he had been sitting with Flint. Even with his head bowed so as not to touch the ceiling, he loomed almost twice Cinnabar’s height.

“Good evening, Magister,” he said. “I think we have met.” “By the oldest Deeps.” Cinnabar was clearly amazed. “Chaven Makaros, isn’t it? You’re the physician—the one who’s supposed to be dead.”

“There are many who would like that to be true,” said Chaven with a rueful smile, “but so far they have not had their wish granted.”

Cinnabar turned to his hosts. “You surprise me again. But what is this to me?”

“To all of us, I’m beginning to think,” said Chert. “My bracing can’t take the weight of all these secrets any longer, Magister. I need your help.”

The head of the Quicksilver clan looked up at the physician, then back at Chert. “I’ve always thought you a good and honest man, Blue Quartz. Talk to me. I will listen. That much at least I can promise.”

When Ludis saw that his visitor had arrived, the Lord Protector of Hierosol gestured for his military commanders to leave. The black-cloaked officers rolled up their charts of the citadel’s defenses, bowed, and departed, but not without a few odd glances at the prisoner.

Ludis Drakava and his guest were not left entirely alone, of course: besides the Golden Enomote, half a pentecount of soldiers who never left the lord protector’s presence even when he slept, and who stood now at attention along the throne room walls, the lord protector also had his personal bodyguards, a pair of huge Kracian wrestlers who stood cross-armed and impassive on either side of the Green Chair. (The massive jade throne of Hierosol was reputed to have belonged to the great Hiliometes, the Worm-Slayer himself, and certainly was big enough to have seated a demigod. In recent centuries, more human-sized emperors had removed much of the throne’s lower foundation so they could sit with their feet close enough to the ground to spare their pride.) Ludis, a former mercenary himself, was broad enough in chest and shoulders to mount the Green Chair without looking like a child. He had once been lean and muscled as a heroic statue, but now even the light armor that he wore instead of the robes of nobility—perhaps to remind his subjects he had won the throne by force and would not give it up any other way—could not hide the thickness around his middle, nor could his spadelike beard completely obscure his softening jaw.

Ludis beckoned the prisoner forward as he seated himself on the uncushioned jade. “Ah, King Olin.” He had the rasping voice of a man who had been shouting orders in the chaos of battle all his grown life. “It is good to see you. We should not be strangers.”

“What should we be?” asked the prisoner, but without obvious rancor.

“Equals. Rulers thrown together by circumstance, but with an understanding of what ruling means.”

“You mean I should not despise you for holding me prisoner.”

“Holding you for ransom. A common enough practice.” Ludis clapped his hands and a servant appeared, dressed in the livery of House Drakava, a tunic decorated with a stylized picture of a red-eyed ram, a coat of arms that had not been hanging in the Herald’s Hall quite as many years as the other great family crests. You can make yourself emperor in one day, warned an old Hierosoline saying, but it takes five centuries to make yourself respectable. “Wine,” commanded Ludis. “And for you, Olin?”

He shrugged. “Wine. One thing at least; I know you will not poison me.”

Ludis laughed and pawed at his beard. “No, no indeed! A waste of a valuable prize, that would be!” He flicked his hand at the servant. “You heard him. Go.” He settled himself, pulling the furry mantle close around his shoulders. “It is cold, this sea wind. We plainsmen never get used to it. Are your rooms warm enough?”

“I am as comfortable as I could be any place with iron bars on the doors and windows.”

“You are always welcome at my table. There are no bars on the dining hall.”

“Just armed guards.” Olin smiled a little. “You will forgive me. I cannot seem to lose my reluctance to break bread with the man who is holding me prisoner while my kingdom is in peril.”

The servant returned. Ludis Drakava reached up and took a goblet from the tray. “Or would you like to choose first?”

“As I said.” Olin took the other goblet and sipped. “Xandian?”

“From Mihan. The last of the stock. I suppose they will make that foul, sweet Xixian stuff now.” Ludis drank his off in one swallow and wiped his mouth. “Perhaps you scorn my invitations because you are a king and I am only a usurper —a peasant with an army.” His voice remained pleasant, but something had changed. “Kings, if they must be ransomed, like to be ransomed by other kings.”

Olin stared at him for a long moment before replying. “Beggaring my people for ransom is bad enough, Drakava. But you want my daughter.”

“There are worse matches she could make. But I am told her whereabouts are...unknown at the present. You are running out of heirs, King Olin, although I also hear your newest wife has whelped successfully. Still, an infant prince, helpless in the hands of...what is their name...the Tolly family...?”

“If I did not have reasons already to wish to put my sword through you,” said Olin evenly, “you would have just given me several. And you will never have my daughter. May the gods forgive me, but it would be better if she truly is dead instead of your slave. If I had known then what I know about you now I would have hanged myself before allowing you even to suggest such a match.”

The lord protector’s eyebrow rose. “Ah? Really?” “I have heard of what happens to the women brought to your chambers—no, the girls. Young girls.”

Ludis Drakava laughed. “Have you? Perhaps as you curse me for a monster you will tell me what your own interest is in girl-children, Olin of Southmarch. I hear you have developed a...friendship with the daughter of Count Perivos.”

Olin, still standing, bent and put down his goblet on the floor, sloshing a little wine onto the marble tiles. “I think I would like to go back to my rooms now. To my prison.”

“My question strikes too close to home?”

“All the gods curse you, Drakava, Pelaya Akuanis is a child. She reminds me of my own daughter—not that you would understand such a thing. She has been kind to me. We talk occasionally in the garden, with guards and her maids present. Even your foul imagination cannot make that into anything unseemly.”

“Ah, perhaps, perhaps. But that does not explain the little Xixian girl.”

“What?” Olin looked startled, even took a step back. His foot tipped over the goblet and the dregs pooled on the floor.

“Surely you don’t think you can meet with a chambermaid, or laundry-maid, or whatever that little creature is, let alone my castle steward, without my knowing it. If such a thing happened I would have to poison all my spies like rats and start over.” He brayed a laugh. “I am not such a fool as you think me, Southmarch!”

“It was curiosity only.” Olin took a deep breath; when he spoke again his voice was even. “She resembled someone, or so I thought, and I asked to meet her. I was wrong. She is nothing.”

“Perhaps.” Ludis clapped for the servant again, who came in with an ewer of wine and refilled the lord protector’s cup. He saw the goblet on the floor and looked accusingly at Olin, but did not move to clean it up. “Tell the guards to bring in the envoy,” Ludis ordered the man, then turned back to his captive. “Perhaps all is as you say. Perhaps. In any case, I think you will find this interesting.”

The man who came in, accompanied by another halfpentecount of the lord protector’s Rams, was hugely fat, his thighs rubbing against each other beneath his sumptuous silk robes so that he swayed when he walked like an overpacked donkey. His head and eyebrows were shaved and he wore on his chest a gold medallion in the shape of a flaming eye. He paused when he reached the foot of the throne and looked at Olin with casual suspicion, like someone who had spent most of his life making quick decisions on court precedent and disliked seeing anyone he could not quickly put into an appropriate list in his head.

“Pay no attention to my...counselor,” Ludis Drakava told the fat man. “Read me your letter again.”

The envoy bowed his huge, shiny head, and held up a beribboned scroll of vellum, then began to recite its contents in the high tones of a child.

“From Sulepis Bishakh am-Xis III, Elect of Nushash, the Golden One, Master of the Great Tent and the Falcon Throne, Lord of All Places and Happenings, may He live forever, to Ludis Drakava, Lord Protector of Hierosol and the Kracian Territories.

“It has come to Our attention that you hold prisoner one Olin Eddon, king of the northern country called Southmarch. We, in our divine wisdom, would like to speak with this man and have him as Our guest. Should you send him to Us, or arrange for him to return with Favored Bazilis, Our messenger, We will reward you handsomely and also look kindly on you in the future. It could even be that, should Hierosol someday find itself part of Our living kingdom (as is the manifest wish of the great god Nushash) that you, Ludis Drakava, will receive a guarantee of safety and high position for yourself in Our glorious empire.

“Should you refuse to give him to Us, though, you will incur Our gravest displeasure.”

“And it is signed by His sacred hand, and stamped with the great Seal of the Son of the Sun,” the eunuch finished, letting the vellum roll closed with a flourish. “Do you have an answer for my immortal master, Lord Protector?”

“I will give you one by morning, never fear,” said Ludis. “You may go now.”

The huge man looked at him sternly, as at a child who seeks to shirk responsibility, but allowed himself to be led out again by the soldiers.

Soon the throne room was empty again of all save Olin and Ludis and the bodyguards. “So, will you give him what he wants?” Olin asked.

Ludis Drakava laughed hard again. His cheeks were red, his eyes only a little less so. He had been drinking for much of the afternoon, it seemed. “He is readying his fleet, the Autarch—that poisonous, eunuch-loving child. He will be coming soon. The only question is, why does he want you?”

The northern king shrugged. “How could I know? They say this Sulepis is even more of a madman than his father Parnad was.”

“Yes, but why you? In fact, how did it come to his attention that you are my...guest?”

“It’s hardly a secret.” Olin smiled in an ugly way. “You have made sure that all of Eion knows I am your prisoner.”

“Yes. But it is also interesting this should come so soon after you spoke with that Xixian girl. Could your innocent meeting have been an opportunity for you to...send a message?”

“Are you mad?” Olin took a step toward the Green Chair.

The two huge guards unfolded their arms and stared at him. He stopped, fists clenched. “Why would I want to put myself into such a madman’s hands? I have fought him and his father for years—I would be fighting them now, if you and cursed Hesper had not conspired to take me prisoner in Jellon.” He slapped his hands together in frustration. “Besides, I spoke to that girl only a few days ago—how could any message go back and forth to Xis so swiftly?”

The lord protector inclined his head. “All that you say seems reasonable.” He seemed satisfied merely to have angered Olin. “But that does not mean it is true. These are unreasonable times, as you should well know, with your own castle attacked by changelings and goblins.” He looked up, fixing Olin with his reddened eyes. “Let me tell you this— you belong to Ludis. I bought you, and I will keep you. If I sell you, I alone will profit. And if the Autarch of Xix somehow manages to knock down the citadel walls, I will make sure with my last breath that he does not get you. Not alive, anyway.” The master of Hierosol waved his hand. “You may go back to your chambers now to read your books and flirt with the chambermaids, Eddon.” He clapped his hands and the prisoner’s guards appeared from outside the throne room door. “Take him out.”

The minutely carved roof of the cavern that shielded Funderling Town was renowned throughout Eion. In better times people actually traveled up from distant countries like Perikal and the Devonisian islands just to see the fantastical forest of stone, the loving work of at least a dozen generations of Funderlings.

The ceiling of the House of the Stonecutters’ Guild was not so famous, and certainly nowhere near so large, but was in its own way just as stupefying a piece of art. In a natural concavity on the underside of Southmarch Castle’s foundation slab a combination of limestone, cloudy quartz, beams of ancient black ironwood and the Funderlings’ own matchless skills had been crafted into something the gods themselves might envy.

Chert had seen it many times, of course—his grandfather had been part of the team which had performed its last major repairs—but even so it never failed to impress him. Staring up at it from his lonely position at the ceremonial Outcrop, the ceiling seemed a window through quartz crystal and limestone clouds to some distant part of heaven, but those clouds were braced with great spars of ironwood far too thick and workmanlike to be merely ornamental. It was only when the viewer’s eyes adjusted to the darkness (which grew paradoxically greater as the empty space ascended) that he saw the robed and masked figure surrounded by smaller robed and veiled figures, all seated upside down at the apex, glaring down from the vault, and he realized that the view was not that of someone looking up, but looking down into the depths of the earth—a great tunnel leading downward into the J’ezh’kral Pit, domain of the Lord of the Hot, Wet Stone— Kernios, as the big folk called him.

But of course, the true cleverness of the room was beneath the viewer’s feet—something Chert had time to appreciate now as he waited for the noisy reaction to his last words to die down. The Magisters’ semicircle of benches and the four stone chairs they faced sat around the edge of a huge mirror of silvered mica, so that everything above was reflected below. Chert and the others seemed to be sitting around the rim of the great Pit itself, looking down into the very eyes of their god. To approach the Highwardens was to seem to walk on nothing above the living depths of Creation.

It was disconcerting at the best of times. Tonight, with the whole Guild joined together to judge Chert’s actions, it was downright frightening.

“You did what?” His own brother, Nodule, was predictably leading the charge against him. “You cannot imagine the shame I feel, that one of our family...”

“Please, Magister,” said Cinnabar. “No one here has even determined that anything wrong’s been done, let alone that Chert has brought shame to the Blue Quartz family.”

“To the entire Quartz clan!” cried Bloodstone, Magister of the Smoke Quartz branch. Fat and bulging-eyed, he was an ally of Nodule’s and quick to join Chert’s brother in most things—including, it seemed, in being horrified by what Chert had done. He was not alone: the Magisters of the Black, Milk, and Rose Quartz families had also been grumbling all through Chert’s appearance at the Outcrop.

Nice to see my family hurrying to my aid. Chert could only hope that the silence of the other members of the large Quartz clan augured more open minds.

“Strangers in the Mysteries?” Bloodstone shook his head in apparent amazement. “Big folk hiding from their rightful lords here in Funderling Town? What madness have you brought to us, Chert?”

“Your concern has been noted,” said Cinnabar, sounding as though he meant the opposite. As Magister of his own Quicksilver family and one of the most important leaders of all Metal House—most thought he would someday replace old Quicklime Pewter as one of the four Great Highwardens, the most exalted of Funderling honors—he was a good ally to have. On top of everything else, he was also fair and sensible. “Perhaps,” he said now, “we should see if any of the other Magisters or our noble Highwardens have questions before we start shouting about shame and tradition.”

Scoria, Magister of the Gneiss family since his father was lifted to the rank of Highwarden, stood up, his thin face full of fretful anger. “I wish to know why you took in this newest upsider, Chert Blue Quartz. The rest is beyond my understanding, but this seems simple enough. He is a criminal and the king’s regent searches for him. If he is found here we will all suffer.”

“With respect, Magister,” Chert said, “the physician Chaven is a good man, as I said. He was also one of King Olin’s most respected advisers. If he swears that the Tollys have murdered people to seize the throne, and will murder him as well to silence him—well, I’m only a foreman, a working man, but it seems more complicated to me than merely saying he’s a criminal.”

“But that doesn’t change the risk we’re in,” pointed out Jacinth Malachite, one of the few female Magisters. “Chert, many of us know you, and know you as a good man, but there’s a difference between doing a deed of good conscience on your own and dragging all Funderling Town into a quarrel with the castle’s rulers...”

A noise like wet sand rubbing on stone interrupted her: Highwarden Sard Smaragdine of Crystal House was clearing his throat. Unlike the Magisters, the Highwardens did not rise to speak; ancient Sard remained shrunken in his chair like a sack of old chips and samples. High on the wall above his head the Great Astion, seal of Funderling Town, gleamed like a star buried in the stone. “Too many questions here to go about it in such a backward way,” rasped Sard. “Which questions are the most important? That must be answered first. Then we will move our way down, layer after layer, until we have reached the bedrock of the whole matter.” He waved a spindly arm. “What do the Metamorphic Brothers think? Has this...incursion...into the sacred Mysteries angered the Earth Elders?”

Chert looked around, but it seemed nobody at this hastily assembled meeting of the Guild had thought to bring along any of the order. “They knew I went down into the Mysteries in search of my...in search of the boy, and they knew I brought him back up.” The Metamorphic Brothers did not know everything that had happened down there, of course, and Chert didn’t intend to tell the entire story to the Guild, either; as Opal liked to remind him, there was such a thing as having too much trust in your fellows. “They knew the little Rooftopper went down part of the way with me. The only thing that they seemed worried about was that somehow this all seemed to match some of old Brother Sulfur’s dreams.”

“When it comes to the Earth Elders,” said Travertine, another of the Highwardens and almost as old as Sard, “Sulphur has forgotten more than the rest of you ever knew...”

“Yes, thank you, Brother Highwarden,” Sard rasped. “Let us continue. Chert Blue Quartz, why did you first bring this upgrounder boy among us? It is...not our custom.”

“It was something about the strangeness of where we found him, I suppose. But if truth be told, much of it was because my wife Opal wanted to take him home and I could not argue her out of it.” A ripple of laughter passed through the room, but only a small one: the matters at hand were far too daunting. “We have no children, as most of you know.”

Sard cleared his throat again. “Is there anything other than the timing that makes you think there is any connection between what this physician claims is happening in the castle above us and the strange child you brought home?”

Chert had to think for a moment. “Well, Flint found the stone that Chaven says was used to murder Prince Kendrick. That may be happenstance, but for a child who found his way to the Rooftoppers when no one else has seen them, let alone spoken to them, for generations...”

“I take your meaning,” the oldest Highwarden said, nodding. He waved his hand, looking like an upended tortoise struggling to rise. “Do any of my fellows have anything more to ask or to offer?” He squinted his old, near-blind eyes as he looked to the masters of Fire Stone and Water Stone houses, but they shook their heads. Only Quicklime Pewter, the Highwarden of Metal House, had anything to say.

“Is the physician here, brothers?” he asked. “We cannot make up our minds on hearsay alone.”

One of the younger Magisters opened the chamber door and beckoned. Chaven came through with his bandaged hands clasped before him, head lowered and shoulders hunched, although the door to the Magisterial Chamber was one of the few in Funderling Town he could walk through upright. He saw the size of the room and stopped, then looked down at the mica floor, startled by what appeared to be an abyss beneath his feet.

“It’s a mirror,” Chert said from where he stood at the Outcrop. “Don’t be afraid.”

“I’ve never seen one even near such a size,” said Chaven, half to himself. “Wonderful. Wonderful!”

“You may step down, Chert Blue Quartz,” wheezed Sard. “Chaven of Ulos, you may take his place at the Outcrop. We have some questions we wish to ask you.”

The physician was so fascinated by the mica mirror beneath his feet that he almost bumped into the Magister nearest the end, but at last made his way to the Outcrop and stood at the edge of the circular floor, the tall stone chairs of the Highwardens on his left, the stone benches of the Magisters at his right.

As Chaven repeated the story that others had already related, Chert felt a flush of guilty gratitude that the physician did not know all of the tale. Because of Chaven’s seeming madness on the subject of mirrors, Chert had chosen to keep back the full story of Flint’s glass, and likewise had not told the officers of the Guild about his own journey under Brenn’s Bay to meet the victorious Twilight People in mainland Southmarch. Chert still had no idea what any of that meant, but feared that if he told Cinnabar and the others that he had actually handed something over to the Quiet Folk, as they were sometimes euphemistically called, something that the boy had brought from behind the Shadowline in the first place, the Guild might decide keeping the boy was a risk that Funderling Town could not afford.

And that would be the end of me, he thought. My wife would never speak to me again. And, he realized, I’d miss the boy something fierce.

“You realize, Chaven Makaros,” said the Water Stone Highwarden, Travertine, “that by coming here, you may have embroiled our entire settlement in a struggle with the current lords of Southmarch.” He gave the physician a stern look. “We have a saying, ‘Few are the good things that come from above,’ and nothing you have done makes me inclined to think we should change it.”

Even with his head bowed Chaven still towered above the Highwardens. “I was wounded, feverish, and desperate, my lords. I did not think of greater matters, but only hoped to find help from my friend, Chert of the Blue Quartz. For that, I apologize.”

“Foolishness is no excuse!” called out Chert’s brother Nodule. Several of the other Magisters rumbled their approval of the sentiment.

“But desperation may bring true allies together,” said Cinnabar, and many other Magisters nodded. During his brief time in power, Hendon Tolly had taken all building around the castle out of the hands of Funderlings, keeping his plans secret and using handpicked men of his own brought in from Summerfield. Many of the Funderling leaders already feared for their livelihood—work on sprawling Southmarch Castle had provided much of their income in recent years. Chert suspected that as much as anything else might make them more willing to take risks than usual.

“Does anybody else wish to speak?” asked Highwarden Sard after a long pointless speech advocating caution by Magister Puddingstone of the Marl family had dragged to an end. “Or may we get on with our decision?”

“Which decision, Highwarden?” asked Cinnabar. “It seems to me we have three things to ponder. What, if anything, should be done about Chert Blue Quartz taking outsiders into the Mysteries? What, if anything, should be done to punish the boy Flint for visiting the Mysteries without permission (although he seems to have suffered more than a little for his mischief already, and was sick for many days thereafter)? And what should we do about this gentleman, the physician Chaven, and what he says about the Tollys and the attack on the royal family?”

“Thank you, Magister Quicksilver,” said Highwarden Caprock Gneiss. “You have summed things up admirably. And as the best informed of the Magisters, you may stay and help the four of us with our deliberations.”

Chert’s spirits rose a little. One of the Magisters was always picked to help prevent a deadlock among the four Houses, and he could not have hoped for anyone better than Cinnabar.

The five got up—Sard leaning heavily on Cinnabar’s arm— and retreated to the Highwardens’ Cabinet, a room off the Council Chamber that Chert had heard was very sumptuously appointed, with its own waterfall and several comfortable couches. The informant had been his brother Nodule, who as always was eager to emphasize the difference in his and Chert’s status. Nodule had once been the Magister picked to provide the fifth vote and still talked about it several years later as if it were an everyday occurrence.

While the Highwardens were absent the others milled about the Council Chamber and talked. Some, anticipating a long deliberation, even stepped out to the tavern around the corner for a cup or two. Chert, who had the distinct feeling he was the subject of almost every conversation, and not in a way he’d like, went and joined Chaven, who was sitting on a bench along the outer wall with a morose expression on his round face.

“I fear I’ve brought you nothing but trouble, Chert.”

“Nonsense.” He did his best to smile. “You’ve brought a bit, there’s no question, but if I’d come to you the same way, you’d have done the same for me.”

“Would I?” Chaven shook his head, then lowered his chin to his hands. “I don’t know, sometimes. Everything seems to be different since that mirror came to me. I don’t even feel like precisely the same person. It’s hard to explain.” He sighed. “But I pray that you’re right. I hope that no matter how it’s got its claws into me, I’m still the same man underneath.”

“Of course you are,” said Chert heartily, patting the physician’s arm, but in truth such talk made him a bit nervous. What could a mere looking glass do to unsettle a learned man like Chaven so thoroughly? “Perhaps you are worrying too much. Perhaps we should not even mention your own mirror, the one Brother Okros has stolen.”

“Not mention it?” For a moment Chaven looked like someone quite different, someone colder and angrier than Chert would ever have expected. “It may be a weapon—a terrible weapon—and it is in the hands of Hendon Tolly, a man without kindness or mercy. He must not have it! Your people...we must...” He looked around as though surprised to find that the person speaking so loudly was himself. “I’m sorry, Chert. Perhaps you are right. This has all been...difficult.”

Chert patted his arm again. The other Funderlings in the wide chamber were all watching him and the physician now, although some had the courtesy to pretend they weren’t.

“We have decided,” said Highwarden Sard, “not to decide. At least not about the most dangerous issue, that of the legitimacy of the castle’s regent, Lord Tolly, and what if anything we should do about it.”

“We know we must come to a decision,” amplified Highwarden Travertine. “But it cannot be rushed.”

“However, in the meantime, we have decided about the other matters,” continued Sard, then paused to catch his breath. “Chert Blue Quartz, stand and hear our words.”

Chert stood up, his heart pounding. He tried to catch Cinnabar’s eye, to glean something of what was to come, but his view of the Quicksilver Magister was blocked by the dark, robed bulk of Highwarden Caprock.

“We rule that the boy Flint shall be punished for his mischief, as Cinnabar so quaintly put it, by being confined to his house unless he is accompanied by Chert or Opal Blue Quartz.”

Chert let out his breath. They were not going to exile the boy from Funderling Town. He was so relieved he could barely pay attention to what else the Highwardens were saying.

“Chert Blue Quartz himself has done no wrong,” proclaimed Sard.

“Although his judgment could have been better,” suggested Highwarden Quicklime Pewter.

“Yes, it could have been,” said old Sard with a sour look at his colleague, “but he did his best to remedy a bad situation, and then realized that he could not go on without the advice of the Guild. To him, no penalty, but he must no longer act without the Guild’s approval in any of these matters. Do you understand, Chert Blue Quartz?”

“I do.”

“And do you so swear on the Mysteries that bind us all?”

“I do.” But though he was reassured by what had been said so far, Chert found he was not as confident about what would be done in the long run. Also, he had grown used to doing things that others—especially the Magisters and Highwardens—might think were beyond his rights or responsibilities. He and his family were dug very deep into a strange, strange vein.

“Last we come to the matter of the physician Chaven,” said Sard. “We have much still to discuss about his claims and will not make a decision recklessly, but some choices must be made now.” He stopped to cough, and for a moment as his chest heaved it seemed he might not go on. At last he caught his breath. “He will remain with us until we have determined what to do.”

“But he cannot remain in your house, Chert,” said Cinnabar. “It is already nearly impossible to keep our people from whispering, and it’s likely that only the fact these Tollys have banned us from working in the castle has kept his presence secret from them this long.”

“Where will he go...?”

“We will find a place for him here at the guild hall.” Cinnabar turned to the Highwardens. Sard and Quicklime nodded, but Travertine and Gneiss looked more than a little disgruntled. Chert guessed that Cinnabar had cast the deciding vote.

“I am sure Opal will want to keep feeding him,” Chert said. “Now that she’s learned what he eats.” He smiled at Chaven, who seemed not entirely to understand what was happening. “Upgrounders don’t like mole very much, and you can’t get them to eat cave crickets at knifepoint.”

A few of the other Magisters laughed. For the moment, things in the Council Chamber were as friendly as they were likely to be—still tense, but no one in open rebellion.

“So, then.” Sard raised his hand and all the Magisters stood. “We will meet again in one tennight to make final decisions. Until then, may the Earth Elders see you through all darknesses and in any depths.”

“In the name of He who listens in the Great Dark,” the others said in ragged chorus.

Chert watched the Magisters file out before turning to Chaven, who was still staring down at the floor of the Council Chamber like a schoolboy caught with his exercises unlearned. “Come, friend. Cinnabar will show us where you’ll stay, then I’ll go back to my house and pack up some things for you. We’ve been very lucky—I’m surprised, to tell you the truth. I suspect that having Cinnabar on our side is what saved us, because old Quicklime trusts him. Cinnabar will probably replace him one day.”

“And I hope that day is far away,” said the Quicksilver Magister, striding up. “Quicklime Pewter has forgotten more about this town and the stone it’s built with than I’ll ever know.”

As they began to walk toward the chamber door, Chaven at last looked up, as if wakening from a dream. “I’m sorry, I...” He blinked. “That veiled figure,” he said, pointing at the fabled ceiling. “Who is that? Is it...?”

“That is the Lord of...that is Kernios, of course, god of the earth,” Chert told him. “He is our special patron, as you must know.”

“And on his shoulder, an owl.” The physician was staring down again.

“It is his sacred bird, after all.”

“Kernios...” Chaven shook his head. “Of course.”

He said no more, but seemed far more troubled than a man should who had just been granted his life and safety by the venerable Stone-Cutter’s Guild.

23. The Dreams of Gods

“It...It sounded like you said...that you were there.” Briony didn’t want to offend her hostess (especially not before she’d shared whatever food the crone had to spare) but even in the throes of fever and starvation, the habits of a princess died hard: she didn’t like being teased, especially by grimy old women. “When the gods went to war.”

“I was. Here, I’ll put a few more marigold roots in the pot for you—you’d be surprised how nicely they cook up once you boil the poison out. I’ve been in flesh so long I can scarcely remember anything else, but one thing I don’t miss about the old days—all that bloody, smoking meat! I don’t know what they thought they were doing.”

“Who? Wait, poison? What?” Briony was trying to keep still and avoid sudden movements. It had only just occurred to her that an old woman who lived by herself in the middle of the Whitewood was likely to be quite mad. She felt sure that even as weak and sick as she was, she could defend herself against this tiny creature, bony as a starveling cat— but how could she protect herself when she slept? She didn’t think she could survive another night on her own in the rainy wood.

“I’m talking about those bloody men and their bloody sacrifices!” the old woman said, which explained very little. “They used to be everywhere in this part of the forest, chopping wood, hunting my deer, generally making a nuisance of themselves. Some of them were handsome, though.” She smiled, a contraction of wrinkles that made her face look even more like a knot in the grain of a very old tree. “I let some of them stay with me, bloody-handed or not. I was not so particular then, when my youth was on me.”

It was no use trying to make sense of what the woman was saying. Briony shivered and wished the fire were big enough to keep her warm. Her hostess stared at her as she dropped more roots into a clay pot sitting on the stones beside the fire, then began to wrap two wild apples in leaves. When she had finished, the old woman reached out toward her. Briony shied away.

“Don’t be stupid, child,” she said. “I can see you’re ill. Here, let me feel your brow.” The old woman put a hand as rough as a chicken’s foot against Briony’s forehead. “That’s a bad fever. And you’ve other wounds as well.” She shook her head. “Let me see what I can do. Sit still.” She brought up her other hand and flattened both palms on Briony’s temples. Startled, Briony reached for the knife in her boot, but the woman only moved her hands in slow circles.

“Come out, fever,” the old woman said, then began to sing in a quiet, cracked voice. Briony could not understand the words, but her head had begun to feel increasingly hot and vibrantly alive, as though it were a beehive in high summer. It was such an odd sensation that she tried to pull away, but her limbs would not obey her. Even her heart, which should have sped up when she found herself helpless, did not comply. It bumped along, beating calmly and happily, as though having an ancient stranger set your head on fire with her bare hands were the most ordinary thing in the world.

The heat traveled down from her skull into her spine and spread throughout her body. She felt boneless, woozy: when the woman at last released her it was all Briony could do not to tumble onto her face.

“The rest of the healing you must do yourself,” the old woman said. “Pfoo! I have not expended so much energy in a while.” She clapped her hands together. “So, do you feel well enough to eat now?” When Briony did not immediately answer, because she was more than a little stunned by what had just happened, the old woman spoke again, more sharply. “Briony Eddon, daughter of Meriel, granddaughter of Krisanthe, where are your manners? I asked you a question.”

Briony stared at her for a long moment as her thoughts caught up with her ears. Her fingers went numb and hair rose on her neck and scalp. She snatched out her small knife and held it out before her in a trembling hand. “Who are you? How do you know my name? What did you just do to me?”

The old woman shook her head. “Every time. By the sacred, ever-renewing heartwood, it happens every time. What did I do? Made you better, you ungrateful little kit. How do I know your name? The same way as I know everything I know. I am Lisiya Melana of the Silver Glade, one of the nine daughters of Birgya, and I am the patroness of this forest, as my sisters were the protectors of Eion’s other forests. My father was Volios of the Measureless Grip, you see—a god. You may call me Lisiya. I am a goddess.”

“You’re...you’re...”

“Do I mumble? Very well, a demigoddess. When my father was young, he fathered a brood on my mother, who was a tree-spirit. It was all very romantic, in a brutal sort of way— but it’s not as if my father stayed around to help raise us. I didn’t call him ‘Papa,’ as you did with yours, and sit on his knee while he chucked me under the chin. The gods aren’t like that—weren’t then, and certainly aren’t now.” She chuckled at some private joke. “Like tomcats, really, and the goddesses weren’t much better.”

Briony lowered her knife to her lap but did not put it away. Even if the woman was completely mad, she had skills. Briony felt much better. She was still cold and tired, and still definitely hungry, but the weakness and misery of her illness and her many wounds seemed to have vanished. “I...I don’t know...”

“You don’t know what to say. Of course you don’t, daughter. You think I might be mad but you don’t want to offend me. In your case, you’re being careful because you’re cold and lonely and hungry, but you have the right idea. It’s never a good idea to annoy a god. If a mortal offended us in the old days, even in the smallest of ways, well, we were likely to turn him into a shrub or a sandcrab.” The old woman sighed and looked at her wrinkled hands. “I don’t know that I could manage anything that impressive anymore, but I’m fairly certain that at the very least, I could give you back your fever and add a very bad stomachache.”

“You say you’re a goddess?” It wasn’t possible. A forestwitch, perhaps, but surely goddesses never looked like this.

“Only a demigoddess, as I already admitted, and please don’t rub my face in it. There aren’t any true goddesses left. Now don’t be dull.” Lisiya frowned. “I can hear some of your thoughts and they’re not pretty. Very well. I hate doing this, especially after I already spent so much vigor healing you— ai, my head is going to hurt tomorrow!—but I suppose we won’t be able to get on with whatever the music has in mind unless I do.” The old woman stood, not without difficulty, and spread her thin arms like an underfed raptor trying to take flight. “You might want to squint your eyes a bit, daughter.”

Before Briony could do more than suck in a breath the fire billowed up in new colors and the darkening sky seemed to bend in toward them, as though it were the roof of a tent and something heavy had just landed on it. The old woman’s figure grew and stretched and her rags became diaphanous as smoke, but at the center of it all Lisiya’s staring eyes smoldered even brighter, as though fires bloomed behind volcanic glass.

Briony fell forward onto her elbows, terrified. The maid Selia had changed like this, taking on a form of terrible darkness, a thing of claws and soot-black spikes; for a moment Briony was certain she had fallen into some terrible trap. Then, drawn by a glow gilding the ground around her, she looked up into a face of such startling, serene beauty that all her fear drained away.

She was tall, the goddess, a full head taller than even a tall man, and her face and hands, the only parts of her flesh visible in the misty fullness of her dark robes, were golden. Vines and branches curled around her; a corona of silvery leaves about her head moved gently in an unfelt wind. The black eyes were the only things that had remained anything near the same, although they glowed now with a shimmering witchlight. How terrifying anger would be on such a face! Briony didn’t think her heart could stand the shock of seeing it.

The seemingly immobile mask of perfection moved: the lips curled in a gentle but somewhat self-satisfied smile. “Have you seen enough, daughter?”

“Please...” Briony moaned. It was like trying to stare at the sun. “Yes—enough!”

The figure shrank then, like parchment curling in a fire, until the old woman stood before her once more, wrinkled and stooped. Lisiya lifted a knobbed knuckle to her eye and flicked something away. “Ah,” she said. “It hurts to be beautiful again. No, it hurts to let it go.”

“You...you really are a goddess.”

“I told you. By my sacred spring, you children of men these days, you’re practically unbelievers, aren’t you? Just trot out the statues on holy days and mumble some words. Well, I hope you’re happy, because now I am quite exhausted. You will have to tend the roots.” The old woman gingerly settled herself beside the fire. “Every season it is harder to summon my old aspect, and every time it takes more out of me. The hour is coming when I will be no more than what you see before you, and then I will sing my last song and sleep until the world ends.”

“Thank you for helping me.” Briony felt much better—that was undeniable. The mist of fever had cleared and her breath no longer rattled in her lungs. “But I don’t understand. Any of this.”

“Nor do I. The music has decreed that I should find you, and that I should feed you, and perhaps give you what advice I may—not that I have much to offer. This is no longer my world and it hasn’t been for a long time.”

Briony could not help staring at the old woman, trying to see the terrible, glorious shape of the goddess, once more so well hidden beneath wrinkled, leathery flesh. “Your name is...Lisiya?”

“That is the name I am called, yes. But my true name is known only to my mother, and written only in the great Book itself, child, so do not think to command me.”

“The great book? Do you mean The Book of the Trigon?”

She was startled by how hard the goddess laughed. “Oh, good! A very fine jest! That compendium of self-serving lies? Even the arrogant brothers themselves would not try to pass off such nonsense as truth. No, the tale of all that is and shall be—the Book of the Fire in the Void. It is the source of the music that governs even the gods.”

Briony felt as though she had been slapped. “You call The Book of the Trigon lies?”

Lisiya flapped her hand dismissively. “Not purposeful lies, at least not most of them. And there is much truth in it, too, I suppose, but melted out of recognizable shape like something buried too long in the ground.” She squinted at the pot. “Spoon those hot stones out, child, before the water all boils away, and I will try to explain.”

The night had come down in earnest and Briony, despite the strangeness of her situation, was feeling the tug of sleep. She had been frightened by the woman’s display, by seeing what Lisiya had called her true aspect, but now she also found herself strangely reassured. No harm could come to her in the camp of a forest goddess, could it? Not unless it came from the goddess herself, and Lisiya did not seem to bear her any ill will.

“Good,” she said, spooning up the marigold root soup.

“It’s the rosemary. Gives it some savor. Now, that song you were singing, there’s an example of ripe modern nonsense, some of it stolen from other poems, some of it straight out of the Trigonate canon, especially that foolishness about Zoria being helped by Zosim. Zosim the Trickster never did anyone a good turn in his life. I should know—we were cousins.”

Briony could only nod her head and keep eating. It was glorious to feel well again, however preposterous the circumstances. She would think about it all tomorrow.

“And Zoria. She was not stolen, not in the way that the Surazemai always claimed. She went with Khors of her own free will. She loved him, foolish girl that she was.”

“Loved...?”

“They teach you nothing but self-serving nonsense, do they? The heroism of the Surazemai, the evil of the Onyenai, that sort of rubbish. I blame Perin Thunderer. Full of bluster, and wished no one had ever been ruler of the gods but himself. He was named Thunderer as much because of his shouting as the crashing of his hammer. Oh, where to begin?”

Briony could only stare at her, dazed. She took a bite of the marigold root and wondered how long she could keep her eyes open while Lisiya talked about things she didn’t understand. “At the beginning...?” Maybe she could just close her eyes for a bit, just to rest them.

“Oh, upon my beloved grove, no. By the way, that’s not just a bit of idle oathmaking—this place where you sit used to be my sacred grove.” Lisiya waved her gnarled fingers around the clearing. “Can you tell? The stones of this fire pit were once my altar, when all men still paid me homage. All gone to wrack and ruin hundreds of years ago, of course, as you see—a lightning fire took the most glorious of my trees. More of the Thunderer’s splendid work, and I’ve not always believed it was an accident. A sleeping dog can still growl. Ah, but they were so beautiful, the ring of birches that grew here. Bark white as snow, but they gleamed in moonlight just like quicksilver...” Lisiya coughed. “Mercy on me, I am so old...”

Briony belched. She had eaten too fast.

The goddess frowned. “Charming. Now, where was I? Ah, the beginning. No, I could not hope to correct all you do not know, child, and to be honest, I do not remember all the nonsense that Perin and his brothers declared their priests must teach. Here is all you need to know about the oldest days. Zo, the Sun, took as his wife Sva, the Void. They had four children, and the eldest, Rud the Day Sky, was killed in the battle against the demons of the Old Darkness. Everyone knows these things—even mortals. Sveros, who we called Twilight, took to wife his niece Madi Onyena, Rud’s widow, and she bore him Zmeos Whitefire and Khors Moonlord. Then Sveros Twilight was lured away from her by Madi Onyena’s twin sister Surazem, who had been born from the same golden egg. Surazem bore him Perin, Erivor, and Kernios, the three brothers, and from these five sons of Twilight—and some sisters and half sisters, of course, but who talks of them?—sprang the great gods and their eternal rivalries. All this you must know already, yes?”

Briony did her best to sit up straight and look as though she were not falling asleep. “More or less...”

“And you have to know that Perin and his brothers turned against their father Sveros and cast him out of the world into the between-spaces. But the three brothers did not then become the rulers of the gods, as your people teach. Whitefire, the one you call Zmeos, was the oldest of Sveros’ chilren, and felt he should have pride of place.”

“Zmeos the Horned One?” Briony shuddered, and not just from her still-damp clothing. All her childhood she had been told of the Old Serpent, who waited to steal away children who were wicked or told lies, to drag them off to his fiery cave.

“So Perin’s priests call him, yes.” Lisiya pursed her lips. “I never had priests myself. I do not like them, to be honest. In the days when people still sacrificed to me I was happy enough with a honeycomb or an armful of flowers. All that bleeding red meat...! Animal flesh to feed priests, not a goddess. And I would not have been caught dead in their stone temples, in any case. Well, except for once, but that is not a story for tonight...” The old woman’s eyes narrowed. “You are falling asleep, child,” she said sternly. “I begin to tell you the true tale of the gods and you cannot even keep your eyes open.”

“I’m sorry,” Briony murmured. “It’s just been...so long since...”

“Sleep, then,” said Lisiya. “I waited a day for you—and years since my last supplicant. I can wait a few more hours.”

“Thank you.” Briony stretched out, her arm beneath her head. “Thank you...my lady...”

She did not even hear if the goddess said anything, because within moments sleep reached up and seized her as the ocean takes a shipwrecked sailor grown too weary to swim.

For a moment after waking she lay motionless with the thin sunlight on her closed eyelids, trying to remember where she was and what had happened. She felt surprisingly well —had her fever broken? But her stomach felt full, too, almost as if the dreams had been...real.

Briony sat up. If the last night’s events had been dreams, then the dreams still lingered: only a few yards away from her sleeping spot the fire was burning in its pit of stones, and something was cooking, a sweet smell that made her mouth water. Other than Briony, though, the little clearing was empty. She didn’t know what to think. She might have imagined the old woman who claimed to be a goddess, but the rest of this—the fire, the careful stack of kindling beside it, the smell of...roasting apples? In late winter?

“Ho there, child, so you’ve finally dragged yourself upright.” The voice behind her made Briony jump. “You didn’t get your sweet last night, so I put some more in the coals.”

She turned to see the tiny, black-robed figure of Lisiya limping slowly down into the dell, a pair of deer walking behind her like pet dogs. The two animals, a buck and a doe, paused when they saw Briony but did not run. After a moment’s careful consideration of her with their liquid brown eyes, they stooped and began to crop at the grass which peeked up here and there through the fallen leaves and branches.

“You’re real,” Briony said. “I mean, I didn’t dream you. Was...was everything real, then?”

“Now how would I know?” Lisiya dropped the bag she was carrying, then lifted her arms over her head and stretched. “I stay out of mortal minds as a rule—in any case, I spent the night walking. What do you recall that might or might not be a dream?”

“That you fed me and gave me a place to sleep.” Briony smiled shyly. “That you healed me. And that you are a goddess.”

“Yes, that all accords with my memory.” Lisiya finished her stretch and grunted. “Ai, such old bones! To think once I could have run from one side of my Whitewood to another and back in a single night, then still had the strength to take a handsome young woodsman or two to my bed.” She looked at Briony and frowned. “What are you waiting for, child? Aren’t you hungry? We have a long way to go today.” “What? Go where?”

“Just eat and I will explain. Watch your fingers when you take out those apples. Ah, I almost forgot.” She reached into her sack and pulled out a small jug stoppered with wax. “Cream. A certain farmer leaves it out for me when his cow is milking well. Not everyone has forgotten me, you see.” She looked as pleased as a spinster with a suitor.

The meal was messy but glorious. Briony licked every last bit of cream and soft, sweet apple pulp off her fingers. “If we were staying, I’d make bread,” Lisiya said. “But where are we going?”

“You are going where you need to go. As to what will happen there, I can’t say. The music says you have wandered off your course.”

“You said that before and I didn’t understand. What music?”

“Child! You demand answers the way a baby sparrow shrieks to have worms spat in its mouth! The music is...the music. The thing that makes fire in the heart of the Void itself. That which gives order to the cosmos—or such order as is necessary, and chaos when that is called for instead. It is the one thing that the gods feel and must heed. It speaks to us—sings to us—and beats in us instead of heart’s blood. Well, unless we are wearing flesh, then we must listen hard to hear the music over the plodding drumbeat of these foolish organs. How uncomfortable to wear a body!” She shook her head and sighed. “Still, the music tells me that you have lost your way, Briony Eddon. It is my task to put you back on the path again.”

“Does that mean...that everything will be all right? The gods will help us drive out all our enemies and we’ll get Southmarch back?”

Lisiya threw her a look of dark amusement. “Not expecting much, are you? No, it doesn’t mean anything of the sort. The last time I helped someone to get back onto his path, a pack of wolves ate him a day after I said farewell. That was his rightful path, you see.” She paused to scratch her arm.

“If I hadn’t stepped in, who knows how long he would have wandered around—he and the wolves both, I suppose.”

Briony stared openmouthed. “So I’m going to die?”

“Eventually, child, yes. That’s what’s given to mortals—it’s what ‘mortal’ means, after all. And believe me, it’s probably a good deal more pleasant than a thousand years of everincreasing decrepitude.”

“But...but how can the gods do this to me? I’ve lost everything—everybody I love!”

Lisiya turned to her with something like fury. “You’ve lost everything? Child, when you’ve seen not just everybody you love but everybody you know disappear, when you’ve surrendered all that I have—beauty, power, youth—and the last of them slipped away centuries in the past, then you may complain.”

“I thought...I thought you might...”

“Help you? By my grove, I am helping you. You’re not starving anymore, are you? In fact, it seems like that’s my sacred offering of cream on your chin right now, and Heaven knows I don’t get many of those these days. You had a dry night’s sleep, too, and you’re no longer coughing your liver and lights out. Some might count those as mighty gifts indeed.”

“But I don’t want to get eaten by wolves—my family needs me.”

Lisiya sighed in exasperation. “I only said the last person I guided was eaten by wolves—the remark was meant as a bit of a joke (although I suppose the fellow with the wolves wouldn’t have seen it that way). I don’t know what’s going to happen to you. Perhaps the music is sending some handsome prince your way, who will sweep you up onto his white horse and carry you away into the sunset.” She scowled and spat. “Just like one of that Gregor fellow’s unskilled rhymes.”

Briony scowled right back. “I don’t want any prince. I want my brother back. I want my father back, and our home back. I want everything like it was before!”

“I’m glad to hear you’re keeping your demands to a minimum.” Lisiya shook her head. “In any case, stop thinking about wolves—they’re not relevant. There’s a stream over that rise and down the hill. Go wash yourself off, then drink water, or make water, or whatever it is you mortals do in the morning. I’ll pack up, then if you need more explanations, I’ll provide them while we walk. And don’t dawdle.”

Briony followed the goddess’ instructions, walking so close past the grazing deer on her way to the stream that one of them turned and touched her with its nose as she went past. It was an unexpected thing, small but strangely reassuring, and by the time she’d washed her face and run her fingers through her hair a few times she felt almost like a person again.

With her worse fears placated, a little food in her belly, and the company of a real person—if a goddess as old as time could be said to be real—Briony found that there was much to admire about the Whitewood. Many of its trees were so old and so vast that younger trees, giants themselves, grew between their roots. The hush of the place, a larger, more important quiet than in any human building no matter how vast, coupled with the soft light filtering down through the leaves and tangled branches, made her feel as though she swam through Erivor’s underwater realm, as in one of the beautiful blue-green frescoes that lined the chapel back home at Southmarch. If she narrowed her eyes in just the right way Briony could almost see the dangling vines as floating seaweed, imagine the flicker of birds in the upper branches to be the darting of fish.

“Ah, there’s another one,” said Lisiya when Briony shyly mentioned the chapel paintings. “Don’t your folk hold him as an ancestor, old Fish-Spear?”

“Erivor? Why, is that a lie, too?”

“Don’t be so touchy, child. Who knows if it’s true or not? Perin and his brothers certainly put themselves about over the years, and there were more than a few mortal women willing to find out what it felt like to bed a god. And those were only the ones who participated by choice!”

“This is all...so hard to believe.” Briony flinched at Lisiya’s expression. “No, not hard to believe that you’re a goddess, but hard to...understand. That you know the rest of the gods, know them the way I know my own family!”

“It isn’t quite the same,” said Lisiya, softening a bit. “There were hundreds of us, and we seldom were together. Most of us kept to ourselves, especially my folk. The forests were our homes, not lofty Xandos. But I did know them, yes, and while we met each other infrequently, we did gather on certain occasions. And many of the gods were travelers— Zosim, and Kupilas in his later years, and Devona of the Shining Legs, so the news of what the others did came to us in time. Not that you could trust a word that Zosim said, that little turd.”

“But...but he is the god of poets!”

“And that fits, too.” She looked up, swiveling her head from side to side like an ancient bird. “We have made a wrong turn. Curse these fading eyes!”

“Wrong turn?” Briony looked around at the endless trees, the unbroken canopy of dripping green above their heads and the labyrinth of damp earth and leaves between the trunks. “How can you tell?”

“Because it should be later in the day by now.” Lisiya blew out a hiss of air. “We should have lost time, then gained a little of it back, but we have gained all of it back. It is scarcely a creeping hour since we set out.”

Briony shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“Nor should you, a mortal child who never traveled the gods’ paths. Trust me—we have made a wrong turn. I must stop and think.” Lisiya suited word to deed, lowering herself onto a rounded stone and putting her fingers to her temples. Briony, who was not lucky enough to have a rock of her own, had to squat beside her.

“We must wait until the clouds pass,” Lisiya announced at last, just as the ache in Briony’s legs was becoming fierce.

“Shall we make a fire?”

“Might as well. It could be that we cannot travel again until tomorrow. Find some dry wood—it makes things easier.”

When Briony had returned to the spot with half a dozen pieces of reasonably dry deadfall, Lisiya piled them into a tiny hill, then took the last piece in her bony grip and said something Briony could not understand, a slur of rasping consonants and fluting vowels. Smoke leaked between Lisiya’s fingers. By the time she put the stick down among the others, fire was already smoldering from a black spot where she had held it.

“That’s a good trick,” Briony said approvingly.

Lisiya snorted. “It is not a trick, child, it is the pitiable remains of a power that once could have felled half this forest and turned the rest into smoking ruin. Mastery over branch and root, pith and grain and knot—all those were mine. I could make a great tree burst into flower in a moment, make a river change course. Now I can scarcely start a fire without burning my hand.” She held up her sooty palm. “See? Blisters. I shall have to put some lavender oil on it.”

As the goddess rummaged through her bag Briony watched the fire begin to catch, the flames barely visible in the still-strong afternoon light. It was strange to be in this between-place, this timeless junction between her life before and whatever would come next, let alone to be the guest of a goddess. What was left to her? What would become of her?

“Barrick!” she said suddenly.

“What?” Lisiya looked up in irritation. “Barrick—my brother.”

“I know who your brother is, child. I am old, not an idiot. Why did you shout his name?”

“I just remembered that when I was in...before I found you...”

“You found me?”

“Before you found me, then. Merciful...! For a goddess, you certainly are thin-skinned.”

“Look at me, child. Thin? It barely keeps my bones from poking out—although there does seem to be more of the wrinkly old stuff than there once was. Go on, speak.”

“I was looking in a mirror and I saw him. He was in chains. Was that a true vision?”

Lisiya raised a disturbingly scraggly eyebrow. “A mirror? What sort? A scrying glass?”

“A mirror. I’m not certain—just a hand mirror. It belonged to one of the women I was staying with in Landers Port.”

“Hmmmm.” The goddess dropped her pot of salve back into her rumpled, cavernous bag. “Either someone was using a mighty artifact as a bauble or there are stranger things afoot with you and your brother than even I can guess.”

“Artifact...do you mean a magic mirror, like in a poem? It wasn’t anything like that.” She held up her fingers in a small circle. “It was only that big.”

“And you, of course, are a scholar of such things?” The goddess’ expression was enough to make Briony lower her gaze. “Still, it seems unlikely that a Tile so small, yet clearly also one of the most powerful, should be in mortal hands and no one aware of it, passed around as if it were an ordinary part of a lady’s toiletry.”

Briony dared to look up again. Lisiya was apparently thinking, her gaze focused on nothing. Briony did her best to be patient. She did not want the goddess angry with her again. She did not—O merciful Zoria!—want to be left in the forest by herself. But after the sticks in the fire had burned halfway down, she could not keep her questions to herself any longer.

“You said ‘tile’—what are those? Do you mean the sort of thing that we have on the floor of the chapel? And what is Zoria like? Is she like the pictures to look at? Is she kind?” Once, she recalled, her own lady-in-waiting, Rose Trelling, had gone back to Landsend for Orphanstide and had been asked an extraordinary number of questions by her other relatives—about Briony and her family, about life in Southmarch Castle, a thousand things. So we wonder about those who are above us—those who are well-known, or rich, or powerful. Are they like us? It was funny to think that ordinary folk thought of her as she thought of the gods. Who did the gods envy? Whose doings made them sit up and take notice? There were so many things Briony wanted to know, and here she sat with a living, breathing demigoddess!

Lisiya let out a hissing sigh. “So you have determined on saving me from this painful immortality, have you? And your killing weapon is to be an unending stream of questions?”

“Sorry. I’m sorry, but...how can I not ask?”

“It’s not that you ask, it’s what you ask, kit. But it is always that way with mortals, it seems. When they have their chances, they seldom seek important answers.” “All right, what’s important, then? Please tell me, Lisiya.”

“I will answer a few of your questions—but quickly, because I have concerns of my own and I must listen carefully to the music. First, the Tiles used in the most potent scrying glasses are pieces of Khors’ tower, the things that the foolish poem you were bellowing through the forest called ‘ice crystals’ or some such nonsense. They were made for him by Kupilas the Artificer—‘Crooked,’ as the Onyenai call him...”

“Onyenai?”

“Curse your rabbiting thoughts, child, pay attention! Onyenai, like Zmeos and Khors and their sister Zuriyal—the gods born to Madi Onyena. You know the Surazemai— Perin and his brothers, the gods born to Madi Surazem. The Onyenai and Surazemai were the two great clans of gods that went to war with each other. But old Sveros fathered them all.”

Chastened, Briony nodded but did not say anything. “Yes. Well, then. Crooked helped Khors strengthen his great house, and the things that he used to do it ensured that Khors’ house was not found just in Heaven any longer, nor was it on the earth, but opened into many places. Kupilas used the Tiles to make this happen, although some said the Tiles only masked its true nature and location with a false seeming. In any case, after the destruction of the Godswar, after Perin angrily tore down Khors’ towers, some of the remnants were saved. Those are the Tiles we speak of now. They appear to be simple mirrors but they are far more—scrying glasses of great power.”

“But you don’t think that’s how I saw Barrick...?”

“I am old, child, and I am no longer so foolish as to think I know anything for certain. But I doubt it. In all the world only a score or fewer of the Tiles survive. I find it hard to believe that after all these ages another would wind up in a lady’s cosmetics chest in...where did you say? Landers Port?”

Briony nodded.

“More likely something else is afoot with you and your brother. I sense nothing out of the ordinary from your side, nothing magical—other than your virginity, which always counts for something, for some reason.” She let out a harsh, dry chuckle. “Sacred stones, look at Zoria. Millennia have passed, and they still call her a virgin!”

“What do you mean?”

“A rare possession among both the Surazemai and Onyenai, I can promise you. In fact, other than perhaps the Artificer himself—there’s irony there, isn’t there?—only our Devona remained unsullied, and I think that may have been as much from inclination as anything else. Just as among mortals, the gods were made in all sorts of shapes and desires. But Zoria...certainly not, poor thing.”

“Are you saying that the blessed Zoria isn’t...wasn’t...she’s not...a...”

Lisiya rolled her eyes. “Girl, I told you, Khors was her lover and she loved him back. Why do you think she ran away from the meadows and the Xandian hills? To be with him! And had her father not come with all his army of relatives to defend his own honor—foolish men and their honor!—she would have happily married the Moonlord and borne him many more children. But that was not fated to be, and the world changed.” For a moment the brittleness seemed to soften; Briony watched a sadness so deep it looked like agony creep over the goddess’ gaunt face. “The world changed.”

Her expression was too naked—too private. Briony looked down at the fire.

“To answer your earlier, unfinished question...” Lisiya said suddenly, then cleared her throat. “No, Zoria was not a virgin. And now she simply is not—nor are any but we pathetic few, stepchildren and monsters, castoffs of Heaven. Like insects crawling out of the scorched ground when a forest fire has passed, only we survived the last War of the Gods.”

“You mean...the other gods are dead?”

“Not dead, but sleeping, child. But the sleep of the gods has already been ages long, and it will continue until the world ends.”

“Sleeping? Then the gods are...gone?”

“Not entirely, but that is another story. And I do not doubt that a few more aging demigods and demigoddesses like me are still caring for their forests, or landlocked lakes that once were small seas. But I have not talked to one of my kin in the waking world for so long I can scarcely remember.”

“No gods? They left us?”

Lisiya’s smile was grim. “Not by choice, mortal kit. But they have slept since your ancestors first set stone on stone to build the earliest cities, so it is not as though anything has changed.”

“But we pray to them! I have always prayed, especially to Zoria...!”

“And you may continue to pray to her if you wish, and the others as well. They may even answer you—when they sleep, they dream, and their dreams are not like those of your kind. It is a restless sleep, for one thing...but that is most definitely a tale for another time. As it is, we have dallied too long. Come, rise.”

“What? Are we going to walk again?”

“Yes. Follow.” And without looking back to see if Briony had obeyed her, Lisiya went limping away through the forest.

The late afternoon sun was burrowing into the distant hills when they reached the edge of the Whitewood. As they stood with the great fence of trees behind them, Briony looked out over the meadowlands of what she could only guess was Silverside. The grassy plains stretched away as far to the north and west as she could see, beautiful, peaceful, and empty. “Why have we come here?” she asked.

“Because the music calls you here.” Lisiya fumbled in her shapeless robes and drew out something on a string, lifting it over her head with surprising nimbleness. “Ah, a little sun on my bones is a kindly thing. Here, daughter. I am sorry we have not had more time. I miss the chance to speak to something less settled and slow than the trees, and for a mortal child you are not too stone-headed.” She held out her claw of a hand. “Take this.”

Briony lifted it from her hand. It was a crude little charm made from a bird skull and a sprig of some dried white flowers, wrapped around with white thread. “I am too old to come when summoned,” Lisiya said, “and too weak to send you much in the way of help, but it could be that this might smooth your way in some difficult situation. I have one or two worshipers left.”

As she drew the leather cord around her neck, Briony asked, “Have we reached the place you were talking about? You’re not going yet, are you?”

Lisiya smiled. “You are a good child—I’m glad it was given to me to help you. And I hope this path will lead you to at least a little happiness.”

“Path, what path?” Briony looked around but saw nothing, only damp grass waving in the freshening evening wind. It was the middle of nowhere—no road, no track, let alone a town. “Where am I supposed to go...?”

But when she turned back the old woman had vanished. Briony ran back into the forest, calling and calling, looking for some sign of the black-robed form, but the Mistress of the Silver Glade was gone.

24. Three Brothers

“This does not seem a good idea to me,” Utta whispered. “What does he want from us? He is dangerous!”

Merolanna shook her head. “You must trust me. I may not know much, but I know my way around these things.” “But...!”

She fell silent as the new castellan, Tirnan Havemore, walked into the chamber. He held a book in his hands and was followed by a page carrying more books with—rather dangerously—a writing-tray balanced atop them. Havemore wore his hair in the Syannese style that had swept the castle, cut high above the ears, and because he was balding he looked more like a priest than anything else —a resemblance, Utta thought, that Havemore was only too eager to encourage. Even when he had been merely Avin Brone’s factor he had seen himself as a philosopher, a wise man amid lesser minds. She had never liked him, and knew no one outside of the Tollys’ circle who did.

Havemore stopped as though he had only just realized the women were in the room. “Why, Duchess,” he said, peering at them over the spectacles perched on his narrow nose, “you honor me. And Sister Utta, a pleasure to see you, too. I am afraid my new duties as castellan have kept me fearfully busy of late—too busy to visit with old friends. Perhaps we can remedy that now. Would you like some wine? Tea?”

Utta could feel Merolanna bristling at the mere suggestion that she and this upstart were old friends. She laid her hand on the older woman’s arm. “Not for me, thank you, Lord Havemore.”

“I will not take anything, either, sir,” the duchess said with better grace than Utta would have expected. “And although we would love to have a proper conversation with you, we know you are a busy man. I’m certain we won’t take much of your time.”

“Oh, but it would be a true joy to have a visit.” Havemore snapped his fingers and waved. “Wine.” The page put down the books and the teetering tray on the castellan’s tall, narrow desk, a desk which had been Nynor Steffen’s for years and which had seemed as much a part of him as his skin and his knobby hands. Unburdened, the page left the room. “A true joy,” Havemore repeated as though he liked the sound of it. “In any case, I will have a cup of something myself, since I have been working very hard this morning, preparing for Duke Caradon’s visit. I’m sure you must have heard about it—very exciting, eh?”

It was news to Utta. Hendon’s older brother, the new Duke of Summerfield, coming here? Doubtless he would bring his entire retinue—hundreds more Tolly supporters in the household, and during the ominous days of the Kerneia festival as well. Her heart sank to think of what the place would be like, full of drunken soldiers.

“So, my gracious ladies,” said Havemore, “what can I do for you today?”

Utta could not imagine anything that Tirnan Havemore could do for them that would not immediately be reported to Hendon Tolly, so she kept her mouth closed. This was Merolanna’s idea; Utta would let the dowager duchess take the lead. Zoria, watch over us, here in the stronghold of our enemies, she prayed. Even if they knew nothing of the astonishing business she and Merolanna had embarked upon, the ruling faction held little but contempt for either of them, for one key reason: neither one of them had anything to bargain with, no strength, no land, no money. Well, except Merolanna is part of the royal family and a link to Olin. I suppose the Tollys want to keep her sweet at least until they’ve got their claws well into Southmarch.

“But Lord Havemore, you must know what you can do for us,” Merolanna said. “Since you called us here. As I said, I don’t want to intrude on your time, which is valuable to all of Southmarch, and especially to Earl Hendon, our selfless guardian.”

Careful, Utta could not help thinking. Merolanna had moved and was out of range of an admonitory squeeze of the arm.

Don’t be too obvious. He doesn’t expect you to like him, but don’t let your dislike show too openly.

“Hendon Tolly is a great man.” Havemore’s grin looked even more wolfish than before—he was enjoying this. “And we are all grateful that he is helping to guard King Olin’s throne for its legitimate heir.”

The page returned with wine and several cups. Utta and Merolanna shook their heads. The page poured only one and handed it to the castellan, then stepped back to the wall and did his best to look like a piece of furniture. Havemore seated himself in his narrow chair, pointedly leaving the dowager duchess standing.

“You mean for King Olin, of course,” Merolanna said cheerfully, ignoring the calculated slight. “Guarding the throne for King Olin. The heir is all well and good, but my brother-in-law Olin is still king, even in his absence.”

“Of course, Your Grace, of course. I misspoke. However, the king is a prisoner and his heirs are gone—perhaps dead. We would be foolish to pretend that the infant heir is not of the greatest importance.”

“Yes, of course.” Merolanna nodded. “In any case, leaving aside all this quibbling about succession, which I’m sure is of scarcely any real interest to a scholar like yourself, you did call us here. What have we done to deserve your kind invitation?”

“Ah, now it is you who feigns innocence, Your Grace. You asked to speak to Avin Brone, but you must know that he has...retired. That his duties have all been taken up by me and Lord Hood, the new lord constable. Our dear Brone has worked so hard for Southmarch—he deserves his rest. Thus, I thought I might save him the unnecessary work of trying to solve whatever problem you ladies might have by volunteering my own attention to it, instead.” His smile looked like it had been drawn with a single stroke of a very sharp pen.

“That is truly kind, Lord Havemore,” said Merolanna, “but in truth we wanted—I wanted—to see Lord Brone only out of friendship. For the sake of old times. Why, I daresay Avin Brone and I have known each other longer than you’ve been alive!”

“Ah.” Havemore, like many ambitious young men, did not like being reminded of allegiances that predated his own arrival. “I see. So there is nothing I can do for you?”

“You can remember your kind offer to share yourself more with the rest of us castle folk, Lord Havemore.” The duchess smiled winningly. “A man of your learning, a wellspoken man like you, should put himself about a bit more.”

He narrowed his eyes, not entirely sure how to take her remark. “Very kind. But there is still a question, Your Grace. I can understand your desire to reminisce with your old friend Lord Brone, but what brings Sister Utta along on such a mission? Surely she and Brone are not also old friends? I had never heard that old Count Avin was much on religion, beyond what is necessary for appearances.” Havemore smiled at this little joke shared among friends and for the first time Sister Utta felt herself chilled. This man was more than ambitious, he was dangerous.

“I do consider Brone a friend,” Utta said suddenly, ignoring Merolanna’s flinch. “He has been kind to me in the past. And he is a man of good heart, whether he spends much time in the temple or not.”

“I am glad to hear you say that.” Tirnan Havemore now looked at Utta closely. “I worked for him for many years and always felt his best qualities were ignored, or at least underappreciated.”

Merolanna actually took a step forward, as if to stop the conversation from straying into dangerous areas. “I asked her to come with me, Lord Havemore. I am...I am not so well these days. It makes me easier to have a sensible woman like Utta with me instead of one of my scatterbrained young maids.”

“Of course.” His smile widened. “Of course, Your Grace. So great is your spirit, so charming your manners, that I fear I’d forgotten your age. Of course, you must have your companion.” It was almost a leer now.

What is he thinking? Utta did not want to contemplate it for long.

“By all means, go and see your old friend, Count Avin. I’m afraid he has changed his chambers—I needed more space, of course, so I took these old ones of his over.

When Brone is not at home in Landsend you will find him in the old countinghouse next to the Chamber of the Royal Guard. He still comes in, although he has little to do these days.” The smile had changed into something else now as Havemore rose, something that celebrated an enemy well and truly dispatched. “You will come see me again? This has been such a delight.”

“For us all,” Merolanna assured him. “We are honored by your interest in two old women like ourselves, Lord Havemore, now that you’ve become such an important man in Southmarch.”

“Were you not perhaps spreading the fat a little thick?” Utta asked as they made their way across the residence garden, hoods pulled low against the chilly rain. “You do not need to make an enemy of him.”

Merolanna snorted. “He is already an enemy, Utta, never doubt that for a moment. If I weren’t one of the only people left related to Olin, I’d be gone already. The Tollys and their toadies have no love for me, but they can’t afford to see me off—not yet. Perhaps if they get through the winter they’ll start thinking about how I might be encouraged to die. I’m very old, after all.”

Startled, Sister Utta made the sign of the Three. “Gods protect us, then why did you suggest to him that you were in ill health? Give them no excuse!”

“They will kill me when they want to. I’m convinced now that they had something to do with Kendrick’s murder, too. By reminding Havemore, I was just reassuring him that whatever I got up to, I wouldn’t be around to make trouble much longer.” She stumbled and caught at Utta’s arm. “And I’m not all that well these days, in truth. I find myself feeble, and sometimes my mind wanders...”

“Hush. Enough of that.” Utta took the older woman’s elbow and held it tightly. “You have frightened me with all this... intrigue, Your Grace, all this talk of threats and plots and counterplots. I am only a Zorian sister and I’m out of my depth. Besides, I need you, so you may be neither ill nor feeble, and you certainly may not die!”

Merolanna laughed. “Talk to your immortal mistress, not to me. If the gods choose to take me, or simply to make me a doddering old witling, that’s their affair.” She slowed as they entered the narrow passage between Wolfstooth Spire and the armory. The paint had faded, and tufts of greenery grew in the cracks in the walls. “By the grace of the Brothers, I have not been to this part of the castle in years. It’s falling apart!”

“A suitable place, then, for those who are no longer necessary—Brone, and you, and me too.”

“Well said, my dear.” Merolanna squeezed her arm approvingly. “The more worthless we are, the less anyone will suspect what devilry we’re up to.”

“Your Grace, this is...this is quite a surprise.” Brone’s voice was a bit thick. Other than a pair of young, wary-looking guardsmen who acted more like they were watching a prisoner than protecting an important lord, the countinghouse was empty. “And Sister Utta. Bless me, Sister, I haven’t seen you for a long time. How are you?” “Fine, Lord Brone.”

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t get up.” He gestured at his bare left leg, propped on a hassock, the ankle swollen like a ham. “This cursed gout.”

“It’s not the gout, it’s the drinking that’s keeping you in that chair,” Merolanna said. “It is scarcely noon. How much wine have you had today, Brone?”

“What?” He goggled at her. “Scarcely any. A glass or two, to ease the pain.”

“A glass or two, is it?” Merolanna made a face.

In truth, he looked much the worse for wear. Utta had not seen him for some time, so it was possible the new lines on his face were nothing odd, but his eyes seemed sunken and dark and the color of his skin was bad, like a man who has been weeks in a sickbed. It was hard to reconcile this bloated, pasty creature slumped like a sack of laundry with the big man who only a short time ago had moved through the castle like a war galleon under full sail.

Merolanna rapped on the table and pointed at one of the guards. “Lord Brone needs some bread and cheese for the sake of his stomach. Go fetch some.”

The guard gaped at her. “Y-Your Grace...?” “And you,” she said to the other. “I am old and I chill easily. Go and bring a brazier of coals. Go on, both of you!”

“But...but we are not supposed to leave Lord Brone!” said the second guard.

“Are you afraid the Zorian sister and I will assassinate him while you’re gone?” Utta stared at him, then turned to the count. “Do you think we’re likely to attack you, Brone?” She didn’t give him time to reply, but took a step toward the guards, waggling her fingers like she was shooing chickens out of a garden. “Go on, then. Hurry up, both of you.”

When the baffled guards were gone, the count cleared his throat. “What was that about, may I ask?”

“I need your help, Brone,” she said. “Something is gravely amiss, and we will not solve it without you—nor in front of Havemore’s spies, which is why I sent those two apes away.”

He stared at her for a moment, but his eyes failed to catch light. “I can be no help to you, Duchess. You know that. I have lost my place. I have been...retired.” His laugh was a rheumy bark. “I have retreated.”

“And so you sit and drink and feel sorry for yourself.” Utta cringed at Merolanna’s words, wondering how even a woman like the duchess could talk to Avin Brone that way, with such contemptuous familiarity. “I did not come here to help you with that, Brone, and I will thank you to sit up and pay attention. You know me. You know I would not come to you for help if I did not need it—I am not one of those women who runs weeping to a man at the first sign of trouble.”

The specter of a smile flitted across Brone’s face. “True enough.”

“Things may have seemed bad enough already,” Merolanna said, “with Briony and Barrick gone and the Tollys riding herd over us all—but I have news that is stranger than any of that. What do you know about the Rooftoppers?”

For a moment Brone only stared at her as though she had suddenly started to sing and dance and strew flowers around the room. “Rooftoppers? The little people in the old stories?”

“Yes, those Rooftoppers.” Merolanna watched him keenly. “You really do not know?”

“On my honor, Merolanna, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Look at this, then, and tell me what you think.” She pulled a sheet of parchment from out of the bodice of her dress and handed it to him. He stared at it blankly for a moment, then reached up—not without some discomfort—to take down a candle from the shelf on the wall behind him so he could read.

“It’s...a letter from Olin,” he said at last.

“It was the last letter from Olin, as you should know—the one that Kendrick received just before he was murdered. This is a page from it.”

“The missing page? Truly? Where did you find it?”

“So you know about it. Tell us.” Merolanna seemed a different woman now, more like the spymaster Brone used to be than the doddering old woman she called herself.

“The entire letter was missing after Kendrick’s murder,” he said. “Someone put it among my papers some days later, but a page was missing.” He scanned the parchment with growing excitement. “I think this is the page. Where did you find it?”

“Ah, now that is a story indeed. Perhaps you had better have another drink, Brone,” Merolanna said. “Or maybe some water to clear your head would be better. Understanding this is not going to be easy, and this is only the beginning.”

“So the Rooftoppers...are real?”

“We saw them with our own eyes. If it had been only me you might be able to blame it on my age, but Utta was there.”

“Everything she says is true, Lord Brone.”

“But this is fantastic. How could they be here in the castle all these years and we never knew...?”

“Because they didn’t want us to know. And it is a big castle, after all, Brone. But here is the question. How am I going to find that piece of the moon, or whatever it is? Sister Utta thinks it is Chaven the little woman was talking about, but where is he? Do you know?”

Brone looked around the small, cluttered room. There was no sign of the guards returning, but he lowered his voice anyway. “I do not. But I suspect he is alive. It would be easy enough for the Tollys to trump up some charge against him if all they wanted was an execution. I still have a few... sources around the castle, and I hear Hendon’s men are still searching for him.”

“Well, tell your sources to find him. As swiftly as possible. And it would not hurt to inquire into this moon-stone or whatever it is, either.”

“But I don’t understand—why did these little people ask you? And you said they wanted to bargain with you. How? What did they offer?”

“Ah.” Merolanna smiled, and it was almost fond this time. “Once a courtier, always a courtier, I see. Do you not believe they might have come to me because they recognized me as a person of kindness and good will?”

Brone raised an eyebrow.

“You’re right. They told me they would give me news of my child.”

Avin Brone’s eyes went wide as cartwheels. “Your... your...?”

“Child. Yes, that’s right. Don’t worry about Utta—she’s been told the whole dreadful story.”

He looked at her with a face gone pale. “You told her...?”

“You’re not speaking very well, today, Brone. I fear the drink is doing you damage. Yes, I told her of my adultery with my long-dead lover.” She turned to Utta. “Brone already knows, you see. I have few confidantes in the castle, but he has long been one of them. He was the one who arranged for the child to be fostered.” She turned back to Brone. “I told Barrick and Briony, also.”

“You what?”

“Told them, the poor dears. They had a right to know. You see, on the day of Kendrick’s funeral, I saw the child. My child.”

Brone could only shake his head again. “Surely, Merolanna, one of us is going mad.”

“It isn’t me. I thought for a time it must be, but I think I know better now. Tell me, then—what are you going to do?”

“Do? About what?”

“All of this. About finding Chaven and discovering why the fairies took my little boy.” She saw the look on Avin Brone’s face. “Oh, I didn’t tell you about that, did I?” She quickly related the words of Queen Upsteeplebat and the oracular Ears. “Now, what are you going to do?”

Brone seemed dazed. “I...I can inquire quietly again after Chaven’s whereabouts, I suppose, but the trail has probably long gone cold.”

“You can do more than that. You can help Utta and myself make our way to the camp of those fairy-people, those... what are they called? Qar? We’ve always called them the Twilight Folk, I don’t know why everyone has to change. In any case, I want to go to them. After all, they are only on the other side of the bay.”

Now it was Utta’s turn to be astonished. “Your Grace, what are you saying? Go out to the Qar? They are murderous creatures—they have killed hundreds of your people.”

The duchess flapped her hands in dismissal of Utta’s concern. “Yes, I’m sure they are terrible, but if they won’t tell me where my son is then I don’t much care what they do with me. I want answers. Why steal my child? Why put me through year upon year of torture, only to send him back as young as the day he was taken? I saw him, you know, at Kendrick’s funeral. I thought I’d truly gone mad. And why should this happen now? It has something to do with all this other nonsense, mark my words.”

“You’re...you’re really certain you saw him?” Utta asked.

“He was my child.” Merolanna’s face had gone chilly, hard. “Would you fail to recognize your revered Zoria if she appeared in your chapel? I saw him—my poor, dear little boy.” She turned back to Brone. “Well?”

He took a deep, ragged breath, then let it out. “Merolanna...Duchess...you mistake me for someone who still wields some power, instead of a broken old warhorse who has been beaten out to pasture.”

“Ah. So that is how it is?” She turned to Sister Utta. “You may go, dear. If you will do me the kindness of coming to my chambers this afternoon perhaps we may talk more then. We have much to decide. In the meantime, I have a little persuasion to do here.” She turned a sharp eye toward Brone. “And tell that page waiting in the hall outside that when I’m done, his master will need a bath and something to eat. The count has work to do.”

Utta went out, awed and a little frightened by Merolanna’s strength and determination. She was going to bend Brone to her will somehow, there seemed little doubt, but would that force of character be enough when it came time to deal with all their enemies—with cruel Hendon Tolly, or the immortal and alien Twilight People?

Suddenly the castle seemed no longer any kind of refuge to Utta, but only a cold box of stone sitting in the middle of a cold, cold world.

“Don’t I know you?” the guard asked Tinwright. He took a step closer and pushed his round, stubbled face close to the poet’s own. “Wasn’t I going to smash your skull in?”

Matt Tinwright’s knees were feeling a bit wobbly. As if things weren’t bad enough already, this was indeed the same guard who had objected to Tinwright having a little adventure with his lady friend some months back in an alley behind The Badger’s Boots. “No, no, you must be thinking of someone else,” he said, trying to smile reassuringly. “But if there’s anything else I can do for you, other than having my skull smashed...”

“Leave him be,” said the other guard with more amusement than sympathy. “If Lord Tolly’s got it in for him, they’ll do worse to him soon than you could ever imagine. Besides, he might want this fellow unmarked.”

The fat-faced guard peered at the trembling poet like a shortsighted bull trying to decide whether to charge toward something. “Right. Well, if His Lordship doesn’t flog you raw or something like, then you and I still have a treat to look forward to.”

“By the gods, how sensible!” Tinwright stepped away, putting his back against the wall. “Wouldn’t want to interfere with His Lordship’s plans, of course. Well considered.”

And it would have been a narrow escape, except that Tinwright did not for a moment believe he would be alive to avoid future meetings with the vengeful guard. Surely it could not be a coincidence that Hendon Tolly had summoned him so soon after his moment of madness in the garden with Elan M’Cory, kissing her hands, protesting his love. Before this, Tolly had paid Matt Tinwright no more attention than one of the dogs under the table. He’s going to kill me. The thought of it made his knees go wobbly again and he had to dig his fingers into the cracks of the wall behind him to remain upright. He barely resisted the impulse to run. But, oh, gods, maybe it is something harmless. To run would be to declare guilt...!

Matty Tinwright had received the summons in the morning from one of the castellan Havemore’s pages. Tinwright had thought the boy was looking at him strangely as he handed over the message; when he read it, he knew why.

Matthias Tinwright will come to the throne room today after morning prayers.

It was signed with a “T” for “Tolly” and sealed with the Summerfield boar-and-spears crest. The moment the page had left the room Tinwright had been helplessly, noisily sick into the chamber pot.

Now he clung to the wall and watched the fat guard and his friend talk aimlessly of this and that. Would they or anyone else remember him when he was dead? The fat one would celebrate! And no one else in the castle would care, either, except poor, haunted Elan and perhaps old Puzzle. Such a fate for someone who hoped to do great things...!

But I have done no great things. Nor, to be honest (and I might as well try to get in practice if I’m going to be standing before the gods soon) have I really tried. I thought becoming a court poet would bring greatness with it, but I have done no work of note. A few lines about Zoria for the princess, but nothing since Dekamene—a poem I thought might be my making, but with Briony gone it has ground to a halt. Not my best work, anyway, if I’m telling the truth. And what else? A few scribbles for Puzzle, songs, amusements. A commission or two for young nobles wanting some words to put their sweethearts in a bedable mood. In all—nothing. I’ve wasted my life and talent, if I ever truly had any.

He was still cold as ice behind his ribs, but the numbness above the waist was coupled with a sudden, fierce need to piss.

That’s a man in his last hour, Tinwright thought miserably. Thinking about poetry, looking for the privy.

The door to the throne room crashed open. “Where’s the poet?” said a brawny guardsman. “There you are. Come on, don’t pull away—it’ll all be over soon enough.”

The throne room was crowded, as usual. A pentecount of royal guards dressed in full armor and the wolf-and-stars livery of the Eddons stood by the walls, along with nearly that many of Hendon Tolly’s own armed bravos, distinguishable from the nobles and rich merchants by the coldness of their stares and the way that even as they talked, they never looked at the person with whom they were speaking, but let their eyes rove around the room. The other courtiers were more conventionally occupied, quietly arguing or gossiping. Almost none of them looked up as Tinwright was led through the room, too deeply occupied in the business of the moment. In the current court of Southmarch, with much property newly masterless and hundreds of nobles vanished in the war against the fairies, the pickings were rich. A man of dubious breeding could quickly become a man of fortune.

Still, the court had always been a bustling place, a hive of ambition and vanity, but one thing was certainly different from the way things had been here only a few months ago: during the short regency of Barrick and Briony the throne room had been raucous, less quiet and orderly than in Olin’s day (or so Tinwright had been told, since he had never been in the throne room, or even the Inner Keep, in Olin’s day) but even at its most respectful and ritualistic, the missing king’s throne room had been a place of clamorous conversation. Now it was nearly silent. As Tinwright was led across the room by the guard, the knots of people unraveling before them so they could pass, the noise never rose above a loud whisper. It was like being in a dovecote at night—nothing but quiet rustling.

Like a cold wind through dry leaves, he thought, and felt his stomach lurch again. Gods of hill and valley, they’re going to kill me! The oath, one of his mother’s that he hadn’t thought of, much less used, for years, brought him no solace. Zosim, cleverest of gods, are you listening? Save me from this monstrous fate and I...I’ll build you a temple. When I have the money. Even to himself, this sounded like a hollow promise. What else would the patron of poets and drunkards desire? I’ll put a bottle of the finest Xandian red wine on your altar. Don’t let Hendon Tolly kill me! But Zosim was famous for his fickleness. The sickening weight pressed down on Tinwright and he struggled not to weep.

Zoria, blessed virgin, if you ever loved mankind, if you ever pitied fools who meant no harm, help me now! I will be a better man. I promise I will be a better man.

Hendon Tolly was not in the chair where he ordinarily held court. Tirnan Havemore stood beside the empty seat instead, peering at a sheaf of papers in his hand, his spectacles halfway down his nose.

“Who is this wretch?” Havemore asked, looking at the poet over the rim of his lenses. “Tinwright, isn’t that it?” He turned and held out his hand. The page standing behind him put a piece of thick, official-looking parchment in his hand. Havemore squinted at it. “Ah, yes. He’s to be executed, it says here.”

Matty Tinwright screeched. The world spun wildly, it seemed, then he realized it was himself—or rather it wasn’t him, it was the world: he was flat on his back and the world wasn’t simply spinning, it was whirling like a child’s top, and he was about to be sick. He only just swallowed the bile back down.

As he lay with his cheek against the stones and the sour taste of vomit in his mouth, he heard Havemore speak again, in irritation. “Look at what you’ve done, lackwit! It’s not Tinwright at all to be executed, this says someone named Wainwright—fellow who strangled a reeve.” The poet heard a grunt and a squeak of pain as the castellan struck his page. “Can’t you read, idiot child? I wanted the order for ‘Tinwright,’ not ‘Wainwright’!” Matt Tinwright could hear more rustling of parchment and the whispering of the surrounding courtiers rose again like a flock of bats taking flight. “Here it is. He’s to wait for His Lordship.”

“No need—I am here,” said a new voice. A pair of black boots trimmed with silver chains stopped beside Tinwright’s face where it rested against the floor. “And here is the poet. Still, it seems a strange place to wait.”

Tinwright had just enough sense to scramble to his feet. Hendon Tolly watched him rise, the corner of his mouth cocked in a charmless grin, then turned away and moved to his regent’s chair, which he dropped himself into with the practiced ease of a cat jumping down off a low wall. “Tinwright, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Lord. I was...I was told you wanted to see me.”

“I did, yes, but not necessarily in that strange position. What were you doing on the floor?”

“I...I was told I was to be executed.”

Hendon Tolly laughed. “Really? And so you fainted, did you? I suppose it would be the kind thing, then, for me to tell you that nothing like that is planned.” He was grinning, but his eyes were absolutely cold. “Unless I decide to execute you anyway. The day has been short on amusements.”

Oh, merciful gods, Tinwright thought. He plays with me as if I were a mouse. He swallowed, tried to take a breath without bursting into helpless sobs. “Do...do you plan to kill me, then, Lord Guardian?”

Tolly cocked his head. He was dressed in the finery of a Syannese court dandy, with pleated scarlet tunic and black sleeves immensely puffed above the elbow, and his hair was dressed in foppish strands that hung down into his eyes, but Tinwright knew beyond doubt that if the mood took him this overdressed dandy could murder the poet or anyone else as quickly and easily as an ordinary man could kick over a chair.

The guardian of Southmarch narrowed his eyes until they were almost closed, but his stare still glinted. “I am told you are...ambitious.”

Elan. He does know. “I-I’m not sure...what you mean, Lord.”

Tolly flicked his fingers as if they were wet. “Don’t parse words with me. You know what the word ‘ambitious’ means. Are you? Do you have eyes above your station, poet?”

“I...I wish to better myself, sir. As do most men.” Tolly leaned forward, smiling as though he had finally found something worth hunting, or trapping, or killing. “Ah, but is that so? I think most men are cattle, poet. I think they hope to be ignored by the wolves, and when one of their fellows is taken they all move closer together and start hoping again. Men of ambition are the wolves—we must feed on the cattle in order to survive, and it makes us cleverer than they. What do you think, Tinwright? Is that a, what do you call it, a metaphor? Is it a good metaphor?”

Puzzled, Tinwright almost shook his head in confusion, but realized it might be mistaken as a denial of Hendon Tolly’s words. Did the guardian fancy himself a poet? What would that mean for Tinwright? “Yes, Lord, of course, it is a metaphor. A very good one, I daresay.”

“Hah.” Tolly toyed with the grip of his sword. Other than the royal guardsmen, he was the only one in the room with a visible weapon. Tinwright had heard enough stories about his facility with it that he had to struggle not to stare as Tolly caressed the hilt. “I have a commission for you,” the guardian of Southmarch said at last. “I heard your song about Caylor and thought it quite good work, so I have decided to put you to honest labor.”

“I beg your pardon?” Matt Tinwright could not have listed a group of words he had less expected to hear.

“A commission, fool—unless you think you are too good to take such work. But I hear otherwise.” Tolly gave him that blank, contemplative stare again. “In fact, I hear much of your time is spent making up to your betters.”

This made Tinwright think uncomfortably about Elan M’Cory again. Was the talk of commission just a ruse? Was Tolly just playing some abstract, cruel game with him before having him killed? Still, he did not dare to behave as anything other than an innocent man. “I would be delighted, Lord. I have never received a greater honor.”

His new patron smiled. “Not true. In fact, I hear you were given an important task by a highborn lady. Isn’t that true?”

Tinwright knew he must look like a rabbit staring at a swaying serpent. “I don’t catch your meaning, my lord.”

Tolly settled back in the chair, grinning. “Surely you have not forgotten your poem in praise of our beloved Princess Briony?”

“Oh! Oh, no, sir. No, but...but I confess my heart has not been in it of late...”

“Since her disappearance. Yes, a feeling we all share. Poor Briony. Brave girl!” Tolly did not even bother to feign sorrow. “We all wait for news of her.” He leaned forward. Havemore had reappeared beside his chair and was rattling his papers officiously. “Now, listen closely, Tinwright. I find it a good idea to keep a man of your talents occupied, so I wish you to prepare an epic for me, for a special occasion. My brother Caradon is coming and will be here the first day of the Kerneia—Caradon, Duke of Summerfield? You do know the name?”

Tinwright realized he had been staring openmouthed, still not certain he would survive this interview. “Yes, of course, sir. Your older brother. A splendid man...!”

Hendon cut off the paean with a wave of his hand. “I want something special in honor of his visit, and the Tolly family’s...stewardship of Southmarch. You will provide a poem, something in a fitting style. You are to make your verses on the fall of Sveros.”

“Sveros, the god of the evening sky?” said Tinwright, amazed. He could not imagine either of the Tolly brothers as lovers of religious poetry.

“What other? I would like the story of his tyrannical rule— and of how he was deposed by three brothers.”

It was the myth of the Trigon, of course, Perin and his brothers Erivor and Kernios destroying their cruel father. “If that is what you want, Lord...of course!”

“I find it highly appropriate, you see.” Tolly grinned again, showing his teeth and reminding the poet that this man was a wolf even among other wolves. “Three brothers, one of them dead—because Kernios was killed, of course, before he came back to life—who must overthrow an old, useless king.” He flicked a finger. “Get to work, then. Keep yourself busy. We would not want such a gifted fellow as you to fall into idleness. That breeds danger for young men.”

Three brothers, one dead, overthrow the king, Tinwright thought as he bowed to his new patron. Surely that’s the Tollys taking Olin’s throne. He wants me to write a celebration of himself stealing the throne of Southmarch!

But even as this idea roiled in his guts, another one crept in. He’s as much as said he’ll kill me if I cause him any trouble—if I go near Elan. Clever Zosim, protector of fools like me, what can I do?

“You will perform it at the feast on the first night of Kerneia,” Tolly said. “Now you may go.”

Before going back to his rooms Tinwright stumbled into the garden so he could be alone as he threw up into a box hedge.

“What are you doing, woman?” Brone tried to get up, grimaced in pain, and slumped back down into his chair.

“Don’t speak to me that way. You will refer to me as ‘Your Grace.’”

“We’re alone now. Isn’t that why you sent the priestess away?”

“Not so you could insult me or treat me like a chambermaid. We have a problem, Brone, and by that I mean you and I.”

“But what were you thinking? You have kept the secret for years, and now it seems that everyone in the castle must know.”

“Don’t exaggerate.” Merolanna looked around the small room. “It’s bad enough you stay seated when a lady is in the room, but have you not even a chair to offer me? You are nearly as rude as Havemore.”

“That miserable, treacherous whoreson...” He growled in frustration. “There is a stool on the other side of the desk. Forgive me, Merolanna. It really is agony to stand. My gout...”

“Yes, your gout. Always it has been something—your age, your duties. Always something.” She found the stool and pulled it out, settling herself gingerly on its small seat, her dress spreading around her like the tail of a bedraggled pheasant. “Well. Now is the time when you can make no more excuses, Brone. The fairies are across the bay. Olin and the twins are gone and their throne is in terrible danger —the Eddons are your own kin, remember, however distant.”

“You don’t need to tell me that I have failed my family and my king, woman,” Brone growled. “That is the song I sing myself to sleep with every night.” He didn’t seem anywhere near as bleary as he had only a short time ago.

“Then listen now. The Tollys have their hands around the throat of the kingdom. And somehow—somehow, though I don’t pretend to understand it—my child is involved. Our child.”

“I cannot believe you told Barrick and Briony.” She scowled. “I am not a fool. I said the father was dead.”

He looked at her and his face softened. “Merolanna, I did my best. I never turned my back on you.”

“Too little and too late, always.” “I offered to marry you. I begged you...!”

“After your own wife was dead. By then I had grown quite used to widowhood, thank you. Twenty years after I was foolish enough to fall in love with you. Too late, Avin, too late.”

“You were the wife of the king’s brother. What was I to do, demand he give you a bill of divorce?”

“And I was older than you, too. But I recall that neither of those things stopped you when you wanted my favors.” She paused, took a ragged breath. “Enough of this. It is also too late for fighting this way. We are old, Brone, and we have made terrible mistakes. Let us do what we can now to repair some of them, because the stakes are bigger than our own happiness.”

“What do you want me to do, Merolanna? You see me— old, sick, cut off from power. What do you want me to do?”

“Find Chaven. Find this moon-stone. And help me to cross the bay so I can meet these fairy folk and ask them what they did with my son.”

“Do you mean it? You are mad. But mad or not, I can’t help you.”

She dragged herself to her feet. “You coward! Everything you worked for your entire life is being stolen by the Tollys, and you sit there, doing nothing...!” She leaned across the table and raised her hand as though she would strike him. Brone reached up and caught at it, folding his immense paw around hers.

“Calm yourself, Merolanna,” he said. “You do not know as much as you think you do. Do you know what happened to Nynor?”

“Yes, of course! They pushed him out so they could give his honors and duties to your lickspittle factor, Havemore! Nynor’s gone back to his house in the country.”

“No, curse it, he’s dead. Hendon’s men killed him and threw his body in the ocean.”

For a moment the duchess faltered and if Brone had not been holding her hand, she might have fallen. She pulled away and sat down. “Nynor is dead?” she said at last. “Steffens Nynor?”

“Murdered, yes. He was talking against the Tollys and he spoke to someone he shouldn’t have. Word got back to Hendon. Berkan Hood dragged Nynor out of his bed in the middle of the night and murdered him.” Brone clenched his fists until his knuckles went white. “I heard it myself from someone who was there. They cut that good old man into pieces and smuggled his body out of the castle in a grain barrel. They can’t quite get away yet with slaughtering their enemies without even a mock trial. Not quite.”

“Oh, by all the gods, is that true? Killed him?” Merolanna abruptly began to cry. “Poor Steffens! The Tollys are demons—we are surrounded by demons!” She made the sign of the Three, then wiped at her face with her sleeve and tried to compose herself. “But that is all the more reason you must help me, Avin! There are things going on that...”

“No.” He shook his head again. “There are certainly things going on, and you don’t know all of them, Merolanna.” He looked around again. The guards were still not back, but he dropped his voice even lower. “Please, understand me, Your Grace—I have worked hard to convince Hendon and his party that I am no threat so I could put plans of my own into motion. I cannot afford for them to suspect otherwise. I will do what I can to find Chaven, because that would not seem unusual—the physician and I knew each other well. But I can do nothing else. I will not risk the small chance we have of saving Olin’s throne. Everything is balanced on a knife-edge.”

The duchess stared at him for a long time. “So that is your defense, is it?” She smiled a little, but her words had a bitter edge. “That you are already hard at work on other, more important things? Well and good. But I will discover this moon-piece myself if I must, and find out what happened to my child—our child—even if I have to pull this castle down stone by stone to do it.”

“You are no spy, Merolanna,” Brone told her gently.

“No. But I am a mother.” She reached a trembling hand up to touch her face. “Sweet Zoria, I must be a terrible mess. You’ve made me cry, Brone. I’ll have to repair myself before I go talk to Utta.” She gazed around the cluttered room, slowly and wearily now, energy mostly spent. “Look at this. We sit at the center of the capital of all the March Kingdoms but you do not even have a glass for an old woman to fix her face. How can it be so hard to find a simple mirror?”