CHAPTER ELEVEN

AWAKE

NEIL COUNTED only four men with Robert, all in black leather. They all carried themselves as if they knew how to fight.

“All alone?” Robert asked.

Neil didn’t reply, but he noticed that Alis was nowhere to be seen.

He watched them get closer.

“You’ll pardon me if I don’t make a conversation of this,” the prince said. “Given how our last talk went, I doubt that you’re disappointed.”

Robert drew the feysword, which glowed even more brightly than when Neil had last seen it. It looked like it had been forged from a lightning bolt.

“The music offends me,” the prince confided. “An old friend thought I might like it, but he clearly doesn’t know my tastes.” He stopped and looked down at Neil’s sword and hauberk where they lay on the ground. His eyebrows arched, and his eyes glittered oddly in the torchlight.

Neil had killed his first man when he had had eleven winters, with a spear. He had killed his second a nineday later. He wasn’t strong enough to use a broadsword until he was fifteen.

He threw the first spear, feeling the motion come back to him, as natural as walking. His arm didn’t protest at all, and the shaft flew true, straight into Robert’s shoulder, where it sank deep and stuck. The feysword flew from his hand, and the prince’s shriek was a piercing counterpoint to the strange music coming from the house.

Neil lifted the second spear out of the soil. Everwulf had been right—he still had his feet. He danced toward Robert’s guard as they tried to encircle him, gripping the weapon underhand with his knuckles against his hip.

He rushed up to the lead man, forcing him to cut before he was ready while Neil skipped to the side. His arm shot out, and the steel head punched in at the navel, splitting the chain beneath the leather and coming out bloody. The man stumbled back choking, and Neil went on to deal with the others before the first one discovered that his wound wasn’t critical.

One had come around behind him, so Neil jabbed the butt end back and ducked as something whirred over his hair. He felt the blow connect with a knee and turned, taking the weapon two-handed, and rammed the blade up through the foeman’s crotch.

The spear stuck there, so Neil released it and rolled away, noticing as he did another of Robert’s guards stumbling about headless.

The last man he could see coming from the left, but he was off balance, and there was no way to dodge the blow.

He threw up his forearm to meet the sword at an angle. He heard the snap of bone breaking, and white light seemed to explode from everything.

Between one footfall and the next, the arrows suddenly blurred back to speed, and Aspar followed right after them, vaulting over Leshya and drawing back the ax for a blow. The Vaix’s head whipped around as the arrows hit him. The Sefry stumbled, and Aspar chopped him in the back of the head with the ax as he went by, thrusting at the utin’s eye with the dirk. The dagger went in deep, but the monster hit him with a backhand that slung Aspar back against a tree, then sank its talons into his shoulder and gaped a mouthful of needles at him. Aspar hit the butt of the knife with his palm, driving it in to the hilt. The beast screamed and fell, writhing so furiously in the cramped space that Aspar couldn’t get by it for several long moments. When he was finally able to retrieve his knife and move on, he found two men waiting for him, and beyond he could see the wide opening inside the living lodge where Fend, Winna, and Ehawk were watching him with astonished eyes.

The men confronting him stared at him in what could only be terror.

“You can walk out of here,” Aspar snarled, “or I can kill you.” A look of resolve flashed over the face of one of them, and he cut at Aspar with the sword. He ducked so that the edge thunked into a tree branch and stayed there while Aspar disemboweled the wielder. The other howled and swung wildly, hitting Aspar on the side of his head with the flat. Aspar stumbled back, ears ringing, as the man shouted something in a language the holter didn’t know.

He threw the ax, and it buried itself solidly in the fellow’s breastbone. He stared at Aspar as he walked up, yanked it out, and kicked him over.

“Fend!”

Fend drew a pair of knives.

“How did you do that?” the Sefry asked.

Aspar didn’t reply. He just stepped into the leafy hall, feeling a sort of calm settle over him.

“Aspar!” Winna shouted. She was holding her belly, and her face was ashen. He thought there was blood on her lips, although in the dim light it was difficult to be sure.

“It’s already too late,” Fend said. “It’s already begun.”

“Not too late to kill you, though,” Aspar said.

“Is that all you ever think about? I helped you.”

“Only to get Winna here. You planned to kill me after that.”

“Well, true. I really should have done it sooner, but I had a sense I would need you, and I was right. I only planned to do you because I knew you would slaughter me.”

“And I will.”

“You remember the last time we fought? You’re even older and slower now, and I’m more powerful than ever. I’m the Blood Knight, you know.”

“No playing this time,” Aspar said.

“We can still do this together,” Fend said. “It needs doing.”

“Even if it does, you said it’s already begun. So what do I need you for?”

“I guess you don’t.”

“Aspar!” Winna screamed.

Fend leapt at him, faster than a Mamres monk, his right-hand dagger slashing toward Aspar’s face. The holter ducked, stepped in, and took Fend’s other knife in the gut, then drilled his dirk under Fend’s jaw so hard that he lifted the Sefry clean off his feet. He felt the man’s spine snap.

“I said no playing,” Aspar told him. Then he dropped the gurgling man and slumped down to one knee, lowering his gaze to the knife still stuck in his belly.

He took another look at Fend, but the Sefry was gazing back from beyond the world.

“About time,” he muttered, lowering himself down and scooting toward Ehawk to cut his bonds.

“You let him stab you,” the boy said.

“If I’d fought him, he would have won,” Aspar said. “I’d be dead, and he’d still be alive.” He handed Ehawk the knife. “Cut Winna’s bonds.”

He got up and walked over to Winna. She was panting hard, and he could see her belly moving. She clutched his arm, but her eyes were closed.

“Sceat,” he said. “I’m sorry, love.”

“It’s killing her,” Ehawk said.

“Yah,” he replied.

“What should I do?”

“I don’t know,” Aspar said. “Go bring Leshya here; maybe she knows. She’s right near the entrance.” Ehawk nodded and left.

Aspar was finding it hard to take a deep breath. It was as if something were pushing down on him.

“Winna,” he said. “I don’t know if you can hear me. I’m sorry for how I’ve been—always, but especially lately. There was a lot I needed to tell you, but I couldn’t. I had a geos laid on me.” Winna started to speak, but then she cried out again. Her eyes opened, and he saw they were glazed with pain.

“Still love you,” she said.

“Yah. I still love you. Nothing will change that.”

“Our baby…” She closed her eyes again. “I can see her, Aspar. I see her in the forest with you, with her father. She’s got my hair, but there’s something wild in her, something from you, and she’s got your eyes.”

Aspar reached to stroke her hair, saw he had blood all over his hand, and wiped it on the ground first.

When his hand touched the earth, everything went still, and he felt his fingers reach into the soil, dividing, splitting, faster and faster, and his skin was expanding, moving out through the valley, across the hills, to the dying earth around it, and then he was back up north, staring into the eyes of the Briar King as he died.

Holter.

He lifted his hand and was back where he’d started, next to Winna.

Fend was looking down at him.

“Ah, sceat,” Aspar said.

“It’s time,” Fend said. Except that it wasn’t Fend at all, not anymore. It was the witch.

Cazio stood for a moment in a daze, wondering what had just happened, but then he realized that Austra was awake, looking at him.

“Love,” he said. “Are you well?”

As she pulled up, the other people who had been in the crypt rushed out, probably to see what Anne could do now that she could fly.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I was asleep.”

“For days, yes,” Cazio said. “Do you know what happened?”

“I was with Anne, or she was with me,” the girl replied. “It’s a little confusing, but I think her soul came into me while her body healed.”

“Do you know the way out of here?”

Austra looked around. “We’re in Eslen-of-Shadows?”

“Yes.”

“There’s a path up to the castle, yes. But we have to find Anne.”

“Well, she just flew off with the Kept,” Cazio said. “Can you walk?”

“I feel fine.”

“Let’s go, then.”

He helped her to her feet and kissed her.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go see what’s happening.”

“A moment there,” a familiar voice said.

Marché Hespero stood in the doorway to the crypt. He looked disheveled, and his voice sounded strained.

Cazio drew Acredo.

“I just need her,” Hespero said, pointing at Austra. “She’s the link; she’s the way to Anne. I can still save us all.”

“You?” Cazio nearly laughed the word. “You expect me to believe you’re trying to save us?”

“Listen,” Hespero said. “The man who brought you here and Anne are fighting as we speak. Anne will probably win, and then she will come and finish me. If that happens, we will wish—beg—for the days when we were Skasloi slaves.”

Cazio stepped in front of Austra.

“About all of that, I know nothing. You might be lying, you might be telling the truth. If I had to guess, I would say the first. It doesn’t matter.”

“He isn’t lying,” Austra murmured.

“What are you talking about?”

“Anne was trying to tell me something like that, even though I don’t think she knew herself what she was getting at. And I am linked to her; we walked the same faneway.”

“Listen to her,” Hespero said. “There’s not much time.”

Cazio looked down at Austra. “Do you trust him?”

“No,” she replied. “But what choice do we have?”

“Well, I’m not letting him have you,” Cazio replied. “He might kill you both.” She closed her eyes and took his hands. “Cazio, if that’s what it takes…”

“No.”

“I don’t know why I spent any time talking to you at all,” Hespero said. Cazio saw that he had drawn a rapier.

“You remember that your weapon can’t hurt me, I trust.”

“Oh, we’ll find a way, Acredo and I,” Cazio said, taking up his guard.

Anne called lightning into him and for a moment thought it might actually be that easy. But the Jester grinned and regained his feet, and when she hurled another bolt at him, he twirled it around himself somehow and sent it back.

He laughed, just as he had laughed in the otherwhere she first had met him in.

What was so irritating was that she’d had him right under her nose—or at least the part of him that was Stephen. She could have killed him at any time, if only she’d understood, and this would never be happening. Worse, it had been her vision that sent him off to become—this.

How many of her other visions were false?

Well, there was still time to correct that mistake. She clapped her hands together and ripped him out of the world, into the sedos realm.

“A change of scene?” he said. “Very well, my queen.”

The sky raged with her will; the land was all moors of black heather.

“This is mine,” she told him. “All of it.”

“Greedy,” he said.

Her fury kindled deeper.

“I didn’t want it. I didn’t want any of this, but you all pushed me. The Faiths, you, my mother, Fastia, Artwair, Hespero—your threats and your promises. Always wanting something from me, always trying to take it by guile or trickery. No more. No more. ”

She struck out then, filling the space between them with death of sixteen kinds, and with lovely glee she watched him falter. Yet still he kept smiling, as if he knew something she didn’t.

No more. She saw a seam in him and pulled him open like a book, spreading his pages before her.

“You dare call me greedy?” she said. “Look at what is in you. Look at what you’ve done.”

“Oh, I’ve been a bad boy, I’ll admit,” he said. “But the world was still here when I went to sleep. You’re going to be the end of it.”

“I’ll end you for certain,” she said. “You and anyone else who won’t—”

“Do what you say? Leave you alone? Wear the proper hat?”

“It’s mine, ” Anne screamed at him. “I made this world. I’ve let you worms live on it for two thousand years. If I give you another bell, you should all beg me from your knees, kiss my feet, and sing me hymns.

Who are you to tell me what to do with my world, little man?”

“There you are,” he said. “That’s what we’ve all been waiting for.” She felt him bend his will toward her, and it was strong, much stronger then she had thought. Her lungs suddenly seized as if filled with sand, and the more she fought, the more the weight of him crushed her.

And still he smiled.

“Ah, little queen,” he murmured. “I think I shall eat you up.” CHAPTER TWELVE

REQUIEM

NEIL FELL and rolled, desperately clinging to consciousness. He fumbled for the little knife in his boot, but the man kicked him in the ribs hard, flipping him onto his back.

“Stand him up,” he heard Robert say.

Rough hands lifted him and slapped him up against the wall of the house.

“That wasn’t a bad performance,” Robert said. “I had heard you were in worse shape.” He laughed.

“Well, now I guess you are.”

Neil tried to focus on Robert’s face. The other fellow had his head turned; he seemed to be looking for something.

Neil spit on the second man. He turned back and slapped Neil.

He hardly felt it.

Robert pinched Neil’s cheeks. “Last time we talked,” he said, “you likened me to a mad wolf who needed to be put down. And here twice you’ve failed to do that. There’s no third chance for you, my friend.”

“I didn’t fail,” Neil said. “I did all I needed to.”

“Did you? And what was that?”

“Distracted you,” Neil said.

Robert’s eyes widened. There was a flash of actinic blue light, and then Neil was facing two headless men. Behind the stumps of their necks a grim-faced Alis appeared, as if stepping from a dark mist, the feysword held in both hands.

Neil fell with the dead man who had been holding him. Robert’s body continued to stand.

Neil wiped blood from his eyes and watched through a haze as Alis picked up Robert’s head. The prince’s lips were working and his eyes rolling, but Neil didn’t hear him say anything.

Alis kissed Robert’s forehead.

“That’s for Muriele,” she said.

Then she tossed the head away, into the yard.

Fend’s dead eyes glimmed like oil on water as the witch of the Sarnwood stooped toward Winna.

“No,” Aspar said. “Fend tricked you.”

She paused, cocking her head.

“It won’t work the way you want it to,” he said. “It can’t.”

“It will,” she said. “I know it.”

“You can’t have my child,” he said. “Her child.”

“My child,” the witch replied.

“Not for long,” Aspar said. He pulled the knife out of his stomach. Blood gouted.

“That can’t hurt me,” the witch said.

“I’ve been wondering,” Aspar grunted. “Why my child?” He dropped the knife and put one hand on Winna’s belly and the other in a pool of Fend’s blood. He felt the shock of the woorm’s poison and what it had become in Fend’s Skaslos veins before his fingers dug down again. This time they kept digging.

He closed his eyes and saw again the Briar King’s eyes, stared into one of them as it opened wider and wider and finally swallowed him.

He had been sleeping, but something had awakened him; he felt wind on his face and branches swaying around him. He opened his eyes.

He was in a tree at the edge of a meadow, his forest all around.

A Mannish woman in a brown wool dress lay on her back at the foot of the tree, her knees up and legs spread. She was gasping, occasionally screaming. He felt her blood soaking into the earth.

Everything else was still.

There was pain showing through the woman’s eyes, but he mostly saw resolve. As he watched, she pushed and screamed again, and after a time she pulled something pale blue and bloody from herself. It cried, and she kissed it, rocked it in her arms for a few moments.

“Aspar,” she whispered. “My lovely son. My good son. Look around you. This is all yours.” Then she died. That baby might have died, too, but he reached down from the tree and took him in, kept him safe and quick until, almost a day later, a man came and found the dead woman and the boy. Then he drifted back into the long slow dream of the earth, for just a little while, until he heard a horn calling, and knew it was time to wake fully and fight.

“I’m sorry,” Aspar told the witch. “I’m sorry your forest was destroyed, your world. But there’s no bringing it back. Trying to will destroy what’s left of my forest. That’s what Fend wanted, although I don’t know why.”

“Stop,” the witch hissed. “Stop what you’re doing.”

“I couldn’t if I wanted to,” Aspar said. It was the last thing he was able to say; agony stretched him as everything inside of him pressed out against his skin. Then he split open, and with the last light of his mortal eyes he saw green tendrils erupt from his body. They uncoiled fast, like snakes, and reached for the sun.

The pain faded, and his senses rushed out from tree to grass blade and vine. He was a deer, a panther, an oak, a wasp, rainwater, wind, dark rotting soil.

He was everything that mattered.

He pulled life up from the earth and grew, pushing up through the roof and absorbing the thorns into him as he went.

The music lifted, the discord sharpened, and suddenly a murmur grew in the air, the whisper of a thousand crystal bells with pearl clappers chiming his music in all of its parts. It seemed to spin him around, and the air grew darker until even the flames of the candles appeared only as dim sparks.

But the music. Oh, it went out of the house and into the vast hollow places of the world. It rang in the stone of the mountains and sang in the depths of the sea. The cold stars heard it, and the hot sun in its passage below the world, and the bones inside his flesh. And still it went on, filling everything.

He almost lost his own voice. Mylton’s voice did falter, but then it came back, stronger, leading the lowest chords up from the depths toward the still unseen summit.

On the music climbed, falling now and then but always tending higher, never resolving and seemingly irresolvable.

He couldn’t stop singing now if he wanted to; Mylton’s stumble had been the last time that was possible.

He heard many thousands of voices now sighing in the starless gulf, then millions, and he began to panic, because he couldn’t remember how it finished, what was supposed to happen at the end. The music on paper no longer mattered. The requiem had them all in its grip now, and it was going where it wanted to.

He felt his body shiver like a dragonfly’s wing and then cease to be. Nothing remained of him but his voice.

The end came, and it was terrifying, wonderful, and then—in a single, impossible moment—perfect.

Every note fit with every other. Every voice supported every other. Everything was in its place.

The voices of the dead faded with his own.

Mery sagged against the wall and collapsed.

Out in the yard, the head of Robert Dare stopped trying to talk.

Hespero came at him like lightning, lunging and thrusting at Cazio’s groin. He parried quickly in uhtave, but the blade wasn’t there, for the fratrex had disengaged. It was only by wild chance that he managed to catch the blade a second time and stop it from running through his throat.

Cazio stepped back.

“You know how to use a sword pretty well.”

“I may have neglected to mention that I studied with Mestro Espedio.” Cazio narrowed his eyes. “I met another student of his not long ago. Acredo. This is his sword.”

“An acquaintance,” Hespero said. “You killed him, I gather.”

“No. An arrow did.”

Hespero shrugged and came at him again, using the attack of the Cuckold’s Walk Home. Cazio countered it, move for move for move. Acredo nearly had killed him with that attack when they had fought because Cazio hadn’t known the final reply, but he knew the point would be at his throat when it was all over, so he finished with a high controsesso.

Again he didn’t find the blade, but Hespero’s found him, slipping through the ribs of his right side. Cazio fell back, looking at the blood in utter disbelief. Hespero came grimly on.

You’re going to be fine, Cazio thought. He got lucky.

He parried the next attack barely and then desperately struck deep. His blade grazed Hespero’s off-weapon hand and drew blood.

That was a nice surprise.

“You’re a better swordsman than I thought,” Cazio said. “But you aren’t invulnerable anymore.”

“If you treat that wound now, you might live,” Hespero said.

“Oh, you’re not getting away that easily,” Cazio said.

“I don’t have time for this,” the fratrex said.

Cazio renewed his attack, a feint to the hand, a bind from perto to uhtave.

Hespero punched him in the jaw with his off-weapon hand. Cazio reeled back, trying desperately to get his guard up.

Austra launched herself at the fratrex, leaping on his back and wrapping her arms around his neck.

Hespero reached back with his left hand and grabbed her by the hair, but she didn’t let go until he slammed her into the wall.

By that time Cazio was on his feet, albeit unsteadily. He lurched toward Hespero.

“Saints, you really don’t know when to quit,” Hespero said.

Cazio didn’t waste his limited breath answering; he stamped and started an attack in perto. Hespero, a little impatiently, bound in sesso and riposted; Cazio ducked and lunged low but short.

Hespero started the Cuckold’s Walk Home, and Cazio kept up with him, barely. The last feint came to his throat, and he desperately parried again, and again the blade wasn’t there.

Neither was Cazio. As the final flank stroke came, he twisted his body out of the way and counterattacked rather than trying to parry. Acredo slid neatly through the churchman’s solar plexus.

“Don’t ever try the same thing on me twice,” Cazio advised, yanking the blade out.

Hespero went down on one knee, then suddenly leaped forward. Cazio caught the blade and turned it in a bind, so close to missing it that the point dragged across his forehead. Hespero’s low lunge exposed his back, and Cazio drove his sword down between his shoulder blades.

Then he slipped on his own blood and fell. As Austra rushed to him, he put his hand over his wound and closed his eyes.

Stephen cupped Anne’s face in his hand and smiled ever more broadly.

“Are you ready, little queen?”

Anne felt as if her head were full of wasps, but she couldn’t do anything but stare up at him with hatred.

But then she felt new strength enter her, strength of a sort she had never known before. It came boiling up in her not from the sedos but from the awful depths surrounding all, the chaos from which the world had been born.

My gift, o Queen, Qexqaneh said.

Her lungs cleared. The weight vanished.

The law of death is mended, the Skaslos said.

Stephen staggered back. “No,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” Anne said. “Certainly yes.”

Her right hand was the sickle of the dark moon, and her left was the hammer of old night, and with them she struck so that he fell in pieces and she hurled the pieces out into the abyss, and she stood and grew until the world was tiny beneath her.

Now, the Kept murmured. Now, my sweet, you only need kill me, and all is done.

Anne stretched her grin. “And how do I do that, Qexqaneh?”

You are the rivers. You are the Night Before the World. Take me into you and destroy me. Give me oblivion at long last. You have my power. Now take my soul.

“Fine,” Anne said. “I’ll do that, then.”

Cazio felt Austra stumble. He tried to put all his weight back on his own feet, but they just wouldn’t take it.

“Stop that,” Austra said. “I can support you.”

“Not up the hill, you can’t,” Cazio said.

“I have to get you to a leic,” she replied.

“I think it would be better if you went and found one,” he said.

“I don’t want to leave you.”

“Then just sit here with me,” he said.

“That’s stupid. You’re bleeding.”

“It’s not so bad,” he lied.

“I’m not a fool, Cazio,” she muttered. “Why does everyone take me for a fool?” As they crossed the threshold of the crypt, Austra went rigid and gasped. Cazio looked to see what the matter was. Stephen Darige lay facedown a few feet away, but that didn’t seem to be what she was looking at.

“Oh, no,” Austra said. She suddenly felt very warm—no, hot, so hot he couldn’t keep his arm across her shoulders. He stood away, teetered, and had to lean against the mausoleum wall to stay on his feet.

“No,” Austra repeated. Her eyes suddenly incandesced, and yellow flame sprang from them.

“Austra!” he screamed.

She looked at him, and she wasn’t Austra but a woman with fine, dark features and arching brows, then a Sefry with white hair. She was Anne, with flaming tresses. She was every woman Cazio had ever made love to, then every woman he had ever met. Her clothes had begun to smolder.

“What’s happening?” Cazio screamed.

“She’s doing it!” Austra said, her voice changing like her face. Then, more exultantly, “We’re doing it!” The ground suddenly was colored with strange light, and Cazio looked up and saw a sun descending toward them, a ball of writhing flame and shadow that made the oldest, most animal parts of him quiver and long to run and never stop running, to find a place where a thing like that couldn’t be.

Instead he held on to the stone, panting, fighting the fear with all the life he had left in him.

“Austra,” someone said quietly.

Stephen was standing a few kingsyards away. He didn’t look good. For one thing, one of his eyes was missing.

“Austra,” he said. “You’re the only one who can stop her. Do you understand? He’s tricked her. He’ll die, yes, but he’ll take the world with him. Anne will go mad; it’s too much power. You feel it, don’t you?”

“I feel it,” Austra said. Her voice was that of a woman in the rising throes of passion.

“Fight her,” Stephen said. “You have claim to the power, too.”

“Why should I fight it?” Austra asked. “It’s wonderful. I’ll have the whole world in my veins soon.”

“Yes,” Stephen said. “I know.” He stepped closer. “I didn’t know what he was, Austra. That was what I was missing. He’s been waiting in his prison for two thousand years, planning this moment, building it, planting the seeds in all of us. He doesn’t want to rule, he doesn’t want to return his race to glory, he just wants to die and take everything with him. Can’t you see it?”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Don’t,” he said. “Go see for yourself.”

Flames began to dance on her garments. She looked at Cazio, and for a moment her face was that of the Austra he loved.

“Cazio?” she asked.

“I love you,” he said. “Do what’s right.”

Then his legs went out from under him.

Aspar would have laughed if he could, but the joy was there in the leaves and blossoms for anyone to see. He healed the broken, ended the hopeless, and pulled in the poison, spreading and diffusing it, changing it into something new. He found the heart of the Sarnwood witch and took her in, too, took all of her children in, and reckoned at last she understood, because she stopped fighting him and lent him her strength.

Or perhaps it was that she saw what he saw, the deadly fire kindled in the west, the one thing that would stop life’s rebirth and send everything to oblivion.

The real enemy.

He didn’t need a summoning, not now, and so he moved his weight across the world, fearing it was already too late.

Anne felt the black blood of the Kept flowing into her veins and cried out with glee, knowing that no one since time began had wielded might like this: not the Skasloi, not Virgenya Dare, no one. She was saint, demon, dragon, tempest, the fire in the earth. There had never been a name for what she was becoming.

The Kept coiled around her as the life leaked from him, and his every touch sent shudders through her body, pleasure and pain so pure that she couldn’t tell them apart and wouldn’t if she could. Through his eyes she saw a hundred thousand years of such sensation and more, and the anticipation was its own luscious bliss.

More! she shouted.

There is more, the dying demon replied. So much more.

Stephen tried to keep his focus, tried to stay in the world, but it was difficult with so much of him gone.

Only the ancient, terrible obstinacy of Kauron had let him keep anything, but even that was fading, and soon Anne would notice her mess and clean it up.

It depended on this girl. He ached to take Austra in his arms and drain the life and power from her; she was a vein that tapped right into the thing Anne was becoming, and he—if he had the gift—could bleed Anne through her. She would never see it coming.

But he no longer had that gift. He was less than a skeleton of himself.

He watched as she knelt by Cazio, murmuring, as her clothing finally exploded in blue flame and she was forced to step back from her lover to avoid charring him.

“You can’t heal him, if that’s what you’re trying to do,” Stephen said. “You can’t heal anything. Neither can she. Always a storm, never a gentle rain. Do you understand? But you are her weak spot.” Austra stared at him with her blistering eyes for a moment, and then the flames began to subside, then smoke, until she was wreathed in dark vapor and her eyes shone like green lamps. Then she lifted toward the terror that hung above them.

Anne felt an ebb in her strength and sought jealously for the source of it. Had she missed someone? Was Hespero still alive?

But no, it was just Austra, bearing a fraction of her strength.

If you die, the Kept said, she inherits all.

She doesn’t have the power to kill me, Anne said. And she wouldn’t if she could.

She can betray you more than anyone. You know that.

“Don’t listen to him, Anne,” Austra said.

“Of course I won’t,” Anne replied. “We’ll rule together, won’t we?”

“Anne, Cazio is dying,” Austra said. “Can you heal him?

“No,” she said. She hadn’t realized until she said it that it was true.

Seize the Vhen throne, Qexqaneh interrupted. Then you can heal any of these worms if that is your wish.

“He’s lying, Anne.”

“Why should he? He’s sacrificing himself for me.”

“He’s using you to destroy the world.”

“So he thinks,” Anne said. “But I’m the one with the power now. Anyway, what’s so great about this world? You’re part of me now; you can see what vermin people are. I’ll create another world. I already see how it could be done. We’ll make it the way we want it, the way it ought to be.”

“That’s crazy, Anne. That means killing everyone you’ve ever known, everyone dear to you.”

“Like who?” Anne screamed. “My father? Fastia? Elseny? My mother is dead, too; did you know that?

Everyone I care for is already dead except you and Cazio, and my patience is wearing a little thin with you. Now, if you want Cazio to live, either join me or give up your gifts, because we’ve got one battle left, and I need all the strength I can muster. After that we can have everything, Austra, just the way we want it.”

Austra opened her mouth again, but then she looked beyond Anne.

“I’ll save you, Anne,” she said.

Anne turned.

She stood in a field of ebony roses, the pearls of her dress gleaming like dull bone in the moonlight. The air was so thick with the scent of the blooms that she thought she would choke.

There was no end to them; they stretched to the horizon in a series of low rises, stems bent by a murmuring wind. She turned slowly to see if it was thus in all directions.

Behind her the field ended abruptly in a wall of trees, black-boled monsters covered with puckered thorns bigger than her hand, rising so high she couldn’t see their tops in the dim light. Thorn vines as thick as her arm tangled between the trees and crept along the ground. Through the trees and beyond the vines was only darkness. A greedy darkness, she felt, a darkness that watched her, hated her, wanted her.

“I’ve been here before,” she told the forest. “I’m not frightened this time.” Something pushed through the thorns, coming toward her. Moonlight gleamed on a black-mailed arm and the fingers of a hand, uncurling.

And then the helmet came through, a tall tapering helm with black horns curving up, set on the shoulders of a giant.

But this time, standing her ground, she saw it wasn’t mail but bark, and the helmet was moss and horn and stone. And of the face she could only see the eyes, wells of life and death, birth and decay—need and vengeance.

You have the power, the fading voice of the Kept told her. Kill him and complete yourself.

Anne gathered herself, but her peripheral vision caught motion, and she saw Austra running across the field, running straight for the Briar King.

If he gets her, you lose, the Kept said. You must kill her now.

Anne stood, watching.

Kill her, Qexqaneh said more urgently. Do you understand? Through her he can defeat us.

Anne lashed out at Austra, and the girl stumbled. She tried to rip through the connection between them, recover her power, but she saw what the Kept meant, how intimate that connection really was. Killing Austra was the only way for Anne to be whole, to possess everything.

She reached out, felt the life beating in Austra, knew the familiar smell of her, that little lock of hair that was always out of place, always had been since they were little girls. The Briar King reached for her, and Anne, hot tears in her eyes, started to squeeze Austra’s heart.

Austra stumbled to her knees. She looked toward Anne, her eyes mortal now, wide as saucers, just another Mannish beast that didn’t understand why it had to die.

Yes, the Kept sighed. Finally.

Somehow Austra stood back up, even as the strength drained out of her, as Anne took her in. The sky dimmed as she diminished and then went away.

“Our secret place,” she heard Austra whisper in the darkness.

But it wasn’t complete darkness, and Anne saw they were again in the chamber beneath the horz. But now the sarcophagus was open, and in it Austra sat, back propped against one stone wall. She looked as she had when she was nine, a pale waif.

“I knew better,” the little girl said. “I knew better than to hope for anything for myself.”

“Stop whining,” Anne said. “You had a better life than you could have ever hoped for, born as you were.”

“You’re right,” Austra said. “And I wouldn’t trade it. You were always going to be the end of me, Anne.

I knew that. You’ll bury me here, and the circle goes on.”

“You didn’t know,” Anne accused.

“Of course I did. I didn’t know how it would happen. It nearly happened a dozen times when we were little.”

“That’s nonsense. I loved you.”

“It’s how you love,” she replied. “It’s how you love, Anne.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You probably don’t,” Austra replied, closing her eyes. “I love you anyway.”

“He’ll kill us both, Austra, if he gets you.”

She nodded tiredly. “I know you won’t, but please let Cazio go. Can you do that for me?” Anne started to agree, but why should she? She didn’t have to do anything Austra said or for that matter listen to anything she said. She was the only one who could make her feel like this, feel like…

Feel like what? she suddenly wondered.

But she knew that, too. When her mother—or Fastia, or anyone—disapproved of something she did, she knew she might be in trouble, but deep down she never actually felt bad.

When Austra disapproved of her, she knew in her heart she was wrong.

She didn’t need that, did she?

She felt the Briar King, his power swelling, reaching for what remained of Austra, tearing through the illusory tomb.

Time was up. She had a heartbeat left to act, but it was all she needed.

No.

With a soft, chagrined laugh, Anne released her hold. The Briar King took Austra and loomed up to the sky. The Kept screamed once as he was ripped from her and hurled into the oblivion he craved, and then she felt as if all her veins had been opened, and the scent of black roses filled her lungs until there was nothing else.