PART ONE: SHADOWS

In the Year of the Black Eagle
In the Hundred

1

ON A HOT summer's day like today Flirt liked to fly straight up along the shoreline of the river, huge wings huffing against the wind. The draft off the running water cooled eagle and reeve, and gave the raptor a chance to get close to any unsuspecting deer come out to drink. This time of day, early afternoon, they didn't see a single creature along the shore except once a man chopping wood who had flung up a hand at the sound, poised, listening. When he saw them he relaxed and went back to his work as Flirt's vast shadow shuddered along the rocks. His brindled hound barked, then hushed, ears flat, cowering, as Flirt answered with a piercing cry of her own. She didn't like challenges.

Marit grinned. The man kept chopping and was soon left behind.

Woodland spread up on both sides of the Liya Pass, hills covered so thickly with beech that Marit couldn't see the ground. Here and there a stand of silver birch glimmered on rockier earth, leaves flashing in the wind. The air was smooth today, a steady wind out of the northeast that blew at crosscurrents to their line of flight, but Marit didn't like the smell. She shifted in the harness and wiped sweat off her brow. There'd been something nasty in the air ever since last winter; she knew it and the other reeves knew it. Anyone knew it, who ever tilted her head back to take a look around; who ever stopped to listen. Probably the woodchopper knew it, which is why he'd been scared for that moment, expecting the worst.

Shadows.

"Lust and greed and fear," old Marshal Alard of Copper Hall had said at winter feast. "Mark my words. Blood has been spilled in the wrong places, but we don't know where, not yet. Keep your eyes open. Don't turn your backs."

Not that reeves ever turned their backs, or kept their eyes closed. The Hundred was a broad land made prosperous by towns and villages and markets, by cultivated fields, wide pasturelands, rich forests, and treasure buried in the earth. Yet there were as many hidey-holes—and forgotten caves and old ruins and secret glades and ravines where dangerous creatures might lurk—as there were laughing children.

Like all reeves, she'd ridden a circuit of the land her first year out of Copper Hall. She knew how wide the land was. She knew how the ocean bounded the Hundred to the north and east and how the Spires and Heaven's Ridge with its Barrens protected the good folk of her land from their enemies to the south and west.

"Our worst enemy has always been the one within, Flirt," she said to her eagle, but the rushing wind against her face caught her words and flung them into nothing. Not that Flirt could understand her words, only shading and emotion. Smart as pigs, the great eagles were, but no smarter than that no matter what the old legends said.

That was the first thing you learned when you were marked out for a reeve: limits. A reeve could do so much and no more, just like her eagle. In the old days, so the story went, the reeves had had more power and been treated with more respect, but not any longer. Shadows had been creeping over the Hundred for a long time but it was only now they seemed to be gathering strength.

She shook away these dusty and useless thoughts. Today had been good so far: Just after dawn in the hamlet of Disa Falls she'd successfully mediated a dispute over the stones marking the boundary between two fields. She'd allowed the local arkhon to offer a haunch of sheep as a snack for Flirt, enough to keep her going until a real hunt. So it went, a typical start to a reeve's day.

Flirt banked and shifted position as the air currents altered because of a notch in the higher hills up to the east. Below, the woodland frayed into the patchwork of saplings and underbrush stretching between broad swaths of mature beech that betrayed human hands at work. Soon enough she saw a pretty green valley nestled between the hills. It was mostly trees and meadows, but there was a village with a small boat dock built out into the river and a few houses on the far bank beside new fields cut into the forest. The summit road dipped down from the east to run by the village, which had probably grown up as a wayfaring stop for travelers and merchants.

As she flew over, surveying the lay of the land, she was surprised to see a man actually in the act of running a red eagle banner up the message pole set in the village square. She circled Flirt around and with a swell of wings and a thump they landed on the stony beach. She hitched her legs out of the harness and leaped down, absorbing the landing by bending her knees. A dozen villagers and more children had gathered at a prudent distance outside the low stockade that kept woodland predators and pesky deer out of their gardens and homes. She slipped her staff out of the harness and sauntered over. The staff in her hand, the short sword rattling along her right thigh, and the quiver slung over her back weren't nearly as daunting as Flirt. The eagle's amber stare, her massive claws, and her sheer, shocking size—bigger than a surly cart horse and twice as mean—were enough to concern anyone. The eagle fluffed up her feathers, whuffed, and settled down to wait.

"How can I help you folks?" Marit asked.

They weren't scared of her at any rate. They stared right at her boldly enough, maybe surprised to see a woman.

"Go get the reeve some ale, and bread and cheese," said the man who still stood with the rope in one hand. The banner snapped halfway up the pole.

In answer, a girl about ten years of age trotted, backward, toward an inn whose low barracks-like building took up one entire side of the village square. The girl just could not rip her gaze away from the eagle. Naturally, after a few steps, she stumbled and fell flat on her rump.

An older girl yelled, "Turn round, you ninny! That beast ain't going nowhere yet."

Others laughed as the girl got up and dusted off her bright red tunic and pantaloons, then bolted through the open door of the inn. The sign creaking over the porch bore fresh paint and the cheerful visages of a quintet of happy, drinking fellows: three men and two women. One of the painted men had an outlander's pale hair caught back in a trident braid, but none of the folk who'd come up to greet her had the look of foreigners. These were good, handsome Hundred folk, dark skin, black hair, brown eyes.

"I'm called Reeve Marit. What's the trouble?" She sorted through the map she carried in her mind. "This is Merrivale."

"Indeed it is, Reeve Marit." The man had a bitter twist to his mouth. Everyone else was looking at him with frowns and whispers. "I'm called Faron. I own the Merrymakers, there." He gestured toward the inn. "It's a lad what works for me has caused the trouble." He coughed. Several folk scuffed their feet on the dirt, looking away. She noted the way their eyes drifted and their fingers twitched. "Stole two bolts of silk I'd had brought in. It come all the way from the Sirniakan Empire."

Marit whistled.

"Indeed. Bought it for my new bride and the wedding. I'm getting married again—first wife died three year back," he added hastily. "I miss her, but life goes on."

"You mourned her longer than was rightful," said an elderly woman suddenly. She had a wen on her chin and a killing gaze. "That's what caused the trouble."

The innkeeper flushed. He fussed with the white ribbon tying off the end of his long braid. Everyone turned to look at Marit.

"How old is the thief?"

Faron blew air out between set lips as he considered. "Born in the Year of the Wolf, he was. Suspicious and hasty. Very selfish, if you ask me."

"You would say so, given the circumstances," muttered the sarcastic old lady, rolling her eyes in a way most often associated with rash and reckless youth.

"So he's celebrated his fifteenth year. Has he a weapon?"

"Of course not! Nothing but his walking stick and a bundle of bread and cheese out of the larder. That's all else we found missing."

"How long ago?"

"Just this morning. We looked around in his usual haunts—"

"He's vanished before?"

"Just hiding out, mischief, breaking things. Stealing odds and ends. It's only noontide that we found the silk missing. That's serious. That's theft."

"What would he be wanting with bolts of silk?"

"He's been threatening to run away to make his fortune in Toskala."

"Over the pass and through Iliyat and past the Wild?"

"Maybe so," admitted Faron.

The old woman snorted. "More like he's running up to that temple dedicated to the Merciless One, up at summit. He can buy himself more than a few snogs with that fancy silk."

"Vatta!" Faron's cheeks flushed purple as anger flooded his expression.

"My apologies," Vatta muttered, rubbing at her wen, which was dry and crusty. She'd known prosperity in her day, or a generous husband. Her well-worn yellow silk tunic, slit on the sides from knees to hips, and the contrasting twilight blue pantaloons beneath were also of expensive Sirniakan weave. "But he threatened to do that more than once, too. A boy his age thinks of the Devourer day and night."

Marit smiled slightly, but she had as little trust for devotees of the Merciless One, the All-Consuming Devourer, mistress of war, death, and desire, as she had for out-landers, although the Merciless One's followers were her own countryfolk. Although she'd caroused in the Merciless One's grip often enough, and would do so again. Hopefully tonight.

"Anything else I need to know?" she asked instead.

Faron shrugged.

He was hiding something, certainly, but she had a fair idea of just what he wasn't willing to tell her. Shame made some men reticent. "I'll hunt for him, and come back and report come nightfall."

"My thanks." Faron wiped his brow. "Here's ale, if you'll take a drink."

"With thanks."

She drank standing and handed the cup back to the waiting girl. No one moved away, although at least they had manners enough not to stare as she ate. The bread was hearty and the cheese nicely ripe with the tang of dill. With such provender to warm her stomach she walked back to Flirt, fastened herself into the harness, and lifted her bone whistle to her lips. A single sharp skree was the command to fly.

Up.

The exhilaration never left. Never. Every time was like the first time, when a short, stocky, innocent girl from Farsar sent to hire herself as a laborer in the city—because her family hadn't the wherewithal to marry her or apprentice her out—found herself chosen and set in the harness of the raptor who had done the choosing. Such was the custom out of time immemorial, the way of the reeves. It was not the marshals who picked which of the young hopefuls and guardsmen would be reeves; it was the eagles themselves. In ancient days, the Four Mothers had bound magic into the great eagles, and the Lady of Beasts had harnessed them to their task, and Marit laughed every day, feeling that magic coursing around her, part of her now as she was part of it.

They rose above the tops of the trees. Although Flirt wanted to go back over the river, Marit guided her a short distance east of the river along the lower ridge-line where the road ran, in places carved into the rock itself. The road was older than the Hundred, so it was written in the annals kept by the hierophants who toiled in the service of Sapanasu, the Keeper of Days, the Lantern of the Gods. Who could have built it, back before people came to live here?

So many mysteries. Thank the gods she wasn't the one who had to puzzle them out.

She judged time and speed to a nicety—she'd had ten years of experience, after all—and spotted the youth long before he noticed her coming. He was toiling up the road near the summit along a broad escarpment devoid of trees. Fortune favored her. With him so exposed and no trees to hide behind, the catch would be swift. Flirt's chest muscles rippled as the eagle shifted altitude, narrowing down for the kill. Marit felt the raptor's excitement; it burned in her blood as well.

The two bolts of dazzling green silk were clapped under his right arm as he swung along, left arm pumping with the steady pulse of a highland child accustomed to long hikes up grim inclines. A breath of wind, a whisper from the Lady of Beasts in his ear, good hearing—some hint alerted him. He cast a glance behind, down the road. Flirt huffed and swooped. Too late he looked up. He shrieked and ran, but there was nowhere for him to run because he was stuck out on the road on the rocky flanks of the hills. Flirt loved this; so did Marit. The plunge with the wind rushing, the brief breathless throat-catching sense of abandon as they plummeted.

Flirt caught him in her talons and with her incredible strength cut upward just before they slammed into the dirt. He screamed in terror and piss flooded his legs; Marit smelled it.

"Drop that silk and I'll drop you!" she shouted, laughing.

Flirt yelped her shrill call in answer: Triumphant!

It was harder to turn with the added weight of the boy, who looked like he weighed at least as much as Marit, so they took a long slow sweep south and southwest and northwest and north until they came round eastward and flew back along the river the way they had come. Flirt struggled a bit because of the extra burden, but the eagles weren't natural creatures, and in any case the raptor had an eagle's pride. So it wasn't much past midafternoon when they came within sight of Merrivale, but it seemed like a long trip, what with Flirt tiring and the youth babbling and moaning and cursing and begging and crying the entire time, although he was smart enough not to struggle. Most folk were.

At the sight of them, the inhabitants of Merrivale came running. Just before landing, Flirt let the boy go. He tumbled, shrieking again, grunting and howling, rolling along the rocks but no more than bruised and banged up, as Flirt rose to get past him and then dropped to the earth.

"Oof," said Marit, jarred up through her chest. "That was a thump, girl!"

She loosened her harness and swung out quickly. Faron, at the front of the village swarm, staggered to a stop a stone's toss from her and Flirt. The boy crawled forward, cloth clutched to his chest.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he babbled. He stank, poor lad, and there was snot all over his face. He cringed like a dog. "I'm sorry, Pap. I'll never do it again. It's just I didn't want you to marry her, but I know I'm being selfish. It's not like you didn't mourn Mam what was fitting. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'll never cause you trouble again. Please let me come home."

Marit smiled.

Faron wept as he lifted the boy and embraced him. The girl in red grabbed the precious silk bolts and ran them into the safety of the inn.

Once the first commotion subsided they tried to press gifts on her. She refused everything but food and drink to carry with her for her evening's meal. That was the rule. No gifts meant no bribes, and once she made it clear she'd not budge, they respected her wishes.

"You'll not spend the night?" asked Faron. "You can have my best bed. A reeve can take lodging."

"Lodging and food," agreed Marit. "That's allowed. But I can't stay. I've a fellow reeve to meet at sunset, up near the summit."

"Beware those Devouring youths," said an unrepentant Vatta. The old woman had the wicked grin of a soul that hasn't yet done making mischief. "I should know. I was one of Her hierodules once, before I got married."

Marit laughed. The boy sniveled, chastened and repentant, and Faron wrung her hand gratefully. Maybe there were a few happy endings still to be had.

JOSS WAS WAITING for her at Candle Rock, just as they'd agreed five nights past. The rock was too stony to harbor trees; a few hardy tea willows grew out of deep cracks where water melt pooled, and spiny starflowers straggled along the steep northern slope. Candle Rock provided no cover except the shelter of the craggy overhang where firewood was stowed. No man or woman could reach it without the aid of flying beast, so reeves patrolling over the Liya Pass commonly met here to exchange news and gossip and to haul up wood for the signal fire kept ready in case of emergency.

She saw Joss standing beside the smaller fire pit, which was ringed with white stones like drippings of wax. The fire burned merrily and he already had meat roasting on a spit. The young reeve had his back to the setting sun and was looking east up at the ridge of hill whose familiar profile they called Ammadit's Tit, which despite the name was held by the hierarchs to be sacred to the Lady of Beasts.

Showing off, Flirt made a smooth landing on the height. Joss raised a hand in greeting as Marit slipped out of her harness and walked down to the fire.

"Mmm," she said, kissing him. "Eat first, or after?"

He grinned, ducking his head in that way that was so fetching; he was still a little shy.

She tousled his black hair. "Shame you have to keep it cut."

They kissed a while longer. He was young and tall and slender and a good fit, the best fit she'd ever found in her ten years as a reeve. He wasn't boastful or cocky. Some reeves, puffed up with the gloat of having been chosen by an eagle and granted the authority to patrol, thought that also meant they could lord it over the populace. He wasn't a stiff-chinned and tight-rumped bore, either, stuck on trivial niceties of the law. It was true he had a sharp eye and a sharp tongue and a streak of unexpected recklessness, but he was a competent reeve all the same, with a good instinct for people. Like the one he had now, knowing what she wanted.

Grease sizzled as it fell into the flames. The sun's rim touched the western hills.

"Best see to Flirt," he said, pulling back. "I sent Scar out to hunt and there's no telling when he'll get back. You know Flirt's temper."

She laughed softly. "Yes, she'll not like him moving in where she's roosting. I'll make sure she's settled."

Flirt was cleaning herself. With a resignation born of exhaustion, she accepted her demotion to the hollow where Candle Rock dipped to the southwest to make a natural bowl with some protection from the wind. Marit chained her to one of the rings hammered into the rock, hooded and jessed her. Then she skinned her out of her harness, greased the spot it chafed, and, with an old straw broom she found stuck in a crevice, swept droppings out of the bowl.

"You'll eat tomorrow, girl," she said, but Flirt had already settled into her resting stupor, head dipped under one wing. It was getting dark. Wind died as the sun set.

She hoisted the harness, her pack, her hood, and her rolled-up cloak over her shoulders and trudged up a path cut into the rock, back to the fire. Off to her left the rock face plunged down to where the road cut up toward the summit, seen as a darkening saddle off to the south. Joss was sitting on the white stones, carving up meat onto a wooden platter. She admired the cut of his shoulders and the curve of his neck. The touch of the Devourer teased her, right down to her core. He looked up and grinned again, eyes crinkling tight. She tossed down harness and weapons, pulled the platter out of his hands, set it down, and tumbled him.

"Cloaks," he muttered when he could get in a word.

"Oh. Yes."

He'd already spread out his traveling cloak and tossed his blanket down on top of it. It was a warm night without clouds and they really only needed a little padding to protect flesh from stone.

"Mmm," she said later, when they lay tangled together. He was stroking her breasts and belly absently as he stared up at the brilliant spray of stars. She dragged the platter of meat close up and fed him bits and pieces.

"Do you ever think—?" he started.

"Not when I see you."

He chuckled, but he wasn't as much in thrall to the Devourer as she was. Sated, he had a tendency to spin out dreams and idle thoughts, which she never minded because she liked the feel of him lying beside her. He had a good smell, clean sweat but also the bracing perfume of juniper from the soaps his mother sent once a year to Copper Hall. "Just thinking about what I did today. There was a knife fight at a woodsmen's camp east of summit ridge, out into wild country. Both men stabbed, one like to die."

"Sorry," she said, wincing. "Murders are the worst."

"I wish it were so," he said, wisely for one so young.

"What do you mean?" She speared a chunk of meat with his knife, spun it consideringly, then ate. The meat was almost bitter; a coney, maybe, something stringy and rodent-like. "I've got bread and cheese for the morning. Better than this. Got you no provisions for your pains today?"

"Not a swallow. They were happy to be rid of me. I was wondering if you'd come back with me. A few of them had the debt scar—" He touched the ridge of his brow just to the left of his left eye, where folk who sold their labor into debt servitude were tattooed with a curving line."—and hair grown out raggedly to cover it."

"You think some were runaway slaves."

"Maybe so. It's likely. And then what manner of law-abiding persons would take such men in, I wonder? They made me nervous, like they had knives hidden behind their backs." He shuddered under her hands.

"I'll come. No use courting trouble. They'll not kick with two eagles staring them down."

Abruptly he sat up, tilting his head back. "Ah. There he is."

A shadow covered them briefly. The big eagle had a deer in his claws. He released it, and the corpse fell hard to the ground at the eastern edge of the rock, landing with a meaty thunk. Scar landed with a soft scrape and after a silence tore into his prey. Bones cracked. From across the height Flirt screamed a challenge, but Scar kept at his meat, ignoring her. Flirt yelped twice more, irritated, but she wouldn't be particularly hungry yet. She'd settle and sleep. Marit yawned.

Joss wasn't done worrying over the problem. "I have to go back in two days to see if the man died, and then what's to do? I'm to conduct a hearing? They've no captain, and the arkhon at the nearest village—Sandy Falls—told me he'll have nothing to do with the matter. Maybe the lord of Iliyat will agree to sit in judgment."

"That's a long way for Lord Radas's arm to reach. He's young in his position, too. His uncle died just two years ago, and he's still testing his wings. I don't expect this will fall under his authority. We should be able to handle it. Honestly, sweetheart, no matter how ugly a murder is, it won't be the first time two drunk men settled their argument with a knife."

"I know," he said a little more desperately than the situation seemed to call for, "but reeves aren't meant to judge. It's the place of the Guardians to hold assizes to settle such grievances and disputes, those that can't be resolved by local councils."

"True enough," she agreed. "I had to mediate in a boundary dispute this morning. I've shifted a hundred stone markers in the last ten years, and I don't like it any better now than I did the first time. Half of them don't like that I'm a woman, but they'll say nothing with Flirt at my back. Still. No Guardian's been seen for—oh—since my grandfather was a boy. Maybe longer."

"The Guardians don't exist. They're just a story."

She gave him a light shove, because his words disturbed her. "Great Lady! That's nineteen years' bad luck for saying such a thing! Anyway, my grandfather remembered the assizes from back when they were held properly. He saw a Guardian once, who came to preside over the court. Do you think he was lying to me?"

"He was a boy then, you said so yourself. He listened to, and danced, the tales, as we all do. Stories blend with fragmented memories to make new memories. He came to believe as truth what never really happened. No shame in that."

"Joss! Sheh! For shame! The hierophants preserve in the Lantern's libraries the old scrolls that record the judgments made in those days. Judgments made by Guardians. How do you answer that evidence?"

"What is a name? I could call myself a 'Guardian' and my attendance at an assizes court would show in the records that a 'Guardian' oversaw that day's proceedings."

She squeezed him until he grunted, air forced out of his lungs. "Say so if you must! But my grandfather had the best memory of anyone I have ever known. He could remember the time when he was a lad when the first Silver merchant came through the village, with two roan cart horses and a hitch in his stride as if he'd broken a hip and it had healed wrong. He could remember the names of all his clan cousins, even the ones who had died when he was a lad, and the folk they married and which temple their children were apprenticed to. If we see no Guardians now, that doesn't mean there were never any."

He sighed as sharply as if he'd gotten a fist in the belly. Twisting, he looked eastward, although it was by now too dark to see anything but stars and the dark shadow of the towering spire that gave Candle Rock its name. "Ammadit's Tit is a Guardian's altar, it's said. What's to stop us flying up there and looking around?"

"Joss!" Startled and shocked, she sat up. She went cold, all goose-bumped, although the wind hadn't gotten any cooler. "It's forbidden!"

"No Guardian's been seen for seventy winters or more, you said it yourself. What if you're right, and there were Guardians once? Shouldn't we try to find out what happened to them? Maybe we could find clues at their altars. Maybe someone needs to find out why they're gone, and if we can do anything to bring them back. You didn't see the look of those woodsmen. They scared me, Marit. Even with Scar glaring at them, I knew they'd kill me if I took a step into any corner where they didn't want my nose poking. They hadn't even a headman among them, no arkhon, no manner of priest. No Lady's cauldron. No Lantern. No dagger or key or green-staff or anvil. Not even an offering bowl for the Formless One."

The crawling jitters prickled up and down her back, a sure sign of danger. "Maybe this is what Marshal Alard was warning us about. You'd best not go back there. Fly to Copper Hall and give a report. If there's trouble brewing . . . men like that . . . men who would run away from their legal obligation . . . they could do anything if there's nothing to check them."

"Anything," he muttered at last. He began to speak again, but choked on the words. He was quiet for a long time, arm around her, head still thrown back as he gazed up at the span of stars and the Herald's Road whose misty path cut across the heavens. "Is this what Marshal Alard meant by a shadow?" he whispered. "It seemed to me there was a shadow in their hearts. Like an illness."

"Hush," she said, because he was shivering even though it wasn't cold. "Hush, sweetheart."

MARIT WOKE AT dawn as the sun's pale glow nosed up to paint rose along Ammadit's Tit. Joss still slept, hips and legs covered by her cloak. A blanket was rolled up under his neck, cradling his head. Sleeping, he looked younger than ever, barely more than a child, although he was twenty. A man might hope to celebrate five feasts in his life; Joss was barely six winters past his Youth's Crown, while in another year she would have to lay aside her Lover's Wreath for the sober if invigorating responsibilities represented by the Chatelaine's Belt. Your thoughts changed as you got older. Your hopes and dreams shifted, transmuted, altered into new shapes.

He cracked open an eye. The early-morning sunlight crept up to spill light over his smooth chest. She saw him examining her warily.

"What are you thinking?" he asked.

"If I'm going to have a baby, I have to have it soon. Would you—" She hadn't known how tightly the wish had knotted up inside her; it unraveled in a rush. "Would you father it, Joss? No need to handfast, if you've no mind to. You're young yet."

"Do you mean to give up patrol?" he asked unexpectedly.

The pang struck hard. "Why do you say so?"

"It's unfair," he mused.

"Which part of life?" she said with a grin, but a sour taste burned in her throat.

He stroked her arm thoughtfully. "I could father ten children and no one would speak one word about it, or think it made me unfit to patrol. But I've seen how reeves who are women are told in so many ways that they'd best be a reeve only and not think of ever bearing children. It's true that when a baby is nursing, the mother must stick close if she wants to keep her milk running. But after the child is weaned, he's cared for by his older cousins anyway. That's how it was in my village. No one would have dared to tell any of my aunties what they could or could not do with their businesses or their labor, and then pretend it was for their own good."

"You say the most unexpected things!"

He looked at her, silent, for the longest time, and fear curdled in her stomach as his dark eyes narrowed and with a flick he tossed the blanket aside and gathered up his clothes. "I'm going up to the altar."

"Joss!"

His expression was set, almost ugly. He pulled on his trousers while she sat there, still naked, and stared at him. "Who made all those rules? We don't even know, or why, or when. We just follow them without thinking. We see a fence around our village but we never go out to make sure it's still in good repair. Maybe that's why there are shadows. Maybe that's why the woodsmen live in that camp like beasts. They don't see the point of mouthing the same words their fathers did, so they've cast them aside. And if the fence around your pasture looks sturdy from a distance but is falling down, that's when wolves come in and kill the lambs. I've got to find out."

"Joss!"

The sun illuminated the curve of his handsome chest, the taut abdomen, his muscular shoulders made strong by two years controlling an eagle, the handsome, angular tattoos—covering his right arm and ringing both wrists—that marked him as a child of the Fire Mother. His chin had a rebellious tilt. He threw his tunic over his head. As he wrestled it down, she shook herself and leaped up, groping for her clothes. She always tossed everything all this way and that in her haste to get undressed but at some point during the night, while she'd slept, he'd recovered it and folded it neatly and laid it on her pack, off the ground. She'd not even woken. He might have lain there for many watches brooding over this madness and she never knowing.

"You're crazy," she said. "It's forbidden."

"You don't have to come with me. I know the risk."

"Do you?"

"Are you going to report me to Marshal Alard?"

"He'll flog you and throw you out of the reeves, no matter what Scar wants."

"Go, if you have to. Report if you must. I won't blame you. But I'm going up there."

She paused, shading her eyes as she squinted toward Ammadit's Tit. The black knob thrusting up at the height of the rounded ridge gave away nothing, although—just there—she thought a flash of light or metal winked as the sun rose just off to the southeast behind it. "The Guardians guard their secrets. Marshal Alard won't have to punish you. They will."

"The Guardians are gone. And if they're not gone, then maybe it's time someone kicks them in the butt." His voice was shaking but his hands were steady as he gathered up his harness. "I didn't tell you what else, Marit. I couldn't say it when it was dark out, I just couldn't. They had a Devouring girl at that woodsmen's camp. They tried to keep her hidden, but I saw her." Catching her eye, he held it. His gaze was bleak. "She was chained."

2

That was what decided it, really. The thought of any man chaining one of the Merciless One's hierodules made her stomach churn, but her heart's courage stiffened with anger. It was blasphemy to chain one who gave freely.

She was trembling as she harnessed Flirt, and the eagle caught her mood and pulled this way and that, fussing and difficult, scratching at the rock with her talons and slashing at her once, although not determinedly enough to connect. Marit thrust the staff up to the eagle's throat and held it there, pulling the hood back over Flirt's eyes. Her heart pounded as she listened for Scar's cry, for Joss departing impatiently, but she held the discipline for the correct thirty-seven count before easing the hold. Flirt gave her no more trouble. They walked to the rim of the bowl, she swung into the harness, and the raptor launched out into the air, plunging, then catching a draft to rise.

Scar and Joss were circling, waiting for them. Before departing, he had doused and raked the fire and split wood for kindling to serve the next reeve who camped out on Candle Rock. Now, seeing her catch the airstream, he rose higher as Scar caught an updraft. She and Flirt followed, up and up, gliding south before turning to come up along the high ridgeline. The mountainous mound of Ammadit's Tit was covered with pine and spruce but the actual black knob—the nipple itself—was as bare as the day the Earth Mother molded stone into mountains. The rock gleamed in the morning light, almost glinting. As she circled in more closely, she saw that it was pitted with crystalline structures—sacred to the Lady of Beasts—shot through the stone. She shivered, although the wind was hot and strong. That knot at the hollow of her ribs burned.

At first glance the knob looked too smooth for any creature as large as they were to find a landing spot. Relief flared, briefly, brutally; then Joss hallooed just out of her sight, and she and Flirt rounded through eddying currents to see him banking in toward a cleft situated below the summit.

"Great Lady, protect us," she whispered. "Don't be angry."

She followed him in.

The cleft was about as wide as the feasting hall in Copper Hall was long: forty strides. It was surrounded by a rim cut into the rock, then dropped an arm's span to a flat floor beneath, open to the air but with a sharply angled slope of rock offering a lean-to of shelter to the north. It was difficult to maneuver Flirt in, especially with Scar already claiming territory, but the raptor landed with a cry of protest, opened her wings to give Scar a look at just how big she was, then settled.

Whoof.

Marit sat in her harness as a chill whisper of air brushed her face, like fingers searching, like a sculptor's probing hands. To her left, the sun shone full on Joss. The floor of the cleft was level but scarred by the glittering path of a labyrinth scored into the rock. The pattern took up half the open space; Flirt's open wingspan brushed the path's outermost edge, but both eagles shied away from actually crossing onto the crystalline markings. The space was otherwise empty, just the ledge and the eddy of air swirling around the knob. The northern face ended in that angled wall that shadowed the deepest part of the cleft.

Joss coughed, then slipped down from his harness. He landed so softly she couldn't hear the slap of his feet. He paced the rim, and back again, as she looked about nervously, but she heard nothing but the bluster of the wind. She saw nothing at all, no offerings, no altar post, no Guardian's silk banner fluttering in the constant blow. He stopped at the curving edge of the labyrinth closest to the rim wall.

The outer shape of the path was an oval. Within those boundaries, the shining pavement twisted and turned and doubled back until it was impossible to know how to reach the center, where the ground dipped into a shallow bowl big enough to hold a man and horse together.

"This is the entrance," he said.

"Joss!"

He set his right foot on the glittering pavement, then his left.

Nothing happened.

She let out all her breath.

He turned and spoke to her. She saw his mouth working, but the wind—or the magic of the Guardians—tore his words away.

"Joss!" she cried, but he turned away and with measured paces worked his way in on the tortuous branched path. All her worst fears choked her because with each step he seemed to recede, although he wasn't really getting any farther away from her: he was only fading. It was as if a veil thickened around him, as if mist seeped up from marshland to conceal the landscape. There was nothing quite seen, nothing tangible, but it obscured him nonetheless. Marit had never unduly feared the dangers of her task as a reeve, although she had walked into a hundred different knife's-edge situations with only her eagle, her weapons, and most of all her good instincts to guide her. But fear paralyzed her now.

We've broken the boundaries. We'll be punished.

The boundaries were all that kept the Hundred safe; every child heard the stories; every festival danced the limits; every temple to one of the seven gods was an icon in miniature, each in its own way, of the ancient laws. The master sergeants and the marshal at the reeve halls made the point ten times a day if they said it once.

He faded more as he walked deeper into the labyrinth, never coming closer or back toward her even when the path turned that way. The eagles neither moved or called; the silence daunted them. The ghost of his form, scarcely more than a shadow, reached the center.

He vanished. Just like that: a blink, a shimmer of light—and he was gone.

A gasp escaped her. She couldn't form words, couldn't cry out, couldn't do anything except stare. Her eyes were wet, her heart turned to dust. A thousand years passed while she gaped, too stunned to act.

"Marit! Marit! Come quick! Follow the path! Bring rope."

Where in the hells was that coming from? She slipped out of her harness and leaped down, skirted the gleaming path, and ducked into the shadowed throat of the cleft, but she could not find him. His voice carried to her on the wind.

She ran back to Flirt and awkwardly got the eagle up onto the lip as on a perch. Her acrobatic skills had saved her from bad falls more than once. Balancing on the rim with the world plunging away far down to spruce billowing below, she swung into her harness. Flirt opened her wings and fell into the sky. Marit shrieked with glee, forgetting all fears and creeping terrors as the wind pummeled her and the eagle dove and then, with that instinct for risk that had gotten the raptor her name, pulled up just in time, just before they would have slammed into the trees. Flirt caught a draft and they rose. Marit's pulse hammered as she squinted into the sun, up along the knob of rock, seeking, searching—

There he was! He was standing, impossibly, at the top of the rock, poised as on the tip of a giant spear. And indeed, somehow, unseen before but perfectly visible now, a metal post thrust up from the center of the knob with torn and fraying and sun-bleached banners in many colors snapping from the post. To this he held tightly with one hand as he waved frantically at her to get her attention.

"Thank you, Lady," she breathed, and added a hasty prayer to the Herald, the Opener of Ways, whom Joss had served for a year as a lowly message rider before the day he'd ridden into a reeves' gathering to deliver a summons from the arkhon of Haya, and Scar had changed the course of his life.

She circled, but there was no way to land, so she went back down to the cleft. Scar waited with his head beneath his wing, oddly quiescent. She shed her harness as quickly as she ever had, and grabbed her coil of rope. Knowing better than to stop and think, she jogged to the entrance of the labyrinth and put her right foot on the path, then her left. The pavement seemed pure crystal, as thin as finely thrown ceramic, but so thick, perhaps, that it cut down through the stone to the center of the earth. She took another step, and a fourth, and when she glanced up the world seemed to be slowly spinning around her, picking up speed as she walked in. With each revolution a new landscape flashed into view: surging ocean; a fallen stone tower above a tumble of rocks battered by foaming waves; dense tangled oak forest; a vast flat gleam of water—not the sea—and beyond it the pale endless dunes that she recognized as the western verge of the Barrens; an ice-covered peak shining under a bottomless hard blue sky; a homely village of six cottages set beside a lazily flowing river half overgrown with reeds. The visions made her dizzy. She looked down instead, kept her gaze fixed on the path whose windings confused her, except wherever she had to choose between one turn and another it seemed she could smell the memory of juniper, Joss's scent, and she therefore followed her nose.

A man's voice whispered behind her, questioning, urgent.

". . . when night falls . . . to Indiyabu but only when the Embers moon sets . . . she betrayed them . . . beware the third blow . . . trust me . . ."

Don't turn your back, Marshal Alard would say, but she was walking on forbidden ground. She dared not look back for fear of what she would see. Indiyabu was the legendary birthplace of the Guardians, but no reeve knew where to find it, and none she knew of had ever dared seek for it.

The path took much longer to walk than it should have; she was sweating freely by the time she stumbled into the center bowl. A man waited for her. His long dark beautiful hair was unbraided, twisting around him in an unseen wind. He looked angry, but he was as handsome a man as she had ever seen, demon-blue outlander eyes in a brown face, taller than most reeves and with graceful long-fingered hands talking in signs, the secret language of the Guardians.

She walked right through him before she realized he wasn't really there; he was only a vision, like the landscapes. The pavement dipped. She slipped into the central hollow. Where her foot slapped into the ground, pain stabbed up through her heels. Light flared, like a lantern's door opened wide, and she was spun halfway around by an unknown force and staggered.

"Marit!"

Joss grabbed her before she plunged off the side of the knob to her death. They stood at the very height, the sky a vast gulf and the sun glaring. Wind howled, trying to tug her off. She grabbed on to the metal post. Thank the gods it was well set into the rock. It didn't shift at all with her added weight. The silk of frayed banners battered her; she was drowned in their colors: blood-red, black of night, heaven-blue, mist-silver, fiery-gold-sun, death-white, earth-brown, seedling-green, and the rich violet of the twilight sky just before night envelops the last light of day.

"Look!" Joss shouted to be heard above the wind. "Look there!"

He pointed to a crevice just out of arm's reach along the curve of the rock but because of the wind and their precarious perch too far to get to safely. Something fluttered there, a banner torn off the pole, perhaps. It was hard to identify because it was so white and because there were pale objects jumbled beneath, caught within the crevice.

She was a reeve. She knew what it was with a gut knowledge that slammed down, no question—only a hundred questions. A thousand.

Joss hooked his elbow around the metal post and deftly tied and slipknotted the rope around the post. He'd grown up by the sea; he knew twenty kinds of knots.

"Let's get out of here!" he shouted. He was shaking, gray, frightened.

Bones.

The bones of a Guardian were caught in that crevice. That was the Guardian's death-white cloak caught in the rocks, the cloth sliding and shivering with the purl of the wind as though a snake struggled in its folds. Those were the dead one's long leg bones rattling as the wind shifted them. That was his pelvis, if it had been a man, shattered on one side. Most reeves learned to identify human bones: in the course of seeking out lost shepherds whose remains were discovered beneath spring snowmelt; or runaway wives dead of starvation in forest loam; or miners tumbled under a fall of rocks who couldn't be recovered until the dry season made digging safe. She had exhumed the occasional murder victim buried under the pig trough or beyond the boundaries of a village's orderly fields. That pelvis told her something, even seen from a man's length away. That pelvis had been splintered in a tremendous fall, or by a massive blow.

Guardians couldn't die.

"Give me the rope," she shouted. "I'm going to recover the remains. We have to find out what happened, if we can!"

"Marit!" He almost lost his nerve. He clutched his stomach as though he would retch. He squeezed his eyes shut but opened them as quickly, and steadied himself, ready to aid her.

She tied the rope around her waist, fixed it, and turned round to back down over the curve of the rock, to reach the crevice. As Joss paid out the rope, she walked with her feet against the rock and her body straight out over the world below, nothing but air between her back and the trees. The wind sang through her. She was grinning, ready to laugh for the joy of it and almost down to the crevice when, above her, Joss screamed an inarticulate warning cry.

A fog shrouded her, boiling up from underneath to choke her. A roaring like a gale wind thrummed through her. Her bones throbbed, and it seemed her insides would be rattled and twisted until they became her outsides, all as white light smothered her.

I can't hear. I can't see.

I can't breathe.

She fought, and found herself ripping at cloth that had enveloped her, that seemed likely to swallow her.

An axe smashes into her hip, shattering it; the pain engulfs her like white light, like death.

"Go to Indiyabu! Beware the traitor . . . mist . . . I can't reach her."

Then she was free, feet still fixed to the rock wall. The wind tore the shining white cloak off her body, and it flew out into the sky rippling like light, spread as wide as a vast wing. The bones clattered down the curving slope of the knob until they reached the sheer cliff, and then they fell and fell, tumbling, and vanished into the forest. The cloak spun higher into the sky and was lost to sight in the sun's glare.

"Shit!" cried Joss.

He hauled her back up. She fell on her stomach over the rampart and lay there panting, trying to catch her breath. The wind screamed around them, tearing at their clothes, at the banners, at their hoods. She was grateful for the rule that forced all reeves to wear their hair short, since there was no braid to catch at her throat, and there were no strands of loose hair to blind her.

"What do we do now?" he asked.

"We've got to get down!" she yelled.

She turned, dead calm now, too stunned to be otherwise, and surveyed the rock face. She'd gone that way the first time. In her head, she mapped a new route to take them to the ledge below.

"Follow after I've tugged twice."

She eased out the rope between her hands, let herself lean backward into the air, and walked backward out over the curve of the rock. Down. She was compact and strong and always had been, her chest and arms made more so by ten years of weapons training, by ten years, especially, of controlling Flirt. Strangely, the wind eased once she was on the cliff, and she made it down to the cleft swiftly. There Flirt and Scar waited, heads down, dozing.

How strange that they should doze when the peculiar nature of their surroundings ought to have made them nervous.

By the time she slipped down hand over hand and dropped the last length, her right hand was bleeding and the left was bright red, rubbed raw from friction. Panting, she tugged twice on the rope. Blew on her hands. Pain stung. It would hurt to handle the harness with her hands like this. She pulled gloves out of one of the pockets sewn into the hem of her tunic, but hesitated, not quite willing to pull them on. The gloves would shroud her hands as snugly as that cloak had wrapped her. She shuddered.

No time to dwell on it. Must get on. Must act.

The rope danced beside her. A moment later Joss slid down, half out of control, and she caught him as he fell the last body length. They stood there, holding tight. He was crying. She'd known him almost two years, but she'd never seen him cry. She'd seen him at his first winter feast in the hall, and happened to be called in to assist when he'd found that poor mutilated girl who'd had her hands amputated by her husband's angry relatives. She'd cried that day, but Joss hadn't. Now he wept noisily.

"What about the rope?" she said finally. "If we leave it, they'll know we've been here."

He gulped down tears and spoke in a shaky voice. "I have to report, even if it means I'm flogged out. They have to know."

Since he was right, there was no answer.

He sighed heavily, stepped back, and wiped his eyes. He looked ten years older than he had that morning. "Best go," he said.

She nodded. "I haven't forgotten that woodsmen's camp."

"You can't go in there alone!"

"I won't! I won't, Joss. I won't go to the woodsmen's camp at all. But there's a temple dedicated to the Merciless One up at summit of the Liya Pass. I want to stop there, ask their Hieros if they have any hierodules missing. You fly ahead to Copper Hall."

"I think it's best if I go straight to Clan Hall."

She considered, nodded decisively. "That's right. Take it to the commander. He needs to know first. Once I've stopped at the temple, I'll follow you to Toskala without stopping anywhere else."

He was in no mood for kissing, though she was. She would have laid him down and loved him there on the stone floor of the forbidden altar, but he was too tense and too preoccupied, wholly absorbed in considering just what it all meant. It seemed that despite his talk he believed in the existence of the Guardians after all. An earthquake would have tilted those foundations less. He was unable to talk or to do anything except prepare to go.

As for her, she couldn't dwell on the horror of that cloak twisting around her, of that instant when she'd thought she would asphyxiate; of that noise; of that pain; of that voice.

She couldn't think about what it meant: A Guardian had died, although the Guardians were immortal and untouchable. Maybe all the Guardians were dead. Maybe the Hundred was thereby doomed to fall beneath an uprising of such evil as sucked dry men's hearts, lust and greed and fear chief among them.

She grimaced as she finally tugged on her gloves, wincing at the pain, at the fear. Joss ran back over to her, kissed her hard, then returned to Scar without a word and swung into his harness. She smiled softly, ran a gloved hand through the soft stubble of her hair, and crossed to Flirt, who blinked as if surprised to see her.

"Let's go, girl."

No use dwelling on what she couldn't change. Best to concentrate on what she could do. That's what she was best at. That's why she was a good reeve.

JOSS HEADED DUE west and was lost fairly quickly among the hills, but Marit flew Flirt south up the cut of the road to its summit in the Liya Pass, a saddle between two ridgelines. Just east of the road lay a wide pool worn out of the hills by the tireless spill of a waterfall off the height. On the banks of this isolated vale the acolytes of the Merciless One had erected a small temple to house no more than a score of adepts in training. Obviously, with their holy quarters set in such a remote location, these were not hierodules who served the goddess by trafficking with passersby. Most who dedicated their service to the Devourer served as hierodules for less than a year before returning to life beyond the bounds of the temple; the Merciless One was a cruel and exacting taskmaster. Many of those who remained trained as jaryas, pearls beyond price, the finest musicians and entertainers in the Hundred. As for the few, they served Her darker aspect, and it was rumored they trained as assassins.

This was no jarya school, not up here.

They came to earth at a safe distance, right at the edge of the woods. The waterfall splashed in the distance, but the pool had a glassy sheen beyond the spray, still and silent as if depthless. Three buildings rose out of the meadow of grass and flowering lady's heart: a chicken coop; a long, narrow root cellar with a turf roof; and the temple itself, with its outer enclosure, entrance gate, and "lotus petal" wings surrounding an inner courtyard.

She waited in her harness, listening. Crickets chirred. Wind tinkled strings of bells hanging from posts set in the earth all around the outer enclosure. It rustled the silk banners draped over and tied to the entrance gate. She heard no voices and no music. Nothing. Flirt showed no nervousness. The vale seemed deserted.

She slipped out of her harness and ventured to the chicken coop. It was empty except for a half-dozen broken eggs, sucked dry, and a single bale of straw. She moved on to the root cellar, a building half buried in the earth. She pushed on the door, which stuck. Shoving, she opened it. Cautiously, she ducked under the lintel and stepped down into the shadowy interior. The stores had been cleaned out. That was suspicious, although at this time of year it was possible that was only because they had used up last winter's surplus and not yet received their tithes to carry them through the coming cold season. With the door open behind her, she knelt in the damp confines. The dirt floor had been raked clean. There were no distinguishing footprints; there was no evidence of passage at all except for the brick resting-cradles for two dozen missing storage barrels. Four barrels remained, rounded shadows at the far end of the cellar, barely discernible in the dimness.

Maybe thieves had stolen everything and covered their tracks. Maybe the Merciless One had abandoned the temple and all her people had left, tidying up behind themselves.

It was impossible to know.

A shadow covered the open door. Too late she realized the crickets had ceased their noise. She jumped farther into the darkness, drawing her short sword as she spun to face the door.

But they had already defeated her. They'd been waiting, as if they'd known she was coming and laid an ambush. A staff hit her from behind alongside her right ear. A second blow caught her in the breastbone, knocking the air out of her. Her legs went from under her. The earth slapped up, and she blinked and gasped and breathed in dirt, flat on her stomach, head scorched with pain. Dazed. Choking on dust.

Damn damn damn. If the Merciless One had abandoned the temple, then her hierodules and kalos would have removed the bells and banners before departing.

"Hurry!"

"Kill her now!"

"No, Milas wants her alive."

"Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! Bet I know what for!"

A man snickered.

Her sword was trapped under her hips. She began to roll, but knees jabbed into her back and the weight of a second man, maybe a third, held her down as they stripped her of her bow and quiver, her sword, her dagger; her staff had already fallen uselessly. They didn't find the slender knife hidden between the lining and the outer leather of her right boot. They trussed her arms up behind her from wrists to elbows, hoisted her up using the rope until her shoulders screamed and one popped. The world spun dizzily as she came up, kicking.

The third blow exploded against the back of her head.

She plunged into darkness.

CAME TO, MUZZY, as she was jostled from side to side in a wheelbarrow, banging first one wooden slat, then the other side. She was blind, a cloth tied tightly over her face, over both mouth and nose so that she choked with the fear she was smothering in white silk. Death silk.

No. Just a plain bleached-white linen cloth, maybe a bandanna of the kind worn by laborers to keep sweat from pouring into their eyes. The cloth sucked in and out with her breath. She heard the squeak of wheels on pine needles. She heard the soft tread of feet and the wind sighing through trees. No one spoke. She felt no sun, so couldn't guess at time of day or how long she had been unconscious.

She took stock of her condition: throbbing head, chest and ribs aching, and one heel stinging as though she'd been bitten. Her shoulders were bruised, but somehow the one that had popped was no longer dislocated. It just hurt like the hells. What hurt worst was her fury at her own stupidity and carelessness. Why hadn't Flirt warned her? Her assailants must have been close by, and those who closed in from outside would surely have been spotted by Flirt, who was trained to give the alert.

Shadows.

Some magic had veiled sight and instinct. She had to be ready. Most likely, she would have only one chance to escape and she had to prepare herself for the worst: rape, any kind of brutality, mutilation. She had to lock down her emotions. Thus were reeves trained to respond in emergencies.

"Your fears and passions must be set aside, placed in a treasure chest, and locked up tight. If you are ruled by fear or desire, then you will lose. Be an arrow, unencumbered by any but the force that impels it to its target. Do not let the wind blow you off course."

She stayed quiet as the barrow lurched and rolled along the forest path. She sorted out footfalls and decided there were at least ten men accompanying her. Because they stayed silent, they betrayed no knowledge of Flirt or her fate. She banished Flirt's fate from her mind. Until she was free, there was nothing she could do about the eagle.

At last she smelled wood smoke and the smoky richness of roasting venison. At a distance she heard the sound of many voices, the clatter of life, the ringing of an axe, the false hoot of an owl raised as a signal. She felt a change in the texture of the air as they came out of trees into a clearing. Silence fell. No one spoke, but she felt the mass of men staring. Her skin prickled. Certainly this must be the woodsmen's camp.

"Do not fear pain. Fear will kill you." So Marshal Alard taught.

A man coughed. Someone giggled with the barest edge of hysteria. Hand slapped skin, and the giggling ceased.

"Put her there," said a baritone.

The silence was ugly, made more so by the sudden glare of sun on her face so bright she blinked under the cloth. Just as her eyes teared, shadow eased the blinding light. Leaves whispered above her. A dozen thin fingers tickled her chest and face. The wheelbarrow jolted to a stop, and its legs were set down hard. A man cursed right behind her, and she heard him blowing through lips, maybe on blistered hands. He did not speak. The wheelbarrow raised up abruptly and she slid forward, awkwardly, and slithered down to land in a heap.

On a carpet.

Metal rattled softly, then scraped. Footsteps receded. A man hawked and spat, and she flinched, but a delicate finger touched her chin and carefully eased the corner of the cloth up over her mouth and nose. She sucked in air gratefully.

"Hush," whispered a female voice. "He'll hear. He's coming."

"Who are you?"

"No one. Not anymore." It was a young voice, its spirit strangely deadened.

"Let me see your face. Let me see this place."

"It was a trap."

"That's how they captured me?"

"It was a trap. Half of the hierodules had turned their back on the Devourer and given their allegiance to him. They gave the rest of us over, but he killed the others. All but me. All but me." The finger tickled her nose, pushed under the band of cloth, and eased it upward until Marit could—bless the Great Lady—see a bit of her surroundings and the girl beside her.

She was very young; she didn't even wear the earring that marked her Youth's Crown, although she had breasts and curves enough that she was no doubt meant to dance into the Crowning Feast at midwinter with the rest of the youths ready to don their Lover's Wreaths and enter halfway into the adult world. No more than fourteen years, then. The remains of a sleeveless silk shift that once had been gold in color draped her body. Over it she wore an embroidered silk cloak, the kind of elegant accessory jaryas displayed while riding across town to an assignation or performance. It was a spectacular orange, now ripped and grimy; she'd used it to wipe up blood, likely her own. But as shocking as the sight of her was, with her curling black hair unbound and falling in matted tails and strings to her waist, and her arms and legs stained with dirt and blood and worse things, Marit had seen worse; reeves always saw worse.

Yet she'd never seen a girl dressed in the acolyte robes of the Devourer manacled by the ankle. The chain snaked back to the base of a huge tree, where it was fastened around a stake driven into the ground. The trunk was that of a massive death willow, immeasurably ancient. The trunk had grown up around the head of a tumbled statue. Wood encased the stone so that the grainy face peeked out and the crown of the head and the sculpted ripples of its hair were swallowed within the tree. The stone face stared at nothing. Lichen blinded both eyes. Streaks of white—she couldn't tell what they were—mottled the chin. The lips were darkened with the residue of blood or berry juice. An awful stench boiled out of the ground at the base of the trunk, something stinking and rotten.

The willow's green-yellow canopy concealed the sky and shaded both reeve and girl from the sun. Marit lay on a carpet, and when she turned her head she saw the curtain made by the willow's drooping branches, many of which swept the ground. Beyond, out where it was light, figures moved, but although she opened and closed her eyes three times she could get no good look at anything out there, as though magic hazed her sight. Beneath the death willow, they were alone.

"Do you want to be free?" whispered Marit, sensing her chance.

"Please let me go," the girl whimpered. "Please. Please." The words sounded well rehearsed; she'd said them frequently. Her dark eyes, like those of the stone head, had a kind of blindness to them, although she tracked Marit's face and movements well enough.

"Is there another way out of here? What lies beyond the willow, that way?" She indicated direction with a jerk of her chin.

"No one goes that way," murmured the girl. "That's where he goes when he comes visiting."

"Does it lead into the forest?"

The girl stiffened, head thrown back, lips thinning, and she sniffed audibly, taking in the air like a starving man scenting food. "He's coming." She scrambled to the base of the trunk and tugged hopelessly at the stake, but it didn't budge. Finally she curled up like a turtle seeking its shell, trembling, arms wrapped around her chest.

Voices reached her from beyond the drooping branches.

"My lord! I did not expect you so soon."

"Have you accomplished what I asked of you, Milas?"

Marit knew that voice.

The baritone hemmed and hawed in reply. "Not as we expected, my lord."

"Leave off your excuses!" The curtain of branches was swept aside, and a man ducked in under the canopy. He looked, first, directly at the stone head and the girl cowering there, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet, staring at him in terror. Marit got a good look at his face: that of a man in his early twenties, with broad cheekbones, a mustache and beard, and astonishingly long lashes above deep-set eyes. To her shock, she recognized him.

Radas, lord of Iliyat. He held one of the local authorities under whose auspices order was kept in the Hundred, and he was unusual only in that lordships—local chiefs whose right to office passed through a direct bloodline—were rare, an artifact, so the tales sang, of ancient days and even then known almost exclusively in the north.

His gaze flicked down to her. When he saw that the blindfold had been tweaked aside, annoyance narrowed his eyes.

"Have you touched her?" he said to the girl. Although he did not raise his voice, the change in his tone made Marit shiver and the girl quiver and moan.

With a snort of disgust he let the branches fall and vanished back into the light.

"She'll have to be killed," he said. "She's seen me."

"Right away, my lord," said the baritone.

"Nay, no haste. It would serve my purposes best to let the men do what they will. It's necessary that they understand that reeves aren't to be feared or respected. After that, if she's still breathing—slit her throat."

"Yes, my lord."

"Where's the eagle?"

"This way, my lord."

They moved away. In the camp, the noises of men at their tasks trickled back into life. Evidently the woodsmen feared the lord of Iliyat as much as the girl did—and yet, Marit could not fit the two pieces together. She'd seen Lord Radas at court day in Iliyat, a mild-spoken young man passing judgment and entertaining merchants. Less than a year ago, she'd brought in a criminal to Iliyat's assizes, a thief and his accomplices who had raided two warehouses. The ringleader had been sold to a man brokering for Sirniakan merchants; he'd be taken out of the Hundred into the distant south, into a life of slavery far from home with no hope of return. No worse fate existed. The accomplices were young and foolish; they'd been given eight-year contracts to serve as indentured servants, slaves of the debt they had created through their crime. It was a merciful sentence.

She could not reconcile that man and this one, yet they were clearly the same.

"Hsst. Girl."

The girl looked up. Her eyes were dry but her expression was that of a child who has given up crying because she knows comfort will never ever come. Her eyes were bruised with shadows; her cheeks were hollow, and her complexion more gray than brown.

"Come closer."

She shook her head. "I shouldn't have touched you. Now he'll punish me. He likes to punish me."

"What's your name?"

"I don't have a name anymore."

A stubborn one. "I'm called Marit. Reeve Marit. If I can free you, will you help me?"

"We are all slaves to the will of the Merciless One. There is only one road to freedom."

There wasn't time to be subtle.

"There's a knife hidden in my right boot. I can't reach it, but you can. Then you can free me." Marit wiggled her shoulders and hips and rolled onto her left side to display her bound arms. Her shoulders were aching badly, but that was the least of her worries. She knew better than to think about the problem posed by that chain and that stake. When she won free, she had to alert the reeve halls to this blasphemy and Lord Radas's treason. She wouldn't have time to struggle with the stake. It was a cruel decision, but necessary.

"A knife!" The girl crawled forward. Her expression changed, but the disquiet raised in Marit's throat by Lord Radas's frown tightened, and she had to cough out a breath as the girl tugged off Marit's right boot and swiftly, with strangely practiced hands, probed the lining. Faster than should have been possible her nimble fingers extracted the knife. It was a slender blade, meant for emergencies.

"The Merciless One has smiled on us." The girl kissed the blade. "She'll grant us freedom!"

"Quick! They could come at any moment."

Indeed, she heard a buzz of noise out beyond the willow's canopy as though a mob gathered, with stamping and hollering and wild laughter brought on by waste wine and khaif: men working up their nerve to indulge themselves in their worst nature; men being worked up by a chieftain or overlord as music is coaxed out of an instrument by a skilled musician.

As the captain's wife said in the Tale of Fortune: Make them ashamed of themselves and they will not betray you, because they will know they have stepped outside the boundaries and made themselves outcast by their deeds.

The girl mouthed a prayer of thanksgiving, then sidled closer, right up against Marit's torso. She spun the blade with the skill of an expert trained to handle knives and touched the point against the cloth of Marit's tunic. It rested just below the reeve's breastbone, nudging up the thick leather strap of her walking harness.

"We'll be free. They won't be able to touch us."

The prick of the blade bit Marit's skin. The reeve fell onto her back, startled and frantically reassessing as she stared up at the girl.

I've miscalculated.

That face was so young and so innocent, ravished by her brutal treatment, that Marit had overlooked what stared her right in the face. The girl's gaze had the fixed fanaticism of the Merciless One's most devoted followers, who did not separate war, death, and desire.

She's insane!

She pushed with her legs, scooting away on her back. "Wait! Cut the rope—!"

The thrust punctured skin and gristle with a smooth, strong, angled stroke.

She's done this before.

Right into the heart. There was no pain.

The last thing Marit saw, as the blood drained from her heart, as the white cloak of death descended out of the sky to smother her in its wings, was the implacable face of the girl who was in that instant the Merciless One Herself. Beyond, a lifetime away, men shouted and came running. The girl spun the blade, plunged it up underneath her own ribs and, with a gloating smile, died.