"These are mercenaries from Arethousa, not faithful retainers. We all know what a bloody-minded, vicious people the Arethousans are, as well as untrustworthy."

He smiled without taking the sting from the words. Did he know Theo-phanu's mother was an Arethousan? Was the bait meant for her? Theophanu merely regarded him with a cool stare. "There are a fair number of these Arethousan flies buzzing 'round Adelheid's honey, and I see no reason to encourage them to stay. Take them off!" he shouted to the captain. "Use your knives wisely. Don't cut too deep."

The soldiers in attendance all laughed heartily, not kindly.

"You're going to execute them?" Theophanu demanded, startled. "I will certainly pay the ransom price to free each man among them."

"And enter them into your army? I think not, Princess Theophanu.

Everyone knows the Arethousan emperor desires eunuchs, so I have been sending him many more with my respects, and today he'll receive another twenty or more for his pleasure."

"This is barbaric!" muttered Theophanu.

"I advise that we retire, Your Highness," murmured Rosvita in return. "I fear we'll get no satisfaction here."

"Then how can we reach Adelheid, or even let her know we are here?"

whispered Theophanu. "Lord John has thrown up more obstacles than I thought possible."

As the prisoners were led away, there came a sudden commotion from the road that led to the north gate, which John's encampment faced. A young woman had entered the camp, but she staggered, shrieking, with her hair unbound and all in a tangle. When she saw the lord under the canopy, she wailed more loudly stil and scratched at her cheeks until blood ran. An infant slept in a sling at her hip, and the blood dripping from her face stained its tiny legs like a sudden blooming of the cowpox.

"Bring that woman to me," cried John. Hustled forward with more haste then courtesy, still, she did not flinch when she was flung down to kneel before Ironhead. "What is the matter with you, woman? Al this crying and wailing makes my ears ring."

"What kind of mighty warrior makes war on women who have no weapons?

Some among our sex do truly take up arms, and to them I commend your violent ways, but the rest of us have heeded the words of Our Lady and we use only the tools given us by the Queen of Heaven. But now I see you have decided to make war upon those of us who have sworn to do our Lady's work on this earth."

He looked affronted. "I do not make war on any woman except those who have taken up arms like a man, like the Saz-dakhs of old."

"Is it not a war you make upon us when you deprive us of what is ours by right? You took my cattle a month or more ago, and never once have I complained of that. But now you seek to take from me that which can never be regained once it is lost." She gestured toward the prisoners. Ironhead shrugged, as if to say he did not understand her. "You will castrate them, as is your habit, my lord, but by what right do you take from them that member which does not belong to them?"

"Well, then, to whom does it belong, if not to them?" he demanded as the soldiers around chuckled. More had gathered; a siege was boring business, and any distraction was welcome.

"Why, to their wives, of course!" she retorted indignantly. "What else keeps us warm at night? What gives us the children we so dearly desire?" She set a work-roughened hand on the sleeping infant. Drying blood stained her course fingernails. "Take what else you will from me, my lord, but not that which is most important to me!"

At this, the soldiers all began to laugh uproariously and even John guffawed. "I can't defend myself against such an argument," he cried. "Very well, then. You may have your husband back unharmed. But tell me, woman, I must have some means to discipline those who take up arms against me. If your husband fights me again, what may I remove?"

The young woman hesitated only axpoment. "He has feet, hands, a nose, eyes. Take what you will! of the things that belong to him, but I pray you, leave to me'jthat which is mine."

This speech sent the soldiers into another great round of laughter.

Theophanu, too, smiled slightly as the woman's husband was unchained from the rest of the wretches fated to go under the knife. "I hope her husband is worthy of such a clever wife," she said as woman, man, and baby were escorted away.

But Rosvita bent lower, to speak more softly. "I am thinking," she saiu slowly, "that if one woman can come out of the city, then another can get in,"

"I am against it," said Brother Fortunatus. "What if you are caught?"

"I am a cleric," insisted Rosvita. "Lord John is unlikely to harm me. It he takes me prisoner, I will appeal to the skopos in Darre."

"Then let me go with you."

Rosvita indicated the pallet on which poor young Constan-tine lay moaning, clutching his belly. He had foolishly drunk from standing water and now had a flux. "You must safeguard the books, Brother," she said to Fortunatus, "and care for young Constantine. Even if he were well, he's still too young and inexperienced, and I couldn't trust him to watch over things as you can."

The arduous trip over the mountains had stripped Fortunatus of both bulk and humor. He frowned now. "Sister Amabilia could have talked you out of this."

"Nay, Brother. She would have insisted on coming with me."

That forced a laugh from him, but their leave-taking was somber.

The sun had not yet risen; mist muted the edges of camp and made the tents into hulking beasts hidden by cloud. From among her women Theophanu had chosen Leoba, who was tall, strong, and a trifle reckless, to accompany Rosvita. Too many sent together would attract notice; one deacon alone might attract mischief. With her face and figure concealed in a cleric's robe and hood, Leoba waited for her at the edge of camp together with the two guards who would escort them through the lines. The dawn mist robed them in secrecy as they passed through undergrowth, crossed a narrow stream, and then left the guards behind at the farthest sentry post on the lip of the flat plain. The hill on which the gates and towers of Vennaci stood shone in mist and the first glimmer of the sun. They walked across empty fields to one of the old paths on which laborers had once made their way back to the safety of the city walls at night.

The trail lay dusty and level as they walked along, following the path of an irrigation ditch half overgrown with weeds. Everywhere she saw the legacy of conflict: ripe barley unhar-vested, fallow fields that should have been sown with winter wheat instead grown waist-high with weeds, a distant herd of cattle trampling through a stand of oats. Adelheid's people could not come out; Ironhead either had sufficient supplies, or he chose

to leave the fields to rot as a message to the people trapped within the walls.

The young noblewoman said nothing as they walked, kept her hood down over her face to disguise her Wendish features. The loose robe disguised her body but could not hide her height. Even here, alone, she kept silence: practiced it, Rosvita supposed, for the time when Rosvita's skill at dissembling would see them through the lines or find them exposed and taken prisoner.

John Ironhead might be merciful and take a ransom for them, or he might be stubborn. Rosvita knew better than to dwell on such thoughts. Yet she was glad enough of Leoba's silence and the careful way she concealed herself from view. As they walked, Rosvita rehearsed her speech, trying quietly on her tongue the slurs and lisps with which these northern Aostans disfigured the clean sounds of Dariyan.

Ironhead's main encampment lay to the west. Here along the northern wall where only a postern gate opened along the river, his guards had set up watch posts. They had been here long enough that some had built shacks, and there was a brisk business with prostitutes who now left those same shacks in twos and threes to slip back into town, hands clutched over coins or gripping scarves wrapped around bread and cheese. A few vendors had come from town, too, cloaked by night, and now here at dawn they packed up their wares, gorgeous silks, linens, silver spoons, such luxuries that, in the face of dwindling food supplies, might not seem so important when children cried with hunger.

"Here, Sisters! Where have you come from?" The guard who stopped them had greasy hair, and a thread of meat had caught in his yellowed teeth.

"Which kind of sisters?" cried another guard, snorting with laughter as he grabbed roughly at their hoods. He yanked back Rosvita's hood and they all exclaimed over her northern paleness; then, with a stick, he prodded back the hood that concealed Leoba.

Rosvita's heart curdled with fear. It was not Leoba at all. Yet surely she should have known what would happen when the princess acquiesced so graciously as Rosvita insisted that it would be too dangerous for Theophanu herself to attempt to slip through the lines. If Ironhead's men caught them, he would have a noble I

prisoner to ransom and a sharp blade to hold over her father's head.

Obviously her words had fallen on deaf ears. Theophanu neither flinched nor showed any expression as the guards poked at her with their sticks. Clearly they had not been in Ironhead's camp yesterday: they did not recognize her.

The thought hit her at random, like the voice of the Enemy whispering of betrayal: no person seeing Sanglant for the first time could mistake him for anything but a king's son. But without her retinue, it was impossible to know how exalted Theo-phanu's status was.

"Mayhap we should turn these over to Lord John," said the greasy guard.

"We are good deacons of the church, as you can see," said Rosvita coldly, slurring and lisping her words as much as she could manage. The anger she did not need to feign, and if she spilled it out on them, then perhaps she would manage not to betray her anger at her lady for putting herself in such jeopardy.

"We have come all this long walk from the archbiscop's palace at Raveni because we heard that many women have fallen into disrepute due to this siege, which disturbs God's peace. We mean to lead them back onto the path of righteousness."

"Is there much bread on the path of righteousness?" demanded the greasy guard, and this jest earned him a round of laughter from his companions.

"There is no bread sweeter than God's forgiveness," retorted Rosvita sternly. "Will you pray with us, Brothers?"

Bu they didn't want to pray; they were satiated, and bored, and saw no threat in two deacons crazy enough to want to enter a besieged city. But they were alert enough to argue.

"We've orders not to let anyone go in. You'll bring them news."

"Oh, hell, Aldericus, the whores take news in every day. You can't tell me that you don't squeal out bits of gossip before, during, and after. Half those whores are spies for the queen."

"Lady's tits, for all we know, one of them whores is the queen! That's a hot line of women, they say, going back to old Queen Cleitia when she ruled Darre.

They say she took no less than six husbands and made every new presbyter prove himself to her on her couch and the ones she liked best were forced to satisfy her again and again and again until she tired of them or a handsome new face come along. It's no wonder she warred with the skopos, who in those days was of a similar mind. That's all women think about!"

They all snickered and guffawed, but some watched her and Theophanu closely. Rosvita could not hide her scorn, but Theophanu had the Arethousan gift of showing no emotion; her expression remained guileless and haughty.

"There is much sickness in the town." Rosvita had brought silver with her, but she wondered now if a bribe would seem too suspicious. "Both my young Sister and I are healers, and God have spoken to us and told us to come minister as we can among the sick and the sinful. And we shall wait here, praying, in this camp and tell each of our sisters in sin that they must turn aside from the path of folly and uncleanliness, for every day and every week as long as you are here, my brothers, until we are allowed to go inside to help those who are in need."

As a threat, it worked well enough. None of the guards wanted holy sisters praying publicly and attracting attention to the illicit activity taking place under the shadow of the siege.

"Go on! Follow the whores! You'll get less pleasure from them than we did, I'd wager!"

With laughter and mocking calls at their backs, they crossed the no-man'sland, the empty stretch of ground that marked out a bow's shot from the walls, and came to the postern gate.

The city guards were thinner, and less cheerful, and didn't want to let them in in case they were spies sent by Ironhead. Rosvita had to bribe one with silver to get through the gate, but after he'd palmed the slender bars, he took her despite that to the guardhouse. The stone barracks built up against the wall stank of filth and excrement, and most of the soldiers lounging on the cots or on the floor were sick with colds or open, raw sores. But they did not look dispirited.

The stone walls wept moisture; it stank of mold and unwashed sweat. Rosvita sneezed, and their escort murmured reflexively: "Health to you, Sister. May the Enemy's creatures all flee your body and leave you whole."

The captain had his own windowless room at the base of the guardhouse.

There was no door, only a ragged cloth hung across the threshold. A rash covered one side of the captain's face, and his nose wept mucus. The soldier set the silver bribe down on the table before him while he sipped at a cup of wine and eyed them with the resignation of a man who has heard it all.

"I tolerate the whores and the peddlers because every scrap of bread they bring in gives us a brief reprieve on our stores of grain. And because they bring us news. But I have no patience for spies, even ones robed as clerics."

"And I have no patience with fools," said Theophanu, coming to life at last.

She had remained silent for a long time. "I am Theophanu, daughter of King Henry of Wendar." As if she knew he might doubt her claim, she pulled her robe away from her neck to reveal her gold torque.

That was all it took.

The captain jumped to his feet. "Your Highness! I'd heard that a force had come from the north, but I thought it was just a rumor. People will say anything to get a scrap of bread, and Ironhead's men aren't idiots. They know to feed us lies. If this is true—

"If it is true," Theophanu pointed out coolly, "then you had better escort us to Queen Adelheid at once."

Their escort led them through winding streets to the heart of Vennaci: a huge open square fronted on four sides by the cathedral, the town hal , the marketplace, and the palacio. There they were handed over to the care of a steward. The servants who haunted the palacio corridors, like the soldiers, looked thin, but nowhere in the streets or among the soldiery or the citizens of Vennaci did Rosvita see panic or the flush of desperation which precedes defeat.

There was enough water, and obviously someone was doing a good job of administering the food supply.

But the grain stores couldn't hold out forever.

A steward dressed in a rich indigo tunic led them to the courtyard that lay at the center of the stately palacio, the heart of hearts, the pulse of the city.

Flowering vines made the arcades a riot of purple flowers. Bees hummed.

Noblewomen sat on ornate benches, petting monkeys and little dogs who wore gold chains as leashes. Servants swept clean brick pathways shaded by plum trees. A gardener watered a bed in lavender, lilacs, and brilliant peonies with a ceramic pitcher so finely made that a noble lady would not have felt disgraced to use it for refreshment in her chamber. A hedge of bay lay soberly along the south prospect. There the courtyard, enclosed on three sides by the palacio, gave way to a vista of the plain below. Ironhead's army lay encamped on that plain, tents and banners seen from here in distant, muted colors like a fresco laid on against the sky.

There was no throne, no central seat, only benches laid out at tasteful intervals among the planting beds: rosemary, rue, sage, and roses. But among the many souls populating the garden, Rosvita recognized the queen at once, although she had never seen her before. She sat on a bench like any other of the no-hlewomen, and was dressed no more richly than they without the crown of regnancy or the gold torque of royal kinship common in the north. Draped at her feet lay, not a little pug dog or a chittering monkey, but a spotted leopard, lithe and handsome, with lazy eyes and a tense curve to its shoulders. It purred, more of a rumble, as she rubbed it with one slippered foot as casually as if she did not realize it could take off that delicate foot at the ankle with a single bite.

She was interviewing three of the whores, who knelt somewhat nervously an arm's length away from the big cat, and in her quick movements and flashing, sudden changes of expression, Rosvita read the habit of command. The steward bent to whisper in her ear, and she dismissed the prostitutes by giving them each a coin, then rose and strode over to her visitors. The spotted leopard uncoiled gracefully to pad after her. The timbre of the pleasant courtyard atmosphere changed utterly with her movement: Everyone watched to see what she would do.

She halted before them, looked Theophanu up and down, and said boldly, in terrible Wendish: "You my cousin? I learn this tongue for to speak with the king."

"Cousin, I greet you," replied Theophanu in the Aostan way. Then she switched to Wendish and let Rosvita translate. "I greet you, Cousin, and bring you greetings from my father, Henry, king of Wendar and Varre." The princess towered over Queen Adelheid; she stood a good head taller, and her handsome features had that strongboned cast that lasts through old age. Adelheid was formed of different matter: She had the kind of lush, youthful prettiness that fades with age into the respectable authority of a stout matron.

"Come," said Adelheid in Aostan, acknowledging Rosvita with a nod, "we will take wine and food, but alas we can waste no time with pleasantries, as would be proper. You must tell me how many troops you have brought, and if you are willing to use them to drive away Ironhead." She continued talking so rapidly that Rosvita was forced several times to ask her to repeat herself as they left the courtyard, passed down a shadowed colonnade, and were shown onto an airy balcony shaded by a massive grape arbor where servants laid out a table with various delicacies: a platter of fruit, gold dishes filled with plum cakes and poppyseed bread, and a decanter of wine whose rich bouquet flavored every bite they took.

"You have seen," Adelheid began when the worst pangs of hunger were assuaged, "how dogs fight over a bone. The good people of Aosta are my children, and they are obedient, but the lords are scavengers. I can trust none of them. If one throws out Ironhead's army, it will only be to take his place. They say Ironhead had his wife poisoned before he marched here because she refused to take the veil and enter a convent to leave him free to marry me."

"He did not seem a merciful man." Theophanu took another bunch of grapes from the platter and neatly plucked the ripe fruit from the stalk. "But I do not have sufficient strength in troops to drive him away alone."

"If we coordinate our attack? You attack as my own forces sally out of the walls?"

"It is possible. Before I left, I agreed on certain signals with my captains.

They are ready to attack if need be. But what is the number of your forces? How many may you rely on?"

They discussed the option, but dismissed it finally, with reluctance.

Ironhead still had too great an advantage, even if they attacked on two fronts.

"How long can you withstand the siege?" Theophanu asked. "I could return to my father and assemble a larger army. Nay. Even if we can still cross the mountains, we couldn't return until spring."

"By then our stores will be exhausted." Adelheid gestured toward the table.

"The palace gardens cannot feed everyone, and the sentries on the wall have told me that Ironhead has already set engineers to work to try to dam the river.

Nay, cousin. This morning my clerics brought word to me that guards at the north gate saw a vision in the night sky, of an army made of flame. Surely that sign was the herald of your arrival. I believe this is part of God's plan. Now is our last, best chance to act."

"Ironhead will soon know the disposition of my forces," added Theophanu,

"and then he will know that I dare not fight him. At that point, I will be forced to withdraw."

"He won't let you go. You are at risk here as well. He would as gladly marry a Wendish princess as another woman, if he cannot have me. His first wife he took by force as well, after he'd murdered her husband. She came from the south, although her family's lands are now in the hands of the Arethousan generals. Thus she was of no more use to him. No, there must be some way out."

"Perhaps you can escape in the same way we got in, disguised as a cleric, or as some other sort of woman."

Adelheid laughed. "As a whore? I know what they say of me. It might work, I alone with one other might be able to get away, but I will not leave my loyal subjects in Ironhead's hands, especially not my good soldiers. You see what he wil do to them. No, but stil I must get to Henry. Is it true his queen is dead and he has not yet remarried?"

"It is true, Cousin. My mother, Queen Sophia, died three years ago.

Indeed, I will not conceal from you the wish of my father's heart." Theophanu paused, and a sly smile graced Adelheid's pretty red lips as she waited for Theophanu to finish. "That you will marry his son."

"His son?" Adelheid flushed red. "He must be very young, no, this prince?"

"No, Sanglant is certainly five and twenty by now, and rich in reputation as a warrior and a captain—

Adelheid jumped to her feet, and the leopard, who had seemed asleep, sprang up so quickly that Rosvita let out a yelp of alarm. "This Sanglant you speak of, he is the bastard, no? will marry no bastard! Is Henry crippled? Is he too old to sire children, or too sick to ride to war?"

"No, Your Majesty," replied Rosvita, not waiting for Theophanu. "He remains strong in every way."

"Then what would a woman like me want with a young man when I can have a man in his prime, who is still strong, and who has proved he knows how to rale? Let us only come free of this place, and make our way safely to his court, and I will offer him my hand and the king's crown of Aosta. Do you think he will turn me away?"

Even subtle Theophanu was taken by surprise by this outburst. But Adelheid was magnificent in anger and distress, and she offered Henry what he had wanted all along. Sanglant had disgraced himself by refusing such a rich reward. Why should Henry turn away from it, now that circumstances were so changed?

Theophanu rose, walked to the balcony's edge, and leaned against the balustrade to look down the steep side of a hill covered in olive trees. Between each tree lay a squat beehive. Farther down lay an orchard whose trees grew all the way to the inner wall. "My father is not a fool, Cousin." She stared downslope for a long time until Adelheid grew curious, or impatient, and crossed to stand beside her. Rosvita was careful to keep her distance from the spotted leopard, who stood alert by the young queen's side, tail lashing, as the queen stroked its head absently.

"What are you thinking, Cousin?" Adelheid asked finally, breaking the silence.

Theophanu smiled, cool and almost mocking, as she cupped her chin in a hand and surveyed the olive grove and the beehives. "I am thinking that I have an idea. We have other allies if only we think to use them. Tell me, Cousin, do Ironhead's horses wear much armor?"

THERE was no reason for the tree to fall at that moment, and from that direction. His keen hearing saved him: a creak where he should have heard nothing, the first splinter of a tree's weakened stump as it groaned into a fall, the alarmed whispering of his ever-present companions. One tweaked him, hard, on the thigh, and he jerked sideways, then leaped out of the way as a huge ancient fir tree crashed down through the forest cover and smashed onto the spot where, an instant before, he had been standing. Branches and coarse needles scratched him as he spun away out of their reach. The shuddering noise of its fall echoed off the surrounding cliffs.

Sanglant was so stunned that he actually stood gaping among the firs and spruce and scattering of ash that covered the hillside, ax hanging loosely from his hand, as the branches of the fallen tree shook, quivered, then quieted, and the last echoes rolled away. There was no sign of disease along that vast length, no brown in the dense coat of needles, no infestations riddling the bark. His breath came in clouds in the air, here on the highest slopes at the fringe of the enchanted valley, where winter could reach. Snow dusted the ground, fading on the slopes below into grass and spring flowers.

Healthy trees do not fall by themselves.

He shook himself out of his stupor and whistled to the dog. It raced down the length of the fallen fir, lost itself in a thicket, and yipped wildly, came racing back with whip-tail tucked between its legs. After the incident with the soup, he had taken to carrying his sword with him. He leaned his ax against the trunk of the tree he'd meant to fell, scarred now by his first half dozen strokes, and grabbing up the sheath, drew his sword. It had good balance, although it was a little light to his hand now that he had put on weight and gained strength working with Brother Heribert on his construction projects.

He growled softly, scenting the air. One of the servants flashed by him, strange because she had no scent but rather a texture, in the way cloth has texture, a difference felt by touch, not seen or heard or smelled. Others crowded around, until he felt smothered by their presence.

"Hush, I beg you," he said, to still their chattering. They quieted. He listened, but heard nothing. He followed the tree to its base. The huge trunk had been cut away, a wedge taken out of it so smoothly that as he ran his fingers along the severed stump he knew no ax had hewn this. It looked more as might an apple sliced by a knife. He got down on his knees and sniffed along the ground, but smelled nothing.

"What has done this?" he asked the spirits. They would not answer, only crowded together. He did not smell their fear, precisely; it was more like a weft woven through the pattern of their being, abrupt, rough, and startling, they who were not creatures of earth at all but some kindred of the daimones whose natural home was the airy heights below the moon, or so Liath had told him.

Easy to catch and enslave, these airy spirits served the five magi who lived at Verna.

Just as, in cold truth, he and Brother Heribert served them by building and hewing. Indeed, it was particularly irritating to see that someone in this valley had the means to fell trees with far less effort and time than he had to expend and yet was unwilling to share that knowledge with him and Heribert, the ones who had to perform all the hard physical labor of building decent living quarters for everyone. A king's son ought not to serve others in this way, no matter how exalted their rank, and yet for the time being, and with Liath's pregnancy and studies advancing, he was willing to bide his time. He was willing to work and eat and enjoy this interlude of peace.

But the surreptitious attempts on his life were beginning to get annoying.

He explored the forest briefly but, as he expected, found neither sign nor trail of his assailant. He did not expect another attempt today; whoever didn't want him here was a little clumsy, as witness the incident with the soup, someone unused to murder, perhaps, or someone who consistently underestimated him. Obviously no one in this valley knew of the curse his mother had laid on him, or they wouldn't have bothered to try killing him.

He went back and felled the tree he had come for, then set to the tedious work of trimming branches off the trunk of the great fir. He paused only to take bread and cheese and ale in the midafternoon, and several times to sharpen his ax, but even so, as dusk neared, he had only cleared half of it. His back ached, and his tunic was clammy with sweat. He slung the sheathed sword over his back and headed downslope on an animal track.

Firs and spruce gave way to oak, to beech and ash, then to orchard. He paused at the vineyard to pluck a few ripe grapes and, savoring these, went on.

Shadows drew long over the dilapidated stone tower, the old sheds, and the newly-finished hall, so raw that it still seemed to gleam. Heribert worked at the sawhorse, stripped to the waist with his robes tucked into his belt. He had the slight elegance of a cleric, wiry now with muscle, and the callused hands of a carpenter. He was planing smooth a plank.

"Peace, Brother," said Sanglant, laughing as he came up. "You'll shame me if you don't stop working and join me at the pond." Heribert grinned without looking up from his work. "Some day," Sanglant observed, "I expect an avalanche to wipe out this entire unnatural valley, but, by God, while the rest of us flee to safety, you'll stand your ground and be swallowed up under it because you damned well are determined to get a last corner curved just so."

Heribert chuckled, but he continued to work. His ever-present helper, a robust creature who seemed as much wood as air, blew wood shavings off the plank as quickly as they flew up from the plane. Sanglant sat on a neat stack of unfinished planks that he and Heribert had sawed out of logs over the last week, and several servants settled around him like so many contained whirlpools of air.

He had become accustomed to their presence. While Heribert finished the plank to his liking and touched up the corners, the prince watched two of the magi, one old woman and one young one, who sat outside the stone tower on a crude bench arguing in a language he didn't know. They were too far away to hear him and Heribert, and as usual did not appear to notice them.

"I dearly would like to see our Sister Zoe naked even just one time, for I think she must be a rare sight to behold under that robe."

Heribert snorted as he measured the corners with a square, then grunted, satisfied with the proportions.

"But I fear me," continued Sanglant, "that she despises the male kind."

"Or the male member." Heribert shrugged the sleeves of his cleric's robe back on and retied the rope belt at his waist. The servant made the odd noise that signified "farewell," and slipped away into the uncut logs piled nearby. "She was married very young to a man who used her cruelly, so I've heard. She kil ed him with a spell when she was sixteen, after three years of abuse in his bed."

Sanglant shook his head. "If only she'd done it sooner! How came she here?"

"She fled to her aunt, who was a nun at St. Valeria. By one means and the other they ended up here."

"Ah," said Sanglant. "But which is the aunt?"

"Dead, now, so they say." Heribert had started to put away his tools. Now he paused. "Do you think Sister Zoe is the one trying to kill you?"

"Who can know? Sister Zoe and Brother Severus prefer not to speak to me at all. They despise me, I think. To Sister Meriam, I am an object of complete indifference. To our fine and mighty Sister Anne, I do believe I am only another tool, one she hasn't yet discovered a use for." He gestured toward the older woman who sat next to the voluptuous Zoe. "Only Sister Venia treats me kindly."

Heribert colored. "The more subtle they are the more fair they appear. Do not trust her."

"So you have said before, and since she is your aunt, I suppose I must trust your judgment since you surely know her far better than I do. A fair face can conceal a foul heart." He grinned, thinking of Hugh. Although it was certainly no Godly sentiment, he liked to remember how he'd last seen Hugh, bleeding and beaten on the ground, at the mercy of the dogs. But thinking of the dogs made him think of his father, and he sighed. Two of the servants brushed against him, their light touch like balm on his scratched-up skin.

"You'd think Sister Anne would put a stop to the attempts to kill you,"

Heribert was saying as he tied up his tools in a cleverly-sewn pouch of his own devising.

"Maybe it's a test. Or perhaps she doesn't know."

Heribert laughed sharply. "I don't believe there is anything she doesn't know. But surely Liath might have some insight into her mother's mind that we lack. You should confide in her."

He considered, but finally shook his head. "Nay. It would worry her needlessly, and she would insist we leave—and that, I fear, would cause more problems than it would solve in every way. She needs to be here, at least until the child is born and she has recovered her strength." Then he smiled wryly.

"And in any case, Heribert, I haven't found that she can keep secrets very well, although she thinks she does. If she gets angry, she'll blurt it all out and accuse everyone just because she is so indignant on my behalf. I like knowing that they don't know that I know."

"Unless they do know that you know, and, knowing that, know that you believe that they don't know that you know, so that this is only a more convoluted game than even you perceive, my friend."

"Ah, but you forget that I was raised on the king's progress. Certainly I have seen almost every knot that can be tied when it comes to intrigue."

Heribert hesitated, looking troubled. "You must be careful, my lord prince,"

he said, using the title as he always did when he meant to tease, or to be serious. "A nest of mathematici is a nest of dangerous creatures, indeed."

"Why do you stay, Heribert?" asked Sanglant suddenly.

Heribert's smile was mocking. "I fear leaving more than I fear staying. I'm not a brave man, as you are, my lord prince. I'm not a warrior in my heart, as many churchmen are. I'm afraid of what they'll do to me if I try to go. In any case, there is no way out except through the stone circle, none that I've ever found. I don't know the secrets of the stone." He put his leather tool pouch away in the shed he and Sanglant had built beside their working ground, where Heribert now slept. "Truth be told, I'm content here. I was never given a chance to build before."

"Well, my dear friend," replied Sanglant, standing, "it's a handsome edifice you've built. But right now I want to be clean. Shall we go?"

The servants swirled around him as he rose, tickling his chin and tweaking his ears. He had enough natural quickness that he could pinch them in turn, a form of teasing they delighted in because he could do no harm to their aetherical bodies. Laughing, he chased them until they scattered, their delicate laughter chiming on the breeze. Heribert only shook his head and, together, the two men went to the pond to wash themselves free of the sweat and dust of an honest day's work.

Sister Venia, formerly known as Biscop Antonia of Mainni, watched her illegitimate son and his companion vanish into the dusk. Perhaps it was inevitable that the two men, thrown together under such circumstances, would become friends. Whatever his virtues, Prince Sanglant was uncouth, uneducated, and only half human, scarcely a fit companion for a young man who had been molded carefully from childhood on to become the ornament of wisdom and the shining vessel of God's grace. Still, the prince could hardly fail to be uplifted by the company of such an astonishingly fine young cleric.

"I don't like the way he looks at me," said Sister Zoe abruptly. "He has a lewd eye."

"Brother Heribert?" cried Antonia, astounded by the accusation.

'

"Heribert? Nay, I speak of Prince Sanglant."

"Ah, yes. He is much attached to the flesh, I believe."

Zoe shuddered.

"None of us can escape the flesh." Brother Severus emerged from .the tower, lantern in hand. "Not while we still walk on this earth, at any rate. He's a bad influence on the girl. As long as he is around, there is no hope she can learn with a focused mind. Pregnant!" He said the word with distaste. "She is not what we were led to expect."

Zoe shuddered again. "It's disgusting. I can hardly stand to look at her, with that swelling belly. It's a deformity of the clean flesh she might have, had she kept herself a pure vessel."

"Who among us has been given leave to cast the first stone?" asked Antonia mildly. "Not one of the women in this valley is unstained, even Anne, who gave birth to the girl, after all. For the men, of course, I cannot speak." But she often wondered about Severus, the old prune. He had the kind of self-important arrogance that in her experience might cover a multitude of sins, now since conveniently forgotten.

He only raised an eyebrow. "That is of no matter. We expected a pure vessel, but now we receive one that is broken. It is not just this carnal marriage that has made her so, but her entire association with that creature. The prince is a danger to everything we've worked for. See how the servants cluster around him when they ought to be engaged in tasks for us."

"Better under our eye than where he can work mischief hidden from us,"

retorted Antonia.

"An argument Sister Anne has used. It may even be true. But it seems to me that we could simply rid ourselves of him once and for all time, and that would be the end of it."

"He is not so easily killed," said Sister Anne, emerging from the tower with Sister Meriam walking slowly behind her, "although I am in agreement that his influence on Liathano works counter to our purposes."

Meriam had become increasingly frail over the past several months, and her voice was scarcely more than a whisper, thin and dry, but her mind had not lost any of its penetrating strength. "We were all young once, and the young are most susceptible to temptation. I sometimes think that only our absent Brother Lupus may have remained faithful to his vows."

"A commoner!" Severus looked toward the hall, now lit by wands of light that glowed as softly as will-o'-the-wisps. "Hardly the creature such as we ought to measure ourselves against, Sister Meriam."

"We had a saying in my country, Brother: that a rich man might as easily become a slave as a poor man might, if God so wills it. Fortune is fickle, and a poor man might become rich, or a slave become a general, by God's design."

"The sayings of infidels can be of little interest to us," retorted Severus coolly.

"Let us go in to supper," said Zoe, standing hastily. "Then perhaps we may eat our fill before the dog returns. I hate having to watch him eat."

"You must strive for detachment," said Sister Anne in a calm voice. "What disturbs you is not his presence but some lingering touch of the Enemy within your own soul."

Zoe flushed. Since the arrival of Sanglant, Zoe had begun habitually, and no doubt unconsciously, to smooth her robes down against her body whenever she spoke of the prince. She did so now, brushing white, soft hands never marred by manual labor along the azure linen of her robe. In a way, it was a relief to Antonia; Heribert might have noticed Zoe's lush charms, but it was now manifestly obvious that she had never noticed him. His purity was safe from her, at least. He noticed Liath, of course. Antonia had observed human nature for many years, and she had known at once that Liath had the unconscious warmth of beauty that attracts males as moths to the flame that wil kil them. But Liath was pregnant, and her husband hovered at her side in all his bestial glory.

Heribert would not interfere there. Males were easily led precisely because of their inclination to submit to any one of them who seemed stronger; that was why God had chosen women to administer Their church, because women were more rational.

"He has brought discord in his wake," said Severus, "but that, I suppose, is the legacy of his mother's blood."

Poor Sister Zoe was a passionate being, despite her wish to live the contemplative life. Still flushed and flustered, she set off for the hall. Antonia could smell roasted lamb and freshly baked bread. Anne glanced toward the open door to the tower, made some internal decision, and followed Zoe. Severus waited only long enough to accompany Sister Meriam at her slow pace. For once, Antonia missed Brother Marcus, who for all his haughtiness had more conversation than the rest combined and was not afraid to speculate on the goings-on in the world outside, but he had left weeks ago to travel to Darre.

A light still burned within the lower chamber of the old stone tower.

Antonia glanced inside to see Liath seated on a bench at the new table recently built by prince and cleric. That they should set themselves to carpentry was appalling, of course, but on the other hand, the old table had been atrocious, gapped, listing, rotted at one corner. The new tables they had built for tower and hall were a great improvement.

Liath was reading, her finger tracing words across the vellum page, her lips forming the words as she read but rarely uttering an actual sound. She was the quietest reader Antonia had ever seen, uncannily silent: "Ah," Liath said suddenly, to herself. "If all things fall toward the center at an equal pressure, and if therefore the universe as a whole would be always pressing against the Earth on al sides and of a uniform nature, then the Earth would need no physical support to rest at the center of the universe."

"What are you reading?" asked Antonia. Liath was a strange creature; although she was Anne's daughter, there was something unnatural about her, not least that she was capable of reading in such dim light.

Liath started up, surprised, banged her thighs on the table, and muttered a word under her breath. "I beg your pardon, Sister Venia," she said politely, closing the book. "I hadn't realized it was dark. I'm reading Ptolomaia. I never had a chance to read the Syntaxis before, only excerpts from it. I see now that although I've read On the Configuration of the World there was a great deal hidden in its words that I never fully understood."

Antonia had never heard of a book called On the Configuration of the World, but she was not about to admit it to this ignorant child who still dressed like the common Eagle she once had been and who did not have the decency to conceal her unattractive passion for the crude creature she called "husband." It was tremendously hard to see her as the daughter of Anne, who was arrogant and cold and in all other ways everything one would expect from the scion of a noble house. Just which noble house Anne was from Antonia was still not sure, because her compatriots had not yet taken her fully into their confidence, but she was not stupid: she was beginning to see the pattern that had been woven here.

Liath wrapped the book in its leather binding and put it away in the cupboard, then frowned for a moment at the tablet on which she'd been writing, mathematical calculations drawn from an ephemerides, a collection of tables which showed the daily positions of the heavenly bodies. She hesitated, fingered the stylus, then made a correction to her calculations. "What do you think?" she demanded imperiously, thrusting the table out for Antonia to look at.

It was immensely irritating that this callous young woman should grasp so easily what was for Antonia the most excruciatingly difficult part of the education of a mathematici. No wonder the church had condemned such arithmetic as the scratches of the Enemy's fingers when they had sat in judgment on Bis-cop Tallia, an adept of the art and the daughter of Emperor Taillefer, at the Council of Narvonne one hundred years ago. "That is for Sister Anne to correct," said Antonia sternly. "I came only to tell you that it is time to go in to supper."

"Is Sanglant back yet?" demanded the girl. She had no respect for the dignity due her elders. She seemed quite unconscious of the elegant manners that Heribert, for instance, wore as unthinkingly as his robes.

"He has gone to cleanse himself, I believe."

"Oh! I'll go fetch him to supper."

Antonia began to reprove her, but she already slipped past, quick even with the early belly of pregnancy on her. Poor Sister Anne. The child had been poorly brought up. It must, indeed, be a daily affront to Anne to see her own daughter behave with the manners of a commoner and the thoughtless insolence of a petty prince. Sanglant might be uncouth, but even his manners, court-bred as he was, were better than Liath's. Like a dog, he was trainable.

Antonia followed her through the twilight, past the orchard and the vineyard, to the grassy meadow where a pond lay nestled against a slope, almost swallowed in darkness. She heard the two men laughing with that easy companionship common to the male kind, feckless creatures that they were.

Then Sanglant called, suddenly, in the kind of voice that carries over the clash of battle: "Liath! God forbid you come any closer or you'll despoil our chaste cleric, who stands here quite as his mother made him." There was a loud splash.

Alarmed, Antonia moved closer to see the moon's light illuminating the water, where Heribert's slender figure stood waist-deep, hands on his hips.

Sanglant came spluttering up from the water next to him and burst into merry laughter as water sluiced off his chest and back and head. He had been dunked.

"Don't think me weaponless," retorted Heribert in a bantering tone unlike anything she had ever heard from him before, "since I have the sword of wit at my service and you, alas— well, I'll say no more."

"I just came to say that supper is waiting for us," called Liath plaintively from the darkness.

Sanglant emerged from the water quite immodestly and shook himself all over like a dog, then patted himself dry with a tunic. He dressed hastily while Heribert remained discreetly in the water; when he was dressed, he vanished into the trees. There came murmuring, too indistinct to make out but with the timbre of love words.

It was a puzzle, but like all puzzles it could be solved or, at worst, bludgeoned until it gave up its secrets: two children born out of mothers who were, if all accounts of Sanglant's mother were true, powerful magi. No matter what the others suspected the Aoi of, no matter if they suspected the Aoi were not truly lost but only somehow hidden to the world of humankind, for all their knowledge they were fools to wish to kill Prince Sanglant. He had power writ large in him; he had been blessed by God with the power to lead. She knew what reputation was worth in the world. She had owned it once herself and had not given up her hopes and dreams. Her sojourn here in Verna was only a way station to something larger, something she could control with the knowledge she would gain from the mathematici here. Brother Severus was wrong: it was not God's will that all Their chosen ones should let go of the world but rather that the wisest among them should rule it rightly. She was one of those chosen ones.

"We'll meet you there, Brother!" called Sanglant to Heribert.

Antonia listened as their footsteps moved away in the direction of the hall.

His usual throng of attendants—any of the servants who had not been commanded by Anne to various tasks—followed in his wake. It was uncanny how they clustered around him.

By now the pond was gray and Heribert only a grayer shadow as he got out of the water and dried himself. How much had Liath seen of him? Surely the twilight had covered his nakedness, and if it had not, well then, that was a small price to pay while he unwittingly ingratiated himself with the prince who might someday prove of great use to her.

THE beekeepers of Vennaci had a special kind of smoke they burned to make the bees go to sleep. In the night they moved the hives up to the ramparts on either side of the great eastern gate, and made ready with small catapults.

Adelheid's army had assembled the day before and with a single sortie at dawn out of the eastern gate, in force, had done damage to Ironhead's camp before his superior numbers forced them to retreat back into the city. Many had been captured; some had been killed. In the wake of their attack Theophanu had broken through the lines with a small escort and returned to her army, leaving Rosvita with Adelheid as a sign of good faith.

Now, from the ramparts by the eastern gates, Rosvita watched the survivors assemble again before dawn, ready for a fight in which many would perish. She was impressed by their loyalty: Adelheid knew the secret of rulership, that as ye give, so shall ye receive. She was generous and she looked after her own. That was why they were willing to risk so much to win her the freedom to escape north.

Ironhead had not been idle. He had drawn his forces up before the eastern gates for an assault, and as the sun rose, he brought his cavalry forward to repel a second sortie if it came.

"Sister, I pray you, we must assemble at the north gate." One of Adelheid's clerics drew Rosvita away just as, from the hills to the north, she saw the first thick clots of smoke begin to rise: the signal from Theophanu. They hurried away through the quiet city. The citizens of Vennaci had either retreated into their houses to hide or now waited outside with such belongings as they could carry, hoping to flee in the wake of Adelheid's escape. It was so quiet in the town that Rosvita heard the first clash of arms, as distant as a bell ringing in a church a league away. Theo-phanu's army had attacked Ironhead's camp, or so they hoped.

At the north gate an armed escort of some one hundred soldiers surrounded Adelheid. Behind them came her train, wagons, servants, and livestock by now bawling and mewling. There came a shout from the eastern gates.

Queen Adelheid sat on a fine black mare. Rosvita mounted, beside her, on a gray gelding, and just as she got on the horse, she heard a maddened roar erupt from the east.

Adelheid laughed out loud. "They have thrown down the bees into Ironhead's cavalry!" she cried as her soldiers cheered. "Come. Let us ride!"

The north portal was flung open as her archers began shooting from the walls. Infantry clattered out to carve a path for the cavalry behind, and soon Rosvita was moving with them. It was horrible and exhilarating at the same time to ride out into battle armed only with prayers.

An arrow whistled overhead. She ducked, felt taut muscles pull, cursed herself for age and infirmity. A spasm tore through her back, but she felt no blood. Her horse faltered as she gasped, and then a soldier came up beside her and grabbed the reins out of her hands. He yelled something at her that she couldn't understand; sound roared in her ears, but whether it was the cacophony of battle or only her own fear and discomfort deafening her, she could not tell.

She let him lead her, and set her thoughts to that task that had been drilled into her in the convent: praying.

They trampled the line drawn up beyond the north gate, where three days ago she and Theophanu had crossed words with Iron-head's bored and satiated guards. Now, Adelheid's soldiers crossed swords with those same guards, cutting them down as their heavy horses thundered past. Wagons rumbled in their wake. Shacks crumbled under the weight of their charge, and then they were out on the plain. From this angle, she could see the cloud of battle before the eastern gate, observed only from this distance as a churning mass of maddened horses, thrown riders, smoke along the rampart, a seething struggle fading into a haze of dust. They pounded over abandoned fields, leaped irrigation ditches, skirted ranks of trees set up as windbreaks, and without further incident the front rank of cavalry with Adelheid at their head reached the first crumpled line of hills.

They paused there, looking back. Dust obscured the plain around Vennaci, all but the high towers. The soldiers cheered. Adelheid stared at the city she had left behind, her profile stark against the autumn-gold hills behind. She wore men's leggings under her gown, which was hitched up over the saddle, and a cunningly worked leather coat fitted to her small frame with a capelet of light mail over her shoulders and red leather flaps reinforced with metal plates draping down over her hips. On her head she wore only a conical helm with a scarf wound 'round her hair for padding. The ride and the wind had uncurled the scarf and now it rippled behind her, making of her the banner which her men followed. She was young, and in that moment on the hillside with battle raging behind her and only a fugitive hope of escape ahead, she was beautiful in the way of saints and God-touched generals.

"We're not out of danger yet," she said abruptly. "There should be sentries here." Rosvita recognized the steep-sided little valley through which she and Theophanu had walked those three days ago. Her back still ached, but as the pain subsided, she realized that she had only wrenched it. As she watched the stragglers come up behind them, she knew she had been lucky. Horses arrived without riders. Of the wagons and servants, only one clattered up—Adelheid's treasury, richly guarded by an escort of twenty armed riders of whom four had weeping red wounds on their bodies. Adelheid surveyed this remnant with an expression of fierce defiance.

In their wake came a captain, gloriously outfitted in mail and a tabard whose rich indigo was not muted by dirt. The crest on his helm had been knocked askew. "Your Majesty! Ironhead has rallied his forces. Soon they will understand our purpose. We must ride on now. The rest are lost to us."

"Then we will wait no longer," she said stoutly. "May God watch over and protect those who have served me faithfully."

Captain Rikard took control of the troops, and they plunged into the hills with the wagon lurching and rattling behind them. A shout tore the air, coming from far behind, then they heard screams and the clash of arms. A rider appeared, vanished where the ground dipped, and reappeared. He wore Adelheid's colors. The captain sent a trooper back as the rest pressed forward, and as soon as the trooper reached the messenger, they both turned to follow the rest. Soon their shouts could be heard: "Ironhead has sent a large force in pursuit!"

They came to a landmark Rosvita recognized, a forked tree at the meeting of two paths. As the captain began to direct the queen straight ahead, Rosvita hailed him. "The path toward Princess Theophanu's encampment is this way!"

she cried, indicating the path that ran to the right.

Rikard shook his head. "If the Wendish forces are engaged with Ironhead, then we'll be caught between his flanks. We must ride north. There are nobles faithful to the queen in Novomo."

Five soldiers split off and rode down the path that led to the Wendish camp. For an instant, Rosvita considered riding after them. But she did not. She had been charged with aiding Adel-heid, and Adelheid would not be safe until she reached Wendar. Some truths taste bitter: like most second children, Theophanu was dispensable. Was that why Henry had sent Theophanu to Aosta instead of Sapientia, after Sanglant had refused him?

The winding path broke through bracken and swathes of grass turned brownish gold. They pressed higher, each turn of the path taking them up in switchbacks until they had to get off and lead the horses. The midday sun made the rock outcroppings shimmer, but only Rosvita seemed to suffer under its heat although the soldiers, too, were sweating. On one rocky stretch the wagon finally broke an axle. A great wailing arose among the servants as Adelheid surveyed this calamity with a frown. Anger sparked in her eyes, but not for her servants.

"We must keep the royal insignia and the crowns and the tribute lists at all costs," she commanded. "But leave what we can't carry of the rest of the treasure. Gold will be of little use to me if I am locked away with it all in my lap in a prison of Ironhead's devising."

"If we could hide some it off the road, Your Majesty," said one of the stewards, "then perhaps we could return and find it."

"Look!" Captain Rikard had sought out a vantage point, the rains of an old tower somewhat above the main track. As Rosvita rode up beside him to look down at the rugged hills up which they had come, helmets bobbed into view far below. "Ironhead's men," he told her, pointing. From this ancient site, soldiers of another race had surveyed the southern approach with ease, as Rosvita did now, shielding her eyes from the sun's glare as she squinted south. Vennaci's towers lay small and dust-hazed far beyond, no taller than her hand measured from this distance. She searched to the west, where Theophanu had set her camp—

"There!" cried the captain.

There! Fire ravaged the Wendish camp, tents ablaze. Smoke obscured the struggle raging below, and in any case they were too far away to truly make sense of what they saw. Was Theophanu routing Ironhead's troops, or being routed in her turn?

"They are closing," said the captain, and all at once Rosvita realized that he cared so little for the Wendish camp that he wasn't looking there at all: He was still measuring the progress of Iron-head's soldiers. A helm winked in sunlight, then was lost to shadow as a score of soldiers vanished up a switchback, riding in the vanguard. Below them, a banner appeared, colors Rosvita could not quite make out but which the captain recognized.

"Ironhead himself dogs us." Hurriedly, they made their way down to the main path, where Adelheid and the others waited. "Your Majesty, we must leave those on foot behind or you will surely be captured. Ironhead has learned of the trick. He himself leads the party that pursues us."

She said nothing for a moment that seemed to drag out into infinity and yet comprised no more than ten heartbeats. But her servants, quickly understanding the situation, threw themselves onto their knees among dirt and stones and begged her to go on. She blessed them and, with tears in her eyes, abandoned them to the mercies of Ironhead's men.

"Was I wrong, Cleric?" she demanded finally as they picked their way down a defile: the queen, a dozen courtiers, six serv-ingwomen, four clerics, Rosvita and about eighty soldiers. Her servants followed en masse, for here on the roughest part of the trail it was no hardship for them to keep up with the horses.

"Was I wrong to believe that it was time to make my escape? Should I have thrown myself on Ironhead's mercy? Should I have maintained the siege through the winter and prayed for deliverance? Was the vision seen in the sky of an army marching in flames a sign sent from the Enemy, not from God?"

"Only God can know, Your Majesty. Their plan remains a mystery to those of us of mortal kin. You did what you thought was right at the time."

Adelheid glanced at her sharply. "What of your lady, my cousin Theophanu? Perhaps this plan of ours has resulted in her death. Was it foolish to try?"

"God have given us free will, Your Majesty. It is in our nature to take risks, to press onward, sometimes foolishly into disaster, sometimes recklessly into unexpected success. I cannot answer. I can only say that we can be no more than what we are."

For a while the path led smoothly alongside a stream flowing down the length of a narrow valley otherwise inhabited only by scrub trees and grassy slopes. Here they made good time, leaving the mass of servants behind. Once they heard a shout, carried on the wind by an echo. But soon the trail turned rough again, pushing up and over several ridges. They came to a stony patch of ground where the path plunged down into a defile, then took a steep turn upward, only to descend again in the next valley, where rocky outcroppings formed fantastic shapes along the steep valley walls, sculpted by a millennia of wind and rain.

"Our road to Vennaci was much smoother than this," said Rosvita to one of the clerics, a lean, unsmiling man called Brother Amicus.

"You came on the road through the Egemo Valley," he observed. "We move west and north into the country of the Ca-pardian ascetics. It is harsh country, and will be hard enough for us to cross. But it will be harder for Ironhead and his men to cross because they have more horses to water and men to feed. It is possible we can hide there until he gives up the chase."

Would Ironhead turn back to take Theophanu prisoner? Or was she already in his hands, or dead?

The horses struggled along on stony paths that in some places were little more than goat tracks. Toward dusk, one went lame. Its rider threw off his armor and took to the countryside, hoping to escape Ironhead by hiding in the hills. The rest pressed on. By this time Rosvita's robes were covered with dust, her lips chapped, her face burned by sun and dry wind. Her back still ached, and she was hungry. But at least her horse remained sound and strong. Slowly, her world had shrunken until the health of her horse and the blessedly empty path behind encompassed her entire world.

Water had collected in the shadowed depths of the next defile, a trickle that fed into a pool and then drained away into rocks. Here they stopped to drink and to water the horses. They were not well provisioned; food and clothing had been lost with the wagons, but the soldiers carried with them dried meat and yesterday's bread, made palatable by keen hunger and by the knowledge that Ironhead was better armed, better provisioned, and probably gaining on them.

There were enough oats for the horses for three days at most. After that, they would have to forage in an increasingly harsh countryside.

Twilight had lowered over them suddenly, but a waxing gibbous moon shone strong enough to light their way as they walked, leading the horses. It was very quiet except for the sound of their passage. Leather creaked. A man whispered to his companion. Brother Amicus coughed. Water trickled down a stony rock face, and after horses and people had drunk their fill, Rosvita took handfuls of it to bathe her face. Grit smeared on her cheeks. One of the combs holding up her hair had come undone, and tendrils of hair stuck to her neck, pasted there by sweat and grime.

They walked on, leading the horses, until the moon set and they had to catch what sleep they could alongside the path with sentries set to watch before and behind. Rosvita dozed fitfully and dreamed of Brother Fidelis' book.

The opening lines of the Life of St. Radegundis burned in her mind as if they had been set afire, lines of flame on shimmering, unearthly vellum. "The Lord and Lady confer glory and greatness on women through strength of mind. .

. . One of this company is Radegundis, she whose earthly life I, Fidelis, humblest and least worthy, now attempt to celebrate. . . . The world divides those whom no space parted once." There was more, but it was not from the Vita at all. It was a scrap recalled from a florilegium which she had read years ago before the words made sense to her, but she could not now remember where, only that the words swam to the surface of her mind in the way of such thoughts, a shoal of minnows darting along the shore.

"In this way the mathematici read the past by means of that ancient record we can comprehend through the uniform movements

of the heavens, which God

have left as their record book, which hides nothing from the scholar who has learned the secret language of the stars. All that has happened may be read there, and all that will happen, and she who masters this language may find revealed to her even the most ancient hidden knowledge of the Lost Ones who vanished off this earth long years ago by means of powers beyond our understanding."

The burning words flashed with sparks as bright as stars falling to earth like angels fleeing God's justice, and she heard a voice in her dream, completely unfamiliar and yet as clear as if she had heard it yesterday: "And they called that time the Great Sundering."

She woke suddenly, shivering. Ai, God! What had happened to the book?

What of Brother Fortunatus and poor, il Brother Constantine? Had they died in the conflagration? Had Ironhead taken them prisoner? Had he tarnished the book? Had it burned? Had it been lost, and the copy so painstakingly made by Sister Amabilia lost with it, all of Brother Fidelis' knowledge, his Vita of the blessed saint, obliterated in a flash of lust and greed?

Without the moon to dim their light, the stars shone with the bril iance of a thousand fiercely burning lanterns. The River of Heaven spilled westward, brimming with the souls of the dead as they streamed toward the Chamber of Light. A horrific fit of certainty overtook her: Amabilia was dead, lost to the world. Her soul flowed overhead in the great river, one of those myriad sparks of light.

She wept a little, and weeping, shifted her seat on the cold rock. Her back flared, hot pain that made her wince. Sparks of light shivered in front of her eyes, only to vanish, then reappear, then vanish again into the hazy distance.

She heard whispers, abrupt and intense. Around her, the company readied to move, although it was still night. The inconstant lights resolved themselves and became will-o-the-wisps and then, with a shudder of fear, she realized they were lanterns carried along the trail.

"Sister!" Brother Amicus knelt beside her, more felt than seen. "We must move quickly."

She could not rise by herself. Two soldiers had to hoist her up, and every least movement sent an agony of pain lancing through her back.

"I can't walk!" she whispered. She almost begged them to leave her, but she heard a sharp challenge, words exchanged, and a blessedly familiar voice.

Joy can ameliorate pain.

The parties mixed, melded, although there were few enough of the Wendish. She fought her way to Theophanu's side and kissed her hand repeatedly.

"Your Highness!" She was aghast to hear what a croak her voice was, sanded away almost to nothing. "How have you come here?"

"These good Aostan soldiers led us on your trail," said Theo-phanu. "My most valued teacher!" She kissed Rosvita on either cheek. It was too dark to see her expression, but her grip was strong, even passionate. "I feared you were lost, like so much else."

"Sister!" From out of the darkness she heard Brother Fortunatus' voice, rather wheezy but wonderfully real. "Sister Rosvita!"

They were separated by the press of the crowd as Adelheid came forward to greet Theophanu, as whispered commands raced through the company and they made ready to leave. Somehow she found her horse and, with the aid of an Aostan soldier, mounted, giving the reins into his care. Perhaps it would have been better to walk. She gripped the saddle and prayed; each least shift in the saddle made her back burn; she became quite light-headed. After a long while she realized that she could see the countryside in the gray light of early dawn.

They came to a forking of paths. Rosvita had somehow gotten to the head of the line. She heard a great deal of discussion behind her, and she desperately wished to look behind, but each time she tried to turn in the saddle so much pain tore through her back and shoulders that she literally could not move, and she finally gave up and just sat hunched there, enduring the pain and the awful curiosity, not sure which was worse. At last they moved on, but she could hear at her back a party moving off away from them.

After a while, Brother Fortunatus drew up beside her. "Are you well, Sister?" His expression betrayed his anxiety. "You are not wounded?"

"It is only the infirmity of age, Brother. I'm not accustomed to riding in this rash manner. My back is al a knot."

"I have a salve that should help you, Sister."

"What have you saved from the camp?" she demanded. "Where is Brother Constantine?"

He looked too tired to cry. "Brother Constantine took a turn for the worse after you left, Sister. I believe—I must believe—

that the worst was over, that he was recovering, but he was simply too weak to be moved when—" Now he faltered. "We had to leave him behind. But I trust that Aostans respect the church and will care for him as God wish Their servants to be cared for." He pressed a hand against the dust-coated saddlebags draped over the mule's back, his only possession besides the robe he wore. "But I have your History, Sister, and the Vita of St. Rade-gundis, and Sister Amabilia's copy. Such salves and ointments as were near at hand, and your eagle quill pen, neatly wrapped. Everything else we had to abandon."

"Bless you, Brother."

"Nay," he said impatiently. "I was of no use. Princess Theo-phanu remained calm throughout the disaster, but it is only because of Captain Fulk and his men that we escaped with our lives. They did not let the passing days lull them into somnolence, as the rest of us did. Ironhead's men are merciless. It is clear to me now that they had long planned to attack our encampment without warning. Indeed, we are lucky that Queen Adelheid chose to lead her escape when she did, or we would all of us have been lost, because I do believe Ironhead had made plans to wipe us out entirely. Only because of the queen's gambit was he forced to pull many of his forces back to the city. He had already placed men beyond our lines in readiness for a night attack."

Abruptly, above the ringing of harness and the steady clip-clop of horses and the whine of wind through the rocks, they heard the unmistakable clamor of battle joined.

"What is happening?" Rosvita exclaimed.

"Captain Rikard stayed behind with half of his men to ambush Ironhead and perhaps kill him, if God should favor them. That will buy us time."

"At the cost of their lives."

Fortunatus merely shrugged. They pressed on and soon the sounds of battle faded. Rosvita's awareness contracted to the agonizing throb in her back and the presence of Brother Fortunatus at her side. She stopped seeing the landscape through which they rode. She did not dismount when they came to a spring but gratefully drank the water brought to her by a Wendish soldier in his upturned helmet. The water was warm and the helmet slick with sweat, but she minded neither of these things: it was moist and it gave relief to her dry throat.

She was past caring about anything else.

War was a sport for the young. Or was it sport at all, but only the physical manifestation of discontented ambition and youthful boredom? Old women rarely had the energy or the compulsion to ride to war: that was why God had placed them in positions of authority, to rein back the dangerously high spirits of those ruled by lust for material power and wealth, all that which is made of flesh and earth and thus tainted by the hand of the Enemy.

For a long while, as the sun rose higher in the sky, she simply shut her eyes and hung on, accompanied only by the sound of their passage through a ringing, empty countryside. It was hot for autumn. She thought perhaps her throat had become so parched that she would never talk again, but that surely would then allow her to retire from court and, at last, to finish her History of the Wendish people which she had promised to Queen Mathilda so long ago. Was it really five years ago she had made that promise? Had she been so occupied in Henry's court that she had accomplished so little? Would she ever finish?

"Sister!" She started, gasped at the pain, and became aware that she had dozed off in the saddle. Brother Fortunatus stood beside her, propping her up.

"Are you fainting, Sister? Can you walk?"

A soldier stood beside her holding a hunk of dry bread and that same helmet. She had to soak the bread in the water to make it edible, but in the end she got it down and was able to look about, counting their much reduced company: Queen Adelheid, Princess Theophanu, some three dozen Wendish soldiers commanded by Captain Fulk, an equal number of Aostan soldiers, and an assortment of noble companions and clerics and servants numbering about three dozen. Slowly, she became aware of consternation eddying through the ranks. It took her a moment to understand its origin: in the last hour, eight horses, including the queen's, had come up lame, and they now did not have enough mounts. Two scouts had been sent back down the path to seek news of their pursuers, but neither had returned. They still had oats for the horses but no more food, and for water they were now entirely dependent on such springs and rivulets as they could find.

The bread had given her a bit of strength, and she now saw how cruel the countryside looked, a reddish, crumbling stone warped by wind and time to make great pillars worn smooth into striations as even as if God's Hand had painted them there and soft cliffs eroded with a hundred tiny cavelets along their faces. There were no trees. Grass and scrubby bushes huddled like lost souls along dry streambeds.

"No!" Adelheid's voice rang out. She looked as bold as a lioness. "I have lost too much now to give in to Ironhead. He has made it a duel between him and me, and I refuse to surrender or to give up! A short way from here we will leave this path and turn north into the wilderness of Capardia."

"He will see our tracks," objected Theophanu, without heat. Rosvita had to admire her. As dusty as they al were, as exhausted, as bereft of hope, Theophanu remained composed and upright, coolly assessing their desperate situation.

"So he will," replied Adelheid. "But where we will go, it will make no matter because he cannot follow us. Who among you is brave enough to follow me into the haunts of those long dead?"

A sentry waved a flag from the ridge behind them, and word was ferried down from man to man until it reached Adelheid. "He sees Berto riding in our direction, at a gallop."

"Then one of our scouts returns to us," said Adelheid with satisfaction.

But suddenly, the sentry left his post and came scrambling down the hill himself at a run, men scattering around him. "Ai, Your Majesty!" he cried.

"Berto's shot in the back by an arrow. I see Ironhead's banner, and his men. We haven't much time."

"And how much time do we have?" asked Theophanu as calmly as if she were asking for a second helping of meat at supper.

"They'll be on us within an hour like to that sung by the clerics at sunrise."

They looked then, all of them, to Adelheid, not toward Theophanu.

"Come," she said decisively. "Brother Amicus knows this country well, for he was fostered here. He will lead us to the convent of St. Ekatarina. There my mother sent me when I was a child and my elder sister had just been abducted and killed by a prince not unlike Ironhead. I lived there in safety for a year while war killed my three older brothers. The nuns won't turn me away. Come, then!

We must hurry!"

Several of them were forced to double up in the saddle, including Rosvita.

As they rode in haste along the path, Rosvita sat behind Fortunatus and simply laid her head against his broad back, bonier now, but still substantial. She drifted off; started into wakefulness when they left the main path and headed up into a landscape so weird that for a hallucinatory while she thought they had passed through a magical portal into another world entirely, inhabited by fantastical creatures from another plane of existence: basilisks and dragons, griffins and giants molded from stones. Eight riders remained behind to brush away the mark of their passing and to go on along the main path as a decoy. Brave men, each one. But wasn't that the way of the soldier? If he served his lady faithfully, he would be rewarded with earthly prosperity if he lived, and when he died, as all must in time, then with a place among the loyal retainers in the Chamber of Light.

She was dizzy with hunger and pain, and everything seemed so strange to her. Her lips burned as with words unspoken.

"What was the Great Sundering?" she asked. But no one answered, and she closed her eyes to blessed darkness.

A long time later she swayed as on the ocean, and the gulf of air opened beyond her so that if she inhaled deeply enough, she could breathe in the entire universe and all the stars which lay within reach of her hand, there beyond the chasm: She saw ground far below and a cliff at her shoulder, rubbed by the huge basket in which she sat all curled up. She was jerked upward, fainted again, and then there was rock beneath her feet and hands to lift her up. Many voices echoed around her, and it was terribly dark, as dark as the Abyss, into which none of God's light shines, for it is not the presence of the Enemy that is torment as much as the absence of God.

But the air was sweet, and she was laid down on a soft bed and water soothed her skin and then an ointment eased the terrible pain that had gripped her back and shoulders and she was fed a gruel so soft and mildly warm that it slipped down her throat like a salve for the dolorous heart.

But no one had yet answered her. A face swam into view, as blurry as a shifting shoal of minnows underwater. It was an

cient, wrinkled like an apple left over from the last autumn's harvest.

"What was the Great Sundering?" Rosvita asked, surprised to hear her own voice, such as it was, coarsened by pain and the hardship of the journey and their failure. Why was she asking this question? Where had it come from?

The ancient crone smoothed a salve onto her cheeks. For a moment it stung, then faded. "You are suffering from a lack of water, and a surfeit of sun and pain and anxiety, my child," she said in a voice made reedy by age. "Who has spoken to you of the Great Sundering?"

"I don't know," said Rosvita, marveling. Her eyes had adjusted. Two slits in the rock chamber let in air and light, and she realized that she lay on a pallet in the middle of a circular room hewn from rock. The plastered walls were entirely covered with frescoes that had long since cracked and peeled with immense age.

People—nay, not people, but creatures like to humankind—stared at her with jade green eyes and skin now discolored to a greenish bronze. They wore plumage more than clothing, bold feathers, crudely cut skirts sewn of leather and furs, cunningly tied loincloths, shawls woven of shells and gold beads and precious stones. There was some narrative written into these paintings, a lush land torn by invasion, a desperate, overwhelmed population, the workings of magi each of whom held a staff carved out of black stone. A man of their kind was flayed alive, and his blood gave birth to warriors. Great cities of a vast and intricate architecture burned and toppled. And there was a crown of stars: a stone circle set out under a night sky brilliant with stars. Only one constellation was picked out in jewels above the stone circle, that of the Child who will be Queen; she reached for the sparkling cluster of seven stars, itself called the Crown, that lay directly above Rosvita at the height of the curved dome that was the ceiling of the stone chamber.

"Where am I?" Rosvita whispered.

"We are here in the convent of St. Ekatarina, she who prayed and fasted in the desert for many days until in the heavens she saw a vision of titanic battles and of dragons flying in the sky. And a voice said to her: 'All that is lost will be reborn on this earth because of a Great Unveiling like to that Great Sundering in which vanished the Aoi.' Then she came to this place. Here she found these paintings which spoke to her of that terrible time when the Lost Ones ruled mortal lands. Here she established a convent, and so we few have followed after her in caring for what God have preserved."

"Are these relics of the Aoi themselves?"

"Who can know, child? These were painted long ago. Perhaps they represent the last testament of the Aoi. Perhaps they represent the memories of those humans who lived in that long ago time, before they had the means to record their remembrances in writing. But you must rest now. You must sleep."

"The others?"

"They are safe."

She left, and Rosvita was alone, yet not alone at all because of the creatures who stared at her from the walls, accusing, plaintive, proud, and angry. They are not like us. They looked hard and cruel, arrogant and cunning and unforgiving. What was it the church mothers had written of elvenkind? "Bom of the mating between humans and angels." With all the cold beauty of angels and the bestial passions of humankind.

Sanglant's mother had looked so. Rosvita had seen her one time, when she was herself a very young woman newly come to King Arnulf's court. The elven woman had called herself. "Alia," which means "other," in Dariyan; no one had ever known her real name. She had wanted something, and everyone had first thought she wanted the child, but then she had abandoned him soon after his birth.

What had Alia truly wanted? Would they ever know?

Beyond the fresco depicting the stone circle and an assembly of Aoi magicians, a painted obsidian knife seemed to cut away the narrative told on these walls, as if to end it. Beyond the knife-cut lay only a scene of sharp sea cliffs and shoreline and the cool expanse of empty sea. All the elves, and their cities, and their troubles, and their enemies, had vanished.

LIATH didn't like being pregnant. It made her feel stupid, and ungainly, and trapped in an odd way that she had never before experienced, as if before she could have stepped off the earth into the aether without looking back and now she was anchored to the earth by the creature growing inside her. It also made her tired, and cranky, and weepy, and distracted. Her feet hurt. And she had to pee all the time.

But except for that, she was utterly and enchantingly happy. Right now, with a contented sigh, she sank down to sit on the edge of the bed. It had, of course, been the first thing Sanglant had helped Heribert build when they arrived at Verna four months ago. Sanglant tumbled into bed behind her and stretched out with one hand propping up his head and the other splayed over her belly, feeling the beat, so he always said, of their child's heart.

"Strong and clear," he said into her silence. "What is it, Liath?"

She had been absently scratching the head of the Eika dog, curled up half under the bed, but his words startled her into blurting out the thoughts, all chopped up and half-formed as they were, that crowded her mind with such pleasant chaos. "When I calculate the movements of the planets in the heavens into the months and years to come, I keep stopping at midnight on the tenth day of Octumbre in the year . On that day I see great signs of change, of powers waxing, the possibility of power and of change. Three planets at nadir, and two descendant, and the waxing crescent moon is beneath the horizon in the sign of the Unicorn, although it will rise in the early hours of the morning. Only Aturna is ascendant, rising at midnight in the sign of the Healer, well, really, right at the cusp of the Healer and the Penitent."

"Is this soothsaying?" asked Sanglant. "I thought one could not read the future in the stars, and surely we have not yet reached the year . Or have we?"

"Nay, nay." She reached for her wax tablet and toyed with the stylus tied to it, then, distracted by the round of cheese sitting on the table, cut off a wedge and ate it. "This year is , and it will soon turn to . But the movements of the wandering stars are constant, so we can predict where they'll be at any date in the future. But when I calculate the chart for that day, I feel that I'm missing one thing. That if I had that one thing, all the portents would make sense."

Sanglant groaned in mock pain. "Perhaps while you think you can find all the aches in my back and arms and legs. I've never seen such a mighty fir as the one that fell—" He broke off, rubbed at a welt on his left hand, and continued.

"As the one I felled yesterday. I have hacked at unyielding wood all day and been scratched by needles, and now I itch horribly, and my back hurts." But he said it with a laugh; he never whined. He moved closer so that he curled against her back, a hand stroking her. "Is it too much to ask for an hour of simple comfort?"

She and Da had lived without much laughter, but with Sanglant, it was easy to laugh. "I never get an hour of simple comfort anymore. Why should you?" He kindly did not reply except to roll onto his stomach, displaying his fine, muscled back in the light of the single lantern that hung from the crossbeam above them.

With Heribert's help he had cleaned out an outlying shed, closed up the gaps in the walls, rethatched the roof, closed off the fourth side, and hung a door in the threshold. The bed had been the first piece of furniture, four posts, a lattice of rope, and a feather bed into which they sank each night with pleasure.

He had also built a chest on which to sit, and in which he kept his armor, which he oiled and polished once a week. Over the last months he had made free with Sister Meriam's herb garden and on a shelf fixed high on the wall above the chest an entire shelf of oils and salves and pouches of dried herbs lay ready.

He closed his eyes while she rubbed ointment into his back and dabbed a poultice mixed of the pulped root of carrot onto the scratches on his hands and lower arms where his tunic had not protected him from the sting of fir. The aroma of pine resin melded with oil of ginger.

It was absorbing work, the feel of his skin under her hands, the slope of his body, the half smile of contentment caught on his face. He lived so easily in the world, in the present moment, purely in the realm of senses. Sometimes that irritated her, but other times she admired it. She could never be like him. Even now, her thoughts spun off as if caught in the whirl of the heavens, ever-moving.

Was it the heavens that moved, east to west? Or was it the Earth, revolving west to east? Both Ptolomaia, writing centuries ago, and the Jinna astronomer al-Haytham, writing only ten years before, believed that physical law and observable fact proved that the Earth remained stationary at the middle of the heavens while the heavens rotated around it. But more ancient authors had argued otherwise. Indeed, the fact that no one truly knew the answer made the questions all that much more interesting to her.

Sanglant grunted as she worked through a knot in his back. God knew he didn't truly belong here in this nest of mathe-matici. And yet, why not? He needed a refuge, too. He needed to rest; he needed a place where he could be at peace. He had fewer nightmares now, and he didn't act quite as much like a dog as he had before. But sometimes she worried that he would grow bored with nothing to do but fell trees and help Heribert build things. She wasn't ready to leave yet. There was so much to learn that it hurt sometimes, knowing that she had finally come to a place where they would let her learn without punishing her for what she was.

And yet. . .

She stroked his cheek gently. "Why do I never feel I can trust them?" she whispered, leaning to his ear. The servants curled and hid everywhere, and she never knew what they reported to Anne, who controlled them. "Why don't I trust my own mother?"

But he had fallen asleep.

In truth, maybe he would never know the answer. Maybe he could never know it. He couldn't do everything for her. Nor could she let him.

She kissed him, slipped on her sandals, and left. She trod the accustomed path, worn smooth now, to the pits out beyond the settlement. The night lay cloudy and cool around her, but she had no trouble seeing in the dim light; she never did. With her pregnancy, she had given up wearing leggings because it was so inconvenient and wore only her old tunic, belted loosely now so it draped over her swelling abdomen and fell to her calves. None of her companions ever said anything out loud, but it was clear to her that they disapproved of the casual way in which she and Sanglant dressed—she like a commoner, he like a soldier. Yet although the magi themselves wore robes of the finest cloth, that cloth was now worn threadbare; they cared little for such trivial considerations as clothing—or so they claimed. And anyway, Da had always said that, "Fine feathers don't make a duck, swimming does."

But their censure made no difference in any case. She had no cloth for new clothing, and no way to get any unless the servants could weave a robe for her from stray beams of light or the silk of spiders or the veins of leaves. No doubt they'd do it if they could, if only to please Sanglant. She could just see a dozen or so twined around the jutting eaves of the old shed, but as she walked down the path to the stone tower, only one servant followed her. It was always the same one, a femalelike daimone with the texture of water, flowing, translucent, yet it wasn't truly interested in her but in what grew inside her, as if the fact of her pregnancy had laid a compulsion on it to remain by her side. The others still seemed to fear her.

She pushed open the tower door, found a lantern on the table, and opened its milky glass door. Licking forefinger and thumb, she touched them to the wick.

Light flared, oil caught, and the lantern burned steadily. Anne had taught her this trick, had schooled her in the habits of mind that allowed her to control such insignificant amounts of fire, like to a child learning her letters so well that she need not think consciously of them to know them instantly on sight. The servant flicked away from the fire, frightened of it, but the creature did not leave the chamber, only hovered nearby like an anxious nursemaid. Liath set tablet and stylus down on the table and unlocked the book cupboard where the ephemerides lay stored among other such treasures, the repository of centuries of knowledge hoarded and saved from the ravages of time and ignorant men. So Anne always said.

Her hand touched the spine of the well-worn ephemerides, but instead, distracted, she drew out Ptolomaia's Syntaxis. She opened it to the second chapter where the esteemed author set down the six hypotheses. One, that the heaven is spherical in shape, and moves spherically; Two, that the Earth is spherical; Three, that the position of the Earth is at the middle of the universe; Four, that in size and distance the Earth has the ratio of a point relative to the sphere of the fixed stars; Five, that the Earth is at rest, not experiencing motion from place to place; Six, that there are two motions in the heavens, one daily motion that carries everything from east to west, and the motion of the Sun, Moon, and planets along the ecliptic from west to east.

She rose again and stepped outside. Was it pregnancy that made her restless, or the sudden infusion of knowledge, the constant studying, the pressure of her five companions in the arts whose expectations pressed on her endlessly? They wanted so much from her. She wanted so much from herself.

Only Sanglant expected nothing of her, and yet that wasn't true either; his expectations were only different than theirs, less open and forceful but perhaps more insidious.

Wind off the peaks had torn up the clouds and she saw stars, quickly covered again. The sphere of the heavens revolved from east to west, and so, seen from a motionless Earth, the stars rose in the east and set in the west. But maybe the heavens were at rest and it was the Earth which revolved from west to east, as the long-dead Arethousan astronomers Hipparchia and Aristachius had suggested. That would create the same effect, wouldn't it? Or perhaps both heaven and Earth moved around the same axis, preserving their observable differences by rotating at differing speeds.

She picked up a rock and threw it into the air, put her hands over her head. It landed with a thunk beside her. Surely if the Earth were in motion, then if she threw a rock with enough force straight up into the air, the motion of the Earth would carry her away from it before it fell to the ground?

Ai, God, she had to pee again. And by the time she had done with that, her mind had swung back to the most nagging question, the only one that clung to her all the time: Why didn't she trust them?

Night was not a good time to work through such a complicated tangle of thoughts. And she was tired again; exhaustion always came on suddenly. But she had left a lantern burning and a book out, so she returned to the tower. All was peaceful there, just as she had left it, the lantern burning quietly and the book resting open on the table, a moment suspended in time that roped her thoughts back to where they had been. Certainly she couldn't throw a rock with enough force to test the theory of the Earth's rotation. Compared to the heavens, the Earth was tiny, but that didn't mean that to a human walking its surface it could be quickly traversed. She had seen ships come up over the horizon, sails and masts emerging first; that suggested not only a spherical Earth but one of immense size compared to a single human stride. It seemed to her that she need only find a place where the summer solstice sun at noon cast no shadow when measured against a stick stuck vertically in the ground as a marker. Then she could walk north along that same longitude, measuring her path, and on the next summer solstice sun she need only measure the shadow cast by another vertical marker at a different location. If there was again no shadow, then the Earth wasn't spherical; but if there was, then she ought to be able to calculate the circumference of the Earth by multiplying the degree of the angle with the distance in leagues between the two points. In The Book of Secrets Da had written of a town far to the south, in sun-raked Gyptos, where St. Peter the Geometer had dug a well so exactly situated that on the summer solstice the Sun's rays touched its bottom. If she walked north from that point. .

.

"Your thoughts are far from here."

She jumped and gasped aloud, almost comically, and was relieved to see Sister Meriam standing just outside the threshold, walking stick in her right hand.

Liath helped her over the threshold.

"I saw a light," said Meriam. "You have not woken Brother Severus?"

Liath looked toward the ladder that led to a trapdoor set into the ceiling. "I have been quiet."

"That is well," replied Meriam. She placed a gnarled hand on Liath's belly without asking permission, but she had the authority of the ancient: Liath could not really be offended by her blunt speaking or intrusive manner. "You are growing as you should be. Where is the prince?" "He's sleeping." "So many knots." "What do you mean?"

Meriam removed her hand. Age had sucked her dry; she was so small that Liath felt like a giant beside her. "I mean what I say: so many knots in the threads that bind the life of humans one to the next."

"Where do you come from?" asked Liath suddenly. "How did you get here?"

"I come from the east," said Meriam wryly, indicating her dark skin.

"I know that!" Liath laughed, then caught herself and glanced up, guiltily, knowing that Severus would not take kindly to being woken. He didn't like looking at her; her pregnancy disgusted him. But his disgust only made her wonder why a man with so much knowledge would even be bothered by such a common thing. What did it matter to him? "I mean," said Liath, "where in the east? How did you get here?"

"I came as a sacrifice."

"A sacrifice!"

"An offering." She had an accent blurred by time and age, a hint of exotic spices and brutal sun. "I was sent as a gift by the khshayathiya to the king of the Wendish people, but the king had no use for me, so he gave me to one of his dukes. When I flowered I was brought to his bed. Some time after that, I gave birth to a son."

"Are you saying," said Liath slowly, astounded, "that you are the mother of Conrad the Black, duke of Wayland?"

"So I am."

It seemed impossible to Liath that this tiny woman could have given birth at all, let alone to as robust a person as Duke Conrad. "But you have estates to administer. A child to watch over. Grandchildren! Why are you here?"

Meriam was too old to take offense at impertinent questions. "That I bore one living child and three dead ones did not change the path laid out for me. It only delayed it. Once my son came of age and gained his dukedom and a wife, then I had the freedom to retire. He no longer needed watching over."

Liath choked back a snort of laughter.

"You have met him?" Meriam asked without smiling, but with the simple pride of a mother who knows the worth of her child.

Liath considered what to say, and chose caution. "He is hard to forget."

"You are not at all like him." Meriam brushed dry fingers over Liath's arm.

Despite her age, her hands bore no calluses; she had lived a noblewoman's life from infancy to this day, never humbling herself with the day-to-day labor of living. Liath's own hands bore calluses, the legacy of her life with Da, and Meriam's light touch explored these briefly as well, as if Liath's skin revealed her entire history, all from the brush of a finger. "You are not of Jinna blood. Who are your father's kin? From whence comes this complexion?"

"All I know of my father's kin is that he has a cousin who is lady of Bodfeld.

But might it not come from my mother's kin?"

Meriam looked at her strangely. "Has Anne not spoken to you of this?"

"Of what?"

"Then it is not my place to do so."

When Meriam spoke with that tone of voice, Liath knew that it was useless to try to influence her to say more. Not even Brother Severus in all his arrogance could bully her. In the intimacy of a private meeting in the middle of a peaceful night, Liath couldn't help but ask one more question. "You said that your path was laid out for you, but delayed. But you never really answered my question.

Why are you here, Sister Meriam?"

Wind creaked the door. Shadows curled along the beams, a servant settling down to listen, or to sleep—if they ever slept. In the dim light it was easy to forget how old and frail Meriam was; her voice still had the strength of youth. "I was taken from the temple of Astareos, He who is Fire Incarnate, where I was to have been an acolyte in His service, a priestess of the Holy Fire. I had already learned enough then to know my task in life, for certain priestesses there had the gift of prophecy. That my fate led me elsewhere for a time is only another knot in the tangle of life."

"The you were always meant to be a magi, the way I was?"

Meriam chuckled, age amused by youthful blindness. "Nay, not as you were. I came here to save what I can."

"Save it from what?"

" 'When the crown of stars crowns the heavens...' Ah. But you haven't completed your calculations yet."

That casual remark threw Liath again, like a flung stone falling to earth far from its original resting place. Those damned calculations. What had she overlooked?

"You will know it when you see it," said Meriam, answering a question she hadn't asked.

"Why must you all make it like a puzzle?" demanded Liath. "Why can't you just tell me what I'm looking for?"

"Because you won't truly understand what it is we work toward until you have discovered it for yourself." Liath began to protest, but Meriam raised a hand for silence. "It is all very well to protest that because you have seen a horse ridden, you know how to ride. But you don't know how to ride until you have yourself ridden. Isn't that true?"

"I don't see—

"You don't see because you persist in thinking that the art of the mathematici is like a story, something you can understand equally well whether it is read to you or you read it yourself. But the art of the mathematici isn't a story, it is a skill, like riding a horse, or fighting, or administering an estate, something that takes time and effort to master. Would you set an apprentice weaver to weave the king's royal robes? Ask a novice to illuminate the Holy Verses? Trust your life to a pilot who had never before sailed through these shoals? You, of all people, must understand fully."

"Why?" Then Liath laughed, having picked up the habit from Sanglant.

"Never mind, Sister. I know what you will say. You will say that when I understand fully, then I will also understand why I must understand fully."

"There lies the beginning of understanding." Was Meriam amused? It was hard to tell. She was too ancient to be easily read. Like all the magi, she held layers within layers in herself, none of which were readily peeled off.

"Is that why you're here, to understand?"

"Nay," she replied so quietly that a hundred misgivings congealed into a dreadful foreboding in Liath's heart, and the night no longer seemed so tame. "I am here to save my child and my child's children from what will come."

Sanglant woke abruptly, was on his knees on the bed ready to lunge for his attacker before he realized that it was dawn and that Liath had just closed the door behind her on her way out. He shook sleep and fear and memory out of his head.

Sometimes he thought the dreams of Bloodheart would never end.

Sometimes he remembered that one night out of two he slept in peace and didn't dream at all.

He had woken in the night when Liath returned, and they had had a long conversation that he didn't recall with any clarity now except that in addition to eating all the cheese and bread she had gone on about not being able to trust this nest of mathematici into which they'd been thrown. Maybe he hadn't really been awake. Sometimes he didn't know when Liath's sudden attacks of foreboding were just shadows woven out of her own fears or real premonitions of a truth she only glimpsed. He knew better than to trust a nest of mathematici, especially ones as powerful and as hidden as these. Especially knowing that at least one among them wanted to kill him. Perhaps Liath only suffered because she wanted to trust them. She wanted them all to have her open delight in knowledge, to want to know things for their own sake. She wanted them to be simple, and honest, and pure.

But he had lived for a long time in court. He had fought in more battles than he cared to count, and he would fight again if need be and pray to God afterward for peace. He had seen a lot of people die. Truly, there were some people who could be trusted, some open, honest souls like his poor, dead, faithful Dragons, or even some old, wily ones, like Helmut Villam, who would hold fast at your back when you were fighting for your life. There might even be some pure souls in this world, but he doubted it.

Most people in this world, he had found, were agreeable— as long as you treated them agreeably in your turn—but they were far from pure. Even after a life of running and hiding, Liath could be remarkably naive.

But with God as his witness, he had never desired a woman as much as he desired her. And he had desired, and consorted with, a lot of women in his time.

He grinned, dressed, rousted out the dog, and went outside to find Liath shooting arrows at herself.

At first he gaped stupidly as he saw her out in the meadow beyond their hut: He had never before seen such a display of idiocy. She aimed directly above her head as if shooting at the heavens, drew, and loosed the arrow.

"Liath!" he shouted, bolting for her.

She had her back to the sun, and to him, and she had thrown her head back to watch the arrow fly up and up and up, and then, as any fool knew it would, slow, tumble, turn, and fall back to earth. At her. She took a step back, caught her foot in a hole in the ground, and fell down hard just as the arrow whoofed into flame above her head and showered to earth as ash, sprinkling her hair.

"Liath!" he cried, kneeling beside her, but she was laughing and rubbing one hip where she'd landed hard.

"I didn't see the hole!" she said cheerfully.

"You would have seen it if you'd kept your eyes on the ground and looked where you were going!"

"But then I couldn't have watched the arrow's flight!"

"Ai, God," muttered Sanglant, helping her up and, for good measure, taking the bow out of her hand. He rested a palm on her abdomen to listen for the child. Its heart beat steadily, quickening as it stirred, slowing as it settled again. No harm taken. "What on God's Earth were you doing?"

"Just that. I'm trying to see if the Earth rotates. Because if it does, then surely an arrow shot high enough would land some distance away from the archer. That's because the archer, standing on the Earth, would have moved as the Earth rotates in the time it takes the arrow to reach the height and fall—"

"On your head!"

"Not if you have sufficient height or speed of rotation." She winced, kneading her bruised hip again, then rubbed the remains of the arrow into the grass with one sandaled toe, looking thoughtful.

The rising sun shone behind her, struggling up over the mountain peaks.

She hadn't rebraided her hair yet, and wisps of it trailed around her face, curling delicately along her neck. How often did he catch himself just admiring her, as if nothing else existed in that moment? It was as if a part of her had settled down inside him, taken up residency in his soul, long before he had realized she was there. He was more her captive than he had ever been Bloodheart's, and yet in this case the chains were of his own making, and they weren't truly chains at all.

That which bound them remained invisible and yet no less strong because of that. It was at moments like this that he felt blinded by happiness.

She glanced up to see him watching her, then smiled brilliantly and indicated her bow, which he now held. "Do you want to try?" she asked brightly.

It was at moments like this that he thought he would probably never understand her.

IN PLAIN SIGHT

SORROW, Rage, and Fear woke him this morning as they did every morning, with dog kisses, sloppy tongues licking his face. They didn't cease pestering him until he rolled out of bed, washed his face and relieved himself, and let a servant bring him tunic and hose. He led them down the stairs and outside, where they ran, tucking their tails and tearing around like wild things, barking with pleasure, snapping at garlands of ice on low-hanging branches. It hadn't snowed yet, although Candle-mass, the first day of winter, was only a week away, but every morning the ground sparkled with a coldly beautiful frost.

When the hounds had run off their high spirits, he whistled them back, and they followed him meekly to the hall. He seated himself in the count's chair, and his people came forward as they did every day, wary of the hounds who lol ed at his feet but otherwise respectful: this week so many apples had been pressed and laid aside into barrels for cider; goats had gotten into winter wheat at the Ravnholt manor, and the man who worked the field wanted the woman who owned the goats to pay him a fine for the damage they had caused; a laborer up by Teilas wished for the count's permission to marry at the new year; the shepherds had cut out fifty head of cattle for the Novarian slaughter, those animals deemed unworthy to be wintered over; his clerics wished to know which grain stores should be opened next for the distribution of bread to the poor.

Duchess Yolande had sent a messenger to say she would arrive to celebrate the Feast of St. Herodia with her beloved cousin. They had, therefore, about six weeks to make preparations to house and feed her entourage. The falcons and merlins must be flown. There was hunting to do, both as sport and for meat to smoke against the lean months of late winter and early spring.

He took something to eat at midday and then, as always, he climbed the stairs to the chamber where Lavastine's corpse lay as cool as stone, without any taint of decay. Terror lay on one side of the bed, Steadfast on the other, two faithful attendants seemingly carved out of granite. Here beside the draped bed Alain prayed every day, sometimes for an hour or more as the fit took him, but today he merely laid a hand on Lavastine's cold brow, feeling for the spirit buried deep within. It was difficult to believe his spirit was flown when he lay here so perfectly hewn as by a master sculptor, in death as in life. Alain wept a little, as he always did, out of shame for the lie.

Ai, God. Tallia had not been visited by her monthly courses since the death of Lavastine over two months ago. Everyone said she was pregnant, and Tallia herself had begun to murmur about holy conception and a shower of golden light visiting her while she was at her prayers, which these days took up most of her waking hours. Alain could not help but hope against hope even though he knew what Aunt Bel would say: "No cow will calve without that a bull covers her first."

It was one of her ways of saying that work wouldn't get done unless someone did it, and he was bitterly aware that he hadn't done his work.

But he was simply too tired to fight past Tallia's resistance. It was hard enough to get her to eat more than a crust of bread each day. It was hard enough to get up each morning himself and sit in the count's chair and ride the count's horse and speak with the count's voice; he kept expecting Lavastine to walk into the room, but Lavastine never did.

But as Aunt Bel would say: No use for the child to cry over what's been spilled; she's better off cleaning it up and getting on with it. Lavastine would have agreed with her. Alain shook himself, kissed the granite brow, and left.

Aunt Bel was much on his mind as he walked to Lavas Church with three clerics and two stewards in attendance, to oversee the work going on there. In the spring he and Tallia must go on progress through their lands, to show themselves, to receive oaths and give oaths in return. How would he be received at Aunt Bel's steading? With surprise? With the respect due his position? Or with scorn and anger? He could not bear to think of Henri; it still hurt too badly, even after all this time. It infuriated him that Henri, of all people, would believe that he could lie and cheat to gain advantage in his life. Maybe it would be better simply to ride on by and not see them, not now. He could wait. There was always another year.

But that was the coward's way.

The stone workers sat outside the church in the sun eating bread and cheese. Strangely, Tallia's attendants also waited outside the church, clustered like a flock of lost doves on the entry porch.

"My lord count." Lady Hathumod came forward hesitantly. She looked troubled. "Lady Tallia asked to be left in solitude to commune with God."

"So she shall be. I'll go in alone." He signaled his own attendants to wait outside, and the hounds flopped down at the threshold.

He hadn't seen her since yesterday and, pausing in the nave of the shadowy church, he didn't see her at first as his eyes adjusted. Light from the east-facing windows fell on the altar. Midway along the nave, the stone bier was rising slowly, dressed stone by dressed stone, to make a fitting resting place for Lavas-tine's corpse.

Her slight figure knelt on the steps before the altar, shoulders hunched and shaking. He walked forward so quietly that she didn't hear him, and as he came up beside her, he heard her grunting softly with pain.

"Tallia?" He gently touched her on the shoulder.

She cried out and jerked back from him. In that moment, he saw what she had been doing: scraping at the wounds on her palms and wrists with an old nail. Blood oozed from the jagged cuts. Pus inflamed the gash on the palm of her right hand. Seeing his horrified expression, she began to weep helplessly.

He did not know what to do, except to take the nail away from her.

Finally, he coaxed her back to their chamber. He settled her on their bed and chased away her servingwomen, even Hathu-mod. She only stopped weeping because she was too weak to cry for long. Her face was sunken, almost skeletal, her skin so translucent that the veins showed blue. She hadn't washed in a long time: he found dirt behind her ears and a collar of grime at her neck.

Her feet were filthy, and her knees scabbed and scaly from all those hours of kneeling. Her wrists felt so thin he thought he might have been able to snap them in two were he angry enough.

But, strangely, he wasn't angry. He was just very tired.

"Tallia," he said finally in the tone Aunt Bel might have used after she'd sat up three nights running with a deathly ill child who, past the point of danger, had now begun to whine that she didn't like her gruel, "you are not well. You will remain in bed, and you will eat gruel and bread pudding every day, and greens and meat, until you are strong enough that you don't forget yourself in this way again."

She began to whimper. "But God must love me. God will only love me if I suffer as did Her beloved Son. It is through our suffering that we become close to God. Then I can become close to God, too. I wish you would let me build a chapel. Then God would love me more because I was so obedient."

"I love you, Tallia," he said, without passion. He felt as-toundingly tired.

The nail weighed in his hand as heavily as a grievous sin, and maybe it was. He did not wave it in her face, or accuse her. Maybe the first time had been a miracle.

But she was still going on about God's love and a shower of golden light and a pure vessel molded as Her Son's bride, who would be clothed with the odor of sanctity granted to all saints beloved of God when in fact—even in a chamber strewn with dried lavender and honeysuckle to sweeten the closed-in scent of winter and sachets of hyssop and mint to drive off fleas and vermin—he could smell her, an odor like milk gone sour.

"You haven't washed," he said. He rose, fetched cloth and pitcher, and sat beside her on the bed. He was too exhausted to coax her, but he knew what had to be done. "Give me your hands."

She complained in a weak voice as he washed her hands, her elbows, her neck and face, and her filthy feet and knees. Because he ignored her and simply did what needed to be done, she finally acquiesced to his attentions.

The water was brown when he finished. He turned the nail through his fingers, examining it, but it told him nothing except that blood stained its point.

The nail could not speak. Then he looked at her to see that she was staring at the nail in her turn, eyes as wide as if she'd seen an adder resting in his hands.

He sighed, pulled the pouch out from under his tunic, and drew out the rose. Its petals lay cool and sweet in his palm. A thorn pricked his finger and blood welled.

She whimpered, staring at him, or the rose, or the nail, or his blood, as if these were signs of the Enemy. Or perhaps she was just afraid he would betray her secret, and her sin.

"Lie still," he said firmly, and, amazingly, she lay still as he stroked the delicate petals along the ugly gashes on her palm, the stroke an hypnotic rhythm as he rocked as they rock, riding heavily on the waves as they leave the still waters of the fjord behind and come into the sound. He stands in the stem of the ship, holding an empty wooden cup in one hand and a small chest in the other.

The waters part before him, stream alongside to form a frothing wake behind.

Heads bob in the surf, his ever-present companions.

With eleven ships he races south toward North Jatharin, because a messenger has come f om Hak

r

onin saying that their

outlying lands have been

attacked and halls burned by Eika gone raiding out of Jatharin. Many slaves have been taken, or killed, and worst of all, a nest of eggs was stolen. This insult must be avenged, and in a way, it is a kind of test. If he cannot protect those who are sworn to ally with him, then one by one his allies will sail away on dawn waters seeking a stronger ally. Seeking the one who has named himself Nokvi, Moe in's r

chief, friend to the Alban tree sorcerers.

He turns, finally, and beckons to the priest, who shuffles fo w r ard holding

what looks like a spear completely wrapped in saffron-dyed cloth.

"You have returned from your journey," he says.

"Have I? Where do you think I have been?"

"North and east, south and west," he replies. "Above and below. These are all mysteries which only the wise can fathom."

"Who is wise, and who is foolish?" cackles the priest.

"We shall see," he answers. "What have you brought me?"

The priest chants nonsense in reply, as priests are wont to do. "Falcon flies, nightwing dies. Raven calls, ash tree falls. Yoke of gold, song of old. Serpent's skin, tooth within. Dragon's wing, wolf's heart-string. In flute's breath, magic's death. Where he stands, lives the land." As he chants, he unwraps the cloth to reveal a man-high half of painted wood adorned with feathers and bones, unnamable leathery scraps, the translucent skin of a snake, yellowing teeth strung on a wire, the hair of Swift-Daughters spun into chains of gold and silver, iron and tin, beads of amethyst and crystal dangling by tough red threads, and several bone flutes so cunningly drilled and hung that the breeze off the water moans through them.

"Did I not travel over sea and land, under the water and through mountains, above the moon and even to the fjall of the heavens, to find these things?" wheezes the priest. "Did I not bring you what I promised? "

Stronghand grasps the haft. It hums against his palm as though bees have made their hive inside the wood—and maybe they have, although he can see no opening. He examines it all around, and except for the humming that emanates f o

r m the half it appears to him as any standard that marks out one chieftain's followers from another's, little different from that he himself made when he triumphed at Rikin's fjord. It is only an object; it cannot speak to him to tell him the truth.

"This will protect me from magic?" he asks. "What of those who follow me?"

The priest rattles the pouch of bones at his skinny waist. With effort he focuses his cloudy eyes as if he is trying to see only in this world, not in the many worlds, as priests are rumored to do. He speaks in true words instead of riddles and questions. "I have labored many months to devise this working. I am wise in the threads that weave magic. This amulet is your banner. Bear it with you, and it will protect you and yours from magic as far as you can spread your arm of protection."

He smiles, holding out the cup in his other hand. "I have a strong hand. In it I can hold many. "

"What of our bargain?" wheedles the old one. "How will you give me freedom from the OldMothers?" He almost shivers with excitement. His skin is like a leathery old purse slipped loosely over scrawny bones. Stronghand wonders how old he really is. How many winters has he seen? How did he stretch the span of his years beyond that natural for a son of an Old-Mother's nest?

But he is resigned to never discovering the truth. Perhaps some truths are better left unspoken.

"It is easy enough to give freedom from the OldMothers," he replies.

He signals, and his warriors grab the priest's arms to restrain him as Stronghand flips open the chest. The scent of blood and power are strong, but he does not hesitate. He plunges his knife into the p iest's pum r

ping heart. The

old creature thrashes, jerking, trying to call down a curse, but the amulet protects Stronghand and his followers from magic. Blood spurts freely from the priest's mouth, and Stronghand catches it in the cup.

Only in death is there freedom from the decrees of the Wise-Mothers, who, like the rock, live for uncounted generations. Their children are like the rain, touching rock briefly before they flow away into the river, into the fjord, into the sea.

As the cup fills to the brim and blood spills over the side, he sees the priest's spirit swirling in the greenish-copper liquid. He hears a disembodied howl: "No, no, no, I have been tricked!"

As the body ceases its thrashing, as the last blood pumps in sluggish jerks and slows to a trickle as the body sags, the priest's spirit reaches with threadlike mist fingers, trying to find a house for its dying spirit; but everyone there is protected by the amulet. It expands in widening circles, seeking, groping, and once it leaves the cup, he takes one swallow of the priest's blood and then passes it around to his soldiers, who each take one swallow. In this way the priest's essence will be diluted among the many, and his vengeful spirit cannot return.

Suddenly, the mistlike hands find the thread that links his body to that of his brother in blood, the one he sees in his dreams, and it races down that thread like a spark of fire as Stronghand takes the empty cup to the railing.

"Throw the body into the sea," he orders, and it is done. Merfolk surface to circle the sinking corpse. Behind him, the chest and its now desiccated heart are placed in a brazier. The smoke of their burning stings his nostrils. He leans on the railing and turns the wooden cup in his hand. The last drop of blood beads on the Up of the cup and falls. As the drop shatters in the waves, a last, faint howl of fury and defeat vibrates that thread that binds him to Alain Henrisson, and then it is empty. The priest's spirit has dissolved. Waves slap the ship. The oars are pulled in, and the sail is hoisted. Wind batters it; they come round, tacking.

From far away he hears a seagull's mournful cry. Surf pounds on unseen rocks.

Casually, he lets the cup roll off his fingers. I f

t alls, hits water, and vanishes

into the sea.

The nail rolled out of Alain's fingers and he jolted up, clutching the rose in his other hand.

"No, no, no, I have been tricked!"

Who had spoken? But there was no one in the chamber.

Tallia had fallen asleep.

He picked up the nail and hid it in the pouch, nestled together with the rose.

EVER since Rosvita had been given the Vita of St. Rade-gundis, she had had strange dreams. Voices whispered in her dreams in a language she could not quite understand. So many people were staring at her, and yet they weren't people at all, they were strangers who had once walked these roads and then vanished; they had been lost a long time ago, but they had left a message if only she could read it. But the words swam close and then skittered away until she could not tell where one left off and another began.

"Are we safe?" she asked, but she was very hot, sweating until the walls seemed to run, bleeding away bright murals of an exotic landscape into white.

"Rest, Sister. You are ill." She thought perhaps it was Theophanu who spoke to her, or it might have been Fortunatus, or else the ancient nun who had spoken of the Great Sundering, the one who rubbed salve into her aching chest when it was an effort simply to breathe. It was easier to sleep, and to dream.

A golden wheel flashed in sunlight, turning. Young Berthold slept peacefully in a stone cavern, surrounded by six attendants whose youthful faces glowed in a shifting glamour of light. A blizzard tore at mountain peaks, and on the wings of the storm danced moon-pale daimones to a melody of envy and mystery and fear. A lion stalked a cold hillside of rock, and on the plain of yellowing grass below this escarpment black hounds coursed after an eight-pointed stag while a party of riders clothed in garments as brilliant as gems followed on their trail.

The lost ones surrounded her, crowding her with their jewel eyes and barbaric clothing, whispering secrets in her ears: "I did not protest as long as I saw that our lord father preferred his firstborn, for that is the way of things, and as one of those who came second I did not mind waiting behind the first, because I saw that he was worthy. But what good is my high birth if our lord father marries again and sires younger children whom he loves more and sets above me? Why should I serve them, when I came before them? Is that not why the angels rebelled?" She woke up.

"Sister Rosvita." Princess Theophanu sat on a stool beside her. She looked as robust as ever, if a little pale. Was that anxiety that swept her face? It was hard to tell, and the expression vanished quickly. "I brought you porridge and wine. And news." "Let me eat first, I beg you, Your Highness." Rosvita lay on a cot in a small monastic cell cut out of the rock. The whitewashed walls seemed so stark compared to the strange and compelling frescoes that had decorated the other chamber, that haunted dreams made rich by a lung fever brought on by exhaustion. For a long while they had despaired of her, but once over the worst of it, she had been moved away from there and into this cell, which lay close to the refectory.

A servingwoman brought forward a tray with a wine cup and bowl, then retreated to the low archway cut into the stone that led into the corridor beyond, out of earshot. Theophanu waited patiently, hands folded in her lap; a thin beam of light from the smoke hole illuminated her face. By this means alone Rosvita knew it was daytime. At the convent of St. Ekatarina, time held no purchase.

One day slipped into the next here confined in the rock walls, shrouded from the world outside, and the only constant was the round of prayer, the canonical hours that slid one into the next, Vigils becoming Lauds becoming Primri becoming Terce becoming Sext becoming Nones becoming Vespers be coming Compline becoming Vigils again. And on and so on, like God in Unity, the circle which never ends.

As soon as Rosvita finished, Theophanu leaned forward to gather tray, cup, and bowl from Rosvita's lap and set it on the floor. The movement covered her whisper, as quiet as that of the Aoi in Rosvita's dreams. "Perhaps I should give myself up to Ironhead in exchange for letting Adelheid go." "Is our situation so desperate?"

In the dim light it was hard to see Theophanu's expression clearly. Was that anger or anguish that flashed across her cool Arethousan features? "It is desperate enough. The good abbess has been generous with her stores. But we are seventy-five people and fifty horses in a convent that houses nine. There cannot be more than a week's worth of food and fodder left. We have taken everything that the nuns have, and won no advantage against our enemy. If I give myself up to Ironhead, then we would not leave the nuns destitute."

"A noble gesture, Your Highness. But we know what kind of man he is. He would make a poor husband."

"He would make a husband. I have been patient, Sister. I despair of my father ever agreeing to marry me to any man, or even to the church. Ironhead is ambitious and ruthless. Am I any better in my heart? I would rather have a husband like Ironhead than wait for my father to marry again and displace me with younger children who please him more."

"It is your words I heard in my dream! I thought it was another voice—"

Was that color in her cheeks? "I beg your pardon, Sister. I should not have spoken so rashly. The Enemy troubles my thoughts."

"Be patient, Your Highness. Surely in this harsh land Iron-head is having trouble maintaining an army of three hundred men."

"So we have hoped. But Ironhead is not stupid. I have other news." Some tone in Theophanu's cool voice made Rosvita dread what would come next. "You must come with me, Sister. You must see. I am not sure I can trust my own eyes."

Such a statement could not help but kindle Rosvita's curiosity, always a flammable thing. She rose and was pleased to find her legs steadier today than they had been yesterday. Theophanu called her attendant in from the hall to help Rosvita dress. Then they made their way down a tunnel carved out of stone that led to the refectory. Light poured in through seven windows carved into the rock high up in the wall, revealing a single trestle table, enough for the nine women who made their home here, and the tall loom at which Sister Diocletia knelt, having just thrown newly-measured warp threads over the crossbar. She acknowledged them with a nod, then grabbed a handful of loose threads and deftly began tying them to a loom weight.

Beyond the refectory a terrace opened out. Rosvita heard the sounds of Ironhead's camp: mallets and hammers pounding in a ragged rhythm, captains calling out orders, men grunting and cursing. Their cries carried easily, echoing off the monumental rock face of the huge outcropping into which the convent was carved. The terrace was a commodious slab of south-facing rock high up on the cliffside. The sun spread such a pleasant light over the terrace that it was hard to believe it was winter, two days after Candlemass. At a shallow basin hollowed out of the rock, Teuda, the stout lay sister, hunched over, grinding grain into meal. Pots of grain soaking in limestone water sat beside her, next to a basket for the freshly-ground barley. A spacious garden filled the rest of the terrace, cut into quarters by walkways raised above the soil and handsome interlaced screens that served as windbreaks. No doubt the dirt had been drawn up basket by basket from below. Sister Sindula was weeding mint; she was quite deaf, and intent on her task, and did not notice them. But the other lay sister, young Paloma, knelt a few strides away, watering herbs. She set down her ceramic beaker, stood, brushed the dirt on her robe back into the plot, and crossed to them. No older than Theophanu, she already had a withering look to her like that of her elderly companions, as if the wind sucked them dry on this isolated height.

"Come." She led them to the railing from which they could look down.

Off to the right on a lower terrace, a dozen of Fulk's soldiers stood guard over the winches. The smaller winch had been damaged in the last attack, one of the support legs smashed by a rock from a catapult. The larger winch held the big basket in / which she had been hoisted up on that day six weeks ago, al-(

though she recalled it now no more clearly than she would a x-~, dream.

According to Theophanu, Captain Fulk and his soldiers / had devised a broad strap to replace the basket so that they could

winch up the horses rather than lose them to Ironhead. She traced with her eye a series of drops and shallower ledges, the ladder path; all the ladders had been drawn up and taken inside. There were also several steep staircases lower down, and an abandoned winch, burned in the first assault. Cliffs loomed above them, broken into giant stair-steps that ended in a small tabletop plateau marked by a stone crown: from this angle she couldn't count the great stone slabs set upright at the flat height, nor could she imagine how anyone could possibly have carried them up this massive outcropping that was almost too steep to climb.

"For a holy place," remarked Theophanu, "it is certainly de-fendable."

"No doubt the ancient mothers who hollowed out the convent here were well acquainted with the imperfections of humanity."

The scaffolding being built by Ironhead's soldiers now reached about halfway to the lower terrace, with a broad base, reinforced sides, and plenty of dampened hides to protect the timber. Iron-head had even allowed his troops to cut down the dozen mature olive trees growing at the base of the cliff. No one seemed idle. Ironhead's banner flew from the central tent, well out of arrow shot of the lower terrace and almost out of sight where the gully cut away to the left.

She did not remember riding down that gully on their last gallop to safety, but she could see it was the only path to the convent.

"Is there something new you wished me to see?" She saw it just as Theophanu pointed to a banner fluttering atop a small traveling pavilion half concealed behind Ironhead's palatial white tent: red silk with an eagle, dragon, and lion stitched in gold.

"Isn't that the sigil of Wendar?" asked Paloma. "Does that mean the king of Wendar has come?"

Rosvita almost laughed, imagining the king confined to such a paltry tent and with no sign of his elaborate entourage. "Nay, child. A party riding on King Henry's business and under his safe conduct would carry such a banner. There, at the tip, is a gold circle. That signifies an embassy led by a cleric from the king's court."

"They arrived yesterday at dusk, escorted by Ironhead's soldiers," said Theophanu.

"Can it be that your father has heard of our plight?"

"You shall see," said Theophanu. She turned to the young lay sister.

"Paloma, you know the route." The young woman nodded. "Gutta," she said to the dark-haired girl, "go see what work awaits you in the kitchens."

Paloma led princess and cleric back through the refectory, down a side tunnel that banked into stairs, and through a hanging that concealed a smaller tunnel ventilated by air holes. Soon it grew too dark to see except by touch, and they crept forward as quietly as wolves nosing up on unsuspecting prey. Then, abruptly, dim light filtered through a screen carved so cunningly out of a thin sheet of rock that they could see into the lit chamber beyond without their own shapes being revealed. Rosvita eased in beside Theophanu and together they gazed into the whitewashed guest hall. Rosvita had come to that hall four days ago to see Brother Fortunatus who, like the soldiers and male servants, could not venture into chambers consecrated as a holy convent. Now she saw only soldiers standing at nervous guard over a pair of Aostan clerics. A red-haired Eagle stood off to one side, expression shadowed.

"It still seems incredible to me," one cleric was saying to another in Aostan.

"I've crossed St. Vitale's Pass in Aogoste and met blizzards. I don't see how his party could have made it over the pass this late in the year and then brag of fine weather." He dropped his voice. "What if it was weather sorcery? Yet none of his escort will utter an ill word of him. It's as if he's bewitched them all."

"Or was wrongfully accused."