He climbed, although he had to rest frequently and more than once slipped and almost fell. When he squeezed out through a narrow cleft, scouring his back against the rough rock, he spilled down a short escarpment, scraped through a bramble bush, yelping and cursing, and came to rest in the shade of a tree on a layer of decayed leaf litter. A bird shrieked a warning and fluttered off through the branches. The light hurt his eyes, but it gentled and mellowed as he caught his breath, dizzy, gasping for air. It was hot and muggy, but there was ease in it and the savor of freedom.

He eased up onto his forearms. He lay on a hillside overlooking a valley a quarter cleared and the rest wooded. A half dozen unseen hearths spun fingers of smoke into the darkening sky. In one clearing a pond faded to a pewter gleam. It was hard to see more detail than this because the sun was setting, the far horizon bathed in an orange-red glow so beautiful that he wept.

FOR three days they trudged overland along an old Dariyan road still used by the locals for market traffic, of which they saw little.

This was the driest country Hanna had ever seen. Nothing that was truly green grew, only prickly juniper, the ubiquitous olive trees, and so many varieties of thorny shrub or broom that she wondered what they had to protect themselves against besides goats. She and the others soon became coated with a film of dust. Her mouth was always parched.

Her lips cracked, and the sun was merciless.

They changed direction, turning east at dawn on the fourth day so that they marched into the rising sun, and for the next three days followed a trickle of water running over rocks which Sergeant By-santius persisted in calling a river. Every chance she got, she sluiced its waters over her head, neck, hands, and red, swollen, blistered feet until she was streaked with sweat and dirt never completely washed away by the water. Yet for moments at a stretch that cool touch relieved her skin and the headache that continually plagued her.

Where a hole in the ground swallowed the stream, they turned up a defile with jagged, steep-sided hills rising to either side. After two arduous days on a rocky trail, making poor time and less distance, the wagons were left on the path with a guard while Sergeant Bysan-tius pointed the rest at an impossibly steep trail that led straight up the side of the hill. His soldiers rolled a dozen barrels out of the wagons and with great difficulty lashed them to stout poles and lugged them up. Two other men carried Mother Obligatia on her stretcher up that twisting trail which switched back and forward and back while the rest of them strung out behind, falling farther and farther back. It took hours, or years, before their footsore and exhausted party reached a row of buildings perched on a ledge cut into the cliff face.

'I almost feel that I am home again," gasped Sister Hilaria with as much of a smile as she could muster. Her lips were bleeding, as were Hanna's.

Certainly, the monastery resembled St. Ekatarina's in its inaccessibility, high up along the cliff face with a forbidding rock ridge above and only the trail leading up to it. An army might besiege this small settlement to no avail since it possessed, as they discovered, a spring within the walls.

'Quite at home," added Hilaria, who smelled water when they passed a stairwell cutting down into the rock. "I only need a pair of buckets and a shoulder harness, and I'll be ready to set to work hauling up water."

Instead, they settled Mother Obligatia in the pair of adjoining rooms—cells, really—

where they were herded and shut in. The two chambers were built of stone so cunningly fitted together that it appeared the builders had not needed to use mortar. The floor was dirt, as gritty and dry as the air. Six pallets lined the walls. The second room had four actual beds with rope strung between the posts for a mattress. It was smaller than the first but opened onto a tiny, triangular courtyard where they could take air and sun; this courtyard boasted a high brick wall too high to see over and a single olive tree under whose inadequate shade stood a stone bench. There was not a single other living creature in the courtyard except ants and flies. They couldn't even hear birds singing.

'Here you will rest until I return to fetch you," said Sergeant By-santius to Rosvita.

"The monks will care for your needs. I leave as well ten of my men-at-arms as guards. Do not, I pray you, be fearful. I mean you and your companions no harm."

'A fine sentiment," said Rosvita when she translated his speech for those who could not understand Arethousan, "but we cannot trust him. We must scout out our surroundings and make ready to escape."

Yet when Hanna surveyed their company, she knew they had traveled as far as they could. Ruoda and Jehan were so weak it was a miracle they had come so far, and Jerome and Gerwita had only made it up the trail by stopping to rest every ten paces. All four of them lay on the pallets, utterly exhausted. Even Fortunatus and Heriburg were flagging, even she was, and the old ache in her hip had returned. They hadn't the strength to run, not now.

For the first ten days they mostly slept, talking little, recovering their strength, with rock and a hard blue sky their only companions. Sister Petra insisted on sitting outside in the direct sunlight until her face was burned and blistered from the sun, and then she suffered under a terrible fever for days.

They saw only two monks, both of them withered old men as wrinkled as the raisins they sprinkled onto the porridge given to the prisoners twice a day. Neither spoke, not a single word, but one knew herb-craft, and he brought ointments for Sister Petra, a foul brew for those suffering from the cough that relieved their congestion, and a spelt porridge for Mother Obligatia along with sage steeped in wine.

'We must keep up our strength," said Rosvita one evening in the courtyard after they had finished a noble and astoundingly filling supper of beans stewed with parsnips and fennel.

With the help of Hilaria and Fortunatus, Hanna climbed up onto the top of the wall—

and shrieked. The courtyard was carved into the last triangle of the ledge, an acclivity whose bounds were cliff above and below. She hung over the wall, feet drumming on the bricks while Fortunatus held her ankles, and stared straight down into the defile as though the wall became the cliff face. The gulf of air made her dizzy. Dusk swept in from the east; the valley below was already drowned. A fly buzzed by her ear, but she dared not slap at it. So far away that it was only a speck, a hawk glided on the wind. If only they could fly, they could sail right out of here. Then she looked down again, and fear choked her: the whole wall might collapse under her weight and send her plunging.

'We can't escape by this route. Too steep to climb above, and too steep and too far below." She kicked out and jumped, landing with knees bent as Fortunatus steadied her.

She wiped her hands on her leggings, but they were so dry that she wondered if the dust would adhere permanently to her skin. Her heart was still racing.

'The sun will kill us if we escape without a good store of water," said Aurea, always practical.

The rest were silent, waiting for Rosvita to speak. Both Gerwita and Heriburg had come down with the cough, but they didn't suffer from it as badly as Ruoda and Jehan, who were only now beginning to recover the color in their cheeks although they still slept most of the day and night.

'Until we are all strong, I think we must bide here quietly," said Rosvita at last. "I will ask the guards to allow us to take turns hauling water up from the spring. Surely they tire of performing this task, and it will allow us to gain strength by climbing the stairs with full buckets. When all of us can manage the feat—" She smiled at Mother Obligatia, lying on a pallet beside the open doorway, since it was understood that Obligatia and Petra would be exempt from work. "—then we choose between what opportunities seem open to us. Meanwhile, I will ask the guards if we might obtain quills and ink and a table and bench for writing. As well make good use of the time, if we can."

WITH fewer than fifty picked troops at his back, the boldest and most reckless, Stronghand struck inland, following the hounds. The trail took them east and northeast through northern Salia. The war between the Salian heirs had already ravaged the countryside, but they still fought a dozen skirmishes before they came to a ferry crossing on the banks of a great river which marked the limit of Salian territory.

The Hessi interpreter nodded at the river and the garrison stationed on the far bank.

'That is Varrish country, part of the duchy of Arconia," Yeshu said. He had spent much of his childhood in Salia under the tutelage of an uncle and knew the country well.

"Under the rule of King Henry and his sister Biscop Constance. But those in the garrison are flying the sigil of Duke Conrad. You see? The hawk of Wayland. We heard rumors in Medemelacha that King Henry is dead, or has abandoned the north to linger in the old city of Darre, seduced by dreams of empire. Biscop Constance is said to be a prisoner of her half sister, Lady Sabella. Sabella married her daughter to Duke Conrad. Maybe this is true. I haven't seen it for myself."

Hessi merchants liked to see things for themselves before pronouncing them true or false. It was one of the reasons Stronghand found them useful to work with. If he dealt fairly with them and allowed them to expand their trading networks, then they returned a fair profit in information and taxes in exchange.

'We'll need ships to attack that position," said Stronghand, "unless you know another ford that can be crossed."

'Duke Conrad is vigilant, so they say. He has ambitions in eastern Salia, I have heard."

'Yet such a river makes a powerful border. It would be hard to rule both sides of the bank if you haven't enough of a foothold. Duke Conrad sounds like a prudent commander."

'It is said he is. He has allowed my people to trade in his cities. He does not demand more of a tax than other nobles."

'So he is a man who will watch his back." Stronghand turned to Last Son, now his second because he had left Trueheart behind in Alba as governor. "We'll need fifty sheep or cow bladders. Call as little attention to yourself as possible. Eat your fill."

They moved upstream under cover and once they were out of sight of the garrison he unstoppered the precious flask the merfolk had given him and let fall two drops of spoor into the streaming water. They ate well that night, careful not to gorge, and remained concealed in the woodland all through the next day, scouting upstream for the likeliest place to cross. A bend in the river offered the best conditions; the twenty human soldiers could swim it and the Eika cross with the aid of inflated bladders. By dusk they were ready to go. He left four men behind to wait for the merfolk.

Now they would have an escape route if the hounds led him farther inland than he hoped. They were a small group, fashioned for speed and a quick strike, not for a prolonged campaign.

He let the hounds support him across. Swimming made him nervous, as it did all Eika because they did not float like humankind. And because he knew what lurked in the depths. Although he had an alliance with the merfolk, he did not trust them. Their desires and goals seemed too alien from his.

But as he clambered up on the far shore, these reflections made him grin. Certainly humankind feared and hated the RockChildren for the same reason. What we do not understand makes us afraid. What does not look like us on the outside must remain suspicious. Yet how much harder it was to see past the outer seeming into the inner heart.

The merfolk wanted restored to them what they had lost.

Was that so difficult to understand? Any soul might feel compassion for what they had suffered—if it were a soul that could feel compassion.

The hounds shook themselves off. His soldiers deflated the bladders and carried them along in case they had another river to cross. The hounds cut back toward the ferry crossing to find their trail, and once again they speared east and south through woodland.

After a pair of days the land became broken and hilly, and the fields and settlements they had been careful to avoid fell away. Up in the hills no one farmed.

On the third day he smelled the smoke of smelting fires and in the late afternoon they crept up to the verge of a great scar dug into the land. The forest had been cleared back; the reek of charcoal tainted the air. Shafts pitted the land, and steam rolled out of their depths.

Men dug and hauled and hammered, most in chains and a few with whips and spears and knives set as guards upon the others.

'These are mines," said Yeshu. "Silver and lead if we're in the Arbeden Hills, as we should be. These are the richest veins of silver and lead in the northwest, so it is said.

King Henry controls these mines and feeds his treasury out of their bowels. But you see, there." He pointed to a log house set at the eastern edge of the clearing, where two banners could be seen through drifts of smoke. "Duke Conrad's hawk flies beside a guivre. The guivre is the sigil of the duchy of Arconia.''

The hounds whined, ears flat, bodies tense. They wanted to charge forward, but they looked up at Stronghand, awaiting his command.

'We'll move swiftly," said Stronghand, gathering his men close. "Some man out to relieve himself will stumble upon us soon enough. We'll strike first to free those in chains and kill as many of the guards as possible. Some of the slaves will join us. Others will flee. The confusion will divide the attention of the guards. I will follow the hounds. Once we have my brother, we grab anything we can carry and retreat. What you grab is yours to keep or trade, and all of you will have boasting rights. Is that understood?"

They nodded. He had been careful to pick those who liked daring and risk but who had no obvious pretensions to rule. For this troop, including young Yeshu, the hazard itself was the reward. Such a gamble made the blood sing.

He grinned and gestured. "Move out. When I release the hounds, that is your signal to attack."

They split up into smaller groups and spread out to surround the clearing. He waited, counting off the interval, and with the sun a hand's span above the western horizon and the guards and workers beginning to slacken their pace as they readied themselves for the evening rest, he released Sorrow and Rage.

The hounds bolted forward. Silent, as was their custom, his troops broke from the woodland cover and sprinted across the open ground, overwhelming the first guards they came to before those men could raise the alarm. The scuff of feet on earth; a shout; the ring of hammer on chain as a slave struggled to free himself; a grunt as a guard doubled over, skewered on the end of an Eika spear. Rage leaped, bowling over a guard who had turned, in surprise, a shout of alarm twisting into a scream as the weight of the hound bore him to the ground.

Guards, free workers, and men without chains grabbed their picks and raced toward the log house.

'To arms! To arms!"

'We're attacked!"

'Beasts! Fire! Run!"

Many scattered into the forest. Others barricaded themselves into the log house. His men swarmed the open ground, which was a carpet of ash and dust and chipped, wrinkled, rutted earth from the tread of feet, the dragging of chains, and the press of wheels. Twenty surrounded the log house, using the dips and levels of the uneven ground as cover; his human archers shot at any sign of movement within the house. Others spread out to stand sentry along the woodland's edge or to stand guard over the shafts, not knowing if men might clamber up from the depths.

Yet the scene of this swift victory gave him no pleasure. The stench of the workings stung like poison on his skin. The land had been stripped to bare earth, and even that soil had been mauled into an ugly facade. To steal treasure out of the earth they had created a wasteland.

The slaves, chopped free, ran for the trees, but his soldiers captured about a dozen, driving them forward in a herd. The hounds loped up to the lip of a big shaft and yipped and whined at its edge.

'I'm looking for a man known as Alain," he said to the slaves cowering before him.

"I'll give a handsome reward to any man who leads me to him."

They responded with frightened silence.

'He is so tall, more or less. Black hair, fair skin. He may have been blind or mute when you saw him. The hounds belong to him. Perhaps you recognize them."

From the crowd a low voice murmured. "What kind of reward?"

Stronghand grinned, showing the jewels studding his teeth. "Your life. Is that not enough? Your freedom, which I grant you regardless. If you will have more, I must have more. I deal fairly with those who serve me faithfully, but I also punish those who believe they can cheat me."

A stocky young man stepped forward out of the crowd, trailed by a second, taller companion. They wore rags that shed dirt with each step; they were themselves so filthy it was difficult to make out their features. But he liked the look in their eyes: although they feared him, they each had a keen gaze and an intelligent expression. Their captivity had not beaten them down. They hadn't given up yet.

I 'We came here with a fellow we called Silent, for he couldn't speak or see," said the stocky one. "They took him into the shafts to walk the wheel. He might live yet, or he might not. The slaves who tread the wheels don't live long."

The taller one nodded. "He was a decent fellow, poor lad. But the Captain would know if he still lives. I heard a rumor that the Captain had him cast into the pit in exchange for a pair of gold nomias."

'The pit?"

'Only dead men are cast into the pit."

The slaves shuddered, hearing these words; the pit scared them more even than he did.

'I don't know who would have wanted him dead, though," added the taller one, "a blind mute as he was."

His stocky companion nodded. "He wasn't just an ordinary prisoner. Someone was trying to get him out of the way. He knew something, I'd wager."

'Where is this wheel? Where is the pit?"

But he already knew. The hounds whined and scratched at the lip of one of the shafts.

They knew where their master had gone.

The ones who had made Alain suffer would suffer in their turn. With cold fury in his heart he turned to Last Son. "Kill every man here except the slaves we have freed. They may go free, as they wish. Burn the rest alive."

Last Son nodded and called out to the archers. By the time Strong-hand reached the shaft and turned to clamber down the ladder into the workings, the log house was already ablaze and he heard the shouts and screams of the men inside as they made their final charge, out the door, in a vain attempt to escape.

As he descended, darkness swallowed him. He had his men bring torches such as the miners used, and with rather more difficulty the hounds were lowered after him, down each level and farther down until they reached the lowest wheel. Here, by the wavering, stinking light of pitchblende torches, Sorrow and Rage snuffled all around the wheel and up a low tunnel to a cold, damp hollow worn into the stone where rags and leavings and waste had collected.

Their tails beat the walls, wagging. They stuck their noses into the garbage and whined. Alain wasn't here, although by the testimony of the hounds he once had been.

'Hsst!" Yeshu stood beside him, head cocked. "Listen!"

They heard the clamor of metal striking stone. A shout, followed by a harsh scream. A few moments later two of his soldiers padded out of the blackness dragging an injured man with a third soldier holding a torch to light their way.

'He and his companion attacked us," they said. "The other one is dead."

The captured man moaned, lifting his head. "Mercy," he croaked. Blood pooled at his shoulder and dripped to the floor. "Mercy, lord. We are only poor miners, defending ourselves."

'Where is the pit where you cast dead men?"

The man sniveled. "I'll show you! I'll show you!"

'You'll come down with me. Bind up his wound."

He cried and pleaded as his wound was bound up, and it puzzled Stronghand to see that his fear of the pit outweighed his fear of his captors. What lay down there? Ought he to be afraid also? Yet the unknown had never frightened him. He feared only where he knew danger threatened him, and the unreasoning, babbling terror of this man made him curious.

'Please don't make me go down!"

The workings lay eerily silent, all sound muffled, the weight of earth heavy over their heads. Water trickled down side passages. Torchlight illuminated ancient scars mottling the walls where stone had been chipped away as miners sought new veins. These rich workings could supply a great treasure-house. It would be worth a great deal to him to possess mines like this.

The captive staggered to a halt at the edge of a shaft plunging down into the earth.

Light did not penetrate far; it was pitch-black below, empty, although a faintly sulfurous wind skirled up from the depths like the breath of a buried giant long asleep.

We'll need rope," said Stronghand, understanding the risk he took. If his men were not loyal, they could strand him there. But Old-Mother wanted Alain; he wanted Alain. He had to take the chance. And, in truth, the gamble made his blood sing.

With rope lashed around his torso, he allowed himself to be lowered down and down and down, using his feet to balance himself away from the sheer wall and probing ahead with his spear until he found rock beneath him. He untied himself and tugged twice on the rope, then waited as both hounds, the miner, young Yeshu all strung about with coils of rope, and a Rikin soldier laden with four torches, an ax, and more rope arrived.

They were ready to explore. They tied more rope to the main rope and strung it behind them as the hounds sniffed forward into a labyrinth of passageways, blind alleys, one breakdown where blocks of stone littered the passageway, and a dead end—a sloping cavernous chamber ridged with ledges where the hounds snuffled with great interest for a long while before turning and leading them back in a different direction.

They scooted down a steep incline while the miner moaned under his breath until the sound so grated on Stronghand's nerves that he whirled around and brought the edge of his knife to the man's throat.

'There's nothing here." He knew the words as truth as he spoke them. No living scent touched his nostrils. He heard no echo of footfalls, no whisper of scuttling movement, no monster's slither or the fluttering breath of an ancient evil lying in wait.

The pit lay empty. Deserted.

He snarled, low, and the hounds echoed his anger with growls of their own. They, too, knew the truth, but they led the party on regardless as the miner gulped down his sobs and Yeshu exclaimed at every pillar and shaft and new texture of rock. A new smell assailed them as they scrambled up a ramp into a large cavern.

'Bread!" Yeshu exclaimed as he ventured forward into the space, the light of his torch dancing over a field of mushrooms. Spoors settled where their feet kicked dust up.

'Corpses!" said Far-runner, the Rikin brother who accompanied them. "They're growing mushrooms on corpses!"

The miner fell to his knees and vomited.

'There was someone here, then," said Yeshu. "Someone who could think, and drag these bodies to this place, and plant them. There is an old legend among my people of a race of men who delved under the earth because of a curse placed on them by their enemies. I know lots of old stories, most of them nonsense. Maybe this one is true!" He laughed, delighted, and probed among the field with his staff, shifting bones, uprooting a clump of the fleshy white growth that was bound to a rib cage with pale tendrils.

'God protect us!" wept the miner, and retched again.

'Come," said Stronghand, because the hounds were pulling him on, padding to the limit of the light and yipping, eager to move forward.

He quickly outpaced the others, hearing Yeshu's voice behind him exclaiming over some marvel or another as they passed through glittering caverns and skirted sinks and trenches that gave out into other levels beneath. Another day he might wonder, but he felt himself close—so very close. Torchlight illuminated a wide cavern peculiarly ornamented with low structures constructed out of bones, but the hounds trotted down a path and he hastened after them even as Yeshu and Far-runner came out of the passage and broke into startled exclamations at the sight of this city of bones.

In the darkness the ceiling met the floor; where they met, a tunnel ramped down. The hounds scrabbled forward, Rage pressing into the tunnel with Sorrow nudging at her hindquarters, tails lashing. Then they barked and in some confusion backed out of the tunnel. He got down on hands and knees and, thrusting the torch before him, pushed into the tunnel.

A foul-tasting water had swallowed the passageway. The route was blocked.

The others came up to him as he stood and furiously kicked at the nearest house of bones, sending it rattling and clattering down. He would have smashed them all, if he could have.

'Is that wise?" asked Yeshu. "There might be a spell on those bones."

'Gone," he said. "Out of my reach. There's no one down here, and Alain is gone."

The walls ate the sound of his voice, but the rock could not absorb his anger and the blinding grief that, for the space of ten breaths, took hold of him. He choked out a breath and sucked one in, then turned to the miner.

'Pray you can swim," he said. "We'll tie a rope to your ankle and you'll go in. If you reach the other side, you may flee, if you dare, or you may tug on the rope and we'll haul you back. If you succeed, if there is a way out, then I'll reward you with silver and riches, as much as you can carry."

The man wept and gibbered, but Stronghand himself tied the rope to his ankle and drove him forward into the water. The rope paid out, and paid out, and paid out, and Yeshu said:

'No man can hold his breath that long."

It ceased moving, then slackened slightly. They waited far past the point where a man might live so long underwater.

'Draw him in," said Stronghand at last, and Far-runner took the line in hand over hand, hauling with all his strength, but a weight fetched up somewhere within the tunnel, and although all three of them yanked, they could not dislodge it.

'He's fled, or drowned," said Stronghand.

'That's an awful way to go," said Yeshu. A spark of fear brightened his expression as he looked at the creature he served.

Stronghand nodded. "I am not like you, Yeshu, but I deal fairly and I use the tools I have. Come. There's nothing for us here."

His loyal soldiers hauled them up; outside, in the blessedly fresh air, the log house was still smoldering, ringed by a garden of corpses. His men had methodically looted what they could, and as dawn shaded the trees from black to gray, scouts raced out of the forest.

'A war band approaches, flying the banner of the hawk."

They had nothing to wait for, nothing to fight for. They had taken the chance and lost the gamble. Alain was still alive—he knew that— but the hounds had lost his trail and he did not have a strong enough force to fight off determined and organized resistance.

They ran west, and when three days later they reached the ferry, four ships waited by the far shore, just out of sight of the garrison. The merfolk had come when called and brought him a swift means of escape.

'What do we do now?" asked Last Son as they set sail, letting the current sweep them downstream toward the distant ocean. Oars beat the water to keep them in the main current. Stronghand stood at the rudder, watching the shoreline pass. The hounds lay at his feet, heads on their forelegs; they seemed as despondent as any creature he had ever seen, but they trusted him enough to return with him to the ships. At the stem, Yeshu and Far-runner had gathered an audience while they told their tale of wandering among the dead bones of the Earth. Men and Eika huddled together, shoulder to shoulder, comrades rather than enemies as they listened appreciatively. Because he looked closely, he saw two new faces among the assembly.

'Aren't those two of the slaves we freed at the mines?"

'So they are. They followed us and were strong enough to keep up. They desire to join the army."

'Is that so?"

'Will you take them?"

As he watched, he saw the stockier one, the more talkative of the two, raise his voice to add to the story being woven by Yeshu and Far-runner. The others did not shout him down. "It seems I already have. A man bold enough to run in our pack is bold enough to fight with us."

Last Son nodded. "They call themselves 'Walker' and 'Will.' I've kept my eye on them."

As he had not. He had thought of nothing except Alain, except how water and rock had defeated him, who was mortal and short-lived, unlike the Earth. Stronghand considered while oak forest slid past on the banks. In battle it was usually necessary to act precipitously, but in council a measured decision gave the best results. It was necessary to always keep your eyes open, to examine your position from every side before you chose your course of action.

He had not kept his eyes open.

But Last Son had.

'Why did you not take a name?" Stronghand asked.

Last Son grinned, displaying his teeth. "Last Son is a good name, too," he said. "It's the name I want. What do we do now?"

'My brother Alain wanders out there. To find him, I must plan carefully and not overreach. The Salians will fight us. The Wendish are strong. We will use Medemelacha as our foothold and we will push step by step inland, consolidating as we go, just as we are doing in Alba. That way we will find Alain but also gain more land for our empire.

Piece by piece."

'Yes," said Last Son, nodding. "That is a good plan. That is why we follow you, Stronghand. Because you are not like the chieftains that came before you."

JHlJc Y say the end of the world is coming, Sister Antonia," said the empress.

Adelheid gripped the railing of the balcony, knuckles white as she stared out over the city of Darre from the second story of the royal palace. Roof tiles baked under the sun.

Heat shimmered. At this time of day, in the middle of the afternoon, the streets were deserted but the stink never abated; on a day like today, with no wind, it only subsided a bit with no breeze to spread its miasma over the palace hill. Perhaps the stench wasn't quite so bad this year because so many people had fled the great earthquake and returned to the villages and fields of the countryside, where they felt safer.

In truth, Adelheid wasn't looking at the city at all. She looked west toward the hills that bordered the sea. They all looked west when they had the courage to look. It was now possible to see the smoking mountain at all hours of the day and night, belching ash and sparks.

Antonia said nothing. She had a comfortable seat on an Arethou-san-style couch, she was fed, and a servant stood beside her waving a fan so she didn't get too hot. She knew when to be patient. She hadn't caught her fish yet.

'If you get my daughters, and me, and the emperor through it safely, then I will give you anything."

Ah. The line twitched.

'Anything?"

'Yes."

Hooked. Now she needed only to reel her in. "Very well. You are at risk in the city.

You and your daughters and household must move to a villa outside the city, but keep troops under the command of Duke Burchard garrisoned in strength in the city to protect your position here."

'No. I would be a fool, and a coward, to abandon Darre and leave a Wendish foreigner, however loyal, in charge."

Stubborn creature! Antonia suppressed a grimace of irritation. She knew better than to let anger show. People didn't like to be reminded that they knew less than she did.

The empress went on speaking, oblivious to Antonia's silence. "Henry has been absent for over a year now, fighting in Dalmiaka. If I leave Darre as well, then the people will say we abandoned them. I will not go."

'It won't be safe."

'It will be less safe if I flee. The people of Darre want an Aostan regnant, not a Wendish regent. They will not tolerate Duke Burchard."

'Leave an Aostan lady in control of the palace."

'If I do so, the people will rise up and crown her queen. How does it benefit me to save the cow but lose the farm?"

Adelheid had a tendency to be pigheaded. In Antonia's experience too much soft youthful prettiness gave girls an inflated notion of their importance. In addition, she listened too much to the common folk and spouted their rustic wisdom as if she were born to it; as if the rabble had the wisdom to rule themselves!

'If you will not go, Your Majesty, then at least send your daughters to a place of safety."

A rumble whispered under their feet, shivering the ground. The balcony swayed, and the servingwoman who was fanning Antonia shrieked and then laughed as the rumbling subsided as quickly as it had come. A vase brimming with lavender teetered but did not fall.

'Just a small one, Your Majesty. Your Grace." The servant curtsied nervously.

'The fan," said Antonia. With a last anxious chuckle, the woman resumed stirring the air. "Your Majesty, I pray you—

Adelheid had a pretty face, but when she clenched her jaw, she betrayed her obstinacy.

"I cannot leave Darre. Look how they swarm out onto the street. They are frightened, Sister. They fear. If I abandon them, they will seek a different strong hand to rule them.

To give them hope and strength. Henry charged me to stay. This is the empire we have won together, the heart of our regnancy. I cannot leave."

'Your daughters would be safer in the countryside," continued Antonia, sensing that the tremor had offered her an opening. "Take a dozen girls from the city to act as servants and companions and you will please the common folk, who will see you acting on behalf of their daughters as well as your own. Send them out of the city. They will be safe even as you suffer the same dangers as your subjects."

There was no wind to cool them, but Adelheid endured the heat without wilting. These sweltering late summer days did not make her face mottle with unsightly red blotches, as it did Antonia's; her complexion remained smooth and lovely. Her hair stayed neatly coifed under a linen scarf, held in place by a slender gold circlet that she wore at all times except for formal audiences, when she placed the heavy imperial crown on her own head.

Sweat stippled her brow but otherwise she gave no sign in her silk robes of being hot, not as Antonia was.

'I don't know…" she mused, still staring down at the city.

Voices called out in the hallway. The door into the chamber slammed open and a girl ran in, sobbing.

'Mama! Mama! Make the shaking stop, Mama! I'm scared!"

Adelheid turned as little Mathilda flung herself against her mother's skirts and clung there, arms wrapped around her hips, shoulders heaving and shaking with far more violence than the tremor that had precipitated the girl's outburst.

The nursemaid hurried in, accompanied by two guardsmen. She was an older woman, breathless from the run. Her bones popped and creaked as she knelt before the empress.

"I pray pardon, Your Majesty. I let the princess run away from me."

'What of Berengaria?" Adelheid asked sharply, one hand stroking her crying daughter's head. "Where is she?"

'She slept through the tremor, Your Majesty. Such things do not trouble her. She is still an infant."

'Very well." She wiped Mathilda's tears away with her thumb and tipped her head up so that the girl looked up at her. "Should you like to go to the countryside, Tildie? Would you like to be a shepherd?"

Mathilda sniffed hard. At four, she had a face both more handsome and less pretty than Adelheid's, and was already tall and strong for her age, brown-haired, snub-nosed, with an endearing dimple in her left cheek.

'I should like that, Mama!" she cried, her tears forgotten. "I would much rather run outside. I hate Darre! I hate it!"

She was a passionate child. Antonia smiled as Adelheid melted before her daughter's fierce will, so like her own. Yet Mathilda possessed her father's famous ability to rage outwardly, whereas Adelheid held her feelings on a tighter rein, pulled tight, concealed behind a prettiness that disarmed her antagonists. Henry was stronger, but Adelheid more dangerous.

'You hate the hot summer air and the walls," said Adelheid sternly, "not the city."

'Yes, Mama," said the girl meekly. "I love Darre. Just it's so hot and stinky. I wish I could climb trees like we do in Tivura."

'So be it." Adelheid nodded at Antonia to show that she had accepted Antonia's advice. "You and Berengaria will go to Tivura for the rest of the summer, until Octumbre at least."

She clapped her hands, then stilled. "But what about you, Mama? Won't you come with us?" Her lip trembled. Tears brimmed.

'I must stay in Darre until Octumbre. You know our duty is to rule. It will be your duty one day."

'Yes, Mama." She struggled and got the tears under control. At four, she already comprehended her destiny. "When will Papa come home?"

Adelheid glanced again over the city. "We must pray that the Lord and Lady grant him success very soon, and that he return swiftly. Go on, then. Go make ready. You will leave tomorrow."

'Yes, Your Majesty," said the nursemaid. She grunted and rose with some effort, wincing at the pain in her limbs. "Come, Your Highness. You must pick out which of your animals you wish to take with you."

Adelheid kissed her daughter's forehead and watched as she skipped out of the room, now holding onto her nursemaid's hand and babbling happily about lambs and foals and how she absolutely must take all five of her whippet puppies.

'I am not sure you understand Aosta, Sister Antonia," said Adel-heid quietly once the doors had shut. She came back into the room and sat on a couch, took a cup of wine from a servant, and sipped. "This is not Wendar, where nobles rule and the common folk till the ground and pay their tithes to whichever lady commands them. The 'rabble,' as you call them, speak loudly in Darre, and if we ignore them, then they will rise against us.

That is why I cannot leave, or leave Duke Burchard as regent, no matter how affectionately I admire him. The people have suffered much—the earthquake, two bad harvests, the shivering sickness. Many have fled to the countryside, but others from the country walk in rags to the city walls hoping to be given flour from my granary. I must feed them, or they will riot. They love me because I never deserted them, because I came back to save them from Ironhead. I will not desert them now."

She tucked her feet up onto the couch, curled up like the leopard it was rumored she had once kept as a pet—lost when she had fled John Ironhead's siege of Vennaci. She was small but lithe and alert; no fool, indeed.

Antonia did not trust her.

'I respect Lord Hugh, Sister Antonia. He supports Henry and myself because he is Henry's loyal subject, and because we allow him influence beyond that granted to most men who are dedicated to the church. I am not naive, although you may think me so because I have a pretty face. Lord Hugh recommended you to me. That is why I have admitted you to my councils."

No other reason. Adelheid did not say the words; she didn't need to.

'Lord Hugh is an ambitious man."

'He is a bastard and a churchman. He cannot rise higher than presbyter. He can never hope to become skopos. He can never cast off his robes and become a lord and sire children to inherit after him. His sisters inherited Olsatia and Austra. He is trapped as he is now."

'Do you not trust him, Your Majesty?"

'I know what he is, Sister Antonia. I think you do as well. I trust him as I did my beloved cat. Cats are not dogs. They serve you if they wish. Their claws are sharp."

'They are among God's most beautiful creatures."

'Are they?" Adelheid's smile was as sharp as the rake of a leopard's claws. "I have never thought any man as desirable as my dear Henry."

Maybe it was even true. Hugh had never had the power to give Adelheid an imperial crown.

Antonia swallowed a sigh of irritation and speared a slice of melon with her eating knife. "Let us be honest, then, Your Majesty. What do you want of me?"

'You are educated in the arts of the mathematici. Your knowledge can be of value to me and to the kingdom. I hope you will agree to go with my daughters to Tivura and educate them. Mathilda is destined for the throne. Berengaria, however, must go to the church. It would be better for Mathilda if the two sisters never quarrel over what is already ordained. The elder must go before the younger. That is the way of the world.

Teach Berengaria what she needs to know so that she can support her sister when they have come of age and into the inheritance that Henry and I mean to leave them."

The servants had retreated to the door, standing silently, heads bowed, as they awaited Adelheid's commands. Only the woman fanning did not cease, as Antonia could not endure the heat if the air remained still. The tick of the fan's rising and falling was the sole sound in the chamber. From outside there came a shout. Much farther away, the noise of people who had rushed out onto the streets in the aftermath of the tremor faded as folk retreated indoors. The sun's hammer struck more mightily than their fear. They had grown used to the tremors, to the daily sight of the smoking mountain and its sparks and clouds of spitting, hot ash blown in by the west wind. The market would open as afternoon melted into dusk. In summer, the city was more lively in the evening than during the heat of the day.

In this way, the Darrens were a practical people.

Horses whinnied in the courtyard below. Adelheid drained her cup, beckoned, and a servant hurried over to refill it. Antonia popped the melon into her mouth and savored its sweet moisture.

The infant Berengaria could walk and speak a few words. She seemed biddable and clever, although she was not yet two years of age. Adelheid's plan had merit, although the empress might not comprehend the full magnitude of Antonia's ambitions. Berengaria could serve her in many ways, as could Mathilda.

Yet they were so young, and she was old. She would be dead before Mathilda ruled.

Unless, of course, both Adelheid and Henry died untimely deaths.

'I will go to Tivura if you command, Your Majesty," she said, bowing her head obediently.

'I trust my daughters with you, Sister, because you need them. Care for them as if they were your own, bring them safely through the days to come, and I will see that you receive that which you desire most."

'What do you suppose I desire most?"

Adelheid made a sweeping gesture toward the unseen portion of the hill where the other palace lay. "I will make you skopos. Is that enough?"

'I have underestimated you, Your Majesty," said Antonia with a curt laugh, because Adelheid had surprised her, and she did not like to be surprised.

There was silence, and for a moment Antonia thought she had offended the empress, but Adelheid made a little noise in reply, half laugh, half thoughtful sigh, as she rose and went back out onto the balcony. It was the vantage point she liked best. "I am a small flower, Sister Antonia, but a hardy one. Drought and sun and wind and snow will not kill me."

'All things die, Your Majesty."

'As God will it, so shall it come to pass. But are we not creatures of free will? I acquiesced to my first marriage. I thought I had no choice in the matter, I thought those who chose for me must know best, until I discovered that my noble husband was no better than a rutting stag, bellowing and roaring. I swore never to acquiesce again." Her white scarf fluttered as a wind rose off the river, bringing with it the stench of the city's sewage, but Adelheid did not flinch, although Antonia felt compelled to cover her own nose with a corner of her sleeve. "Nor will I. Now that I have tasted the sweetness of freedom, I cannot return to the bitter plate."

'God demand obedience."

'God demand that we do what is right."

'The Enemy tempts with sweet things."

'Yet so do God, for what is right must seem sweet to us. So the blessed Daisan preached."

Voices rang in the hall beyond the closed doors. The servants leaped aside as the doors were flung open and a captain wearing the tabard of the palace guards strode in, dropping to his knees before the empress. Like all her captains, he was a solid, competent man, neatly dressed and devotedly loyal to his young queen.

'Your Majesty! A messenger from the north. From Zuola."

'Zuola!" The county of Zuola lay north and east of Darre, near the border with Dalmiaka, on the plain below the easternmost extent of the Alfar Mountains. "Is it news of the emperor?"

'Alas, no, Your Majesty. Ill news, I fear." He looked back toward the door, hearing the jingle of mail, and a weary man clattered into the room with a guard on either side. The messenger's dark hair was plastered to his head with sweat, and sweat had made runnels through the dust staining his face. Dust spit from his boots with each step; he shed it from his clothing onto the rugs. "Your Majesty," he croaked. "Give him wine," said Adelheid.

'Nay," he insisted, kneeling beside the captain. Dust shook from him. Antonia coughed. "I'll take wine after, if it pleases you, Your Majesty. Dire news."

She was pale but not cowed. "Go on. Is it the emperor?" "Nay, I have heard nothing of the emperor, Your Majesty. I am one of those you posted in the Brinne Pass." "An army!

Has it come?"

'A large army, Your Majesty." He began coughing too hard to continue.

One of the guards was so excited he could not contain himself, but blurted out rash words. "Rumor says it is led by a sorcerer who commands two griffins."

'Griffins!" The servants exclaimed in wonder. Adelheid's face changed color, but she said nothing. "Hush!" Captain Falco gave the guard a sharp look, and he flushed, shamefaced, and stepped back.

'Rumor delights in false words." The empress turned her attention back to the messenger. "What is your name?"

He bent his head, acknowledging her intent notice, the honor she did him by asking who he was. Most men and women lived and died without ever coming to the attention of their noble ruler, and often this was to their advantage, but Adelheid was a different kind of ruler, one who liked to know to whom she spoke, even if they were the lowest laboring serf.

'I am called Milo, Your Majesty."

'Drink first, then tell me only what is known for certain." He dared not disobey, and in truth it was clear that he was grateful to drain two cups of wine and wipe his neck and face with a damp linen cloth. Adelheid waited patiently, as still as a cat watching a mouse which has not yet realized that it is intended to become dinner.

'It is better to consider your words than to speak in haste. Captain Falco, send for Duke Burchard, Count Tedbald, and Captain Lut-fridus."

He sent a guard on the errand, then knelt again beside Milo. Already word had run through the palace that a messenger had come bearing ill tidings, and a murmur of voices betrayed the gathering of servants, guardsmen, and courtiers come to lurk outside the doors, although none dared enter the empress' private apartments without explicit permission.

'Go on, then, Milo. Do not fear to speak before me."

'Your Majesty." He wiped his forehead one more time, more for courage than to cool himself. "We camped many months in the pass. The winter wasn't so hard, for it snowed less than usual. We placed ourselves with a good view of the trail, so we might see scouts or the van of an army coming long before they might chance to see us. So it proved. A large army is crossing the pass. In truth, they may have come down into Zuola in the days it has taken me to ride here, although over the months we rigged traps to create as many obstacles as we could manage. My comrades have ridden according to our orders. I came here."

'Describe exactly what you saw."

'A great army." He trembled and for a time was so overwhelmed by exhaustion, or recollection, that he could not go on. She waited. A commotion stirred the company waiting beyond the doors. Duke Burchard entered, leaning on his cane and attended by one of his nephews. Adelheid moved aside on the couch to let him sit next to her, and she patted his aged hand fondly, had a servant bring him wine, and bade him listen to the messenger's report.

Milo drank another cup of wine and went on.

'A great host of armed men. It is true there are a pair of griffins, for I saw them myself.

They are huge beasts! They shine in the sun! There was a horde of barbarians with wings sprouting from their backs, although others say they aren't true wings but only crude emblems constructed out of wood. They looked like wings to me. And there were other foul creatures as well—men with the bodies of horses."

'Bwr! Bwr!" The cry erupted, torn from the listening multitude, for certainly a mass of people now pressed into the chamber and crowded the broad hall beyond. More folk came, a staccato of footsteps and a clamor of voices calling back the news to those who pushed at the rear.

'Silence!" cried Adelheid. One by one and in groups they fell silent.

Maybe the entire palace hushed, waiting on her words. "Barbarians? An invasion from the east? Are they Arethousans?"

'Nay, Your Majesty. Most of them seemed to be Wendish." "Wendish!" exclaimed the old duke. His hands trembled because of age, not anger or shock. His sojourn in Aosta and two bouts of the shivering fever had weakened him.

'They fly the banner of a black dragon."

'The Dragons!" said Burchard. "It was Duchess Yolande's rebellious brother Rodulf who was sent east to lead the Bang's Dragons into the field against the Quman. Can it be the Dragons have come to aid Henry?"

Adelheid's small hand closed on Burchard's wrist just as the duke opened his mouth to speak, and he looked at her, surprised. What message passed between them, read in lips and eyes, Antonia could not interpret, but the old duke bent his head, obedient to the young empress' will, and kept silence.

'Go on," said Adelheid. "What else did you see and witness?" "There were other banners as well, a dozen or more. A silver tree on a blue field—" "Villam!"

'A gold lion on a black field."

'Avaria!" The old duke moaned, and Adelheid called for a linen cloth and wiped his damp brow herself. "My Avaria. What means this? Have my heirs turned their backs on me? On the king?"

'If they are friend," said Adelheid, "then they do not threaten us. If they are our enemy, then we must crush them before they reach Darre. Burchard, will you march out with me?"

'Do you mean to march against this army yourself?" "I did not surrender to John Ironhead. Henry still fights in Dalmi-aka. I will protect Aosta. I will not run."

'If there are Bwr, Your Majesty…" said Captain Falco. "Bwr!" He was a brawny soldier, a man of action who served his lady bravely, but the name had the power to make a man as stalwart as he was shudder. The crowd murmured. This was how fear sounded, like water washing all resolve out of their hearts.

The empress rose, lifted a hand, and commanded silence. Antonia did not trust Adelheid, but she admired her. It was a pity the empress was not as malleable as her young daughters, but God did not place obstacles in one's path in order to make life easy.

The road to heaven was paved with thorns and barriers. One had to climb them and not be afraid of getting scratched up.

'Heed me!" she cried. "The Bwr once burned this city, but they will not do so today, nor will they do so as long as I rule over you and protect you! I will ride to meet them.

Let every man or woman who can carry arms go to the north gate. Together with the city guard under Captain Lutfridus, they will guard the walls in my absence. I will ride out with my army, and with Duke Burchard's and Count Tedbald's faithful men."

That Burchard had been too old and Count Tedbald too untrustworthy to ride to Dalmiaka with Henry and Anne she did not say, although Antonia and most of the others knew it.

They cheered her because she was their beloved queen, young and brave and pretty.

Being pretty always helped.

When they had dispersed to make ready, Adelheid turned to Burchard and repeated her question. "Will you ride out with me, Duke Burchard? It seems that the obedient son has turned rebel."

'I cannot believe it," said the old man. "Do you truly believe that Prince Sanglant has taken the field against his own father?"

'A black dragon?"

'Saony flies the red dragon. It must be the prince. Just as you warned me."

'He has turned against Henry. Will you ride with me, Burchard?"

He wept quietly, but his gaze on her was steady. Like most men, he adored her. "I will ride even against my own children, Your Majesty. I will not waver. You know that."

She nodded. "We will ride together, old friend."

All were gone except the servants. Antonia relished the solitude. The bees had buzzed so frantically, maddened by fear and uncertainty, but now the chamber lay quiet, the only noise the beat of the fan against the air. That rhythmic pulse was so soothing. It was cooling off as the sun set. In the city, the markets had opened and folk walked the streets, hunting their suppers.

Adelheid went back out onto the balcony. "See!" she called. "Have you seen it, Sister Antonia? It is brighter tonight. There it is, burning in the heart of the Queen."

Antonia knew what the empress pointed at. She sighed and rose. The only good thing about the heat was that her joints didn't ache as much as they did in the cold.

As the sun set, darkness rose in the east and the accustomed stars slowly burned, one by one, into view. In the constellation known as the Queen, now at zenith, a comet shone.

'The Queen's bow is pointed at the Dragon," said Adelheid. "Oth ers have claimed this comet portends the end of the world, but now I know it signals my victory over Prince Sanglant."

Lamplight stippled the battlements of the distant city walls as well as the nearer palace walls that ringed the hill on which the two palaces stood. Dusk waned to twilight and twilight faded to night as they stared at the comet, which was noticeably brighter than it had been three nights before—the night the queen's clerics had first marked it. Three nights ago it had burned in the Queen's Bow.

'It moves quickly across the sky," said Antonia. "How can you know what it portends?

It might only portend God's displeasure because of the manifold sins committed on Earth by the wicked."

'It might." Her tone changed, and her head tilted provocatively. "Do you know what is whispered in the streets? Some say the comet is a warning that God mean to punish us because the church mothers suppressed the truth." "Which truth?"

'That the blessed Daisan was brought before the Empress Thais-sania and condemned to death, that he had his heart cut out of him while he yet lived."

'Heresy! Foul heresy! You must pray that your ears should be burned off rather than another whisper of such foul lies touch them! This is the Enemy's work!"

'Do you think so?" Adelheid's voice was as light as that of a laughing child's although her words were as heavy as lead. "The ancient Babaharshan astronomers said that a comet portends change. I will have need of you, Sister Antonia. One task." "If I can aid you, Your Majesty, I will."

The queen nodded, as though she had expected this answer. As though she knew Antonia had few other options at this moment. "I fear it will come to battle, but we are ready, because we have been forewarned. Because we have already prepared the trap. Yet force of arms alone cannot win the day."

At once, Antonia understood what Adelheid wanted. "What you ask is not a pleasantry, Your Majesty. Only blood can summon the galla. You are the one who must give me the lives I need to work the spell. Have you considered your part? Are you willing to do what is necessary? Are you willing to be the executioner?"

The queen placed a hand atop Antonia's. Her fingers were surprisingly strong as they tightened on Antonia's. "I will do what I must so that I and my daughters survive." xxv:

>LY FIRE Al dawn he shook the leaves off his body that he'd used to make a nest for sleeping. The air was cool but promised heat later. He licked his dry lips. After he slaked his thirst, he could search for food. A haze blurred the valley, but he smelled water close by, and pushing through thickets he got in under the canopy of beech and headed downhill. The beech began to give way to a mixed wood of oak and hornbeam in the full leaf of summer; the shade made him shiver. The sun hadn't yet risen high enough to penetrate the cover.

He heard a stream and kicked through wood-straw and fescue to the bank, where he knelt and drank his fill. For a while he lay on the grassy verge while insects crawled on his body and the sun's light warmed his face, but at length hunger drove him on.

He followed the stream as it plunged down the hillside and found himself in a broad clearing where the water emptied into a pond. He paused at the forest's edge, seeing movement not too far from him, out in the high grass: a man was cutting hay with a brush hook. There was a child, too, and a dog playing with a stick on the far shore of the pond within sight of the laborer. The man bent and cut, rose, bent and cut again. At once, suddenly, without warning, the iron hook tore free of the handle and flew spinning through the air to land with a splash in the pond.

At first there was silence, only the chirp of a bird and the lazy humming of insects; then the man cursed so loud and long and so despairingly that the child and the dog left off their play and came running.

'What happened, Uncle? What's wrong?"

'Some damn fool didn't fix the handle to the hook. Now it's flown off and into the water. We'll never find it! That was the iron blade I borrowed from the steward so we could make our tithe this month by bringing in straw for the lady's stables."

'It's lost?" The child's voice quavered as the enormity of the accident struck home.

"But we can't replace an iron blade, Uncle. Can we?"

The man shook his head, unable to speak through his tears. He and the child went to the shore. Neither wore shoes or leggings. They waded through the reed-choked waters, the man pushing the stick along under the surface, the child groping through the vegetation.

'Where did it fall?"

'Ai, God! It happened so fast! What will we do? Ai, God. What will we do when the steward demands recompense?"

He stepped out from the trees.

The dog barked at once and trotted forward to greet him, snuffling into his hands as the man stood and pulled the child against his body, shielding it.

'What is it, Uncle?" cried the child. "Is that a wild beast?" "It's a man!"

'That's not a man. It looks like a goblin!"

'It must be a beggar, child. God enjoin us to give bread to beggars."

'Even if we've none to feed ourselves? What if he's a thief or a bandit?"

'Hush, now. See how Treu greets him." The man pushed the child behind him. He stood to his knees in the water, and from the safety of the pond hoisted the dripping brush hook handle so it could be seen he had something to use as a weapon. "Greetings, stranger. You're welcome to our steading if you've a wish for a hank of bread and a cup of sweetened vinegar."

'Give me the handle," he said as he approached. He held out his hand, and the man got the strangest look on his face, puzzled and wary at the same time, but as he waded into the water with Treu wagging his tail happily at his side, the laborer let him take the handle.

'I saw where it fell." He thrust the handle into a stand of reeds, and after pushing it here and there for a little bit the stub jostled something hard. He reached into water made murky by all the wading. Groping through pond scum, his fingers skimmed over a curved blade.

'Here."

The laborer wept when he lifted the hook out of the water.

'Bless you, Friend! Bless you! You have saved my family. Come, I pray you. Come with me to my home, and we'll feed you, for you look sorely in need of feeding."

'So I am," he said wonderingly. The water had sluiced a layer of dirt off his fingers and arms, and he could see his nails grown long, packed with dirt under the cuticles where before he had merely seen an encrustation of filth formed in the crude shape of a hand. His bare thighs and chest were equally filthy. A scrap of grimy cloth concealed his hips. Otherwise he was naked.

What was he?

He lifted his head to stare at the man, thinking that the laborer's gaze might tell him something he needed to know, but the other two had already clambered out onto the shore and the child kept its distance, although the dog seemed eager enough to accept his strokes and patting.

'Come," said the laborer.

He led the way through feather grass whose golden heads were stippled with black.

The ground had a moist, squishy feel under his feet, as if it never entirely dried out, but the dew on the grass had burned off and it was beginning to be hot and humid. They crossed into the woodland and walked on a well-worn path in glorious shade. Here the mark of human hands shaped the land; where larger trees had been chopped down for planks and logs, light speared into open spaces lush with saplings and shrubs. No fallen trees rotted and there weren't many branches on the ground either; the villagers had picked the ground clean for firewood. Some pigs rattled away over the ground, squealing.

'Pigs haven't done well this year," said the laborer, squinting after them. "Some of the sows went dry and there wasn't a litter that half didn't die though we did what we could to save them. It'll be hard going this winter. Four of the steward's cattle died over the winter beyond what was picked out for the Novarian slaughter. Two of the steward's mares lost their foals, too."

'My mam died just last week," said the child. "She saw demons and they made her fingers and toes burn until she went crazy. So did the deacon and six other folk in the valley. It was witches what cursed them. They gave me and all the other kids a tummy ache for days, too, those witches. And my fingers got all cold."

'Hush now, Brat." He said the word fondly. "I beg pardon, Friend. We don't mean to burden you with our troubles."

'Was there a murrain among the cattle?" he asked, because he had a sudden unexpected memory of sheep with weeping hooves and a crying farmer who was set to lose everything, but he couldn't recall how it had all fallen out.

'God forbid!" The laborer drew the Circle at his chest. "We've been spared that curse at least. We've had too much rain, and it's been cold. This sickness that's haunting the valley, that's troubled us. But we're no worse off than many other folks, I'd wager."

'My dad died," said the Brat kindly. "But that were two winters ago, when we hadn't enough grain or stores to last all winter and the new lord didn't bring more, not like the old one always done. So all our troubles didn't just start this year!"

'That's right," agreed the laborer. "They started when the rightful heir was dispossessed by that greedy Lord Geoffrey, for he wanted the county to go to his infant daughter instead of the lord's true son. That was when all our troubles started. Every one of them."

Maybe the root shrugged up out of the ground and wrapped its tendrils around his foot and tripped him. Maybe his scattered thoughts skipped, jostled by these words, so that he stopped paying attention to the uneven trail.

He stumbled and went down hard on his knees, bruising his knees, his hands, and an elbow.

The child cried out. Treu barked, then came to lick him, and while he lay there half stunned and aching, he heard the laborer speak softly to the child.

'I've never seen Treu take to a man like that. Never."

'And him such a wild beast!" whispered the child agreeably. "He stinks!"

'Hush, Brat."

They did not want to touch him or get close enough for him to touch them. With a grunt, he sat back on his haunches, then rose, shaking himself as a dog shakes off water.

He was indeed so filthy that dust and matter spattered onto the ground around him as water droplets might spray. They stepped away, and the laborer gestured awkwardly toward the trail and kept walking. It wasn't difficult to keep up with them looking back every five steps, although he hurt all over. The fall had jarred him badly and his head throbbed; each step jarred more pain loose until he thought he was going to go blind. The hamlet appeared where woodland ended in open ground striped with fields of rye and a trio of soggy gardens ringed by high fences to keep out deer, goats, and rabbits. Farther down, at the valley bottom, trees grew thickly along a small river's winding banks. Three more dogs came running out to greet them; tails wagging and ears high, they swarmed around him and he patted them all. "Where is this?" he asked, staring over the straggle of buildings. "Shaden is what we call it. Just my father and his brother and sister and two cousins came out here thirty year back when they were young, with the permission of the count, and cut back the forest and tilled the high ground. I heard tell from the deacon, before the sickness took her, that the count—him who died just a few year back—had a new plow so strong it could cut through that good earth down at the bottom of the valley, but we've never heard tell of such since he died, God rest him. It's said he meant to share out plows among the countyfolk, but the new lord hasn't done so. That land would make good tillage. We had such a hard rain these past two year that the best soil got washed down to the river, and we got black rot in the rye stores, and it come up in the grain again this year."

'It's my job to pick it out," said the Brat cheerfully, "but I don't get it all."

The hamlet boasted five houses and one common stable in addition to six lean-tos, a chicken coop, and a broken-down corral missing half its fence, with the inside grown to weeds.

Every soul in the village turned out to see the marvel: a visitor. Even the old one—the Brat's grandmother—got up from the bench on which she sat in the sun and hobbled over to examine him with the expression of a woman who has seen too much not to be skeptical of a gold coin pressed into her hand.

'This beggar did me a good turn," said the laborer, "and I've promised him a bit of bread and something to drink in recompense."

He went over to the corral and sat on a listing log. He was so weary. A passel of tiny children stood at a safe distance and stared at him, with an older girl keeping watch to make sure they didn't ven ture too close. The dogs scratched at the dirt before settling down at his feet. The adults seemed to be conferring among themselves, out of earshot, but the Brat lugged over a big ceramic pot sealed with a lid and a wide basket tipped over her head like a hat. She settled down on the ground near him and gestured to the other girl.

'Won't you come sit by me, Lindy?" She smirked when Lindy shook her head and took a step back.

After setting the basket down beside her, she took the wooden lid off the pot to reveal grain. "It's not gone down to the miller yet, but that's a two-day walk," she said as she ran her hands through the grain. "Uncle goes tomorrow." She began to pick through the grain, tossing black kernels onto the ground. The dogs snuffled at them but did not eat.

"Whew! This is a bad one!"

'Here," he said, "let me." He slid off the log before she could say more than a startled protest, and the watching children shrieked and scuttled backward, but the Brat only scooted away, not running, as he crouched beside the widemouthed pot. The top layer of grain was indeed contaminated by monstrous black kernels grown to twice the size of the regular kernels. He sifted them through his hands into the basket, but the farther down he got, the cleaner the grain became until there wasn't a trace of black rot.

'Look at that!" The Brat had slid closer by degrees and now she peered over his shoulder and whistled with awe. "Nary a bit wasted! That'll be enough flour to get us through to harvest, after miller and lord take their tithe."

'Brat!" Uncle called, and she hopped up, poured all the grain back into the pot, covered it, and hoisted it up to haul back to him.

Chickens came over, pecking for the discarded grain, but he shooed them away and swept dirt over the black grains. They looked evil to him, although he wasn't sure why.

He'd seen black rot before, just never so heavy. Indeed, staring through the hazy day toward the fields it seemed to him that the entire field was poisoned by black rot, as thick as flies on honey, and he heaved himself up and walked, weaving because he really was getting light-headed from hunger, out to the fields and down those long strips brushing his hands over the heads of rye. They tickled his skin. Black grains tumbled to the earth like rain.

Harvest tomorrow, or next week—wasn't that what the girl had said? He couldn't recall. The dogs followed him patiently down one strip and up the next and after a while he remembered that the villagers had promised to feed him and he wandered back through …„

golden fields unstained by rot into the hamlet. Here he found a wooden platter waiting for him with a cup of sweetened vinegar that made his eyes open wide, a cup of onion soup, and an entire half a loaf of rye bread, very dry so probably some days old, but by soaking it piece by piece in the soup he softened it and gulped it down. It sat like a lead weight in his stomach, the vinegar fizzing and bubbling, the onion burning, and he was suddenly so tired that he had to lie down. He crawled over to the stables where he would feel more comfortable with the animals, but of course what animals the villagers kept were out grazing in the pastures, so he found a filthy pile of straw for his bed and slept.

JHlJc griffins could take the cold, but they didn't like the elevation, and despite the uncanny number of trees blocking the road and rock-falls whose shatter-trail had to be cleared before the wagons could pass, it was the griffins who slowed them down most.

'It were a warm, wet winter," said their guide, an old Avarian man called Ucco who had crossed the pass at least fifteen times in the last twenty years, leading merchants out of Westfall and southern Avaria who had slaves, salt, and Ungrian steel to trade in northern Aosta. "That makes the avalanches worse, mind you. If it's cold, it don't melt.

But it weren't so bad earlier this year, for I crossed back in Quadrü with a Westfall merchant who's been trading Ungrian slaves for Aostan spices and cloth. I don't know where all this rock-fall come from, or how these trees come to fall. It weren't here two month ago."

'Might there have been storms?" the prince asked. "We got hit by a dozen strong storms out of the south. I lost a dozen men, and saw a village flattened by wind."

'Nay, not so I recall except that one thunder boomer in Cintre that blew a bit of snow on it off the peaks. But for that, it hasn't rained much the last two months. See how the streams are low. Look at all that bare rock on the heights. Where's the snow? That'll bring drought, mark you. Drought this summer already, and drought this autumn, and worse to come if there's not snow this winter."

He was a voluble man accompanied by an exceedingly pretty granddaughter who seemed delighted to flirt with a noble prince who was, once again, without his wife. It was at times like this Sanglant missed Heribert most, but in truth Hathui proved a stronger fence; she had a hard gaze and a way of snorting with laughter that suggested amusement at the foibles of mankind.

'The men have cleared the trees away, my lord prince," Hathui said now, riding up to him where he waited on the road. She eyed the granddaughter, rolled her eyes, and went on. "Two were felled by axes. You can see the bite of a blade in their trunks."

'Bandits?" he asked.

'No bandits up here, my lord," said the old guide, "unless they've come north from Zuola because of hard times there. No man winters up here. That's a death sentence."

'The monks winter over at St. Barnaria's Pass."

'Well, they ain't rightly men, are they? Clean-shaven like women—begging your pardon, my lord—and women can take the cold better, that's for certain." He patted his granddaughter fondly. She was a sturdily built girl of no more than fifteen or sixteen years with the thick buttocks and legs of a person who hikes and climbs every day. She smiled at Sanglant, displaying remarkably even, white teeth, sign of strong stock. Hathui snorted. He flushed and hastily turned his attention to other things, tilting back his head to survey their route.

They had reached the pass' summit yesterday after struggling through a complex warren of stones cast across the road in stages that had seemed to be the remains of three different rockfalls. Now the road wound almost level at the base of a barren valley, which they had mostly climbed out of before this latest barrier had brought the vanguard to a halt. They had crossed through a land of rugged mountains capped with bare rock which dropped down on this side in north-facing slopes where green alder bushes grew along the furrows and alpine rose on the higher slopes where water did not collect. There were no patches of snow on the slopes at all, not even in the shade. According to Ucco, they had come three quarters of the way across and tomorrow would start their final descent through the foothills of Zuola and, beyond that, down through steep valleys onto the northern coastal plain of Aosta.

'Is it possible they know we are coming?" he asked, eager to discuss war rather than lust.

'They might know," Hathui admitted reluctantly, "if it's true Wolfhere betrayed us."

'We must suppose that he did. To believe otherwise is folly." Her frown was answer enough to a question she didn't like the sound of, no matter how many times it bowed before her. "Wolfhere is a good man," she insisted.

He shrugged. Behind, the male griffin huffed, and Sanglant dismounted.

'We'd best stop for the night," he said, wiping his forehead. There hadn't been rain for weeks. Even Ucco had difficulty finding enough drinking water for their entire army and all their stock.

'I'll let Captain Fulk know, my lord." Hathui reined her horse away.

The male griffin was limping, and even the female—bigger and stronger—suffered from the altitude.

'I didn't think they'd hurt like this just from climbing," said Si-bold, standing clear of the huffing griffin as he watched the prince approach. "They never seem to catch their breath."

'Domina hasn't flown once since we reached the mountains," said Sanglant.

Lewenhardt had shot a bear yesterday and Sanglant fished a hank of meat out of a barrel and walked right up to the griffin so that it fed out of his hands. He respected the sharp curve of its beak, but more and more he had come to think of Argent as a cross between his horse and a jessed eagle. Though it loomed larger than a warhorse, and could send him flying with a swipe of its foreclaws, it never did, and he felt easy around it now, although Domina still held herself aloof. After Argent fed, he stroked its downy head-feathers until it rumbled with pleasure deep in its chest, rather like a cat. Still, its breathing was labored, and it huffed twice more, too much like the dry cough of a man who has caught a fever in his lungs and can't squeeze it out.

'We'll stop here for the night and let them rest. It's not more than two days' march to Aosta."

'Thank God," said Sibold. A few other soldiers had gathered, those brave enough to stand watch on the griffins, and they echoed Sibold's words. They wanted out of the mountains. They wanted action, not this endless long journey.

Yet Aosta wouldn't bring peace.

They set up a rough traveling camp. The duman had a way of pitching canvas lean-tos to hold off the prevailing wind that the rest of the army had adopted, and after feeding the griffins Sanglant made a tour of the camp: the Villam auxiliaries under the command of Lord Druthmar; the Saony contingent who chafed under the difficult rule of Lord Wichman; a ragtag collection of fighting men out of Eastfall and Westfall whom he had placed under the able command of Captain Istvan; Lady Wendilgard and her Avarians; the centaurs and their Kerayit allies; the Quman clans, stolid and silent, and their strings of horses; his own personal guard, now numbering more than two hundred.

His soldiers had grown used to the routine of the long march. The horses were cared for first while sentries took up places along the road. A line formed at the infirmary, mostly men complaining of loose bowels and sore feet. There was plenty of light for men to collect mountain pine for firewood, although little enough meat or porridge to cook over those fires. They would live off the land in Aosta and make enemies by doing so, yet he could not regret that they would march down onto the Aostan plain at harvest time, when they might be assured plenty to eat and bread every night.

'You're quiet, my lord prince," said Hathui when they returned to the van where the griffins had settled down to rest like big cats curled up for the night.

'So I am." He shaded his eyes to sight west along the mountain ridges, then turned to examine the wandering line of camp stretching north along the roadway. The rear guard lay out of sight because of the curve and dip of the valley. "We're vulnerable, strung out along the road like this. Ah! Look there!"

A rich harvest of herbs grew beyond the alder, and until it grew too dark to see he plucked saxifrage, chervil, and wolfsbane.

'What virtue do these herbs have, my lord?" Hathui asked, working alongside him to his direction.

'Different virtues for different plants, but all of them can aid men who take wounds in battle. Wolfsbane can do more." He glanced up at the sky, which was darkening as night swept up the valley. Only the peaks were still lit. "It can poison a man, should it come to that."

'Poison is a traitor's weapon."

'Some name us traitors. Would you poison a man, Hathui, if it meant that a thousand men would be spared death in battle?"

She sat back on her heels. "You've taken me off my guard, my lord prince. How can we measure one man's life against a thousand?"

'We do so all the time. Every day."

She chuckled as she tied up the herbs into tight bundles. "Perhaps we do. Shall I hike back down the trail and light a fire for Eagle's Sight, my lord? Liath may have reappeared. It's been three nights since I've looked."

He shook his head. "I don't feel easy. We're too close to Aosta now. Liath knows what her task is. We must stay hidden." He grinned as an unexpected mood of reckless jollity swept him. "It is an irony, is it not? Isn't that what the poets would call it? The regnants of Wendar kept secret the knowledge of the Eagle's Sight so that they could make use of the advantage it gave them. Now, protection against that sight has become so commonplace among those of us who know of its existence that the sight no longer serves any function.

Yet I find I prefer knowing that I will make my way unencumbered by sorcerous aids or obstacles."

'Not even those wielded by your wife?"

He laughed, because it was both painful and sweet to think of Liath. "I don't know. I only know that without magic Anne and Adelheid and Hugh could not have ensorcelled my father." He gathered up the herbs. "Come," he said, rising. "Only protect me from our guide's lovely granddaughter, by whatever means necessary, and you'll have my thanks."

Thoughts of Liath stirred his dreams, and he woke more than once, restless, discontented, until those disturbing visions melted into broken dreams of war. A hammer beat out a sword, cruel and jagged in shape. Sparks flew from the glowing iron with every stroke, and each spark drifted heavenward on that holy fire, spiraling and dancing, to become a star.

All at once he started awake, hearing that ringing beat, but he realized he was listening to the chuffing of the griffins. From the half-open tent he saw the stars twinkling above, yet a haze began to obscure them as he watched, growing murkier, covering the sky. The canvas rustled as if a rain were rolling in, but the air was dry and no thunder sounded in the distance.

Something is coming.

As he slipped on his boots and buckled his belt, an odor that reminded him of the forge crept into the air, blown in on that wind. Memories like bright sparks snapped in his mind. The dark spirits, the galla, that he and his mother had battled at Verna three or more years ago had brought with them the stench of the forge.

He faced into the rising wind. Up and down the camp came awake.

Horses stamped and neighed. Dogs barked. Men called out each to the others or pounded extra stakes and rope to fix down flapping canvas. The wind whipped his hair around his neck as he turned to face south toward the height of the road ahead where a dozen soldiers stood sentry duty. The chuffing of the griffins grew in pitch until it became a cross between a yelp and howl. Others woke, grasping their weapons. From the hill they heard the somber tolling as of a bell.

'What manner of storm is this?" asked Captain Fulk, coming up beside him.

'Nothing good. Let an alert be passed all the way down the line. We must be ready."

He pushed past the men to the hooded griffin; Domina had scattered men by stalking through the tents to stand with its eagle's head upraised as it called out a piercing challenge.

A horrible screech answered that call, carried on the wind from the sentries at the forward edge of camp where the road disappeared over a rock rise.

The sound of a man dying told much about how he was being killed. A quick blow on the field of battle might produce a subtle sigh. A gut wound often elicited screams, a mixture of pain and the realization that one's life was ending. This scream was that of a man dying in increments as his flesh was flayed off still living bone. Through the darkness, for now the stars were all but gone, Sanglant saw the shadows of men fleeing their posts. One figure, caught in mid-stride, was lifted from the ground where he flailed as if drowning, while he screamed and screamed until his silhouette against the deep blue of night was extinguished. A scatter of bones fell to earth.

'Torches!" cried Sanglant, coming fully awake at last.

While few men had senses keen enough to see or smell the galla or taste on their tongue the scent of the blood of dying men which carried on the wind, all could hear. All realized that they were set upon not by a mortal foe but by wicked demons.

'Your Highness!" Fulk ran up beside him, and even he, who rarely sounded shaken, could barely speak from fear. "I don't think steel or fire can banish such creatures!"

Panic bled backward from the vanguard as men cut loose their horses and fled north along the road, or up the slopes, anywhere; a rout unfolded around him in the space of two breaths. Like a rolling mist, the galla came over the hills that sheltered the camp; few of the sentries stationed at the perimeter of camp were swift enough to escape, and as he finally got an arm to move, a leg to move, those slowest in their flight were flayed to the bone and their remains scattered on the gale.

The griffins howled in unison, and Domina turned her head back to chuff at her mate.

Her iron feathers glimmered where the wind ran through them.

'Fulk! Take the men and horses and retreat north at full speed. At dawn if you've had no signal from me, gather our forces. If I am dead, let Lady Wendilgard take command.

Save my father."

'My lord prince." Fulk did not hesitate; he was too good a soldier. He called out.

Anshelm raised the horn to his lips and blew. The call rang above the screams and chaos and soon the tide of men flowed north along the road in a steadier stream, pushing the rear of the panicking army before it. Even the centaurs and the Quman fled.

Sanglant ran to Argent. "This is your fight!"

He cut the trusses that held the hood and as the cloth fell away and Argent shook its head to cast off the remaining tangle of ropes, he sawed through the restraining ropes.

The toll of bells rang through the air. The hot iron scent of aetherical bodies descended upon them. He heard his name in their heavy voices. Turning, he raised his sword as the ranks of galla swept down.

'Sanglant! Sanglant!"

'This earthly realm of pain is no gift, let us free your soul!"

Their forms were clear, towers of darkness and vaguely humanlike, although their features were blurred and faceless. They had grasping claws and could rend flesh. The smell of iron overwhelmed him as he staggered backward, unable to stand against such an onslaught. A wave of heat washing down before them completed the feeling of being cast into a blacksmith's white-hot hearth. He struck with his sword, but it passed through a wispy form and a quick hop backward was all that saved him from its touch. The rocky ground twisted under his feet, and he stumbled and fell flat.

The griffin sprang. It leaped not like a warrior plunging into battle or a wolf in a last burst of speed as it brings down an elk, but rather like a kitten chasing a moth around a candle, surprised at the ease with which the moth is swatted down but greatly pleased when another comes along to play. Its mate yelped and danced along the slope, wings outstretched as she sliced through the crowded galla.

The galla felt no fear, and so they came on, much to the griffins' delight. They shrilled no death screams, only whushing sighs of relief as their earthly forms splintered where griffin feathers cut through them; one by one, they were banished from Earth and fled back to the abyss from which they sprang.

Some few of the galla pursued the army, but with great bounds and gliding leaps the griffins cleared the camp and took off in pursuit of the pursuers. As they overtook each of the galla, they made a great spectacle of pouncing on the shimmering spear of darkness, and with each snap of release, each galla vanquished and banished, the griffins released a rumbling noise that could be mistaken as nothing but the sound of elation.

Sanglant climbed to his feet. He stood alone amid the ruin of camp and laughed to watch the griffins at play while his heart wept for those of his men who had been murdered in such a foul, cowardly manner.

And yet, and amazingly, when the galla were all gone and every trace of that iron sting had been blown into oblivion, the griffins circled around and padded back to him.

They loomed over him, and Argent bent its head and shoved him playfully as if to say: will there be more?

'There will be more," he promised. "So I fear."

As soon as it was light, he rode south with two dozen men along the trail while leaving Captain Fulk to set the army in order. The path made by the galla was easy to follow: all living things were dead where they had passed, even the plants. About an hour's ride south he discovered a hollow lying east of the road where the massacre had happened. Vultures and crows led him to it, for they had gathered in great numbers.

Within this bowl of ground fifty or more men had had their throats cut and then been abandoned. Blood spattered everywhere, and it stank. The birds had pecked out all the soft eyes already, and the feast was so rich that he had to kill one before the rest fluttered away reluctantly only to roost close by, waiting.

Hathui and several of the men were sick; he himself could scarcely stand to look. It was one thing to kill in battle against an armed opponent. This was murder, plain and simple.

They returned to the army in a grimmer state of mind than they had left it, rejoining them at midday. Captain Fulk had the ranks set in marching order, and as soon as the prince arrived, he made his report.

The guide and his pretty granddaughter had vanished, but more than one man reported having seen them running north with their packs bouncing on their backs. All but forty-eight men were ac counted for, yet the bones they had collected on the hillside and along the road where the galla had attacked seemed to add up to no more than nineteen men.

Most likely some had lost heart and run for home. Still, not one among the Quman, or the centaurs, deserted him. Of his own men, Den and Johannes were missing and presumed among the dead.

'My people took the brunt of it!" Lord Wichman complained. "Twelve men posted on sentry duty in the van, and only poor Thruster is left of them. Look at him!"

Lord Eddo had a bad reputation and was not liked even by Wichman and his cronies, but Sanglant had to pity the man now. He was a wreck, babbling and weeping without end about demons and fearful whispers and the claws of the Enemy raking into his guts until a potion got down his throat made him sleep.

'This may be the least of the losses we'll suffer," said Sanglant, looking at each of his commanders in turn. "If there are any without the heart to go on, now is the time to leave, without shame."

His captains looked beyond him to the two griffins, who lounged up on the rocks, taking the sun, sated and satisfied. Unbound and unrestrained, they had not flown off.

Captain Fulk laughed. "If such creatures follow you of their own volition, why would we poor frail humans turn away? Your army is ready to march, my lord prince."

UNCLE pushed the handcart and its precious container of grain plus a beautifully carved bench for trade along the windy path that led out of the valley. The Brat padded alongside, chattering nonstop about each least sight; she had never left the valley before, not in her entire life. The trail rose, crested a ridge, and descended out of the hills into open country beyond. That journey took them all morning and into the afternoon. Treu followed at his heels the entire time and now and again licked his hands.

'Look at how wide open everything is! Look, there's a hamlet! Look, I've never seen those people before! Hey, there! Hello, there!

We've come walking all the way from Shaden! What's this place called? Obstgarten?"

In a lower voice. "Isn't that a peculiar name, Uncle? Just calling themselves 'orchard'?

Look! I've never seen an oak tree so big! We could live inside that trunk if it was hollow!

Is it much farther to the miller?"

His stomach hurt. Although the others had taken cheese and baked eggs for the journey, he was so hungry he couldn't wait for midday so he had eaten another half a loaf of old bread that morning, the last of the hoard stored in the deacon's cupboard, too precious to waste although it had become so dessicated that it tasted like rocks and gritted between his teeth.

This countryside seemed vaguely familiar to him, although he wasn't sure why, but every time they came around a curve in the path the sight of that particularly unmistakable oak tree whose broad, leafy crown seemed to hide half the sky, or an apple orchard, or a hollow lush with alder made his eyes hurt and his head throb until he thought he would go blind again. His fingers were cold, although it was a late summer day so hot that the heavens had a tendency to shimmer.

'Storm," said Uncle, pausing to rest while he wiped sweat off his brow. He pointed southeast where the land was most open. "Coming up that way."

Thunderheads piled up to form a huge wall of cloud, white at the top and an ominous green-gray color along the base.

'We'd best take cover," added Uncle.

'Can't we make it to the miller?" asked Brat anxiously, biting on a grimy finger.

'We'll go a bit farther. I don't see any likely place here and we passed that village too long ago. I don't feel rain yet."

'I'm hungry."

'We'll eat when we've reached shelter."

The leaves danced on the trees, spinning and whirling until he thought he saw daimones at play in the rising wind, laughing and teasing as they sported in the branches of the broken woodland through which they traveled. Meadows and fallow fields cut the woods into clumps and strips where humankind had hacked out a place for themselves; they could never leave well enough alone. They delved deeply where they weren't wanted and chopped down the forest because it made them fearful, and in time they would flatten and consume everything like rats set loose in a storehouse of grain.

He walked behind Uncle and Brat and the cart, wondering why his fingers, which had been so cold, were now beginning to burn as if he had thrust them into flames and yet here he just walked and there wasn't a fire anywhere except maybe the one in his head because his head was burning, too, a conflagration so fierce that although he could see, it wasn't like true seeing where a man touches an object with his vision and notes and measures that it is there and thinks about it and makes a judgment or a decision of what to do regarding what he has seen, only there were objects before him moving or not moving and he wasn't sure what they were any more only that he had to avoid smashing into things which was getting more and more difficult.

'What's he babbling about, Uncle?" "Hush, child. He's a holy man. Don't offend him."

"He's scaring me, Uncle! He's a crazy man! Fire and judgment and the world burning. Is he seeing the end of the world?"

'Hush, Brat. Hush. Look there! Thank the Lady. It's the miller." A little river glimmered in front of them, but it was the turning wheel that made his head spin so badly that he staggered sideways until he stumbled up against a fence, which he hadn't noticed.

Two white clouds moved in the field: a pair of sheep running away from something.

'Why are they building that wall, Uncle?"

'I don't know, Brat. Best you keep quiet and let me do the talking."

Rain spattered, flecking the dirt road. The wind tossed the boughs in a stand of apple and walnut trees lining the path. A pair of ripening apples fell and bounced on the ground. A branch heavy with walnut fruit whirled past on a gust, sank as the wind dropped off abruptly, and landed on the earth with a thump and crackle. "Hey! Hey, there, traveler!"

A pair of men dressed in the coarse tunics of workmen strode out from the settlement, which consisted of a pair of houses and the laboring contraption that was the wheel and the grinding house. A half-built stone wall rose between the mill and the path like a fortification. Treu loped forward to place himself between Uncle and the men, barking.

'Quiet!" scolded Uncle. Treu whined and flattened his ears. "Big storm coming in!"

cried one of the men, having to shout to be heard as the wind roared behind them.

"Hurry!"

They ran, but not quickly enough. Rain lashed their backs. They were pummeled by loose branches and debris as the wind gusted so strong that it pushed Brat right over, and she stumbled and fell while Uncle struggled to keep the handcart from tipping over.

He grabbed Brat's wrist to drag her up. A stick came down on his arm.

'Leave off her, beast!" cried one of the workmen, brandishing the stick as if it were a sword. The other man hauled Brat up and they ran for the door of the miller's house, where a stout woman stood crying out and beckoning although her words could not be heard above the howl of the storm. Thunder rolled, but it was the shriek of the gale and the drumming of rain that deafened them. He staggered to the shelter of the half-built wall just as Brat tore away from the man holding her and dashed back to him.

'Come on!" she screamed. "You can't stay out here!"

Maybe the mortar hadn't set yet. Maybe it was the wind, because a cruel gust actually tore thatch off the roof of the miller's house and sent one line of fence clattering into sticks.

The wall tumbled down on them. Heavy stones hit his legs and head but, because the Brat had been crouching under the highest part, the stones buried her entirely. Only one strand of her pale brown hair could be seen, and a pair of fingers, twitching once, then still.

Bruised and dizzy, afire as his hands burned and his head was struck again and again by flying debris, he shoved stones off his legs and heaved the stones that had covered her to one side as the gale tried to flatten him. Beyond, he heard faint cries like the whimpering of birds. He glanced that way only once. Treu had been blown over against the mill itself; the gale pressed the poor dog against the wall of the outer housing, and if he barked, the scream of the wind drowned him.

Uncle dropped down beside him, hair whipping wildly against his face, half blinding him, but he, too, tossed stones aside until Brat was revealed, crushed, lying as still as a dead thing. The second workman fought over to them, holding tight a blanket that seemed ready to take wing. A branch hit him square on and he went down to one knee and crawled forward. They managed to roll her body onto the blanket, but even so she seemed likely to be blown away on that gale as they carried her at a run back to the houses, going to the shed, which hadn't lost half its roof.

The door banged shut. Inside the storehouse they huddled as the wind tore at the roof and whistled through cracks in the logs. More than once the whole structure shuddered as if it was being shaken in the claws of a monster.

'Ai, God!" moaned Uncle, bending over his niece's body. The gloom hid much, for the shed hadn't any windows, but it was obvious that the collapsing wall hadn't just broken all the bones in her body but crushed them. Horribly, she was still breathing. Blood bubbled on her lips, and one eye was open while the other was purpled and swelling shut so fast they could see the skin rise and blood rush up under it.

He wept over her, although he burned. His tears burned, as bright as petals of flame where they struck Brat's mangled body. The dark shed flickered with sparks of light flashing in and out of existence. Angels had come to visit them, bringing holy fire.

'I pray you," he murmured, beseeching them, "heal her."

But the angels tormented him, pricking and stinging his skin, and the wind piped a tune around the frail shed that forced him to dance although there wasn't much room among the barrels and sacks and the shelves piled with rope and tools shaped by the millwright's lathe.

'He's a madman!" cried the workman who still wielded the stick. "He threw that wall down on her!" He poked him back, and back, slapping at his thighs and body until he was driven up against the door.

'Leave him be!" cried Uncle, still weeping. "He's a hermit, come out of the forest. Just a beggar. The wall fell because of the storm, or because of your poor workmanship!

Leave be!"

'We didn't! I won't!" cried the workman. "I'm not feared of madmen. I fought in the army of the old count, God save him. We saw plenty of worse things than filthy beggars, didn't we, Heric?"

The stick pressed him against the door while, beyond the planks of wood, the wind battered and beat, the strength of it thrumming against his shoulders. He twitched andjerked, needing to dance, anything to shake the sparks free that snapped open and closed all around him.

A shadow rose beyond the dying girl, a face that exploded into bits only it was still there, staring at him with a twist of its lips and a jaded gaze. "I recognize him." The workman shook his head. "Nay. Can't be."

'Let me go!" he begged. "Can't you see the angels? It's all fire! Ai! Ai! It burns!"

'What, that filthy creature?" asked the other man.

'Leave him be," said Uncle, but weeping had crushed his voice to a monotone and he did not look up from his niece to see what they were doing.

'Uncle?" whispered the girl, the sound of her voice almost lost beneath the noise of the wind.

'It looks like that stable boy, the one the old count took for his son and who was fooling him all along, the cheat."

'Nay! Do you think so, Heric? I've heard all kind of stories—that Lord Geoffrey's daughter ain't the rightful count and that there wouldn't be such bad times if that son had stayed on. Wouldn't Lord Geoffrey be happy to show the doubters that the cheater was nothing more than a madman? There might be a great deal of silver in it for us, if we took him along to Lavas Holding."

'Silver! Don't you remember how he tossed us out after all that time we'd served the old count, bless his soul? Why shouldn't Lord Geoffrey cheat us as well even if we did do him a good turn?"

The wind was dying. Far beyond, he heard the bleating of sheep and Treu barking and barking and barking, but the snow of angels had turned to flowers winking and dazzling in front of his eyes until the whole world turned the white-hot blue fire of a blacksmith's flame, searing his body.

'As if we can live with what work we can find now, eh, Heric? Building walls for a bowl of porridge. That's no way to live!"

'

'Least we eat almost every day."

'You lost your spirit in the war."

'I lost my spirit when Lord Geoffrey threw us out to make room for his wife's uncle's war band! Didn't even give us a loaf of bread for our pains and our wounds."

'Why not try? It's a gamble. It might not be the same man. Lord Geoffrey might want nothing to do with him. But we might win something."

'Why not?" said Heric as light showered down around him, obscuring his face. The wind moaned in through the cracks in the shed and up among the rafters. "Why not, indeed? The stable boy never did me any favors, did he? Even tried to take my girl, before she left me for a man who could give her a meal every day. Here's some rope."

** A fT™1 ILj 1T5 ,''t'tJr I JcJK hearing this news of Princess Theophanu's troubles, and after reflecting upon his triumphs in the south, the king decided to settle his affairs in Aosta and return north to Wendar."

When Heriburg's quill ceased its scratching, the young woman looked up. "What next, Sister Rosvita?"

Rosvita sighed and looked over her company. They had become accustomed to long stretches of silence, and in truth this prison was a remarkably silent place, with the sound of the wind and the occasional skree of a hawk almost the only noises they heard. Now and again a guard might laugh; at intervals they heard wheels crunching on dust; the monks never spoke nor ever sang even to worship. She had come to believe that the brothers who lived here had all had their tongues cut out.

Prison was a species of muteness, too, but she had rallied her troops and kept them busy marking the hours of each day with worship, discussing the finer points of theology and the seven arts and sciences and memorizing the histories that they knew and the three books they possessed, her History, the Vita of St. Radegundis, and the convent's chronicles. Fortunatus proved especially clever at devising puzzles and mental games to keep their minds agile.

Now Fortunatus, Ruoda, Heriburg, Gerwita, Jehan, and Jerome all looked at her expectantly. The Eagle was out fetching water—of all of them, Hanna had the least ability to remain peaceably within such monotonous confines, although when Rosvita taught the others to understand and speak Arethousan, which she did every day for several hours, Hanna had shown an unexpected facility for that language.

Sister Hilaria was sitting with Petra out in the courtyard while Teuda continued her fruitless attempts to garden. Sister Diocletia and Aurea were in the next chamber massaging Mother Obligatia's withered limbs, a duty done in privacy. She heard one murmur to the other, and a stifled grunt from Obligatia, followed by a chuckle and an exchange of words too faint to make out.

'In truth," said Rosvita finally, "that is as far as I have got. I con fess that when I composed the History in my mind, while in the skopos' dungeon, I stopped there. I could not bring myself to speak of that night when I saw Presbyter Hugh murder Helmut Villam. I had not the courage to record the queen's treachery. As for the rest, I must rely on your testimony to construct a history of the months I was imprisoned in the skopos'

dungeon. What remains to be written beyond that has passed unknown to us, or has not yet come to pass. Now we write the events as we live them."

Seventy-three days they had remained confined at the monastery, each day a hatch mark scratched onto a loose brick pried out of the courtyard wall, but since the monks remained silent, it was impossible to find out exactly what date it was, although they might all guess that it was summer. It was so blazing hot that each trip down into the rock to fetch water from the hidden spring was a relief and, even, a luxury. At first only Hilaria, Diocletia, Aurea, and Hanna had the strength to complete the climb, but eventually every one of them except Petra and Mother Obligatia could negotiate those stairs.

Fortunatus bent over the table to examine Heriburg's calligraphy. "A sure hand, Sister, and much improved." He glanced at Rosvita as if to say "yet never as elegant as Sister Amabilia's."

She smiled sadly at him. How many of these truehearted clerics would survive their adventure? Amabilia certainly was not the first casualty of these days, nor would she be the last if all that they had heard predicted actually came true. It had proved far easier to write of the great deeds that formed history than to live through them.

'We must pray we survive to see the outcome of these events," she said at last.

Sister Diocletia came into the chamber, rubbing her hands. She had connived olive oil out of the guards and it was this she used to manipulate and strengthen the old abbess'

limbs.

'She'll sleep for a bit," she said, "but she's well today, as strong as she has been in months. However much it has chafed at the rest of us, this long rest has saved her."

'Bless you, Sister," said Rosvita, knowing that the young ones needed to hear such words, to believe that the confinement wasn't wasted; that they hadn't doomed themselves. They hadn't fallen into Anne's grip yet. There was still hope.

From far away, as if the sound drifted in on a cloud, they heard muffled shouts. Soon after, footsteps clattered outside. The door creaked open on dry hinges, and Hanna burst in, her face red and her hands empty, without the buckets of water they depended on.

'Sergeant Bysantius has returned!" she exclaimed. "He's taking us to his commander.

We leave tomorrow!"

The broad valley had so much green that it made Hanna's eyes hurt, and she could actually see flowing water, a dozen or more streams splashing down from surrounding hills. After ten days spent crossing dry countryside, Hanna inhaled the scent of life and thought that maybe they had come to paradise.

The others crowded up behind her to exclaim over the vista and its bounty of trees: figs, olives, oranges, mulberries, and palms. But Sergeant Bysantius wasn't a man who enjoyed views. He barked an order to his detachment of soldiers, and the wagons commenced down the cart track toward the land below. He was still the only one riding a horse; the wagons were pulled by oxen, slow but steady, and they had a trio of recalcitrant goats whose milk kept Mother Obligatia strong.

As she trudged along beside the foremost wagon, exchanging a friendly comment or two with the carter, Hanna shaded her eyes to examine the valley. Its far reaches faded into a heat haze, although certainly the weather was not as hot as it had been through much of their time confined to the tiny cliff monastery. In the center of a valley a small hill rose, crowned with ancient walls and a small domed church in the Arethousan style, almost a square. Beyond and around the hill a formidable ring wall appeared in sections, half gnawed away by time or by folk needing dressed stone for building. Tents sprouted like mushrooms on the plain around the old acropolis and mixed in among what appeared to be the ancient ruins of a town now overgrown with a village whose houses were built of stone and capped by clay-red tile roofs.

'Tell me what you see, I pray you," said Mother Obligatia, who lay in the back of the wagon on her stretcher, wedged between dusty sacks of grain.

'It's a rich land, with more water than we've seen in the last three months altogether, I think." She described the vegetation, and the layout of the buildings, and last of all described the tents. "It's an army, but I can't make out the banners yet."

Mother Obligatia thanked her. "If they had meant to kill us, they have had plenty of opportunity. I suppose we are meant to reside as hostages. Yet among whom?"

'I wish I knew," replied Hanna, "but I fear we shall discover our fate soon enough."

She clasped the old woman's hand briefly, then let go in order to negotiate a badly corrugated stretch of road over which the wagons jounced and lurched; she lost her footing more than once, turning her ankle hard and gritting her teeth against the pain.

By the time the path bottomed out onto level ground, she was limping and could no longer see anything except the high citadel walls in the distance, which did indeed resemble a crown set down among the trees. Yet down here in the valley the wind had a cool kiss, and there was shade, and ripe figs and impossibly succulent oranges to be plucked from trees growing right beside the rutted road. They crossed two streams, and the sergeant was gracious enough to allow them to pour water onto their hot faces and dusty hands, even over their hair and necks, before he ordered them onward.

They crossed a noble old bridge with seven spans, water sparkling and shimmering below, and passed under the archway of the ring wall. A lion, like that sacred to St. Mark, capped the lintel, although it had no face.

Once inside this wall they walked on a paved road with wheel ruts worn into the stone at just the wrong width for their wagons. Fields surrounded them, most overgrown and all marked out by low stone walls. There were more orchards and one stand of wheat nearing harvest. She heard ahead of them the shouts and halloos of a host of men, and the braying, barking, caterwauling, and neighing of a mob of animals. Where the road turned a corner around an unexpected outcrop of rock, they came into sight of an old palace of stone, still mostly standing, where three grand tents sprawled with banners waving and folk here and there on errands or just loitering. Men forged forward to gawk at them as their party lumbered in.

'Isn't that the two-headed eagle of Ungria?" Hanna asked, but before she got her bearings or an answer two handsomely robed men with beardless cheeks and shrewd expressions rushed out from the central tent to meet them.

They spoke to Sergeant Bysantius in Arethousan, while Rosvita crept forward to stand beside Mother Obligatia and whisper a translation, although Hanna found that she could pick up much of what they said herself.

'They know we are coming and ask if we are the prisoners whom the king and his wife have asked for. The lady is pleased. We are to be escorted in at once, even without pausing to be washed."

Soldiers trotted forward to hoist the stretcher out of the wagon.

Sergeant Bysantius herded the gaggle of clerics forward. Heriburg clutched the leather sack containing the books, but Jerome left their chest behind. It contained nothing so valuable that it couldn't be abandoned. Except for the books, they possessed nothing of value except the clothes on their backs—and their own persons.

Who would ransom them? Who would care? Aurea crept up beside Hanna as they were pressed into the anteroom of the central tent, and clutched her hand. Her palms were sweaty, her face was pale, but she kept her chin up.

'Take heart," said Rosvita softly to the girls. She exchanged a look with Fortunatus.

He nodded, solemn. Even Petra had, for a mercy, gone silent, eyes half shut as though she were sleepwalking.

The anteroom was crowded with courtiers dressed in the Arethousan style but also in the stoles and cloaks of Ungrians. There were a lot of Ungrians. It seemed a face or three looked vaguely familiar to Hanna, but she wasn't sure how that could be. She caught sight of a man short but powerfully broad with the wide features and deep eyes common to the Quman, enough like Bulkezu that she actually had a jolt of recognition, a thrill of terror, that shook her down to her feet, until she realized a moment later that the ground was shaking, not her.

A rumble swelled, then faded, a shiver through the earth like a great beast turning over in its sleep.

The crowd in the anteroom fell silent. Outside, a woman laughed, her high voice ringing over the sudden hush.

'Just a little one," whispered Gerwita, her voice more like the squeak of a mouse. She let go of Ruoda's hand.

Blood-red curtains shielded an inner chamber from the anteroom. A eunuch, resplendent in jade-green robes, appeared and held a curtain aside for them to pass. It was dim and stuffy within the inner chamber, which was lit by four slits cut into the tent's roof and by two lamps formed in the shape of lamias—sinuous creatures with the heads and torsos of beautiful women and the hindquarters of snakes. A couch sat in the place of honor, raised on a low circular dais constructed out of wooden planks painted the same blood-red shade as the heavy curtains. Two young men, stripped down to loincloths, worked fans on either side of the woman reclining there at her leisure. She eyed the new arrivals as though they were toads got in where they did not belong. She had a dark cast of skin and black hair liberally streaked with gray, and she was fat, with a face that would have been beautiful except for the smallness of her eyes and the single hair growing from her chin. A blanket covered her body from her midsection down, and Hanna began to labor under an obsessive fancy that the noblewoman might actually herself be a lamia, more snake than woman.

A dark-haired, homely boy of about ten years of age sat at the base of her couch, holding a gold circlet in his hands and trying not to fidget. A general outfitted in gleaming armor stood behind her, striking because he had one eye scarred shut from an old wound while the other was a vivid cornflower blue, startling in contrast to his coarse black hair and dark complexion. He stood between the two slaves, so straight at attention, hands so still, that he might have been a statue. But he blinked, once, as he caught sight of Hanna's white-blonde hair, and then a man laughed, such a loud, pleasant, hearty sound that Hanna's attention leaped sideways to the king and queen seated on splendidly carved chairs to the right of the Arethou-san lady on her dais.

Nothing could have shocked her more—except the appearance of a lamia slithering in across the soft rugs.

The king and queen sat on a dais of their own, rectangular and exactly as high as that on which the Arethousan noblewoman presided. Two banners were unfurled behind their chairs—the double-headed eagle of Ungria, and the red banner adorned with eagle, dragon, and lion stitched in gold belonging to the regnant, or heir, of Wendar. Behind the queen stood three grim-faced Quman women, one young, one mature, and one very old.

They wore towerlike headdresses covered in gold, and when Hanna looked at them they made signs as one might against the evil eye.

The king laughed again. He was a big, powerful man not quite old but not at all young. "It's as if a breath of snow has come in. I've never seen hair so white!" He turned to his queen, taking her hand, but her expression was as sour as milk left too long in the sun.

'That's just what your brother used to say," Princess Sapientia said. "She is my father's Eagle, but I don't trust her. Nor should you."

Hanna gaped, but she knew better than to defend herself.

'These folk are known to you, King Geza?" asked the Arethousan lady. Behind her, the one-eyed general was smiling at a jest known only to himself.

'They are known to me!" said Sapientia. "That woman is Sister Rosvita, one of Henry's intimate counselors. I have never heard an ill word spoken of her, although it's true some are jealous that the king honors her so highly when her lineage is not in truth so high at all." "Will she know the usurper's mind?" asked the lady.

'She might."

They spoke Arethousan slowly enough that Hanna could follow its cadences; Geza and Sapientia were not fluent, and the noblewoman evidently disdained to use a translator. "Sister Rosvita, step forward," said the lady. Sister Rosvita took one step, halted, and inclined her head respectfully. "I am Sister Rosvita. Although I could once claim to be one of Henry's intimate counselors, that is true no longer." "So she says!"

snorted Sapientia.

'Yet we have seen rebellion in plenty," said Geza, "not least in the person of your charming brother, my dearest Sapientia. Henry loses support and his authority falls to pieces. Is that not the sad fate of those who do not rule well, Lady Eudokia?"

The lady's smile thinned her lips. Hanna almost expected her to flick a snake's forked tongue out of her mouth. "We need but one great victory to gain the support of the people here in Arethousa, it's true. We must drive the usurper's army out of Dalmiaka. After that, we will turn to the golden city in triumph. My aged cousin will retire to a monastery and allow my nephew to take what ought to be his." "Is that when I will become emperor, Aunt?" The homely child sitting at the foot of the couch spoke in a piping voice, peculiarly loud. He looked as if surprise were his normal state as he spun the circlet between his fingers. Obviously he would rather be playing than sitting in on this grave council.

'Yes, Nikolas," she said dismissively. The general did not move, not by one finger's breadth, although he had developed a disconcerting habit of flicking his gaze now and again back to Hanna. "Tell us again, Sergeant Bysantius, in what condition you found this sad party?"

'In my opinion, Exalted Lady, they were fleeing from the usurper's soldiers. If not, then they should become actors and go on the stage, for they have fooled me."

'I pray you," said Rosvita in a strong voice, "we are a small group of clerics, harmful to no one. We have both crippled and ill among us.

'I did not give you permission to speak!" snapped Lady Eudokia. Rosvita pinched her lips together over a retort, yet otherwise her placid face did not change expression.

Rosvita was a mild woman, but she was probably smarter than the rest of them put together.

Hanna was surprised to find herself shaking a little, indignant on Rosvita's behalf.

Where had this loyalty sprung from? When had she lost her heart to the cleric, who did not command the loyalty of those around her but claimed it nevertheless?

Rosvita would never desert them. She would never stain her own honor.

That was what her companions all knew. That was why they followed her. In her own way, she was a prince among men, too, but the army she led bore different weapons: the quill, the steady mind, the slow accumulation of knowledge put to good use.

'Do you know why the usurper came to Dalmiaka?" demanded Lady Eudokia.

'I do," said Rosvita evenly. "I must have some assurances regarding the safety of my people before I will speak honestly with you."

'Will you betray my father just as my brother has?" cried Sapi-entia, face flushed. She began to stand, but Geza's hand tightened on her wrist and she subsided at once, trembling so hard that it was noticeable, as though that mild earthquake still gripped her.

'I have never betrayed Henry, Your Highness. Others betrayed him, but never me. The task which lies before us all is much graver, and will afflict high and low, Arethousan and Wendish and Ungrian and Dariyan regardless. What date is it, I pray you?"

'This night begins the feast day of St. Nikephoras," said the attendant in the jade-green robes. "In the two hundred and thirty-sixth year as acknowledged by the Patriarch's authority, and recalling the foundation of the Dariyan Empire, of which we are the only true heirs, one thousand six hundred and eight years ago."

'I pray you, what date according to the calendar recognized by the Dariyan church?"

The beardless man sneered. Lady Eudokia looked offended and had actually to drink wine before she could bring herself to express her disgust. "You have forgotten the proper rites and observances! Can it be that an educated churchwoman of the apostate church no longer recalls St. Nikephoras, who was patriarch and defender of the True Church?"

Geza called forward a steward from his entourage who, with great reluctance, admitted to knowing and keeping track of the calendar of the apostate Dariyans.

"Begging your pardon, Exalted Lady," the man said to Eudokia. "This is the day celebrated by the false shepherd in Darre as a feast day of one of her ancestors, called Mary Jehanna, who also donned the skopal robes in defiance of the rightful patriarch.

Rebels and heretics, all!"

'That means it is already the equinox," exclaimed Rosvita. "We were six months or more within the crown!" Her color changed. She swayed, and Ruoda and Gerwita steadied her. "Nay, not six months at all!"

She was so stunned that she was talking to herself out loud, the workings of her mind laid bare for all to see. The secret method of their arrival in Dalmiaka, too, was betrayed, but she was profoundly shocked. "The Council of Addai took place in the year 499, and if the Arethousan church has counted two hundred and thirty-six years… then it is not the year 734 but rather 735. We wandered within the crown for fully eighteen months! How it can be so much time slipped away from us?"

'What does she mean?" murmured Geza, face tightening with suspicion.

Lady Eudokia leaned forward, her hand greedily gripping the blanket that covered her legs. "The crowns! How comes it that you have gained this ancient knowledge long forbidden to those in the True Church?"

Rosvita glanced at the girls. The flush that had reddened her face began to fade. "I pray you, Sisters. I can stand. It was a trifling blow."

Hanna hardly knew whether to breathe. They all stared at each other, trying to comprehend what Rosvita had just said. Was it true they had lost eighteen months in one night? Was this the cost inflicted by the crowns for those who thought to spare themselves the effort of travel? Fortunatus' lean face had gone gray with fear, and the others muttered prayers under their breath or gazed in astonishment at Rosvita. Mother Obligatia had closed her eyes, although her lips moved. Only Petra appeared unmoved; she swayed back and forth, eyes still half shut, singing to herself under her breath.

Rosvita drew in a shaky breath and clasped her hands before her in an attitude something like prayer. "Exalted Lady, I have learned many things in my time. What is it you want of me? If you wish to learn what I know, then I must get something in return."

'Your life?"

Rosvita shrugged.

'The lives of your companions?"

'That I will bargain for, it's true, yet they are free to choose their own course of action.

If the intelligence I know is true, then it matters little what coercion you choose to inflict on me, or on them. 'The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood.' A storm is coming—"

So Sanglant claimed!" retorted Sapientia.

So he did," said Geza, "He may have been obsessed, but he is no fool. We would be fools to discount what he said."

'It was a ruse! A lie to catch us off guard! He meant to abandon me in the wilderness all along. I would have died if it weren't for the Pechanek mothers! I never believed his story of a cataclysm!"

'I do," said Lady Eudokia in a voice that commanded silence. "Our scholars have studied the ancient histories. We in Arethousa escaped tie full fury of the Bwr invasion that destroyed much of Dariya five hundred years ago, but we remember it. We recall bitterly the anger of the Horse people, who swore to avenge themselves on the descendants of the Lost Ones because in ancient days the Lost Ones ripped the Earth itself asunder in their war against humankind."

Eudokia spoke with as much passion as if the event had occurred last month, but Hanna could not fix her mind around such gulfs of time, years beyond counting. In Heart's Rest a woman was considered rich in kinship who remembered the name of her grandmother's grandmother.

'Now this Prince Sanglant seeks an alliance with the Horse people. How can we know whether he seeks to aid humankind, or his mother's kinfolk, the Lost Ones? How can we trust any creature who is not fully human, as we are? Who does not worship God as we do?"

The crowd remained silent, not even a whisper, but Rosvita was not cowed by the lady's zeal. "What do you want of me, Exalted Lady? Your Highness? Your Majesty? We are nothing, we fourteen wanderers. We matter not."

'You fled my father," said Sapientia. "That means you are guilty of some crime. You are guilty of sorcery! You admit it yourself!"

'No need, Cousin," said Lady Eudokia to Sapientia. "It matters not what crime she was accused of back in Dariya. We march to Dalmi-aka with or without her and her companions."

'I think it wisest to keep them close by," said Geza thoughtfully, with a respectful nod toward Rosvita.

'If it is possible her knowledge can aid us, then I think we must march with her and hold her in reserve," agreed Eudokia.

'When our victory is achieved?" Sapientia asked. "What, then?"

'Do not disturb yourself on that account, my dearest," said Geza, IHE whose gaze never flicked by the least amount toward Eudokia, although any idiot could see that he and the Arethousan lady had cozened Sapientia between them. "You will be restored to your rightful place. His Exalted Lordship will be placed on the throne that belongs to him."

'That's me!" cried the boy with a big grin.

'All will be well," finished the Ungrian.

'And you, King Geza?" asked Rosvita boldly. "What do you gain from these ventures?"

He did not smile, but he wasn't angry either. He had Bayan's ability to be amused, but his was a character much deeper and murkier than Bayan's had ever been. "Certain territories along the Anubar River, which has for many years marked the disputed border between Arethousa and Ungria. And justice for my wife, who sought my aid after being abandoned by her brother in the wilderness."

Sapientia smiled brilliantly at him; her eyes sparkled with unshed tears. He patted her hand, but no wise differently, Hanna thought, than he would have patted the head of one of his favorite dogs. Bay an had treated Sapientia with more respect.

Yet how could she know where the fault lay? Had Sapientia thrown herself into Geza's arms, or had he taken her by force? The princess had marched east with her brother, and without asking questions that an Eagle hadn't the right to ask as a prisoner, Hanna couldn't know what had transpired to set Sapientia so fiercely against Prince Sanglant except perhaps the prince's refusal to execute Bulkezu.