This thought of Bulkezu surprised her. The old familiar revulsion and hatred still clung, like a stench, but after her time in Darre she could see now that necessity might force a man's hand, might bring him to spare the life of a man he detested for the sake of the greater good.

Have I forgiven Sanglant? The revelation startled her. His name evoked no fury in her heart, only resignation. Only a wry smile.

She had changed. She had come through the fire, and she had an inkling of the fearful vista opening before them that could make their former trials seem light in comparison.

'Let them be taken away, Basil. Let them be fed, and given decent accommodation and a wagon to ride on as we travel, but do not allow them to escape or I will have your head."

The general chuckled, and perhaps he blinked just as Hanna looked at him, or perhaps he winked at her. She averted her gaze quickly.

'Yes, Exalted One." The man in the jade-green robes turned with a flourish and beckoned to a trio of men as beardless as he was, if not quite as elegantly dressed.

They were led to a tent whose dimensions and accoutrements seemed royal after the spare monastic cells in which they had remained confined all summer. The exhaustion brought about by unremitting anxiety and the stunned recognition of their changed circumstances, as well as their discovery of that unexpected passage of time within the crowns, made them a quiet group as they each found a place to sit on the chairs, benches, and pillows carried in for their comfort. Tea and honey cakes were brought, and bread, and a porridge of mashed peas spiced with rosemary, which was, in truth, overdry and had a bitter aftertaste. They ate in silence. Even Rosvita said nothing as she drank wine and, at intervals, rubbed her head as if it hurt her.

When all were sated and sitting slumped and slack-faced, Hanna dared speak. "What now, Sister Rosvita?"

Rosvita's smile was more ghost than real. "It is an irony, I think, that we find what proves to be a kind of refuge with one who is enemy to our regnant."

'Sapientia is his rightful heir!" protested Fortunatus.

'So she is, yet he has claimed Mathilda in her place, under the influence of Adelheid.

Princess Sapientia has not necessarily made a foolish bargain with King Geza and the Arethousans, although she may come to regret it. It may be that she believes this to be the only way she can hope to restore herself to the position she has long assumed she would one day possess. Yet we know as well that the Henry who speaks and rules in Darre now is not our regnant but a puppet controlled by outside hands. Who, then, is the enemy, and who the ally?"

'Will you tell them so?" asked Hanna. "How much do we dare say to the regnant's enemies?" Inside the walls of this pleasant tent, a finer bower than any place they had rested for the last many months, Hanna felt at ease, although she knew Rosvita was right.

"It seems to me that we face enemies on every side. How are we to know what to do and whom to trust?"

'Sanglant claimed that the crown of stars would crown the heavens on the tenth day of Octumbre, in the year seven thirty-five. I do not know the means by which the mathematici arrived at that date, or if they are correct, but that date falls next month. We now camp in southwestern Arethousa, I believe, just north of Dalmiaka. This army plans to march into Dalmiaka, apparently to face the Holy Mother and Henry themselves. Yet I know not whether we must turn the Holy Mother Anne aside from her task at the crown in Dalmiaka, or aid her in succeeding to weave her mathematicus' spell."

Throughout this discussion Mother Obligatia had remained silent. Hanna had even thought her asleep. One of those shivering tremors shifted the ground beneath them, so that Gerwita cried out, then giggled nervously as the quake subsided as quickly as it had arisen. As if the earth had roused her, Obligatia lifted her head and braced herself up on her elbows. Sister Diocletia came to her aid, supporting her. They all turned respectfully to hear her.

'The old can be blinded by sentiment." It was always a surprise to Hanna how strong a voice could issue from so frail a form. "I know this, for I have seen it. I have regretted it.

Yet I do believe that I saw my son Bernard's daughter, and that she saved us against the galla, although she was too late to spare Sister Sindula." "Liath!" whispered Hanna.

The abbess nodded toward her before continuing. The tent grew dim as shadows lengthened, as the sun set and the blazing temperatures abated with the coming of twilight and the promise of night. They had no lamps.

'If this woman, this skopos, who calls herself Anne is truly Lia-thano's mother, then that is where Liath will go. Seek out the Holy Mother Anne, and we will find the one we seek. That is where I wish to go." Tears glistened on the old woman's cheeks, and Diocletia tenderly wiped them away. "I am content with this turn of events, my friends. I am old, at the end of my life. The world will end for me whether a storm comes or not, and now I see that all along I have been selfish."

Although outside the tent's walls the camp grew lively as night fell, inside a hush contained them. The twilight wind fluttered along the canvas.

'I want to meet my granddaughter before I die."

XXIX THE TRAP SH HAD LAID Verna, Liath used an arrow to weave a net of magic through the crown. The threads pulled down from the heavens thrummed through her arms. This was joy. She felt transported and alive; her body hummed with the touch of the stars and the music of the spheres, the ever-turning wheel of the cosmos singing through her from top to toe.

Lady Bertha rode in the van, leading her thirty mounted men-at-arms in ranks of two through the blazing portal. Sorgatani followed, her wagon driven by the two slave women who attended her while her Kerayit guard rode behind. Last of all, Gnat, Mosquito, and Breschius paused, glancing back at her, and she willed them to forge forward. She dared not speak or move for fear of shifting the portal as the stars spun slowly westward, tugging at the threads.

The subtleties of direction and distance were harder to control than she had imagined, but with practice—indeed! With practice she could master this skill. The stars could speak through her; she could sing with them. She could dwell on Earth among those she loved and still touch the heavens.

As long as they defeated Anne.

The three men dashed forward through the archway at last. The ethereal threads quivered as if in a gusty breeze as the men passed under them and vanished, and as she pulled the threads in behind herself she paused on the threshold and looked back. The daimone waited in the valley, hiding itself, but she could see its pale form quavering against the fading night. It had hovered nearby all night.

'Who are you waiting for?" she asked, but it did not answer, so she turned her back on Verna and stepped through as light cascaded around her. It seemed in that passage as if all those threads drew the spheres in behind them, the entire cosmos—stars, the sun, time itself—swirled as the light from one body blurred into the next.

She sees Sanglant marching out of the mountains at the van of a great army. He rides at the front on Resuelto with Hathui behind him and noble ladies and lords surrounding him. On either side pace the two griffins. The male no longer wears a hood. It lifts its eagle's head and shrills a call that echoes down the valley. No clouds soften the hard blue glare of the sky. The view is glorious, and the road lies clear before them, all the way down to the coastal plain.

An Eika prince sails on choppy seas, brooding at the stem of his ship. He stares across the gray waters, hand clenched around the haft of a standard laced with bones and beads and feathers. Two black hounds lie at his feet. Behind him, a deacon prays.

Ivar rides along a woodland path beside a young man who looks star-tlingly familiar.

Erkanwulf? Wind ripples through the leaves, turning her down a new path.

She sees Hanna sleeping.

Hanna!

The threads whip and crack her sight down new passageways, a maze that pulls her in a hundred directions as it splinters into manifold paths.

She has lofted far above the world, and she sees how the threads of each life are intertwined with all the others, a chain linking every soul and every thing and every place.

A filthy beggar with hands and feet chained is shoved into a cage. Shadow obscures his face.

A creature half-man half-fish swims in calm waters, hair writhing like eels.

Sister Venia wipes her brow, standing among two score corpses. She has blood on her hands, and a disfiguring anger suffuses her expression.

In the depths of the earth, a wizened beast crouches before a sheet of metal and runs its fingers across a glowing sequence of lumps and etch-THE GATHERING i>TORM , ^ ings. Others cluster behind it, clicking and humming, tapping the ground.

Snakes hiss. A phoenix stirs in its deep cavern. The ground trembles.

An owl hoots. She turns to see Li'at'dano looking right at her through a stone burning with blue fire "Beware!" the centaur cries. "Beware the trap she has laid!"

Seven crowns of seven stones form the loom on which the great spell was woven in the long-ago days, laid out across the land to make the points of a vast crown. She glimpses each circle in turn, and she sees:

Meriam.

Hugh.

Marcus.

Severus.

A middle-aged woman in presbyter's robes, completely unknown to her. A stranger.

An arrogant young man wearing the robes of an abbot. His face looks vaguely familiar with a family resemblance to Duchess Rotrudis.

Where is Anne?

Why can't I see Blessing?

She hears the surge and suck of a sea as waters rise and fall against rock close by.

She stepped through.

'At them again!" Bertha's voice rang out above the clash and clamor of arms.

Liath stumbled out of the circle and into madness. In the light of the waning sun it seemed that beyond the stones on all but one side stood a forest, tightly packed and denuded of branches, ringing them in like a rank of men with a tightly linked shield wall.

Scattered in no particular pattern on three sides were tents and a profusion of campfires.

Torches glared. Men, most on foot, charged back and forth, shouting, and because she was staring at them in shock and amazement, she did not watch her feet. She tripped and fell forward over a dead man who had been killed by an arrow in his throat. Blood eddied into the dirt. Two more dead faces grimaced at her, one by each of her outflung hands.

The first she recognized as one of Lady Bertha's soldiers; the other wore a tabard sewn with a gold Circle of Unity on a black field: the sigil of the guardsmen who protected the skopos.

Now she understood what she saw. They had come through the crown into the middle of an armed, fortified encampment set up to protect the stone circle.

'To me, to me!" Bertha's voice sang above the din. Again she drove her small force against a knot of footmen who had formed up but were not yet ready to receive a charge.

They scattered, some falling, but some taking horse or rider down with strokes at a horse's legs or clever thrusts to the rider's exposed rib cage. There wasn't enough room for Lady Bertha to swing her cavalry around and get the full weight of their horses behind them. More infantry surged up from behind to attack them. Arrows whistled out of the twilight. They were surrounded.

Ai, God. She struggled to her feet and readied her bow, but they were hopelessly outnumbered. She drew, shot, and took down a valiant sergeant who had just then gripped the stirrup of Bertha's charger. A second man fell, mortally wounded, with her second shot.

'Push that way!" cried Bertha. "There! Where the stockade is unfinished!"

Had the Austran lady already lost half her men? Liath fell in behind Kerayit guardsmen as they pushed to make a path for Sorgatani's wagon to the breach in the wall.

Breschius ran at the back, a dagger glinting in his hand. She couldn't see Gnat and Mosquito. She grabbed a pair of arrows off the ground and shot, and Lady Bertha got her surviving soldiers pulled in around her and threw them forward to support the retreat.

Gnat and Mosquito appeared out of the stones and sprinted for the wagon, bent low, dodging arrows and spear thrusts with astonishing agility.

'Here!" she cried as she leaped over bodies and fell in with the others. She looked around for a spare horse, but too many soldiers pressed forward against them. She hadn't time to do more than grab arrows off the ground, to duck away from a sword blow that swept past her head. She shot a man in the gut not a body's length from her, and he jerked backward, screaming, carrying two of his fellows with him as he flailed.

Yet as they closed on the south end of the camp, toppling tents and cutting down stray soldiers, they seemed as one to realize that in fact the stockade was finished. It ringed the camp. The sound of water grew, but the open ground did not expose the side of a steep hill but rather became the edge of a cliff that plunged far down to the sea below. The stockade finished at either end with a pile of stone and earth; beyond that, only air. They were trapped. No one could climb down that cliff.

The Kerayit guards reached the stockade first, and one hacked in ,' ?*> vain at green logs as his fellows formed up around Sorgatani's wagon and Lady Bertha called on her soldiers to dismount and make a shield wall. Arrows fell among them, some chipping up the dirt; a few thudded into the logs. She felt one whoosh past her cheek; another found its mark, and a man shrieked. A horse bucked and spilled its riders.

They were trapped.

She reached out and called fire. First the canvas of tents burst into flame, then, brushed by billowing, roaring canvas, a hapless soldier who had boldly stepped forward to urge his men to advance caught fire. He spun screaming as flames wrapped his body.

She had no time to regret his death. She reached into the green logs of the encircling palisade. Fire slumbered deep within. She pricked it, and again, harder, until flame exploded up from a dozen logs in the stockade right where the Kerayit soldier stood chopping at the wood. The fire blackened and consumed him in an instant; he didn't even have a chance to scream. The other guards dragged the wagon back one turn of the wheels, but they understood what she meant to do. They braved the heat, waiting for their chance as the logs burned from inside out.

Fire was the only thing that would keep them alive. The enemy had fallen back away from the burning tents, and now with her party clumped next to the blazing wood, easily seen, the archers set arrow to string and began to shoot at will.

She set her will to the bows the archers held, one by one, and yet for each man who cast his bow aside when flame licked along the curve, the next might find his arm ablaze, his tabard streaming with fire. Their screams burned her, yet she could not flinch.

Wasn't this war?

Didn't men die just as horribly stuck deep in the guts by spears or their heads sliced open by swords?

She was too slow. She could not stop every archer, not quickly enough. Arrows peppered the ground. Lady Bertha's soldiers hid behind their shields, but the horses were easy targets and their enemy happy to cause havoc among them by shooting for their bellies. The poor beasts kicked and screamed and half a dozen bolted for the enemy line.

It was not the battle but the fire that panicked them. She still held her own bow, but where she aimed, she called fire. A flight of arrows burst into flame above and rained ash down over their party.

The stockade roared.

The enemy pushed forward step by step, calling out, readying a charge.

'Go, Arnulf! Go!" cried Bertha.

Liath glanced back. They were twenty still standing, no more. One of Bertha's soldiers, a giant of a man with massive shoulders and thick arms, threw a cloak over his head and braved the flames with ax in hand, hacking at the wood. The cloak began to burn, but the logs crumbled into flaming splinters. The heart of the wood had burned away.

'Move!" screamed Bertha. "Go! Go!"

'Charge them, men!" bellowed a captain among the enemy. More massed behind that front line. Archers with burning hands wept. A horse thrashed on the ground beside her, pierced by a dozen arrows.

The Kerayit slave women drove the wagon headlong into the burning wall, their horses frantic with fear as they plunged through the fiery gap. Under the press of the wheels, logs crumbled like burning straw, and the flames that licked along the painted wagon guttered and failed as Sorgatani's magic killed them. The wagon was through! A cheer rose from the survivors as they pressed forward in its wake, seeing escape.

A roar unlike that of fire rose from the enemy.

'Forward!" The captain took a step, then a second. "Forward, you cowards!"

The line doubled, swelled, gathering strength for the charge.

'You must go, my lady!" cried Bertha, coming up beside her, still mounted. Her horse's eyes were rolling with fear, and it was streaked with ash and flecks of charcoal, but it held its ground. An arrow dangled from its saddle, fixed between pommel and seat.

Bertha's shield had been lopped in half, and she cast it away.

'Mount up behind me!" she cried.

'Go on!" shouted Liath. "I'll hold the rear. Hurry!"

Bertha did not hesitate as Liath delved into the iron rimming of shields; she sought deep within swords for sparks of fire bound tightly within. Boot and belt, hair and bone, all bloomed as fire scorched through the front line, and yet they came on and on, screaming, shrieking, while those behind them yelled and cursed and some ran toward her all over fire like torches.

,' am a monster.

One passed by her and threw himself on a Kerayit who hung back with a few others to protect her back. She saw their faces change shape as fire ate flesh down to bone. Their eyes were black pinpricks,

bursting open at the moment of death. The tents within arrow shot burned so bright it seemed like day. Yet nothing touched her. She was the center, the sun.

'Fall back, my lady!" cried Bertha far behind her. "Or we shall all surely die waiting for you!"

Had they all gone so quickly? She retreated, step by step, holding the enemy at bay simply because she existed. More than two score men lay in ruin around her, some dead, their fingers and arms curling like charred twigs. A few, the unfortunate, writhed on the ground, whimpering, moaning, skin melted off or hanging like rags. Smoke, sweet with scorched flesh, drifted in a haze around her so it seemed she moved backward into a miasma.

So I do.

She fought an urge to run. To turn her back would be certain death as arrows still rained around, many burned away within an arrow's length of her body. Hundreds of furious, fearful men kept their distance but moved with her, pace by pace. She saw her death in their gaze. They hated her for what she was.

'Liath!" cried Breschius from far away, but not so far, where moments might seem like an hour, where three strides might seem like three leagues The stockade still burned; she heard the rattle of the wheels of Sorgatani's wagon crunching away over dirt. Had she taken more than ten breaths between the collapse of the stockade and now?

She was almost there. The heat of the burning logs whipped along her back.

'Bright One! Run quickly!"

Gnat's voice came from the wrong direction. She lost track of her footing. With her next step she tripped over the leg of a fallen horse.

She was able to catch herself as she rolled onto the body of the beast, but before she could rise, an arrow struck through her thigh, piercing her flesh and burying its head deep in the horse's belly.

She screamed. Pain bloomed. Flames spit up from the earth. As she twisted, seeing fletchings protruding from the leg, a second arrow hit through the same thigh, at a different angle.

Mosquito appeared, dodging through burning tents, ducking behind a fallen horse.

"Mistress! I come!"

Fire shot up in a wall, driving her foes back. Horsehair singed, its scent stinging her.

'Go!" she screamed. "I command it, all of you. Gnat! Mosquito! Retreat! Save Sorgatani!"

She grabbed one of the arrows, but her touch on the shaft sent pain shooting up her spine and down her calf. She choked down a scream; she knew what she had to do.

Let them run, she prayed. Let them retreat and save themselves.

She grabbed each shaft, closed her hands around them, and called fire. The pain inside her thigh flared; it bit; it flowered. It stunned her with its ferocity, eating at the flesh from inside. She wept. Tears spattered her face with cold fierceness. There was a terrible strong wind blowing in off the sea. Thunder rumbled.

Or was it the earth trembling beneath her?

Fire guttered as rain splashed, yet it wasn't the rain that cooled the flames but the sparkling wings of butterflies, a thousand winking shards. Where they fluttered, flame died.

The first arrow crumbled away into ash. Blood from the wound gushed down the belly of the horse. Ash and blood in a muddy mixture dripped onto her feet. She tugged on the second arrow and almost passed out, but it did not break. It had not burned through.

'I've got it, Mistress! I'll put it out."

Mosquito was the one with the round scar on his left cheek and a missing tooth. Gnat had broader shoulders, a broader face, and was missing the thumb on his right hand.

And, damn him, there he was, scuttling in beside his brother. He shoved a knife between her thigh and the horse, levering it in until it hit the shaft.

She thought the pain of that movement alone would kill her. The heavens dazzled; stars spun webs, and Mosquito yelped with fear as Gnat sawed and she moaned. A glittering net drifted out of the sky an arm's length above them. Butterflies skimmed across her cheeks.

Anne stepped out of the line of soldiers and halted a stone's toss in front of her. The skopos was crowned and robed in the splendor of her office, wearing white robes embroidered with red circles. No ash marred the purity of that linen. A gold circlet rested on her brow, mirroring the gold torque that circled her neck, the sigil of her royal ancestry.

Anne regarded her in silence for some moments. Because the light of the burning tents blazed behind her, her face was in shadow, half obscured. Yet Anne had always been obscured; if there was passion beneath that cool exterior, it, like coals, had always been buried beneath a layer of ash.

'Shoot the servants," she said.

Five arrows flashed out of the burning night. Three thudded wetly into flesh: two into Mosquito and one into Gnat, just above his collarbone. He fell back, choking. Mosquito had collapsed without a sound.

'I am disappointed in you, Daughter," Anne said in that mild, flat tone. Anne never raged. "You cost me so much. Yet now I have nothing to show for it."

'Did I cost you so much?" The agony awash in her thigh, the sting of the blade's edge pinching her mangled flesh where the knife was still wedged between leg and horse, was nothing compared to the pain in her heart. "I cost you nothing. My mother and father are both dead. What cost was there for you in my conception? In my mother's death? In my father's murder? Except that you had to lie to the others all these years, pretending that I was born from your womb."

'Ah." Even with the truth cast on the ground for them both to consider, with the charred bodies of men smoldering around them, Anne did not flinch or falter; she showed not the least tremor of emotion. "Well, then. Certainly there is no hope of a rapprochement if you have discovered the truth. Yet I wonder. How do you know these things?"

'Well, then," echoed Liath, mocking her. Mockery was all she had, surrounded by the ruin of her hopes. "It seems you have told me more than I have told you, since you have now confirmed what I only guessed at. I have nothing further to say."

The first strands of that net brushed her hair and settled over her shoulders. The fire that burned inside her, her mother's spirit, shrank from its cold touch.

'You need not speak, Liath. Your plans are an open book to me. You may have a fire daimone's heart, but you are weak, as Bernard made you. You were easily captured and will be easily held in my power. With this same net of sorcery I caged your mother."

The net was a cage for fire. But she was only half born of fire. The rest of her was common human flesh, Da's heritage.

She grabbed the arrow and wrenched. The pain blinded her, but only for an instant.

Gnat's knife had done just enough work, weakening the shaft, which snapped, half charred, half splintered. She rolled sideways over the smoking body of the horse to fall between her wounded servants.

She grabbed their arms and, of a miracle, they scrambled up although it was impossible to know how they could still walk. They ran, staggering, bent over, while men shouted and gave chase.

One glimpse only she caught of the smoking gap in the stockade of Anne's soldiers pouring through the opening in pursuit of her own people. Rain swept over them. Hail burst, thundering over the ground. Lightning flashed to display in one sharp vision the broad expanse of sea, waves churning up as a storm drove down on them from across the waters. Whitecaps foamed.

A wall of men blocked the gap in the stockade. Anne's net brushed the skin of her trailing hand, leaving bloody welts.

'This way!" cried Mosquito, but his voice was liquid; the second arrow had punctured his lung and blood frothed on his lips.

They wavered on the edge of the cliff, poised there, staring down and down to the water below. There was no beach, only the sheer face of the cliff and a scattering of rocks showing above the waves. Out in the sea, mer creatures swarmed, their ridged backs parting the choppy waters as if they sensed the battle, or the magic, above and wished to discover what was going on.

'There is no other way," murmured Gnat. "It is better if they do not have the chance to mutilate our bodies."

He leaped, and his brother jumped after, and she did not think or hesitate as she followed them over the edge, springing out as strongly as she could so that she might not fall straight down to the deadly rocks below.

Her wings of flame shuddered, flared and unfolded, and for two breaths she had lift.

Gnat hit the water and vanished under the waves. Mosquito was gone an instant later, swallowed by the sea. The wind blasted her sideways. Thunder crashed.

Her aetherical wings had not the strength to hold her. Their substance collapsed as the wind battered her. The inexorable weight of the Earth was like grief, dragging her down.

I'll never see my beloved, or my child, again.

She plunged, wingless, lost, and tumbled into the sea.

rang. Axes thunked into wood. Shovels scraped into dirt followed by the spitting fall of earth thrown up onto the VUl growing ramparts, the sound like hail spattering against the ground. The music of these labors accompanied Stronghand as he toured the new fortifications at Medemelacha. Eika and men worked together if not always side by side.

With his escort of the five dour merchants whose families controlled most of the commerce in the town, a dozen men-at-arms, and his most faithful attendants—the two hounds—he walked down to the strand where the shipyard bustled. Axes and adzes rose and fell. Men hammered wedges into a huge trunk to cleave it in two. Four boats lay propped up on stumps and posts, the newest no more than a keel while the most complete was being fitted with a side rudder. Soon it would be ready to launch.

Medemelacha had doubled in population in the last six months as folk swarmed to the trading town to get work in the shipyards and on the fortifications. Barracks had been built for the workers and to house the garrison. The farmland for a day's walk on all sides lay under his control, enough to feed the population as long as the harvest was good. He had given up inland strikes in favor of consolidating his position on the Salian coast and in Alba.

Yet the failure of his rescue gnawed at him. He had no peace; he could not savor his triumphs.

'There are three men in the customhouse who await your pleasure, my lord," said Yeshu as they lingered in the shipyards and the merchants began to fidget.

He tore his gaze away from a young Alban man, his pale hair tied back with a strip of leather, who under the hot harvest sun had stripped down to a loincloth as he carved out a stem with an ax. It was sweaty work. He worked in tandem with an Eika brother, a handsome, brawny fellow whose skin gleamed with silver and who had taken to wearing a tunic in the human fashion, covering him from shoulders to knees. They worked easily together, making a comment now and again, picking out splinters, blowing away sawdust; laughing once, as comrades do. A young woman came by with a skin of ale; he could smell it from here. She had her hair concealed under a scarf and her skirt robed up for ease of movement so that her pale calves and bare feet were exposed. They joked with her, Alban and Eika alike, although it seemed she was Salian and could barely understand them. Yet she did not fear them. She, too, laughed.

This was prosperity—that folk laughed while they worked because they did not fear hunger or war.

'My lord," repeated Yeshu.

He returned his attention to his companions. The merchants murmured among themselves. One was a veiled Hessi woman; she stood away from the others, who were Salians once beholden to other noble protectors. Out in the bay, a longship was being rowed toward shore, and its oars pulled in as the sailors made ready to draw up on the beach. It flew Rikin's banner. He sighed, and as he turned to address the others, he stifled a nagging sense of regret that he could no longer stand where the Lightfell plunged down the mossy rock face, far down into the still, blue fjord. Hadn't he known peace there once?

Maybe not. Maybe he had never known peace from the day he was hatched and began his struggle to live.

'What matter needs my attention in the customhouse? Is there not a council of elders to consider such things?"

'Yes, my lord. But it seems two of these men are suspected of being smugglers, and the other is a merchant from north up the coast, out of Varre. It's thought you might wish to speak to him. He may know something of the disposition of Duke Conrad's forces."

'Very well." He whistled the hounds to him. They came obediently. They suffered him, but they pined for their master, and so each time he patted their heads he was reminded of his failure.

They walked past the new jetties to the customhouse, an old long hall that had once belonged to a Salian lord, now dead, who had taxed the merchants and sent a tithing to the Salian king while keeping the balance for himself. He hadn't been well liked. Indeed, his skull was stuck on a post out in front beside the door, stripped of most of its flesh and trailing only a few tatters of straggling brown hair.

Inside, the hall had been cleared of its old furnishings and transformed into something resembling a cleric's study with shelves, tables, benches, and a single chair set on a dais.

He sat in the chair. The hounds settled beside him, Sorrow draping his weight right over his feet, but he didn't have the heart to move him.

'Bring them forward."

All work ceased, clerics scritching and scratching with pens, women and men arguing over the worth of their trade goods, merchants counting by means of beads. They feared him, as they should, but he found their fear wearying. He tapped his free foot, waiting.

Two men were dragged forward. Their hands had been tied behind them; they were cut, bruised, and terrified. Four witnesses came forward to testify against them: they'd been caught north of town in an inlet setting out in a rowboat laden with cloth that had been re ported stolen two days before from the house of Foxworthy, a respected merchant.

The thieves begged for mercy. They were young, they were dirty, and they looked hungry and ill-used, shorn of hope, but the penalty for stealing trade goods from the merchant houses was death and all men knew it. He called forward the scion of the house, a middle-aged man with red hair and beard dressed in a fine linen tunic whose border was embroidered with fox faces half hidden amidst green leaves.

'What is your wish in this matter?" Stronghand asked. "They do not deny the charge.

Do you wish to make a claim against them?"

The merchant considered thoughtfully. "There's always need of labor in the mines, my lord. If they are sold to the mines, then I will take whatever price they fetch as recompense for the crime. The cloth was recovered in good condition. No permanent damage was sustained by my house."

'Very well."

Rage heaved herself up and nudged his hand. He remembered the mines. He wanted those mines. But not yet.

Not yet.

Patience had served him well. It would have to continue to serve him. If he moved too quickly, he would overreach and lose everything.

The criminals wept, but they had sealed their own fate by becoming thieves.

'Bring the other man forward," he said, feeling the curse of impatience draining into him, although he fought it.

Where was Alain?

Sorrow barked, just once, like a greeting, a demand for attention. Rage whined.

There!

He rose, he was so startled, but an instant later realized he was seeing things. It wasn't Alain at all; it was the shadows within the hall that had tricked him. This was an older man of middle years, dark hair well streaked with gray, who walked forward between an escort of two soldiers. He looked nervous, but he had a proud carriage and an alert gaze.

If he was shocked to come before an Eika lord, he showed no measure of his surprise on his face.

He knelt before Stronghand as though he were a petitioner, not a prisoner. He spoke Wendish, not Salian. "I am called Henri, my lord. My sister is a householder in Osna Sound. I carry her goods to market once a year. We came late this year due to the troubles, and I find myself held as if I am a criminal although all my dealings among the merchants here have been fair and perfectly ordinary. I pray you, my lord, I am a simple man. No merchant complained of the goods I traded. I had quernstones, very high quality, and good quality wool cloth woven in my sister's weaving hall. That's all. I am taking home wheat and salt in exchange. Nothing more."

He looked at the hounds, expression clouded with doubt, and after a moment tore his gaze away from them to meet the dark eyes of Yeshu. He nodded, to show he was done speaking, and waited for the translation to begin.

'Have we met before?" Stronghand asked in his perfect Wendish.

The man started visibly, as if he had not thought an Eika could form human words. "I-I think not, my lord. Many years ago Eika burned the monastery near our village." He stammered again, realizing that he might have offended. "The-the count as was then drove off another group of invaders that year. He captured one of them, rumor said, but the creature later escaped. My foster son was at Lavas Holding at that time, but we heard the story from others. I've met no Eika face-to-face. Not in all my years." He twisted his fingers through his beard in an anxious gesture, realized that he did so, and lowered his hand. "My lord."

'Have you heard other news of Eika this summer? Have you heard news of Duke Conrad? Of the Salian war?"

His hands were clenched, and he nodded in a manner so suggestive of resignation, of a man who has given up hope of a successful enterprise, that Stronghand felt a stab of compassion. "In truth, my lord, we at Osna have been beset by our own troubles for the last year or two. We've heard nothing of the world."

'What troubles have plagued you?"

'Harvests have failed. It's rained too much. There's no trade at our little emporium, none at all these last two years, although we showed signs of prosperity before. Refugees from the Salian wars have overwhelmed us. There were four murders in the village last year. Unthinkable!" He shook his head. "Lads have gone off to join the war and never returned. Laborers beg for a crust of bread. There's been a sickness among the outlying farms and among the poorest— they call it 'holy fire' because their limbs burn and the poor afflicted souls see rivers burning with blood. Our new count has deserted us. He hides in his fortress, fearing enemies on all sides. Some say he's not our true count, that the rightful heir was disinherited, cheated of his place."

'Do you think that's true?" asked Stronghand, intrigued by the man's complex expression which grew yet more grim, leavened by sadness.

'Nay, my lord. If any man cheated, it was him who claimed to be the rightful heir. Yet I'll not say the new count has courted God's favor either, for his folk fare ill in these days." He shifted on the plank floor, setting his left knee on the floor to give his right a rest. "I pray you, let me go. I am no spy. I have no grand knowledge to reveal to you. If we eat once a day, we count ourselves fortunate. It's true we've heard tales of troubles along the coast and seen sails passing, but they did not stop. I sailed south this year to Medemelacha because we have become desperate. I pray you, my lord, let me return home."

'Let him go on his way!" said Stronghand brusquely. The man's speech had shaken him, although he wasn't sure why. "I see nothing suspicious in his arrival here. Are there any here who have a complaint of him?"

There were none. The man was known as one of those who traded once a year at the market, bringing in a few goods from the countryside which lay north up the coast. He had always dealt honestly over the many years he had come to Medemelacha. He had only been detained today while loading his small boat to leave, because it had occurred to someone that he was a foreigner and might therefore be a spy.

'He has nothing of importance to tell us. Go!"

The man hurried out, although when he reached the doors, he glanced back toward Stronghand. As if in answer to an unspoken question, Sorrow heaved himself to his feet and barked again, and he and Rage trotted over to the door as if in pursuit. The sunlight streaming in through the doors hid the man in that haze of light as soon as he stepped outside.

'Osna Sound," Stronghand murmured. He whistled, but the hounds did not return.

Because he was seated, others came forward to press him for a decision on trifling matters, disputes and arguments that a strong council ought to have disposed of. Yet they tested him; they wanted to know if he was as clever as rumor made him out to be. He had to listen, to ask questions, and to judge.

Yet the name teased him as petitioners came forward and retired in pairs, as trios, in groups, now and again a single person. A disputed fence that marked the border between two fields; a bull that had gored a child; stolen apples; a knife fight between feuding suitors.

Osna Sound.

He had heard the name before. Wasn't that where Alain had come from? He wasn't sure; he didn't know the Varren coast well, not as he had learned the Eika shore and the settlements and roads and landscape of Alba or the fields around Gent. In Varre, when he had been captured, he hadn't been quite awake; he had only vague memories of those days when he was little more than a ravening beast like his brothers. The cage had changed him. It had woken him, and Alain's blood had quickened him, and since then he had been plagued by this restlessness, this lack of peace, and yet he could not wish for it to have transpired in any other way.

'Where is that man's boat laid up?" he asked Yeshu when the tide of petitioners ebbed.

'Which man, my lord?"

'The one from Osna Sound who was brought forward to be questioned."

'Most of the local merchants beach their boats up by the north wall, my lord. By the mill. They do most of their trading at Weel's Market."

'Go find him. Bring him to me. I've a mind to visit this market and see what goods he brought with him."

He rose, and his escort gathered behind him as he strode to the door. He hadn't asked the right questions. He had missed an important clue. Had this man known Alain? Hadn't he said his name was Henri? For a long time Stronghand had assumed that Alain was the king's son, for the king of the Wendish was called Henry, but Alain could not be both a king's son and a count's heir, could he?

He had let himself be distracted. He had failed to follow the scent when it was right before his nose.

Where had those damned hounds gone?

At the door, a large party of Rikin brothers hailed him cheerfully. A short, plump woman stood authoritatively in their midst, one hand slack at her side and the other cupped at her waist. It was clear these fierce Eika warriors followed her lead, although they towered over her and might have crushed her with a single blow of an ax.

'My lord prince! I bring a message of utmost importance. I pray you, let me speak."

The sun dazzled him. He turned aside to stand under the eaves. "Deacon Ursuline!"

The world tilted; a cloud covered the sun as the waters stream around him, but he has to walk against the current because his hands are bound and they are dragging him through the flowing river of blood that burns so brightly that the heat forces tears from his eyes.

The blood is everywhere, drowning the land. Its rushing roar obliterates every noise.

No matter how loudly he cries out, how he shouts or sings, he cannot hear himself. He cannot hear anyone, only the river's furious flood and the rumbling tremor that afflicts the earth beneath him where pebbles slip under the soles of his feet and he slides and slips, dancing to keep upright.

Buildings rise around him and through an open doorway he sees into the interior of a dim chapel. A lord lies there with a steadfast hound curled asleep at his head and terror at his feet. He fights free of his captors and darts into the church, flinging himself weeping against the lord, but no human flesh embraces him. He is all stone.

Everything is stone or fire.

"Get him out of there! He profanes the holy chapel."

"Madman," they cry.

They drag him outside and pour water over him.

Ai, God. It burns.

Coarse brushes scour him until his skin bleeds. Everything is bleeding. The world is bleeding.

There is a man sitting in a chair with a child beside him, a girl, sweet-faced and quite young, but the blood had got into her bones and she turns red. She is burning.

He struggles to reach her, to save her, but they pin him down and beat him.

"It is him," says the man. "So am I vindicated. Let all the folk who have whispered under their breath see what he has become. He lied about his birth. He tried to cheat my cousin. He has now tried to assault my daughter, who is the rightful count. Put him in a cage. Restrain him, so that he can't hurt anyone. Let an escort be assembled. I will make the folk who scorn to bend their knee to my daughter see what he truly is."

'My lord?"

He fell, caught himself, dizzy, and his claws extruded as he slammed a fist into the log wall, thrusting deep. He stuck there a moment, and only after he shook his head did he wrench his claws out of the wood.

'My lord prince?" she asked again.

'The light blinded me," he said. "I walked too quickly from inside the hall into the open air."

His head rang with the sound of that roaring, the unceasing stream. I know where he is! It was difficult not to shout aloud with joy and triumph.

'Are you sure you are well, my lord?"

He attacked with questions, to give himself time to recover. The scent of blood had been so strong. The hallucination had almost subsumed him.

'What brings you to Medemelacha, Deacon Ursuline?" he asked. "I am surprised to see you."

'No less surprised than I am to be here, my lord. I was sent at the command of OldMother."

This was staggering news, but he knew better than to let his amazement show by any gesture or expression. "What message do you bring, Deacon?"

Yet his heart raced, and he could scarcely quiet his trembling limbs. Alain was at Lavas Holding. Now he could sail to rescue him, and do it quickly, before worse harm was done to him. What had sent him mad? Why was he being punished in this way? Or was it punishment at all? There were other plagues abroad; they spread among humankind as maggots in rotting flesh. No man, or woman, was immune. Alain had wandered into places where he might well have taken sick.

All the more reason to save him and take him to the WiseMothers, as they had commanded him to do.

'Yes, my lord," she said, as if he had spoken out loud. "OldMother wishes you to sail to Alba at once, to the stone crown where Brother Severus has left several adepts to perform the ceremony on the tenth day of Octumbre. There is little time left if you are to reach there by the proper day."

'What about Alain?" he demanded. His passion startled her; she took a step back, and the Rikin brothers crowded around to listen circled nearer, pressing forward, as if they expected to see blood spilled.

Rivers of blood.

The wind was rising. A cloud covered the sun, blown in off the sea, and out beyond the harbor he saw rain coming in across the water, changing the color of sea and sky.

'OldMother said nothing of a person called Alain," Ursuline said after a moment's consideration. "Is that one of Brother Severus' adepts? I can tell you, I do not care for these noble clerics. They sneer at a woman like myself although my lineage is perfectly respectable. They think themselves above the work of shepherding the common folk from birth to death, although certainly the blessed Daisan spoke of the importance of the ordinary work of living, of choosing what is useful and good instead of what is evil.

Every person faces this struggle, not only the high and mighty!"

She was indignant. Her expression gave him pause.

'OldMother made no mention of Alain?" he asked again.

Yet OldMother knew. OldMother herself had told him to find Alain.

'She said this." Her voice changed pitch, deepened and roughened. " 'Stronghand must go at once to the Alban crown, there to set in motion what is necessary. Now we understand what we need to do.' I am to go with you."

'Said she no more than this?"

'Is that not an express command?" she demanded of him. "Yet if that is not enough, then she bade me give you this to remind you of her power."

She unfolded her right hand to display four ephemeral items: a tiny white flower, a lock of downy infant's hair, the shards of an eggshell, the delicate wing bone of a bird.

These things he had once placed in the hand of the youngest WiseMother as she climbed the path to the fjall to join her grandmothers.

'My lord Stronghand!" Yeshu jogged up, face red, tunic plastered with sweat. "The man's gone. His boat's already put to sea, that's what they said, him and two big black dogs, but he can't be far yet. The tide's not with him. He must be moving right up along the coast. Do you want men sent out in pursuit? We'll catch him soon enough."

He reached for the precious items cupped in Ursuline's hand, but she closed her fingers over them and pulled her hand away gently, so as not to seem defiant in front of the others.

He saw now the trap Ursuline had laid.

'No. Let him go. No matter."

Ursuline was born out of humankind, weak and soft, but like the WiseMothers she bore within her the capacity to gestate life. Therefore, the mothers ruled. They alone could create life, and destroy life before it came into autonomy.

She understood their power, and now she challenged him. The stab in the back he had long expected had come from the most unlikely place. Ursuline had shifted her alliance.

She obeyed him not for himself alone but because he obeyed the wishes of OldMother.

She knew who ruled the Eika; he was simply their servant. For some strange reason, caught up in the exhilaration of war and conquest, he had forgotten.

Of course he had no choice. To go against OldMother was beyond him. He bowed his head, knowing he had lost Alain and the hounds. He had failed his brother.

'I am OldMother's obedient son," he said. "Tomorrow we sail for Alba." she hit the water hard and went under, the remnants of her wings held her aloft just long enough that the impact did not knock her out. She fought to the surface, gagging and spitting, and gulped air.

Storm waves crashed against cliff. One of the brothers bobbed up next to the rocks. It was difficult to tell whether he was alive or dead, and she kicked to swim over to him, but the movement sent such a shock up her leg that she almost passed out, floundering. All at once, too suddenly, his body vanished into the waters.

A swell off the storm washed right over her. She swallowed sea water, panicked, and slid under. Nightmare memories of the battle choked her as she struggled.

I am a monster.

A blow slapped into her rump. A large body shoved against her. She spun in the water, thinking it was one of the brothers, but there were other creatures in the water with them.

Her eyes were open, and as lightning split the darkness she saw the limp bodies of Gnat and Mosquito, who were not even flailing as two huge men-fish glided gracefully around them.

Was it a dance? Was it curiosity?

Her air was giving out. She clawed for the surface, but not soon enough. Not before lightning flashed again, and she saw what was happening.

Gnat and Mosquito were being eaten, flesh ripped from their bodies. Already their faces had lost shape and the bone of their skulls gleamed in patches where the flesh had been gnawed away. Their eyes were gone.

They hadn't been dead when they'd leaped into the water.

She came clear into the air gasping and heaving, and a face emerged from the seas just as lightning again illuminated the heavens. It had lidless eyes and horrible writhing hair that was a mass of eels with tiny sharp teeth nipping at her face. The monster loomed so close that the shock of seeing it made her forget to paddle. She sank beneath the waves again. Yet drowning gave her no surfeit from a broken heart.

I led them into a trap.

She thrashed, trying to find the surface, but everything had gone topsy-turvy.

A second body undulated underneath her kicking legs. She burst out of the water and, flailing, found a muscular arm under her hand. A rough hand gripped hers. She tugged, trying to break free, but it yanked her along after it. Spray and waves broke over her. The storm howled and thunder made her ears ring. A squall of rain passed over them, pounding on her head.

Must fight.

That claw closed around her arm and the monster dove, dragging her under.

I have been trapped.

She struggled, but the wound had drained her. She had no reserves left, and they were too far under the water for her to fight back to the surface if she could even figure out which way to swim. Her lungs emptied; her vision faded and sparked into hazy blotches as bubbles rolled past her eyes.

A face loomed. A lipless mouth fastened over hers, and a thick, probing tongue forced her mouth open. Now it would feed on her, consume her from the inside out as she had woken the fire that had consumed from the inside out the logs and the poor, doomed soldiers who had died screaming. Razor sharp teeth pressed against her own in an ungainly kiss. Pinpricks jabbed in her hair as the eel-mouths sought flesh.

Air.

Ai, God. Air filled her lungs, breathed into her by the monster.

The creature unfastened its mouth and dragged her onward, down and down, breathed air into her lungs a second time, and when she thought they could go no farther, it swam into a tunnel opening deep in the rock, far underwater, felt not seen because by now she was blind. They were trapped in a drowned hole in the ground and when her head scraped against rock, the pain washed down her body like knives. She passed out.

Eyes swollen shut, she woke when the ground shivered beneath her. Her tongue was so thick it seemed to fill her entire mouth. Clammy fingers pried her lips open and a foul liquid trickled into her mouth. She spat, and struggled, but she hadn't the strength to fight.

As the potion soured in her stomach, she slid back into darkness.

Speak. To. Us. Bright. One. Speak. To. Us. We. Know. Where. You. Are.

'Dead, is it?"

She swam up from the depths. Her face hurt, and her ears rang from a hallucinatory dream of ancient voices afflicting her. Her body throbbed with pain. The earth beneath her trembled and subsided. She opened her eyes and saw a double image wavering in front of her, but at long last she realized that she saw two distinct creatures who were speaking Jinna for some odd reason.

She hadn't spoken Jinna since the years she and Da had lived in Aquila among the fire worshipers. Those had been good years. Da had been happy there. That's where he had got the astrolabe, a gift from his noble patron. There had been chopped dates and melon at that banquet. She recalled it well enough, the feasting and the singing, the poem that had taken five nights to tell about a bold queen and the wicked sorcerer who had opposed her; she had known that poem by heart once, it had amused the court poets to teach her because of her excellent memory, but a veil clouded her sight… the palace of memory lay under a fog. She couldn't recall the opening line.

In the beginning. No.

This is a tale of battle and of a woman.

No.

Wisdom is better than love.

No!

In the Name of the God who is Fire I offer my tale…

'Bright One!"

Gnat and Mosquito, her mind told her hazily. Certainly they pestered her mercilessly enough. One pinched her so hard on the arm that she croaked a protest.

'Not dead," observed the first.

'Bright One, wake up! You must drink."

She drank. The water cooled her tongue, and she could talk almost like a person. "It was a trap."

'A trap, indeed, Bright One. They were waiting when we came through," said Gnat.

'Maybe so, Brother," retorted Mosquito, "but we don't know if they were waiting for us or if they were waiting for anyone!"

'How many sorcerers can weave such a spell, you idiot? Who do you think they expected?"

'Where is Sorgatani?" she asked, managing to get up on her elbows.

The ground she lay on scraped her skin, and it hurt to move at all, but no pain could equal the shock of looking up with her salamander eyes and remembering that Gnat and Mosquito were dead; they had been fed to the fishes. Where their bodies had gone she did not know, but the creatures who stared back at her were not the Jinna brothers at all but mermen, the same beasts she had seen devouring her hapless servants in the stormy waters.

They had the torsos of men but the hindquarters of fish, ending in a massively strong tail. They had arms both lean and powerful, and their scaly hands had webbing between the digits and claws at the tips. Monstrous faces stared at her, with flat eyes, slits for noses, lipless mouths, and hair that moved of its own accord, as if a nest of eels was fastened to their skulls. Yet they spoke Jinna with the inflections of Gnat and Mosquito.

'The Hidden One?" Mosquito shook his head, and looked at his brother, although it was too dark in this pit for any normal man to see, and they were not men to have lips or wrinkles from which to read thoughts and emotions.

Gnat shook his head like an echo. The eels that were his hair woke and hissed, then settled. "We don't know. Her wagon went through the gap. Then we came back for you."

'What of Breschius?" she asked, choking on the words. "Those who were still living ran out through the stockade. We came back to help you." "You are dead!"

Again they spoke to each other by looking alone. Water made a sucking sound in a hole nearby, rising and falling. Lichens growing along the walls of this cavern gave off a slight luminescence, and this dim light allowed her to see that the two mermen rested half in and half out of water where it funneled away into a tunnel sunk into the rock, an old flooded passageway. She lay farther up, almost in the center of a cavern no larger than a royal bedchamber. It looked high enough to stand in, and she thought there were three passageways opening into the rock on the far side of the chamber, if she could only get so far. Yet to move seemed an impossible task. Her head felt muzzy and her ears clogged.

Her leg hurt so badly that she could barely think.

'Many are dead," agreed Gnat somberly. "Many more will die. We died for you, Bright One."

'How can it be you speak to me now?" Her words echoed through the cavern. The ground shivered in response.

'The Earth is waking," said Mosquito. "The Old Ones speak. We are your servants.

What do you wish us to do?"

Ai, God. She wept. She had not feared to risk her own life, but she hadn't really considered what it meant to allow others to die on her behalf. Gnat and Mosquito were dead, pierced by arrows and then eaten alive, yet some portion of them remained living within the bodies of these creatures.

Was she their prisoner, or their master?

'Where are we?" she said when she could talk through her tears. Her voice shook, or perhaps it was the ground trembling again, the shudder of a chained beast. Fear washed through her, its taste as harsh as sea water. As the quake subsided, a second followed hard on it. Did the shaking never stop?

'Beneath," said Gnat.

'We are at the heart," said Mosquito. "Lay your head against the earth, Bright One.

Close your eyes. Let the Old Ones speak to you."

Liath sat up. Pain shot through her injured thigh, but she gritted her teeth and endured it. "Who are the Old Ones?"

They shook their heads and, after another wordless consultation, Mosquito spoke. "We don't know. They live in the Slow, just as you do, but they live even beyond the Slow for the passage of their life is not like that of flesh, which feeds us."

Flesh fed them, mind and body. If they consumed her, would they ingest her knowledge and her memory and her way of speaking? Even if they did, how were they, who fed as all creatures must feed, any worse than she was? She had killed men this day in the most horrific fashion imaginable.

Who was the monster?

'Very well," she said, although she couldn't bear thinking of closing her eyes again. If she closed her eyes, she might see the blackened bodies of comrade and enemy alike. But what else could she do? She was at the mercy of these creatures who spoke like Gnat and Mosquito and who had not yet devoured her. Who knew how long they would claim to be—or seem to be—the brothers. She would drown if she tried to escape back the way she had come. She might not have the strength to walk, and there might be no way to escape to the surface from this cavern in any case.

'We know of a plant that will soothe the wound. Rest. Listen to the Old Ones. We will bring nourishment, and brackweed for healing."

'So be it," she said.

Mosquito rolled sideways, got most of the way into the water, then vanished with a heave of his tail. Water boiled up to her toes before subsiding across the uneven floor. He was gone. Gnat remained, silent and watchful.

She stretched full length against the earth and laid a cheek against the ground. The surface abraded her skin. For a long time she remained there with eyes open, just breathing, emptying her mind, trying not to remember the battle. Or Sanglant. Or Blessing. Or Hanna. Or Da. Or the fire daimones. Let. It. Go. She shut her eyes.

Hers was not a nature that took easily or eagerly to earth. Earth buried fire. Earth cast on flames choked them. But with each breath she let her awareness sink into the earth, and she remembered those slow voices that had spoken to her in her dream. How long ago was it? How far must she travel? How deep must she go?

Stone was only a blanket covering the deeps of the Earth where fire flowed in vast rivers hotter than any forge. The Earth churns around a dragon's heart of fire and a cold, heavy mass at its innermost core.

Listen. Swift. Daughter. Listen. The. Storm. Is. Coming. The. Earth. Will. Crack. To.

Pieces. If. We. Do. Not. Aid. Her. Make. Room. Make. Room. Will You. Help. Or. Hinder.

Speak. Daughter. Can. You. Hear. Us. The fires within the Earth were a conduit linking her to the Old Ones who spoke through the earth, who were part of the earth and yet apart from the earth, slow as ages yet with the sharp intellect of humankind and the powerful dreams of creatures long since vanished from Earth who were called dragons, children of fire and earth. "We must stop the weaving." Her whisper carried on the thread of liquid fire deep into the earth and away, into the web that wove all things together.

No. No. So. We. Thought. First. But. Now. We. Know. Better. This. We. Have.

Learned. From. The. Fallen. One. The. Weaving. Must. Open. To. Allow. The. Song. Of.

Power. The. Resonance. Between. Land. And. Land. Make. Room. Or.

They had no words for what came next. It was an explosion of images beyond anything she had ever seen, beyond even the destruction wrought by Adica and her companions twenty-seven hundred years before. A scorching rain would blast the countryside; the earth itself would buckle and heave, spilling forth rivers of fire to drown land and sea alike. All creatures, dead. All life, obliterated.

'What of the Ashioi? Are they doomed?"

Make. Room.

Open the weaving to make room, to soften the blow, but close it before Anne could cast the Ashioi land away again.

'How?" she whispered as hope bloomed in her heart because now she recognized where she was. She knew how the threads connected them. She lay directly below the central crown. She lay buried in the earth, and they called to her through the ancient resonance that linked all the crowns each to the others. What they spoke of made a sudden, awful sense. She had to trust that they were her allies. She had no other choice, not anymore.

'How can we do this?" she asked.

They told her.

JHiJC Y bound him to the wagon's bed with chains that rubbed his ankles and wrists raw. Each jolt as the cart hit ridges and ruts in the road slammed him into the railing until his hip and torso bruised all along that side. Splinters stung in his bare arms, but he hadn't enough give in the chain to be able to raise his hands to pick them out. When it rained, he got soaked; the sun burned him where no clouds protected him from its glare.

It was still a merciful existence because, slowly, over days or weeks, the rivers of blood receded from his sight. He was weak, and so dizzy more often than not that he could barely stand. He had long since forgotten what was real and what was hallucination: a hamlet might rumble into sight and children might throw rotting fruit at him, laughing and screaming, the two sounds too close to untangle because of the desperation ringing in their voices, and yet as he stared trying to make sense of the scene or wincing at the impact as a wormy apple struck him full in the abdomen, a flood would crash down drowning the huts and casting beams and thatching into foaming waves like kindling, but if he blinked, he might be staring at forest again or at the sea, for it often seemed he stood at the stem of a dragon ship with oars beating away at the waters and the wind blustering in his bone-white hair.

'Who are you?" cried the guardsmen who attended him as they jerked the wagon to a halt on the commons and folk ventured in from the fields or out from their workshops and cottages to see what their lord had brought 'round on procession. "What's your name, noble lord?"

The words smirched him no less than the rotten fruit, but he could not answer their questions or defend himself. If he spoke at all, the words that poured from him made his audience laugh, or weep.

'We'll never know peace. What is bound to Earth will return to Earth. The suffering isn't over!"

'See what a count's progress this cheat and liar makes now!" called Heric, who had bread every day and a new tunic for his reward as well as the pleasure of accompanying the cage as it made its rounds through villages and farms that at times seemed familiar to him although he could put no name to anything if it were not spoken within his hearing.

The only name he remembered was Adica's. She was dead.

His only companions were rage and sorrow, invisible but always crouched at his side, and the shackles bound him close against them. He could never escape.

At least the rivers of blood had stopped flowing.

'Yet blood will cover us again," he said to the villagers as he tried to blink away the glare of the sun. He had to make them understand even though there was nothing they could do to save themselves. "The cataclysm is coming. She set it in motion. She didn't know what she was doing. She did know, but she couldn't have understood. I loved her.

She couldn't have wished harm on so many."

She couldn't have.

No matter how many times he said it, he knew he would never know.

Because of the chains, he could not wipe dust from his eyes. Tears ran constantly as the dirt of the road was kicked up into his face. His tongue tasted of grit. Now and again they gave him porridge poured onto the floorboards of the wagon so he had to kneel and lap it up while curious folk watched and whispered. Once a child threw the end piece of a moldy cheese at him, and he barely caught it and wolfed it down even though it was so hard it was like eating rocks. Even apples rotted to a brown mush inside the soft skin were welcome. He picked the skins off the bed of the wagon where they had splattered.

He drank rain, licking it from his hands.

'He's no better than a wild beast!" said Heric. "Yet this creature claimed kinship to our noble count! For shame! For shame that any of you once bowed before him!"

Fear shamed them. He saw right into their hearts. They were afraid of their new lord, the one they called Geoffrey, yet they feared his raving words and filthy appearance even more and so they hated him. He spoke aloud of the terror that slept within each one, songs of despair whose melody was the end of the world.

They believed him but did not want to. He heard their murmurs as they spoke among themselves of the harbingers that had plagued them for the last few years, ever since the lamentable death of the old count. Troubles beset them with refugees on the road and children starving and holy fire burning their limbs and plague rife in the south, so rumor had it, and the harvest blighted and the storms as fierce as any in living memory with hailstones so large they destroyed houses and lightning that had burned down a church and untimely snows in late spring which caught travelers and householders and shepherds unprepared.

They believed him, and therefore they cursed him. Lord Geoffrey rode into each village in his wake with his young daughter beside him, and they bowed and genuflected before the young countess and pledged their oaths, because Geoffrey was better than the end of the world.

'No one will escape," he said to the air.

'Especially not you!" crowed Heric, and the guardsman called to the carter who controlled the reins. "Here, now, Ulf! Time to move on! We've a long way to go today before you and I will get our feast and a longer way to go before the usurper gets his fill of his just reward."

The wagon lurched forward as Ulf the carter got the oxen moving. They jounced down a forest path. The leaves of the trees had begun to turn to gold and orange, and as the wind rattled through the branches, leaves spun loose and danced in eddies and spirals.

Ahead, Heric called out. The wagon jolted to a stop in a clearing carved out of the woodland where stood half a dozen wattle-and-daub huts roofed with sod. Fences ringed vegetable gardens, each one neatly tended although most looked recently harvested. A stand of rosemary flowered; a few parsnips remained in the ground. A score of ragged folk stared as Heric launched into his tirade and the other guardsmen poked at him with sticks to emphasize Heric's words.

'… claimed to be the son of the count, but it was all a lie… God have punished him…

found as a madman roaming the countryside stealing a deacon's bread and trying to murder a girl… no better than a beast."

A woman stepped out of the crowd, holding tightly to the hand of a small child. She was thin and wasted, and the child was not much more than skin stretched over bone, but both had a fierce will shining in their expressions, not easily cowed by Heric and his arrogant companions. Strangely, although she dressed in rags like the rest of the villagers, she wore over all a sumptuous fur-lined cloak more fitting to a lord than a pauper. It was this cloak that gave her authority among the others. It was this cloak that made his eyes burn, and his head reel.

'We know what you are about," she said to Heric with the calm contempt of a woman who, having stood at the edge of the Abyss and survived, no longer fears worldly threats.

"Leave us, I pray you. Do not mock us by this display. We know who walks among us.

We know who he is."

Some of them wept, and their compassion silenced him. He did not condemn himself by babbling but only watched as Heric angrily swore at the carter and got the procession moving again down the forest path. The trees closed in around them. The hamlet was lost as if it had never existed, and maybe it hadn't. Maybe it was just a vision, not real at all.

His head hurt. In the distance he heard the rumble of thunder that heralded a gathering storm.

XX THE NATURE OF THEIR POWER ssy pray you, Sister Rosvita."

Rosvita started awake. "I dozed off," she said, brushing a fly off her cheek. The warmth of the sun soaked into her back, which ached from lying on the ground. Despite the late date—by her calculations, it was the ninth of Octumbre—the sun glared ungodly hot. Beneath her body the earth trembled. Horses neighed. Dogs barked. As the noise subsided, a stillness sank over them, as taut as a drawn bowstring. There was no wind.

'That was a little stronger than the others," said Ruoda, but there was an odd tone in her words, a warning.

Rosvita sat up. Her little company sat like rabbits caught under the glare of an eagle, all but Mother Obligatia, who lay beneath the shelter of the awning on a pallet. The old abbess was also aware, raised up on one elbow to watch. Hanna stood beside her with her gaze fixed on the five men waiting at the edge of their little encampment, one of whom was the one-eyed general, Lord Alexandras, wearing a handsome scarlet tabard and, under it, a coat of mail. He did not speak. Such an exalted man had servants to speak for him.

'Sister Rosvita." Sergeant Bysantius inclined his head respectfully.

'General Lord Alexandros requests the attendance of the Eagle at his tent."

'Very well," said Rosvita, knowing they had no way to protest if the general chose to drag Hanna off by force. "I will go with her."

'Those are not our orders, Sister."

'I pray you, Lord Alexandros." Rosvita turned her attention to the general. "She is under my protection."

'I know what he wants," murmured Hanna, who had gone ashy pale. "It's my hair.

These eastern men are obsessed with pale hair."

'I can't let you go, Hanna! I'll let no man abuse you. I am not so weak or cowardly."

'Nay, Sister." Hanna moved up to take her hand and whispered into her ear. "I am not without weapons of my own, although you cannot see them. Let me go. Better if I go now. We may need to rebel on a different day than this."

'Soon," Rosvita agreed, but such a tight fist clenched in her chest that she despaired.

Soon the world would alter, and they were prisoners and helpless to combat it.

'We must survive," murmured Hanna. "That is all we can hope to do. If I do not come back, do not despair. If I can escape, I will."

'Go with my blessing, Daughter." Rosvita kissed her on either cheek, then on her forehead, and wiped away tears as the Eagle left the circle of rope and went with the general and his escort. Hanna did not look back, but Fortunatus went right up to the rope and gripped it in his hands, staring after her. Rosvita joined him there.

The day was so hot. "This is not natural heat," she said. The guards glanced at her, but since they could not understand Wendish, the conversation did not capture their attention.

"I feel all the Earth holds its breath."

Another rumble danced through the ground and faded so swiftly that it might have been no more than a fly buzzing at her ear. No clouds softened the hard blue sky. The sun dazzled over the ranks of white tents arrayed in neat columns. They had settled into this campsite four days ago and not moved, and she did not know why, although she suspected that over the last weeks they had marched well into Dalmiakan territory and now waited close to the sea.

They camped on the slope of hills that crumpled up the ground to the north and west, and it seemed likely that the hills rolled flat to become a plain to the southeast, but since they rode in the midst of the army and camped in the midst of the army, it was hard to get a good look. No vista opened before them, only the rugged outline of hills burned to a pale yellow by the autumn heat. The quartermaster's tent blocked their view to the west.

Under the glare of the sun, the camp lay quiet. A man walked between tents hauling two buckets of water from a pole balanced over his shoulders. A dog slunk out from the shade of a tent and trotted, ears flat, after a scent too delicate for her to catch.

Lady Eudokia, too, was waiting. That was why she had ordered her army to leave off marching and set up camp. That catch in their air was the false calm before a storm breaks, the worse for having held steady for three days. Often the noontime sky lightened from blue to a shade nearer white, and on occasion she thought it actually rippled the way tent canvas ripples when wind runs across it. She hadn't heard a bird for days. Even the bugs had fled.

'I am afraid, Sister," said Brother Fortunatus.

She put her hand over his, then glanced back at their tiny encampment. The young clerics had fashioned a writing table and took turns copying to her dictation or from the pages of one of their precious books while the rest clustered around watching or offering commentary. Gerwita read aloud to Mother Obligatia in a voice so soft it was inaudible from a stone's toss away. Teuda and Aurea were washing shifts in a bucket of water, now gray with dust, and chatting com-panionably as Aurea labored to improve her Dariyan.

Petra slept, as she did more often these days.

'A peaceful scene," said Rosvita. "Deceptively so."

'What will become of us?"

'I have told Princess Sapientia what I know. If she chooses not to believe me, I can do no more. It is in God's Hands now." the general's tent there was wine as well as sherbert cooled in a bowl of ice crystals, all arranged on an ebony table placed beside a couch covered with green silk. Lord Alexandros indicated that Hanna should sit. At first he sat beside her, taking her hand in his as he examined her emerald ring and fingered her hair, but quickly enough he rose, went to the entrance of the tent, and spoke in a low voice to a person stationed outside.

Hanna ate the sherbert, seeing no reason to let it go to waste. It tasted of melon; it melted on her tongue and sent a shiver through her as she braced herself for what would come next. Besides the table and the couch, the tent was empty. A sumptuous jade-green carpet, embroidered with pale-green Arethousan stars, covered the ground.

A servant—one of the beardless eunuchs—brought in a bowllike brazier glowing with coals and opened up its tripod legs. He arranged sticks in a latticework over the top and, receiving a nod from the general, retreated. The curtains swayed back into place. The general frowned thoughtfully at Hanna, standing with hands clasped behind himself as he surveyed her, his gaze lingering longest on her hair. She waited, holding the empty cup in one hand and the silver spoon in the other. Even a spoon could be used as a weapon, if need be.

He chuckled. The injury to his eye—not visible beneath the patch— had affected his facial muscles; when he smiled, he had crow's-feet only on the unmarked side of his face.

'I know what you think." He spoke so softly that she had to listen closely to distinguish words out of his heavily accented Dariyan. "I have a wife. You're not that pretty."

She flushed and with an effort did not touch her hair. The curtain lifted; Basil the eunuch entered and held the cloth aside as Lady Eu-dokia was carried in on a chair by two brawny men adorned with bronze slave collars and wearing only short linen shifts and sandals. An embroidered blanket covered the lady's legs. The slaves set her down beside the still smoldering brazier. Smoke trailed upward, but the latticework of sticks had not yet caught flame. A spark popped out of the coals and spun lazily to the carpet.

Hanna shifted her knee to grind it out. She couldn't bear to see a hole burned in such a magnificent rug.

'I understand you can see through fire," continued Lord Alexandras without greeting the lady. He did not look toward Eudokia, as if he had not noticed her entrance. "The Eagle's Sight, they call it. Show me."

Hanna grunted under her breath, both amused and outraged, but she supposed it mattered little. They could not see what she saw unless they had themselves been trained in Eagle's Sight. As she knelt before the low brazier on its tripod legs, Lady Eudokia cast a handful of crumbled herbs onto the fire and flames blazed up and caught in the sticks.

The heat seared Hanna's face, and she sat back on her heels, but the general had already moved, as quick as a panther, to draw his sword and rest the blade flat across her back.

'If you see nothing," he said, "then you are no use to me. I will kill you here and now.

If you see, I spare you."

All her breath whooshed out. She set her palms on her knees as she steadied her breathing, however difficult it was with the pressure of the blade along her shoulders and the chill of the threat hanging in the air. Fear not. She had survived worse trials than this.

She focused her thoughts and stared into the flame. Whom should she seek? What could she see through fire that would not betray them?

Yet what betrayal remained? Rosvita had told the truth, but Sapi-entia and her companions had not believed her. Her thoughts skittered. The general loomed over her with his sword held close to her vulnerable neck.

Ai, God, where was Liath?

In the depths there is only shadow,' a darkness so opaque that she imagines she smells the wrack of seawater; she imagines she hears the sigh of wavelets lapping on a stony shore. A sound catches her, the scrape of cloth against pebbles as if a limb moves as a person shifts in sleep. Down, and down, she falls, following that sound, until the flame itself becomes one with a river of fire that rages in a tumult, pouring over her.

She starts back. Iron confines her movement and shoves her forward again, and she breathes his name, whom she has sought for so long.

Ivar.

He kneels before a lady crowned with a circle of gold. A gold torque grips her throat.

She is tall and sturdily built, a powerful woman with brown hair and the broad hands of a person who rides and does not fear to wield a weapon.

"Go, then," says the lady.

Hanna knows that cool voice well: It is Princess Theophanu. She is seated in a hall with banners hanging from the beams and a crowd of courtiers about her, most of them women. There is another young man with Ivar, but Hanna does not know him. "Take this message and return to my aunt. I am shut up here in Osterburg. My influence ranges no farther afield than Gent and the fields of Saony because I was left as regent without enough troops to maintain my authority. I dare not leave the ancient seat of my family's power. It may be all we have left. Famine and plague have devastated the south. I have sent into Avaria and the marchlands, but now I hear that they have cast their lot with my bastard brother, and that they, too, have marched to Aosta in pursuit of Henry and the imperial crown! I cannot ride against Sabella and Conrad. They are stronger than I am."

"What must Biscop Constance do, Your Highness?" Ivar asked despairingly. "She is their prisoner."

"She must pray that deliverance comes soon."

"So it is true." Lady Eudokia's voice jerked Hanna out of the fire, but Lord Alexandras' sword still pressed against her back. She wasn't free, and might never be so again. "How much more is true if this is true?"

'Queen Sapientia believes the cleric's story is not true," said the general.

'She is easily led. Geza has gained a pliant coursing hound to bend to his will."

'As long as he keeps to his share of our bargain, we are well served by this alliance."

Eudokia smiled, and Hanna pretended to stare into the waning flames so they could not guess she understood them. "General, I do not criticize the alliance with the Ungrian barbarians. I only speak the truth. It is the truth we must discover before we decide whether to attack the usurper and the false skopos or to retreat. The portents speak of an ill tide rising. Does the fire speak the truth? Does it speak only of this day and this hour, or can it see into both past and future? Do we strike now? Or protect ourselves until the worst is over?"

The sword shifting against Hanna's back betrayed a gesture on his part, which she could not see. She dared not turn her head. Hairs rose on the back of her neck. How easy it would be for him to kill her here where she knelt, yet surely they wouldn't want to spoil the carpet with her heretic's blood. She had betrayed the Eagle's Sight to foreigners. What more did they want of her?

Eudokia fished beneath the blanket covering her legs and drew out a bundle of straight twigs, none longer than a finger. She leaned forward and scattered a dozen onto the dying fire. Flames curled and faltered, then caught with renewed vigor, and the smell that burned off those twigs was a punch so strong that Hanna reeled from it and would have fallen if the general had not closed a hand over her shoulder and wrenched her upright.

'See!" he commanded.

Smoke twined about the licking tongues of fire and dizzied Hanna until her eyes watered and she could no longer tell if she saw true or saw hallucinations brought on by the taste of the smoke.

"Camphor will lead her," said Eudokia, but Hanna was already gone. Her head throbbed and she broke out in a sweat, coughing, while her awareness seemed sharply stimulated. She felt the pile of the carpet through the cloth of her leggings; she heard the rustle of silk as the general changed position behind her; the wasp sting burned in her heart while Lady Eudokia murmured words under her breath, a spell like a snake that drew the smoke into a mirror into whose smooth depths Hanna fell Holy Mother Anne stands in a circle of seven stones on the edge of a cliff. Through the stone crown she weaves threads of light into a glimmering net reaching far across the lands. Its apex explodes in fire and lightning so bright it stings her eyes, it blinds her the Earth burns the Earth splits and cracks open and a yawning abyss swallows the Middle Sea, and she is choking as a wall of water sweeps inland, drowning all before it 'Enough!" cried Eudokia, voice rising, cracking with fear. Hanna was flung backward and hit her shoulders and then her head, although the carpet cushioned the blow somewhat. Yet sparks shot from the brazier and spun like fireflies, raining down as the general leaped forward to shove Lady Eudokia's chair out of the way, chair legs catching in the carpet and dragging it up into stiff folds. An ember ghosted down to light on Hanna's cheek. No vision, this. It burned into her skin and, with the heavy incense clouding her lungs, she gulped for air, coughed helplessly, and passed out.

'Hanna, I pray you, wake up."

She fought those hands, knowing that the fingers that closed around her neck would choke the life out of her just as the smoke had.

'Hanna!"

A jolt threw her sideways into a hard wall. After this new pain resolved into an ordinary scrape and bruise, she found herself staring into the grain of rough-hewn wood.

She recognized the scrape of wheels and the lurching gait of a wagon. She lay in its bed with the heavens splayed above her almost gauzy, they glared so whitely. Because the sight made her eyes hurt, she looked down. Fortunatus strode alongside, peering down anxiously at her.

'Hanna? Are you awake?"

The taste of the incense still clogged her throat.

'Hanna, what happened?"

Other faces crowded around as they jostled to get a look at her: Ruoda, Heriburg, Gerwita, Jerome and Jehan, the sisters from St. Ekatarina's, the servant women, all sliding in and out of her vision. Then Rosvita came and the others melted aside so the cleric could walk with one hand upon the wagon. Her gaze on Hanna had such a benign aspect that Hanna gave a sigh of relief, though it hurt to let air whistle from lungs to mouth.

'Let her be, comrades."

'But what happened?" cried the others, voices tumbling one on top of the next. "Where are we going in such haste? Why are we traveling back the way we came as though we're fleeing the Enemy?"

'Can you tell us what happened, Hanna?" Rosvita's tone was mild but her expression disconcertingly tense. She touched Hanna's cheek with a finger, flicking at the skin; Hanna winced, feeling the scar where the ember had burned her. "Ah!" murmured Rosvita sadly, as if she had only now realized that Hanna bore a new injury.

'I saw it." She did not recognize her own voice. The smoke had ruined it. "Fire.

Burning. A flood of water as mighty as the sea unleashed." Tears made her stammer. "T-the end of the world."

JLiJc company of thirty handpicked soldiers and their charge fled down onto the coastal plain in blistering heat to rejoin the queen's army, and on the evening of the fifth day they rode into a camp situated near the shore in the hope, perhaps, of catching a breeze off the waters. Yet the tide was far out, exposing rocks and slime, and despite the lowering twilight there was no wind at all, only the heat.

In the center of camp Antonia dismounted from her mule and fixed Adelheid with an exasperated gaze as a servant showed her to a seat under an awning. Adelheid indicated that all but Duke Burchard and her most faithful retainers should depart to give Antonia a few moments to relax in peace.

'How long will we suffer in this heat?" Duke Burchard asked the empress, as if continuing a conversation halted by Antonia's arrival.

'It is part of the skopos' plan. If clouds cover the sky, then she o^s cannot weave her great spell. Or so I understand." Servants fanned them, but it was still almost too hot to breathe.

Burchard grunted, sounding uneasy. "When I was young, the church condemned tempestari. They said such magic interfered with the natural course of God's will."

'One might say the same of swords and spears," observed Adelheid, "for otherwise enemies would do much less damage each to the other when they went to war, and battles would be a far less bloody business. Sorcery is a tool, Burchard, just like a sword." She turned to regard Antonia, who had finished drinking her wine while a servant wiped her sweating brow and neck with a damp linen cloth. "You were not successful, then, Sister Venia?"

She was dusty, sore, hot, tired, and thoroughly angry. "He has griffins!"

'So the scouts reported," said Burchard with an uplifted brow.

'Didn't you believe them?"

'I did not comprehend the nature of their power."

'What is the nature of a griffin's power?" The empress sat with feet tucked up under her in a most unbefitting informality; one blue silk slipper peeped out from beneath the gold drapery of her robe.

She leaned forward now, lips parted, eyes wide, as innocent as a child and most likely just as stupid.

'They have the power to banish the galla. It is said griffin feathers can cut through the bonds of magic."

'Did the galla not throw confusion into his army?"

'A score of men may have died, more or less. I viewed the attack from a safe distance.

We have not stopped him." "But we have slowed him down." The queen's prettiness had never irritated Antonia more than at this moment. How soft those pink lips looked! How pale and inviting were those lovely eyes! Adelheid had not sullied her hands with blood, since the criminals she had handed over to Antonia were marked for execution in any case. But Adelheid had the knack of getting others to do her dirty work for her so that her hands remained lily white. She had scribes to write her missives; loyal guardsmen to wield swords in her defense; stewards to bring her food and drink and a host of fawning courtiers like that old fool Burchard to sing her praises. Beauty was a perilous gift, so often misused. Even as a girl Antonia had scorned those who with their ephemeral beauty got their way even when it was wrong for them to have done so. She had never possessed winsomeness. She had studied righteousness and the game of power to achieve her ends, molding herself into God's instrument.

That was a better kind of sword, one whose reach was infinite and whose span was eternal.

'We cannot stop him," said Antonia. "Have you not considered what the failure of this attack means? The galla were our most powerful weapon."

'Think you so, Sister Venia? I would have thought that surprise was our most powerful weapon."

'The galla surprised him, yet he overcame them."

Adelheid sighed, shifting her feet. Her hair was uncovered as relief from the heat, and her thick black hair braided in as simple a fashion as any farm girl. "I hope you do not despair. I do not."

Antonia knew better than to say what she thought. She had her own plans, and it would not do to anger the empress. "What do you mean to do, Your Majesty?"

'I mean to send you back to my daughters. You will reside at Ti-vura until I call for them. I believe you can protect them with your galla, if need be. You have proved your worth. I know you will do what you must to protect them. I hope you do not fear the journey back to Darre. There may be dangers now that Prince Sanglant's army descends into our land."

Burchard was nodding in time to the queen's recital. Antonia had once had more patience for this kind of nonsense, and it was difficult to endure it now, but even so she knew how to smile to gain another's confidence and goodwill. Adelheid needed her, and for now she needed Adelheid. "I am well armed, just as Prince Sanglant is, Your Majesty.

And your plans?"

'We will march east through Ivria along the coast."

'Away from Darre?"

'Prince Sanglant will not march on Darre if we challenge him elsewhere. Darre is not the heart of Aosta. I am. He must capture me to have a hope of capturing the empire."

'Rumor speaks that it is his father he seeks, not you, Your Majesty."

'No man refuses a crown if it is dangled before him."

Antonia frowned. "Do you want Prince Sanglant, Your Majesty? Is this a feint to capture him?"

Burchard snorted. "The queen is loyal to her husband!"

Adelheid laughed and reached out to pat Burchard's trembling hands. That sweet laughter had captivated a court, a king, and an empire, but it did not fool Antonia. "Hush, Burchard. My loyalty to Henry is not in question." She settled back and turned her bright gaze on Antonia. "Of course it is a feint to trap him, Sister. What else would it be? Eagles fly swiftly. I am not the only one who received news from a messenger ten days ago speaking of Sanglant's approach over the Brinne Pass."

S army retreated in good order a half day's ride out in front of them through the worst heat Sanglant had ever suffered and at last took shelter within the walls of the seaport town of Estriana while his army laid in a siege. Few Wendish towns boasted strong stone walls; most had wooden palisades and a stone keep. These were ancient walls erected in the days of the old Dariyan Empire. The town stood on an outcrop that thrust into a shallow bay with waters flat and glassy beyond and the belt of surrounding fields shorn of forage. Her forces had worked efficiently, leaving nothing more than dusty stubble, plucked vines, and a number of gnarled olive trees. To the east the ground rose into rugged hill country and west the wooded coastal plain stretched into a haze of heat and dust. To the north lay hills as well, and where a tongue of a ridgeline thrust out onto the narrow coastal flat a river spilled down onto low land and thence out to the bay, joined halfway by a smaller stream winding in from the eastern hills. Because this bluff lay less than half a league from the town walls, they used it to anchor their siege works to ensure access to water.

As the camp went up in a huge half circle around the town, he sat down under an awning and held court. No man could stand out in the sun's glare for long without succumbing to dizziness and fainting and, indeed, the report of his chief healer and head stable master made him feel light-headed with concern.

'Five men have died since we came out of the mountains," said the healer. "I swear to you, my lord prince, this heat is worse than the cold of the eastern plains. I've a hundred men or more with blistering burns and a fever, or who have collapsed on the march."

'I wonder if the Aostans have as many words for heat as the Quman do for cold. What of the livestock?"

The stable master had dire news as well. "We've lost twenty-two horses over the last ten days, my lord prince. While it's good that we're digging in so as to keep the river within our lines, there's so little water trickling down from the higher ground that I'm wondering if the queen's forces haven't diverted it upstream. We just don't have enough water for the livestock."

'There's a drought on this land."

'Truly, there is," he said, wiping sweat from his forehead, "but if this is the same river we rode beside yesterday and the day before, it had a great deal more water in it then. It would be good tactics on the queen's part to deprive us of water, especially if they've access to a spring within their walls."

'Lord Wichman." Sanglant called the duchess' son forward. "Will you take fifty men and venture to find this dam, if there is one, and destroy it?"

'With pleasure!"

'Do you think that wise?" asked Hathui as Wichman strode out of the gathering, eager to get on the move. "He'll be alone in enemy countryside. The heat is ruinous."

'Then I'm rid of him and the trouble he causes, or he solves our water shortage.

Captain Fulk?"

The captain stepped forward. "We're setting up our perimeters on both sides, my lord prince, and digging two rings of ditches, one facing out and one in. That bluff to the north holds one flank. The spot where the stream meets the river fortifies the second. We can't do anything about an attack from the sea, if one comes, but we've set the wagons in line as a palisade. I've got a score of men strung out as sentries well into the countryside.

We've heard a rumor that King Henry marched east many months ago into Arethousan country—a region called Dalmiaka. If it's true, his army lies east of us. If not, he could come up from the southwest."

'Very good."

'I pray you, Prince Sanglant." Lady Wendilgard of Avaria came forward with a dozen of her best soldiers at her back. Although her nose and cheeks had been burned red by the sun, her face had the pallor of a woman held under a tight rein. "We have come from the forward line."

When she knelt before him in an uncharacteristic show of humil ity, he smelled trouble. The way she had set her mouth, teeth clamped shut and lips pressed thin, bode ill.

"I pray you, go on."

In the distance he heard the griffins shriek. Lady Wendilgard remained silent too long, and when she spoke, she spoke too quickly.

'I have been to the forward line, my lord prince. I have seen the walls of Estriana. My father's banner flies beside that of Aosta. He rides with Queen Adelheid. I cannot fight against him." For once she could not look him in the eye, knowing what he was: bastard and rebel. "I cannot."

Silence was a weapon, and she employed it better than he did.

He spoke first. "It may be a feint. How do you know your father himself rides with the queen?"

Like her parents, she was proud and with a few breaths regained her composure enough to look him in the eye. "I called out to the guards on the wall, my lord prince."

Such formality from a woman who was near enough his equal in rank condemned him.

He knew what she would say next. "My father was summoned. I saw him on the walls, hale and alive."

He tapped a foot on the dirt, stilled it; a surge of energy coursed through him but he had to remain seated and in control. "So," he said, temporizing, but he had already lost this battle and it was too late to change the course of the defeat.

'So be it," she replied, again too quickly. "I gave you my oath, my lord prince, which I will not forswear. I will not draw my sword against you. Yet I must remain loyal to my father. I and my Avarians will withdraw from the army and return home."

X E ' JOS] HE could not let it be. The lady and her soldiers rode out in the late afternoon while Adelheid's men gathered on the walls of the town and jeered those who remained, although the griffins prowling between ditch and wall gave the enemy pause.

One man shot an arrow which fell harmlessly short of Domina.

The Avarian defection dealt the siege a grievous blow. Men frowned as they dug the ditches that would protect them. Soldiers muttered and fell silent as he passed. They gazed north, toward home. They argued about who had the camp next to the Quman contingent although Fulk had already assigned places, and Gyasi was forced to order his nephews to stake out a rope to encircle the Quman encampment and bind it with charms and bells to keep Wendish and Quman apart.

Worst of all, the griffins flew off suddenly, and although they had done so before in order to go hunting and had always returned, this time their departure smelled of defeat.

Men watched them go and turned muttering back to their tasks. On the rocky shoreline, five dead dolphins washed up, their corpses half decayed and infested with tiny worms.

In the wake of this omen the seawaters began to retreat as though draining away into a sinkhole. Fish flopped and gasped in shrinking hollows on the exposed seabed, and his soldiers waded out into the muck to retrieve them in baskets—yet one man wandered too close to the walls and three arrows pierced him before his comrades could drag him to safety. He died shortly after, as the sun was setting, and no sooner had the one piece of ill news made the rounds than two horses suffering from colic had to be slaughtered.

Sanglant took Hathui aside as the camp settled in for an uneasy night punctuated by curses and jeers from Estriana's walls and the too-distant sigh of the sea, whose waters receded finger's width by finger's width although by now the tide—if there even were one in the sheltered Middle Sea—ought to be turning to come back in. Drought on the land and an uncanny ebb tide at sea. What next?

'Saddle a mount. I'm riding after Wendilgard."

She began to speak, but after making that first sound—no recognizable word—she shut her mouth.

'You know I value your advice. I pray you, Eagle, say what you think."

'Only this, my lord prince. Best that you persuade her to return. The Avarians make up a fifth part of the army. Lady Wendilgard commands respect because she, too, rode south not for glory but because of loyalty to her father. Now folk are reminded that you are a rebel. They do not like to think of fighting against the regnant they love."

'How is it, then, that you dare think of it, Hathui?"

Her steady gaze matched his. She held her ground. "I witnessed what they did to the king. Who is to say they have not ensorcelled Duke Burchard in the same manner? Isn't it a form of sorcery if he doesn't know the truth and instead remains faithful because of a lie? How is it rebellion to raise weapons against false dealing?"

By the time they rode out along the road that cut into the wooded hills left of the bluff, it was night with only the waxing crescent moon to light their way and a wind blowing in hard off the water. He took fifty men, half of them dismounted and walking on foot with torches. The road plunged into a pine-and-oak forest open enough that they could see the stars twinkling through the foliage. Wendilgard had ridden farther than he expected, and the moon had set by the time he called his soldiers to a halt and went on with only Hathui.

The Avarian sentries heard him coming and let him pass into the center of the encampment, which had been hastily thrown up in the lee of a solitary hill with the slope at their backs and a ravine, not much more than a ditch, protecting their left flank.

Wendilgard had set up her tent beside a jumble of boulders and dressed stones as big as a man's torso. These had once rested higher up on the hill where the face of a long abandoned fortress was being eroded by degrees. She greeted him with reserve. Wind tossed the branches of the trees, and they heard a roar of wind sweeping in from the east.

'Come," she said, beckoning him into the tent as her men raced for cover under the trees or where fallen walls made a windbreak.

A gust raced through camp so swiftly that men had just begun yelling by the time the wind abated and Wendilgard and Sanglant came out of her tent to see half a dozen tents flattened. Horses had bolted free of their lines. Men scattered to search. Distantly, they heard the rumble of thunder, but no herald of lightning lit the sky. There was no rain.

'So," said Wendilgard as they stood by the ruined fire her stewards had lit earlier. Its coals were scattered, and servants stamped out sparks. "What do you want, my lord prince?"

'I want you to come back."

'Impossible. I cannot fight against my sire."

It was too dark to see her face well. All of the torches that had earlier lit the camp had been doused by the wind, and the soldiers searching for the lost horses had claimed the first to be relit. The glimmer of their flames winked and vanished and reappeared like the dance of will-o'-the-wisps in a summer forest in the north, spirits that would lead a man astray if he followed them into the dark.

'You knew I meant to lead an army against King Henry. If your father fights with those who corrupted Henry, is he not more of a rebel than we are?"

She said nothing at first. She had the knack of keeping still, like stone. He tapped his own thigh repeatedly with one hand because he could not pace.

'I do not disagree with you," she said at last. "But when I saw my father, I knew I could not raise my sword against him. I could not ask his Avarians to press into battle against their brothers and cousins. I could not do it. How do you know, Sanglant, how you will react when you meet your father on the field?"

'If I do. If he is ensor celled, and I believe he is, then I would be a traitor not to free him."

'Yet wouldn't you wonder? What if there is no enchantment? I tell you frankly: I doubt, where I did not doubt before. Are you sure of your information? Or are there other ambitions driving you that whip doubt away?"

'I am not ambitious," he said impatiently. "I have always been an obedient son."

'Have you? Rumor has it you married against your father's wishes. I hear whispers that the end of the world is upon us, that drought and famine and plague and even the Quman invasion afflict us because of God's displeasure. Because of a curse laid on humankind by the Lost Ones many ages ago. Now I am no longer sure. You are only half human blood.

Are you my ally, or my enemy?"

'I was abandoned by my mother! My loyalty has always been to my father!"

He hadn't meant to speak so sharply. All around the camp men raised their heads and looked toward them. A few touched swords and spears; a dozen moved closer, but Wendilgard waved them away. She was a prudent woman, not easily cowed and rather older than he was, a late child of mature parents and after the untimely death of her younger brothers and older sister the only remaining direct heir.

'I am on the knife's edge," she said quietly. "If I choose wrong, then I doom my own people as well as my father. Avaria has suffered badly these last few years. I weep when folk come before me and tell me their tales of hardship. I have not protected them."

He reined in his temper, hand clenched now and rapping a staccato rhythm against his leg. "Caution will not save us."

'Maybe not, but I have come too far. Or rather I should say: I have come as far as I can go. My soldiers will not fight, Sanglant. They have seen my father's banner. Some among them have seen my father, as I have, and now all know he lives and rides beside Adelheid, who is, after all, Henry's wife. If I press them, they will mutiny. I cannot help you."

'Without your forces, Henry may be lost."

'If I rejoin you, my forces will be lost because they will rebel against me."

'What will come is something far worse than fears of rebellion. If we do not save Henry and turn against Anne, we are lost."

She shook her head. "You ask too much of me and of my soldiers. Thus are we caught. There is nothing I can do."

She would not be swayed and in the end he had to retreat to save face, but he did not go gladly. He fumed, although he spoke no word of his vexation aloud. He went graciously, because anger would lose him even, and especially, her respect.

But he was angry. He burned with it, and because he could not even stay seated in the saddle without risking too hard a hand on Resuelto's mouth he walked and soon outpaced his own guardsmen whom he waved back when they jogged up to catch him. Hathui he tolerated because he knew that she, like a burr, would cling unless he tore her loose and he hadn't the energy, had too much energy, to pry her off.

'My lord prince," she said as they walked down the path where it hooked and crooked among oak and pine and underbrush, "this is the wrong turn. We're going back the way we came. Can you see there, through the trees? That dark shadow is the hill where the Avarians camped. Those are their torches."

'Damn her!" fie kept walking. "Will she now be a threat to our rear? Will she try to lift the siege? Should I attack her at dawn and take her men prisoner? Can I trust her to retreat north and leave us, so that she's neither threat to me nor aid to Burchard and thus to Adelheid? God Above, Hathui! I have trusted your word this long. Is it true my father is ensorcelled? Am I driven by other ambitions? Did I sell Sapientia to elevate myself?

No doubt she's dead now, and I'm no better than a murderer who kills his own sister to gain the family lands."

She said nothing, only followed as they blundered on. He couldn't listen, although he knew he ought to. Branches scraped his face. The brush layer crunched beneath his boots.

'My God," Hathui said, and stopped dead.

He thrashed on for another ten paces through the undergrowth until he glanced up through the trees. The heavens bled fire across them, whips of pink, orange, and a drowsy red light that writhed like serpents. A drumming like rain swept out of the north, and as they stood there, a second tempest swept over them.

While in the distance his men shrieked in fear, they were pounded by hail the size of fists and he shrank under the shelter of an oak tree whose trunk was laced by a thick cloak of ivy. Hail pummeled him, even through the branches, tearing leaves loose, ripping ivy from the trunk. Hathui cursed and cried out. He called to her and, when she did not answer, dashed out to find her. He held his arms over his head as the hail bruised him all along his back and shoulders. The brunt bore him down to his knees because it came so fiercely. He crawled, seeking shelter under a bush that smelled faintly of honey suckle, and there, strangely, no hail struck him although it slammed down on either side.

A peculiar gleam painted vague shadows along the lacy architecture of the bush whose branches arched over him. His hands scrabbled in the moist leaf litter. He dug away several old layers to reveal dry earth beneath, white grains like sand, and beneath these chalky smears a paved stone road. He tasted the sting of magic on his tongue.

The front passed as swiftly as it had come, and when he staggered out with his palms and knees weeping sodden leaves, he found Ha-thui trembling so hard beneath a black pine that he actually grabbed her shoulder to stop her. The heavens were bright with stars but otherwise perfectly normal as though no strange strands of color had ever shone there.

There were no clouds.

She could not speak because she was shaking so hard.

A ghostly half moon floated in the sky, fading in and out of focus, although the crescent moon had already set. It was too dark for him to see, but he could hear. A few animals braved the quiet: two squirrels scrabbling up a rustling branch, three pigs, a deer.

Their scents brushed him but faded as they fled away through the forest. The whisper of footfalls was itself like a breeze, carried on the air. No scent of humans touched him, yet someone approached from the northwest traveling through the woods without dust or actual sound.

Hathui stared past him, gone rigid.

He turned.

Light shone in a thread whose unwinding ran right across the spot where he had crouched beneath the bush during the hailstorm. That pale ground was part of a path no wider than his outstretched arms, glittering now with sorcerous light. Shadowy figures appeared on the old road, marching south. He slid his sword from its scabbard and pushed Hathui backward, staying between her and the gleaming path.

The shadows walked at a steady pace, not quickly, not slowly, but with the certain stride of folk who have walked a long way and mean to reach their destination. As they walked they sang in a lost language, the rhythm of their song timed to the fall of their feet on the ground. The words were unknown to him, yet the meaning seemed clear, as if he had absorbed this secret out of his mother's body during that interval when he had existed not as a self but as part of her.

They sang of a land lost, which was their home; they sang of fami 'I H E G AT

HERING STORM lies never forgotten, of love unfulfilled. They sang of war, and of vengeance unsated. Yet a note of hope twined through their song, as if they had sung it for a very long time but believed that a final cadence would soon signal its end. Although he hadn't Liath's salamander eyes, he saw them clearly as they passed him in a line that straggled along the path. Old men led children. Strong warriors both male and female masked with animal faces strode proudly, armed with bows or spears or strange swords forged not of metal but rather edged with black glass. Stout old women balanced on their hips baskets woven of reeds and jars decorated with spirals and hatch marks, white paint on red fired clay. They were all of them shadows walking amid shadows; they weren't real, they hadn't substance, not as he did. Yet they were as perilous a people as he had ever met.

They were the Lost Ones, the Ashioi. His kinfolk.

For a long time he watched them pass. Hathui spoke no word. He could not even hear her breathing because the unearthly hush that had fallen over the wood muffled all earthly sound. It seemed he and the world slipped into shadow as the shadows marched. They passed, one after another after another and on and on, so many he could not count but certainly more than a tribe, more than a town. They were a host, journeying southeast on the gleaming path.

The stars wheeled above on their appointed round as the night wore on. The world lay still, waiting, as did he. He had a wild notion that he could fall in at the end and join that line, although none seemed to notice him—he might as well be a shadow to them, as they were to him. Was he only dreaming? Would he see his mother among them?

He did not see her. As the first gray tiding of dawn filtered through the trees, the last of the line passed him, brought up, in the rear, by a proud young man of stature very like to his and a face that seemed eerily familiar, a man's face molded out of the lineaments of his own mother. He was clad in a cuirass molded of bronze whose surface shimmered.

The young warrior halted and stared at the prince. His hip-length white cloak swirled in an unfelt breeze. Leather tasses clacked softly about his thighs.

'Kinsman!" he called. "How is it you watch us pass and do not join us? It is near. It is close. Can't you feel it?" He faltered, shifting his entire body as a shudder passed through him. "How can it be?" he demanded, voice changed. "You are not one of us, yet I recognize you. Who are you?"

This was no language Sanglant knew, yet he understood it any way. It melted into him like the heat of the sun, which shines on all folk whether they know to call it the sun, or whether they are blind.

'I am Sanglant," he replied, taking a step toward the path. "I am son of Henry, king of Wendar. I am son of Uapeani-kazonkansi-a-lari."

The other man lifted his spear in a gesture of warding, or astonishment. Beaded sheaths covered his forearms and calves, and in the twilight they flashed, catching the attention of the warriors who had gone on and now paused, turning.

'Hasten! Hasten!" they called. "The time is near! We must hurry."

'I know you!" cried the young warrior, tense with frustration. "Yet who are you? How do you claim descent from a name that cannot exist? Uapeani-ka,'onkansi-a-lari is the name my brother's daughter would have carried had he ever sired a girl child, but he is many lifetimes gone, lost to me. Who are you?"

'Are you dead or are you living?" demanded Sanglant. "To my eyes you are a shade, a ghost. Yet you speak as if others have died while you survived."

'We are dead and we are living. We are caught in the shadows, torn out of Earth yet not killed when the witch Li'at'dano guided the hands who wove the great spell that exiled our land and our people."

'I am your kinsman! I am trying to help you—"

'It is too late. What is done cannot be undone. The exiled land will return."

'Nay. Another cabal of sorcerers seeks to weave that ancient spell a second time, to cast the land back into the aether."

'Do they still hate us? Does the witchwoman still brood over our ancient war?"

'She aids me. She is no longer your enemy."

The other man laughed. "If she says so, then she lies to you, or you are foolish enough to believe her. How can she even be alive? We have seen ages pass. No one who lived in the time of the Exile can still be alive!"

'You are alive!"

'I am a shade, but I hope to live once more so that I can take my vengeance. Enough!"

His comrades, a dozen masked warriors waiting a bow's shot away, called again to him.

The rest of the procession had vanished into the trees and dawn's twilit haze. The man followed.

'Heed me!" called Sanglant angrily. "Do not turn your back on me! I do not lie. You know less than you believe you do. I have met the Horse shaman you call Li'at'dano. I have spoken with her. She still lives. She spoke freely of the ancient weaving, which she now regrets. She strives to prevent those who would banish the Lost Ones again. We must act as allies—!"

The warrior heeded him no more than had Lady Wendilgard. From down the path his comrades called to him, but their voices were too faint even for Sanglant to hear.

'I must go," the warrior said. "The day dawns." A strange note changed the timbre of his voice. He looked once more, piercingly, at Sanglant, then jogged away on the ancient road to join the others. As light rose to scatter night, they faded into the trees.

Hathui collapsed to the ground in a dead faint, completely limp, and he gaped, taken by surprise, then heard a clamor of voices as his escort fought their way through the forest to reach him. He knelt beside her, and she opened her eyes just as Sergeant Cobbo ran up with a worried expression on his face and a big dent in his helm.

'My lord princel We've been searching for you all night. We thought we'd lost you when that gale blew through! That wasn't anything natural! What's amiss with the Eagle?

Was she struck down?"

She rubbed her head and groaned, sitting up. "I got hit in the head by hail. I don't remember anything after that."

The prince looked toward the path, but he saw only butcher's-broom and buckthorn beneath a spreading canopy of ivy-covered oak. The trail that had glimmered so clearly last night was invisible, and when he walked over to the bush he believed he had sheltered under, he found no trace of those chalk-white grains nor, when he kicked aside layers of matted leaf litter, did he uncover an old stone roadway. The drought had baked the dirt until it was as hard as rock.

'My lord prince?"

They watched him in the manner of folk who are not sure if the dog is crazy or only needs a few moments to relieve itself. Far away they heard a shout. He still held his sword, and with a murmured curse he sheathed it and returned to them.

'Come," he said. "Best we get back to camp without disturbing Lady Wendilgard's peace."

Wichman returned at midday having lost a third of his men. His horse was in a lather, and he dismounted and flung its reins into the face of a waiting groom. The prince stood on a rise looking over the city walls and the coastal shoreline where the retreating sea had uncovered all manner of ancient refuse—slime-covered rocks, bones, an encrusted anchor, the ribs of several boats, as well as what appeared to be the old straight track of a paved road. Evidently when the road had been built what was now the bay had rested above the waterline.