"What is that?" asked Falcon Mask.

The staff was lovingly shaped and smoothed from polished hardwood, oak perhaps, and crowned with a magnificent carving: a pair of miniature dogs' heads remarkably like the heads of the Lavas hounds. A nick had been cut into the haft, as ragged as a sword's blow.

Tarangi sauntered out from the trees, shaking her head. "I told you. A power as strong as lightning. You are fortunate to be alive."

The raspy call of a tern sounded from the trees. Tarangi did not even look behind her, but the two mask warriors lowered their weapons. Buzzard Mask lifted his mask, put his two little fingers between his lips, and replied with two sharp whistles.

Sharp Edge trotted into view. "Hurry!" she cried, beckoning. "Calta found trace of their passage down the other path!"

She raced away up the path before they could answer. Tarangi and the two mask warriors bolted like arrows loosed.

Liath followed more slowly. As she passed into the shadow of the trees, she heard a deep cough behind her. She paused to look back. In the dusty open space the hut stood alone, but a flash of movement drew her gaze to the top of the outcropping. There the lion prowled, but as she watched, it poured over the rocks in a graceful scramble and vanished from her sight.

A cold shudder passed through her body. The wood of the staff seemed unnaturally warm under her hand.

"Whsst! Bright One!" Ten steps up the path Sharp Edge danced from one foot to the other, waving impatiently at her.

"I have been touched by a strange glory," Liath said.

Sharp Edge looked at her sidelong and hopped a few steps closer. She had blood on her face from a cut over her right eye that was still oozing, as though she'd been slapped by a branch while moving too fast through the trees. "Did your gods give you a vision?"

"Maybe they did."

The clearing lay abandoned except for a single figure curled up on the ground. Buzzard Mask and Falcon Mask and Tarangi trotted past, making for the main path out of the clearing, but Liath halted beside the girl.

"Anna?"

She did not answer or even respond.

"Anna!"

Nothing.

Sharp Edge turned back, nudged the girl none too gently with a foot, and shrugged. "She's useless.

She can't even speak."

"Yes, she can."

"She can't speak our tongue. They say she lived several moons among our people but learned nothing. What good is she to you?"

"She looked after my daughter for many years. I won't leave her behind."

Sharp Edge moved away paused, looked back at Liath. Waited, tapping her foot.

"Anna, we must go." She knelt beside her.

Her eyes were squeezed shut, and her arms curled tight against her body. She had closed in on herself, as might a flower when the cold night air sweeps over it.

"Anna. I need your help. I pray you."

Exasperated, Liath grabbed one of the girl's wrists and tugged her upper arm away from her body.

"Here! Here! You need to carry this for me. I can't take it and use my bow, if it comes to that." She unprised the clenched fingers and fixed them around the haft of the dog-headed staff.

Anna gasped. Her eyes opened. She sat up. At first, but briefly, she stared at the object in her hand. Then she looked at Liath.

"They're dead," she said in a voice so soft it was barely audible. "I knew they must be, but I hoped. I hoped maybe they had escaped. But they're dead."

"They served faithfully," said Liath. "Their souls have surely ascended to the Chamber of Light.

Anna, we must go. We must find Blessing. We haven't time to dawdle, to hold back, to linger here any longer."

"Yes."

She clambered to her feet, clutching the staff, and began to walk in the stolid manner of a person who knows she has no choice but to move forward. Without joy, but with purpose. Sharp Edge rolled her eyes, then jogged off, too impatient to wait. Liath brought up the rear, and at length, after they had walked some way along the path, through the forest, Anna paused.

"I thank you, lady," she murmured, ducking her head.

"Thank me? For what?"

Her expression, so worn and weary, could break your heart. "For not leaving me behind."

Liath shook her head, too sick at heart to know what to say. "Sanglant would never have left you behind," she said at last, "no more could I, knowing how well you have served my daughter.

Now then, let's go on."

They came at last to an overlook where Zuangua had gathered his entire force, five bundles of mask warriors. Together, they gazed over a wide vista. Forest cut away on the hill to either side, bright green with early leaves. A river cut through the valley below, a few farms and hamlets strung along its length. Farther away rose an estate, recognizable as a monastic institution because of its architecture. It was ringed by a livestock palisade, and by stripes of fields and several well tended orchards.

A bird chirruped in the trees. A flight of swifts circled up from the direction of the clearing, as if startled.

"That is Hersford Monastery." She shut her eyes. Pacing through her palace of memory, she climbed through the hierarchy of gates until she came to the circle of the sword of truth. There she made her way into a wooden hall whose floor she had entirely covered with a rimmed basin carpeted with damp sand. Onto this malleable surface she had incised the many tracks and roads on which she had herself ridden while an Eagle and those she had been told of by other Eagles. "Hersford lies a week or two weeks' journey east of Autun, which we must avoid. But it is only a few days' journey southwest, to Kassel. Where Sanglant and Liutgard meant to go."

"What of Hugh of Austra?" asked Zuangua.

She opened her eyes. In the light of day, he looked frightening, his skin on one side of his face blistered and the tip of his curled hand like a claw where it peeped out of the sling. The burns made him appear even more grim and determined.

Sharp Edge and the four masks who had accompanied her looked at Liath, waiting for her to speak, but the rest—even Anna—had fixed on Zuangua, their commander.

"You are a strong man," she said to him, "to keep walking with such injuries."

"Hate makes me strong." He indicated the distant monastery. "What of that place?"

Looking more closely, she saw the inner fields were thronged with a crowd of people, moving among what seemed to be tents and makeshift shelters. "That's where I would go first, if I were Hugh of Austra. He needs provisions, maybe a horse to ride. He's a churchman, too. They'll shelter him for one night."

"After that?"

She shrugged. She burned, thinking of Blessing, so close now. "I don't know how many days ago he reached here, how quickly he crossed through the crowns, how far ahead he is. I must go down. If he's gone, they'll have seen what direction he rode out."

Zuangua nodded toward his trackers, already ranging ahead on the path. "He won't escape us."

5

HE found a court surrounded on three sides by barracks where he could wash his face and hands, and water and feed the hounds. Aestan and Eagor kept on his tail, although fatigue had deadened Aestan's tongue. At the trough, the two soldiers also scrubbed the night's work from their own hands.

Wendish troops eyed them suspiciously but spoke no damning word, holding to the agreement sworn by their leaders the day before. In a neighboring barracks, Eika soldiers lounged at open shutters and doors, but they called no greetings to their brothers, only nodded as Aestan and Eagor passed under a portal that led to the vast central courtyard within the oldest portion of Kassel's palace complex.

Servants were up and moving already. Most, he supposed, had not slept on such a night. He and his escort approached the great hall from the east. The hall was a huge timber edifice with thick beams and a massive roof, built in the time of Queen Conradina. The second story of the new palace, where Theophanu and Stronghand had retired, could be seen rising behind the single-storied barracks court that separated the two sections of the palace. A steady wind out of the east beat the pennants and banners flying from the high roof peaks. It was unusually cold.

An honor guard stood at attention in the court, where an empty wagon had been drawn up.

These were Sanglant's remaining guardsmen as well as twoscore Lions, some with heads bowed and others with chins lifted. Many had been weeping; some wore clothing stained with blood from yesterday's battle. Seeing Alain, a number of the Lions watched him walk past but said nothing.

The main entrance stood around the corner on the narrow front of the hall where it looked down over the city, hidden from his view here by a wing of the old palace. He followed the stream of servants bearing trays of food and drink toward a side door. As they approached this entrance, the hounds whined and sulked. At the threshold, he had to call them twice, thrice, and then four times, and they crawled forward almost on their bellies because they were so reluctant to enter, ears flat and hindquarters tucked tight. Rage growled in an uneasy undertone; Sorrow yawned repeatedly to show his discomfort.

"Come!" he said sternly to the hounds. His pair of escorts stayed by the door, crossing their arms to stand like glowering statues.

God so loved humankind that They had given them ears to hear with, mouths to argue with, and hands and arms for sweeping gestures that punctuated those statements.

At least twoscore clerics populated the hall. It was a surprisingly contentious gathering given the early hour and the presence of a dead king lying in state—and frankly ignored—in the shadows at the back of the hall where light did not quite reach. The bodies of Sabella and Sapientia had already been taken away to be washed and wrapped, but it seemed no person had yet been detailed to care for Sanglant's corpse.

Most of the conclave clustered on benches at the foot of the dais, although one nervous man paced beside the unlit hearth, pausing to listen carefully only when the conversation got most heated. The rest were grouped in factions, according to the three women seated at the edge of the dais.

The largest group swayed to the words of Mother Scholastica: monks, nuns, noble clerics, and a pair of cowed biscops whom Alain did not recognize. A smaller but equally vociferous number— mostly young and all in monastic or clerical dress—had their sights fixed on Biscop Constance, whose pain-racked face was marked, Alain saw now, with early death. She was not much more than thirty, but he knew she would be dead within the year, and by the vigor of her argument, the fierceness with which she scolded her eminent aunt, he guessed that she knew it, too. Hathumod stood behind her, holding a cup, so intent on Constance that she did not notice Alain.

Seated to the left, speaking least, and least regarded, was Sister Rosvita. She held three books on her lap, guarded by the way her arms crossed over them. She, too, boasted a company of faithful followers, but they were only five in number, watchful rather than talkative. Two men and three young women.

"The writ of excommunication is not a problem, now that Sanglant is dead," said Mother Scholastica.

"It is a problem if there is no skopos willing, or able, to lift it," objected Constance.

"Need we even believe that Antonia of Mainni had the right to elect herself? Or the power to enforce her edicts? I think not."

"Then why insist that the writ mattered at all? You did, so I am told, when Sanglant was still alive."

"Any such writ must be taken seriously! You will cause far more suffering, Constance, with your stubborn insistence in this matter of heresy. Not just excommunication, but war may result. We are weak, and cannot hope to defend ourselves on multiple fronts. I do not approve of Theophanu's alliance, but I admit it spares us from civil war."

"She did what was necessary. I believe we will not be sorry for supporting her. As for the other, we must hold a council. The evidence must be weighed. I have it all written down!"

"Hold a council? Under whose jurisdiction? Whose authority? Are we still at war with Aosta?

Will the skopos send a representative? Or is this report true, that Darre is fallen into the pit?"

"I tell you again," said Constance, "we must send a party to Darre to look for ourselves. To report back to us. How else may we determine the truth? How else determine what action to take?

Why are you being so stubborn, Aunt? We must act, and act decisively. Send a party to Darre. Call a council, to be held at Quedlinhame, if it pleases you." She turned—even that slight movement caused her face to whiten and her lips to pinch—and held a hand out to Rosvita.

"Sister Rosvita! You walked first among the clerics in King Henry's schola. He trusted you more than any other cleric, so he told me more than once, because of your clear-sighted vision. What do you say?"

"Yes," said Mother Scholastica with an ominous frown. "What do you advise, Sister Rosvita?

Be careful what you say, because the words you speak now will always be remembered."

Rosvita had seen Alain and the hounds in the murky shadows under the eaves by the side door, but she drew no attention to him. She waited to speak while Hathumod held the cup to Constance's lips, helped her sip, and patted her lips dry with a cloth. Mother Scholastica glared, an owl impatient for its prey to expose itself.

"We are commanded by God to speak truth," said Rosvita. "I am God's obedient servant, and after that, the regnant's."

"Go on!"

"Belief in the phoenix has spread widely, and into strange nests. I hold in my possession—" her arms tightened over the books, "—a book containing an ancient text written in a forgotten language, but glossed in Arethousan. The words I read there trouble me deeply. They lend credence to those who wish to support the doctrine of the Redemption."

"A forgery! A lie!"

"That is always possible. The Enemy may cast swords among us in the hope that we will grasp their tempting hilts and set to on all sides. But it is also possible that this is the truth."

"Impossible! That battle was fought and won three hundred years ago!"

"By women and men not unlike ourselves. We are imperfect vessels, Mother Scholastica. At times, we can be mistaken."

"No! I will admit no heresy to pollute Wendar. It may be this poison is the cause of all our suffering in these days of tempest and trouble."

"It may be," agreed Rosvita mildly. "That is why I support the recommendations of Biscop Constance. Send a party to Darre, to discover the state of the holy city. We know that Holy Mother Anne is dead. If there are no presbyters living to elect a new skopos, then it is not acceptable that one ambitious woman merely appoint herself. We cannot accept edicts passed by Antonia of Mainni, who has condemned herself twice over by her own malefic actions."

There came a long and grudging silence, while clerics slurped at cups and Alain smelled spilled wine and a finer, more delicate scent of rose water. The hounds did not move; they seemed turned to stone, heads turned toward the bier half hidden by shadows.

"I agree." Scholastica's tone could not have been tighter. "A company must travel south to Aosta to bring our dispute and pleas to the palace of the skopos, and indeed to determine if it—and the presbyter's council—still exists. But as for a council to consider the heresy of the phoenix—I will countenance no such discussion as long as I stand as abbess of Quedlinhame!"

That cowed them.

Or so it seemed, until Sister Rosvita spoke in the most temperate of voices. "What do you fear, Mother Scholastica? It cannot be that you fear the truth."

"These lies are the work of the Enemy."

"Maybe so. None of us are without sin in this matter, I think. You yourself, Mother Scholastica—"

"I?"

"You crowned and anointed Sanglant, but at the same time it appears you were already in league with Duke Conrad and Lady Sabella. Theophanu knows by now that you were ready and willing to pass her over, although hers was the highest claim. Who will trust you, knowing you have shown two faces to those who sought your support?"

The abbess' lips pulled back in a flash of teeth almost like a snarl. "I have remained loyal to Wendar and Varre. That has been my sole concern. Do you believe otherwise, Sister Rosvita? Of what do you accuse me?"

"Of what do you accuse yourself?" Rosvita asked mildly.

Every gaze fixed on the abbess—every gaze, that is, but that of Rosvita. The cleric looked toward the lonely bier. In that moment, the light indoors changed markedly, from a pale filtered glow to a strong yellow glare, as the sun cleared the low-lying clouds. For the first time, Alain saw that the dead man was not, after all, alone and abandoned. The body was flanked by attendants: two nuns and a third figure so bent, doubled over by the head of the corpse, that he could not quite discern what it was. Sorrow whimpered. Rage turned tail and tried to slink away toward the door, but he snapped his fingers and she crawled back.

"Let us see it done quickly, then," said Scholastica hoarsely. "We will hold a council immediately, to begin on the first day of summer, next year. I suppose presbyters, biscops, holy abbesses, and clerics can be called and make their way to Autun in so short a span of time."

Rosvita nodded. "That is acceptable to me."

"Autun?" Constance's hands were trembling and her face was very pale. "Do you still hope for Conrad's backing, Aunt? He remains duke of Wayland. It is Tallia who by right of birth is now duke of Arconia, and you will find her peculiarly sympathetic to the tale of the phoenix."

"I have made my choice," said Scholastica. Her face was white, and she groped for a cup of wine and drained it in one gulp. "Let messengers be sent. Now, I think we are done here."

A tall, hawk-nosed Eagle crossed into the hall through the main doors, walked up to Rosvita, whispered in her ear, and retreated. Rosvita glanced toward Alain, and then raised a hand before Mother Scholastica could, by rising, call a halt to the conclave.

"That leaves only the question of the dead. Both Lady Sabella and Princess Sapientia were taken away last night by stewards and servants to be washed in preparation for their last journey."

The man who had been pacing by the hearth stepped forward. "I am a faithful servant in Lady Sabella's schola. We are only waiting now for the wagon and horses to be brought and her escort to be assembled. Best we leave right away. In summer, the flesh rots quickly. The lady must be buried in Autun, laid to rest beside her mother and her uncle—the last heirs of Varre."

"Sapientia will go to Quedlinhame," said Scholastica, "to be buried by her father's ancestors, as is fitting."

"What of Sanglant?" asked Rosvita.

"None dare touch him," said Scholastica in a cruel voice, "for fear of his mother's curse."

"Many men wait outside who fear no such thing," snapped Constance. Hathumod wiped her brow with a cloth, and after a moment the biscop went on. "But I would ask to hear the testimony of the holy mother who has sat beside his body throughout the last night."

An ancient woman shuffled forward out of the shadows, held upright on either side by two nuns, women so thin they seemed more like cords of strong rope. She was so frail and bent that it was remarkable she could stand; a breath of wind might topple her. Age has its own authority. Even Mother Scholastica gave way before her, rising with every evidence of sincere respect to allow the old woman to sit in her chair.

Just as a child's face hints at the adult visage to come, so the most aged and wrinkled bear in their face a memory of their youth. He saw her full in the light as she settled into the chair, and about the eyes and chin marked the family resemblance.

Heart-struck like a mute beast, his eyes swam with tears. His breath caught as in a cage so that he had to remember to breathe. His hands tingled. For an instant he felt himself weightless, as if his feet were no longer touching earth.

She spoke in a voice strangely powerful, coming from such a fragile, tiny frame. "I have sat vigil this night beside the body, for the sake of my granddaughter, as she would have done herself were she here.

These are my observations. When I press a hand to his chest or against his throat, I feel no beat of his heart. No blood pulses from his open wounds. No breath eases from his lips or nostrils. A man cannot live whose heart is silent, and who has no breath. He is surely dead. Yet he does not stiffen or putrefy.

He smells of rose water, as though he were but freshly washed. I swear to you that his wounds are healing, knitting and closing in a manner most unnatural."

"Sorcery!" declared Scholastica. "So the curse remains, although his spirit is fled. This is the work of a maleficus, or of daimones out of the upper air. I say he shall be carted to Gent, where he ought to have died but did not. There is a crypt there that might hold him."

Rosvita glanced again toward Alain, but she did not address him or otherwise indicate that she knew he was there and ought to be acknowledged. "Take him west, along the northern path," she said, when he did not speak. "I will escort his body, if you will allow it."

"West?" said Constance. "Why west?"

"What plot is afoot?" demanded Scholastica.

"I will attend the body as well," said the old woman, "as is my right because of my kinship to this man."

"Your kinship?" Respect for age was all very well, but Mother Scholastica had clearly swallowed her moment of humility and could endure no more. "Mother Obligatia, I pray you, forgive my bold speaking to a woman of your age and authority. But you are fled from your convent in Aosta and come to take refuge here in Wendar. What kinship do you speak of?" She looked accusingly at Rosvita. "Is there something I have not been told?"

Rosvita opened the topmost book of the three on her lap.

At long last, it was time.

Making ready to step forward, to fulfill his oath, Alain turned to command the hounds to accompany him.

Only to find that after all they had escaped him. He looked around, and saw Sorrow's hindquarters vanish as the hound scuttled out the door. Rage had already fled. Aestan and Eagor stuck their heads out into the courtyard, staring after the hounds, and then ducked back in again. Aestan was scratching his beard in confusion. Eagor gestured to Alain, to alert him, and then both soldiers vanished outside.

Alain hurried after them, but the hounds had truly bolted and no one was willing to call them to heel.

They had really run this time. He could not keep up with them as they raced down into Kassel town, out the gates, and loped east along the Hellweg.

He followed as well as he could, unwilling to give up their trail. At length an escort of riders caught up with him on the road, with spare horses, and he saw behind them a score of Eika soldiers trotting along at their own tireless jog.

These were powerful reinforcements, but even so, a man must pause to catch breath now and again, eat a slice of bread and cheese when he has not eaten since the day before, and take a drink. Horses must have water. Men muttered that those hounds were demon-get, surely, for how else could their unnatural stamina be explained?

In the end, it took him until midday to catch them, far east along the Hellweg in the midst of forest, but only one sharp word to bring them slinking and shamed to heel.

6

THE stockade surrounding Hersford Monastery had been built to keep wild animals out and livestock in. The gates could not sustain an assault by armed forces, but they were closed nevertheless when Liath limped up the road and halted beyond arrow range. The exertions of the previous day had caused her thigh wound to flare with pain. It was not fully healed. Maybe, with poison scarring the tissue, it would never fully heal.

Anna was her sole attendant. The servant held on to the staff as though it was the only thing that kept her walking.

Folk lined the stockade wall, armed with staves, scythes, sharpened staffs, shovels, and a trio of pitchforks. Beyond the monastic buildings, storm clouds piled up along the eastern horizon but with the wind at her back, she was safe from their rain for now.

"I pray you," she shouted. "I am called Liath, daughter of Bernard. In earlier days I rode as an Eagle at the command of King Henry. I am a loyal servant of Wendar."

To this introduction she got no answer.

"I seek a man named Hugh of Austra. He travels with a girl child, in appearance no more than twelve or fourteen years of age."

In difficult times, strangers are met with distrust, and by their silence she judged her audience suspicious of her. A man dressed in a monastic habit stepped out through the gate and walked toward her, stopping at a distance perfectly balanced to allow him to see the intimate details of her expression but far enough away that he could bolt if she threatened him.

"I am Prior Ratbold. These holy brothers and poor refugees are under my charge. There are others with you, but they hide in the woods. Who are they?"

She did not turn, knowing better, but naturally Anna did, taken by surprise when, after all, they had decided ahead of time to leave the Ashioi in hiding.

The prior smiled crookedly as he glanced at the stockade. When he nodded, shovels and staves and fists were raised and shaken defiantly.

"So we were warned," he said, turning back to face her. "Go on your way. This monastery is a place of refuge. It goes against God's holiest law to abandon one who has begged for Her sanctuary."

The wind shifted, skating in out of the north. Although it was summer, this wind blew chill, and Liath shivered. Far away, thunder growled.

"The girl he holds captive is my daughter, Brother Ratbold. I will come in and fetch her, whatever you say. I would rather do so peaceably."

"That child he saved from the Cursed Ones? Painted like a savage and dressed in scraps? Growling and biting like a dog? He saved her from the clutch of the Enemy!"

"So you believe. He has told you lies and woven them to appear as truths. Let me pass. Once I have my daughter, I will leave you in peace."

The prior had the tenacious look of a dog bred to go after vermin, and he had also the broad shoulders of a man once accustomed to wielding a stave or spear in defense of the innocent. He did not back down. "Every person who can bear arms has risen to the defense of this monastery today. All these were driven from their homes by the creatures of the Enemy. Many are dead, many more are missing, and worse still, what crops were sown are left unattended. Famine will stalk us in the seasons to come."

"He could be sneaking out the back right now," muttered Liath to Anna.

The girl shook her head. "Lord Zuangua sent his masks to circle the cloister. We'd have heard their signal by now if there was fighting back there. What will you do, my lady?"

Prior Ratbold had ceased speaking, seeing them talk between themselves. "What will you do?" he asked, in an echo of Anna's soft words.

Liath took one step toward him, and he took one step back. "I am not your enemy. Whatever Hugh of Austra has told you is a lie."

"You are a sorcerer. Is that a lie?"

"So is he."

"You have killed men by burning them alive with fire called from your very hands. Is that a lie?"

"It's true. God help me. Yet he has killed. The trail of death that follows him goes back many years."

"Why should I believe you? You are excommunicated, are you not? Is that a lie?"

Sanglant would have fought this battle of words better than she could. Now that she had Hugh trapped, and knowing he had Blessing in his grasp, she lost hold of what little patience she had mustered.

She lifted her left hand, thumb and forefinger raised.

She did not turn. She did not need to. She saw that her allies answered her signal by the expression of fear that fixed itself on Prior Ratbold's face. He backed up slowly, like a man easing away from a rabid dog. Along the stockade, some folk screamed in terror while others shouted in anger; a child bawled; one man cried, "God help us!"

"Hold fast!" called the prior. He reached the gate but, instead of retreating inside, grabbed a stout staff handed out to him by another monk, hefted it in two hands, then twirled it to get his balance and grip. "The Lady will protect us."

The mask warriors loped up to fall in on either side of Liath. All wore masks lowered, presenting a fierce array of animal faces: eagles and ravens, dogs and spotted cats, foxes and vultures and lizards and sharp-tongued ferrets. Zuangua had led a reserve force in a circuit of the stockade. He had given Liath a bone whistle, hanging from a leather cord around her neck, and she put this to her lips and blasted it three times— shree shree shree. An answer shrilled out of the eastern edge of the forest.

"They think you are allied with the Enemy," whispered Anna.

Liath ignored her. All this was merely a skirmish distracting from what really mattered. She walked forward, alert to any movement along the stockade that would mark the release of an arrow. Arrows were the only weapon she really feared, beyond the galla. She guessed that one or more men accustomed to hunting in the wild wood stood among this group, and as she neared the stockade, she swept her gaze along the length of the palisade. She looked at every pale face in turn, no longer than it took to blink one's eyes, and they shifted uneasily and betrayed by the cant and leveling of their shoulders what manner of weapon they hid.

There.

She sought with her mind's eye the precise vision that saw into the essence of things and found those substances most thirsty for fire. She had learned over time how these textures and shapes felt from a distance: the cold slumber of iron, the sluggish whisper of stone, the eagerness of wood clasped in a warm embrace of flesh. There, a bow curved, the breath of flame quivering in its layers. With all her concentration fixed to the finest point of control, she called fire in a line along its length.

A shriek. A clatter as a person dropped it. Shouts and consternation broke out about twenty paces to the right of the gate. A man began sobbing hysterically. Someone was slapped.

She reached Prior Ratbold. He did not move, but his eyes were wide. His fear reminded her of Lady Theucinda, only he was a brave man ready to lay down his life to protect those who lay under his charge.

"I do not intend harm to anyone," she said. He stared at her as he would at an adder and—as with an adder—he did not move, fearing perhaps that he might provoke a strike. "I want my daughter, and I mean to get her. If I am touched by any manner of weapon wielded by your people, this place will go up in flames."

"It is wrong to surrender!" he gasped. "We must fight the Enemy. Better to die than to stand aside and do nothing while innocents perish."

"I do not intend to harm any person within these walls, unless Hugh of Austra defies me. Let me retrieve my daughter, and you and all those with you will be left untouched. I promise you, on God's holy Name."

"You walk with the servants of the Enemy," he croaked, letting go of the staff with one hand in order to indicate the line of Ashioi. "There they are! There they are! Begone, foul daimone!"

He curled his thumb around his middle and ring fingers to make the beast's head, raising fore and little fingers as its horns: the sign of the phoenix, the mark of the heretics whose word had spread throughout the realm.

"Don't you see?" she said, with a soft laugh. "I am not a servant of the Enemy. I am the phoenix, who walks living out of fire."

She sought deep in the heart of heaven and Earth. The aether ran shallow, drained by the cataclysm, but with an effort she found the stream that trickled through the distant stone crown. She gathered as much of it as she could, pulled it to her as carded wool is spun into thread—and her aetherical wings blossomed.

The sound of her wings unfurling cracked like distant thunder. The air sparked, and for an instant those wings blazed so brightly that the prior staggered back, covering his eyes. Folk wept, cried aloud, and prayed. Dogs began barking.

But the breath of aether was too weak to sustain her. The splendor faded as quickly as it had bloomed. Yet that glimpse had been enough. Folk fell back, hiding their eyes. They lowered their crude weapons, and the prior dropped to his knees and braced himself as for a blow.

This was not awe. It was terror.

She pushed open the gate. A wide dirt way led past outbuildings, past the guest compound where a score of faces peeped at her through gaps in the fence, past the beehives, past the stable with a half dozen horses poking their heads out to see what was up, and past a village of tents strung up where sheep would have grazed in more peaceful days. A cold wind chased her, growing in strength. That blast of winter air turned to ice as she broke into a run. Its chill fingers tugged at her. Its chill voice whispered.

Come in now.

The wind fluttered the tent flaps in the refugee camp. A door banged open, caught by a gust. The cold came on so suddenly that it could not have been natural. Memories crowded her, both in mind and in body. Cold ached in her bones. It hit hard, and painfully. Walking hurt, as the cold froze her joints, making each movement into agony The cold dried her lips until they cracked and bled. The touch of wind on her skin was a slap, stinging and raw.

She did not suffer alone.

Folk huddled, wrapped in the rags of their clothing. Others scattered, seeing her come, while a few monks stood their ground beside the path. They watched her pass, although they made no move to stop her. Each one's accusing gaze stung worse than the wintry wind. She was the monster they feared. Hugh had done his work well.

He had not worked with words alone. Fear of her, of what he had told them of her, could not drive them back, but the harsh weather did. They shuddered in the gale pouring down onto them out of the north. They retreated to porches, where the walls offered meager shelter. But the closer she came to the main compound, the harder it became to fight the winter. Men struggled even to walk. They bent, folded over, as they pushed their way to buildings that might shield them.

The wind howled down. With each breath, with each step, she felt the ice spreading. Where a walkway led between two dormitories, a passageway into the central courtyard, she discovered two novices curled up and sleeping, their lips blue and their fingers white from cold, breath bleeding white clouds into the air.

Cold kills, but she dared not stop to help them.

Her feet rapped on stone as she came out of the covered walkway into the famous unicorn courtyard, with its pillared colonnade, rose garden, and trim hedge of cypresses. Four stone unicorns reared on their hind legs. They gleamed, having been scrubbed clean since she saw them last, and all streaks had been scoured from the mosaic basin. Water spouted from their horns in four arched streams, but as she crossed the empty cloister those slender sprays of water crackled and turned to ice, falling in a patter of shards to earth.

And still the cold wind pressed down from the heavens, until it seemed the air cut as with knives.

The scent of burning—of blessed heat perfumed with lavender— teased her with the sting of magic. Sorcery, like the wind, poured down over her, over all of them. This was Hugh's work. What did he care how many died, as long as he got what he wanted? Always he worked his worst against those helpless to stand against him.

The wind tore away that trace of warmth. She pushed on, hunched over as she fought across the courtyard to reach the chap-ter house and the side entrance to the church. Her hands were so numb she could scarcely bend them. Her eyes frosted open.

It was so cold.

Cold had defeated her once, when only the pigs had offered her comfort. But the spark of will had never quite died, not even in the depths of that awful winter in Heart's Rest, although she had surrendered in the end in order to save her own life.

Not this time.

All the guilt and grief of those days, which she had carried with her for so long, had burned away. Now the cold, the sorcery, was simply another battle to fight.

A monk sprawled across the doorway into the church, unconscious or asleep. He was shockingly pretty, so perfect in feature that briefly she felt moved to smile, but she could not really move her lips. She knelt beside him and pressed her hands to his cheeks. He had lost so much heat that his skin actually was colder than her chapped and freezing hands. She wasn't sure he was even breathing. Ice rimed his nostrils. With the fine touch of one wielding a needle and not a knife, she carved warmth out of her own core and poured it into his flesh. Although his skin turned red, he rattled and stirred, and a mist of milky breath poured from him as he coughed out a gasp and sucked in air. His eyelids fluttered, but he did not wake. The magic would not let him wake, and save himself.

"Ivar," he murmured.

Startled, she sank back on her haunches and stared at him. Had she seen him before? His was a hard face to forget, and Ivar had spent time in a monastery and might have become acquainted with such a man. Still, Ivar was a common enough name. Her thoughts wound down dreamily, for it really wasn't so much that she was cold but that she was weighed down by an overwhelming crush of exhaustion. It would be so nice to sleep. It would be best to sleep.

"Liath."

The voice roused her. That voice was itself the creep of ice into her body, a hot pain even when it flashes cold. The act of rising bit into her knees and hips, which were by this time so stiff that she wondered if they were freezing into blocks of ice.

Fire is such a fragile thing. Stone and water and earth all smother fire.

"Liath," he said again.

She was not sure whether he meant to wake her, or to lure her into a sleep that would leave her as helpless as the others. Best not to wait to find out.

She stalked through the open door and into the church. Hersford boasted a modest church with fine friezes along the capitals, braided circles enclosing leaves, vines, and birds. She crossed the bema and approached the apse with its dome and piers. Three wide stair steps led up to the altar. A slender form lay athwart these steps, a girl-child dressed in a simple linen shift with her coarse black hair pulled back into a topknot in the manner of the Ashioi, only this girl was Blessing, as limp and lifeless as if she were dead.

She ran, dropped down beside the girl, and pressed her cheek to Blessing's chest and a hand to her throat. The girl's lips were as cold as ice, the lips of a corpse. Liath's own breath ceased, her heart seemed to stop, as she listened, yet after all the child's steady respiration eased in and out as faint as the patter of a mouse's heart.

She was not dead, only sleeping. Freezing to death, like all the others.

A flare of anger burned bright, but she swallowed it. Anger would not help her now. She stood.

Light bled through the rose window, the holy Circle of Unity bounded on all sides by the glorious wisdom of God, who are Lord and Lady and thereby united. That soft light suffused the space around the altar, and here, naturally, Hugh knelt in the perfect repose of a man who is smiled upon by the angels, looking like an angel himself, serene in God's mercy. His palms were pressed together in prayer. His forehead touched his fingers.

"Liath," he said, not looking at her. His voice was as soft and warm as that of a man coaxing a hurt child or wounded dog. "Come in now. Come in."

He stood, turning to face her.

In this way, in the arctic church with the wind whistling in through open doors and with light spilling over him, she stared up at his beautiful face.

God help her. All those years ago he had abused her. For all the years after he had terrified and tormented her. These memories still had the power to move her, but she was moved with pity and with anger for the helplessness she had endured. She was not the only one who had suffered at his hands, nor was she the only one suffering now. Fumes rose from a brazier burning steadily a few paces away from the altar. The odor of these bindings and workings bled through the monastery to put so many innocents into such a dangerous sleep, as the fierce cold he had called out of the north with his weather working chewed into their sleeping flesh.

Seeing that she watched him, he spoke the words of the psalm in his beautiful voice. " 'You who sit in my garden, my bride, let me hear your voice.' "

"I have a great deal to say to you," she replied. She mounted the last step and halted in front of him.

They might as well have been alone in the world. In a way, she had been alone with him for far too long.

She had been walking for years now with the memory of what he had done a constant burden, never shaken from her back.

No more. She would bear that burden no longer.

Her voice was clear and strong. "A prince without a retinue is no prince. A lord without a retinue is no lord. You are alone, Hugh. You have cut every tie, severed every bond of kinship. Betrayed every ally. I am come to fetch my daughter. When I leave, you will have nothing."

He did not waver. His grave demeanor gave him an authority that made his words fall with a great weight, like a benediction. "I knew you would come into your power. Now you see what you are. What I always knew you could be."

She shook her head. "I know what you want. But it's not yours and it never will belong to you. This much mercy I have within me. Go now. Go, now, and I'll not kill you. Find what shelter you can— if you can escape the vengeance of the Ashioi. They wait beyond the stockade."

She was cruel enough to enjoy the flash of alarm that widened his eyes and startled the smooth assurance of his heavenly smile. But he recovered swiftly. He always did.

"How can you not see it, my rose? To hurt me would be like hurting yourself. We are alike, you and I."

"So is an adder like a phoenix, for they each have two eyes."

"By denying it, you admit it. We are alike. You fear the truth, knowing it to be the truth."

"It's true we are alike in that we seek knowledge. I do admit it. I've seen it to be true. But the outer seeming does not necessarily reflect the inner heart. We are not alike, because you seek to possess and I seek only to comprehend."

"Is that what you believe? You, who could have anything you wanted? Don't you know the truth about yourself, Liath?"

"That my mother was a fire daimone, and my father born out of the house of Bodfeld. What else is there to. know?"

He laughed. "You don't know! You haven't guessed! This is rich irony! Taillefer's great grandchild does not wear the gold torque that is her birthright."

"I am not Taillefer's descendant! Anne was not my mother."

"She was not. Truly, she was not. But who was your father's mother? And who was your father's mother's mother?" He opened his hands in the manner of a supplicant. His voice was pleasing, and his grace and elegance might persuade any woman or man to listen, and to believe. "Have you ever met the hounds of Lavas?"

And here she stood, talking, talking, while the killing cold drowned the monastery and its inhabitants. She found the heart of the fire burning in the brazier, and extinguished it. It snuffed out, wisps of smoke rising with a last, sharp aroma of lavender.

"Enough! Your beauty is undeniable. Your voice is lovely. Your words and your eloquence astound me. But I no longer fear you, I can never trust you, and I will not fall prey to you, in any way or in any manner. Nothing you say can shake me. This is your last warning. Go."

"Can it not?" he asked her. "Nothing I say? I am not done with you, Liath. None will have you, if I cannot. Sanglant is dead."

"Is this the best you can do? Ai, God. You are become pathetic."

She was not fool enough to turn her back on him. She backed up cautiously, felt for the step with a foot, and knelt down to gather Blessing's body into her arms. The girl was all limbs, awkward to hold but not particularly heavy.

He did not move, preferring to remain in the light of the rose window that painted him with its pleasing glow. "I would think, my beautiful Liath, that after all this you would know better than to dismiss my words so lightly. I sent Brother Heribert north because he is infested by a daimone. Heribert is dead.

I don't know how he died or how and when the daimone got into his body, although I believe it happened at Verna. But the daimone seeks Heribert, whom it professes to love. I told the daimone to seek Heribert within the body of Sanglant. Once the bastard is possessed—"

She set the girl down.

She rose.

She stepped away from Blessing, for fear of engulfing her in that instant of unbridled rage and fear.

Hugh was ready. A cold howl of wind ripped in through the open doors, so strong that benches tipped over in the nave and slammed into the stone floor. Her clothing writhed around her body, tangling in her legs, and she had to lean backward, overbalancing into the force of that wind, to keep from falling to her knees before him.

Thunder boomed outside. In its wake, shouts and frightened cries split the air and folk shrieked and clamored as Hersford's residents woke from their enchanted sleep to find themselves caught beneath a tempest. The wind screamed over the valley, rumbling along the roof, blasting into the nave like a raging current of water. Hugh's hands were working, in fists and then open, part of the magic of binding and working.

Always, his fingers choked that which he wished to control. Always, he throttled that which did not obey him.

Struggling against the howling wind, she straddled her daughter, a foot fixed on either side of the child's prone body. She fought against sorcery, no longer protected from it by the shield of Da's magic.

How could it be that he knew the secrets of the tempestari and she did not? What would she give for such knowledge? How much would she give up?

They were alike, after all. Ai, God. It was true.

"I am afraid!" she cried in a voice that carried over the growl of the wind and the cracking shout of the thunder. "I am afraid of becoming like you. But I never will."

At these words, she saw the truth within him: the twisted fury that distorted his expression as she defied him.

"It's better you are dead than lost to me!"

"God help me," she rasped. "You dragged off my daughter only to lure me. You threaten my beloved, because you hope to make me weak, knowing I was weak before. But I have walked the spheres. I have survived the storm. I am no longer weak."

"Yet neither am I, my rose. Fear me, as you did once."

Lightning lit the rose window. Its snap sent a shock wave through the entire stone edifice. Thunder broke as if between them, inside the church itself. The rose window shattered. Its shards rained over them like so many slivers of ice.

She called fire into the slow glass, and the fragments poured as shooting stars and peppered the smooth slate floor of the apse. Hugh staggered back against the altar. He slapped the burning remnants off his sleeves and his golden hair. Yet when he looked up, he raised a hand as against a blinding light shining into his eyes.

"Fear you?" The anger burned at such a blue-white heat that she could no longer contain it. In her fury, unbidden, unasked, her wings unfurled with a roar. "I am not the one you will harm! How many more who are innocent will suffer because of you? God forgive me for thinking I should let you go unharmed. Because you will run, and who will be able to find you, when you can weave the stars and walk the crowns?"

He saw her, or saw beyond her, into the heart of her blazing wings. He saw what she had become and what she truly was, and his expression changed. In the wreckage of the rose window he slipped and scrambled.

He fled from what he saw.

A surge of furious triumph scalded her, shameful as it was, to know that he feared her as she had once feared him. How easy it would be to make him grovel and plead, to make him obey her, to make him crawl.

But she let it go. She had to let it go. Hate makes you blind.

She reached and, with her touch, with the knowledge of the fire that slumbers in all creation, she found the recesses within his eyes where the smallest of messages pass from the world to the mind.

"I beg you." He fell to his knees.

She found the depths within his eyes that formed the passageway of sight, and in this place she sought the slumbering fire. Called fire, with a needle touch, precise and delicate.

Burned him.

Hate makes you blind. And so would he become, who had been blinded by hate and envy for his whole life long.

With a strangled cry, he fell to the floor in spasms as the pain bit deep, but she had already let him go.

Blessing coughed, and came up spitting and growling like a wild creature. Footsteps hammered, and voices shouted outside. The mask warriors poured into the nave, Zuangua in the lead with his obsidian sword held high for the killing stroke.

"Halt!" she cried.

They clattered to a halt and backed away from her, all but Zuangua, who strode boldly up the dais and straddled the wounded man. The Ashioi had a wide, white grin on his face, eerie to look on. Here was a man who enjoyed his revenge.

"I made a pledge—I swore he would live," said Liath. Already she felt the wings furl, die away, because the faint current of aether could not support that blaze.

He looked at her, the unburned side of his face twisted up in a look of disbelief although the other, still red and raw, was pulled tight and unmoving. "You cannot be so stupid."

"The words have been said. I said I would not kill him."

"So you admit it!" He laughed.

"Or let him be killed. The words have been said."

It was clear he did not intend to provoke her by challenging her. "I'm not greedy, Bright One. I see you have crippled him. You've taken his sight. That means he can never weave the looms. He can't threaten us. I'll accept that. I need only proof for my people that we have taken our share, and gained a measure of vengeance for Feather Cloak's death."

He acted so quickly she had no time to react. He bent, tugged Hugh's right arm out straight, and chopped down in a strong stroke, cutting off the hand just above the wrist.

Hugh screamed. He rolled and thrashed.

The Ashioi laughed and howled as they pounded their spears on the paving stones and stamped their feet. She jumped up beside Zuangua, put her hand over the stump pumping bright red blood over the floor, and cauterized it. Hugh gasped—the only noise he could get out—and fainted.

The smell made her sick, and even Zuangua leaped back to get away from that sizzling odor. He retreated down the steps as she rose with blood dripping from her hand and Hugh passed out beside the Hearth.

"Your people have been murdering the Wendish," she said, understanding now the reaction of the monks and villagers. "Packs of them, like roving wolves. That's why they feared me, and hate you. How could you be so foolish as to squander the alliance Sanglant would have offered you?"

Zuangua held up the severed hand. Blood drizzled, although the cut was amazingly neat, sliced by a very sharp edge. The fingers were pale, curled, and there was—she noted—only one simple gold ring on those handsome fingers. Hugh had not been a man greedy for riches. Strange to think he had been spared such a vice.

"I am content," said Zuangua.

But she was not. "Do not offend me and mine, Zuangua. I will keep the peace, if you will."

He shrugged. "Our truce is over."

"That's all you have to say?"

"That's all. Let those of my people who mean to return with me come now."

Sharp Edge stepped out of the crowd. "I'll weave him through, but I'm staying with you, Bright One.

If you'll have me." She said the words with a teasing smile—the kind that men will walk leagues to taste, given the chance. At least one young mask groaned audibly, and a few others muttered and shifted their spears in restless hands.

Liath met her gaze and nodded. "You have a home with me."

"What of the child, my little beast?" asked Zuangua. "I've gotten fond of her."

The girl had seen it all, crouched on the steps. But instead of answering, she lifted her head. Liath, too, heard footsteps. Anna ran into the nave and, with the aid of the staff, shoved her way through the bundle of soldiers, out of breath and crying.

"My lady! Princess Blessing! They're all waking up! And they look so angry!"

The girl looked first at her mother, then at her uncle, and finally at Anna. It was Anna she crawled to, sobbing and coughing between heaves and wheezes.

Zuangua gestured. He and his warriors ran out the door, leaving a stillness behind them, the quiet after a storm. In such stunning calm, one might hear the gentle breath of God.

Liath swayed, rushed by a prickling thrill that ran all along her skin but also made her battle against tears. She could not stop the tremor that afflicted her hands.

"Let us go quickly, Anna. Bring her."

"Where do we go now, my lady?" asked Anna as she gathered Blessing into her arms in an embrace that made Liath want to sob, seeing how the girl clung to Anna so trustingly and yet had not given her own mother a second glance. "Is—he—dead?"

Hugh sprawled on the floor, the stump mercifully hidden under a fold of sleeve. His blood smeared the stone floor. Flecks of soot from the shattered and burned window streaked and spotted his robes and hair. He was still breathing.

"No, but he has been crippled twice over. He'll never weave the crowns again. He'll never read another book. Let us go, immediately. I want no trouble with the poor souls who live here and serve God so faithfully."

Dread already possessed her. Because, after all that, Hugh's last spell had woven into her flesh and her heart to eat at her as one might burn a man from the inside out until he shrieked and howled while his flesh melted away. He was not done yet. She had hurt him, but he had gotten in the last blow.

"Quickly," she repeated. "We must take those horses we saw and ride to Kassel. Ai, God.

Sanglant. I fear—I fear—"

She could not say it. The fear choked her, just as Hugh had hoped it would.

XIII

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1

SHE could no longer ride through deep forest without looking over her shoulder. She could not forget the daimone that had stalked her, or the galla, whose darkness eats souls. She could not forget the elfshot that had killed her mount years ago, although she knew the shades of elves no longer stalked the shadows.

No, indeed, they walked abroad in sunlight, and they were still angry.

She had commandeered nine horses—all that Hersford possessed—but her two Ashioi companions were terrible riders. Again and again she ranged far ahead, only to wait champing, as she did now, for them to catch up together with Anna and Blessing. Usually she heard them coming because of Blessing—the girl had a penetrating voice and seemed determined to comment on everything— but it was getting close to dark and perhaps after all she would have to turn around and ride back.

God, she wanted to leave them behind and move ahead. She could lead her horse all night; her salamander eyes would guide her. But she had to stay with the others. She could not leave Blessing behind again, nor could she expect the two masks to ride into Kassel without her escort. Anyway, there might be bandits on the road, or Zuangua might have changed his mind and followed them. Or worse things might stalk their trail, starving wolves and ravenous guivres, although she could imagine nothing worse than this fear riding as if on her shoulders, claws digging into her neck. Her jaw ached from clenching down tears. She had no reason—no reason— to believe him dead.

Only that Hugh had said so. Only that Hugh could carry out such a plan. He alone might recognize a daimone, might think to push such a complex interlocking set of spheres into motion, hoping that the promised conjunction would fall into place as the spinning orrery came to rest.

It was so quiet here, shaded and peaceful. A bird chirped, giving her heart. It was good to hear the call of birds again. A doe and half-grown twin fawns trotted into view, looked her way, and slipped into the green. She heard no sign of the others.

There.

On the path behind, an aurochs paced out onto the path. It paused, and the wind died, and for an instant there fell a silence that might have extended across the entire world, heavy and profound, woven through all the wild places that have not yet been touched by human hands. Beneath the vault of heaven, a single life is nothing, no more than a catch of breath, a shattering tear, a falling leaf. The tides of the world will ebb and flow regardless. Our lives are less, even, than the wrack upon the shore.

Yet for all that, they are a blessed gift, however small, however brief.

The aurochs bolted, crashing away into the undergrowth, swallowed up by the trees.

She heard the slap of hooves coming out of the east. Swinging around, she pulled free her bow and nocked an arrow. Her spare horse tugged sideways, seeking forage along the verge, but the horse she was mounted on held steady, trained and ready for war. As was she.

The rider came clear, emerging around a bend in the path. He was an ordinary figure, covered by a gray cloak trimmed with scarlet and leading a spare mount behind him laden with a pair of saddlebags.

"Wolfhere!"

As he came closer, he said, "I pray you, Liath. Lower that bow."

Startled, she twisted the arrow away and stuck it back in the quiver. "God Above. How come you here, Wolfhere? Where have you been? What news? Oh, God. Oh, God."

Of course, she could not get the words out. He had come from Kassel. Where else? That was where this path led. She feared to ask them, all the heart and breath squeezed out of her.

"Are you alone?" he asked.

She waved toward the west, at her back, and spoke in a voice more squeak than word, "A small group travels with me, but they fell behind."

"Who is with you?"

Only then did she recall how he had come to depart from Sanglant and his army in the Arethousan port of Sordaia. "Where have you been all this time? Is it true you tried to kidnap Blessing?"

He recoiled, raising a hand. "There, now, Liath. I am no threat to you. I am alone."

"What of Anne? You were always her creature, one of the Seven Sleepers!"

He was silent a while. Bunches of bluebells clustered in the shade where the road gave way to underbrush; they nodded as the wind rippled through them. A hawk shrieked far above, unseen beyond the trees. Finally, he shrugged.

"I have spoken of this before. I was raised with Anne. She and I were taught that my service in life was meant for her, for the Seven Sleepers, who continued the work begun by Biscop Tallia and Sister Clothilde. They sought only and always to prevent the return of the Aoi."

"It seems you did not succeed. Anne is dead, the Ashioi are returned, and the Seven Sleepers are scattered or dead. You may be the last one of them who lives." She did not mention Hugh.

"I no longer count myself among their number. I was nothing more than the cauda draconis."

"The tail of the dragon, least among them."

His smile was faint. But there was something about his smile that she had always trusted, even now, when she knew she ought not to. As you say. I came to distrust Anne, alas, although I never ceased loving her, as I was taught to do. Some bonds cannot be broken, even when they are betrayed."

She waited, forgiving him nothing and yet wondering what he would say next. An unseen chain bound her to him, since he was the one who had freed her from Hugh. That ought to count for something. But she also waited for the sound of hoofbeats behind her. If he and Blessing must meet again, she would be here to oversee it.

"When she brought that corrupt woman, Antonia of Mainni, into her councils, then I knew I could no longer serve her. That is why I left the Seven Sleepers behind and rode on my own path."

"Then who do you serve, Wolfhere?"

"I am in the service of the king, as I have always been. My first loyalty was always to him, whom I loved best and most faithfully. All I did, in the end, was at his command."

A twig snapped, and she jerked in the saddle. Her mount shied, but after all, it was only a deer in the forest bounding away.

He coaxed his spare mount forward, untied one of the saddlebags, and withdrew a bulky object wrapped in oilcloth to protect it from rain.

"This belongs to you." He held it out, arm trembling at its weight.

Ai, God, it was heavy. She set it across her thighs, settled her reins over her horse's neck, and unfolded the oilcloth. Underneath, a round, spiky shape was tightly bundled in purple silk of the highest quality, so tightly woven she could scarcely perceive the weave.

"What is this?" she asked, knowing the question pointless as she pulled the layers free. Her horse flicked its ears when she gasped. Wolfhere said nothing.

Even in the shady woods, under a cloudy sky, without sunlight to brighten it, the crown gleamed. It was thickset and nothing delicate, a reminder of the burdens of empire that must crush down on the neck of the one who rules. A crown is a form of binding; that she knew. The crown of stars held seven points, each one set with a gem: a shining pearl, rich lapis lazuli, pale sapphire, carnelian, ruby, emerald, and banded orange-brown sardonyx. She almost laughed, seeing the pattern unfold. Even Emperor Taillefer had sought the secrets of the mathematici. His crown mirrored both the stone crowns which in ancient days had forged the great weaving, but also the fabled earthly palace of coils whose winding path echoed the ladder that climbs through the spheres: the Moon, Erekes, Somorhas, the Sun, Jedu, Mok, and Aturna.

"Why do you give it to me?" she said at last. "I am not Taillefer's heir."

"Are you not?"

Her anger sparked. "You know this better than I, since you were there when my mother was called and caged. I am the child of flame. Not Anne's daughter."

"Not Anne's daughter," he agreed, "but who is your father's mother?"

She flashed a smile, meant unkindly, because she was really getting irritated now. Blessing would come, and she desired no conflict, not now, not when she had to get to Kassel to find Sanglant but also had to ride at this agonizingly slow pace in order to protect those she was responsible for.

"I don't trust you, Wolfhere," she said, as if that was his answer. "But in any case, I know who my father's mother is. I have met her. A very aged lady, a holy woman."

"The hand of the Lady has guided you," he said with surprise. "How comes it you have met her?"

"That is a tale I'm not sure I wish to tell you, until you tell me how you are come here this night.

And how you came into possession of this crown. And what is happening at Kassel."

He was in a mood to duel. There was a demon in him tonight that made him more oblique and maddening than ever. "What of her mother, then? Who was your father's mother's mother?"

"I don't know. Neither does she. She was a foundling, given into the church."

He nodded, as the praeceptor does when the discipla gives the long awaited, and correct, answer. "Therefore. The crown belongs to you. Your right, to determine who will hold it, who wield it, and who wear it. And if you do not believe me, ask the hounds of Lavas."

Always he had the means to confound her!

A high voice rose in the air, and faded. Liath turned as the sound of approaching riders caught her ear. She had not keen enough hearing to sort out numbers and speed, not as Sanglant could, but she had recognized that voice's timbre immediately. She swung back. Wolfhere's hands had tightened on his reins, and his chin lifted and eyes narrowed as he squinted west along the road.

"If you threaten my daughter," she said in a low voice, "I will kill you. I have come through too much. My patience is all burned away."

He bowed his head without answering; his right hand slid into his left sleeve and he sighed and rested his arm there, as if releasing Taillefer's crown had taken all his strength. She turned her horses all the way around and moved a few paces back the way she had come to get the best vantage of the unwinding path. Wrapping up the crown, she stowed it in one of the saddlebags she had taken from Hersford half-filled with supplies. She refused to mention her encounter with Hugh until Wolfhere confessed the whole, and he seemed just as unwilling to speak.

Silence is a locked chest.

Without speaking, they waited until the company rode into sight with Falcon Mask in the lead, Anna behind leading the string of spare mounts, and Blessing on her own small mare. Buzzard Mask had fallen behind to become rear guard.

"Hai!" called Falcon Mask with a big grin. "We thought you'd out-raced us, Bright One!"

"They're too slow!" Blessing had no volume below a petulant shout. "I'm trying to teach them to ride faster. They're so slow! How soon until we reach Papa?" She tilted her head back and sucked in a breath through her nose. "What's that smell? Sharp, like magic."

Anna sneezed.

Buzzard Mask trotted up, clinging to the saddle like a sack about to slide off. "Ow! Ow! Ow!" he cried as he jerked on the reins, but his horse had already decided to stop, with the others, and he did slide off, starting slow and then falling hard, unable to stop himself. 'Ah!" His string of curses was powerful.

Anna dismounted and offered a hand, but he brushed off his legs, tugged with a look of disgust at the short tunic that Liath had insisted he wear over his otherwise naked torso, and offered Anna a grateful smile. He was young, like Falcon Mask, healthy and attractive because of his youth. Anna blushed and backed away. She gripped the dog-headed staff as if it were the only thing holding her upright.

Falcon Mask was rigid in the saddle, fixed at an awkward angle with one hand gripping the cantle behind her and the other holding the reins wrong. "I can't get down!" A wild grin twisted her face; unlike her cousin, she was enjoying this knife edge between triumph and disaster.

"Why are we stopped here?" Blessing brushed dark hair out of her eyes. Bruises purpled her wrists, the marks left by Hugh. Her cheek was split where his ring had gouged her, and she held one leg stiffly.

But she challenged Liath with her gaze. Anna, seeing that look, hurried over to grasp Blessing's knee as though her touch might steal the girl's voice. "We're in a hurry. We have to go faster!"

Anna withdrew her hand and ran back to Liath. "I pray you, my lady," she whispered. "Princess Blessing is in pain. That makes her temper short."

"I just want to go!"

"We must rest," said Liath. "Water and feed the horses. It will be dark soon. We'll take a little time to plait torches so we can light our way through the night. Will you ride with us, Wolfhere?"

They all looked at her as if she was a madwoman.

"Wolfhere?" said Anna. "My lady. Are you feeling well? Perhaps we need halt for longer, if you're needing to sleep."

That was when she looked around to see the empty road behind her. Wolfhere was gone. Even the hoofprints of his horses, which ought to have marked the dirt, had vanished.

"And of course," she told Falcon Mask later, "he never answered any of my questions."

They had found a site to rest where a hedge of dense honeysuckle—not in bloom—shielded them from the road. Blessing had fallen asleep soon after choking down a slice of dry bread and pungent cheese; the others had gathered twigs and stems and piled them in a heap. Some of these Liath had kindled into a fire beside which Anna bent studiously to her task, tongue jutting out between teeth as she plaited twigs, both green and dry, into easily-carried torches.

Buzzard Mask took the first watch. His straight silhouette paralleled a slim birch tree growing beside the road; he had a good view in either direction along the road and just enough light to keep watch by. The sky was strangely glamoured this night, the clouds so high and thin that although she could not actually see the moon's disk, she could almost breathe in the misty glimmer of its light seeping through that translucent veil of cloud.

Falcon Mask turned the crown of stars one complete revolution, and shook her head. "Pretty ugly," she said. "I'd take it to the fire workers and let them melt it down for something better. The gems are good, though."

Liath laughed. "Give that back to me!"

Falcon Mask grinned and set the crown on her own head. It stuck on her topknot, and she grimaced. "Too heavy! Eh! This would give you a sore neck. Who wants it?"

"Many people want it. But how and where did Wolfhere get it, and why did he give it to me?"

Buzzard Mask hooted twice, the crude but easy signal they'd agreed on. Two for the east, three for the west, four for the woods. Liath smothered the fire. The flames died, and smoke wisped up in fading trails barely visible to Liath's keen sight. Falcon Mask bundled the crown away and shifted from seat to crouch without a sound, knife drawn. Anna shifted back to kneel beside Blessing while Liath traced a path to a knob of cover they had identified before sunset. Buzzard Mask had retreated here. She crouched beside him.

A pair of lamps, one in front of the other, swayed along the road like will-o'-the-wisps. The walkers came without speaking, but they had horses in their train: one, two, three—probably four. As their shapes got closer, Liath traced the shadows of each creature. There were two men and, indeed, four horses. Travelers meant for reasonable speed, hoping to make better time with a spare mount and a way to travel straight through the night. Just as she hoped to do.

She tapped his arm in a four square pattern; let them pass. He returned the tap on her forearm to show he understood. He shifted back as she shifted forward to get a better look. Most likely they were messengers, but it made sense to be cautious until she was sure they were not enemies.

The wind fluttering in the trees and the soft tap of their footfalls covered their words, so it wasn't until they were close enough to toss a stone at that she realized they were speaking in low voices, a murmur as constant as that of a stream. She could not distinguish words, although Sanglant could have, but she could tell that they were arguing. The lamps swayed in their hands; held low to illuminate the road, the swinging lights captured only flashes of a chin or cheek until all at once one of the walkers raised her lamp high and stopped dead. The light shone full on her face.

"What is it?" hissed her companion, stumbling to a halt a step ahead of her as the horses stamped and waited. "I told you we shouldn't be walking so fast. We'll hurt ourselves. Or the horses."

"She's here!" said the woman in tones of surprise and dismay.

Liath uncurled with a sharp breath and stepped out onto the path. "Hanna! Ivar!"

Ivar recoiled a step. "God be praised. You're gleaming."

No greeting met her. The message they carried was written on Hanna's face, in the tight line of her mouth and the deep circles under her eyes. "I pray you, Liath, this is not how I wished to find you."

"What is it?" said Liath, her voice gone hoarse.

"Oh, God." Hanna faltered, and could not go on.

So the arrow finds its mark, seeker of hearts, deadly and sure. Pierced there, she went blind, mute, deaf, the dark forest and the night breeze and the dusty path and all the people gathering around her fading to insignificance. There is only the white light of pain blossoming, although it does not yet hurt in the way it will when the blood starts running.

"I don't believe it," she said, because sometimes words are a spell that can alter the fabric of the universe, a weft shuttled through the tight warp of fate. "No creature male or female can harm him."

Hanna's expression, torn by sorrow, was thereby implacable. It is when the ones who truly love you tell you the worst news that you know it cannot be escaped.

"Come," said Hanna gently. "Best we go wait at Hersford Monastery. It will be peaceful there.

Have you companions—oh!"

"My friends," said Liath, words emerging by rote. "They are my friends, my allies. And the baby is here. Take us to him. I beg you."

Her companions emerged cautiously from the trees, but what they did or what accommodation they reached with Hanna and Ivar, Liath did not notice, only that Blessing clung to Anna and spoke not one word, as though her voice had broken like her father's long ago in battle, forever altered by an arrow to the throat.

As Liath was herself changed. What she feared most had come to pass. There was no going back. There can never be.

The world had narrowed to a tunnel of shadows down which she must walk.

"Not this way," she said insistently. "Not this way!"

But no one heard her, and she had no power to alter destiny or even the path and direction her feet must take.

Weeping, Hanna took her arm and led her back toward Hersford Monastery, into the darkness.

2

ALAIN caught up with the funeral procession in the late afternoon just before they reached the eastern gate of Hersford Monastery, because a man who walks with two hounds—however unwilling those hounds may be—can move faster than a train of wagons. Theirs was a solemn, formidable procession. In the rear marched two score Lions, led by a one-handed captain with bright red hair.

They watched Alain pass them along the side of the road, and although they said nothing they nodded and met his gaze, each one, as a man greets a comrade.

At the end of the line of wagons lurched the closed cart whose scarred walls imprisoned the Kerayit shaman. Her escort came courtesy of Stronghand, two score of Eika and Alban soldiers to match the Lions. These had neither greeting nor words for him, who had never marched to battle at their side.

In the middle of the line rolled the wagon bearing Biscop Constance and her attendants. These, too, remained silent as he overtook them and walked past. Hathumod saw him, but she no longer wept, only marked him; she must tend to the lady as each jolt jarred her; it was a constant struggle to bring the crippled biscop a measure of comfort. One of their number, a stick-thin young man scarcely larger than a child, formed the sign of the phoenix as the hounds passed, before dropping his gaze humbly.

They would believe what gave them comfort. So people always did.

Next in line rode the remaining ranks of Sanglant's personal guard—about thirty men arrayed before and behind the wagon that bore the body carefully tucked in between sacks of grain, cushioned by linen and covered with a silk shroud. These men noted him striding past, but it was the hounds that got their attention and made their horses a trifle skittish.

Loyal men, and truehearted. They would follow until the end.

The vanguard had already reached the gate. Monks and novices and lay brothers swarmed forward to greet proud Father Ortulfus, who walked alongside the lead wagon together with Sister Rosvita, her hardy schola, and a dozen soldiers Alain did not recognize who wore much-mended tabards sporting the sigil of Austra.

A mob of refugees had gathered behind the stockade, all amazed and confounded. Churchmen and householders alike chattered and clamored, wept and cried praises to God, and drew the sign of the phoenix as thanksgiving until Prior Ratbold bellowed over their noise.

"Beyond all expectation, you are returned to us, Father Ortulfus! We came under siege! Yet by the blessing of God, and with the help of the phoenix, the Cursed Ones were cast out!"

A miracle!

So they must believe, and perhaps it was even true.

There stood Brother Iso, nervous among the humble lay brothers. When he saw Alain and the hounds, his eyes grew wide and he nudged and poked his brethren until they, too, looked. And said nothing. Father Ortulfus turned, seeing how the locus of attention shifted, and he stepped away from the open gate to indicate that Alain should pass through before him.

But the hounds had a duty and an obligation. They went reluctantly, ears down, hindquarters in a slow waggle as dogs will when they mean to show doggish apology. They crept to the foremost wagon, whining. Even seeing them display such a frenzy of submission, folk feared those powerful bodies and fierce teeth. Soldiers and clerics sidled away.

The sight of those huge hounds amused the frail old woman riding in the foremost wagon. When the hounds leaped up into the bed, rocking it, clerics shrieked and soldiers shouted, but Mother Obligatia merely extended both hands and let the cowering hounds lick her fingers.

"Who are these poor, sweet creatures?" she asked, and looking around saw how far everyone else had retreated. Shamefaced at abandoning her, the soldiers gritted their teeth and squared their shoulders and forced themselves to creep closer, not unlike the hounds.

"You can't think they're dangerous?" she added, chuckling as she rubbed their foreheads and scratched over their ears. Seeing that they would be greeted kindly, they flopped down on either side of her, as well as they could on the sacks of grain piled to make her seat, and rolled to expose their bellies and bare their throats.

"What means this?" asked Sister Rosvita. "She was married to the son of Taillefer. She was not a child of Taillefer herself. If these are the hounds descended from those in the emperor's kennel, how come they to bow before her?"

"These are the hounds of Lavas, Sister Rosvita," said Alain quietly. "They know who rules them. How they come to her, I know not."

The wagon carrying the old abbess was drawn onto the monastery grounds. The crowd backed away as the mounted guardsmen forced a path for the wagon bearing the body of their dead liege, and some folk even broke and ran when they saw the Eika infantry marching up behind it.

"Clear the way! Clear the way!" cried Father Ortulfus.

Prior Ratbold took up the call as brothers and farmers scattered and took up places on either side of the dirt path that led from the eastern gate to the central compound.

The day was warm despite the haze that whitened the sky. It had thinned until the disk of the sun setting into the west could be discerned as a bright patch beyond the veil. The scene opened with a clarity that astonished Alain: the whitewashed buildings set at neat angles; the covered porch fronting the lay brothers' barracks; the squat, square church tower built of stone; the wide path to the main gate that led past the two-storied guesthouse and the beehives and the smithy and stables and byre; the late flowering orchard overgrown with cloth shelters, sprouted up between the trees like so many unruly weeds, to house the refugees.

A familiar place to one who had lived here many months. Here he had found a measure of peace after losing—forever and irrevocably—the one he loved.

He knew how hard that blow struck.

He saw her emerge with a pair of companions from the guesthouse. The crowd backed away to widen the path by which she might approach them. The sound of her wings unfurling sang as a faint chiming music in his body, the kiss of the aether; they were brilliant to his eyes but lacking true existence, more thought than substance. They blazed, as she did, but with the fire of despair. Maybe, right now, he was the only one who could see them.

Marking the wagon and the riders, she staggered as if hit. The two who stood beside her caught her. They held her, because she could not walk. The wagon's driver brought the conveyance to a stately halt in the middle of a grassy field. She jerked out of their arms and dashed to it, flung herself against the side with a thud, yanked the shroud off the body, and saw his slack face.

Wind raked through the trees and rippled the grass.

What greater cataclysm can there be than this, that which tears the world asunder?

This is the poison that strikes deep, the bee's sting, the nectar of anguish. How can it be that life goes on? What point is there in living? Ai, God. So we fall into the Pit as the black Abyss rips open under our feet.

3

DEAD. Dead. Dead.

All the rest, hands touching her and pressing her this way and that, voices murmuring, faces leering into view and fading away, the roar of the wind and the shuffle of feet and hooves and wheels grinding on dirt and doors shutting and an unexpected laugh heard down the distance and the trickling splash of water and a cough, all this was noise.

She sank into the tide.

"Let me go to her."

Not party to the storm of discussion that followed the arrival of Sanglant's cortege, Hanna stuck close to Liath until the body was laid on a bier in the nave of Hersford's church. Lamps were lit along the aisles and blazed beside the Hearth at the eastern end as dusk fell. Liath clung to his dead hand. She said no word; she was lost. Father Ortulfus scattered sprigs of cypress over the body. Mother Obligatia was carried in, with her attendants and Sister Rosvita at her side. Seeing that others attended Liath for the time being, Hanna sought out Sorgatani.

"Is this a good idea?" Ivar dogged her path as she crunched along the gravel walkway that led along one side of a dormitory. She wasn't quite sure whether his presence was gratifying or aggravating. "I heard some awful story just now, that one look from her eyes and you're a dead man."

"I'm never a dead man, Ivar, and anyway, it's the guivre's stare that paralyzes you. You must stay outside, though. It's true that if you looked on her, you would die."

"Well, then, I'm not going to let you look! I'll not risk you dying, not now!"

"You managed it before!"

"That's not what I meant!"

Before she could turn under the covered walkway that cut between two dormitories into the famous unicorn courtyard where, she had heard, they had hauled Sorgatani's wagon, Ivar dragged her to a stop.

"You can't go into the cloister anyway. Only men can—this is a monastery."

"Shut up, Ivar," she said, and kissed him on the lips, which shut him up for long enough that she was able to shake her hand out of his grasp and get five steps ahead of him.

The unicorn fountain streamed quietly, water burbling down horns and forelegs. The rose garden was neatly trimmed, but only a few flowers bloomed, their colors delicate in the deepening light of the dying afternoon. Outside was brighter than inside; it was still possible to distinguish bees circling among the flowers.

She was not sure why they had pulled Sorgatani's wagon all the way in to the fountain courtyard and hidden it beside the hedge of cypress, but cypress was said to protect against death. And, in truth, someone had set up a pair of braziers on either side of the wagon and thrust an evergreen bough of cypress into each one. The smell made her nose tickle; she wiped her eyes.

Atop the battered wagon perched a huge owl. She blinked, and it became a thread of smoke winding skyward.

The entire roster of Lady Bertha's surviving guardsmen had set up camp in the courtyard, although she wasn't sure who they were guarding from whom. She nodded at Sergeant Aronvald. The wagon creaked under her weight as she set a foot on the step. The wood step gave a high snap and twisted slightly.

"Careful," he said. "That's cracked, there."

The men skittered away behind the hedge as she opened the door, stepped over the threshold, and slid the door closed behind her.

The interior of the wagon was a shambles. The tall chest of drawers had fallen onto its side; two of the drawers were broken; silks and silver bowls and utensils had been shoved into a pile. The boxed-in bed listed, one leg broken off, although the bed on the other, empty side of the chamber stood intact and seemingly untouched. On the altar, the golden cup lay on its side, the flask rested against the handbell, and a crack sliced through the gleaming surface of the round mirror.

Sorgatani sat on the bed with one arm in a sling and her head back and resting against pillows piled up over the saddle. Seeing Hanna, she rolled to rise, set a foot on the floor, and winced.

"Nay, nay, do not move! God Above! You were badly tumbled."

"But I survived."

"What can I do? How have you eaten and drunk?"

Sorgatani gestured toward the window set into the door. It was shuttered with a square of wood that could be slid open and closed, and screened with strands of beads that formed a concealing curtain.

The aroma in the closed wagon was heavy with sweat and mildew. Hanna opened the shutter, and the rising breeze jangled the lengths of beads.

"Help me to go there," said the shaman. "I want to see where I have come."

"Rest a moment," said Hanna. "Let me straighten up. How did you get that sling on your arm?"

"He entered when the wagon was set upright. I feared for him, but, after all, his magic was stronger than mine."

"Who came?"

"I don't know his name. He was attended by a pair of black hounds. He cared for my wounds.

My hip is badly bruised. My arm—up at the shoulder—broken. He told me I would heal. He told me that the Holy One—my teacher—Li'at'dano—has passed on beyond this life."

She said the words without tears. They were a statement. A burden.

Smoke coiled around the center pole, which stood straight and true despite the crash. Hanna shivered as cold air winged around her. A sense of being watched prickled along her back. She turned to see the owl perched on the saddle tree. It had not been there a moment before.

"So you see," said Sorgatani. Her headdress was heaped at the other end of the couch, and her hair was tangled. An ivory comb lay on the bed, black strands of hair wrapping the teeth, but she hadn't gotten far in her combing. Maybe it hurt too much. "The owl's coming is a sign that I must return to my people. This is the shaman's messenger. Mine, now."

"Yours?"

"I am the Holy One's heir. The owl came to me last night and led me along the flower trail that leads to the other side. There I met the Holy One. She is dead, as he said she was. I had hoped ... to stay a while . . . here with those who understand me." She clenched her jaw at a pain, and smiled wanly.

When Hanna sat beside her, Sorgatani grasped Hanna's forearm with her good hand. "I must return to my people. I cannot stay here. Will you come with me, Hanna?"

Tears rose. "I cannot."

She sighed as if this was the answer she expected. "Must I go alone, then?" She laughed softly, but the sound conveyed only grief. "You were to bring me a pura, Hanna. Breschius served me, and for that I honor him, but he was old. Anyway, a man can only be pura to one woman in his life. Like Liath and her Sanglant."

"He would not take kindly to the comparison," said Hanna with a chuckle that spilled to tears, quickly shed and quickly dried. "I have not done well by you, Sorgatani."

"No. You are my luck. It matters only that you exist."

"Ivar! What are you doing here? Don't you know that wagon is haunted?"

The well-modulated voice, a youthful and melodic tenor, pierced easily the veil of beads. Sorgatani sat up, tugging on Hanna's arm.

"Let me see," she said.

Outside, the two young men fell into a fevered and rather disjointed conversation that seemed mostly to consist of Ivar stammering out the story of his ride to Kassel and the battle while the other one kept interrupting him with questions that never quite made sense.

"... we ran to get away from the skirmish but were overtaken in the woods by Duke Conrad's men—"

"Why would horsemen be attacking the woods?"

Sorgatani moved slowly but with determination, favoring one leg. She leaned on Hanna and tweaked aside a few strands of beads, allowing her to look out without others looking in upon her.

Hanna saw Ivar at once, pulling at his hair as he did when he was nervous and upset and frustrated. An astonishingly pretty young man had hold of Ivar's elbow in a possessive way that forced a slow simmer of jealousy to boil up in her heart. How could anyone be that good-looking? It wasn't right. It wasn't fair.

Angels might look so, with their perfect features and their sunlit hair aglow.

"Look there!" murmured Sorgatani huskily, perhaps because standing hurt her. "Now that's a handsome stallion!"

He's mine, she almost blurted, but of course Sorgatani wasn't referring to Ivar. No woman would call Ivar a handsome stallion when he was standing next to that creature, even though Ivar was the most beautiful man in the world to her eyes even if she knew very well that he really wasn't.

She blushed and turned her attention to Baldwin, who was now gesticulating wildly as he related some tale to Ivar that Ivar did not, in fact, appear very interested in hearing. Ivar kept staring at the wagon, shifting his feet, and tugging on his hair. He was standing off at an angle and had not noticed the shift in the concealing beads.

Well. It was no surprise that Sorgatani would notice Lord Baldwin. True enough, he was breathtaking of feature, but it seemed to her as she watched him talking that there was something a little vacant about that pretty face.

"Is he crippled or injured in some way?" Sorgatani asked breathlessly. "Has he been wounded? Ah, look! His hand has been cut off.

Just like Breschius! Maybe it's a sign." Leaning on Hanna, she tightened her fingers as folk do when they grasp the rope that will save them from drowning. "What do you think?"

Sorgatani wasn't looking at Baldwin and Ivar. She was looking beyond them where the fading light poured its golden aura over a portion of the fountain and the paved pathway. A pair of sturdy lay brothers was carrying a man on a litter out of the monks' quarters. They cut along one of the diagonal paths, bringing them close by the wagon. They were on their way perhaps, to the infirmary. They weren't in any hurry. The presence of the foreign wagon seemed of no interest to them at all, nor did they show much interest in their patient. They kept pausing between strides to look toward the church, although it wasn't clear what they hoped to see there.

The man lying on his back on the litter was covered from feet to hips with a thin blanket.

Otherwise, he was naked from the waist up, his left hand resting on a taut belly and his right arm, slightly elevated on a rolled-up blanket pressed along his side, ending in a stump at the wrist. He had good shoulders, and pale, lovely, rose-blushed skin. His eyes were closed, but in the manner of a person who, although awake, prefers to shut out the truth. His golden hair had been washed and combed, and it gleamed when they passed out of the shadow and into that last spill of sunlight lancing through the westward-facing walkway.

"Can I have that one?" Sorgatani said with a ragged laugh.

Ai, God! Hugh.

"Is there any man handsomer than you?" Hanna whispered.

"There cannot be," murmured Sorgatani, lips parted, leaning until her face almost brushed the beads as the monks moved past.

"He is dangerous, that one. Unforgiving, unkind, arrogant, vain, proud, obsessed, and cruel.

Forget him, Sorgatani."

"But he's so beautiful. I am Kerayit, daughter of the Horse people. I can break the most vicious-tempered stallion that walks Earth. It is in my blood and my breeding and my training. I do not fear him."

The monks passed out of sight. Ivar shook Baldwin's hand free, grabbed his wrist, and tugged him away from the wagon, and it seemed a trick of the air that she could hear Ivar's answers but not Baldwin's questions as they moved away.

"Yes, that's right, they all survived. Yes, Sigfrid, Ermanrich, and Hathumod. They're all here with Biscop Constance. In the guesthouse, I think. Come, I'll take you to them; that's where you belong.

No. No. I'm not going to stay in the church. I'm going to become a messenger, just like you, for the phoenix, only not in the church. It's for the best, Baldwin. Trust me."

Sorgatani turned away from the beads to grip Hanna's hands with both of her own, although the gesture caused tears to start up as her lovely face was ripped with desperation and pain. "You are still the King's Eagle, Hanna. And my luck. That is what I ask of you. Let him become my pura, and I can go back to my tribe knowing I will not be alone."

4

GRIEF strikes each body in a different way. For the longest time Liath drifted in a stupor, clutching the cold hand, vainly trying to heat the corpse and ignite the spark of life that no longer burned within.

Folk whispered around her, gliding in and out of view, but their motions were meaningless and random.

In no way did they move with the sure predictable paces of the stars. Yet the sun and the moon and the canopy of heaven, raised above us, have no liberty to govern themselves. They are subject to the law; they do what they are ordered to do, and nothing else.

How much easier, then, to see the fate that awaits you and brace yourself. Wasn't it better to know the path in advance than to stumble like this?

Ai, God! Ai, God!

The child was screaming. She heard it now, and it occurred to her that these hysterics had been going on for some time.

She had to let go of the hand, and she feared by doing so she would lose him forever, but she had to let go.

There.

She tried to stand, but her legs were all pins and needles. Arms steadied her. She sought and found the child who had thrown herself onto the floor of the nave with a ring of troubled onlookers standing carefully back while she shrieked and shrieked, no matter that she was breaking the sanctuary of the holy church and pounded feet and hands on the floor in the throes of a furious tantrum.

"We were too slow! We didn't get there fast enough!"

"Blessing," she said.

They parted ranks to let her through. Anna knelt just out of range of those flailing hands and feet.

"Careful, my lady" she said in a hoarse voice. She had a purpling bruise on her chin, and she was favoring one arm. "She's gone wild."

"Does the Brother Infirmarian not have some manner of sleeping draught?" Liath asked to the air at large.

There were so many people in the church, crowding and choking her, that she began to think some were real flesh and others only shadow and light, souls and presences descended from the higher spheres, shifting in and out of existence like a light winking on and off as a hand covers and uncovers its flame.

"Lady? Liathano?" A voice swam past her. A hand brushed her elbow. "I think she is fainting."

Easier to be the sun, who never says, "I will not rise at my regular time." Easier to be the moon, who wanes and waxes according to the law that set it in motion. Easier to be stars, who rise and set as they are commanded, and the winds, who blow, and the moun-tains, who remain in the place they are set. They are instruments of the power that set them in motion.

"Here, lady. Drink."

She staggered to her feet.

Blessing was still sobbing, lips moist and liquid spattered down her chin. "I shouldn't have stayed with Uncle! I should have gone sooner! Then I would have gotten to him. I would have saved him! I could have! I could have!"

"You must take more, Your Highness." Anna was fixed at the girl's side, holding a cup away and out of arm's reach. "You must."

Captain Fulk stood beside Liath, a hand hovering a finger's breadth from her arm.

"I pray you, my lady," he said in a low voice, "there's something I must speak of immediately."

She nodded, because God had given humankind liberty to choose for the good or for ill, for the blessing or the curse. "Princess Theophanu is to become regnant by marrying this Eika lord, called Stronghand. It's agreed that the princess will adopt Blessing as her heir, and that the girl will marry Conrad's infant son, if the little lad lives."

"Become regnant? Blessing?"

The captain was weary, face shadowed, eyes dark, as he considered the girl now dropping off to sleep. "I don't know what to think of this alliance with the Eika. Yet they did have us outnumbered and surrounded. They could have done great damage to the armies of Wendar and Varre, but their lord, this Stronghand, did hold back the killing blow. There's a party of them with us, come to escort the witch woman. To make sure she's not harmed, I suppose, although she's more dangerous to us than we are to her."

Words, like stars, swung on their course overhead and passed on into the night. She knew she ought to concentrate, but it was so difficult.

"What of Sanglant?" she asked. "Hanna, bring me the crown." Then, after all, she remembered he was dead.

"She's all that's left of him." Fulk's face was wet, and he smiled sadly. "The little spitfire. Thinking she could have saved him! Poor mite."

"No, he's not dead," she said, but when she turned around and saw him lying still and silent within the ring of light, she knew he was. "I can't bear it," she whispered.

"Nor can any of us, my lady, but we must. Ai, God! We must."

5

CAPTAIN Fulk carried Princess Blessing to the guesthouse, where a soft bed awaited her. Anna knelt beside her. As the girl slept, Anna undid the awful topknot and combed out Blessing's black hair as well as she could. She could not bear to look at the girl with her hair done up in the manner of savages.

Fulk was speaking at the door in a low voice, arranging for food and drink, water to wash, a guard to be set over the girl. Two lamps were lit, one set on a tripod by the door and one hanging from a hook in the corner, so the girl would not wake to darkness. She would be well guarded. Sanglant's guard would see to that.

She heard them talking: Blessing was to be named as heir to Theophanu. She would marry the son of Conrad and Tallia, now an infant. Someday, God willing, she would be regnant.

Anna caught the attention of one of the guardsmen, Sibold, the man with the torn throat who spoke now in a hoarse croak that would always remind her of Prince Sanglant's injured voice. "Is it true that Princess Theophanu will marry an—an Eika prince?" she whispered.

Sibold had always been a lively, bold man more likely to leap than to look, but his face was pale, he was exhausted, worn right through with grief. "So it is," he said curtly, then shook his head and turned away.

She sat cross-legged beside the girl's pallet, stroking that black hair, too restless to sleep as night came on. With her other hand she traced, over and over, the carved dogs' heads on the staff.

Something about the polish and smoothness of the wood comforted her.

From outside, a dog gave a low, whuffing bark, as a man might gently call for attention from a dozing merchant. Voices murmured from the porch. The door opened, and a man walked into the room. She recognized him, although he did not walk with his two massive black hounds in attendance, not in here.

He looked first at Blessing. The princess slept with an arm flung out and her legs tangled in a blanket. He knelt beside her, touched a hand to the girl's cheek, listened, sighed. Then he looked up at Anna. Tipped his head sideways, eyes narrowing.

"I know you," he said softly. "You were at Gent."

Choked, she could only nod. But as her hand tightened over the staff, she found her voice.

"You gave your Holy Circle to an Eika prince," she said.

He smiled, eyes crinkling with surprise. "So I did."

"I-I saw it. Him. He was in the cathedral at Gent. He let Matthias and me escape. He let us go.

He could have killed us. Any of the others would have. But he let us go."

The young man's eyes were dark. Like the guivre, his gaze pinned her, as though he would dig all the way down until she had no secrets left. She clutched the staff and, drawn by the movement, he looked beyond her, and saw it.

He gasped. A slap across the face might have struck him, because he recoiled, eyes widened and head thrown back.

Yet the sting, however sharp, was brief.

He coughed, wiped his brow touched his throat. From outside, a dog barked interrogatively.

"I pray you," he said, voice a bit ragged, "where did you get that staff?"

Must she tell him? He stared at it possessively, and she wrapped both hands around the haft and drew it awkwardly against her body. Words stuck in her throat, but she knew she must speak. She must not remain silent.

"I-I-Lady Liathano gave it to me."

"How came she by it? Do you know?"

"I-I-we didn't have it before. In Ashioi country. She found it up at the crown, the one up here, where we walked through from the south. I heard her telling—as we walked down here—she found it by the hermit's hut. She said—she said—" The words seemed so ridiculous she was afraid to utter them, but he looked at her so steadily that she stumbled on. "She said a—a lion dropped it at her feet." She braced herself for his scorn, for laughter, for anger.

He sat back on his haunches. He let out all his breath, and passed a hand over his hair. "No. No." And then, reluctantly, but as if he could not stop himself from saying it, he said, "It was mine, once."

Almost, she sobbed.

He flicked moisture from beneath an eye. "Might I just—-just—" Reaching, he hesitated.

At length, rigid with fear of losing the staff, she released it into his hands. He traced the carved heads, the length of the shaft, the cut where the wood had been hacked. He shut his eyes, and after a moment opened them. Blessing snorted softly in her sleep and turned over, but did not wake.

"Let it be passed on to the one who needs it most," he said, giving it back to her.

She was ashamed at how she grabbed it from him, but he only smiled gently. He rose, took a step away, paused to turn back.

"You are not the only survivor from Gent who walks in royal circles this day, now that I think on it. Lord Stronghand's council includes a man who was once from Gent, called Otto. 'Papa Otto,' I heard the others calling him. He's in Kassel with the rest of Strong-hand's army."

Then he left.

She stared at the closed door as the lamps hissed. Papa Otto! If Princess Blessing was to be the heir, and Princess Theophanu and this Lord Stronghand were to rule, and Papa Otto stood in Lord Stronghand's council, then surely she and Papa Otto could be together somehow, sometimes.

Leaping up, she ran after him. He was still on the porch, talking in a low voice to Captain Fulk, whose eyes were red from weeping.

"I'm sorry," she said, grabbing his arm. "Here. Here."

She pushed the staff at him. Reflexively, he took it. He stiffened, holding it, stroking it. He, too, had tears in his eyes.

"I have what I need," she said. "You just gave it to me. Please. This is yours. You must take it."

For a long while he did not move, as if he had been struck dumb. But at length he smiled. He touched her forehead with two fingers.

"For this gift," he said, "I thank you."

Then he was gone.

6

DURING Vespers, Rosvita stayed beside Mother Obligatia, who rested comfortably, propped up on pillows, on a litter set across a pair of benches beside the bier.

"I will remain with my granddaughter," said the old abbess as the service came to a close. Captain Fulk had carried off the sleeping princess, while Liathano remained kneeling by the bier.

Rosvita nodded. "I must pay my respects at the guesthouse, to Biscop Constance."

She left the church and walked alone to the guesthouse.

Although the upper suite was usually given to the highest-ranking guest, Biscop Constance had taken the lower rooms because she could not get up the stairs. She greeted Rosvita from a chair. Now and again she rubbed her hands together as if chafing them against cold. The lamplight softened the lines of pain that creased her forehead and around her eyes and mouth. She even smiled, although the gesture quickly flickered into a wince of pain.

Rosvita kissed the biscop's ring. The young nun who hovered in constant attendance patted pillows and rubbed Constance's shoulders, trying to make her more comfortable.

"I leave in the morning to continue my journey to Autun." Although Constance's body was weak, her will remained strong. "I must return to my seat as biscop. Seal the betrothal between Conrad's son and Sanglant's daughter. Oversee preparations for the crowning and anointing."

"Have we judged wisely, or rashly?" Rosvita asked her.

"We have judged as well as we can. This Eika lord is far more subtle and farseeing than he seems at first glance. In any case, his army would have crushed both Wendar's and Varre's had Theophanu not acted precipitously."

"Had you speech with her beforehand? Did you know what to expect?"

"No. I was as surprised as you. That is not even the greater part of what this cataclysm has brought in its wake. These clerics of my loyal schola will begin preparations for the council to be convened next summer. Best if it is held in Autun, under the shadow of the old emperor and the Council of Narvone."

"When Biscop Tallia was repudiated, the arts of the mathematici and malefici, any sorcery done outside the auspices of the church, were condemned."

Constance reached for and, with an effort, grasped Rosvita's hand, looked searchingly into her eyes. "Will you support me? You understand that I believe in the miracle of the phoenix."

"I will judge fairly. The writings of the church mothers weigh heavily, but I must bow to truth if truth is revealed."

They kissed as sisters.

After checking to make sure the child was settled and her attendant given food and drink and a pallet to rest on, Rosvita walked upstairs where Brother Fortunatus, Brother Jehan, and the three girls had open the books: the Vita of St. Radegundis, their copy of the Chronicles from St. Ekatarina, and the Annals of Autun salvaged from the library in Darre.

"Fortunatus found a copy of the Chronicle of Vitalia in the library here." Heriburg brandished the volume triumphantly. "So it is agreed that Taillefer had four daughters who lived to adulthood. Three entered the church, one of them Biscop Tallia. The fourth, Lady Gundara, married the duc de Rossalia.

She had three children by him. The eldest inherited the dukedom, the second entered the church, and the third—a boy named Hugo—married the infant daughter of the count of Lavas, Lavastina."

"So it's true that the only remaining descendants of Taillefer in Wendar and Varre are the line of Lavas," said Ruoda, speaking on top of Heriburg's last sentence. "But we learned this before, in Darre, Sister Rosvita. Why is it of interest now?"

" 'The world divides those whom no space parted once.' " Rosvita found that Fortunatus had brought her a chair, and she sank down gratefully. She rubbed her forehead with the heel of a hand, shutting her eyes. "It has all been hidden in plain sight. We know whose child Brother Fidelis was. He was the heir of Taillefer by Queen Radegundis. We are blinded by his piety and his longevity, his good name, his reputation. That is why we never wonder at the girl he briefly wed."

"Why do the hounds of Lavas bow before Mother Obligatia?" asked Gerwita. "We all saw it happen."

Rosvita nodded. "The simplest explanation is usually the correct one."

The room was simply furnished with rope beds, benches, a table, and a chest. The shutters had been taken down from both windows. They had left the door open to help the breeze pass through.

Besides their writing implements and the precious books, they traveled with nothing more than a few extra robes and tunics, a pair of combs, brooches and pins for cloaks, blankets, flasks, needles and thread, eating utensils, a maul and muller, a bladder filled with lanolin, a sack of candles, and one iron pot.

They asked for nothing more than this.

She looked at her loyal schola: Fortunatus, who had endured so much and never once complained; the three clever girls; young Jehan, made frail by their journey but hanging on. Sister Amabilia had died long ago, and Brother Constantine had not survived the king's progress. Aurea had died together with Brother Jerome in that first raid, but there would be others, waiting in Theophanu's schola or learning their lessons in some novices' hall, who would join them.

Someone must strike a lamp to flame in the darkness. Someone must care above all things that the truth be illuminated.

"He knows," said Rosvita.

"Who knows?" asked Gerwita, but the others were already nodding.

"I saw him," said Heriburg, "as I was coming upstairs. He was in this house, but he left and walked out into the tent camp, among the refugees. Is he a holy man, Sister?"

"He is a mystery, sent by God for us to unravel. He knows the truth. This I must do, as we are commanded by the regnant, whom we serve. Princess Theophanu desires that the rightful heir of the county of Lavas be brought forward. I will see it done. For the sake of King Henry, whom I loved, who loved his bastard son best of all his children, although it was unwise of him to do so."

"Love is not wise," said Fortunatus, whose hand rested on her shoulder. "Love is most unwise of all."

"Yet it sustains us."

7

THE night wind whispers in the trees. Folk huddle under the scant shelter of canvas stretched between limbs, staked down at corners. Some among the children sleep soundly, curled tight in blankets, but one is sobbing with eyes open.

He knelt beside the women tending her. "Is this your child?"

"Nay, not mine. My sister's. She saw her mother murdered, my lord. She has these nightmares. You see." She waved a hand in front of the child's staring eyes, but the little girl did not react. "She is asleep. I always wake her, but when she falls back to sleep, it's the same over again."

He set a hand on the child's dirty brow. The hair was combed back and tightly braided, greasy because unwashed, but otherwise neat. The shift the child wore was smeared with dirt but several tears in the fabric had been precisely repaired with even stitches.

He closed her eyes gently. After a moment her sobs subsided and she sighed and fell into a calm slumber.

"Can you sleep?" he asked her aunt, who was, he saw now, a young woman made old by what she had seen. No older than his foster cousin, Agnes, yet her cheeks were hollows, and her gaze was bleak.

"It's hard to sleep," she admitted.

"You must have a name. What happened?"

"I'm called Leisl. I've six nieces and nephews to tend. Both of my sisters were murdered. And my brother-in-law, hit by a falling branch. The other's husband is gone missing, God help him. I was betrothed to Karl, who lived over by Linde—that's a half day's walk from our village. But I haven't seen him since that day. We've good land where we are, but no man to till and tend the fields. These boys are too young. I can't tend to house and field at the same time. I don't know what we'll do this winter."

She raised her head to stare through the dark night toward the black shadow of the church and its high tower. "They say the phoenix came, that it was a sign from God. But I don't know, my lord. I was frightened. It got so cold, like a winter storm. Maybe it was the Enemy instead. Three demons walk here, with their masks, in the company of the winged one. The same ones that killed my family. How can I think they are beloved of God?"

"These seeds were sown long ago," he said, taking her hand, "but it is our fate to be left with the harvest. Let those who remain here be at peace. God's mercy reaches into many hearts. As for you, Leisl, what needs doing?"

She shrugged, gone beyond sorrow into bitter practicality. "I need a husband. If Karl is dead—and I suppose he must be, since he didn't come here and I heard that Linde was burned right down, all of it— then I must find another man willing. It's a decent household, with good land, and two walnut trees and six fruit trees. We had five sheep and four goats, but they're lost, too. Chickens.

Near the river. The house well thatched. Three other families nearby, none of them cousins to us. One family of outlanders up from south of Autun who settled there in my grandmother's time."

"There might be a man among these refugees here, who lost his wife and needs to marry."

She flashed him a look. She had a stark gaze, stripped of illusions. "There is one man I have noticed. He came out of Kien, up in the high country. But he's lost in his mourning, more a mute beast than a man. I don't know if I can carry him out."

"Wounded beasts can be healed by treating them with patience and respect. So may humankind.

You are strong."

"What choice have I? I am all that's left. I would not have my family's name die with me, and the good land we farm go to some other, for we've not even any cousins left to us. If I lose the land, the children will have to go out as bondsmen or servants."

He left her and went on, talking to those who were wakeful and smelling out those who were sick. Hamlets and villages and farms all through this region had been laid waste, they told him, crops left unsown, livestock scattered, and many, many folk were dead. It would be a hard winter ahead, but at least they now had the rest of summer to rebuild and some measure of peace to build in. At least they now had some hope to hold onto.

Late in the night, he circled back to the main compound. The haze had thinned. The quarter moon faded in and out behind wisps of high cloud. At zenith, the Queen processed in glory with her Sword, Staff, and jeweled Cup. The Dragon had already set.

Lions stood at guard on the porch, and their captain hailed him.

"Lord Alain. You are out late."

"Many sleep restlessly tonight," he remarked. "Now that I think on it, Captain Thiadbold, are there any men among your Lions who are ready to retire from the regnant's service? There's at least one young householder with a grand inheritance who is in desperate need of a partner—a husband—to help her hold her land and title."

"She's too high for me," said the captain with a startled laugh.

Alain was startled in his turn. "I pray you, what do you mean?

"Sister Rosvita has let it be known. The good cleric went inside not long ago, to the mourners."

"Let what be known?"

"About the rightful heir to Lavas County. Who would have guessed it! The holy abbess cannot live long, and so the granddaughter will take the coronet. It's a miracle—don't you think?—for the truth to be known after so long." He paused, seeing that his dozen men on guard had shifted closer to listen. "Still, no triumph, coming in the wake of her grief."

"See there." Sergeant Ingo pointed at the sky over the dormitory roofs. "There's the Phoenix, rising."

Where the haze cleared, the constellation Alain had always known as the Eagle unfurled its great square of wings. No one corrected the other man.

"They're saying it's why you brought the hounds of Lavas, all this way," said the captain. "None dare touch them but the rightful heir to Lavas. That's what they're saying."

"What will you do now, you Lions?" Alain asked.

The lamps lit along the porch illuminated the captain's crooked smile and flame-red hair. "Queen Theophanu herself called me to her chambers before we left. She has asked me to stay on as captain.

It's all I'm good for—training new Lions, that is. I'll do it. As for these others, that's up to them. They've served faithfully on a long road."

"There's a young woman named Leisl in the refugee camp. She's looking for a husband willing to farm the land she inherited, and help her raise her nephews and nieces." He nodded at the gaggle of men.

Passing up the steps and under the porch, he crossed into the church.

In silence, the vault of air below the high ceiling of Hersford's church breathes. A pair of monks murmurs prayers, and the lamps lit along the aisles whisper along their wicks, but otherwise the scene looks very like a painted mural.

The bier rests solidly on earth, holding death, which weighs heavily on all mortal kind. The face is uncovered and at peace. The black hair is combed neatly away from the beardless face. He is robed in rich linen, a fitting burial shroud. A glittering crown of stars sits upon the motionless chest. His cold hands hold it, a thing forever beyond his grasp.

Two women crowd close, one kneeling in an attitude of despair and the other standing with hands at rest on those bowed shoulders, but it is youth that has been felled and age that shows resilience. Mother Obligatia has gained remarkably in strength even in the short hours since they entered Hersford Monastery. It may be a tangled skein of sorcery is at work, or perhaps it is simply her joy at being reunited with her granddaughter that invigorates her.

The hounds sit on either side of the old woman. It is they who see him enter. They thump their tails lightly and gaze lovingly at him but do not move. His grip tightens on the staff Kel carved for him so long ago that those days are lost to memory, just as these days will be, in time. Only the daimones of the upper air can see in all directions: north and south, above and below, past and future.

Yet memory prods us. Much of what we are and what we choose and how we act and react come about because of what we remember. Not so long ago he himself knelt beside the bier set in Lavas church; he touched Lavastine's cold right hand and heard the breath of stone.

What seems dead may only be in stasis.

He walked forward. Many had joined the vigil, out of love or respect for the man. Sister Rosvita had brought her schola. A pair of Eagles waited to one side—no, after all, it was only the Eagle called Hanna, with a redheaded companion, a man he had seen before but whose name he did not know. Father Ortulfus prayed by the Hearth together with Prior Ratbold and all the monks and lay brothers. Captain Fulk stood guard over Princess Blessing, who had, it seemed, come back after resting in the guesthouse. The child's eyes were open, and she watched Alain pass. Captain Thiadbold, Sergeant Ingo, and a trio of other Lions moved up behind him, following him in from outside.

Honest witnesses all.

Mother Obligatia turned as he came up behind her. She was frail, tiny, ancient, but nevertheless a woman of immense spiritual power and inner strength. She smiled in the manner of one who has experienced every means and method of betrayal, yet can still find it in her heart to trust humankind, at least one or two of them. Her trust was hard won, but once won, given without reservation.

"Who are you?" she asked him.

The hounds waggled over to greet him. He noticed for the first time how Rage's belly had begun to round. The truth, it seems, is fertile ground. He scratched her under the ear just how she liked it best. Sorrow pressed his big head against Alain's leg.

"Lady," he said, acknowledging her. "Lavrentia, count of Lavas. Great granddaughter of the Emperor Taillefer."

"How can it be?" she asked him. "Although you are not the first to say so." She nodded toward Sister Rosvita.

"There are some links in the chain that I still do not quite understand," said Sister Rosvita. Each member of her schola, clustered around her, clutched a book like a talisman, these keepers of memory. "That the counts of Lavas claim a grandson of Taillefer as their ancestor I can prove through these chronicles. It is the shadow that lies over the succession of the elder Charles that defeats me."

"I know only what I have seen in a vision. Yet this same vision has been woven into a tapestry that hangs in Lavas hall."

As Alain began speaking, Father Ortulfus broke off his prayer and, with the prior, strode to the bier in order to listen.

"Imagine, if you will, a boy born as the only child of a powerful count. He is raised with every expectation of becoming heir. Then his mother—after eighteen years of barrenness—becomes pregnant late in life. She dies in childbed. She will never know the truth: that she gave birth not to a second son, but to twins, girl and boy. In Varre, according to the old custom, girls take precedence over boys because only through the body of the woman is it sure that the line continues."

Rage whined. Sorrow gave a faint growl that sounded almost like a groan.

"So comes Sister Clothilde, companion and ally to Biscop Tallia, to Lavas Holding.

They are in need of a fitting bride for the last heir of the long-dead Taillefer, to set in train a defense against the coming cataclysm they alone perceive. It must not be any girl but one of highest birth. Like this one, descended herself from Taillefer."

"They would be too closely related," protested Sister Rosvita. "The church would never approve."

"None of this was accomplished under the auspices of the church. To the elder Charles—now desperate—they give the hounds as surety for the exchange. He gives them the infant girl. His mother is dead. The midwife's fate I do not know. It is as if the girl never existed, was never born. He becomes count, marries, sires an heir. His younger brother gives birth to children of his own, all unknowing."

"You are saying," said Mother Obligatia, "that I was that infant girl."

The hounds squirmed over to her and licked her hands. They could have knocked her over with a single butt of one of those huge heads, but their touch was as gentle as that of mice.

"And that my granddaughter is therefore my heir. That Liath is heir to the county of Lavas."

Wind gusted through the dark opening where the rose window had once shone. Every lamp flame shuddered. A cold breeze kissed Alain's face, whispering around him. A tickle of cool air slipped in his ears and mouth and nose. For one instant, the essence that is the aether breathed through his limbs and his chest, embracing him, and then it poured away and into a different vessel.

Liath leaped to her feet as Sanglant's eyes snapped open. They shone with sharp blue fire, easy to see in the gloomy light.

She shrieked with rage. "Go! Go! Get out of his body!"

Alain stepped up beside her and stilled her with a hand on her arm.

"You are come back," he said.

"I found what we spoke of," said the daimone through Sanglant's lips, in a voice that was like and yet utterly unlike Sanglant's familiar and well loved voice. "I brought it back."

"Then you have done as he would have done."

The head nodded, an awkward movement learned rather than natural. "I have done as he would have done."

"Go in peace," said Alain.

The flame in those dead eyes wavered. The mouth moved, and after a moment sound came out.

"Can I ever find him again?"

Alain touched his cheek to the cool wood of the staff. It was Adica he saw, walking the trail that leads to the land where the meadow flowers bloom. A place far away and long ago, lost to him. He looked up, into the eyes of the daimone.

"Sometimes we are forever separated from the one we love. But, in truth, I do not know what lies beyond the veil."

"Then I will keep looking."

A breath gasped out of those lips.

Liath groaned as the body went slack. She collapsed to the floor.

Now and again, silence is a caught breath, all creation suspended between one heartbeat and the next. No one spoke. No one moved. The lamps burned, but they could not obliterate the shadows.

"He is breathing," said Countess Lavrentia, once known as Mother Obligatia.

Sanglant opened his eyes, dark with the look of his mother's kin. He blinked, as if trying to focus, and he did so finally as Liath staggered to her feet and stared at him incredulously.

"Liath," he said, and he reached for her hand.

XIV

THE CROWN

1

"I PRAY you, Sister. Wake up."

She sighed, wishing for this instant that she might not have to open her eyes and walk into the new day

Fortunatus chuckled. "You must wake. It is already accomplished three days ago. Fear not. We will stand beside you. But come quickly. Sister Hathumod is asking for you."

She opened her eyes to see his dear face hovering above hers. He had gained weight over the last year. He looked well. The girls—in truth they had earned the right to be called young women, but they would always be girls to her—waited impatiently, all bright smiles and shiny faces, and there was Brother Jehan and the new scribe, shy Baldwin, the frail scholar Brother Sigfrid, genial Brother Ermanrich, and more besides, clerics, presbyters, deacons, fraters, abbesses and abbots, monks and nuns, biscops, and even the humble lay brothers and sisters who worked the holy estates.

Hers, now. All of them.

The chamber was an opulent one, clothed in silks and tapestries. The couch on which she had taken her nap was embroidered in the Salian style with scenes cross-stitched into the fabric, in this case, episodes from the life of the Emperor Taillefer. There he rides with his black hounds upon the hunt; there he stands with staff and book, one hand raised, remarking on the stars in the heavens; there he sits with the crown of stars on his brow while he passes judgment over the famous dispute between two beekeepers; there he weds for the fourth time, and there he dies, hand clasping the wrist of his young queen, Radegundis, who is soon to be known as a saint.

The journey is a long one, and none can know when or where it will end.

They helped her to rise, and arrayed her in heavy robes, which she did not like. She thought longingly of her books. Surely there would be an hour here or there to continue the Deeds of the Great Princes once all the fuss died down.

They escorted her down a wide corridor, down steps to the lower level, and through a garden heavy with the scent of roses.

Last summer had remained cool, and the first frosts had come early. The winter had been hard, and many had died, and spring had come late again, but the skies had begun to clear. All summer they had been fortunate in days of lingering heat that caused the flowers to bloom wildly and in fierce colors.

She heard the swell and murmur of the crowd in the octagonal chapel, constant like the mutter of the sea along the shore, but Brother Fortunatus steered her to a suite opening off the rose garden. The shutters were closed because, here at the end, the light hurt the dying woman's eyes.

Mother Scholastica was leaving. She paused at the door, and stepped back to let Rosvita pass in before she went out. She inclined her head, as she must do now, although Rosvita felt no triumph in it.

Indeed, none of this had been of her doing.

"It is agreed that—with your blessing—Sister Hathumod will become biscop of Autun," said the abbess.

Rosvita nodded. "Are you at peace, Mother Scholastica? Your voice has been raised many times among those who argued most forcefully against the final decision made by the council."

The abbess looked toward the couch placed among the shadows. Her expression remained disapproving, but her words were firm. "I have spoken last rites over her. At the hour of dying, a person may see the heart of God, and speak true words. So is it written."

She departed, making for the chapel. Rosvita crossed the chamber and knelt beside the couch, but Constance's eyes were closed although a faint rise and fall like the echo of the sea swell stirred her chest.

Sister Hathumod kissed Rosvita's ring. "Holy Mother."

"Has she spoken?"

"Not since three days ago, Holy Mother, when she made conference with the last of them that held out against the truth."

"Does she know that the final vote came last night?"

"I have not told her, Holy Mother."

Rosvita took that limp hand between hers. She felt Fortunatus behind her, a steadfast presence.

There were others in the chamber, and it seemed to her that many stood who were living and many who were only there in spirit, waiting to guide Constance's soul up through the spheres to the Chamber of Light.

"I will tell it quickly, Constance. It has come about as you foresaw. The testimony of The Book of Secrets has opened its heart to us. The council has spoken. The world has changed. From this day forward the church will follow the path of the Redemption. So be it."

Constance stirred. Her mouth parted. "Who are you?" she whispered.

Rosvita smiled wryly, glancing over her shoulder at Fortunatus and the others. In the room it was too dim to make out any but shadows, figures that might be dream or real, the past or the present or the future.

"I have been elected as Holy Mother, according to the decision of the council and the college of presbyters. Darre lies in ruins. It is uninhabitable, as our agents have seen. Autun will become the seat of the skopos. What is left to tell you? Nothing and everything."

"You are the rose," Constance murmured, in answer to her own question, and Rosvita saw that her vision had, in fact, ascended far past the bounds of mortal Earth. "Yet where have you gone?"

Then her eyes opened and her face was transformed as if by light. "Ah! There is your crown!"

The breath left her. She died.

The journey would be a long one, climbing the ladder of the spheres.

Rosvita prayed over the body, and then they must go. Many were waiting.

The day was bright; the sun shone. The octagonal chapel was packed tight, and more spilled into the courtyard, folk from many lands: Wendar and Varre, the Eika north, the marchlands, Karrone, Polenie, Salavii deacons and monks, a handful of renegade Salian clerics split away from the rest of Salia's biscops who had refused even to send an official representative to the council, a straggle of church folk out of Aosta who did not support the unknown skopos appointed by Queen Adelheid, and a party of contentious observers from Arethousa who had nonetheless striven at intervals to strike a note of conciliation. They, too, had suffered. They, too, struggled to recover from the cataclysm. Alba remained stubbornly heathen except where the Eika ruled, and it was rumored that the king would soon set sail to fight a rebellion in the Alban hinterlands.

For now queen and king observed together with other nobles of the land, Prince Ekkehard, the dukes and margraves and nobles and biscops and monastics, any of whom could see the great benefit to Wendar and Varre in having the seat of spiritual power move into the north out of the south. The crown of stars rested in the grasp of Taillefer once again, atop his carved statue, because it had been returned to Autun and laid on his bier in memory of his empire. But after all, it was only an object of gold and jewels.

The true crown of stars had no such earthly substance. It could not be grasped or held, fought over or broken, but it could be worn by the one whose heart was pure.

He had vanished after the miracle of Sanglant. That was all anyone knew.

Fortunatus touched her on the elbow. "I pray you. Wake up."

She startled out of her reverie. This was not what she had expected, nor was it anything she had sought. But it had come to her nevertheless. So be it.

She fixed her courage with a deep breath, and walked forward into the assembly that was waiting for her.

2

HANNA had ridden to Lavas County before, although never with such an escort. All morning the road had pushed through woodland, passing here and there an abandoned or burned-out farmstead or hamlet. For the last three days they had traveled through empty countryside, seeing no one. She remembered the road, and knew they were no more than two or three days out from Lavas Holding.

Near midday, freshly cut fields appeared suddenly along the roadside, ringed by low fences.

Ahead, a wide path cut away from the road. In the distance she heard axes ringing against wood. A voice shouted just before the crash of a felled tree resounded. Then the axes started up again.

A wain piled high with hay and a cart loaded with coiled rope were cutting off the main road onto the path. One of the men walking alongside saw their company coming up around the curve, and he broke off from the others and sauntered their way, holding his scythe as if he knew how to make it a weapon.

Hanna pushed forward from the van and rode to meet him. He was a lanky young man with dark hair and a pleasant face.

"Well met," she called out. "I'm an Eagle, riding from Autun."

"A fine company you have to escort you," he said. "I recall when Eagles rode alone on these roads."

"Not that long ago," she retorted, "but you know it isn't safe now. There's some rough country back there, abandoned by honest folk since the tempest."

He grunted, squinting as the company neared, counting them on his fingers: a dozen horsemen and a dozen Eika ambling at that easy stride they could hold for weeks on end, it seemed. Over the course of a day they had to restrain themselves from outpacing the horses.

"Some abandoned their lands," he remarked, looking at the Eika with the usual suspicion. "The others starved or were murdered by savages and outlaws."

"They're our allies."

"So they are, now. But I was at Gent."

She saw no way to answer this, so she changed the subject. "There wasn't so much settlement here last time I passed this way. New fields. What's down that path?"

"Oh, that's Ravnholt Manor, all right. It was cut out of the forest a generation ago, just a small holding, but we've got it building fast, now, quite a few out of Lavas Holding have moved along out this way with the blessing of the count and some have fled to us from farther east, as you saw. We've a stout palisade, and room to grow. We've got our own plough, too!" He grinned, suddenly delighted, raised a hand, and waved frantically. "Ivar! Ivar!"

Ivar broke out of the company—he had been arguing with that impossible chatter-mouth Aestan of Alba about whether the phoenix had two wings or six—and trotted toward them. Ai, God! She bit down on a grin to see his sulky expression break into a broad smile.

"Erkanwulf!"

"What? Are you riding in the regnant's service now, Lord Ivar?"

"I'm an Eagle," he said.

"You can't be. You're noble born. My lord." That last said with a grin.

Ivar pulled up alongside and swung down off his horse. "Maybe so, but my brother Gero is glad to be shed of me. Good God, Erkanwulf! You're looking well!"

Then she must endure greetings and slaps on the back and all manner of hail, fellow and well met cheer, when truly she just wanted to get on to Lavas Holding. At length, it was settled that Ivar would stay overnight in Ravnholt Manor to catch up on the news and give out his own, and come along afterward.

She rode on with the escort. They were truly in Lavas County now, ripe with summer, trees in full leaf and berries plump and juicy where the sun had sweetened them.

Hamlets sprouted at intervals along the road, each ringed by a stockade. Goats grazed, heads deep into brambles. Shepherd children waved at her, then scampered off as the Eika contingent strode into view.

In another day they came to cleared land surrounded by stands of woodland and coppice where flocks of sheep grazed amiably, and after that rode past newly cut fields where men and women were picking out stones so the land could be ploughed for winter wheat. Sooner than she expected, they came over the slope to see the vast spread of striped fields surrounding Lavas Holding. A new stockade had engulfed the old church, which had long stood outside the old earth wall and its four wooden towers. Folk were building a pair of houses along a dirt street struck straight out from the old gate. The company passed a pair of recently planted orchards, still saplings, and a tenting field with fulled cloth strung out taut to dry.

The call came up from the watchtower. She unfurled their banner, and they rode through the outer gate, along the dusty avenue, under the old gate, and into a busy square.

Grooms ran up to take their horses and show the soldiers to barracks.

Hanna ran up the steps into the hall, which was empty and peaceful in the late afternoon but with the tables set in place for a feast. The clap of her feet on the plank floor seemed desperately noisy. A steward led her through a tiny courtyard alive with color and fragrant with herbs and flowers, and she almost mistakenly turned through the arch that led into the stable yard beyond but was guided to a door set into the old stone tower, relic of an earlier time. As she climbed the curving staircase that led to the upper chamber, she tried to walk softly.

She paused in the entryway. Two windows set at angles into the walls allowed light into the whitewashed room. One was a magnificent painted glass scene depicting the martyrdom of St. Lavrentius and the other a simple opening to let in a cooling breeze. Through that window she saw the skeletal rafters of a two-storied wing being added onto the compound, but no one was working there at the moment. A pair of tapestries hung to either side of the door. One depicted the Lavas badge—two black hounds on a silver field—but the murky colors of the other mostly obscured its scene, which seemed to show a procession making its way through a dark forest.

After the steady clop of travel and the hustle of the courtyard, the silence in the chamber weighed heavily, nothing heard or seen except the scritch of a quill on parchment and the press of styluses into wax tablets. This was the count's chamber, with a table, cushioned chair, and a dozen cups and two flasks set along a sideboard, but it appeared more like one of the schoolrooms found in the convent. Yet most of the people hard at work here were not children but adults, both young and old. At intervals, one or another of these glanced up to note her presence before returning to their work. A young woman with the coloring and features of the Ashioi gave Hanna a tartly welcoming smile, and then winked at a good-looking young man, who blushed furiously. It was strange to see one of the enemy dressed in Wendish clothing, although admittedly she wore neither shoes nor leggings under her knee-length tunic.

To one side stood a fine couch on which lay the ancient countess, sleeping while the others worked.

Sister Hilaria sat beside her, sewing; she greeted Hanna with a welcoming smile. A pack of yearling hounds stretched out around and under the couch, three plopped on their sides, one rolled onto its back, and the fifth licking a forepaw.

Two fair-haired girls whispered, but so loudly that Hanna could hear them.

"I don't think it's fair, that she got to go out."

"And we had to stay in! But I guess she always gets what she wants."

"She is the heir. She's never said a mean thing to me, Blanche. She's not nearly as mean as you are."

"I am not!"

"You are, too!"

"I just tell the truth. That's not mean!"

"Blanche. Lavrentia. Keep to your work, I pray you," said Liath from her writing table, so engrossed in her work that she alone did not look up or even seem to notice that someone had come into the room. From this angle, all Hanna could see was loops and circles and the scratchings that signified letters and numbers.

A horn sounded in the distance. The young hounds leaped into motion, skittered over the floor, streamed past Hanna, and bounded away down the steps. The two girls set their tablets down with a clatter and raced after them before anyone could scold them to a stop.

By now every soul there except the sleeping woman and the oblivious one was looking either at Hanna or toward the window. Finally, the youth got up and stuck his head out the window.

For some reason, this movement drew Liath's attention, and she glanced first at the window and then toward the door.

"Hanna!" She put a hand over her mouth and glanced toward the couch, but her grandmother did not wake.

The youth pulled back in. "Have you a message from the queen? Or my sister?" He was a young man of perhaps eighteen, restless, with a charming smile and ink-stained fingers.

"Afraid it's news of your betrothal, Berthold?" asked one of the other students.

He looked toward the Ashioi woman, who was now deliberately ignoring him, and blushed again.

"Hush," said Liath sternly. "Do not wake my grandmother. Go on. Out with you."

Hanna stepped aside as they filed out of the chamber. Liath sighed, smiled happily at her, and levered herself up out of her chair. The position of the desk had concealed her rounded stomach. She walked over to her grandmother and bent awkwardly to kiss her cheek.

"I'll stay with her," said the nun.

"Thank you, Sister." She hurried over to Hanna.

"You're more than I can embrace," said Hanna with a laugh, kissing her.

"Come," she said to Hanna, taking her arm. "Let me use you as balance going down these steps. I'm afraid I'll topple forward. Ai, God, it is good to see you. What news?"

Hanna waited to answer until they came out into the garden. Bees buzzed, and a fly pestered her until she swatted it away. "The Council of Autun has voted to recognize the Redemption."

Liath caught in her breath, but made no comment.

"I've brought back your Da's book, courtesy of the Holy Mother, who had copies made."

"The Holy Mother?"

"They elected Sister Rosvita. Autun is to be the seat of the skopos. For now. She has lifted the writ of excommunication."

Liath stroked her pregnant belly. "Thank God, for the child's sake as well as my own. If there's more, I pray you, wait until we meet together later, so it can all be said at once. Let my grandmother be awake to hear it."

"Is she well?"

"Very old, and very tired, but her mind remains clear. She could die tomorrow, or five years from now. I just don't know. I pray she stays with us as long as possible." She paused beside a rosebush to touch a blossom whose petals were saturated with crimson. "Oh, look, another bloom."

A commotion blew in from the stable yard, a burst of laughter and bodies flooding through the arched gate and out into the garden, foremost among them the prince.

He marked Hanna instantly, and smiled. "What news for my daughter?" It was a shock to hear him speak. The powerful tenor remained, but that familiar hoarseness was utterly gone.

The young hounds galloped to Liath for pats on the head but immediately returned to circle Sanglant, shoving in to get a rub and a scratch on the head.

After a moment, Hanna remembered herself and spotted the princess lingering under the archway in a patch of shade beside Lord Berthold, who had paused there to talk to Captain Fulk.

She was quite a tall girl, well filled out.

"Yes, there is news," said Hanna. "Queen Theophanu sends her affectionate greetings to her dead kinsman. The king is on his way to Alba. He will take Princess Blessing with him on campaign."

"I want Berthold to come with me," said Blessing in that bold way she had. Some things hadn't changed!

Startled, the young man turned around. "To Alba? With the brat?"

"He will be going," said Hanna, "since a betrothal has been arranged for him with one of the surviving daughters of the Alban royal family."

Liath looked at Sanglant. The prince shrugged, lifting one eyebrow. Berthold looked toward the Ashioi woman, who rubbed the back of her neck and preened in the manner of a woman who enjoys teasing men. Blessing sucked in a sharp breath.

After a moment, in which the entire garden and all its inhabitants seemed to hold a collective breath, waiting for the explosion, the girl bit her lip and said nothing. She moved forward to shyly kiss her mother, but like the hounds she swung back to her father's side.

"How soon can we expect Lord Stronghand?" asked Sanglant, resting an arm over his daughter's shoulders affectionately. She leaned against him.

"He will arrive by the Feast of the King."

"Captain Fulk, best take her to the armory and see what needs fitting. We haven't much time."

"Yes, my lord prince."

Sanglant nodded, studied Hanna's state of dress and dust, and called a steward. "See that this Eagle is given whatever she needs, something to drink, and a bath, if she desires it. If you could wait until the count wakes, and give your message then?"

"I'd be glad of it, my lord prince," she said.

"Oh!" said Liath. "You must be thirsty. Come, I'll go with you." She took Hanna's arm, and then turned to the prince. "And your hunt?"

He shook his head. "Escaped us again. There's a score of them, we think, under a cunning leader. I have in mind a trap."

"What is he hunting?" Hanna asked as Liath led her past the barracks to the bathhouse. "Wolves?"

"Outlaws. A pack of them have been preying on the outlying farmsteads to the north. There was so much trouble all last winter along the eastern road that we finally had to bring in the folk who lived there and resettle them in Lavas and Ravnholt. There's been a great deal of stockade building this spring.

Wolves, too, coming out of the south. And a raid hit our southwestern border, up out of Salia."

"I saw new fields cleared."

"We've absorbed many new settlers, and we feed a hundred milites as well, courtesy of the queen regnant. You'll have to ask Sanglant about the ploughs. What luck with the Eagle's Council?"

"Sending the Eagles through crowns? Not many favor it. Not more than one or two, I admit. It's too much. They fear it."

"Let it be, for now. The queen and king will come to see its utility, once enough have the skills."

They talked of a hundred things and of nothing as Hanna bathed and Liath sat on a stool beside her. Much later, after she was clean and dry, they returned to the tower.

Count Lavrentia was awake, propped up on pillows, attending to the business of the county with the prince and a chatelaine seated beside her. The count and her grandson-in-law were a good match, and it was well he had an administrator's bent of mind, since Liath was distracted and soon after Hanna's long recital slipped out of the room with a pair of her companions: the Ashioi woman and a man Hanna recognized as an archer who had long fought beside the prince.

At length, disputes were resolved, capitularies sealed, a bull requested for breeding by a nearby manor, a pair of merchants out of Medemelacha interviewed and given the right to set up trading houses at Osna Sound, tithing for St. Thierry's Convent, some ques-tion about building, and a report from the Osna shore about five boats that had put in to the ruined monastery and departed again, none knowing who these folk were or where they had come from or what they were looking for.

Everyone was anxious about plague, having heard rumors of sickness along the Salian border and in parts of Wayland and Varingia.

"You are weary, Grandmother." Sanglant dismissed the stewards, and bent to kiss the old woman on either cheek. "Rest. I'll go make sure she doesn't fall into a well."

She chuckled, but it was true she was pale and trembling with fatigue, although she had been awake no more than three hours. "Pray the child takes after you, Son," she said to him affectionately.

The hounds whipped their tails hopefully as the prince went to the door, and she released them to seethe after him.

Outside, the afternoon had drawn long shadows over the open courts. The exposed rafters of the new building formed hatch-mark shadows on the dirt. The squat spire of the old church could be seen over the palisade. Hammers rang from the outer town. Nearby, two men were sawing planks out of logs. The kitchens boiled with activity, and the smell of chickens roasting on a spit gave the air a rich savor.

Sanglant had a long stride, but Hanna kept up with him. He whistled a merry tune—actually, now that she recognized it, she recalled its bawdy words. Although he was stopped five times so his opinion might be solicited on some matter or other, he remained fixed to his path with a pleasant determination that soon led them out beyond both old berm and new stockade and onto a path that led up a steep hill. A shout came from behind, and they paused to see a soldier toiling up the slope behind them. Sanglant brushed hair out of his eyes, surveying the wide and open valley that held Lavas Holding. Folk had turned toward home, coming in from the fields and orchards and woodland stretched out on all sides.

"Is it well with you, my lord prince?" she asked quietly, not sure if he would deign to answer.

At first he looked startled. Then he laughed. "God have granted me what I most wished for. How can it not be well?"

"It seemed . . ." He was a generous man, warm spirited and charming, easy to confide in and trust.

He looked and acted content, but a man might hide his inner heart behind a mask of outer seem-ing. "It might be said that you lost a great deal, my lord prince."

A crown. A spell woven into the flesh that made you invulnerable.

She did not say these things out loud.

"I lost nothing that I regret losing." He smiled, looking not at her but at Lavas Holding. "A grant of land, Liath as my wife, and peace. You can be sure I'll hold tight to them. No onion I, Hanna. I am as you see me."

"My lord!" The soldier had the ragged voice of a man who has had his throat damaged in battle, and never healed. "They promised me that I could go first, and now Lewenhardt has gotten the jump on me!

Damn him to the Pit!"

"So he may well fall into the Pit this very night. God Above! Will you two never be content?" He spoke cheerfully; he was amused.

"I was promised!" said the soldier stubbornly.

"Come, then," he said. "Best if we hurry."

It was a fair long walk curving up along the hill and into the woods behind, much cut back now, the path beaten into a broad path where two wagons might roll abreast.

The tree line ended abruptly at the edge of ruins. Beyond an outer wall of stone lay an ancient fort in the style of the old empire, Dariyan work. The light drew long and late in summer, and the fallen walls and buildings shone with an aura of gold where the sun's rays pulled across them. Most of the building stone was grainy and dark, but the centermost building—its roof long since fallen in—had been built in a marbled white stone that had a soft gleam. The outer walls of this building had been cleared away to expose its paved, platform of a floor, an ovoid altar stone, and the six pillars that had once supported the roof.

Here Liath and her disciplas had gathered, with four horses tethered nearby. Here, as Hanna and the prince and the soldier walked up, she heard Liath speak.

"Name the seven spheres and their order."

"The sphere closest to the Earth is that of the Moon!" said Sharp Edge, jumping in before anyone else could utter one word.

They were an unruly lot. Most were young and reckless, although Liath was grateful to have a pair of older and wiser heads among them. It was her own fault, truly. In addition to stamina, strength, courage, and adventurousness, they had to have the patience and wit and desire to learn the art of the mathematici. Sometimes they weren't easy to get along with. She was just like them.

"The second is that of the planet Erekes, and the third planet is Somorhas, the Lady of Light.

Fourth is the sphere of the Sun. Fifth is Jedu, Angel of War. Six is Mok. Seventh and last—Aturna."

"The realm of the fixed stars," added Berthold. He was irritated with Sharp Edge, as well he might be. She was a terrible tease, and did herself no favors, but as much as young men hated her for it, they came panting for more. 'And beyond all of this, the Chamber of Light, the home of God, and the phoenix."

“And the ladder by which the mage ascends," said Sharp Edge, taunting him. "First to the rose, the touch of healing-"

"Enough!" Liath braced herself, and pushed to her feet. She was getting ungainly, but she felt good, strong, energetic. Not a day's worth of sickness with this pregnancy. “Ah, there's Sibold!"

Lewenhardt groaned.

The other man punched the archer on the shoulder as he swaggered past. "Thought you'd slip past me!"

"Enough!" she repeated, seeing the change in the light as afternoon trickled away into long summer dusk. "Take your places. Shar. Sibold. Get the horses."

Wood burns when touched by threads of starlight, so no crown of wood would serve her, and they had not the leisure in such troubled times to invest a host to raise the huge menhirs as was done in the days of the ancients. But it transpired that the old Dariyans had copied the ladder of the heavens in their architecture. An oval formed by six tall stone pillars could form a gateway as well as any other crown.

A glow still rimmed the western horizon, but she caught the Guivre's Eye as it peered over the northeastern rim of the world and wove its thread into warp. She anchored the gate on the Healer's outstretched arm, rising out of the southeast. Behind her, the disciplas who would learn to do this watched and measured. She had twelve so far, but more would come and more would be born. Eagles were brave souls, and tough messengers, but phoenix could bridge vast distances as long as they had the means and the knowledge to waken the crowns.

A gate flowered over the altar stone.

Her sight had grown keener since the cataclysm, and the current of aether was gaining strength, an upwelling out of the heart of the universe. A road paved with blue fire led straight into the uttermost east, held open briefly by this conjunction of stars. There, as down a long corridor sparkling with light, a veiled Sorgatani waited for the messengers who would come to her.

But there are many roads and many turnings. Sometimes we choose the path we walk on, and sometimes other forces compel our feet onto an unexpected track. Not everything happens according to our will, but neither are we slaves to the law, mere instruments of the mover.

Here we wander in a vast weaving whose twists and turns are like a palace of coils where windows reconnoiter both past and future, a sight denied to mortal kind. Only the daimones who bide above the moon can see in all directions.

We are not the only ones walking the paths.

The goblins hammer in their halls of iron. In the depths, the merfolk excrete a substance that they shape into buildings like pearls, while far above them a slender dragon boat cuts the swells of the Middle Sea. There is Secha, studying an astrolabe!

The path takes a sharp turn. A lion pauses in rocky desert flatlands and looks back, except it is not a lion—it has the torso of a woman—and when it sees her, it spins and pounces, only to vanish in a rush of wings as a pair of golden dragons washes the many threads into ripples of light as they land on a nest cupped into a hollow of hot sand.

So many mysteries to unravel! So much to discover!

Almost, she lost the road, but she pulled it tight again.

"Go. Go," she called to them.

Sharp Edge and Sibold did not hesitate. They were bold and eager. They crossed under the glittering arch and walked into the east,

Sharp Edge to teach and learn from the Hidden One and Sibold to guard her and care for the horses and gear.

The threads pulled taut as the stars wheeled on their nightly round. It was time to close the gate, and yet she was caught betwixt and between. Always, the yearning to go, and always, the yearning to stay.

There!

An old man rides alone on a lonely road, his back to her. She cannot see his face, but she knows who he is, the last of his kind. Almost she calls to him, but he has already faded from sight.

She hears the tentative noises of folk beginning to shuffle their feet, yawn, murmur a song. Argue good-naturedly. A stomach growls with hunger. Someone coughs.

Sanglant laughs, a bright sound that lights the world, and, of course, those who are not caught in the weaving as it unravels laugh with him.

A hound yips.

She sees the black hound as it halts to stare back at her through the crown woven out of the stars. Its mate pauses beside it, also looking back. The hounds can see her, because she is heir to Lavas. They gave her a litter of puppies, but they themselves never belonged to her.

Ahead of them on the path, a dark-haired man walks into a meadow. There is still sunlight, shadows falling long but not yet swarming to overtake the grass and bramble vines laced along the edge of the trees. He must be walking farther west where it is still day, or perhaps this is another day, one not yet come. The salamander eyes she took from her mother can discern shapes in what to humankind may seem darkest night.

He pauses where a wild bramble rose has sprouted out of the grass. Its twisting vine boasts only one delicate blood-red bloom, but that is enough to lend the snarl of branches an intense beauty.

Because he bends to look more closely, she sees many buds forming within the pale leaves, not yet flowered. It's only that one must be patient, and resolute.

He straightens, calls his hounds, and walks on, into the haze that marks the land beyond. She takes a step, and another, to follow him.

"Liath," Sanglant said, behind her. "Where are you going?"

After all, the gate scattered into a spray of incandescent sparks, and she turned, and came home.