IN THE FORECOURT, ISTA WAS STARTLED BY THE HORSE LISS LED out for her. Tall, shimmering white with a soft gray nose, mane and tail like silk banners—Ferda would have waxed poetic. The stall stains were carefully washed off its coat, with only a few faint yellow traces that reminded her inescapably of the blotches on dy Cabon's white robes. It snuffled and nudged at her, big dark eyes liquid and amiable.
"What's this?" Ista asked, as Liss led it to the mounting block.
"They tell me his name is Feather. Short for Featherwits. I asked for the best-trained horse in the stable for you, and they begged me to take him out, because since Lord Illvin fell sick he's done little but laze in his stall and eat and get fat."
"Is this Lord Illvin's own mount, then?" asked Ista, throwing a leg over the broad back. The horse stood perfectly still for her as she disposed her padded knees gingerly against its sides and found her stirrups. "Surely it isn't a warhorse."
"No, he has another stallion for that—evil-tempered scarred red brute that no one else will go near." Liss threw herself up on her courier palomino, which sidled uncooperatively and seemed inclined to buck, but settled under her stern hand. "It's savaged any number of grooms. They showed me their injuries. Very impressive."
Foix's hand rose and fell, and he and Pejar on their mounts led the way out the gate, followed by Liss and Ista and then the half dozen remaining men of the Daughter's company. They sorted themselves into single file to descend the narrow switchback road past the village. Beyond its walls, they turned onto the road from Tolnoxo that Ista had arrived down so many crowded days ago. Foix set a brisk but not killing pace, walking up slopes, trotting down, cantering on the flat. Feather-wit seemed a slander, for the horse was so responsive to Ista's lightest command of rein or heel that it seemed she had only to think her desire. Its trot was a long smooth ripple, its canter like being rocked along in a sedan chair. She was relieved by its gentleness, for it seemed a long way to the hard ground from her perch. Lord Illvin would need a tall horse, certainly.
Riding through a moist wooded area by the river, they stirred up a plague of large buzzing horseflies. Ista grimaced and slapped at the ones she could reach as they settled hungrily on Feather's silky sides. They crunched disgustingly, leaving blood streaks on her palm. Liss's palomino bucked and squealed. Foix glanced back over his shoulder; only Ista saw the little violet flicker from his hand, but the ugly flies lifted from Liss's mount. Since they then collected on Ista's, this seemed little improvement, but the cavalcade broke into the sunlight and left the flies behind before she could complain.
They made the long climb up the valley's steeper side and stopped to water the horses at the village with the olive grove, some five miles out from Porifors. This shade was mercifully free of bloodsucking insects. Pejar went off to inquire of the villagers for word of the wagon they pursued. Ista found herself standing and stretching next to Foix in the shadow of a huge olive bole as the sweaty horses gulped from the stream.
"Still playing with flies?" she inquired softly. "I saw that trick. No more, please, or I shall report you to the divine."
He blushed. "It was a good deed. Besides, I wanted to please Liss."
"Hm." She hesitated. "Take my advice, and do not use magic to court her. Most especially, do not yield to the temptation to use it directly to induce her favor."
By his embarrassed grin, he knew precisely what she implied—and this wasn't the first time the notion of some sort of aphrodisiac spell had crossed his mind. "Mm."
Ista's voice dropped further. "For if you do, and she finds out, it will destroy her trust not only in you, but in her own mind. She would never again be sure if a thought or a feeling were truly her own. She would be constantly halting, second-guessing, turning about inside her head. Madness lies down that road. It would be less crippling and more loving if you should take a war hammer and break both her legs."
His smile had grown fixed. "As you command. Royina."
"I do not speak as your royina. I do not even speak as one god-touched. I speak as a woman, who has walked to the end of that road and returns to report the hazards. If you still possess half the wits you started with—and if it is indeed love you seek and not just your gratification—you will listen as a man."
His little bow, this time, was visibly more thoughtful, his smirk wiped clean.
Pejar came back with the news that a wagon and team had indeed stopped at the grove earlier, lingering in the shade long enough to unhitch and water both pairs of horses; the wagon had left again not half an hour before. Foix grimaced satisfaction and cut their own rest short.
Another four miles of trotting brought them to the top of a long rise. They at last saw their quarry rumbling down the road, small in the distance, the wagon's canvas top, painted with the sigil of Porifors's garrison, bright in the sunlight. Foix waved his troop onward. They had largely closed the gap before someone from the wagon spotted them. The invisible driver whipped up the team, but the lumbering dray horses, burdened by the load they towed, were no match for the pursuers' faster mounts.
Men of Foix's company galloped up on either side of the noisily bouncing vehicle to lean over and seize the lead pair's reins. As she in turn urged her horse up and around, Ista could hear Cattilara's voice crying out in protest. The wagon slowed to a halt.
Cattilara, dressed in an elegant traveling costume of gray and gold, was crouched on the driver's box berating a terrified Goram, who hunched down with his eyes nearly shut, clutching his team's reins in clenched and shaking hands. Ista narrowed her eyes against the light of the world and tried to extend her inner vision to its fullest sensitivity, to directly perceive not spirits hidden in matter, but spirits alone. Was this how the gods saw the world? Cattilara's demon was not, to Ista's relief, expanded and dominant, but curled in on itself within her again. Another male servant, one of Cattilara's younger ladies, and Arhys's page cowered together in the wagon's back.
Two nearly extinguished forms lay side by side within. With the blockage of Ista's corporeal vision by the canvas and wood, it became almost easier to see what she was actually looking for. A wispy line of white fire, sluggishly drifting from one body to another; at a level of perception even below that, a net of violet light running three ways, the spell-channel.
She tightened her fingers, and Feather stopped and stood in a placid obedience. She let the reins fall to his withers and stretched her hands, letting her spirit follow along with her body. And then, for the first time, flow beyond her body. Bastard, help me. Curse You. She did not, did not dare, try to break the underlying lines of the demon's spell yet, but she set her ligatures and summoned soul-fire. The white line from Illvin to Arhys blazed up like a thatch catching alight in a distant dark.
Arhys's deep voice sounded from within, irritable as a man waking from sleep: "What is this? Illvin . . . ?"
Cattilara's screaming abuse abruptly stopped. Her head drew in, and she shrank in her seat. Panting, she glowered at Ista.
Movement sounded within the wagon: a creak, boot steps on the floorboards. Arhys poked his head out and stared around. "Bastard's hell! Where are we?" A glance at the familiar landscape evidently answered the question to his satisfaction, for he turned his frown on his weeping wife. "Cattilara, what have you done?"
On the wagon's other side, the tensed Foix breathed relief and sent a small salute of thanks in Ista's direction. The mauve flicker waiting in his palm died away.
Cattilara turned in her seat and threw her arms around her husband's thighs in wild supplication. Goram ducked out of her way. "My lord, my lord, no! Order these people away! Tell Goram to drive on! We must escape! She is evil, she wants to encompass your death!"
Automatically, he patted her hair. His rolling eye fell on Ista, watching grimly. "Royina? What is this?"
"What is the last thing you remember, Lord Arhys?"
His brows drew in. "Cattilara sent me an urgent message to attend upon her at the garrison's stable yard. I walked in and found this wagon standing at the ready there, then—nothing after that." His frown deepened.
"Your wife took it into her head to carry you off and seek healing for you elsewhere than Porifors. To what extent she was encouraged in this by her demon, I know not, but it certainly assisted her in it. Illvin was brought along principally, I suppose, as your commissary."
Arhys winced. "Desert my post? Desert Porifors? Now?"
Cattilara flinched at the iron in his voice. Her collapse in tears before him failed, for once, to have any softening effect. When he turned her face up to his, Ista could see the tension in the tendons of his hands, standing out like cords beneath his pale skin.
"Cattilara. Think. This desertion dishonors my trust and my sworn oaths. To the provincar of Caribastos, to the Royina Iselle and Royse-Consort Bergon—to my own men. It is impossible."
"It is not impossible. Suppose you were sick of, oh, any other illness. Someone else would have to take over then all the same. You are ill. Another officer must take your post for now."
"The only one I would trust to take over at a moment's notice in this present uncertainty is Illvin." He hesitated. "Would be Illvin," he corrected himself.
"No, no, no—!" She fairly beat on him with her fists in a paroxysm of frustration and rage.
Ista studied the pulsating lines of light. Can I do this? She wasn't sure. Well, I am sure that I can try. So. She folded her fleshly hands quietly in her lap and reached again with her spirit hands. Again leaving the demon's underlying channels undisturbed, she tightened the ligature between Illvin and Arhys nearly to closure.
Arhys fell to his knees; his lips parted in shock.
"If you want him upright and moving," said Ista to Cattilara, "you must keep him so yourself, now. No more stealing."
"No!" screamed Cattilara as Arhys half collapsed across her. Goram grabbed at him to keep his heavy body from toppling from the seat. Cattilara stared down at Arhys's pale confused face in horrified denial. The fire of her soul roiled up from her body and collected at her heart.
Yes! Ista thought. You can. Do it, girl!
Then, with a wail and a white rush, Cattilara fainted away. The disorderly fire burst from her heart, splashing irregularly in the spell-banks. Ista extended a transparent hand again. The flow steadied, settled. Not too swift, lest it drain its reservoirs altogether, nor too slow, lest it fail its purpose. Just. . . there. Her inner eye rechecked the lines. A tiny trickle of life still flowed from Illvin, just enough to maintain contact. She dared not touch the demon's subtle net, not that she was at all sure she could break it even if she tried. Arhys blinked, flexed his jaw, shakily stood up, one hand braced on Goram's shoulder.
"Oh, thank you," muttered Foix into the blessed silence.
"I used to carry on not unlike that, from time to time, in my first grief," murmured Ista across to him, in uncomfortable reminiscence. "Why in five gods' names did no one ever smother me and put themselves out of my misery? I may never know."
A rasping voice from within the wagon said, "Bastard's demons, now what?"
A flash of relief crossed Arhys's features. "Illvin! Out here!"
A padding of bare feet; Illvin, wearing only his linen robe and looking much like a man wakened too early after a night of too much revelry, stumbled out and stood blinking into the bright morning, one lean hand grasping the canvas frame for balance.
His eye fell on Ista, and his face lit. "Witless!" he cried in delight. This odd greeting, Ista concluded belatedly, was actually addressed to his horse, who flicked its ears and snuffed, flaring its gray nostrils, and almost, but not quite, moved from the spot on which its rider had bade it stand. "Royina," Illvin continued, giving her a nod. "I trust Feathers-for-Wits here has gone well for you? Five gods, did no one think to cut his feed?"
"He is a most perfect gentleman," Ista assured him. "I find him very shapely."
Illvin looked down at Catti, now slumped over against Goram's shrinking shoulder. "What's this? Is she all right?"
"For the moment," Ista assured both him and Arhys, who was eyeing his wife even more uncertainly. "I, ah ... required that she change chairs with you for a little while."
"I did not know you could do that," said Illvin cautiously.
"Neither did I, till I tried it a moment ago. The demon's spell is unbroken, just. . . reapportioned."
Arhys, his face rigid with his discomfiture, nevertheless knelt and gathered Cattilara up in his arms. Illvin felt his right shoulder and frowned; his frown deepened as his glance took in a slow red leak starting on Cattilara's shoulder. He leaned aside for his burdened brother to duck back into the wagon. Ista handed her reins to Liss and scrambled from her saddle across to the wagon seat; Illvin extended a hand to swing her safely aboard.
"We must talk," she told him.
He nodded in heartfelt agreement. "Goram," he added. His groom looked up with open relief in his face. "Get this wagon turned around and headed back to Porifors."
"Yes, my lord," said Goram happily.
Ista ducked after Arhys and Illvin as Foix began calling instructions to his men to help back and turn the team. Arhys laid Cattilara, her head lolling, down on the pallet he had just vacated. It was dim and musty under the canvas after the bright light outside, but Ista's eyes quickly adjusted. The other servant, Cattilara's woman, and the page squatted fearfully at the back of the wagon among three or four small trunks. It seemed modest provision for the journey, though the marchess's jewel case no doubt reposed somewhere within the baggage.
Arhys sent the manservant and the woman forward to sit with Goram. His page, round-eyed with worry, settled near him; he gave the boy a reassuring ruffle of the hair. Arhys sat cross-legged by his wife's head. Illvin handed Ista down onto the pallet opposite; she felt her scabs crack under their pads as she folded her knees. Illvin started to settle cross-legged next to her, realized the inadequacy of his narrow robe for that position, and sat instead on his knees.
Arhys glowered down at his wife. "I can't believe she'd think I would desert Porifors."
"I don't imagine she did," said Ista. "Hence this deceit." She hesitated. "It's a hard thing, when all your life rides on the decisions of others, and you can do nothing to affect the outcome."
The wagon finished its turn and started off at a walking pace. The team would be tired enough by the time they'd retraced the ten or so miles to the castle.
Arhys touched Cattilara's shoulder, now showing a dark red stain from the slow ooze beneath. "This won't do."
"It must, till we get back to Porifors," said Illvin uneasily. He stretched his arms and hands and hitched his shoulders, as if settling back into a body grown unused to him. He tested his own grip, and frowned.
"I can only hope the garrison hasn't fallen into an uproar over my disappearance," said Arhys.
"As soon as we arrive," said Ista, "we must make another attempt to question Cattilara's demon. It must know what is afoot in Jokona and, most of all, who dispatched it." She repeated to Illvin the officer's tale of the sudden reform of Sordso the Sot.
"How very strange," mused Illvin. "Sordso never showed any sign of such family feeling before."
"But—will we be able to question the creature, Royina?" asked Arhys, still staring down at Cattilara. "We had little enough luck the last time."
Ista shook her head in equal doubt. "I did not have Learned dy Cabon's advice, before. Nor the assistance of Foix dy Gura. We may be able to set one demon upon the other, to some good effect. Or ... to some effect. I shall take counsel of the divine when we return."
"I would take counsel of my brother, while I can," said Arhys.
"I would take counsel of some food," said Illvin. "Is there any in this wagon?"
Arhys bade his page search; the boy emerged from rooting among the supplies with a loaf of bread, a sack of leathery dried apricots, and a skin of water. Illvin settled and began conscientiously gnawing, while Arhys detailed the reports from Porifors's scouts.
"We are missing news from the north road altogether," Illvin observed as Arhys wound up his rapid account. "I mislike this."
"Yes. I am most troubled for the two parties that have not yet returned or sent any courier. I was about to send another patrol after them, when my morning duties were so unexpectedly interrupted." Arhys glanced in exasperation at his unconscious wife. "Or possibly go myself."
"I beg you will not," said Illvin, rubbing his shoulder.
"Well . . . no. Perhaps that would not be wise, under the circumstances." His gaze upon Cattilara grew, if possible, more worried. She looked terribly defenseless, curled up on her side. Without the underlying strain of subterfuge in her face, her striking natural beauty reasserted itself.
He glanced up and managed a brief smile for Ista's sake. "Do not be alarmed, Royina. Even if some unseen force approaches from that direction, there is little they can do against Porifors. The walls are stout, the garrison loyal, the approaches for siege engines difficult in the extreme, and the fortress stands upon solid rock. It cannot be undermined. Support from Oby would arrive before our assailants had time to finish making camp."
"If Oby is not itself attacked at the same time," muttered Illvin.
Arhys glanced away. "I have spoken at length with the temple notary in the past few days, and placed my will in writing under his care. The castle warder has charge of all my other papers. I have appointed you my executor, and joint guardian of little Liviana."
"Arhys," said Illvin, his voice drawn with doubt. "I would point out that there is no guarantee that I will get out of this alive either."
His brother nodded. "Liviana's grandfather becomes her sole sponsor in that case, and guardian of all her dy Lutez properties. In all events—given the lack of any child between Catti and me—I mean to return Cattilara with her jointure to the guardianship of Lord dy Oby."
"Cattilara would care as little for my rule as I would care to exert it," said Illvin. "Thank you from us both."
Arhys nodded in wry understanding. "If you—if—if you cannot undertake it in Liviana's name, Porifors's military command must revert to the provincar of Caribastos, to be assigned to a man he judges able to carry out its tasks. I have written him to warn him . . . well, only that I am ill, and that he may wish to look about him just in case."
"You take care of every duty. No matter how distasteful." Illvin smiled bleakly. "You have always sought to take a father's care of us all.
Is there any doubt which god waits to take you up? But let Him wait a little longer, I say." He glanced aside at Ista.
But no god awaits him, Ista thought. That's what sundered means.
Arhys shrugged. "The days gnaw at me as rats gnaw a corpse. I can feel it now, more and more. I have already overstayed, most grievously. Royina ..." His eyes upon her were uncomfortably penetrating. "Can you release me? Is that why you were tumbled down here?"
Ista hesitated. "I scarcely know what I can do and what I cannot. If I am meant to channel miracles, that one would not be my first choice. Yet it is the nature of miracles that their human conduit may not choose them, except to cry them yes or no. It is only demon sorcery that we may bend to our own wills. No one bends a god."
"And yet," said Illvin thoughtfully, "the Bastard is half a demon himself, they say. I think his nature is not wholly as the rest of his family's. Perhaps his miracles are not either?"
Ista frowned in confusion. "I ... don't know. He seemed just as much beyond me in my dream as his Mother did in my vision of her, nigh on twenty years ago. In any case, I have only tried to rearrange the strength that flows among you three. I have not tried to break the bindings beneath, or force the demon to do so against its mistress's will, though it is clear enough that it would abandon all and fly if it could."
"Try now," said Arhys.
Both Ista and Illvin made simultaneous noises of protest, and glanced at each other.
"Because if you cannot do this, I must also know," said Arhys patiently.
"But—there is no way to test it but to do it. And then I would not know how to undo it."
"I did not suggest that you then seek to undo it."
"I would fear to leave you damned."
"More than I am now?"
Ista looked away, discomfited. She read a soul-deep exhaustion in his face; as if he grew hourly less loath to end his travails, even into the dwindling silence of nothingness. "But—what if this is not the task I was sent for? What if I am wrong in my reasoning—again? I should have been ecstatic if it had been given me to heal you. I do not wish to murder another dy Lutez."
"You did once."
"Yes, but not by sorcery. By drowning. The method would not work on you. You haven't taken a breath in the last fifteen minutes."
"Oh. Yes." He looked embarrassed and made an effort to inhale.
Illvin's eyes had grown wide. "What tale is this?"
Ista glanced at him, gritted her teeth, and said, "Arvol dy Lutez did not die in the Zangre under questioning. Ias and I drowned him by mistake in the course of an attempt among the three of us to call down a miracle for Chalion's sake. The treason accusation was entirely false." Well. That was certainly getting more succinct with practice.
Illvin's mouth hung open for a moment longer. He finally said, "Ah. I always did think that treason charge was oddly handled."
"The rite failed because Arvol's courage failed." She stopped. Then blurted out, "And yet I might have saved the hour even at the last, if I could have called down a miracle of healing. Even as he lay drowned dead at our feet. The Mother, the very goddess of remedy, stood at my right hand, just around some . . . corner of perception. If my soul had not been so knotted with rage and fear and grief that there was no room in it for any god to enter." Three prior confessions had all evaded this codicil, she realized. She glanced aside again at Illvin. "Or if I had loved him instead of hated him. Or if—I don't know."
Illvin cleared his throat. "Most people fail to work miracles most of the time. Such a dereliction scarcely needs accounting for."
"Mine does. I was called." She brooded, as the wagon creaked along. Now I am called again. But what for? She glanced up at Arhys. "I wonder how our lives would have been different if your father had brought you to court? Maybe we put the wrong dy Lutez in that barrel." Now, there was a vision. "What was he like at twenty, Illvin?"
"Oh, quite as he is now," Illvin responded. "Not as polished or practiced, perhaps. Not as broad in the shoulder." A smile of memory flickered over his mouth. "Not as levelheaded."
"Not as dead," growled Arhys, frowning at his hands, which he was stretching and clenching again. Testing for numbness? For increasing numbness?
"When I was young and beautiful, at court in Cardegoss ..." When Arhys had not yet been married even once. When all things were still possible. Might she then have taken a dy Lutez as a lover after all, and made the false slander true? And yet Fonsa's dark curse had blighted all budding hopes in that court—to what horrors might it have bent that sweet dream, to what disasters drawn Arhys's youthful brilliance? Would it be true or false comfort to suggest to Arhys that Arvol had kept him away for his own safety? She suppressed a shudder. "It was still too late."
Arhys blinked at her, missing the implications, but Illvin grunted a pained laugh. "Imagine you'd met him before you'd married Ias, then, as long as you're spinning might-have-beens," he advised dryly. He cast her an odd look. "All my might-have-beens come out the same either way."
The wagon bumped and rocked, marking a turn off the road. Ista peeked out to discover that they had returned to the walled village, and were stopping in the olive grove again to water the horses. The sun had climbed to noon, and the day was growing very hot.
Ista clambered down for a moment to stretch her half-healed legs and get a drink. Liss still had Lord Illvin's white horse in tow, watering it at the stream. Illvin looked out longingly at it, then abruptly disappeared back inside the wagon. Voices came from behind the canvas, some sort of argument involving Illvin, Goram, and the manservant. Illvin emerged a few minutes later smiling in satisfaction, wearing his groom's leather trousers and the manservant's boots below his light linen robe. The trousers were cinched in around his waist and barely reached his calves, but the boots made up the difference.
Illvin reclaimed his horse and grinned as he mounted it. Appreciation for a body up and moving at will through the bright world again was plain in his face, perhaps the more keenly felt for the fragility of the stolen moment. He let Liss help lengthen his stirrups, spoke a word of thanks, settled in his saddle, and gave Ista a cheery salute.
Goram, Ista was relieved to see, now wore a pair of ill-fitting linen trousers evidently borrowed from the wagon's scanty store, though the hapless manservant was left barefoot. The Daughter's men helped roll up the wagon's canvas sides partway, as the heat of the day was making the suffocating stuffiness a greater trial than the dust of the road. Not, Ista conceded, that Lord Arhys was likely to notice either one. They started off again. Foix disposed four of his men before and two behind the lumbering wagon, and Illvin and Liss rode along at either side, within easy speaking distance.
A few miles from the village they topped the rise, swung right along the slope, and began their drop into the broad valley that Porifors guarded. They rounded a stand of trees; abruptly, Foix flung up a hand. Their little party ground to a halt.
Illvin rose in his stirrups, his eyes widening. Ista and Arhys scrambled to the front of the wagon and looked out. Arhys's lips drew back, and his teeth clenched, though only Ista's breath drew in, harsh as a rasp down her dry throat.
Turning onto the road just ahead of them from some cross-country push was a large column of cavalry. The white pelicans of Jokona glowed on their sea-green tabards. Their armor glinted. Their spear-points winked in the light in a long line, stitched like jewels across a courtier's cloak in the descending folds of the land.
A LOW MOAN BROKE FROM GORAM'S LIPS AS HE CROUCHED, GRAY with fear, over his team's reins.
"Get back, get back," Arhys hissed to the manservant and Cattilara's woman, shoving them behind him to stumble and crouch in the bed of the wagon. His hand clapped down on Goram's shoulder. "Drive on! Drive through them, if we can." He stood up and signaled to Foix, sitting his skittering horse and staring frantically forward and back. "Go on!"
Foix gave him a salute, drew his sword, and wheeled his horse around. The forward four men from the Daughter's Order drew their weapons and fell in to either side of him, preparing to clear the way for the wagon behind them. It was not possible to see how much of the Jokonan column had already debouched onto the curving road ahead, though the number still to come, strung back through the brush on the valley's steep side to their left, seemed to go on and on. Goram whipped up his team. The wagon groaned and began to rumble forward.
The Jokonans nearest them looked over their shoulders to see what was bearing down on them from behind. Shouts, the ring of weapons being drawn, the squeals of horses jerked around and spurred forward.
Arhys grabbed Ista by the upper arm and hustled her back to relative cover in the wagon's center. The wagon bed bumped and rocked, and Ista dropped to her knees before she was pitched onto them.
Illvin's parade horse trotted beside the wagon, breaking into its rocking canter as the dray horses picked up speed. Illvin leaned over and shouted, "Arhys! I need a weapon!" His empty hand extended in demand toward his brother, who looked frantically around. Illvin glanced ahead. "Quickly!"
With a curse, Arhys snatched up the only pointed object in view, a pitchfork that had been fastened along the wagon bed's inner wall. He swung it out to Illvin, who glared at his brother in extreme exasperation but grabbed it anyway, sweeping it around prongs forward. "I was thinking of a sword."
"Sorry," said Arhys, drawing his. "It's taken. I need a horse." His head swiveled to Liss, cantering along the opposite side.
"No, Arhys!" Illvin shouted over the rumbling of the wagon, the quickening hoofbeats, and the yells rising ahead. "Stay back! Have some sense!" He pointed to the unconscious Cattilara.
Arhys's head jerked back, and he drew breath through his teeth not for air but for anguish, as he realized just whose body must now bear his battle risks.
"Stay by the royina! Ah. Here comes my sword—!" Illvin clapped his borrowed boots to his white horse's sides; the beast's broad haunches bunched, and it sprang forward with a startling bound. Illvin's linen bed robe flapped open on his bare torso and fluttered in his wake. His tied-back hair streamed out behind him.
Ista clutched the side boards and stared out openmouthed. Wrong horse, wrong weapon, wrong armor—half naked qualified as wrong armor, did it not?—yelling like a madman . . . Illvin wrapped his right arm around the pitchfork and pointed it like a lance at the Jokonan soldier bearing down upon him, sword upraised. At the last moment, at some hidden pressure from Illvin's knee, the heavy white horse swerved, caroming into the Jokonan's mount. The pitchfork tines slid up on either side of the enemy's descending sword wrist. A twist, a yank, a snatch, and Illvin was riding onward with the hilt clutched in his other hand while the Jokonan tumbled from his saddle and was half trampled by the horses of Foix's two rear guards galloping after them. Illvin gave a whoop of triumph and brandished the sword, but, with a thoughtful glance at the humble tool gripped under his other arm, also hung on to the pitchfork.
Although their noisy charge succeeded in driving the Jokonans immediately ahead of them off the road and scattering them to the sides, the enemy cavalrymen formed up rapidly again behind and began to give chase. There seemed nothing aboard to throw at them but four trunks and some hard bread crusts, though Arhys's page groped frantically through the gear for some better missiles. Cattilara's woman clutched her mistress's flaccid body and wailed. Galloping along on the wagon's right, Liss had drawn her new dagger, but it seemed an inequitable match for the mounted men's swords. Arhys lunged over and dragged Ista back to the center, then waited tensely, swaying on one knee, sword unsheathed, ready to dart to whatever side an enemy first tried to climb through.
The white horse shimmered by, heading to the rear; with a sun glitter, a sword spun into the wagon and clanged on the floorboards. Arhys kicked it over to the barefoot manservant, who snatched it up gratefully and took up a guard position on the wagon's end. A few minutes later, the white horse overtook them at a gallop on the other side, and Illvin leaned in to toss yet another sword aboard. His grin flashed past like a streak of light as he brandished the pitchfork and hurtled onward once more.
From the driver's box, Goram cried out. Arhys plunged forward. Ista could see only the back of Arhys's legs as he braced himself and swung at some unseen assailant riding alongside. He moved with power, speed, and utmost sureness. But the white line of soul-fire pouring out of Cattilara and into him seemed to have doubled in speed and density. Too fast, thought Ista frantically. She cannot sustain this rate for long. It will empty her . . .
The wagon rumbled around a tight curve. Ista slid across the rough boards on hands and knees, collecting splinters in her palms, tumbling into Cattilara on her pallet. The waiting girl's tear-streaked face was mottled red and white with heat and terror. Beyond Liss, one of the men of the Daughter's Order fell back along the roadside, bleeding and toppling from his saddle, his horse limping and slowing. Ista tried to spin around and mark his fate, but she was bounced again as a wheel smacked through a pothole, and by the time she found her balance and looked up again, he was lost to her view. A galloping Jokonan was poking his sword rather clumsily through the space between the wagon's side and the half-rolled-up canvas top, and being parried equally clumsily by Arhys's page, fighting from his knees with Illvin's captured sword.
Louder cries and curses came from ahead, in two languages. A flash of red-violet demon light seared across Ista's inner vision as she crouched, staring downward. A scream of tortured metal sounded from beneath the wagon. The wagon wobbled, then jerked down on the left rear side. The three women slithered across the wagon bed in a heap; even Ista yelped. She heard the snap of the rear axle, then the back end dropped altogether and began dragging. With a cry, the manservant fell out. Arhys slid back in from the driver's box, barely avoiding spearing the weeping waiting woman on the point of his blade.
Arhys stared around wildly. "Liss!" he called.
"Here!" The palomino had held to its position on the wagon's right side and was now slowing with them.
More cries rose from up ahead, along with crashing noises and a scream of a horse. The lurching wagon slewed off the crown of the road and grated to a tilted stop. Arhys dropped his sword and snatched up his wife's limp body, heaving her out and across into startled Liss's arms. "Take her, take her! Ride, if you can. On to Porifors."
"Yes, yes!" Ista endorsed this. Foix's horse flashed into Ista's view,
sliding to a rearing halt. Ista pointed downward. "Foix, did your demon do that?"
"No, Royina!" He leaned over his pommel to stare in at her; his eyes were very wide. The bear shadow was not curled tight within him, but on its seeming-feet, its head swinging dizzily from side to side.
"Royina . . . ?" Liss's hoarse voice called uncertainly, as she struggled to get a better grip on her limp load.
"Yes, take Cattilara and ride, or all are lost together! Foix, go with her, get them through!"
"Royina, I can't—"
"Go!" Ista's scream nearly burst her lungs. Both horses wheeled away. Foix's sword, swinging past, shed a spatter of dark wet drops. Cries, scraping metal, the twang of a crossbow, and the thunk of a heavy blade biting flesh—whose?—echoed back to Ista's ears. But the dual echo of their horses' hooves dwindled in the distance without slowing or diverting.
Ista climbed forward to grab the rear edge of the driver's seat and peek over. Dropped across the road in front of them was a large palanquin with green cloth hangings and gold trim. One of the foremost dray horses plunged and kicked, its front legs tangled with the palanquin's rear boards and braces. The splintered wood had ripped its skin. The other lead horse was down in its traces, bleeding and making dreadful noises. A dozen bearers in heavily embroidered green uniforms were scattered about, shouting and screaming, the ones who could still walk trying to help their injured comrades. Three of them tried to control the rearing horse and drag a moaning fourth man out from under the wreckage.
They had descended perhaps half the height of the slope to the river bottom, where the road made its last turn for Porifors. If not for this ghastly obstruction, Ista realized, they might well have burst through the front of the column, though whether they could have outdistanced the enemy thereafter was an open question.
Goram sat frozen, his hands in the air; Ista followed his frightened gaze to a Jokonan soldier standing in the road with a cocked crossbow, trained upon the groom. Another and another ran up, until the wagon was surrounded by a dozen tense men, their fingers tight, and sometimes trembling, on the release catches.
A Jokonan soldier sidled up cautiously and pulled Goram down off his box. Goram stumbled onto the road and stood with his arms wrapped tightly around his torso, sniveling uncontrollably. The soldier returned to grab at Ista and manhandle her down. She went unresisting, the better to keep to her feet. Arhys emerged upon the box and stood a moment, sword out but held still. His jaw tightened as his gaze swept over the bowmen. One corner of his mouth turned up in a weird smile, as it apparently crossed his mind just how little those gleaming quarrels might affect him, should he choose to leap in an attack, to the consternation—truncated consternation—of his enemies. But the smile grew sour, and his teeth set, as he followed out the rest of the inevitable consequences. Very slowly, he lowered the tip of his blade.
A crossbowman motioned him to throw down his weapon. Arhys's eyes coolly considered the quarrels aimed at Ista, and he did so. The blade clanged on the gravel. A Jokonan snatched it up, and Arhys stepped deliberately down off the box. For just a moment longer, the Jokonan soldiery forbore—or feared—to seize him.
Two more green-uniformed bearers assisted a small, shaken-looking woman clad in dark green silks out from under the drunkenly angled canopy of the palanquin. Ista's breath drew in.
Her inner vision revealed a soul the like of which Ista had never seen before. It roiled and boiled with violent colors in the confines of the woman's body, but darkened toward the center, till Ista seemed to be looking down a black well at midnight. Black, yet not empty. Faint colored lines radiated out from the bottomless pit in all directions, a tangled web that writhed and pulsed and knotted. Ista had to forcibly blink away the overpowering second sight in order to take in the surface of the woman.
On the outside, the woman was a bizarre mix of delicately decorated and aged and drab. She was only a little taller than Ista herself. Dull, gray-brown curling hair was braided up in an interlaced Roknari court style, bound with strings of glittering jewels in the shapes of tiny flowers. Her face was sallow and lined, without paint or powder. Her dress was many-layered, embroidered with thread of gold and brilliant silks picturing interlocking birds. The body it covered was slight, with slack breasts and sagging belly. Her mouth was pursed and angry. Her pale blue eyes, when they turned at last on Ista, burned. Seared.
A young officer on a nervously capering horse rode near; he pulled it to a halt and swung down beside the woman, abandoning his reins, which were snatched up at once by a soldier hurrying to assist him. The officer stared at Ista as if transfixed. His high rank was signaled more by the gold and jewels decorating his horse's gear than by elaborations on his own clothing, but he bore a gold-trimmed green sash across his chest decorated with a string of flying white pelicans. High cheekbones graced a handsome, sensitive face, and the hair braided tightly to his scalp was bright crinkled gold in the blazing noon. His soul. . . was lost in an intense violet haze that extended to the margins of his body.
They have a sorcerer. The origin of the flash of chaotic power that had popped the wagon's axle pins and burst the rear wheels off seemed revealed to Ista's inner eye, for the color in his body still pulsed and shivered as if in some aching reaction or echo. Yet even as she stared across at him, the demon light seemed to shrink in on itself, retreating.
The page and the waiting woman, clinging to each other, were prodded out of the back of the wagon at sword's point and made to stand near Arhys. The march's eyes flicked to them, half closed as if in some attempt at reassurance, and returned to the old woman and the officer. Illvin and the Daughter's men had all disappeared from sight. Scattered? Captured? Slain?
Ista grew conscious of her plain riding costume, stripped of decoration or marks of rank, of her flushed face and sweat and dirt. Too-familiar calculations raced through her mind. Might she pass for a waiting lady or a servant? Conceal from her captors the value of their prize, effect some escape from their inattention? Or would they just throw her to their troops for a cheap tidbit, to be tormented and discarded like that unfortunate maidservant of the rich woman from Rauma?
The sorcerer-officer's eye took in Goram, and widened briefly, then narrowed in thought. Or even . . . recognition? Thought, but not confusion. He sees Goram's ravaged soul. Yet it does not surprise him. His eyes traveled on to Arhys, and his lips parted in true astonishment.
"Mother, she shines with a terrible light, and her guardian is a dead man!" he said in Roknari to the woman at his side. His stare at Ista intensified, grew fearful, as if he wondered if she were performing Arhys's appalling marvel of revivification. As if he imagined she concealed some further bodyguard of walking corpses, about to erupt from the dirt of the road beneath their feet.
This must be the Dowager Princess Joen herself, Ista realized with a shock. And Prince Sordso. The erect, slender young man looked anything but a sot right now. And yet—was it Sordso, in that alert body? The demon light seemed utterly ascendant. He took a step backward; the woman grabbed his arm, her fingers pinching fiercely.
"She bears a god, we are undone! " he cried in rising terror.
"She does no such thing." the woman hissed in his ear. "Those are nothing but smears. She has barely enough capacity to channel a little sight. Her soul is choked with scars and disruption. She is afraid of you." That much was surely true. Ista's mouth was dry, her head pounding; she seemed to float on a rocking sea of panic.
The woman's blue eyes narrowed, flared with triumph. "Sordso, look at her! This is Ista herself, just as she was described! Half the prize we came for, delivered into our hands! This is a gift from the gods Themselves!" She hurts to look upon!" No, she is nothing. You can take her. I'll show you. Take her now!" The clawed grip shook the young man's arm. "Undo her." One of the coiling strings of light writhing from her dark belly seemed to brighten, blaze. Its distal end, Ista saw, terminated in Sordso's body like some obscene umbilicus.
The young man moistened his lips; the violet light returned to the margins of his body, and intensified. He raised a hand, using the dense habits of matter to direct a force that had nothing to do with matter at all. A purple glare boiled off his palm and wound around Ista like a coiling snake.
Her knees went first, buckling beneath her, dropping her into the dust. Her cracked scabs split open altogether, and she could feel the blood trickle and soak, slick beneath the battered, sweat-stained, loosening bandages. Her spine seemed to unhook itself, bone from bone, and she bent forward helplessly. Hideous knots of spasming pain began beneath each shoulder blade. Almost, her bowels seemed loosened as well, if that was not just by her own horror. She had a glimpse of Arhys's bearded lips parting, of his eyes darkening with dismay, as she sank down before all assembled here for no cause that fleshly eyes could see. Her hands went out to catch herself, then her arms grew limp as well. Her head grew heavier still, and she was barely able to turn it aside so that her soft cheek and not her slackening mouth smeared into the sharp-edged gravel and the dirt.
"You see? So will all Chalion and Ibra bow before us." Joen's voice dripped with satisfaction. Ista could see her green silk slippers, peeping from beneath her skirts, and Sordso's polished boots. The boots shifted uneasily. In some dizzied distance, Ista could hear Goram's low,
choked, liquid sobbing. Blessedly, the injured horse's screams had stopped; perhaps some merciful man had cut its throat. Perhaps some merciful man will cut mine.
"I admit," Princess Joen's voice went on above Ista's head, "I do not understand the dead man ... " The slippered footsteps shuffled through the gravel, approaching Arhys. Ista found herself unable to even moan. She could barely blink; a drop spun from one eyelash to plop into the dust before her nose.
From the slope above echoed sudden shouts. Ista's head was turned the wrong way, looking out over the brim of the road into the valley beyond. Around and behind her, men's booted feet suddenly scuffled. She heard a crossbow twang, and caught her breath in fear for Arhys. Hoofbeats. Many hoofbeats, pounding, scrambling, sliding down from the ridge above. A lunatic whoop in a suddenly dearly familiar voice.
Sordso gasped. His boots crunched across the gravel; grunting, he swung those green slippers up out of sight. The boots staggered past Ista's face; nearby hooves scraped. Ista managed to turn her head a little more. The prince's horse, with Joen in her elaborate dress clinging awkwardly to its saddle, was being towed forward at a sudden trot by a running bearer, who shot a look of fear over his shoulder, upslope.
A thump sounded. The invisible weight like a huge hand pressing Ista to the earth lessened. The rasp of Sordso's sword being drawn from its scabbard sliced across her hearing, and she flinched, and at last jerked her head around the other way. Some crossbowman had been careless enough to take his eyes off Arhys for a moment, and the march was now locked in struggle with him. Several nearby bowmen had fired upward, and were frantically recocking. Arhys yanked a dagger from the sheath of the man he wrestled and flung him aside just in time to parry Sordso's thrust. The thrust of steel, that is. A violet light collected in Sordso's palm. He shoved it forward.
The searing purple line passed through Arhys's body without effect, to bury itself in the soil beyond. Sordso yipped with surprise and scrambled frantically backward as a riposte from the dagger nearly swept his sword from his grip. The scramble became a run.
What seemed a very avalanche of horses overwhelmed them. The Jokonan bowmen were knocked aside, ridden down. Swords clanged and spears thrust, fiercely wielded by yelling men in gray-and-gold tabards. In front of Ista's face, a set of hooves that seemed the size of dinner plates suddenly materialized, and danced. Three long equine legs were silk-white, the fourth soaked scarlet with blood.
"Got you that horse you were wanting," Illvin's voice, would-be laconic but for its gasping, sounded from above. Beyond the dinner plates, another set of hooves crunched and slid. And, more sharply, "Five gods! Is she hurt?"
"Ensorcelled, I think," Arhys gasped back. He knelt beside Ista, gathered her up in cool, unliving, welcome hands. Heaved to his feet, and boosted her upward still farther, into his brother's arms. She landed with a limp grunt, stomach down across Illvin's lap.
Illvin cursed, and grabbed a thigh through her skirt to hold her there. He bellowed over his shoulder to someone, not Arhys, "Get Goram!"
"They're re-forming!" shouted Arhys. "Go!" The loud slap of his hand across the white horse's rump was scarcely needed to speed them on their way; the animal was already pirouetting. They plunged down slope, away from the road.
The source of the terrifying gore was revealed, before Ista's bouncing nose, as an ugly cut across Feather's right shoulder, bleeding freely. The ground swept past dizzily. The horse hesitated, its body bunching; Illvin leaned far back in his saddle, his clutch on her leg tightening to a vise. Abruptly, they were sliding straight down the steep hillside in a spray of dirt and stones, the horse's front legs braced; it seemed nearly to squat on its broad haunches behind. Illvin whooped again. Whipping bushes slapped and scratched Ista's face. The least loss of balance, and they would all three be tumbling heads over tails together, bones shattering and guts smashed . . .
The endless slide terminated not in disaster, but in a wild splash across Porifors's little river. Other horses were galloping up around them now. Illvin released his death grip on her thigh and gave her buttocks a distracted, reassuring pat.
Ista found her control of her body returning, and she spat out a mixture of bloody river water and dirt. What had happened to the sorcerer prince? His attention had been diverted altogether from her, evidently. For the moment. Along with control, unfortunately, came sensation. "I think I'm about to vomit," she mumbled into the horse's red-lathered shoulder.
For a blissful instant, they came to a halt. Illvin bent and wrapped his long arms around her, and heaved her upright and over, to sit across his lap. Weakly, she wrapped her arms around that bony sweat-slick torso, itself laboring for breath. His bed robe had been lost somewhere along the route, along with the pitchfork. His mouth was bloodied. His streaked dark hair was a wild tangle across his face. His live body was hot with exertion. But he bore no serious wounds, her testing hands reassured her.
His own shaking hand rose to her face, gently wiping at whatever ungodly mixture of horse blood, sweat, and dirt smeared it. "Dear Is'— Royina, are you hurt?"
"No, that's all from your poor horse," she assured him, guessing it was the blood that alarmed him. "I am a little shaken."
"A little. Ah." His brows arched, and his lips grew less thin, curling up once more.
"I think I am going to have bruises on my stomach from that ride."
"Oh." His hand, across her belly, gave it an awkward little rub. "Indeed, I am sorry."
"Don't apologize. What happened to your mouth?" She reached up with one finger to touch the lacerated edge.
"Spear butt."
"Ouch."
"Better than a spear point, trust me." They started forward once more. He glanced over his shoulder. They were on a minor road, hardly more than a track, that ran along the opposite side of the river from the main one. Other gray-tabarded soldiers now rode all around them. "This is a bad time to linger out-of-doors. That Jokonan column we overtook is one of three closing in on the castle just at the moment, the scouts say. No siege engines sighted in their baggage trains yet, though. Can you hang on to me if we canter?"
"Certainly." Ista sat up straighter and brushed hair out of her mouth, she wasn't quite sure whose. She felt his legs tighten beneath her, and the white horse broke without transition into its long, rocking gait.
"Where did you find the troop?" she gasped, clinging harder to his slippery skin against the jouncing.
"You sent them to me, thank you very much. Are you a seeress, as well? I met them coming down the road even as I was galloping back to Porifors to raise them."
Ah. Dy Cabon had carried out his orders, then. A little early, but Ista was not inclined to chide him for it. "Only prudence rewarded. For a change. Did you see Liss and Cattilara, and Foix? We tried to send them on."
"Yes, they passed through us as we were making for the ridge to flank the Jokonan column. They should be safe within the walls by now." He twisted to glance back over his shoulder, but he did not kick his horse to greater speed, by which Ista concluded that they had, for the moment, shaken off their pursuit. The great horse's stride was shortening, its bellows-breath growing more strained; Illvin eased back in the saddle and allowed it to drop to a slow lope.
"What happened up there on the road?" he asked. "What struck you to the ground? Sorcery, truly?"
"Truly. Sordso the Sot is now Sordso the Sorcerer, it seems. How he came by his demon, I know not. But I agree with you—his dead sister's old demon must know. If we must face Sordso in battle ... does demon magic have a range, do you know? Never mind, I'll ask dy Cabon. I wonder if Foix knows by experiment? I wouldn't put it past him."
"Three sorcerers, Foix reported. At least," said Illvin. "Or so he thought he perceived, among the Jokonan officers."
"What?" Ista's eyes widened. She thought of the tangle of strange lines emanating like a nest of snakes from Dowager Princess Joen's belly. One had held its jaws clamped into Sordso, no question. "Then there may be more than three." A dozen? Twenty?
"You saw more sorcerers?"
"I saw something. Something very uncanny."
He twisted again to look over his shoulder.
"What do you see now?" Ista asked.
"Not Arhys, yet. Blast the man. He always has to be the last one out ali—the last one out. I've told him such bravado has no place in a responsible commander. It works on the boys, though, I admit it does. Bastard's hell, it works on me, and I know better . . . ah." He turned again, a grim smile of temporary relief tweaking up one corner of his bleeding mouth. He let his mount slow to a walk, and frowned; the horse was distinctly limping, now. But Castle Porifors loomed up almost overhead. A few last stragglers were streaming into the town gates from the country round about. The refugees' shouting sounded strained, but not panicked.
Arhys trotted up beside them on a Jokonan horse, presumably obtained by Illvin from the same convenient store as his sword collection. His white-faced page sat up behind, bravely not crying. Ista's inner eye checked the line of pale soul-fire pouring into the march's heart; clearly, Catti still lived, wherever she was. The flow was reduced from its earlier terrifying rush, but still very heavy.
Goram, Ista was glad to see, clung on behind another soldier, and Cattilara's distraught young woman behind a third. Of the barefoot manservant, she saw no sign. Arhys saluted his brother with a casual wave, as casually returned; his eyes upon Ista were grave and worried.
"Time to go in," said Illvin suggestively.
"You'll get no argument from me," returned Arhys.
"Good."
Their tired horses clambered up the switchback road to the castle gate and into the forecourt.
Liss bounded to receive Ista as Illvin lowered her to the ground; Foix followed, to offer her his arm. She leaned on it thankfully, as the alternative was to fall down in a heap.
"Royina, let us take you to your chamber—" he began.
"Where did you take Lady Cattilara?"
"Laid down in her bedchamber, with her women to take care of her."
"Good. Foix, find dy Cabon and attend upon me there. Now."
"I must look to our defenses," said Arhys. "I'll join you as soon as I can. If I can. Illvin . . . ?"
Illvin looked up from instructing a groom in the care of his injured horse.
Arhys's gaze flicked briefly toward the inner court, where his and his wife's chambers lay. "Do what you must."
"Oh, aye." Illvin grimaced, and turned to follow Ista. The wild excitement that had sustained him through the clash on the road was passing off. He limped like his horse, stiff and weary, as they passed under the archway to the fountain court.
CATTILARA'S CHAMBER HAD MUCH THE SAME AIR OF FEMININE refuge as when Ista had entered it on her first day at Porifors. Now, however, the marchess's women were upset rather than welcoming: either anxious and outraged or frightened and guilty, depending on whether they had been privy to the escape plan. They stared at the royina's present bloody, breathless, tight-lipped disarray with horror. Ista ruthlessly dismissed them all, though with orders for wash water, drinks, and food for Lord Illvin—and for the rest of her party, who had all tumbled out onto the road a lifetime ago this morning with no more breakfast than a swallow of tea and bread, or less.
Illvin went to Cattilara's basin and wrung out a wet towel; he glanced at Ista and politely handed it to her first. The red grime she rubbed off her face was startling. Nor was all of the blood from the horse, she realized as she dabbed gingerly at her scratches. Illvin rinsed and wrung out the cloth again and rubbed down his own bloody face and dirt-streaked torso, and accepted a cup of drinking water from Liss, draining it in a gulp. He then trod over to Ista's side to stare at Cattilara, laid down on her bed still in her traveling dress. The right sleeve had been removed, and a compress bound about the ambiguous wound in her shoulder.
She was lovely as a sleeping child, unmarred but for a smudge on her cheek. On her, it looked an elegant decoration. But Illvin's finger uneasily traced the new sunken quality around her eyes. "Surely her body is too slight to support Arhys's as well as her own."
And he ought to know. Ista glanced at Illvin's hollow cheeks and ridged ribs. "For weeks or months, no. For hours or days ... I think it is her turn. And I know who Porifors can least spare right now."
Illvin grimaced, and glanced over his shoulder at the opening door. Foix escorted an anxious dy Cabon within.
"Five gods be thanked, you are saved, Royina!" the divine said in heartfelt tones. "The Lady Cattilara as well!"
"I thank you, too, Learned," said Ista, "for abiding by my instructions."
He regarded the marchess's silent form with alarm. "She was not injured, was she?"
"No, she is not hurt." Ista added reluctantly, "Yet. But I have induced her to lend her own soul's strength to Arhys for a time, in place of Lord Illvin. Now we must somehow compel her demon to speak. I don't know if it was master or servant to Princess Umerue, but I am certain it was witness to—more, a product of—Dowager Princess Joen's demonic machinations. Illvin was right, yesterday: it has to know what she was doing, because it was part of what she was doing. Although it seems to have escaped her . . . leash." Upon reflection, an encouraging realization. "Joen's control is evidently not inviolable."
Dy Cabon gazed at her in blank alarm, and Ista realized belatedly that this must seem gibberish to him. Illvin's high brow wrinkled in nearly equal puzzlement; he said cautiously, "You said Joen seemed more uncanny than Sordso. How so?"
Haltingly, Ista tried to describe her inner vision of the dowager princess, glimpsed so briefly and terrifyingly beside her wrecked palanquin, and of the demon-ridden Prince Sordso. Of how Sordso's demon fire had seemed to unknit her very bones. "Demons have always cringed before me up till now, though I do not know why. I did not know I was so vulnerable to them." She glanced uneasily at Foix.
"This array you describe is very strange," mused dy Cabon, rubbing his chins. "One demon battening on one soul is the rule. There is no room for more. And demons do not usually tolerate each other even in the same general vicinity, let alone in the same body. I do not know what force could harness them all together like that, apart from the god Himself."
Ista bit her lip in thought. "What Joen contained did not look like what Sordso contained. Sordso seemed possessed of a common demon, like Cattilara's or Foix's, except ascendant instead of subordinate—like Catti's when she let it up for questioning, before, and we could barely force it back down again. It was the demon, not her son, who was answering to Joen."
Dy Cabon's face bunched in distaste as he took this in.
Ista glanced at Foix, standing behind him and looking even less pleased. He was as sweat-soaked and grimed from the morning's work as any of them, but he, at least, seemed to have escaped any bloody wound. "Foix."
He jerked. "Royina?"
"Can you help me? I wish to push Cattilara's soul-fire down into her body, and the demon light up into her head, that it may speak and answer and yet not seize her. Without allowing it to break the net by which it sustains Arhys. This not being a convenient moment to drop Porifors's commander down dead. . . . More dead."
"Are you just waiting till Lord Arhys is ready, then, Royina, to release his soul?" asked Foix curiously.
Ista shook her head. "I don't know if that is my task, or even if I could if I tried. I fear to leave him a ghost, irrevocably cut off from the gods. Yet he hangs by a thread now."
"Waiting till we are ready, more like," muttered Illvin.
Foix frowned down at Cattilara. "Royina, I stand prepared at your command to do anything I can, but I don't understand what you want of me. I see no fires, no lights. Do you?"
"I did not at first. My sensitivity was but a confused wash of feelings, chills, intuitions, and dreams." Ista stretched her fingers, closed her fist. "Then the god opened my eyes to His realm. Whatever the reality may be, my inner eye now sees it as patterns of light and shadow, color and line. Some lights hang like a net, some flow like a powerful stream."
Foix shook his head in bewilderment.
"Then how did you work the flies, and the stumbling horse?" asked Ista patiently. "Do you not perceive anything, perhaps by some other metaphor? Do you hear, instead? Or touch?"
"I"—he shrugged—"I just wished them. No—willed them. I pictured the events clearly in my mind, and commanded the demon, and they just happened. It felt. . . odd, though."
Ista bit her finger, studying him. Then on impulse, stepped in front of him. "Bend your head," she commanded.
Looking surprised, he did so. She grasped his tunic and pulled him down yet farther.
Lord Bastard, let Your gift be shared. Or not. Curse your Eyes. She pressed her lips to Foix's sweaty brow. Ah. Yes.
The bear whined in pain. Briefly, a deep violet light seemed to flare in Foix's widening eyes. She released him and stepped back; he staggered upright. A barely perceptible white fire faded on his brow.
"Oh." He touched the spot and stared around the room, at all his company, openmouthed. "This is what you see? All the time?"
"Yes."
"How is it that you do not fall down when you try to walk?"
"One grows used to it. The inner eye learns, just as the outer ones do, to sort out the unusual and ignore the rest. There is seeing without observing, and then there is attending. I need you to attend with me to Cattilara now."
Dy Cabon's mouth pursed in awe and alarm; his hands rubbed one another uncertainly. "Royina, this is potentially very bad for him . . ."
"So are the several hundred Jokonan soldiers moving in around Castle Porifors, Learned. I leave it to your reason to decide which danger is more pressing just now. Foix, can you see—" She turned back to find him staring down at his own belly in a sort of horrified fascination. "Foix, attend!"
He gulped and looked up. "Urn, yes, Royina." He squinted at her. "Can you see yourself?"
"No."
"Just as well, maybe. You have these odd little sputtering flashes flaring off your body—all sharp edges, I can see why the demons cringe ..."
She took him by the hand and led him firmly to Cattilara's bedside. "Look, now. Can you see the light of the demon, all knotted in her torso? And the white fire that streams from her heart to her husband's?"
Foix's hand hesitantly traced the white line, proof enough of his perceptions.
"Now look beneath that stream to its channel that the demon maintains."
He glanced along the line of white fire, then to the trickle still leading from Lord Illvin, and back to Cattilara. "Royina, isn't it coming out rather fast?"
"Yes. So we haven't a lot of time. Come, see what you can do." As before, she made passes with her hands over Cattilara's body; then, for curiosity's sake, dropped her hands to her sides and just willed. It was easier to make the white fire obey using the habits of dense matter, but her material hands were actually not necessary to the task, she found. Cattilara's soul-fire collected at her heart, pouring outward as before. Ista made no attempt to interfere with the rate that Arhys was drawing on it. At least while it continued she knew he was still . . . functional, wherever he was.
"Now, Foix. Try to drive her demon to her head."
Looking very uncertain, Foix moved around the bed and grasped Cattilara's bare feet. The light within him flared; Ista seemed to hear the bear growl menacingly. Within Cattilara, the violet demon light fled upward. Ista's inner eye checked for the continued maintenance of Arhys's life-net, and she tried setting a ligature around Cattilara's neck. It worked for the soul-fire as before, but for the demon?
Evidently, it did, because Cattilara's eyes suddenly opened, glittering with a sharpness alien to the marchess. The very shape of her face seemed to change, as the underlying muscles altered their tension. "Fools!" she gasped out. "We told you to flee, and now it is too late! She is come upon you. We shall all be taken back, weeping in vain!"
Her voice was breathy and disrupted, for the pumping of the body's lungs was not coordinated with the mouth's speech.
"She?" said Ista. "Princess Joen?"
The demon tried to nod, found it could not, and lowered Cattilara's eyelashes in assent instead. Illvin quietly brought a chair to the bed's other side and settled himself in it, leaning forward on one elbow, eyes intent. Liss withdrew uneasily to seat herself on a chest by the far wall.
"I saw Joen standing in the road," said Ista. "From a black pit in her belly seemed to swarm a dozen or more snakes of light. At the end of every snake, is there a sorcerer?"
"Yes," whispered the demon. "That is how she harnessed us all to her will. All, to her will alone. How it hurt!"
"One such band of light ended in Prince Sordso. Are you saying this woman placed a demon in her own son?"
Unexpectedly, the demon vented a bitter laugh. The shape it gave Cattilara's face seemed to shift again. "At last!" it cried in Roknari. He would be the last to go. She always favored her sons. We daughters were useless disappointments. The Golden General could not live again in us, to be sure. At best we were bargaining counters, at worst drudges—or fodder. "That is Umerue's voice," whispered Illvin in grim dismay. "Not as she came to us in Porifors, but as I glimpsed her once before, back in Hamavik."
"From where is Joen collecting these elementals?" asked Ista.
The demon's voice shifted again, back to the Ibran tongue. "Stolen from hell, of course."
"How?" Dy Cabon asked. He hung over Foix's shoulder at the foot of the bed, eyes wide.
The demon managed to indicate a shrug with a lift of Catti's eyebrows. "The old demon did the trick for her. We were filched from hell all mindless and confused, chained to her leashes, fed and trained up . . ."
"Fed how?" asked Illvin, his voice growing apprehensive.
"On souls. It is part of how she manages so many; she farms them out to feed on other souls than her own. At first animals, servants, slaves, prisoners. Then as Joen learned the subtleties of it, on others purpose-taken for their knowledge or gifts. She would place us in their bodies till we had eaten up the things she wanted us to know, then yank us out again. Until we grew fit to become riders upon her best sorcerer-slaves. Fit even to mate with a princess! If she were a sufficiently scorned princess."
"Goram," said Illvin urgently. "Was my groom Goram such a one? Made demon fodder?"
"Him? Oh, yes. He was a Chalionese captain of horse, we think. Never any food of ours, though. She gave us a finch, first, and then the little servant girl. Then that Chalionese scholar, the tutor. She let us eat him all up, as he was only to be executed for following the ways of the Bastard anyway. And then the Jokonan courtesan. She got along better with the tutor than we would have expected, being similarly fascinated by men. Joen despised her for the very expertise she sought to steal, so let her go alive and witless, to find her fate in the streets."
Dy Cabon and Illvin looked equally sick; Foix had hardly any expression at all. Dy Cabon said, "You mean Princess Joen somehow pulls demons from their mounts while the mounts still live? Separates them from the victim souls as the saint of Rauma did?"
The demon's lips curved up in an unpleasant smile. "Exactly the reverse. For Joen, the purpose was binding, not separation. When we'd fed enough, she pulled us out, tearing the souls apart. Taking what she desired for us, leaving the rest as waste. A process equally painful to both parties, we can assure you, though it helped keep us off-balance and servile, we suppose."
Ista was uncertain why the demon had suddenly grown so forthcoming, but she determined to press on while its mood lasted. "The old demon," she repeated. "What is this?"
"Ah. Joen's legacy," said the demon. It spoke now, Ista thought, in the scholar's voice, precise and dry, its Ibran of a pure native accent from somewhere in central Chalion, not at all like Cattilara's softer northern speech. Nor did the young marchess speak in quite such rounded periods. "Shall we tell you all the tale of it? The enemies of our enemy are no friends to us. And yet, why not? We know what awaits us, why shouldn't you? Fools." This last was delivered in an oddly dispassionate tone.
It waited for the body to supply it with breath again, and continued, "In the days of the Golden General's glory, men swarmed in from the Archipelago, seeking advancement in his court and spoils on his battlefields. Among them was an old, old sorcerer, who had long plied his demon magic in the islands among the Quadrenes, passing among them subtly and uncaught. His demon was older still, dozens of lives old. The chaos and disorder of the promised war attracted them like perfume. It was a vast mistake, for the Lion of Roknar was beloved of the Father Himself, and possessed many god-gifts, among them the inner sight.
"The old sorcerer was perceived, accused, convicted, and burned. In its immense accumulated craft, the ancient demon jumped from its dying mount and evaded the Quadrene divines' precautions. Yet it could not jump so far as to reach safety, so it chose for its new mount a person whom the Golden General would not burn—his three-year-old daughter, Joen."
"Princess Joen has been a sorceress all these years?" cried dy Cabon in astonishment.
"Not quite." The demon smiled briefly, bitterly, with Cattilara's lips. "The Golden General was wild with rage and grief. He turned to his god in prayer, and yet another gift was granted to him. The Father gave it to him to encapsulate the demon, to put it to sleep within the little girl. It was the Lion's intention, then, when Chalion was conquered, to secretly seize and bring back a saint of the Bastard, if any such could be found, to excise the demon safely from his daughter according to the forbidden Quintarian rites. And then he rode off to his war.
"But by Roya Fonsa's great work of sacrifice, the Lion of Roknar died before he could accomplish his aims, or return. The disunited princedoms settled into another generation of border war with the Quintarian royacies. And the sealed demon waited for its mount's death, that it might be released again into the world of men. For fifty years, it waited.
"Then, some three years past, something happened. The capsule broke open, releasing the demon into Joen. But not into the malleable child the demon had chosen. Into the harsh, determined, embittered, and embattled woman."
"How?" asked dy Cabon.
"Yes," said Illvin. "Why hold fifty years, then fail? Unless it was set so . . ."
"I know how," said Ista, her mind burning with cold satisfaction. "I believe I could name the very day and hour. I will tell you in a moment. But hush, let it go on. Then what?"
The demon's eyes narrowed at her in something like respect. "Joen was in a desperate quandary, then. She was co-regent for Prince Sordso with her two closest enemies, the general of Jokona and her late husband's brother. Sordso was a surly young sot who hated them all. The general and his uncle were conspiring to seize Sordso and put his uncle on the throne of Jokona in his place."
"Ah," said Illvin in a disconsolate tone. "That was when I'd wanted to strike at Jokona. What excellent timing it might have been, just as their palace coup began . . . oh, well."
"Joen was frantic," said the demon. "She believed—or convinced herself—that the old demon was a legacy from her great father, given to her in secret to rise up in just such an unhappy hour and save his grandson from traitors. So she kept it in secret and began learning from it. The old demon was pleased to have such an apt pupil, and taught her everything, thinking it would soon turn the tables and mount her. It underestimated the iron strength of her will, tempered through four decades of swallowed rage. It became even more her slave."
"Yes," whispered Ista. "I follow that."
"Joen's co-regents were her first enemies to earn her attention. Easy because so intimate, we suppose. The uncle, well, he died quietly. The general underwent a subtler fate, and soon became Joen's fondest supporter in all things."
"Joen is a Quadrene, if fallen into blasphemy by their lights," said dy Cabon, his face knotting with consternation. "But a bad Quadrene is not the same thing as a good Quintarian. She can't possess the correct theological background to handle any elemental safely, let alone a troop of them."
"Indeed," breathed Ista, "not."
The demon-Catti continued, "Her leashed demons soon became more to her than salvation for Sordso; they became her joy. At last, at last, she could exert her will and force a compliance that smiled as it hurried to obey. Her family was not last, but first to fall to her binding. Except for Sordso."
The demon's voice and language changed again. "She took me when I refused to be wed to a Quintarian bastard lord, and her eyes shone with triumph as she did so. All, all to do exactly as she said, always, down to the smallest detail. Except for Sordso, her golden cub. Oh, it cheers my heart even in this living death to know that she finally took my brother Sordso." Catti's—Umerue's—lips drew back in a fierce grin. "I warned him not to defy her. Did he listen? Of course not. Hah!" Cattilara said you were sent to suborn Porifors," said Ista to the demon. "Hence, I suppose, the inclusion of the courtesan . . ."
Illvin's expression, across the bed from her, was a study in surmise, a complicated amalgam of memory, regret, and horror. Ista wondered if these half-digested souls would all run together into one mind, in time—or would they always be a little separate?
"Was it Illvin or Arhys whom your mother instructed you to bind to yourself?" Ista asked. "Or both?"
The Umerue-lips' smile softened. "Lord Illvin. He seemed pretty enough at first. But then we saw Arhys . . . Why settle for second-best, for second-in-command, and all that complicated plot of usurpation and revolt to follow, when we might so simply and pleasantly take Porifors from the top down?" It added in Ibran, "Lord Arhys, yes," and "Arhys. Yes. Mm." And, sighing in no identifiable tongue, "Ah."
"It seems it was unanimous," murmured Illvin dryly. "The servant girl, the princess, the courtesan, and I doubt not the scholar, too. All up in smoke at the first sight of him. I wonder if that bird was female as well? If so, it would probably have flown to his finger. And so Joen's plot was put in disarray by an altogether older sorcery than demon magic." His brow wrinkled half in amusement, half in pain. "Fortunately for me." All pain, now. For a moment, his deep underlying exhaustion floated very near his surface, as if the pull of the whole world bowed his back. Then his dark eyes glittered, and he straightened. "So how was this master demon released from its long prison? You said you knew, Royina."
"I guess, at least. It was the timing—do you not see it? Three years ago on the Daughter's Day, the Golden General's death curse was pulled from Chalion, and from my House: all his spilled, perverted god-gifts swept up and taken back by the gods through their chosen saint. And if all was retrieved that day—it must have included the power of the encapsulation."
Illvin met dy Cabon's eyes; the divine gave a reflective nod.
Ista mused, "I wonder, if Arvol and Ias and I had succeeded in breaking the curse twenty years ago, would Joen have been granted her demon two decades sooner? And which of them would have been ascendant then?"
Dy Cabon stared down at Cattilara with an expression of arrested theological curiosity. "I wonder if the actions of this same Roknari master sorcerer would account for the outbreak of elementals that Chalion suffered in Fonsa's day . . . ?" He shook off the distractions of historical theory, as it perhaps occurred to him that the outbreak they faced now was suddenly all too present and practical.
Why is the creature telling us all this? Ista wondered. To create fear and disorder among her little company? To spread its own distress? She glanced around at Foix's stolidity, dy Cabon's thoughtfulness, Illvin's shrewd concentration. If that was the plan, it wasn't working. Maybe it had simply stolen enough humanity by now to enjoy complaining to an attentive audience. Maybe, with all hope of flight lost, at some last gasp and despite its preferred solitary nature, it sought allies.
The door opened; startled, Ista snapped around. Lord Arhys entered and gave her a respectful nod. She was glad to see he was mail-clad again. He, at least, would not be overheated by his armor. He was followed by maids with trays, a welcome sight, and Goram, considerably recovered, with a pile of Illvin's clothing and war gear.
Ista's party seized on the contents of the trays without ceremony. Arhys strode to the bedside and stared down at his wife, his face bleak. The demon looked back, but said nothing. Ista hoped that wasn't Cattilara's longing leaking into in its eyes. Then she wondered if her own eyes had looked like that, resting on him.
"Is she awake?" Arhys flexed his hand in puzzlement. "How then do I . . . ?"
"Cattilara sleeps," Ista told him. "We gave her demon access to her mouth, that it might speak. Which it has."
"What's arrived out there, Arhys?" demanded Illvin. He alternated downing bites of meat wrapped in bread and swallowing gulps of cold tea with being dressed by his groom.
"About fifteen hundred Jokonan soldiers, my scouts estimate. Five hundred in each column. My two scouts who made it back, that is. Since the ring of besiegers is now closed around Porifors, I despair of the other dozen. I have never lost so many scouts before."
"Siege engines?" Illvin asked around a mouthful of bread, thrusting a leg into a boot of his own held by the kneeling Goram. The lost manservant's boots were tossed aside. Dead man's shoes? No telling now.
"None reported. Supply wagons, yes, but no more."
"Huh."
Arhys glanced at Ista. She did not know what expression was on her face, but he attempted reassurance. "Porifors has withstood sieges before, Royina. The town walls are secured as well—I have two hundred men of my own down there, and half the townsmen are former garrison soldiers. There are tunnels between us to shift reinforcements. What was it, Illvin, fifteen years ago that the Fox of Ibra sent up an assault of three thousands? We held them for half a month, till dy Caribastos and dy Tolnoxo—the present provincar's father—relieved us."
"I don't think it's siege engines that Jokona sends against us now," said Illvin. "I think it's sorcerers." He supplied his brother with a blunt synopsis of the demon's testimony. As he spoke, Goram, pale but resolute, expertly combed back his hair and bound it in a tight knot at his nape, then shook out his mail coat ready to don.
"If this madwoman Joen truly drags a dozen or more sorcerers on leashes," Illvin concluded, ducking into his mail, "you may be sure she means to let them slip against us. If not for revenge for her lost daughter, then for a blow against Chalion to turn the whole line of attack that Marshal dy Palliar plans against Borasnen. An early strike, and hard; and if successful, to be followed by a sweep into north-central Chalion before Iselle and Bergon's forces are properly mustered . . . that's the way I'd do it, if I were the Jokonans. I mean, if I were only mad, and not stupid."
Arhys grinned briefly. "I can scarcely guess what Sordso's staff officers are like at present."
"Cooperative," said Ista blackly. "Of one mind."
Illvin grimaced, and at Goram's silent tap held out a forearm for the groom to buckle on his vambrace.
"Arhys," Ista continued urgently. "Despite your strange state, you have no inner sight, correct?"
"Nothing like what you describe, no, Royina. If anything, my sight seems less than before. Not blurred or dimmed, but drained of color. Except that now I see better at night; almost the same as in the day."
"So you did not see, did not perceive, the strike that Prince Sordso made upon you, when you clashed on the road?"
"No . . . what did you see?"
"That deep light that marks demon magic to my inner eye. A searing bolt of something. Or anyway, it was clear that Sordso thought it was going to be a searing bolt of something. But it passed through you harmlessly, as though you weren't even there."
They both looked to dy Cabon, who opened his plump hands in uncertainty. "In a sense, he isn't there. Not as live souls are, nor even as demons are. The true sundered ghosts are divorced from all realities, the world of matter and the world of spirit both."
"Is he, then, immune to sorcery?" began Ista. "And yet it is sorcery that sustains him now . . . Learned, I do not understand."
"I will give it thought—"
A tangled mess of violet lines of light abruptly appeared throughout the room, flared, and vanished. Foix jumped. A moment later, so did everyone else, as vessels of tea or wine or wash water tipped or cracked or shattered. Illvin's clay cup cleaved in his hand as he was lifting it to his lips, and he danced backward to avoid the splash down his gray-and-gold tabard.
"Joen's sorcerers are now in place, it seems," said Ista flatly.
Foix swung around in wide-eyed dismay; within him, his bear shadow was on its feet, snarling. "What was the purpose of that! A warning? If they can do that, why not burst our bellies or our skulls and have it over with?"
Dy Cabon raised a shaking hand. "Free demons cannot slay directly—"
"The Bastard's own death demon does," said Ista. "I have seen it do so."
"That is a very special case. Free demons, those escaped into the realm of matter . . . well, they might try to slay directly, but—death opens a soul to the gods. Whether the soul chooses to advance through that door at that moment or not is a matter of will, but in that instant it opens both ways. And the demon is vulnerable to recapture."
"And so they jump away when their mount is slain ..." said Foix.
"Yes, but using magic to slay also creates a link between sorcerer and victim. The effort and the backwash are supposed to be very hard on the sorcerer, as well." He paused thoughtfully. "Of course, if a sorcerer uses magic to stampede your horse over a cliff, or any other indirect method of accomplishing your death, the risk does not apply."
A panting soldier in a gray-and-gold tabard burst through the door. "Lord Arhys! There is a Jokonan herald at the gate, demanding parley."
Arhys drew in his breath between his teeth. "Warning indeed. Notice. Well, they have all my attention now. Illvin, Foix, Learned dy Cabon—Royina—will you attend upon me? I want your sight and your counsel. But stay back below the battlement, out of view, as much as you may."
"Yes." Ista paused to release her ligature from Cattilara's neck and be certain the demon would remain quiescent. Foix watched silently, taking up station at Ista's shoulder as if to guard her. Liss had not been named in Arhys's roll, but she rose anyway, arms crossed and shoulders tucked as if trying to make herself small and unnoticed.
Illvin, striding for the door in Arhys's wake, suddenly stopped and swore. "The cisterns!"
Arhys's head swiveled; the two looked at each other. Illvin clapped his brother on the shoulder. "I'll check, and meet you above the gate."
"Hurry, Illvin." Arhys motioned all within to follow him out; Illvin turned aside on the gallery and ran.