CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

THEY CROSSED THE COURT OF THE FLOWERS AND CLIMBED THE inner stairs after Arhys. Above the gate a projecting parapet thrust out. Arhys shouldered past his archers spread out along the sentry-walk, mounted to the top of the battlement, and stood spread-legged, staring down. Ista peeked out between the toothed stones.

To the right, where the road turned away toward Oby, she could see the Jokonans settling into camp in a grove of walnut trees, just out of bowshot or catapult range. Tents were being set up, and horse lines arranged. On the far side of the grove, some especially large tents of green cloth were rising at the hands of servants, some wearing the uniforms of the palanquin bearers. To the left, down in the valley along the river, another column was pouring in, threatening the town walls. At its rear, some soldiers were already driving a few plundered sheep and cattle into the arms of their camp followers, dinner on the hoof.

Beyond, the countryside looked deceptively peaceful—emptied out, Ista hoped; only one or two barns or distant outbuildings seemed to be on fire, presumably sites of some temporary, desperate resistance. The enemy had not—or not yet—fired the fields and crops. Did they anticipate being in secure possession of them by harvest time? The third column presumably was taking up position behind the castle, along the ridge.

The drawbridge was up, the castle gates closed. On the other side of the deep dry cleft that fronted the wall, the Jokonan parley officer stood, bareheaded. The blue pennant of his office hung limply from the javelin in his hand in the afternoon heat. He was flanked by two tense guards, sea-green tabards over their mail.

As the parley officer turned his face upward, Ista's breath drew in. He was the same translator she had met in the raiding column retreating from Rauma. So, was his new duty a reward or a punishment? He did not notice her, half concealed in the embrasure; but it was quite clear by the alarmed widening of his eyes that he recognized Arhys as the sword-wielding madman who had nearly taken his head off in that ravine. Arhys's stony expression gave no clue if the recognition was returned.

The Jokonan moistened his lips, cleared his throat. "I come under the flag of parley from Prince Sordso to Castle Porifors," he began, in loud, clear Ibran. He gripped the shaft of his blue pennant as a man might clutch a shield, and ground the butt a little harder into the dry soil by his boot. It was considered very bad form to shoot a messenger, likely to be coldly criticized by an officer's peers and commanders, later. Rather too belated a consolation from the messenger's point of view, to be sure. "These are the demands of the prince of Jokona—"

"Doesn't it worry you, Quadrene," Arhys overrode him in a carrying drawl, "that your prince has become a demon-ridden sorcerer? As a pious man, shouldn't you be burning him rather than obeying him?"

The guards did not react, and Ista wondered if they had been chosen for their lack of Ibran. By the grimace that flashed over the parley officer's face, he might have felt that his enemy had a point, but he returned sharply, "They say you are a man dead three months. Does it not worry your troops to be following a walking corpse?"

"Not notably," said Arhys. He ignored the slight murmur of his archers, clustered behind him. The looks they exchanged covered a range of expressions, from disbelief to alarm to revelation, plus one fellow who vented an impressed Ooh. "I can see how it might pose a problem for you. How, after all, can you kill me? Even a sorcerer must find it a troublesome paradox."

With a visible effort, the parley officer wrenched himself back to his script. "These are the terms of the prince of Jokona. You will surrender the Dowager Royina Ista at once, as hostage for your cooperation. All officers and soldiers of the garrison will lay down their arms and march out your gate in surrender. Do this, and your lives will be spared."

"To be corralled as demon fodder, perchance?" muttered dy Cabon, crouched looking through an embrasure farther down the walkway. A rather more merciful fate, Ista couldn't help reflecting, than what a divine of the Bastard caught in such a conflict might normally expect from overexcited Quadrene troops.

"Come, come, Jokonan, would you trouble me to spit upon you?" asked Arhys.

"Pray save your spit, Lord Arhys. I hear such liquids will be hard to come by in there soon."

Lord Illvin had climbed up behind the parapet in time to hear this exchange, and smiled sourly. He cast a quick look out over Ista's head, taking in the enemy's arrangements in a sweeping pass. Arhys glanced down at him; Illvin leaned his shoulders against the wall below his brother's feet and gazed back out over the forecourt. In a voice pitched not to carry to the Jokonans, he reported, "They got both cisterns. Leaking like sieves. I have men bailing with every intact vessel they can find, and trying to line the tanks with canvas to slow the outflow. But it's not good."

"Right," Arhys murmured back. He raised his voice again to the parley officer. "We refuse, of course."

The parley officer looked up with grim satisfaction at what was obviously the expected answer. "Prince Sordso and Dowager Princess Joen are merciful beyond your deserving. They will give you one day to reconsider your stance. I will come again tomorrow to hear your new answer. Unless you send to us first—of course." With a bow, he began to back away, inadequately covered by his two guardsmen. He retreated quite a distance before he dared to turn his back.

Not just the expected answer: the desired outcome, apparently.

"What happens next?" asked dy Cabon in worry. "An assault? Will they really wait a day?"

"I wouldn't trust them to," said Arhys, jumping down onto the walk again.

"An assault, yes," said Ista. "But not, I think, by their troops. I would wager anything you please that Joen wishes to play with her new toys. Porifors is her very first chance to test her array of sorcerers in open war. If the results satisfy her ..." A purple line, though only one this time, flashed across Ista's inner vision.

Most of the stretched bowstrings along the sentry walk snapped at once, twanging. A couple of men yelped from the sting of the recoiling cords. An exception was a cocked crossbow that let loose. Its quarrel shot into the thigh of the man standing next to its bearer; the man screamed and fell backward off the walk to smack onto the stones of the court and lie still. His horrified comrade gaped at his bow, flung it from himself as though it burned his hand, and hurried after his fallen mate.

Another, darker flash crackled past.

"Now what?" muttered Foix uneasily, staring up and down the line of appalled archers. Some, already fishing in their belts for replacement strings, found them shredding in their hands.

A few moments later, across the rooftops of the castle's inner courts, a plume of smoke billowed into the air.

"Fire in the stable," said Illvin, his laconic voice at odds with his sudden lunge forward. "Foix, I want you, please." He sped away down the stairs, long legs taking them three at a time.

Now it begins in earnest, thought Ista, her stomach clenching.

Liss's eyes were huge. "Royina, may I go with them?" she gasped.

"Yes, go," Ista released her. She bolted away. Every competent hand would be needed . . . And then there is me. She took herself down off the wall, at least.

Arhys, running past her, called, "Lady, will you look to Cattilara?"

"Of course." A task of sorts. Or maybe Arhys, a prudent commander, merely wanted to get all the useless deadwood stored in one safe place.

Ista found Cattilara's ladies in hysterics; when she had finished with them, their noise was at least muted to well-suppressed hysterics. Cattilara lay unchanged, except for an already visible shrinking of the soft flesh of her face, tightening across her bones. The demon light was knotted tensely within her, making no attempt—yet—to fight for ascendance. Ista blew out her breath in unease, but made sure that the soul-fire continued to pour out toward Arhys without impediment.

*     *     *

THROUGH THE ENDLESS AFTERNOON, ISTA MADE FREQUENT FORAYS from the marchess's chambers to check the effect of the various ripples of sorcery light that scraped through her perceptions. Only that first great assault on the water supply seemed fully coordinated. After that the attack broke into a disorder mirrored by its effects. People fell and broke bones. The horses saved from the burning stable block, let loose in the star court, knocked down a gallery in their squealing and plunging. A wasp nest fell with it, and three men died screaming, choking, and convulsing from the stings; more men were knocked about and injured by the sting-maddened horses.

Other, smaller fires started in other courts. The little remaining water dwindled rapidly. Most of the stored meat, no matter how preserved, was found to be starting to rot and stink; bread and fruit grew green mold that seemed to spread even as one watched. Weevil larvae burgeoned in the flour supply. Leather straps and fiber ropes rotted and came apart in people's hands. Pottery cracked. Boards broke. Mail and swords began to rust with the speed of a maiden's blush.

Any men with histories of tertiary fever began violent relapses; Cattilara's pleasant dining hall was soon filled with men on pallets, moaning, burning, shivering, and hallucinating. Dy Cabon was pressed into service to help tend the sick and, unbelievably soon, the dying. By evening, the faces of the soldiers and servants that Ista passed had gone beyond edgy and frightened to a pale, deadened, bewildered shock.

At sunset, Ista climbed the north tower, the highest, to take stock. Liss, stinking with smoke and limping from being stepped on by frantic hooves, mounted slowly after her. A man in a gray-and-gold tabard clumped up behind to drop an armload of stones onto a growing pile by the battlement, exchange uneasy grunts with two comrades whose unstrung warped bows were flung aside into a corner, then turn and clump back down the winding stairs.

In the level light of the westering sun, the unpeopled countryside appeared weirdly beautiful and serene. In the grove of walnut trees, the Jokonans' well-ordered camp seemed to be enjoying a feast; the only smokes were thin aromatic trails rising from cooking fires. Little clusters of horsemen rode about, patrolling, delivering messages—out for an evening jaunt, for all Ista could tell. All abroad wore sea-green tabards.

The town, behind its walls in the valley, also sent up plumes of smoke, but ugly and black. With better access to water than the castle crowning the hill, the townsmen had kept most of their blazes from spreading out of control, so far. But the few tiny figures Ista could see moving fearfully through its streets and alleys were stiff with fatigue. The men behind its walls crouched, or sat barely moving, or lay as if in exhausted naps. Or dead.

Leaden boot steps scuffed on the stone stairs, and Ista looked around to see Lord Illvin emerge onto the tower platform carrying a small, greasy cloth sack. Even the flushed light of sunset failed to make his face look anything but filthy and pale. Soot and sweat had melted together, to be rubbed in odd streaks by whatever swipe of his hand had dashed the grime from his eyes. He had abandoned chain mail and scorched tabard hours ago, and his plain linen shirt, dotted with small black spark holes, was half stuck to his torso.

"Ah," he said in a voice that sounded as though it came from the bottom of a mine shaft. "There you are."

She nodded greetings; he came to her shoulder, and together they stared down into the disaster of Porifors, behind its deceptively blank and solid outer walls.

The whole stable block was burned-out. Blackened timbers were strewn across it, and messes of broken roof tiles spilled over them like blood. Temporarily, no other smoke was rising, but one corner of the kitchen block was also blackened and fallen in. The star court was a mess—one gallery knocked down, the fountain empty and choked with filth. Horses were tethered along one side; their backs looked odd and lozenge-shaped from this high angle of view. What people who could be seen scuttled about bent and anxious.

"Have you seen Learned dy Cabon lately?" Ista asked Illvin.

He nodded. "Still holding up in the sickrooms. We have pallets strewn through three chambers now. Half a dozen fellows just came down with dysentery. With no wash water left, it won't even take demons to spread that all over the fortress. Bastard's hell. At this rate, Sordso will be able to take Porifors by assault tomorrow with six ponies, a rope ladder, and a Quadrene temple children's choir." His teeth gritted, white against his blackened face. "Oh." He held out the sack. "Would you like some baked horsemeat? It's not rotted. Yet."

Ista eyed it dubiously. "I don't know. Is it Feather?"

"No. Happily."

"Not. . . right now, thank you."

"You should keep up your strength. Five gods know when we'll eat again." He dug out a chunk and dutifully munched it. "Liss?" He held out the bag to her.

"No, thank you," she echoed Ista thinly.

Failing to take his own advice, he passed the bag on to the former archers, now stone-throwers, who accepted it with murmured thanks and somewhat less revulsion. A crack sounded, as another timber in the stable block gave way and fell in a cloud of soot. Illvin returned to the inner side of the tower to stare down into the debacle again.

"That was one day. Less. Bastard's tears, what will we be reduced to in one week?"

Ista leaned on the sun-warmed stone with arms that shook, past prayer. "I have brought this down upon you all," she said in a low voice. "I am sorry."

His brows flicked up; he rested on one elbow beside her, looking across at her. "I'm not so sure you can claim that honor, lady. The situation here was well along this road before you ever arrived in our midst. If your presence had not baited the Jokonans into attack now, you may be sure they would have struck within another month or so— against a fortress with both of its most experienced commanders dead and rotted, or worse, and none even to explain the horrors pouring down out of nowhere upon it."

Ista rubbed her aching brow. "So we're actually not sure if I make any difference, except this way I hand myself as hostage and pawn to Joen." Perhaps. She stared down at the patterned paving stones, far below her. There are other ways to avoid becoming a hostage.

He followed her gaze, and his eyes narrowed in a penetrating frown. He reached out with two fingers and gently turned her chin toward him. "You made a difference to me," he said. "Any woman who can wake a man from a sleep of death with a kiss deserves a second glance, I think."

Ista snorted bitterly. "I didn't wake you with a kiss. I only disrupted and redirected the flow of your soul-fire, as I did later with Cattilara. The kiss was just. . . self-indulgence."

A little smile curved his lips. "I thought you said it was a dream."

"Uh ..." Oh. So she had. His lips curved up farther, maddeningly. She said, "A stupid impulse, then."

"Come, I thought it was a brilliant impulse. You underestimate yourself, lady."

Ista flushed. "I am afraid I have no talent for"—she swallowed—"dalliance. When I was young I was too stupid. Now I'm old, I am too drab." Too stupid then too mad then too drab then too late. "I'm just not the sort."

"Really?" He turned around, leaned against the battlement, and took up her hand with an air of great curiosity. One sooty finger began to trace the dirt-streaked lines within her palm. "I wonder why not? They say I am a man of wit. I should be able to figure it out, with a little study. Map the ground plan of Castle Ista, mark the defenses ..."

"Find the weaknesses?" Firmly, she took her hand back.

"All right, a deal of study."

"Lord Illvin, this is not the time or place for this!"

"Truly. I'm so tired I could hardly stand up. Nor climb to my feet, either."

There was a short silence.

His lips peeled back on a flash of teeth. "Ha. I saw your mouth twitch, then."

"It did not." It did now, helplessly, as she was reminded of the bird in its nest.

"Oh, better—she smirks!"

"I do not."

"Poets speak of hope in ladies' smiles, but give me a smirk any day, I say." Somehow, his thumb was massaging her palm again, tracing the subtle muscles of her hand. It felt wonderful. She wished he would rub her shoulders, her feet, her neck, her everything-that-hurt. And everything hurt.

"I thought you said Arhys was the great seducer in the family." She tried to muster the energy to take her hand back again, and failed.

"Not at all. He's never seduced a woman in his life. They leapt on him from ambush all by themselves. Not without cause, I grant you." He smiled, briefly. "There is this, about being the sparring partner of the best swordsman in Caribastos. I always lost. But if ever I meet the third best swordsman in Caribastos, he's going to be in very deep trouble. Arhys was always better at all things we turned our hands to. But there is one thing that I am quite certain I can do that he cannot."

It was the fault of the hand massage; it lulled her. She said unthinkingly, "What?"

"Fall in love with you. Sweet Ista."

She jerked back. She had heard that endearment before, but not on those lips. "Don't call me that."

"Bitter Ista?" His brows climbed. "Cranky Ista? Cross, ill-tempered, cantankerous Ista?"

She snorted; he relaxed, and his lips quirked again. "Well, I can no doubt learn to adjust my vocabulary."

"Lord Illvin, be serious."

"Certainly," he said at once. "As you command, Royina." He bowed slightly. "I am old enough to have many regrets. I've made my share of mistakes, some"—he grimaced—"hideous indeed, as you well know. But it was the little, easy things—the kisses I did not give, and the love I did not speak, because there was no time, no place—and then, no chance . . . Surprisingly sharp sorrows those are, for their size. I think all our chances grow narrow, tonight. So I shall reduce my regrets— however brief—by one, at least..."

He leaned closer. Fascinated, she did not retreat. Somehow, that long arm had found its way around her aching shoulders. He folded her in. He was quite tall, she reflected; if she didn't bend her head back, she was going to end up with her nose squashed to his breastbone. She looked up.

His lips tasted of soot, and salt sweat, and the longest day of her life. Well, and horsemeat, but at least it was fresh horsemeat. His dark eyes glittered between narrowed lids as her arms found their way around that ridged torso and pressed him inward. What was it she had snarled to dy Cabon—mimicking above what is desired below . . . ?

Some minutes later—too many? too few?—he lifted his head again and set her a little from him, as though to look upon her without having to cross his eyes. His slight smile was altogether drained of irony now, though not of satisfaction. She blinked and stepped back.

Liss, sitting cross-legged against the parapet on the opposite side of the platform, was staring up with her mouth open. The two soldiers weren't even pretending to be watching Jokonans. Their riveted expressions were of men contemplating a daunting feat they had no desire to emulate, such as swallowing fire, or being the first to charge up a scaling ladder.

"Time," Illvin murmured, "is where you take it. It will not linger for you."

"That is so," whispered Ista.

She had to give his dalliance this much credit; the stones seemed suddenly a much less attractive solution to her plight. That had been his intent, she had no doubt.

A dark violet splash of light sparked past her inner vision, and Ista's head turned to follow it. From somewhere below, an outraged cry rang out. She sighed, too wearied to pursue the mystery. "I don't even want to look."

Illvin's head, too, had turned at the cry. By his lack of further craning, he also shared her surfeit of horrors. But then he looked back at her, his eyes narrowing. "You looked around before we heard anything," he noted.

"Yes. I see the sorcerous attacks as flashes of light in my inner vision. Like little bolts of lightning, flying from source to target, or like streaking fire-arrows. I can't tell what their effect will be just by seeing them, though; they all look much the same."

"Can you tell sorcerers from ordinary men just by looking? I can't."

"Oh, yes. Both Cattilara's demon and Foix's appear to me as shapes of shadow and light within the boundaries of their own souls, which, since they are both living persons, are bounded by their bodies. Foix's demon still retains the shape of a bear. Arhys's ragged soul trails him, as though it struggles to keep up."

"How far away can you tell if a person is a sorcerer?"

She shrugged. "As far as my eye can see, I suppose. No, farther than that: for my inner eye sees spirit shapes right through matter, if I pay attention, and concentrate, and perhaps close my outer eyes to reduce the confusion. Tents, walls, bodies, all are transparent to the gods, and to god-sight."

"What about a sorcerer's sight?"

"I am not sure. Foix seemed not to have much, before I shared mine, but his elemental is an inexperienced one."

"Huh." He stood a moment, looking increasingly abstracted. "Come over here." He took her hand and towed her to the western side of the tower, overlooking the walnut grove. "Do you suppose that you could give an exact tally of Joen's sorcerers, if you tried? In her camp, from here?"

Ista blinked. "I don't know. I could try."

The trees' feet were now wading in gray shadow, though their very tops still glowed golden green in the last of the light. Campfires twinkled through the leaves, and a suggestion of the pale squares of many tents. Men's voices carried enough to be heard up on the battlements, although not well enough to make out what they said in the Roknari tongue. On the far side of the grove, the cluster of big green tents, gaudy with pennants, began to glow like verdant lanterns from the lamps being set within them.

Ista took a long breath to try to compose her mind. She extended her perceptions, closing her eyes. If she could sense Joen or Sordso from here, could they sense her? And if Joen could sense her . . . she took another breath, banished the frightening thought, and determinedly uncurled her soul once more.

Upwards of five hundred faint soul-lights moved like fireflies among the trees, the Jokonan soldiers and camp followers busy about their ordinary tasks. A smattering of souls glowed with a stronger, much more violent and disrupted light. Yes, there were the threads, the snakes, wavering through the air from those scattered whorls to converge all in one dark, disturbing spot. Even as she watched, one line crossed another as their possessors moved in space, passing like two strands of insubstantial yarn that did not knot or tangle.

"Yes, I can see them," she told Illvin. "Some are snubbed up near to Joen, some are all spread out across the camp." Her lips moved as she made her count. "Six hug the command tents, twelve are arranged near the front of the grove, nearest to Porifors. Eighteen altogether."

She peeked, turned half around toward the river and the Jokonans' second camp investing the town, and closed her eyes once more. Then turned fully around, toward the bivouac of the third column that had set up along the ridge to the east of the castle, cutting the road to Oby and commanding the valley upstream. "All the sorcerers seem to be in the main camp near Joen. I see no ribbons reaching to the other two camps. Yes, of course. She would want all her sorcerers as close under her eye as possible."

She completed her turn and opened her eyes again. "Most of the sorcerers seem to be sheltered in tents. One is standing under a tree, looking this way." She could not see his physical body, through the leaves, but she could tell which tree it was.

"Hm," said Illvin, staring over her shoulder. "Can Foix tell which is which? What man is a sorcerer, what man is not?"

"Oh, yes. I mean, he can now. He saw the sorcery light with me when the cups broke—and again, standing on the wall when the rest of it began." She glanced warily back over her shoulder at Illvin's tense, closed expression. His eyes were tight with thought, some notion that did not seem to give him much pleasure. "What are you thinking?"

"I am thinking . . . that by your testimony Arhys appears to be immune to sorcery, but sorcerers do not appear to be immune to steel. As Cattilara proved upon poor Umerue. If Arhys could close with them, just them, and yet somehow avoid the other fifteen hundred Jokonans around Porifors . . ." He drew a breath, and wheeled. "Liss."

She jerked upright. "Lord Illvin?"

"Go and find my lord brother, and ask him to attend upon us here. Fetch Foix, too, if he is to be found."

She nodded, a bit wide-eyed, scrambled up, and scuffed rapidly down the tower's turning stairs. Illvin stared out over Prince Sordso and Princess Joen's camp as if memorizing every detail. Ista leaned uneasily by his side, studying that profile suddenly gone distant and cool.

He looked back and smiled down at her in apology. "I am seized by a thought. I fear you will find me a rather distractible man."

It wasn't how she would describe him, but she smiled briefly back in attempted reassurance.

All too soon, footsteps sounded on the stairs. Arhys emerged into the luminous twilight, followed by Liss and Foix. Arhys looked scarcely more corpselike than anyone else in Porifors at present, but his face was spared the usual smears of sweat. Foix's stolidity masked a deep depletion. He had spent the afternoon clumsily trying to undo sorceries all over the castle, to little effect. Dy Cabon had named the effort fundamentally futile, for various theological reasons that no one stayed to listen to, and yet had begged Foix's aid himself when faced with the rising demands of the sick.

"Arhys, come here," said Illvin. "Look at this." His brother joined him at the western parapet. "Five gods attest we know this ground. Royina Ista says there are but eighteen sorcerers in Joen's pack altogether. A dozen lie in the front of the camp, along there . . ."—his hand swept in an arc—"six more in the command tents, a rather better guarded area, I suspect. One big circle could pass round them all, if it were rapid enough. How many sorcerers do you think you could excise with steel?"

Arhys's brows rose. "As many as I could close with, I suppose. But I doubt they would just stand there while we galloped up to them. As soon as they thought to drop our horses, we'd be afoot."

"What if we attacked in the dark? You said you see better in the dark these days than other men."

"Hm." Arhys's gaze upon the grove intensified.

"Royina Ista." Illvin turned urgently to her—and where was all that Sweet Ista now? "What happens when a leashed sorcerer is slain?"

Ista frowned. Surely the question was rhetorical. "You've seen it yourself. The demon, together with whatever pieces of its mount's soul it has digested, jumps to whatever new host it can reach. The body dies. What the fate of the remaining parts of the person's soul may be, I do not know."

"And one other thing," Illvin said, excitement leaking into his voice. "The leash is broken. Or at least—Cattilara's demon broke from control at Umerue's death. More: at that moment, the free demon became Joen's rebellious enemy, dedicated to flight from her as fast as possible. How many demons could Joen suffer to have cut away from her array—jumping randomly into unprepared hosts, or even turning on her—before she was forced to retreat in disorder?"

"If she doesn't have others in reserve, ready to harness like a fresh team of horses," said Arhys.

"No," said Ista slowly, "I don't think she can. All must be there, tied in her net, or they will fly—away from each other if not from her. By Umerue's testimony, it took Joen three years to develop this array, to bring each sorcerer-slave to some apex of carefully selected, stolen skills. Without another visit to whatever back door of hell her master demon can unlock, I doubt she can replace them. And all she'll get at first is a spate of mindless, formless, ignorant elementals. We know she spills them, too; it cannot be a well-controlled process, not when dealing with the essence of disorder itself. Although . . . Cattilara's demon fears recapture; if that is not just some filial obsession of Umerue's, it implies recapture is possible. I don't know how quickly Joen might effect it."

"With several freed demons flying in all directions, it would be more difficult, I should guess," said Illvin.

Arhys leaned his elbow on the stone wall and eyed his brother. "You are thinking of a sortie. A sorcerer-hunt."

"Aye."

"It cannot be done. I am certain to take wounds—which Catti would be forced to bear."

Illvin looked away. "I was thinking the royina could switch you back to me. For the occasion, as it were."

Ista gasped protest. "Do you realize what that would mean? Arhys's injuries would be yours."

"Yes, well ..." Illvin swallowed. "But then Arhys could go on for quite a bit more than his enemies would guess. Perhaps physicians or women could stay at my side, binding up the leaks as they spring. Buying extra minutes."

Arhys frowned. "And then . . . what? At your last gasp, break the link? Return all my wounds to me at once?"

Ista tried not to let her voice emerge as a shriek. "Leaving you trapped in a hacked-apart body that can neither die nor heal?"

Arhys said vaguely, "I really don't have all that much feeling in my body anymore. . . . Maybe I might not be trapped. Maybe"—his ravishing gray eyes rose to meet Ista's, and the sudden light in them terrified her down to her bones—"I might be released."

"To the death of nothingness? No!" said Ista.

"Indeed not!" said Illvin. "I mean the sortie to swing round and return to Porifors. The others would ride to guard you, and clear your way to the sorcerers. And make sure you got back."

"Mm." Arhys stared down into the dusk. "How many men do you think it would take?"

"A hundred would be best, but we do not have a hundred. Fifty might make it."

"We do not have fifty, either. Illvin, we do not have twenty, not mounted."

Illvin straightened up from the parapet. The excitement drained from his face. "Twenty is too few."

"Too few to ride out? Or to ride back?"

"If too few to ride back, then too few to ride out. I could not ask it of any man if I were not riding myself, and I would perforce be detained in here."

"Only in a sense," said Arhys. He was looking increasingly, disturbingly, intent. "We are dying here by the hour. Worse—Lord dy Oby will ride apace to our relief. He was never laggard, but for the sake of his daughter he will brook no delay. Without warning of Joen's demonic deceits, he will race his troops into this trap."

"He cannot be here before day after tomorrow, at the soonest," said Illvin.

"I wouldn't be so sure. If today's courier was taken by the Jokonan screen and failed to arrive at Oby, he'll know at once, for I know the warnings about the ambush of Foix and the divine reached him. The fortress of Oby is already well aroused." Arhys's frown deepened. "Also, the longer we wait, the worse condition we will all be in."

"That would certainly appear to be true," Illvin conceded.

"And," his voice lowered, "the worse condition I will be in. Our men are dying now without a blade being lifted or a quarrel being fired. By nightfall tomorrow, at this rate, Sordso's forces will be able to walk unopposed into a castle manned only by corpses, unmoving save for one. And I will be left facing the same enemy—alone and unsupported."

"Ah," said Illvin, sounding shaken.

"Had you not thought it through? I'm surprised. Royina"—he turned to Ista—"I am sundered now. Freeing me from this body will not change that state. Let it be done while . . . while there is still some honor in it. Some use."

"Arhys, you cannot ask this of me."

"Yes. I can." His voice fell further. "And you cannot refuse me."

Ista was trembling, both at what he proposed and at what he envisioned. That solitary fate was, she had to admit, the logical progression of events.

"Arhys, no, this is too fey," protested Illvin.

"Fey is a man who looks forward to death. I look back upon mine. I am beyond fey, I think. If this hazard is to be cast at all, it must be soon. In the dark before dawn."

"This night?" said Illvin. Even he, who had advanced the plan, sounded appalled at its sudden acceleration.

"This very night. We've been shoved most forcefully onto the defensive, and the Jokonans do not look to us, in our present shock, to turn it about. If ever the gods gave me the gift for finding the moment on the field, I swear to you, this is one."

Illvin's lips parted, but no sound came out.

Arhys smiled slightly and turned again to view the walnut grove in the fading light. Though perhaps not fading for him, Ista was reminded. "So, how would I find these sorcerers and not waste time butchering ordinary men?"

Foix cleared his throat. "I can see them."

Behind them, sitting small and cross-legged by the wall again, Liss caught her breath.

Arhys looked across at Foix. "Would you ride out with me, dy Gura? It's a good pairing. I think you are less vulnerable to these sorcerous attacks than any other man here."

"I ... let me look at the ground." Foix, too, advanced to the battlement and leaned upon it, staring down at the camp. Ista saw by the way his eyes opened and closed that he marshaled his second sight to study this challenge.

Arhys turned to Ista. "Royina, can you manage this thing? Neither Illvin nor I will be able to speak to you—we must rely on your judgment when to make or break our links."

lam every kind of afraid. Physically. Magically. Morally. But mostly the last. "I think I could cut Illvin free of you, yes. What about Cattilara?"

"I would spare her," said Arhys. "Let her sleep."

"To wake a widow? I am not sure that is a betrayal she could ever forgive. She may be young and foolish, but she is not a child now, and will never be a child again. In any case, she must be allowed to wake and eat, that she may lend you strength, and not fail through no fault of her own."

Illvin said, "I fear if she has any hint of this, she will grow quite frenzied. And I doubt her demon will be on our side either."

The stars were coming out, overhead. On the western horizon, glowing pink feathers of cloud were fading to gray. So much indifferent beauty, in the world of matter . . .

"I must take thought for Cattilara," said Ista. It seems no one else is willing to.

From the deepening shadows, Foix spoke: "Lord Arhys, if you decide to ride out, I will go with you. If the royina will release me to your command."

Ista hesitated for three sick heartbeats. "I release you."

"Thank you, Royina, for this honor," Foix said formally.

"Come," said Arhys to Illvin. "Let us go see if there is enough unbroken gear left in Castle Porifors to outfit this curious hunt. Foix, attend." He turned for the stairs.

Illvin strode back to grasp Ista's hand and lift it to his lips. "I shall see you shortly."

"Yes," whispered Ista. The grip tightened, and was gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

IT WAS CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT BEFORE LORD ARHYS WENT TO REST in his chambers, so that Cattilara, on the other side of the door, might be roused to eat. His page removed his boots, but no more, and settled by the foot of the bed to guard his repose. Ista thought the exhausted boy would be asleep on the floor before five minutes had passed. Arhys lay back on his bed, eyes wide and dark in the light of the room's sole candle.

"Be tender with her," he pleaded to Ista. "She has had to endure far too much."

"I will use my very best judgment," Ista returned. Arhys accepted her words with a nod. It was Illvin, overseeing the dispositions before returning to the night's too-eventful watch, who cocked a curious eyebrow at her as they turned away.

"Be as careful of her as of her demon, and I don't mean it the way Arhys does," he muttered to Ista. "After that accursed escapade with the wagon, I believe there is no limit to what she would do in pursuit of her ends."

"I will use," said Ista neutrally, "my very best judgment." She let Foix and Liss pass before her into Lady Cattilara's chamber and closed the door upon him, gently but firmly.

The most levelheaded of Cattilara's ladies was just arriving with the meal tray. The haggard look on her face, as well as the care she took setting the food down, told Ista she recognized the cost of it. Ista dismissed her only as far as a seat on a chest. Liss stayed by Ista's elbow as she approached Cattilara's bed.

"Foix, stand by her feet. Keep an eye on her demon," Ista directed. Foix nodded and did so. Ista was unhappy to be demanding yet one more duty of him, when he was so plainly drained to the point of swaying on his feet. He desperately needed to rest for a few hours before the sortie. But Joen had taught her greater caution of demons.

Ista called up her inner sight and closed her hands around the flow of soul-fire from Catti's heart, reducing it to the tiniest trickle of contact with Arhys. Ista imagined the look of life flowing from his face in the next room, and her chest tightened. The demon shadow squirmed in agitation, but did not challenge Ista's control. Cattilara's eyes flew open, and her breath drew in. She sat up abruptly, then swayed, dizzy. Liss pressed a tin cup of water into her hand. By the way she guzzled, pressing it to her dry lips, Ista thought they were none too soon with this sustenance. Liss transferred the tray to a small table by the bedside and drew off the linen cover. Plain fare, and stale, presented on a miscellany of battered old plates.

Catti glared over the cup at Ista and glowered down at the tray. "What is this? Servants' food? Or a prisoner's? Is the mistress of Porifors so dethroned by her usurper, now?"

"It is the last and best untainted food in the keep, reserved for you. We are now surrounded by a Jokonan army and besieged by a troop of sorcerers. Their demon magic is chewing everything within these walls to pieces and spitting it out upon us. All the water is gone. The meat seethes with maggots. Half the courts are burned, and a third of the horses lie dead. Men are dying tonight below us of disease and injury without ever having come within bowshot of Joen and Sordso's troops. Joen's new way of making war is ingenious, cruel, and effective. Extraordinarily effective. So eat, because it is the only meal Arhys will have tonight."

Cattilara gritted her teeth, but at least she gritted them on her first bite of dry bread. "We could have fled. We should have fled! I could have had Arhys forty miles from here by now, and out of this. Curse you for a lack-witted bitch!"

Foix and Liss stirred at the insult, but Ista's raised hand stayed them. "Arhys would not have thanked you. And who is we? Are you even certain whose voice speaks from inside your head right now? Eat."

Catti gnawed, gracelessly, but too driven by her ferocious waking hunger to spurn the proffered meal. Liss kept the water coming, for Cattilara's sunken features betrayed how dangerously parched she had grown. Ista let her chew and swallow for several minutes, until she began visibly to slow.

"Later tonight," Ista began again, "Arhys rides out on a hazardous sortie, a gamble to save us all. Or die trying."

"You mean him to die," Catti mumbled. "You hate him. You hate me."

"You are twice mistaken, though I admit to a strong desire to slap you at times. Now, for instance. Lady Cattilara, you are the wife of a soldier-commander and the daughter of a soldier-commander. You cannot possibly have been raised, here in this dire borderland, to such wild self-indulgence."

Cattilara looked away, perhaps to conceal a flash of shame in her face. "This stupid war has always dragged on. It will always drag on. But once Arhys is gone, he's gone forever. And all the good in the world goes with him. The gods would take him and leave me bereft, and I curse them!"

"I have cursed them for years," said Ista dryly. "Turnabout being fair." Cattilara was furious, distraught, writhing in overwhelming pain. But was she divorced altogether from reason?

So what is reality now, here in this waking nightmare? Where is reason? Absurd, that I of all women should insist on reason.

"Keep chewing." Ista straightened her weary back, crossed her arms. "I have a proposition for you."

Cattilara glowered in suspicion.

"You may accept or refuse, but you may not have other choices. It quite resembles a miracle, in that regard. Arhys rides out tonight against Joen's sorcerers. Illvin has volunteered to accept his wounds, to the point of death. It seems to me that two bodies, both nourishing Arhys's sword arm and bearing his hurts, would carry him farther than one. Perhaps just the needed edge, that little difference between almost succeeding, and almost failing. You can be a part of his ride, or you can be shut out of it."

Foix, startled, said, "Royina, Lord Arhys would not desire this!"

"Quite," said Ista coolly. "No one else here will offer you this choice, Cattilara."

"You cannot do this behind his back!" said Foix.

"I am the appointed executor of this rite. This is women's business now, Foix. Be silent. Cattilara"—Ista drew breath—"widow you are and shall be, but the grief you will carry into the rest of your life will be different depending on the choices you make tonight."

"How better?" snarled Cattilara. Tears were leaking from her eyes now. "Without Arhys, all is ashes."

"I didn't say better. I said, different. You may accept the part apportioned to you, or you may lie down and be passed over. If you do not take your part, and he fails, you will never, ever know whether you might have made the difference. If you accept the part, and he still falls—then you will know that, too.

"Arhys would have protected you from this choice, as a father would a beloved child. Arhys is wrong in this. I give you a woman's choice, here, at the last gasp. He looks to spare you pain this night. I look to your nights for the next twenty years. There is neither right nor wrong in this, precisely. But the time to amend all choices runs out like Porifors's water."

"You think he will die in this fight," grated Cattilara.

"He's been dead for three months. I did not war against his death,

but against his damnation. I have lost. In my lifetime, I have looked two gods in the eye, and it has seared me, till I am afraid of almost nothing in the world of matter. But I am afraid of this, for him. He stands this night on the edge of the true death, the death that lasts forever, and there is none to pull him back from that precipice. Not even the gods can save him if he falls now."

"Your choice is no choice. It's death all ways."

"No: death in different ways. You had more of him than any woman alive. Now the wheel turns. Be assured, someday it will turn for you. All are equal in this. He goes first, but not uniquely. Nor alone, for he will have a large Jokonan escort, I do think."

"He will if I have anything to do with it," growled Foix.

"Yes. Do you imagine not one of them is also beloved, as Arhys is? You have a chance to let Arhys go out in serenity, with his mind clear and unimpeded, concentrated as the sword which is his symbol. I will not give you leave to send him off harassed and dismayed, distracted and grieved."

Cattilara snarled, "Why should I give him up to death—or to the gods, or to you, or to anyone? He's mine. All my life is his."

"Then you shall be hollow and echoing indeed, when he is gone."

"This disaster is not my doing! If people had just done things my way, this all could have been averted. Everyone is against me—"

The food on the tray was all gone. Sighing, Ista touched her ligature, and opened the channel wide once more. Cattilara sank back, cursing. The flow of soul-fire from Catti's heart was slow and surly, but it would suffice for the next few hours.

"I would have liked to give her a chance to say good-bye," said Ista sadly. "Lord Illvin's remarks on kisses withheld and words unspoken weigh much on my mind."

Foix, his face appalled, said, "Her remarks were better left unspoken to Lord Arhys just now, I think."

"So I judged. Five gods, why was I appointed to this court? Go, Foix, get what rest you may. It is your most urgent duty now."

"Aye, Royina." He glanced at Liss. "Will you come down to see us off? Later on?"

"Yes," whispered Liss.

Foix started to speak, seemed to find his throat strangely uncooperative, nodded thanks, and bowed his way out.

*     *     *

ISTA, TOO, EVENTUALLY WENT TO LIE DOWN IN HER CHAMBERS FOR A few hours. She longed for a dreamless slumber, feared the sleep of dreams, but in any case merely dozed, disquieted by the occasional agonized noises that filtered in through her lattice from a castle disintegrating, it seemed, about all their ears. At length Liss, drawn face candlelit by a stub in a brass holder whose glass vase lay in shards somewhere, came to rouse her. Ista was already awake and dressed. The bleak mourning garb was growing dirty and frayed, but its black robe suited her mood and the shadows of this hour.

Liss followed her, holding up the meager light, as Ista eased out the door onto the gallery. She took three steps down the empty stairs, and stopped. Her breath caught.

A tall, somber man stood on the treads two below her, so that his face was level with hers, in precisely the position she had kissed and challenged the dead Arhys, half a lifetime ago here. His face and form were uncertain in outline; she thought he looked a bit like Arhys, a bit like Arvol, and more than a little like her own dead father, though dy Baocia had been a shorter, thicker man. He was not much, she thought, like Ias.

He was dressed as an officer of Porifors, in mail and a gray-and-gold tabard; but the mail gleamed, and the tabard was pressed and perfect, its embroidery bright as fire. His hair and beard were pure gray, cut short as Arhys's were, clean and fine. The wavering candlelight did not reflect from his upturned face, nor from the endless depths of his eyes; they shone instead with their own effulgent light.

Ista swallowed, raised her chin. Stiffened her knees. "I wasn't expecting You here."

The Father of Winter favored her with a grave nod. "All gods attend on all battlefields. What parents would not wait as anxiously by their door, looking again and again up the road, when their child was due home from a long and dangerous journey? You have waited by that door yourself, both fruitfully and in vain. Multiply that anguish by ten thousands, and pity me, sweet Ista. For my great-souled child is very late, and lost upon his road."

The deep resonance of his voice seemed to make her chest vibrate, her bones ring. She could barely breathe. Water clouded her vision and fell from her unblinking eyes. "I know it, Sire," she whispered.

"My calling voice cannot reach him. He cannot see the light in my window, for he is sundered from me, blind and deaf and stumbling, with none to take his hand and guide him. Yet you may touch him, in his darkness. And I may touch you, in yours. Then take you this thread to draw him through the maze, where I cannot go."

He leaned forward and kissed her on the brow. His lips burned like cold metal. Fearfully, she reached up and touched his beard, as she had Arhys's that day, tickling strange and soft beneath her palm. As he bent his head, a tear fell as a snowflake upon the back of her hand, melted, and vanished.

"Am I to be a spiritual conductor on Your behalf, now?" she asked, dazed.

"No; my doorway." He smiled enigmatically at her, a white streak in the night like lightning across her senses, and her reeling mind slipped from dazed to dazzled. "I will wait there for him, for a little while." He stepped backward, and the stair was empty again.

Ista stood, shaken. The spot on the back of her left hand where his tear had splashed was icy cold.

"Royina?" said Liss, very cautiously, stopped behind her. "Who are you talking to?"

"Did you see a man?"

"Um . . . no?"

"I am sorry."

Liss held up her candle. "You're crying."

"Yes. I know. It's all right. Let us go on now. I think perhaps you had better hold my arm till we get down the stairs."

The stone court, the archway, the star court with its restive horse line, and the gate into the forecourt passed in a dark blur. Liss held her arm the whole way, and frowned at its fierce trembling.

The torch lit forecourt was crowded with men and horses. Most of the flowerpots were broken, fallen from the walls or tipped, spilling their dry soil. The succulents were smashed, the more tender flowers wilted and limp like cooked greens. The two espaliered trees on the far wall shed dry leaves in the breathless night heat, falling one by one atop a drift of rotting petals.

Foix was the first to notice her arrival; his head turned, and his mouth opened. No doubt she moved in a cloud of god light, just at present, being so recently touched. And I bear a burden that I am most gravely charged to deliver. Her eye swept the court, found Arhys and Illvin, but her attention was temporarily distracted by the horse they both studied. From a distance.

It was a tall, long-nosed chestnut stallion, held by three sweating grooms. A blindfold covered its eyes beneath its bridle, which was fitted with a deep curb bit. One groom held its upper lip tightly in a twitch. Its ears were back flat, and it squealed angrily, showing long yellow teeth, and kicked out. Illvin was standing well back from it, looking aggrieved.

Ista came up beside him and said, "Lord Illvin, do you know that stallion is possessed of an elemental?"

"So Foix has just informed me, Royina. It explains a lot about that horse."

Ista peered through half-closed eyes at the writhing mauve shadow within the animal. "Grant you, it appears to be a small, unformed, stupid one."

"That explains yet more. Bastard's hell. I was going to lend the accursed beast to Arhys. His good dappled gray has gone lame, along with half the horses that remain to us—an outbreak of thrush, developing with unnatural speed, and I hope Arhys can soon deliver our thanks to whichever Jokonan sorcerer thought of that one."

"Is this an especially good warhorse?"

"No, but no one will care if Arhys rides it to death. In fact, I think the grooms are hoping he will. Five gods know I've tried to, without success."

"Hra," said Ista. She walked forward; the two grooms holding the beast's head squeaked protest. Her eyes narrowed, and she reached up and placed her god-splashed hand upon the stallion's forehead. A tiny six-pointed mark burned upon her skin, snow-white to her outer vision, a fierce spark to her inner eye. "Remove its blindfold."

The groom glanced somewhat desperately at Illvin, who nodded permission but drew his sword and held it with the flat out, watching tensely.

The horse's eyes were dark brown, with purple centers. Most horses' eyes had purple centers, Ista reminded herself, but they didn't usually have quite so deep a glow. The eyes fixed on her, and rolled whitely. She stared back. The animal suddenly grew very still. Ista stood on tiptoe, grabbed one ear, and whispered toward it, "Behave for Lord Arhys. Or I will make you wish I'd merely ripped your guts out, strangled you with them, and fed you to the gods."

"Dogs," corrected the nervous groom holding the twitch.

"Them, too," said Ista. "Take off the twitch and stand away."

"Lady ... ?"

"It's all right."

The groom backed away. The horse, shivering, flicked its ears up to strict attention and arched its neck to bring its face, submissively, flat to Ista's torso. It gave a brief nudge, leaving a trail of red horsehairs across her black silk robe, and stood perfectly quietly.

"Do you do that sort of thing often?" Illvin inquired, strolling over. With extreme caution, he reached out to give the beast an experimental pat on the neck.

"No," sighed Ista. "It has been a day for unique experiences."

Illvin was simply dressed in light linen trousers and his spark-spotted shirt, in preparation for his role to come. Arhys looked so much as he had when Ista had seen him for the very first time that she caught her breath. Except that his mail and tabard were not blood-spattered. Yet. He smiled soberly at her as he came to her side.

"A word, Royina, before I go. Two words."

"As many as you please."

He lowered his voice. "First, I thank you for bearing me up to a better death. One less shameful, small, and stupid than my first."

"Our men may yet surprise you on that score," said Illvin gruffly. On the far side of the forecourt, a mere dozen soldiers were also preparing their mounts. Pejar was among them; his face was flushed with fever, Ista noted. He should have been lying on a pallet, not attempting this. Then she wondered how few men in Porifors were still able to walk at all, at this hour.

Arhys smiled briefly at his brother and forbore to argue or correct, or pull that thin hope from his hands. He turned back to Ista. "Second, I beg a boon."

"Anything within my power."

His clear eyes fixed on her with penetrating intensity; she felt targeted. "If this dy Lutez manages to die well tonight, let it complete the set that was left undone so long ago. Let what victory I may gain swallow up forever the old, cold dereliction. And be you healed of the long wound that another dy Lutez dealt you."

"Oh," said Ista. Oh. She dared not let her voice break; she had still an office to perform. "I was given a message for you, too."

His brows rose; he looked a little taken aback. "No courier has penetrated the Jokonan blockade for a day. What messenger was this?"

"I met Him on the stairs but now. It is this." She swallowed to clear her voice.

"Your Father calls you to His Court. You need not pack; you go garbed in glory as you stand. He waits eagerly by His palace doors to welcome you, and has prepared a place at His high table by His side, in the company of the great-souled, honored, and best-beloved. In this I speak true. Bend your head."

Wide-eyed, astonished, he did so. She pressed her lips to his brow, the pale skin neither hot nor cold, unsheened with sweat. Her mouth seemed to leave a brief ring of frost that steamed in the heavy night air. A new line appeared in her second sight, a fine thread of gray light, strung from him to her. It is a life-line. It could, she somehow knew, stretch to the ends of the earth without breaking. Oh.

Moved, she completed the full formal rite, kissing the back of each hand, then bending to his feet and touching her lips to each boot as well. He jerked a little, as if to dissuade her, but then stood still and allowed the gesture. He recaptured her hands and helped pull her back to her feet. Her knees felt like water.

"Surely," he whispered in awe, "we are blessed."

"Yes. For we bless each other. Be at rest in your heart. It will be very well."

She backed away to let Illvin embrace his brother. Illvin held Arhys away by his shoulders, after, and gazed with smiling puzzlement into those strange exultant eyes, which seemed to look back from some great and receding distance. The cool lips smiled kindly, though. Illvin turned to give him a leg up on the painfully obedient red stallion, check his girths and stirrups and gear one last time, and slap his leather-clad leg in some habitual gesture. He stood away.

Ista looked around through blurred and stinging eyes to find Liss, standing at the shoulder of Foix's horse. Foix was already mounted. He saluted Liss in the gesture of the Daughter's Order, touching his forehead. She returned a courier's salute, fist tapped over her heart. Foix, meeting Ista's eyes, saluted her as well; she gave back the sign of the fivefold blessing.

The dozen men of Arhys's forlorn little company mounted up at his quiet word. No one spoke much.

"Liss," Ista choked, and cleared her throat. "Liss," she began again. "Attend on me. We must get to the tower."

Both Liss and Illvin fell in beside her, and they started back through the archway. Behind them, Ista could hear Porifors's gates begin to creak open, the iron ratcheting of the drawbridge chains echoing among the dying flowers. Illvin walked backward a moment, staring into the fire-streaked 'dark, but Ista schooled herself not to turn around.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

ISTA'S ACHING LEGS PUSHED HER UP THE NARROW TOWER STAIRS, the curving stone wall harsh beneath her groping hand, into a square of unexpected radiance. Rows of candles were lined up at the base of the parapet walls on the north and south sides, stuck into blobs of their own wax, burning clear and unwavering in the breezeless night air. The heat seemed to stream upward into the starry night sky, but withal the air of the tower was much less close and stale than that of the forecourt.

With their arrival, the platform seemed crowded. Ista surveyed the arrangements she'd ordered and breathed satisfaction. At one side Lady Cattilara, dressed in a robe, lay silently upon a straw pallet that was covered with a sheet. Another pallet, also covered with old linens, lay empty beside her. The sewing woman with her basket, Goram, and Learned dy Cabon, his robes now very stained indeed, all waited anxiously. The little company would have to suffice; the few physicians and acolytes of the Mother left alive in the beleaguered town were felled by fevers, or worse, and in any case could not be smuggled up the collapsed tunnels to their castle's aid.

Illvin, emerging from the stair's blackness, shielded his eyes against the candle glow. "Royina, will you be able to see out, to track my brother's progress?"

"It won't be these eyes I use to follow him. And your attendants must be able to see you." Her material hand reached to touch the invisible reassurance of the gray thread, which seemed to spin out from her heart into the darkness below. "I will not lose him now."

He grunted somewhat disconsolate acquiescence, drew a breath, and seated himself upon the empty pallet. Laying his sword aside, he peeled out of his speckled and sweat-stained shirt and rolled up his loose trouser legs. Goram helped pull off his boots. He swung his long legs out straight and lay back, face not so much composed as rigid, his dark dilated eyes looking up at the stars. Wisps of cloud, moisture out of reach, crossed the spangled vault in gray feathers. "I am ready." His voice sounded parched, but not, Ista thought, just from lack of water.

From the castle below, she heard the faint ratchet of the drawbridge chains being pulled up again very slowly, and a jingle of harness and thump of hooves passing away from the walls, fading with distance. The gray thread was moving in the pool of darkness below, very like a fishing line taken by a pike. "We have not much time. We must begin." She dropped to her knees between the two pallets.

Illvin took her hand and pressed it to his lips. She caressed his slick brow as she took it back. Composed herself. Shut out the confusing sight of her eyes and brought up the tangle of lights and shadows by which the realm of spirit represented itself to her now. She suspected the gods simplified it for her, and that the reality beneath this was stranger and more complex still. But this was what she was given; it must do.

She undid her ligature around the white trickle coming from Illvin's heart, opening the channel wide. Soul-fire poured out, joined the sluggish, sullen stream from Cattilara, and flowed away into the night, winding around the gray thread but not touching it. The life drained from Illvin's face, leaving it stiff and waxen, and she shuddered.

She turned away and studied the sleeping Cattilara. The demon swirled in agitation beneath her thin breastbone. Enormous stresses propagated here, straining toward some cataclysmic breakage. Ista's next task was dangerous indeed, dangerous to them all, but she could not shirk from it. So many souls were at risk in this ride . . .

She tightened Cattilara's ligature, pushing the soul-fire up from her heart toward her head. The demon tried to follow it. She laid her snow-spangled left hand upon Cattilara's collarbone, stared in fascination at the gray glow her fingers suddenly shed. The demon shrank again, crying with new terror. Cattilara's eyes opened.

She tried to surge upright, only to find her body still paralyzed. "You!" she cried to Ista. "Curse you, let me go\"

Ista let out her tight breath. "Arhys rides out now. Pity his enemies, for death on a demon horse descends upon them out of the darkness, bringing sword and fire. Many will bear him company on his journey to his Father's keep tonight, their souls like ragged banners borne before his echoing feet. You must choose now. Will you aid him or impede him, in his last journey?"

Cattilara's head yanked back and forth in an agony of denial. "No! No! No!"

"The god himself awaits his coming, His own holy breath held in the balance of the moment. Arhys's heart flies ahead to his Father's hand like a messenger bird. Even if he could be dragged back now, he would spend the rest of his life, and I think it would not be long, hanging at that window, longing for his last home. He would not thank you. He could not love you, with all his heart anchored in that other realm. I think he might even grow to hate you, knowing what glory you denied to him. For one last moment, the last instant of time and choice, think not of what you desire, but of what he does; not of your good, but of his greatest good."

"No!" screamed Cattilara.

"Very well." Ista reached to open the ligature, one eye on the restive, mutinous demon.

Cattilara turned her head away, and whispered, "Yes."

Ista paused, exhaled. Murmured, "So I pray the gods may hear even me, and let my whispered yes tower above my shouted no and mount all the way to their fivefold realm. As I would be heard, so I hear you." She swallowed hard. "Hold your demon on its course. It will not be an easy one."

"Will I feel much pain?" asked Cattilara. Her eyes met Ista's at last. Her voice would have been almost inaudible, but for the silence on the platform. Not even cloth rustled, from the people standing watching.

Yes, no, I have no idea. "Yes, I think so. All births have some."

"Oh. Good." She turned her head away again, but not in denial. Her eyes were wet, but her face was as still as carved ivory.

Ista lifted her hand, but her intervention was not needed. As Cattilara's face went slack, the white fire burst redoubled from her heart, to join the flow from Illvin in a torrent, roaring down over the parapet. So, you do not ride alone, Arhys. The hearts of the two who love you best go with you now. She hoped his body received their outpouring as an exaltation, at the other end of that white line.

She rose and hurried to the parapet, motioning the others to make ready with pads, cloths, and tourniquets. She stared out into the darkness, the roads like gray ribbons, the open spaces rucked like mist-shrouded blankets across an unmade bed, the trees of the grove black and silent. A few watch fires burned in the enemy camp, and Jokonan horsemen slowly patrolled back and forth out of bowshot. A clot of moving shadows reached the trees, slipping between the patrols.

She glared out with all the strength of her other eyes, following the white flood and thin gray thread to where a dozen soul-sparks moved, atop the lesser life-blurs of their horses. Arhys's gray glow was distinctive, Foix's violet-tinged double shadow even more so. She could see clearly through all the moving masses that lay between, when Arhys kicked the demon-lit shape of his horse into a canter. He closed rapidly on a quiescent, colored thread of sorcerer light, like a hawk swooping on unsuspecting prey.

"Can you see Foix?" Liss's breathless voice sounded by her ear.

"Yes. He rides by Arhys's side."

The shouts of alarm didn't go up till the first tent went down. As more cries and a ring of steel split the night, the mounted patrols wheeled about and began galloping back toward the camp. Abruptly, the snake of sorcerer fire stretched and snapped. A bluish gout of soul-fire shot aloft, separating even as Ista watched from a violent purple streak, which sped away trailing soul shreds in torn-off, fluttering rags. The bluish gout writhed in agony, and faded into elsewhere. The purple streak grounded itself in a moving soul-spark somewhere beneath the trees; both the recipient and the demon dropped flat in the shock of that arrival. But the snake did not renew itself.

"That's one," said Ista aloud.

The attackers made no cries or calls at all, moving in grim, determined silence. The pale blur of another tent, sheltering the head of another colored snake, swayed, shook, and collapsed. The Jokonan sorcerer gathered energy for some strike at his attacker; Ista could see the flash of a bolt of demon magic pass through Arhys, and hear the wail of the sorcerer's surprise and woe, cut off. She rather thought that faint, distant, liquid thunk might have been a beheading. Another violet streak separated from another white gout. Shocked and tumbling, the violet blur fell helter-skelter into a horse being ridden toward the fray by a Jokonan cavalryman. The animal stumbled, jerked sideways, dumped its rider, and wheeled to run at a hard gallop away down the Oby road. The loose snake head seemed to quest after it as if seeking to strike, but then fell back in on itself, disintegrating in a stream of sparks.

"That's two," said Ista.

From the trees a wavering glow blazed up, yellow and bright, as a tent caught fire. Beyond the grove, lights were being lit in the big green command tents. Ista had no doubt that those sorcerers asleep when the first blow fell were now astir, yanked awake by Joen if they'd slept through the noise. How quickly could the surprised Jokonans coordinate their defenses? Their counterattack? Another spurt of soul-fire, without a demon this time, seared past her eye. An ordinary enemy soldier slain, or one of Arhys's defiant volunteers? From a god's-eye view, she realized, it made no difference. All death-births were accepted equally into that realm.

"Three," she counted, as the attack pressed forward.

"Are we winning?" gasped Liss.

"It depends on what you think is the prize."

At the fourth tent the attackers began to come to grief at last. Three sorcerer snakes had somehow combined there. Possibly Arhys was weirdly invisible to them, for they chose to concentrate on Foix. Of course—they must imagine another sorcerer as the greatest danger to them, mistake Foix for the heart or head of the enemy strike. Soul-lights swayed, jerked, spun in Ista's dizzied perceptions. The bear went down, roaring, under a net of fire. But the fourth and fifth snakes were beheaded, ribbon-bodies lashing furiously in their death throes before shredding apart in a streaming aurora. From that far green-glowing tent, Ista could hear a woman fiercely screaming, but the Roknari words were blurred to unintelligibility by distance and rage.

"I think they have taken Foix," said Ista.

Behind her, a triple gasp. "Help!" cried the sewing woman. White-faced, Liss whirled and dropped back to her post by Cattilara's side.

On both Cattilara's right thigh and on Illvin's, long dark slices had opened up. A brief glimpse of the red-brown of pulsing muscle, a pale streak of tendon, then both the twin wounds were flooded with red. The sewing woman and Liss, and Goram and dy Cabon, hastened to pad and bind each cut and slow the stream.

Yes. Yes, thought Ista. Her strategy was good. On one recipient, that sword cut would have gone to the core. The half wounds were half as dire. She almost laughed aloud, if blackly, imagining the dismay of Arhys's assailant, knowing from the shock of contact, the jerk of blade from the bone, the ringing up his arm, how hard he'd struck, yet seeing that wound close up again before his eyes . . . Indeed, the wild wail that echoed up now from the grove might well be the very man. You thought you'd dropped all the horrors of nightmare down upon Porifors, while you sat safe. Now, watch Porifors return the favor. We hold, we hold.

For a very little while longer.

She turned again to try to peer beneath the trees. She could mark Arhys's striding progress across the camp by the sounds of terror, she thought, as his enemies flew screaming before his pale face and deadly blade. And by the streams of white fire rising in his wake. He was unhorsed; she was uncertain when that had happened. She hoped he was not yet alone, without one comrade left to guard his back.

I think he is alone now.

A weird wet thunk sounded behind her. She glanced back to see her helpers rushing to press pads to Illvin's and Cattilara's stomachs. That was a crossbow bolt. She wondered if Arhys had plucked it out to throw back at his dazed enemies, or left it in place like a badge. It would have been a killing strike, on any other man, at any other time. Soon there will be more. By the gods, a dy Lutez does know how to die three times, and three times three if needed.

She fell to her knees behind the parapet, clinging to the stone.

It seemed to her that some great black glacier, some ice dam in her soul, was melting, as if a hundred summers' heat had fallen on it in an hour. Cracking, coming apart. And that in the mile-deep, mile-long lake of icy green water backing it up, an expectant surge rippled from bank to bank, from the surface to the uttermost depths, troubling the waters. I passed blessing to you in the forecourt. But you passed blessing back to me, too. Trading rescues. Five gods watch us ride out together in this breaking dawn.

You Five may awe us. But I think we must awe You, too.

"Seven," she whispered aloud.

Then something went wrong. A hesitation, a turning away. Too many, far too many, soul-sparks swirled around that gray flame. Now he is surrounded, cut off. Dozens who ran away now run toward, encouraged by their own numbers, daring to take him down.

In the midst of your enemies, your Father has prepared a feast for you, on a table your father set long ago. Here it comes . . .

Another thunk, and another. From behind her, Liss's sharp voice cried, "Lady, there are too many wounds splitting open! You must stop this!"

Dy Cabon's strained rumble, "Royina, remember you promised Arhys that Lady Cattilara would live—!"

And a certain fat white god has promised Illvin to me, if I did not mistake Him. If we both live. A god-given lover, importunate and bold as a scarred stray cat, rubbing past my guard into my good graces. If I can keep him fed.

She glanced over her shoulder. Illvin's body jerked upward with the transferred force of some massive blow to Arhys's back, and Goram, his face frantic, rolled him over to reach the red rent. Cattilara's white hand half split from its wrist, and Liss pounced to staunch the spurting.

Now. Oh yes, now. Ista clenched her hand about the torrent of white fire running past her shoulder. The flow stopped abruptly. Wild shocks pulsed back in both directions from her grip. The violet channel shattered. The white fire, the constant companion of her inner eye for days, winked out.

A hushed hesitation: then, in the shadowed grove, a grotesque roar of hysteria-tinged triumph went up from half a hundred Jokonan throats.

The ice dam exploded. A wall of water towered, bent, and broke, thundering forward, bursting its banks, blasting her soul wide, wider, scouring and flushing a lifetime of stones, rubble, rotted and clotted trash before it. Boiling, roaring outward. Ista spread her arms wide, and opened her mouth, and let it go.

The gray thread, almost lost to view in the violent blazes, stiffened to a taut rope. It began to move back through her new dilation, faster and faster, until it seemed to smoke with the heat of its passage, like an overstrained fiber rope about to char and burst into flame. For an instant, Arhys's astonished, agonized, ecstatic soul moved through hers.

Yes. We are all, every living one of us, doorways between the two realms, that of matter that gives us birth, and that of spirit into which we are born in death. Arhys was sundered from his own gate, and lost the way back to it forever. So it was given to me to lend him mine, for a little time. But so great a soul does need a wide portal; so knock down my gates and breach my walls and burst them wide, and pour through freely, by my leave. And farewell. "Yes," Ista whispered. "Yes."

He did not look back. Given what he must be looking on toward, Ista was not in the least surprised.

It is done, Sire. I hope You find it was done well.

She heard no voice, saw no radiant figure. But it seemed to her she felt a caress upon her brow, and the ache there, which had throbbed for hours as though her head were bound in a tight iron band, stopped. The end of the pain was like a morning birdsong.

There was a real morning birdsong, she realized muzzily, here in matter's lovely realm, a cheery, brainless warble from the bushes below the castle walls. The gray cloud-feathers among the fading stars were just beginning to blush a faint, fiery pink, color creeping from east to west. A little thread of lemon light lined the eastern horizon.

Illvin groaned. Ista turned to find him sitting up in dy Cabon's grip, pulling blood-soaked bandages from his unmarked body. His lips parted with dismay as he took in the extent of the mess, starting to glow scarlet as color seeped back into the world. "Five gods." He swallowed against a surge of bile. "That was bad, at the end. Wasn't it." It was no question.

"Yes," said Ista. "But he's gone, now. Safe and gone." In the grove below, the fear-crazed Jokonans, she somehow knew, were hacking Arhys's body to bits, pulling it apart, terrified that it might yet reassemble and rise once more against them. She did not see any merit in mentioning this to Illvin just now.

Cattilara lay on her side, curled up. She cried in quiet, stuttering sobs, almost unable to breathe, clutching the sponge that had stanched her stomach so hard that the blood bubbled through her fingers. The sewing woman patted her clumsily and uselessly on the shoulder.

The world darkened around Ista, as if dawn, appalled by the scene, retreated again over the horizon. Strolling into in her mind like some casual wayfarer, a Voice spoke: familiar, ironic, and immense.

My Word. Spacious in here all of a sudden, is it not?

"What are You doing here now? I thought this was become your Step-father's battlefield."

You invited Me. Come, come, you can't deny it: I heard you whispering over in that corner.

She was not sure she had any emotions left for this. Not rage, in any case. Her disembodied quietude might be either serenity or shock. But the Bastard was surely a god to be approached with caution. "Why do you not appear in front of me?"

Because I am behind you, now. The Voice grew warm and amused. The press of an enormous belly seemed to heat her back, along with an obscene implication of loins against her buttocks, and a pressure of wide hands upon her shoulders.

"You have a vile sense of humor," she said weakly.

Yes, and you catch every one of My jokes, too. I love a woman with a keen ear. He seemed to breathe into hers. You should have a keen tongue to go with them, I vow.

Her mouth filled with fire.

"Why am I here?"

To complete Arhys's victory. If you can.

The Voice was gone. The darkness faded into a streaked pale dawnlight. She found herself fallen on her knees on the tower platform, leaning into Illvin's alarmed grip.

"Ista? Ista!" he was saying into her ear. "Royina, dear, don't frighten a poor naked cavalier. Speak to me, yes?"

She blinked open blurry eyes. He was only a nearly naked cavalier, she discovered to her disappointment. The bloodstained rags of his linen trousers were still rucked up around his loins. He was a most magnificent mess otherwise, true, dark matted hair falling in a wild tangle over his face and shoulders, sweaty and soot-smeared and smelly and striped with red. But all his scars were old ones, healed and pale. He huffed with relief when he saw her looking back at him and bent his neck to kiss her. She fended off his lips with her palm. "Wait, not yet."

"What was that?" he asked.

"Did you hear anything? Or see anyone?"

"No, but I'll swear you did."

"What, would you not swear instead that I am mad?"

"No."

"And yet you see no god lights, hear no voices. How do you know?"

"I saw my brother's face when you blessed him. And yours when he blessed you. If that is madness, I would run down the road after it dressed as I am, and barefoot."

"I will walk slowly."

". . . Good."

He helped her to her feet.

Liss said anxiously, "Royina, what of Foix?"

Ista sighed. "Foix went down beneath many soldiers and sorcerers. I did not see his soul arise, nor his demon flee. I fear he is taken, perhaps wounded as well."

"That's . . . not good," said dy Cabon, still kneeling by Illvin's pallet. His teeth grated in a little, nervous gesture. "Do you think ... do you think Joen can bind him into her array?"

"I think yes, given time. What I do not know is how long he can resist her." Five gods, I do not wish to lose another boy.

"Not good at all," Illvin agreed.

He had barely exhaled, steadying himself upright, when a shout rang out, Goram's voice: "Lady Catti! No!"

Ista twisted around. Cattilara was on her feet, her bloody robe falling wide about her. Her eyes were huge, her mouth open. The demon light within her had expanded to the margins of her body, and pulsed violently.

"The demon is ascendant!" Ista cried. "It is taking her. Seize her, do not let her run!"

Goram, closest, attempted to take her arm. A violet light appeared in her palm, and she shoved it toward him. He fell, retching. Ista staggered toward her, stepping between her and the opening of the stairs. Cattilara started forward, then shied away, her hands raised as if to shield her eyes. She looked around frantically. Her knees bunched, and she lunged for the wall.

Liss sprang forward and grabbed her ankle. She twisted, snarling, and yanked at Liss's hair. Illvin danced forward, hesitated for an instant of calculation, and clipped her precisely across the side of the head. She flipped backward, half-stunned.

Ista tottered over and fell to her knees beside her. She seemed to see the demon like a tumor spreading tendrils throughout Cattilara's body. Winding like a parasitical vine around the tree of her spirit, sapping strength, and life, and light. Stealing the high complexities of personality, language, knowledge, and memory that it could not, in the fundamental disorder of its nature, ever make for itself.

Oh. Now I see how to do this.

She reached out with her spirit hands and lifted the demon, trailing recoiling tendrils, from Cattilara's soul. It came unwillingly, flopping in panic like some sea creature drawn out of the water. Ista held out a material hand, fingers spread for a screen, and pushed back the trailing shreds of Cattilara's soul, like carding wool, until only the demon was left in her hand. She held it up dubiously before her face.

Yes, said the Voice. That's right. Go ahead.

She shrugged, popped the demon in her mouth, and swallowed it.

"Now what? Are You going to extend this metaphor to its logical conclusion? It would be just like You, I think."

I shall spare you that, sweet Ista, said the Voice, highly amused. But I do like your vile sense of humor. I think we shall get along well, don't you?

There was no cranny in her armored spirit for the demon to wedge itself within, to clutch, to hold; and it wasn't only that she was filled by the god. She felt the demon, knotted up in terror, pass out the other side of her soul. Into the realm of the spirit. Into the hands of the god its Master. Gone.

"What will happen to the pieces of the other souls who are tangled up in it?" she asked in worry. But the Voice had vanished again or, at least, didn't choose to answer.

Cattilara was crouched on the tower platform, panting and hiccupping in little short sobs.

Illvin cleared his throat apologetically, and shook out his hand. "The demon tried to fling you to your death, and its freedom," he told her.

She stared up at him with a ravaged face. In a ragged voice she said, "I know. I wish it had succeeded."

Ista motioned the sewing woman, Goram, and Liss to her. "Get her to a bed, a real bed, and call her women to her. Find her what comforts this castle can yet yield. Don't let her be left alone. I'll come to her when I can." She saw them down the spiral stairs, Cattilara, weary beyond weeping, leaning on the sewing woman and shrugging away from Liss.

Ista turned back to find Illvin and dy Cabon slumping worriedly on the eastern parapet, staring down at the Jokonan camp in the growing light. It roiled with activity, half hidden beneath the trees. Wisps of smoke still rose from the tents that had been burned. A stray saddled horse trotted away from a man trying to catch it; his Roknari curses carried faintly through the moist dawn air. Ista craned her neck in hope, but it did not appear to be Illvin's red stallion.

"So what has happened, Royina?" asked dy Cabon, gazing down in perplexity. "Have we won or lost?"

"It was a very great hunt. Arhys slew seven sorcerers before they brought him down. He stumbled at the eighth. I think it was a sorceress. I wonder if she was young and beautiful, and he could not force his hand swiftly enough to the task?"

"Ah," said Illvin sadly. "That would be Arhys's downfall, wouldn't it."

"Perhaps. The Jokonans had realized how few were his numbers and were combining against him by then, anyway. But the freed demons are fled away in all directions; Joen did not recover any."

"Alas that we do not have two more Arhyses to complete the task," said Illvin. "Perhaps ordinary men must try now." He hitched his shoulders and frowned.

Ista shook her head. "Joen has hurt us, and now we have hurt her back. But we have not defeated her. She still holds eleven sorcerers on her strings and an army barely scratched. She is in a rage; her assault will redouble, without mercy."

Dy Cabon slumped on the parapet, thick shoulders bowed. "Then Arhys rode in vain. We are lost."

"No. Arhys has won us everything. We have only to reach out our hands to collect it. You didn't ask me what I did with Cattilara's demon, Learned."

His brows went up, and he turned toward her. "Did you not bind it in her, as before?"

"No." Ista's lips drew back on a smile that made him recoil. "I ate it."

"What?"

"Don't look at me; it's your god's metaphor. I have finally penetrated the mystery of the Bastard's second kiss. I know how the saint of Rauma accomplished her task of booting demons out of the world and back to their holy commander. Because it seems the trick of it has now fallen to me. Arhys's parting gift, or rather, something he made possible." She shivered with a sorrow to which she dared not yet give way. "Illvin."

Her voice was sharp, urgent; it jerked him from the grieving lassitude that seemed to be overtaking him, as he leaned all his weight on the wall and stared into nothing. He had lost, she reminded herself, a worrisome amount of his own blood in the past hour, for such an already-depleted man. Muddled with Cattilara's, it was spread out in clotting pools across half the tower platform. His wounds had all closed as if they had never been, except for the row of scabbed needle holes bound with thread across his shoulder. He looked back at her and blinked owlishly.

"What is the swiftest, most efficient possible way by which I might come face-to-face with Joen?"

With unthinking brilliance, he replied simply, "Surrender." Then stared at her aghast, and clapped his hand to his mouth as if a toad had just fallen from his lips.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

ISTA HAD JUST FINISHED WASHING, OR AT LEAST, CLEANING, HER body with a half cup of water and some rags when Liss returned to their chambers. She clutched a pile of white garments in her arms, pushing open the inner door with a twist of her hips. "These are the best Cattilara's women could find in a hurry," she announced.

"Good. Put them on the bed." Ista closed the dirty black robe back about herself and came over to examine them. It had not been, by any definition, a bath, but at least the touch of her less-sticky skin against clean clothing might not feel like some violation. "How fares the marchess?"

"She is asleep now. Or unconscious. I really couldn't be quite sure, looking at her. She was very pale and gray."

"Just as well, either way. The blood she spent on the tower buys her a favor, perhaps, in this drained slumber." Ista sorted through the piles. A linen shift the color of new cream, bordered with elaborate cutwork, looked as though it had a hem short enough that she would not trip over it. A delicate white over robe, embroidered in shining white thread that lent it weight and swing, was a Bastard's Day festival garment. The unknown needlewoman had somehow endowed the friezes of tiny dancing rats and crows with considerable charm. "Perfect," Ista murmured, holding it up. The spark, she noticed, was gone from her left hand, though the frost mark on her skin remained.

"My lady, urn . . . isn't it a little provocative to place yourself in Quadrene hands wearing the Bastard's own color?"

Ista smiled grimly. "Let them imagine so. Its real message is one I do not expect them to read. Haste, now. Tie the ribbons of the shift in back straightly, please."

Liss did so, cinching in the graceful waist. Ista pulled on the over-robe, shook out the wide sleeves, and fastened it closed beneath her breasts with the amethyst-and-silver mourning brooch. The meaning of the heirloom had shifted, it seemed to her, half a dozen times since it had come into her possession. All its old woes had drained out utterly, last night. Today she wore it new-filled with stern sorrow for Arhys, and for those who had ridden with him. All about her must be renewed, in this hour.

"The hair next," she instructed, sitting on the bench. "Something quick and neat. I do not mean to go out to them looking like a madwoman dragged through a hedge, or a haystack hit by lightning." She smiled in memory. "Put it in one braid."

Liss swallowed hard and began brushing. And said, for the fourth or fifth time since dawn on the tower, "I wish you would take me with you."

"No," said Ista with regret. "Ordinarily, you would be much safer as the servant of a valuable hostage than left in a crumbling fortress about to fall. But if I should fail in what I attempt, Joen would make demon fodder of you, steal your mind and memories and courage for her own. Or take you in trade for her sorcerer-slaves that Arhys killed last night, and set you on me not as my servant but as her guard. Or worse."

And if Ista succeeded . . . she had no idea what might happen after that. Saints were no more immune to steel than sorcerers, as her predecessor the late saint of Rauma—was no longer able to testify.

"What could be worse?" The long strokes of the brush faltered. "Do you think she has enslaved Foix and his bear? Yet?"

"I'll know in an hour." What worse might be, should Liss fall into Joen's hands, suddenly occurred to Ista. Now that would be the perfect, unholy union of two hearts: to feed Liss to Foix's bear, and let Foix's own caring drive him mad with horror and woe as their souls mixed . . . Then she wondered whose mind was blacker, Joen's, to do such a thing, or her own, to impute such a course to Joen. It seems I am not a nice person, either.

Good.

"There are some white ribbons here. Should I braid them in?"

"Yes, please." The pleasant, familiar yank of the plaiting went on swiftly, behind Ista's back. "If you see any chance of it at all, I want you to escape. That is your highest duty to me now, my courier. To carry away the word of all that has happened here, though they call you mad for it. Lord dy Cazaril will believe you. At all costs, get you to him."

Silence, behind her.

"Say, I promise, Royina,'" she instructed firmly.

A little mulish hesitation, then a whisper: "I promise, Royina."

"Good." Liss pulled the last bowknot tight; Ista rose. Lady Cattilara's white silk slippers did not fit Ista, but Liss knelt and tied on a pair of pretty white sandals that did well enough, binding the ribbons around Ista's ankles.

Liss led the way to the outer chamber, opening the door to the gallery for Ista to step through.

Lord Illvin was leaning against the wall outside, arms folded. It seemed he had also found half a cup of water to bathe in, for though he still reeked more than slightly, his hands and fresh-shaved face were clean of blood and dirt. He was dressed in the colors of court mourning, in the light fabrics of this northern summer: black boots, black linen trousers, a sleeveless black tunic set off with thin lines of lavender piping, a lilac brocade sash with black tassels wrapped about his waist. In the hot noon, he had dispensed with the weight of the lavender vest-cloak, though an anxious Goram hovered with the garment folded over his arm. Goram had arranged his master's hair in the pulled-back, elegant braiding in which Ista had first seen it; the frosted black queue down the back was tied with a lavender cord. Illvin straightened as he saw her and gave her a sketch of a courtier's bow, truncated, she suspected, by bloodless dizziness.

"What is this?" she asked suspiciously.

"What, I had not thought you slow of wit, dear Royina. What does it look like?"

"You are not going with me."

He smiled down at her. "It would reflect exceedingly oddly upon the honor of Porifors to send the dowager royina of all Chalion-Ibra into captivity without even one attendant."

"That's what I said," grumbled Liss.

"The command of the fortress has fallen to you," Ista protested. "Surely you cannot leave it now."

"Porifors is a shambles. There is little in here left to defend, and not enough men left standing to defend it with, though I would prefer to conceal that fact from Sordso for a while yet. The parley for your transfer this morning has bought us hours of precious delay, which we could not have purchased with blood. So if this is to be Porifors's last sortie, I claim it by right. By the unfortunate logic of the situation, in my last bad idea, I could not ride along to correct my strategy in mid-leap. But such logic does not prevail here."

"Your riding would not have changed the outcome."

"I know."

Disconcerted, she studied him. "Do you, in some fey mood, seek to outdo your brother?"

"I never could before; I see no need to try now. No." He took her hand and made little soothing circles on her palm with his thumb. "In my youth, I was apprenticed to my god's order, but I missed the whisper of my calling. I will not miss that calling twice. Well, I scarcely see how I can, when it smacks me on the side of the head and bellows, Attend! in a voice to bring down the rafters. I spent the years of my manhood aimlessly, though well enough in my brother's service, for the lack of a better direction. I have a better direction now."

"For an hour, perhaps."

"An hour will suffice. If it is the right hour."

Arhys's forlorn page padded into the stone court, and cried from the foot of the stairs, "Royina? They are come for you now at the postern gate."

"I come," she called down gently to him. She hesitated, frowning at Illvin. "Will the Jokonans even let you go along with me?"

"They will be glad enough to have another prisoner of rank, at no further cost to themselves. It is also the perfect disguise by which I might scout their camp and number their forces."

"How much scouting do you think you can do as a prisoner?" She squinted at him. "What are you disguised as?"

His lips twitched. "A coward, dear Ista. As they believe we betray you in terror to save our property, so they will think I have attached myself to you to save my skin."

"I don't think they are going to think any such thing."

"So much the better for my poor reputation, then."

She blinked, beginning to feel light-headed. "If I fail, they will make demon food of you. A very banquet for some Jokonan officer-sorcerer. Maybe Sordso himself."

"Ah, but if you succeed, Royina! Have you given thought to what you will do after?"

She looked away uncomfortably from that dark, intent gaze. "After is not my task."

"Just as I thought," he said in a tone of triumph. "And you accuse me of being fey! I rest my argument. Shall we go?"

She found her hand disposed upon his arm while she was still trying to decide if she was convinced or just confused. He handed her down the stairs as though they advanced together in some procession, a wedding or a coronation or a feast day, or onto a dance floor in a roya's palace.

The illusion ended soon enough as they picked their way across the charnel wreckage of the star court—two more horses lay dead and swelling there this morning—through the shadow of the archway, and into the disorder of the entry court. A dozen men clustered on the walls in view of whatever Jokonan embassy waited without, very nearly the whole of the garrison who could stand.

Two short, round towers bulged outward on either end of the front wall of the forecourt, allowing a covering cross fire upon the outer gate. A few more soldiers, and a broad, familiar figure in unfamiliar clothes, waited by the leftward tower that harbored the postern door. Ista and Illvin, trailed by Goram and Liss, came to a halt there.

"Learned." Ista favored dy Cabon with a nod. He had shed his order's distinctive robes, not that his filthy whites hadn't been ripe enough to burn by now, and was dressed in a hodgepodge of borrowed gear that mostly failed to fit him. In any color but white, Ista noted.

"Royina." He swallowed. "Before you go ... I meant to beg your blessing."

"We are well met, then; before I went, I meant to beg yours."

She stood on tiptoe, leaned over his sadly reduced belly, and kissed his forehead. If the god light passed any message to him, it was too subtle even for her inner eye to read. He swallowed and placed his hand upon her brow. Whatever ceremonious benediction he'd mustered escaped him as he burst into tears: he managed only a choked "Bastard help us!"

"Sh, sh," Ista soothed his agitation. "It is well." Or as well as might be, under the circumstances. She studied him narrowly. His sleepless hours with the spell-sickened, with their impossible demands made upon skills he didn't even possess, had shaken him badly. The bloody rite on the north tower had been even more harrowing. His god, she thought, had sapped and mined his soul very nearly to the point of breakthrough, stressing him close to cracking open, little though he realized it. The gods had either been unusually lucky in driving two such mules down the road to Their task at Porifors, or else had been trying exceptionally hard . . . I wonder if dy Gabon is Their second sortie?

Five gods—was it possible to pray that her burden might pass to him instead? The notion shook her, and she blinked to clear her vision. She had a hideous conviction that the answer was yes. Yes. Yes! Let the responsibility for disaster pass to another, not to her, not to her again . . .

Except that dy Cabon's chances of surviving success, let alone failure, seemed to her even less than her own. She fought back an impulse to fling herself upon him and beg him to take her place. No.

I have paid for this place. I am emptied out with the cost of it. I will not give it up for any man.

"Buck up, dy Cabon, or else take yourself off," Illvin muttered, scowling. "Your weeping is unnerving her."

Dy Cabon swallowed again, marshaling his self-control. "Sorry. Sorry. I am so sorry that my mistakes brought you here, Royina. I should never have stolen your pilgrimage. It was presumption."

"Yes, well, if not you, the gods would have just had to send someone else to make the mistakes." Who might have failed upon the road. "If you would serve me, live to testify. Your order will need to know all the truth of this, one way or another."

He nodded eagerly, then paused, as if finding her offer of release harder to digest than he'd expected. He bowed and stood back, brow wrinkled.

Illvin removed his sword and passed it to Goram. "Hold this for me till I return. No point in handing my father's blade to Sordso for a present, unless it be point first." Goram ducked a nod and tried to look stern, but his features just came out looking contorted.

Ista embraced Liss, who, with a glower at dy Cabon, managed not to cry at her. Then Illvin was handing her through the dark, close space under the tower. The door opened to the light, and a soldier grunted and heaved at something that fell with a muffled thump, then turned aside to let the two of them pass.

The object turned out to be a narrow board, which he had thrown across the sharp cleft before the castle wall. Illvin hesitated, and Ista wondered if he thought of all the random breakage Porifors had suffered in the day past, and if this makeshift bridge was likewise vilely ensorcelled. But he cast her a quick, encouraging smile over his shoulder and stepped briskly across it. It bent disturbingly, in the center of its span, but held.

Ista glanced across at the Jokonan embassy drawn up before the gate to accept her surrender. Some dozen horsemen were assembled— mostly soldiers, together with three officers. Ista recognized Prince Sordso instantly. The translator-officer rode nervously by his side. The other officer, a heavy, leathery, bronze-skinned man with gray-bronze hair, was also a sorcerer-slave; Ista saw by the ascendant demon light that filled his skin. As with Sordso, a twisting ribbon of light floated from his belly back toward the distant green tents.

Also tethered thus was the one horsewoman, or rather, a woman who rode pillion Roknari-style behind a servant, sitting sideways on a padded chair atop the horse's haunches with her feet demurely disposed on a little shelf. The sorceress wore courtly, trailing garments, and a broad-brimmed hat tied below her chin with dark green ribbons. She was a much younger woman than Joen, though neither maidenly nor beautiful. She stared intently at Ista.

Ista stepped out after Illvin, keeping her eyes upon his face and not the dark drop below, which was deliberately lined at the bottom with sharp rocks and glinting broken glass. Cattilara's sandals slipped on her sweating feet. Illvin reached to clasp her hand, a hard grip, and pulled her to stand upon the dusty ground beyond. Instantly, the board was jerked back, scraping through the postern door, which was then clapped shut.

The woman rode closer. Even as Ista looked up to return her glower, the demon light within her faded, until Ista only saw skin and clothing. The mere expression of a face, not the colors of a soul. Ista's breath caught, and she looked again at Sordso. Now he appeared no more than a golden-haired young man upon a prancing black horse. Not one of the sorcerers flung up their hands, wincing at the glare of Ista's god light, nor did the demons cringe within them—she could not see the demons within them.

My inner sight is stolen. I am blinded.

Something else was missing. The pressure of the god upon her back, which had borne her forward floating as if in a dream since that bloodstained dawn upon the north tower, was gone as well. Behind her, only an empty silence loomed. Infinitely empty, since so infinitely filled just moments before. She tried frantically to think when she had last felt the god's hands upon her shoulders. She was certain He had been with her in the forecourt, when she had spoken with dy Cabon. She thought He had been with her when she'd stepped onto the board across the cleft.

He was not with me when I stepped off.

Her useless outer eyes blurred with terror and loss. She could barely breathe, as though her chest was bound tight with heavy cords. What have I done wrong?

"Who is this?" asked Prince Sordso, pointing at Illvin.

The bronze-skinned sorcerer pushed his horse up next to the prince's and stared down in surprise at Illvin, who looked back coolly. "I believe it is Ser Illvin dy Arbanos himself, Your Highness—Lord Arhys's bastard brother, the bane of our borders". Sordso's blond eyebrows went up. "The new commander of Porifors! What does he here? Ask him where is the other woman." He gestured at his translator.

The officer rode nearer to Illvin. "You, dy Arbanos! The agreement was for the dowager royina and the daughter of the march of Oby," he said in Ibran. "Where is Lady Cattilara dy Lutez?"

Illvin favored him with a slight, ironic bow. His eyes were icy black. "Gone to join her husband. When, watching last night from the tower,

she felt him die, she flung herself from the parapet and gave her grief to the stones below. She lies now waiting to be buried, when you withdraw as you agreed and we can again reach our graveyards. I come in her place, and to serve Royina Ista as warder and attendant. Since, having seen your armies and their dubious discipline once before, the royina did not desire to bring her handmaidens among you."

The translator's brows drew down, and not only at the oblique trailing insult. He repeated the news to Sordso and the others. The sorceress nudged her rider to bring her closer. "Is this true?" she demanded.

"Look yourselves for what you really seek, then," said Illvin, with a bow in her direction. "I should think Prince Sordso could recognize the remnants of his own sister Umerue from this distance, if she were still. . . well, alive is not quite the right term, now, is it? If she were still residing within Lady Cattilara behind those walls." The translator jerked in his saddle, though whether in surprise at Illvin's message or at the tongue in which it was spoken, Ista was not sure. Sordso, the bronze-skinned officer, and the sorceress all turned their heads toward Porifors, their expressions growing intent and inward.

"Nothing," breathed Sordso after a moment. "It is gone." The sorceress eyed Illvin. "That one knows too much." "My poor sister-in-law is dead, and the creature you lost is fled beyond your reach," said Illvin. "Shall we get this over with?" At a nod from the prince, two soldiers dismounted. They first took the precaution of checking Illvin for concealed blades in his sash and boots; he suffered their hands with a look of bored displeasure. Tension flowed into his long body when one of the soldiers approached Ista, relaxing only slightly when the man knelt by her white skirts.

"You are to take off your shoes," the translator called to her. "You will walk barefoot and bareheaded into the presence of the August Mother, as befitting a lesser woman and a Quintarian heretic."

Illvin's chin went up and his jaw set. Whatever objections he had been about to voice, though, he closed his teeth upon. It was an interesting subtlety, Ista thought, that they did not also demand Illvin's boots. The disparity only drove home his impotence to protect her.

The man's hot hands pawed at the ribbons Liss had so lately tied around Ista's ankles. She stood rigidly, but did not resist. He pulled the light sandals away from her feet and threw them aside. He stood, backed away, and remounted his horse.

Sordso rode up to her, his eyes searching her from head to foot. He smiled grimly at what he saw—or possibly at what he didn't see. In any case, he did not fear to turn his back on her, for he gestured her sharply to take position directly behind his horse in the procession forming up. Illvin tried to offer her his arm, but the bronze-skinned officer pulled his sword and pointed with it for him to walk behind her. Sordso's hand rose and fell in signal, and they started off across the dry, uneven ground.

Ista was barely conscious of the brass-bright noon through which she stumbled. She groped inside her mind, within an echoing darkness. Called silent curses to the Bastard. Then, silent prayers. Nothing came back.

Were the Jokonan sorcerers doing this? Defeating a god in the realm of matter? Surely these opponents could not overwhelm this god . . . ?

Not the god's failure, then, but hers; her spirit gates had somehow been shut again, broken and tumbled in, choked with stones of fear, anger, or humiliation, denying the new-dilated passage . . .

She had made a mistake, some monstrous mistake, somewhere in the past few fleeting minutes. Maybe she had been supposed to give this task, to give the god, to dy Cabon after all. Maybe keeping it for herself had been the great presumption, a huge and fatal presumption. Overweening arrogance, to imagine such a task was given to her. Who would be stupid enough to give such a task to her?

The gods. Twice. It was a puzzle, how beings so vast could be so vastly mistaken. I knew better than to trust them. Yet here I am— again . . .

Sharp stones bit her feet along the road. The procession turned aside toward the grove, angling through a low space of dark muck that sucked at the horses' hooves and stank of stagnant water and horse piss. They scrambled up a slight rise. She could hear Illvin's long footfalls behind her, and his quickening breath, his uneven puffing revealing more of his debilitation than his face ever would. The grove loomed before her, its shade a blessed relief from the hammering sun overhead.

Ah. Not so blessed after all, nor any relief. They marched up past an aisle of the dead. Laid quite deliberately along the left side of their route, as if made witnesses to this procession, were the bodies of the men of Porifors killed last night in Arhys's sortie. All were stripped naked, their wounds exposed to feed the iridescent green flies that buzzed about them.

She glanced up the row of pale forms, counted. Eight. Eight, of the fourteen who had ridden out against fifteen hundreds. Six must still live somewhere in the Jokonan camp, then, wounded and taken. Foix's muscular body was not among the still forms. Pejar's was.

She looked again, and recalculated: five still live.

There was a ninth here, but not a body. More of a ... pile. A spear was driven into the ground behind the shambles, with Arhys's disfigured head displayed atop the shaft, peering out sightlessly over the Jokonan camp. The once-ravishing eyes had been cut out by whatever fear-maddened soldier had sought revenge upon the emptied form.

Too late. He was gone before you got there, Jokonan. Her bare feet faltered over some root, and she gasped in pain.

Illvin, striding forward, caught her arm before she tripped and fell headlong.

"They bait us. Look away," he instructed through clenched teeth. "Do not faint. Or vomit."

He looked ready to do both, she thought. His countenance was as gray as any of the corpses', though his eyes burned like nothing she had ever seen in a man's face.

"It's not that," she whispered back. "I have lost the god."

His brows flickered in consternation and confusion. The bronze-skinned officer, his sword out, gestured them along toward the far edge of the grove, though he did not force Illvin from her side. Maybe she, too, looked as though she were about to faint.

She thought Illvin's judgment of baiting to be precise. If either of them had still concealed any uncanny power—or any strength at all— that display might well have drawn it out of them, in some furious, futile lashing at their complacent enemies. If she had been either a sorceress or a swordsman, she swore the prince would not have survived the smirk he had cast over his shoulder as she'd stumbled past Arhys's remains. From a failed saint, the Jokonans were quite safe, it seemed.

"They meant to march Catti past that," Illvin muttered under his breath. "Add it to their tally, and five gods grant I may be the one to come collect ..." His eyes didn't stop glancing from tent to tent, tracing the path of last night's destruction, summing the condition of the men and horses that they passed. Thin silver tracks slid down his face, but his hand scorned to wipe at them, under the gaze of the few dozen jeering soldiers crowded up to watch their little parade. Ista did not know enough vile Roknari to translate the insults, though Illvin no doubt did. His dogged mutter continued, "They're not preparing to strike camp. They're preparing an assault. Are we surprised? Ha. One thing shows—they don't know how weak we've grown. Or they'd be preparing for a romp ..."

Was he trying to distract his senses from the Jokonan desecration of his brother's corpse? She prayed the ploy might serve him. She tried to extend her own blinded senses for any breath of the god, anywhere. Nothing. Joen and Sordso had placed Arhys's head along her path to be a symbol of her failure, a hammer blow of despair. I wonder if Arvol dy Lutez felt as bereft as this, when his dangling hair touched the water for the second time?

And yet the symbol turned beneath her enemies' feet, for the reminder of defeat was also a reminder of triumph. A presence in an absence. Strange.

The god may be absent, but I am still present. Maybe this is a task for dense matter, to do what matter does best: persist. So. She took a breath and kept on walking.

They arrived before the largest of the green tents. One side was rolled up, revealing what appeared to be nothing so much as a portable throne room. Rugs were strewn thickly across the ground. A dais ran along the back, supporting a pair of carved chairs decorated in gold leaf, and a scattering of cushions for lesser haunches. The pious dark green of staid and stern maternal widowhood was everywhere, overpowering even the sea-green of Jokonan arms, and never had Ista loathed the color more.

Dowager Princess Joen, dressed in a different but equally elaborate layering of stiff gowns from when they had—five gods, was it only this time yesterday that they had met upon the road?—sat in the smaller, lower of the two chairs. Her woman attendants knelt upon the cushions, and a drab, moonfaced young woman who might be another daughter crouched at her feet. Ista could not tell how many of them were sorceresses. A dozen officers stood at painful attention along each side. Ista wondered if all eleven of Joen's surviving leashed demons were present for this . . . demonstration.

Twelve. Foix stood rigidly among the Jokonan officers. His face was bruised and cut, but cleaned, and he was dressed anew in Jokonan garb and a green tabard with white pelicans flying. His expression was dazed, his weird smile forced and unnatural. Ista didn't even need her lost sight to be certain that a glittering new snake floated from the woman on the dais to him, and that its fangs were sunk deeply into his belly. Illvin's eyes, too, passed across Foix; and his jaw set, if possible, even more tightly.

The possibilities for more cruel baiting were endless. Fortunately,

perhaps, time was not. The bronze-haired officer gestured Ista forward to the middle of the carpets, to the center of this brief set piece of power, facing Joen. Illvin was stopped at sword's point a few paces back, behind Ista's right shoulder, and she was more sorry that she could not see him than that he could see her. She wondered what final stamp of humiliation had been prepared for her.

Oh. Of course. Not humiliation. Control. The humiliation out there had been to gratify Sordso's sortie-stung troops. The woman in here was more practical.

Ista blinked, seeing Joen for the first time without inner sight, without the vast dark menace of the demon glowering from her belly like some pitch-black pit into which one might fall forever. Without her demon, she was just ... a little, sour, aging woman. Unable to command respect or compel loyalty; easy to escape. Small. Five gods, but she was small, all her possibilities shrunken in upon herself: her only recourse, force. Stubborn will without scope of mind.

Ista's mother had once filled her household with her authority from wall to wall. The Provincara's husband had ruled Baocia, but within his own castle even he had lived on her sufferance. Ista's eldest brother, upon inheriting his father's seat, had found it easier to move his capital to escape the permanent childhood that awaited him in his mother's house than to attempt to claim rule there. Yet even at her direst, the old Provincara had known her limits, and had chosen no space larger than what she could fill.

Joen, it seemed to Ista, was trying to fill Jokona with her authority as a woman filled a household, and by the same techniques; and no one could stretch herself that far. In an unbounded world of infinite space, one might move at will, but perforce must leave room for the wills of others. Not even the gods controlled it all. Men enslaved each other's bodies, but the silent will of the soul was sacred and inviolable to the gods if anything was. Joen was seizing her slaves from the inside out. What Joen did to her enemies might be named war; what she did to her own people was sacrilege.

Prince Sordso took his high seat, flinging himself into the chair with a habit of body not yet eradicated by his new demonic discipline. He grimaced around the chamber. His mother's gaze fell on him, and he sat up straight, attentive.

Ista's eye was drawn again to the moonfaced princess at Joen's feet. The girl seemed to be about fourteen, but stunted for her age, with the stubby fingers and odd eyes of one of those late-life children born sadly lack-witted, and who often did not live long. She was one princess who would not escape her mother's household via marriage to some distant country. Joen's hand fell upon her head, although not in a caress, and it came to Ista: She's using the girl for a demon repository. Her own disdained daughter's soul is made a stall for it.

The demon that she intends next to set in me.

Joen stood up, facing Ista. In heavily accented Ibran, she said, "Welcome to my gates, Ista dy Chalion. I am the Mother of Jokona." Her hand lifted from the girl's head, flicked out, fingers spreading.

Within Ista, the god unfolded.

Her second sight burst anew upon Ista's mind like a dazzling lightning stroke, brilliant beyond hope, revealing an eerie landscape. She saw it all, at one glance: the dozen demons, the swirling, crackling lines of power, the agonized souls, Joen's dark, dense, writhing passenger. The thirteenth demon, spinning wildly through the air toward her, trailing its evil umbilicus.

Ista opened her jaws in a fierce grin, and took it in a gulp.

"Welcome to mine, Joen of Jokona," said Ista. "I am the Mouth of Hell."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

A WAVE OF LIGHT PASSED ALONG THE DEEP VIOLET CORD between Joen and Ista, and its color and brilliance seemed to intensify. Was Joen's first shocked impulse to strengthen her line? For a dizzy instant, Ista wondered who was the fisherwoman and who the fish. Then she felt the struggling, panicked young demon pass firmly into the Bastard's hands, within her.

You have hooked a god, Joen. Now what shall you do? It was as though a galley had thrown a grappling hook onto a continent, thinking to tow it away.

"She bears the demon-god!" Joen screamed. "Kill her now!"

Yes. That would do . . .

Yet even as Joen cried out, time seemed to stretch in Ista's perceptions like cold honey spinning off a spoon on a winter morning. She did not think it would stretch indefinitely.

Where should I begin? Ista asked the Presence within her.

Begin at the center, It replied. The rest will follow perforce.

She opened her material hands and let her spirit hands flow out along the violet cable. Enter Joen's body through that channel. Wrap the dark mass, and pull it out toward her. It came resisting, surging and spitting, streaming corrosive violet shadows like water spilling. It burned her spirit hands like vitriol, and she gasped with the unexpected pain, which seemed to strike down into the center of her being and pulse back out to every extremity, the way the shock of a great wound reverberated in a body. The creature was very dense, and ugly. And large. And old, centuries old, rotten with time.

It is hideous.

Yes, said the god. Go on anyway. Finish Arhys's ride.

Ista's material hands were too sluggish to keep up with her streaming will. With her spirit hands alone, she combed back the strands of Joen's soul tangled with the demon. Yet as fast as she did so, Joen flung out tendrils of cold white fire to wrap the demon round again and pull it back. The demon shrieked.

Let go, Ista urged. Let it go, and turn to some better task. Even now, you have a choice.

No! Joen's mind returned. It is my gift, my great chance! No one shall wrest it from me, least of all you! You were so feckless, you couldn't even keep your own son alive! Mine shall have his place; I have promised it!

Ista flinched, but the Presence sustained her. If she will not stay, she must come, It said. Continue.

Your wrongful attempts to impose order create yet vaster destruction, said Ista to Joen. You torment and demolish the very souls you most desire to make grow and love you. You possess truer gifts, stunted though they have been. Let go, find them instead, and live.

The whipping white fire was a visible scream of denial. In it Ista could discern not the faintest whisper of assent.

So.

Ista brought the great violet-black demon to her lips, and pulled it inward. It seemed to stretch and distort in its passage, its screeching becoming pain in her mouth, fire in her gullet. There are souls inside it, she realized. Many pieces of old souls, all digested and smeared together. Souls of the dead, and the long dead. What is to be done about them?

The dead belong to Us; sorting them is beyond your calling. The souls of the yet living, torn apart untimely while still trapped in the realm of matter, those are your care on Our behalf.

And this? Ista asked. Joen's live white soul-fire, tangled with the demon, was passing into her now. It clawed and burned.

Comes out of your hands and into Mine.

This is not the quiet damnation of sundering. Indeed, the white fire seemed to howl, splitting Ista's ears from within. Neither is this heaven's healing.

No, said the Voice regretfully. This is will-not. So it shall pass with its demon to the place of be-not.

Ista had a vision of a strange, dimensionless void, the picture leaked, perhaps, from His mind to hers: a roiling pool of demon energy, without form, without personas, without minds or wills or song or speech or memories or any gift of higher order—the Bastard's hell. Reservoir of pure destruction. Spilling from that pool into the world of matter, a thin controlled flow. Returning to it, an erratic stream. Balancing the life of the world exactly midway between the hot death that is chaos and the chill death that is stasis. She realized at last why the concatenation of Joen's demons had made her edgy, on a level separate from their direct threat to Porifors. Was it possible that such a vortex of disorder might create its own rip between the two realms, one that even the gods might be hard-pressed to mend again? So much divine attention in one small place . . .

Some human attention now would gratify Me greatly, the Voice murmured. It did not, Ista noticed, either confirm or deny her guess. Bring me in the rest of my little brethren, sweet Ista, as swiftly as you may. It will no doubt take practice before it comes easily.

So therefore my first trial is a dozen at once? The pain flaring in her stomach felt as though she had been forced to swallow molten lead. Along with that sickening, twisted thing?

Well, said the Voice affably, there is this; if you survive this, no other demon astray in the realm of matter should pose too onerous a challenge to you hereafter . . .

Ista considered a wealth of objections starting with What do you mean, if? but abandoned the impulse. Starting an argument with this Presence was likely to do nothing but spin her in endless circles till she was dizzy, and make Him laugh.

You will not abandon me again? she asked suspiciously.

I did not abandon you before. . . . nor you Me, as I have marked. Persistent Ista.

She turned her second sight outward again. Trying to see the god with it had been as futile as trying to see the back of her own head. Joen's mouth was open, her eyes rolling back, her body slumping. Somewhere under Ista's breastbone, the first burst of pain was diminishing, as the god drew the ancient demon and its clawing mistress back into His realm. Following after it, but now running to her and not to Joen, a dozen tangled, writhing cords of light jerked and yanked, as the demons fettered upon them tried to flee the feared presence of their god. The human bodies in which they were lodged were only just beginning to move under their riders' frantic lashings.

One at a time or all together? Ista reached out with her spirit hands and plucked one cord at random, and slid her light-palms along it to the demon within one of Joen's attendant women. This one was well cultivated, with parts of three or four different souls whirling within it. The white soul-fire of the living host was more readily discernible, and she combed it back toward the woman, imperfectly. Ista swallowed the demon. The woman's back arched, and she began to collapse. The demon passed through into the god's hands more easily this time, almost immediately.

These cords. I recognize them. I pulled Arhys safe to shore last night with something very like one.

They were stolen from Us, long ago. The demon could not have created them, you know. The Voice was edged with wrath, though only the faintest reflection of it glimmered through to Ista, else she would have been crushed flat.

Ista reached for another cord, repeating the gesture of plucking and combing. It was a man, one of the officers; his mouth opened on a beginning scream. I'm not getting it all sorted, she worried. I'm not getting it right.

You are brilliant, the Voice reassured her.

It is imperfect.

So are all things trapped in time. You are brilliant, nonetheless. How fortunate for Us that We thirst for glorious souls rather than faultless ones, or We should be parched indeed, and most lonely in Our perfect righteousness. Carry on imperfectly, shining Ista.

Another, then, and another. The demons flowed to her, through her, faster, but it was an undeniably sloppy process. The next demon was Sordso's, and it was the most complex construct Ista had yet encountered. Layer upon layer of souls and their talents were interpenetrated with the young man's agonized, constricted soul-fire. It was a weirdly loving fabrication. Ista thought she perceived bits of soldiers, scholars, judges, swordsmen, and ascetics. All the Golden General's public virtues, collected and concentrated: the purified pattern of perfect manliness. It was horrifying. How could something made of souls be so coldly soulless?

No poets, though. None at all.

This dark piece of soul here is different, she realized, as one fragment began to flow through her fingers.

Yes, said the god. The man still lives, in the realm of matter.

Where? Is it. . . ? Should I attempt to . . . ?

Yes, if you think you can endure it. It will be uncomfortable.

Ista rolled up the patch of darkness and bundled it aside in her mind. It pulsed there, hot and thick. Somewhere off the edge of her material vision, the bronze-skinned Jokonan officer was lifting his sword, beginning to turn. A motion in black was Illvin, beginning to move with—no, after—him. Ista ignored it all and kept on combing. Sordso's mouth was opening on a wordless howl, but not, she thought, of a man bereaved by his dispossession. It might be rage. It might be triumph. It might be madness.

Then the next cord, then . . . the last.

She glanced upward with both material and inner sight at the ashen Foix in his green tabard, standing among the startled Jokonan officers. The violet shadow within him was no longer bear-shaped, but distributed unevenly throughout his body. It seemed both to cringe from her, and stare in fascination.

She considered the final cord in her spirit hand. Lifted it to her lips. Bit it through.

Good, said the Voice.

Oh. Should I have asked?

You are my Door-ward in the realm of matter. A lord's appointed porter does not run to him to ask if each beggar, whether in rags or silks, should be admitted or turned away, else he might as well stand at his gates himself The porter is expected to use his judgment.

My judgment? She let the end of the cord go. It snapped back into Foix, and he was free. Or ... whatever Foix was now, was free.

Foix's face flickered; his lips parted, firmed. Then, after a bare second, stretched again in that horrible strained smile of perfect assent. False falseness; treachery turning in air. He is much less simple than he looks.

Ista was barely aware of the cries and turmoil erupting throughout the tent. The voices grew faint and far off, diminishing, the figures dimmer and dimmer. She turned to follow the entrancing Voice.

*     *     *

SHE SEEMED TO COME TO THE DOOR OF HERSELF, AND LOOK through. An overwhelming impression of color and beauty, pattern and complexity, music and song, all endlessly elaborated, bewildered her senses. She wondered how confusing the world looked to a newborn infant, who had neither names for what she saw nor even the concept of names. The child began, Ista supposed, with her mother’s face and breast, and from there worked outward—and in a lifetime could not come to the end of it all.

This is a world greater and stranger than the one of matter that gave my soul birth, and even the world of matter was beyond my comprehension. How now shall I begin?

Well, Ista, said the Voice. Do you stay or go? You cannot hang forever in My doorway like a cat, you know.

I have not words for this. I would see Your face.

Abruptly, she was standing in an airy room, very like a chamber in Porifors. She quickly glanced down, and was relieved to discover she was granted not only a body, healed and light and free of pain, but clothes as well—much as she had been wearing but cleansed of stains and mended of rips. She looked up, and rocked back.

This time, He wore Illvin's body and face. It was a healthy, full-fleshed version, if still tall and lean. His courtier's garb was silver embroidered on white, his baldric silk, his sword hilt and signet ring gleaming. His hair, pulled back in Roknari braids and a long, thick queue, was pure white. The infinite depths of His eyes destroyed the illusion of humanity, though, even as their darkness recalled the man.

"I should have liked," she admitted faintly, "to see what Illvin looked like with white hair."

"Then you will have to go back and wait a while," the Bastard replied. His voice was scarcely deeper or richer than the original's; it even adopted those northern cadences. "You would take your chances, of course; by the time all his hair is white, will there be any left?"

His body and face shifted through a hundred possible Illvins at a hundred possible ages, straight or bent, thin or fat, bald or not. The laughter on His lips remained the same, though.

"I desire . . . this." It was unclear even to Ista if her hand gesture indicated the god or the man. "May I come in?"

His smile softened. "The choice is yours, my Ista. As you do not deny Me, I will not deny you. Yet I would still await you, if you chose the long way home."

"I might become lost upon the road." She looked away. A great calm filled her. No pain, no terror, no regret. Their immense absences seemed to leave room for ... something. Something new, something never dreamed of before. If this was what Arhys had experienced, it was no wonder he'd never looked back. "So this is my death. Why did I ever fear it?"

"Speaking as an expert, you never seemed to Me to fear it all that much," He said dryly.

She looked back. "There may be more to paradise than the cessation of pain, but, oh, it seems almost paradise enough. Might a next time . . . hurt?"

He shrugged. "Once you return to the realm of matter, the protection I can offer you is limited, and its bounds, alas, do not exclude pain. This death is for you to choose. The next may not be."

Her lips curved up despite themselves. "Are you saying I might find myself back at this same gate in another quarter of an hour?"

He sighed. "I do hope not. I should have to train another porter. I quite fancied a royina for a time." The eyes glittered. "So does my great-souled Illvin. He's prayed to Me for you, after all. Consider my reputation."

Ista considered His reputation. "It's dreadful," she observed.

He merely grinned, that familiar, stolen, heart-stopping flash of teeth.

"What training?" she added, feeling suddenly cantankerous. "You never explained anything."

"Instructing you, sweet Ista, would be like teaching a falcon to walk up to its prey. It might with great effort be done, but one would end with a very footsore and cranky bird, and a tedious wait for dinner. With a wingspan like yours, it's ever so much easier just to shake you from my wrist and let you fly."

"Plummet," Ista growled.

"No. Not you. Granted, you tumble and complain halfway down the abyss, but eventually you do spread your wings and soar."

"Not always." Her voice went lower. "Not the first time."

He tilted his head in a sliver of acknowledgment. "But I was not your falconer then. We do suit, you know."

She glanced away, and around the strange, perfect, unreal room. Antechamber, she thought, boundary between the inside and the outside. But which door was which? "My task. Is it done?"

"Done and well-done, my, true, foster, laggard child."

"I have come very late to everything. To forgiveness. To love. To my god. Even to my own life." But she bowed her head in relief. Done was good. It meant one could stop. "Did the Jokonans slay me, as Joen ordered?"

"No. Not yet."

Smiling, He stepped up to her and tilted her chin up. He lowered His mouth to hers as boldly as Illvin had, that afternoon—yesterday?—on the tower. Except that His mouth tasted not of horsemeat but of perfume, and there was no uncertainty in His eyes.

His eyes, the world, her perceptions, began to flicker.

Infinite depths became dark eyes reddened with frenzied weeping. Perfume became parched, salt flesh, then fragrance, then flesh. Sweet silence became noise and cries, and then silence, and then din again. Painless floating turned to a crushing pressure, headache, thirst, which melted in turn to bliss.

I think He takes His foot to his cat and pushes her to decision. She had no doubt she might yet dodge around that boot in either direction. But just what direction He desired was plain. The unsettling Not yet did at least suggest He did not guide her back toward a body pierced with sword thrusts. The Bastard maneuvers me into this, blast Him. It felt very comfortable, cursing her god. He was a god she might always curse, and the more inventive the invective, the more He would grin. Well suited, indeed, to true Ista.

The flickering slowed, stopped, on parched mouth, weight and pressure, din and pain. On dear, distraught, blinking, merely human eyes. Yes.

And furthermore, my god cheats. He set out this bowl of cream before ever He held the door, and He knew it well. She smiled, and tried to inhale.

Illvin pulled his frantically questing tongue from her mouth, and gasped, "She lives, oh, five gods, she breathes again!"

The crushing pressure, Ista discovered, was Illvin's arms, wrapped around her torso. She stared up into tree branches, blue sky, and his face, bent over hers. His face was flushed with heat and furrowed with terror, and a thin spattering of blood droplets marked it in an angled track from side to side. She raised a weak hand and dabbed at the red beads, and was relieved to find they did not appear to be his.

She whispered through dry, bruised lips. "What has happened?"

"That is what I prayed you might tell me," said Foix's hoarse voice. She looked up to see him looming over them. He still wore his Jokonan mail and tabard, and stood in a convincingly menacing guard stance above his apparent prisoners. She and Illvin were seated on the ground not far from the green command tents. Foix's eyes were white-rimmed, but it seemed not to be the surrounding Jokonans that disquieted him.

"You were marched into the tent," Foix continued in a lower tone. "You looked . . . ordinary. Helpless. Then suddenly the god light blazed from you, so brightly I was blinded for a breath. I heard Joen cry for your death."

Upon her arm, Illvin's tight clutch tightened further.

"When I could see again," continued Foix, gazing away in guard-pretense, "all the demons in the tent seemed to be rushing into you, like hot metal being drawn through a form. I saw you swallow them all down, Joen's soul as well. It was all over in an instant."

"Save one," murmured Ista.

"Eh. Ur. Yes, there was that. I felt when you freed me from Joen's geas. I almost bolted from the tent then, but I got my wits back just in time. Prince Sordso and some other officers were drawing their swords—five gods, but the scraping seemed to go on forever. Sordso's knuckles were white."

"I tried to get between them and you," Illvin said huskily to Ista. He rubbed at his nose and blinked.

"Yes," said Foix. "Bare-handed. I saw you lunge—a lot of good that was going to do. But instead Sordso whirled around and hacked at Joen."

"She was already dead by then," murmured Ista.

"I saw. She was starting to topple, but his edge caught her just in ... time. Or something. He struck so hard, he spun around and fell backward off the dais. Half the freed sorcerers were running away, but I swear half the rest had the same idea Sordso did. There was one of Joen's women had a dagger out, and was going at the body even as it fell. I'm not sure she knew or cared that it was dead—she just wanted to get in her stroke. Everyone was jostling and yelling and starting in every direction. So I jumped in front of Illvin and you and shouted, 'Back, prisoners!' and brandished my sword."

"Cursed convincingly," muttered Illvin. "I just about tried to leap on you. Except that I had my hands full."

"You fell, Royina. You just . . . turned gray and stopped breathing and crumpled up. I thought you had died, for your soul was gone from my sight, like a lantern blown out. Illvin tried to lift you up, fell down, then scrambled up again—I dared not help—I let him drag you out, pretending to stand guard over him. Most of the Jokonans thought you were dead, too, I think. Slain in your sorcery, some kind of death magic like Fonsa and the Golden General all over again. So, um ... lie still for a minute, there, till we think what to do next."

It was not a difficult suggestion to follow. Following any other instruction, now that would have been hard. Illvin was staring down into her face, looking like a man whose kisses had just brought his beloved back from the dead and was now too terrified to move least he shed unexpected miracles in all directions. Ista smiled up muzzily at his delicious confusion.

"The demons are all gone," she reported in a vague, dreamy voice, in case they still harbored doubts. "It was what I was sent to do, and I did it. But the Bastard let me come back." To where she was now, it occurred to her—sitting on the hard ground in the midst of an enemy camp surrounded by several hundred very live and agitated Jokonans. Vile sense of humor. Hers had been a timeless interlude, but for everyone else, she realized, bare minutes had passed since Joen's sanguinary end. But however dismasted their high command, not all of the enemy officers were going to stay confused for long. It was hard to summon fear of anything, in her lingering bliss, but she managed a flash of mild prudence. "I think we should leave now. Right now."

"Can you walk?" asked Illvin uncertainly.

"Can you?" she asked, curious. Crawling, now, she would believe crawling of him, in his present interestingly debilitated state. He should be in bed, she decided. Hers, by preference.

"No," muttered Foix. "Got to drag her again. Or carry her. Can you go on pretending to be a corpse for a little longer, Royina?"

"Oh, yes," she assured him, and sank back gratefully into Illvin's grip.

Illvin flatly refused to drag her, on the grounds that it would scrape her already-bleeding legs and feet further, but carrying her in his arms proved still beyond his strength. A short argument, in which Ista, as a corpse, declined to participate, resulted in Foix helping Illvin rise to his shaking legs with her butt-upward over his shoulder, her arms and legs dangling down in an appropriately lifeless manner. It reminded her of the ride on Feather. She tried not to smile in memory, on the grounds that it would be out of character for her part. Her white gown was even splashed with blood, a continuation, she suspected, of the same spray that had crossed Illvin's face. She could guess its source, and shuddered.

They staggered away. "Turn left," Foix directed. "Keep walking." More Jokonan soldiers ran up to them; Foix pointed backward with his sword toward the command tents and cried, "Hurry! You are needed!" The soldiers sped away as their apparent-officer directed.

Illvin muttered through his teeth, "Foix, you may speak a glib camp Roknari, but I beg you will leave sentences of more than one syllable to me. That tabard can't cover everything."

"Gladly," Foix returned under his breath. "Go right here. We're almost to the horse lines."

"Do you think they're just going to let us walk up and steal horses?" asked Illvin. His wheeze sounded more curious than objecting. Ista peered upside down through slitted eyes to take in the guards loitering in the shade. Some of the men were standing and staring toward the uproar around the green tents.

"Yes." Foix tapped his green tabard. "I'm a Jokonan officer."

"You're relying on more than that," observed Ista, her tone almost as detached as Illvin's.

"Yes, why are you so certain they will not stop and question us?" asked Illvin, a hint of nervousness entering his voice as a few heads turned to follow their progress.

"Did you stop and question Princess Umerue?"

"No, not at first. What has that to do with anything?"

Ista mumbled from Illvin's hip, "I spoke imprecisely, before. There is one sorcerer left in this camp. He's on our side, however. Seemed a good idea. The god did not object."

Illvin tensed, turning to stare, presumably, at Foix.

"Two left," said Foix. "Or a sorcerer and a sorceress. If that is your proper classification, Royina. I am not sure."

"Neither am I. We'll have to ask dy Cabon," she returned agreeably.

"Right," said Foix. "Don't do anything that looks too exciting, though. I'd rather not attempt anything gaudier, and there are limits to mild misdirection."

"Indeed," murmured Illvin.

They trod on for a few more steps.

"Well," said Foix, stopping before the lines, "have you a preference, horse-master?"

"Anything already saddled and bridled."

One choice was made for them. At the end of the line, a tall, ugly chestnut stallion suddenly lifted its head and nickered in excitement. It began shifting its haunches from side to side, disturbing the horses tied not-too-closely to it. Ears pricked, it practically danced as they neared, and raised and lowered its head, snorting.

"Bastard's eyes, Royina, can you shut that stupid monster up?" Foix muttered. "Men are starting to stare."

"Me?"

"It's you it wants."

"Set me down, then."

Illvin did so, letting her slide through his arms to her feet, gazing into her face with a searching look that was, for an instant, as good as a kiss, and holding her upright on his arm. She was very glad for the arm.

She approached the possessed animal, who lowered its head again and laid its face flat to her bloody bodice in what might be submission, love, or dementia. She looked it over in fascination. It still wore the bridle with the deep curb bit. A dozen cuts scored its body, but they were already starting to heal with unnatural speed. "Yes, yes," she murmured soothingly. "It's all right. Where he went, you could not follow. You did what you could. It's all right now." She tried to shake off her dreamy lassitude, saying to Illvin, "I believe I had better ride this one. If you don't want it following after us whinnying its heart out." She stood on tiptoe and glanced along the serrated ridge of its backbone. "Find a saddle, though," she added.

Foix filched a saddle from a pile farther down the line, and Illvin tightened the girths while Foix picked out two more horses.

"What is he called?" she asked Illvin as he cupped his hands to give her a leg up. It seemed a very long way to the ground, typical of his mounts. She disposed her skirts awkwardly in the military saddle, and let Illvin's warm hands guide her ankles to the stirrups. His fingers lingered unhappily over the bruises and cuts on her feet.

Illvin cleared his throat. "I'd really rather not say. It's, um . . . crude. He was never a lady's mount. Actually, he was never any sane person's mount."

"Oh? You rode him." She patted the snaky neck; the horse turned its head around and nuzzled her bare foot. "Well, if he is to be a lady's mount from now on, he'd probably better have another name, then. Demon will do."

Illvin cocked his brows up at her, and a little grin flashed across his tense mouth. "Nicely."

He turned to take his own horse in hand, hesitating briefly in order to gather his strength before swinging himself up into the saddle. He settled himself with a betraying grunt of exhaustion. By mutual, unspoken assent, they started off across the bordering field together at a staid walk. Somewhere back in the grove, something had caught fire; Ista could hear the muted roar of flames and men's cries for water. How much pent-up chaos, both natural and unnatural, had been released upon the Jokonans by Joen's death? She did not look back.

"Turn left," Illvin told Foix.

"Don't we want to circle out of sight over that rise to the north?"

"Eventually. There's a gully along here that will hide us sooner. Go slowly, though, it's likely to be patrolled. That's where I'd put men, anyway."

The counterfeit calm held. The sharpening noise of the camp fell behind them, and the empty countryside began to feign the air of some other quiet, drowsy, over warm afternoon, one not given over to war, sorcery, gods, and madness.

"At the earliest chance," Ista told Illvin, "you must bring Goram to me."

"Whatever you desire, Royina." Illvin looked over the ground they traversed, turning in his saddle.

"Shall we attempt to circle back to Porifors?" asked Foix, following his gaze back over the treetops to the distant stone pile. A curl of dirty smoke still rose from somewhere in it. "I think I might be able to get us in, under cover of darkness."

"No. If we clear the gully, I am going to try to win through to the march of Oby."

"I do not know if the royina can ride that far," said Foix, clearly picturing not just Ista but the pair of them falling from their saddles at any moment. "Or do you think to meet him on the road?"

"He won't be on the road. If he's where I suspect, we've less than ten miles to cover. And if he's not there yet, his scouts will be along soon."

They dropped into the gully, where they found Illvin's predicted Jokonan patrol almost immediately. Between the unexpected direction of their passage, Foix's officer's garb and wit-fogging sorcery, their horses' Jokonan gear, and Illvin's crisp, arrogant court Roknari, they soon left the pickets bowing and scraping in their wake. Illvin returned the hapless soldiers the fourfold Quadrene sign, touching his thumb to his tongue in secret apology to the fifth god as soon as they turned again out of sight. They pressed their horses to a faster pace.

Illvin led them onward, finding what cover the country afforded in low places, little watercourses, spinneys, and groves, angling ever north and east. They had gone some four or five miles before they even stopped to water themselves and the horses. Though multiple columns of smoke still smudged the clear blue air behind them, Porifors had disappeared from sight beyond some low, rolling ridges.

"Can you still feel your bear?" Ista asked Foix, when he'd finished dipping his head in the stream.

He sat back on his haunches and frowned. "Not quite as I did before. Joen did something to us. I hope it was not vile."

"It is my impression," said Ista carefully, "that you two have been pressed together by all these events more quickly than you would have grown on your own. Without either of you becoming ascendant or enslaved, you have merged. Because, I think, your demon did not steal your soul, nor did you plunder its power. You both shared freely."

Foix looked embarrassed. "Always did enjoy feeding the animals ..."

"Drawing you apart is beyond my present skills—or your present need. You have achieved a curious theological state, but not, I suspect, a unique one. I have occasionally wondered where Temple sorcerers came from. Now I know. I expect it was one of the saint of Rauma's tasks to judge who might carry this power without succumbing to it. You will need to take training from the Bastard's Order, probably. I am sure your own order will spare you, if I request it."

Foix's face screwed up. "Me, a Bastard's acolyte? Don't think my father will be best pleased. Or my mother. I can just see her, explaining it to her lady friends. Ouch." He grinned despite himself. "Can't wait to see the look on Ferda's face, though ..." He glanced shrewdly at her. "And will you take training, too, Royina?"

She smiled. "Tutors, Foix. A woman of my rank can demand tutors, to wait on me at my convenience. I think my convenience will be very soon, and possibly not too convenient to them."

The reminder of Ferda and the hope of finding news of his brother overcame Foix's initial urge to coddle Ista, and it was he who marshaled the horses and boosted his companions back aboard.

"Roll up that tabard and stuff it in a saddlebag," Illvin advised, settling into his saddle. "Bastard willing, the next scouts we encounter may well be dy Oby's. Baby Temple sorcerer or no, a mistaken crossbow bolt would not be good for your health."

"Ah. Yes," said Foix, and hastened to do so.

Illvin eyed his red stallion, carrying Ista with such exquisite care that she might hold a cup of water without spilling it, and shook his head in wonder, as if of all the marvels he had lately witnessed this was the most inexplicable. "Can you endure?" he asked her. "It's not much farther now."

"After walking that mile, riding a few more is nothing," she assured him. "I feared the god had abandoned me, but it seems He'd only hid Himself within." And left me to carry Him. It was one of the Bastard's little jokes, she decided, that He had appeared to her before then as such an enormous man. Had He known? Even she, who had now met three face-to-face, could not guess the limits of the gods' foreknowledge.

"All dark, you were," Foix said. "Makes sense. The Jokonan sorcerers would hardly have towed you into Joen's presence looking like some holy fire ship. They weren't that stupid. But when you lit up . . ." He fell silent. Foix was not, Ista thought, an inarticulate man; but she began to see why Lord dy Cazaril said only poetry could come to grips with the gods. Foix finally managed, "I have never seen anything like it. I'm glad that I did. But if I never see anything like it again, that will be all right."

"I could not see it," said Illvin, in a tone of deep regret. "But I could see when things begin to happen, well enough."

"I am glad you were there," said Ista.

"I did little enough," he sighed.

"You bore witness. That means the world to me. And there was that kiss. It did not seem such a small thing."

He blushed. "My apologies, Royina. I was distraught. I thought to draw you back from death, as you once seemed to do for me."

"Illvin?"

"Yes, Royina?"

"You did draw me back."

"Oh." He rode along very quietly for a time. But a strange smile crept across his face, and would not go away again.

At length he looked up and rose in his stirrups, summoning some unimaginable reserve of energy. "Hah," he whispered. Ista followed his glance. It took her a moment to discern the faint clear smokes of careful fires, marking a camp concealed in the watercourse that opened below them. The fires were not few. They followed the ridge around a slight bend, and yet more of the camp came into view. Hundreds of men and horses, more than hundreds—she could not count their numbers, half-hidden as they were.

"Oby," said Illvin in satisfaction. "He made excellent time. Though I thank the gods he was no faster."

"Good," breathed Ista in relief. "I'm done."

"Indeed, and we do thank you for your work, without which we would all be dead in some hideous and uncanny fashion by now. I, on the other hand, still have fifteen hundred ordinary Jokonans to remove from around Porifors. I don't know if Oby meant to wait for dawn, but if we struck more quickly ..." His eyes glazed over in a familiar fashion, alternating shrewd glances summing the men below with staring off at nothing; Ista forbore to interrupt.

A patrol galloped up to them. "Ser dy Arbanos!" cried its astonished officer, waving wildly at Illvin. "Five gods, you're alive!" The riders formed around them in excited escort and swept them into the part of the camp, marked by tents in the shade, where their commanders had no doubt set up their headquarters.

A voice rang from the trees, and a familiar form shot from the green shadows. "Foix! Foix! The Daughter be thanked!" Ferda ran toward them; Foix swung from his saddle to embrace his eager brother.

"What are these men?" Illvin inquired of dy Oby's officer, nodding toward an unfamiliar company of horsemen in black and green. The riders opened out to reveal a crowd of people approaching on foot, some running, some lumbering, some proceeding more slowly and decorously, all calling out to Ista.

Ista stared, torn between joy and dismay. "Bastard spare me, it is my brother dy Baocia," she said in a stunned voice. "And dy Ferrej, and Lady dy Hueltar, and Divine Tovia, and all."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

LORD DY BAOCIA AND SER DY FERREJ LED THE RUSH TO ISTA'S side. The red stallion laid his ears back, squealed, and snapped his teeth, and both men recoiled several feet.

"Five gods, Ista," dy Baocia cried, temporarily diverted, "that horse!" Who was mad enough to put you up on such a beast?"

Ista patted Demon's neck. "He suits me very well. He belongs to Lord Illvin, in part, but I suspect he may become a permanent loan."

"From both his masters, it seems," murmured Illvin. He glanced across the camp. "Royina—Ista—love, I must report first to March dy Oby." His expression grew grim. "His daughter is still trapped in Castle Porifors, if the walls hold as I pray."

Along with Liss and dy Cabon, Ista reflected, and added her silent prayers to his. She felt the walls yet held, but in truth her only certainty was that Goram still lived; and she'd been mistaken before.

"With the news we bring," Illvin continued, "I expect his troop will ride within the hour. I cringe to think what rumors have come to him by now of my brother's fate. There is much to do."

"Five gods speed you. Of your many burdens, I am one the less now. These people here will cosset me to distraction, if I know them." She added sternly, "You spare some care for yourself, too. Don't make me come after you again."

A grin ghosted across his mouth. "Would you follow me to the Bastard's hell, dear sorceress?"

"Without hesitation, now that I know the road."

He leaned across his saddlebow and caught her hand, and raised it to his lips. She gripped his hand in turn and bore it to her own lips, and nipped his knuckle secretly, which made his eyes glint. With reluctance, they released each other.

"Foix," Illvin called, "attend upon me. Your testimony is urgently required."

Dy Baocia turned eagerly to Foix. "Do I have you to thank, young man, for the rescue of my sister?"

"No, Provincar," said Foix, giving him a polite salute. "She rescued me."

Dy Baocia and dy Ferrej stared at him rather blankly. Ista became conscious of the bizarre picture they must present: Foix, gray with exhaustion, wearing Jokonan gear; Illvin a hollow-eyed, reeking scare-crow in the most elegant of court mourning; herself in rumpled white festival dress splashed with brown blood, barefoot, bruised, and scratched, her escaping hair completing the impression of general dementia.

"Look after the royina," Foix said to Ferda, "then come to Oby's tent. We have strange and great tales to tell." He clapped his brother on the shoulder and turned to follow Illvin.

Temporarily unmenaced by Ista's erratic steed, Ferda came to Demon's shoulder to help her down. Ista was dizzy with fatigue, but she stayed determinedly upright.

"See that this dreadful horse is well cared for. He bore Lord Arhys faithfully last night. Your brother rode in that great sortie as well, and endured capture and grievous use. He needs rest, if you can make him take it in this uproar. We have all of us been up since dawn yesterday, through flight and siege and . . . and worse. Lord Illvin lost a great deal of blood last night. Make sure he gets drink and food immediately, at the least." She added, after a thoughtful pause, "And if he attempts to ride into battle in his present state, knock him down and sit on him. Although I trust he has more sense."

As soon as her horse was led out of range by a soldier of Oby, dy Ferrej pounced on Ista, practically wresting her from Ferda. "Royina! We have been in terror for your safety!"

And not without cause, in truth. "Well, I am safe now." Soothingly, she patted his hand gripping her arm.

Lady dy Hueltar tottered up, arm in arm with Divine Tovia. "Ista, Ista, lovie!"

Dy Baocia was looking intently after Illvin. "Now that you are all delivered to each other, I think I'd better attend on dy Oby as well." He managed a distracted smile at Ista. "Yes, yes, good."

"Did you bring troops of your own, brother?" Ista asked.

"Yes, five hundred of horse, all that I could muster in a hurry when these people descended upon me waving your alarming letter."

"Then by all means, attend upon Oby. Your guard may well have a chance to earn the coin you pay them. Chalion owes the garrison of Castle Porifors . . . much, but certainly relief above all, and that as soon as may be."

"Ah." He collected Ferda and dy Ferrej and hurried off after the other men, half in curiosity, half, Ista suspected, in eagerness to escape his importunate entourage.

The problem of explaining her own adventures to them without sounding like a raving madwoman, she discovered, could be put off— possibly indefinitely—by asking after their own journey. A mere query of "How did you come here so timely?" induced an answer that ran on until they reached dy Baocia's tents, and longer. The five hundred of horse, Ista found, had been trailed by what seemed a hundred more servants, grooms, and maids, in support of the dozen ladies from the courts of both Valenda and Taryoon who had accompanied Lady dy Hueltar on her self-appointed mission to bring Ista home. Dy Ferrej,

more or less in charge of shifting them all, was justly punished, Ista decided. That he had moved them such a distance in a week, instead of a month, was a near miracle in itself, and her respect for him, never low, rose another notch.

Ista cut though a plethora of plans by requesting a wash, food, and bed, in that order; Divine Tovia, always more practical than most of Ista's attendants, and with an eye to the blood on her gown, backed her up. The elderly physician managed to run off all but two maids, her own acolyte-assistant, and Lady dy Hueltar from the tent where she guided Ista for a bath and treatment. Ista had to admit, it was both comfortable and comforting to have those familiar hands about her, applying salve and bandages to her hurts. Tovia's curved sewing needle, too, was very fine and sharp, and her hands were quick about the wincing task of mending flesh where it was required.

"What in the world are these bruises?" Divine Tovia inquired.

Ista craned to see the back of her own thigh where the physician was pointing. Five dark purple spots were spaced around it. Her lips curved up, and she twisted about to spread her own fingers between them.

"Five gods, Ista," cried Lady dy Hueltar in horror, "who has dared to handle you so?"

"Those are from . . . yesterday. When Lord Illvin rescued me from the Jokonan column on the road. What excellent long fingers he does have! I wonder if he plays any musical instruments. I shall have to find out."

"Is Lord Illvin that odd tall fellow who rode in with you?" asked Lady dy Hueltar suspiciously. "I must say, I did not like the very forward way he kissed your hand."

"No? Well, he was pressed for time. I shall make him practice, later, until his technique improves."

Lady dy Hueltar looked offended, but Divine Tovia, at least, snorted a little.

Ista was laid down in a tent under a guard of ladies, but rose again to peek out, despite her nightgown, at the sound of many horses thundering out of the camp. It was only late afternoon; on this long summer day Oby's cavalry would be descending on Porifors with hours of light still left for their work. The timing, Ista thought, was excellent. Maximum confusion, disorder, and dismay would have spread through the Jokonan forces from the dire events of noon, and the chances that competent leadership had yet reemerged—especially from the habits of sullen mindless obedience extracted by Joen—were slight.

She let herself be coaxed back to bed by those who loved her. Though the Ista they thought they loved, she supposed, was an imaginary one, a woman who existed only in their own minds, part icon, part habit.

The reflection did not depress her unduly, now that she knew someone who loved the Ista who was real. She fell asleep thinking of him.

*     *     *

ISTA AWOKE FROM UGLY DREAMS NOT, SHE THOUGHT, ENTIRELY HER own, to the sound of female voices arguing.

"Lady Ista wants to sleep, after her ordeal," said Lady dy Hueltar firmly. "I will not have her troubled further."

"No," said Liss in a puzzled tone, "the royina will want the report from Porifors. We started before dawn to bring it to her as swiftly as we could."

Ista lumbered up from her sheets. "Liss!" she cried. "In here!" It appeared she had slept the short summer night through; it sufficed.

"Now see what you've done!" said Lady dy Hueltar in aggravation.

"What?" Liss's bafflement was genuine; she had not Ista's years of training in deciphering her now-senior lady-in-waiting's oblique locutions. Ista translated it handily as I didn't want to travel again today, and now I'll have to, drat you, girl.

A leap from her cot, Ista discovered, wasn't going to occur. She did manage to lever herself painfully to her feet before the tent flap was thrown back, admitting a level golden light and a grinning Liss. Ista embraced her; she embraced Ista back. The grin and Liss's presence seemed almost all the report she needed. Porifors is relieved. There were no more devastating deaths last night. The rest might be learned in order, or no order, as it came.

"Sit," said Ista, not releasing Liss's hands. "Tell me everything."

"Lady Ista needs to be dressed before receiving petitioners," said Lady dy Hueltar sternly.

"Excellent notion," said Ista. "Do go and find me some clothing to wear. Riding dress."

"Oh, Ista, you won't be riding anywhere today, after all you've been through! You need to rest."

"Actually," Liss put in, "March dy Oby has sent some officers to see the camp is broken down and shifted to Porifors as quick as may be. Ferda is waiting with some of your brother's men to guard you on the way, Royina, as soon as you are ready. Unless you prefer to ride in a cart with the baggage train."

"She will surely want to ride in the wagons with us," said Lady dy Hueltar.

"Tempting," Ista lied, "but no. I'll ride my horse."

Lady dy Hueltar sniffed balefully and withdrew.

Ista continued eagerly to Liss, "Oh, you will laugh at my new horse. It has come to me as the spoils of war, I think, though I may persuade Illvin to make it a court gift, which would amuse him. It's Illvin's vile red stallion."

"The one that possessed the stray elemental?"

"Yes; it has conceived a sudden adoration for me, and abases itself in the most appalling unhorselike fashion. You will find it quite reformed, or if you don't, let me know, and I'll put the fear of its god in it again. But say on, dear Liss."

"Well, the castle and town are secured, and the Jokonans driven off or taken—most of them fled north, but there may be some stragglers still lurking."

"Or just plain lost," said Ista dryly. "It wouldn't be the first time."

Liss snickered. "We have captured Prince Sordso and his whole retinue, which has pleased Lord Illvin and March dy Oby no end. They say the prince has gone mad. Is it true you ensorcelled him to hack up the dowager princess?"

"No," said Ista. "All I did was remove the sorcery that was preventing him from doing so. I rather think it was a wild impulse on his part, soon regretted. Joen was dead before his sword struck her; the Bastard took her soul. I wonder if it would be a relief or a regret to Sordso to know that? I should probably tell him in any case. Go on. What of Lady Cattilara, and our stalwart divine?"

"Well, we all watched from the walls as the Jokonans marched you off. And then it got all quiet for a little, and then we could hear some terrible uproar at the those big green tents, but we could not make out what was happening. Lady Cattilara surprised us all. After you and Lord Illvin were made hostage, or so we all thought, she rose from her bed. She drove her ladies to defend the walls, since almost all of the men were too sick to stand by then—it seems they make a game of archery here, and the Jokonan sorcerers' spells had not destroyed their sporting bows. Some of the ladies proved quite good shots. They had not the power to penetrate mail, but I saw Lady Catti herself put an arrow right through a rude Jokonan officer's eye. Learned dy Cabon stood with her—she swore that Porifors would not fall while she was still its chatelaine. Me, I threw rocks—if you fling one from a high enough tower, it hits quite hard by the time it lands on its target, even if you don't have a strong throwing arm.

"We could see the Jokonans were just probing, but we bit them till they bled nonetheless. I think we could not have held for long against a determined assault, but we discouraged them from attempting the walls at once—and then it was too late, for the march of Oby's forces struck and swept them away. Lady Catti was quite splendid when she opened the gates to her father. I thought she would break down and weep when he embraced her, for he did, but instead she was very stern."

"What of Goram?"

"He helped hold the walls with us. He was exhausted and feverish this morning, which is why Lord Illvin did not dispatch him to you, he told me to tell you. Since if you are riding to Porifors this morning, it made no sense to send Goram twice ten miles to meet you at almost the same time anyway."

"Excellent thinking. Yes. I will ride at once." She looked around; Lady dy Hueltar was bustling back into the tent leading a maid carrying an armload of clothing. "Ah, good."

Ista's satisfaction died as she saw the dress the maid was shaking out for her; a fine layered silk, suitable for a court function, in widow's dark green. "This is not riding dress."

"Of course not, dear Ista," said Lady dy Hueltar. "It is for you to wear to breakfast with us all."

"I shall take a cup of tea and a bite of bread, if such may be had in this camp, and ride at once."

"Oh, no," said Lady dy Hueltar, in a tone of earnest correction. "The meal is being prepared. We are all so looking forward to celebrating having you with us again, just as it should be."

The feast would take two hours, Ista estimated, maybe three. "One mouth the less will not be missed. You all must eat anyway before you break camp; it will not be wasted."

"Now, Lady Ista, do have sense."

Ista's voice dropped. "I ride. If you will not bring me the clothing I asked for, I will send Liss through the camp to beg me some. And if none is to be had, I'll ride in my nightgown. Or naked, if I must."

"I'd share my clothes with you, Royina," Liss offered at once, clearly bemused by that last image.

"I know you would, Liss." Ista patted her shoulder.

Lady dy Hueltar drew herself up in offense, or possibly defense. "Lady Ista, you mustn't be so wild!" Her voice grew hushed. "You wouldn't want people thinking you had been overtaken by your old troubles again, after all."

Ista was tempted, for a dangerous moment, to test just how much sorcerous power the Bastard had endowed her with. But the target was too small and unworthy, pitiable in her way. A natural sycophant, Lady dy Hueltar had made her way in the world most comfortably for the past two decades as companion to the old Provincara, enjoying an imagined indispensability and the status lent her by her august patron. It was clear she wished that pleasant existence to continue; and it could, if only Ista would move into her mother's place and take up her mother's life. All just as before, indeed.

Ista turned to the maid. "You, girl—fetch me some riding clothes. White if they may be had, or whatever color, but in any case, not green."

The girl's mouth opened in panic; she glanced back and forth between Ista and Lady dy Hueltar, torn between conflicting authorities. Ista's eyes narrowed.

"Why must you even go to Porifors?" asked Lady dy Hueltar. Her seamed face worked with distress, close to tears. "With your brother's troop to escort us, we could surely start back to Valenda right from here!"

She must take deeper thought for Lady dy Hueltar, Ista decided, for in truth her years of service had earned her some consideration. But for the moment, Ista meant to ride. She unclenched her teeth and said mildly, "Funerals, dear Lady dy Hueltar. They will be burying the dead today at Porifors. It is my solemn duty to attend. I will wish you to bring me the proper attire when you follow on."

"Oh, funerals," said Lady dy Hueltar, in a tone of relieved enlightenment. "Funerals, oh, of course." She had accompanied the old Provincara to a multitude of such ceremonies. It only seemed their primary entertainment in late years, Ista supposed dryly, though she'd be hard-pressed to name a commoner one. But Lady dy Hueltar understood funerals.

She won't understand these. But it wouldn't matter. For the moment, at least, her customary role seemed safely confirmed to her. The old lady brightened instantly.

She actually unbent so far as to go find Ista riding dress, while Liss went to saddle Demon and Ista gulped tea and bread. The costume's pale tan color even looked good atop the chestnut stallion, Ista fancied, settling at last into the saddle. The ride would limber her stiff body, at least. She had a lingering headache, but she knew its cause; and its cure lay in Porifors. Ferda waved on his Baocian troop, and Liss fell in at her side. They pressed forward through the bright morning air.

*     *     *

A RELAY OF DY OBY'S MEN WERE HAULING OUT RUBBLE FROM THE gates of Porifors as Ista's party rode in. Ista watched them work with glad approval. The rebuilding would be a longer project, but with so many hands, at least the clearing and cleaning would be swiftly accomplished.

The forecourt was already swept out. The limp flowers in the two or three pots left intact on the wall even seemed to be lifting their heads again; Ista was obscurely grateful, in all the noisy confusion, that someone had spared a bit of water for them, and she wondered whose hand it had been. The apricot and the almond trees, though half-denuded, had also stopped dropping leaves. She hoped they would recover.

We can do better than hope, she realized, and thought to them, Live. By the Bastard's blessing, I command you. If this lent the trees any special vigor, it was not instantly apparent; she trusted the ultimate results would not prove peculiar.

Ista's heart lifted to see Lord Illvin striding through the archway. He was cleaned up, hair rebraided, freshly dressed as an officer of Porifors; it even seemed possible that he might have snatched a few hours of sleep. The shorter, stouter Lord dy Baocia pattered by his side, puffing to keep pace. At dy Baocia's other shoulder Learned dy Cabon trod, waving eagerly at her. To her relief, a tired-looking Goram trailed immediately after them.

Cautiously, Goram took her horse's head, eyeing the beast's new docility askance. Ista slipped from her saddle into Illvin's upreaching arms, returning his secret embrace on her way to the ground.

"Greetings, Ista," said Lord dy Baocia. "Are you, um, all right now?" He bore a slightly dazed expression, as might any commander touring the inside of Castle Porifors this morning. His smile upon her was not nearly so vague as Ista was used to; in fact, she suspected she had all his attention. It felt very odd.

"Thank you, brother, I am well; a little tired, but doubtless less fatigued than many here." She glanced at dy Cabon. "How do the sick men fare?"

"We've had no more deaths since yesterday noon, five gods be thanked." He signed himself in heartfelt gratitude. "A few are even back on their feet, though I judge the rest will be as long recovering as from less uncanny illnesses. Most have been moved down to town, into the care of the temple or their relatives."

"That is good to hear."

"Foix and Lord Illvin have told us of the great deeds and miracles you performed yesterday in the Jokonans' tents, by the grace of the Bastard. Is it true you died?"

"I ... am not sure."

"I am," muttered Illvin. His hand had somehow neglected to release hers; they both tightened.

"I did have a very odd vision, which I promise I will recount to you at some less hurried moment, Learned." Well, parts of it, anyway.

"For all my terror, how I wish I, too, could have been there to bear witness, Royina! I should have counted myself blessed above all in my order."

"Oh? Well, stay a moment, then. I have another task, which presses on me. Liss, please take my horse. Goram, come here."

Looking puzzled and wary, Goram obeyed, trudging up to her and giving her a daunted bob of his head. "Royina." His hands clenched each other nervously, and he shot a look of supplication at his master. Illvin's eyes narrowed in concern, and his glance at Ista sharpened.

Ista stared one last time at the hollow gaps in Goram's soul, placed her palms upon his forehead, and poured a sudden flood of white fire out of her spirit hands into those dark and empty reservoirs. The fire splashed wildly in its new confines, then slowly settled, as if seeking its proper level. She breathed relief as the unpleasant pressure in her head vanished.

Goram thumped down cross-legged on the cobbles, his mouth open. He buried his face in his hands. After a moment, his shoulders began to shake. "Oh," he said in a faraway voice. He started to weep— in shock, Ista supposed, and in other, more complicated reactions. Her last night's dreams had given her some intimations.

"Lord Illvin, brother, may I introduce Captain Goram dy Hixar, late of Roya Orico's cavalry via the service of Lord Dondo dy Jironal. More recently of service, if an involuntary one, to Sordso of Jokona, as sword master and horseman. In a sense."

Goram looked up from his sobbing, his face stunned. Stunned, but not slack: its shape seemed to tighten along with the mending mind underneath.

"You have returned his memories and his wits? But Ista, this is wonderful!" cried Illvin. "Now he may find his family and his home at last!"

"Just what it is, remains to be seen," murmured Ista. "But his soul is now his own, and complete."

Goram's steel-gray eyes met hers, and for a moment, did not look away. They were filled with amazement, and a roil of other emotions; she rather thought one of them was anguish. She gave him a grave nod, acknowledging it all. He returned a shaken jerk of his head.

"Learned," she continued, "you begged a gift of witness, and you have it. Please help Captain dy Hixar back to his chamber. He needs to rest quietly, for until he has time to put them back in order, his mind and memories will be very unsettled. Some spiritual comfort. . . may not come amiss, when he is ready."

"Indeed, Royina," said dy Cabon, signing himself joyously. "It will be my honor." He helped Goram—dy Hixar—to his feet, and led him off through the archway. Illvin stared after, then turned his dark eyes thoughtfully on her.

Dy Baocia inquired in a small voice, "Ista, what just happened?"

"Princess Joen, through her demon, was in the habit of stealing useful bits of other people's souls for her sorcerers. From, among others, prisoners of war. Prince Sordso was her greatest construct, and full of such fragments. When Sordso's demon passed through me yesterday, the god gave it to me to recognize and retain the portion of Captain dy Hixar woven among the rest, and to return it to him here. It is part of the task the Bastard has laid on me, to hunt demons in the world, pluck them from their mounts, and relay them to His hell."

"This task ... is now done, yes?" he said hopefully. Or, possibly, worriedly. He glanced around the shambles of Porifors. "Yesterday, right?"

"No, I expect it is only beginning. In the past three years Joen released a very plague of elementals. They have escaped all over the Five Princedoms and the royacies, though their greatest concentration is likely still in Jokona. The woman who had this calling before me was killed in Rauma. It is not an easy, not an easy . . . duty to train for. If I read the god aright—He delights in obscurity and riddles—I think He wanted a successor who would be rather better guarded, through what promises to be a, ah, theologically difficult period."

Illvin's eyes glinted, listening to this. He murmured, "Much becomes clear."

"He told me He did not want to train another porter," Ista added, "and that He fancied a royina for a time. His exact words." She let her slight pause emphasize this last. "I am called. I come." And you may either help, brother, or get out of my way. "I expect to form a traveling court, small and adaptable; the god's duties are likely to continue physically wearing. My clerk—as soon as I appoint one—and yours must deal shortly with forwarding my dower income, as I doubt my tasks will take me back to Valenda."

Dy Baocia digested it all for a moment, then cleared his throat and said cautiously, "My men are setting up our camp by the spring to the east of the castle; will you take your ease there, Ista, or return to your rooms in here?"

Ista glanced up at Illvin. "That will be for Porifors's chatelaine to decide. But until this fortress has had more time to recover, I would not burden it with my expanded household. I will rest in your camp for a while."

Illvin gave her a short nod in appreciation of her delicacy, and all that went unspoken in it: until after the dead are buried.

Her brother offered to escort her to his tents, as he was going in that direction, and Illvin gave her a formal bow of temporary farewell.

"My duties today are relentless," Illvin murmured, "but later I must discuss with you the matter of an appropriate guard company for this traveling court of yours."

"Indeed," she returned. "And other appointments as well."

"And callings."

"Those, too."

*     *     *

PEJAR AND HIS TWO SLAIN COMRADES OF THE DAUGHTER'S ORDER were buried outside the walls of Porifors that afternoon. Ista and all her company attended upon them. Learned dy Cabon had come to Ista in distress, earlier, for while he might officiate—none better, in Ista's view—he had no sacred animals to sign the gods' acceptances; those belonging to Porifors's own temple were overburdened and reported close to frenzied with the day's demands.

"Learned," she had chided him gently. "We do not need the animals. We have me."

"Ah," he said, rocking back. "Oh. As you are made saint again—of course."

She knelt, now, in the sunlight by each wrapped form in turn, laid her hand upon its brow, and prayed for their signs. In rites at major temples like the one in Cardegoss, each order proffered a sacred animal, appropriate in color and sex to the god or goddess it represented, with an acolyte-groom to handle it. The creatures were led in turn to the bier, and by their behavior the divines interpreted to the mourners which god had taken in their lost one's soul, and therefore where to direct their prayers—and, not incidentally, upon which order's altar to lay their more material offerings. The rite brought consolation to the living, support to the Temple, and occasionally some surprises.

She had often wondered what the animals trained to this duty felt. She was relieved when she experienced no holy hallucinations: merely a silent certainty. Pejar and the first of his comrades were taken up by the Daughter of Spring, Whom they had served so faithfully, she felt at once, and so she reported. The last man, she discovered, was different.

"Curious," she said to Ferda and Foix. "The Father of Winter has taken Laonin. I wonder if it is for the sake of his courage on Arhys's ride—or if he has a child somewhere? He was not married, was he?"

"Urn, no," said Ferda. He glanced at dy Cabon's whites and swallowed whatever embarrassment he might have felt on the dead dedicat's behalf.

Ista rose from the graveside. "Then I charge you to find out, and see that the child, if it lives, is cared for. I will write to Holy General dy Yarrin as well. It shall have a purse from me to maintain its infancy, and a claim on a place in my household when it comes of age, if it desires."

"Yes, Royina," said Ferda. Surreptitiously, he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

Ista nodded satisfaction. As a conscientious officer, he would not fail in this task, she was sure.

The shaded grove reserved for the castle's dead overlooked the pleasant river; many graves were still being dug, and other grieving people, comrades and relatives of the slain, had watched their company's rites. What rumors were circulating about her in Porifors Ista hardly knew, but within the hour humble petitioners had descended upon dy Cabon to beg the royal saint's indulgence for their dead.

As a result Ista spent the day until darkness fell being conducted by dy Cabon and Liss from graveside to graveside, reporting the fates of souls. There were too many, but the task was not so endless as the devastation Joen's sorcerers would have left across Chalion if not stopped by Porifors's sacrifices. Ista refused none who asked her aid, for most surely, these had not refused her. Every mourner seemed to have some story to tell her of their dead; not, she realized at length, in the expectation that she would do anything, except listen. Attend. Royina, see this man; make him real in your mind, as in ours; for in the realm of matter, he lives now only in our memories. She listened till her ears and heart both ached.

Returning to her brother's tents after nightfall, she fell onto her cot like a corpse herself. As the night drew on, she told over the names, faces, fragments of men's lives in her thoughts. How could the gods' minds hold all these tales in full? For They remember us perfectly.

At length, exhausted, she rolled over and slept.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

ARHYS'S FUNERAL TOOK PLACE THE NEXT MORNING IN THE little temple in the town of Porifors, as if an ordinary border lord had died in an ordinary battle. The provincar of Caribastos had ridden in with a troop too late to bear arms, but in time to help bear up the sealed coffin, together with dy Oby, dy Baocia, Illvin, Foix, and one of Arhys's senior officers. It was as honorable an escort as might be had.

The sacred animal of the Father of Winter here was a fine old gray deerhound, his coat brushed to a silvery sheen for the occasion; he sat at once by the bier when his acolyte-groom led him up, and would not be moved from his guard-place thereafter. The normally articulate Illvin was pallid and close-throated. He managed only a simple He was a great-souled man, in a voice that slid, then stepped back to Ista's side. It was plain that any further demand for speech would have cracked him. To spare him, dy Oby and dy Caribastos stepped forward to deliver all the proper orations, listing their late relative's and liegeman's public achievements.

Lady Cattilara, too, was pale and quiet. She did not speak much to Illvin, or vice versa, just the necessary practical exchanges. There would never be friendship between them, exactly; but the blood they'd mingled on the tower, Ista judged, had bought them enough mutual respect to survive upon. Cattilara, jaw tight, even managed a polite nod to Ista. For the three of them, the morning's rite was a redundant farewell, more a social burden to be endured than an hour of parting. After the interment and the funeral meal, the military men dragged Illvin off for conclave. Lady Cattilara made scant work of packing, left her ladies to deal with the rest, and rode out under the escort of one of her brothers, bound for Oby. It would be after nightfall before she reached it; but Ista, remembering her own horror of the Zangre after Ias's death, had no trouble understanding Cattilara's desire not to sleep another night in her emptied marriage bed. Cattilara bore away great grief in her heart, down that eastern road, but not, Ista thought, a crippling burden of hatred, rage, or guilt along with it. What would eventually grow to fill that emptiness, Ista did not know—but she felt that it would not be stunted.

*     *     *

EARLY THE NEXT AFTERNOON, LORD ILLVIN CAME TO ISTA IN DY Baocia’s camp. They climbed the path above the spring, partly for the view, which took in both Castle Porifors and the valley it guarded, partly to shed any of Ista's would-be attendants less athletic than Liss. Illvin gallantly spread his vest-cloak upon a rock for Ista to seat herself. Liss wandered nearby, looking longingly at an enticing cork-oak tree that her dress prevented her from climbing.

Ista nodded to Illvin's belt, where both Arhys's and Cattilara's keys now hung. "Provincar dy Caribastos has confirmed your command of Porifors, I see."

"For the moment, at least," said Illvin.

"For the moment?"

He stared thoughtfully along the ridge to where the stronghold's walls rose from the rocks. "It's odd. I was born in Porifors—lived here almost all of my life—yet I've never owned it, nor expected to. It belongs today to my niece Liviana—a nine-year-old girl who lives half a province away. Yet it is my home, if anyplace is. I own half a dozen little estates in Caribastos, unentailed scatterings from my mother—but they are mere possessions, barely visited. Still, necessarily, Porifors must be defended."

"By you—necessarily?"

He shrugged. "It is the key fortress, along this border."

"I think this border may be about to shift."

He grinned briefly. "Indeed. Things are stirring, in our counsels. I'm stirring 'em. I don't need Arhys's gifts to tell that this is a boon of timing and chance not to be wasted."

"I trust so. I expect Marshal dy Palliar and Chancellor dy Cazaril to ride into the gates of Porifors within the week. If my brother's and dy Caribastos's and Foix's letters"—and mine—"do not fetch them, they are not the men I take them for."

"Will they see it, do you think? Here, now, is the moment to turn Joen's strategy about—to sweep down, all unexpected, into Jokona while it is so disrupted, and turn Visping's flank—and the campaign could be done before it was even expected to start."

"It does not take second sight to foresee that outcome," said Ista. "If it works, dy Palliar will doubtless be showered with the acclaim for his grand strategy."

Illvin smiled grimly. "Poor Joen, she even loses that credit. She should have been a general."

"Anything but the frustrated puppeteer she was constrained to be," Ista agreed. "What will become of Sordso? I think he is not quite mad, for all that he sniveled and kissed my skirt hem when I passed him in the forecourt yesterday. His soul is his own now, though it will be long before his nerves are anything but shattered."

"Yes, one scarcely knows if he would be of more use to us as a hostage, or set loose to be a very bad enemy leader."

"He spoke of a religious vocation, and conversion to the Quintarian faith, actually. I've no idea how long the fit will last."

Illvin snorted. "Perhaps his poetry will grow better hereafter."

"I shouldn't be surprised." The castle's battlements stood stark and pale in the bright light, concealing the damage being repaired within; Ista could hear a faint echo of hammering. "By the time Liviana's future husband succeeds to the command of Porifors, it will have become a quiet backwater, like Valenda. This place has earned its peace, I think." She glanced at Illvin, who was smiling down at her. "There are two thoughts in my mind just now."

"Only two?"

"Two thousand, but these are uppermost. One is that my roving court needs a royal seneschal: a competent and experienced officer, preferably one who knows this area, to direct my travels and secure my person."

His brows twitched up, encouragingly.

"The other is that Marshal dy Palliar will need an experienced intelligencer, an officer who knows Jokona and the Jokonans better than any other, who speaks and writes both court and vile Roknari, possessing trunks full of maps and charts and ground plans, to advise his strategies in this region. I greatly fear that these are two mutually exclusive posts."

He touched one finger thoughtfully to his lips. "I might mention, it has occurred independently to several military minds here that any army presently wishing to march north would be very, very happy to possess a cure for sorcerers, to carry close at hand. Should any further enemy sorcerers be encountered on this campaign. Resources devoted to the protection of such a sorceress-saint would not be considered wasted. So the saint's seneschal and the marshal's intelligencer might not find themselves working so far apart as all that."

Ista's brows rose. "Hm? Perhaps ... If it is clearly understood that the saint serves not Chalion, not even the Temple, but the god, and must go as the god directs. Alongside the marshal's tents for a time, but not in them. Well, well, dy Cazaril will understand that part; and I think he could drill it into dy Palliar's head if anyone could."

He stared thoughtfully up the valley road. "A week, you think, till they arrive?"

"Ten days at most."

"Huh." His long fingers rattled the keys at his belt. "Meantime ... I actually walked over here to invite you to take rooms within Castle Porifors again, now we are in slightly better order. If you wish. The weather's due to change, judging by the wind; we may have a bit of welcome rain by tomorrow night."

"Not Umerue's old chamber, I trust."

"No, we've lodged Prince Sordso and his watchers there."

"Nor Cattilara's."

"Dy Caribastos and his retinue have taken over that whole gallery." He cleared his throat. "I was thinking of the ones you had before. Across from mine. Although ... I fear there is not enough space to also house all of your ladies."

Ista managed not to grin, or at least not too broadly. "Thank you, Lord Illvin; I should be pleased."

His dark eyes sparked. His hand-kissing technique was definitely improving with practice, she thought.

*     *     *

ISTA SENT HER RESTORED RAIMENT FROM VALENDA ON AHEAD, EVEN minus all the staid selections in widow's green that she left in her brother's tents, she would be spared living in borrowed clothing henceforth. A little later, dy Baocia escorted her from his camp. Foix attended, guardsman handily making a smooth transition to courtier.

Dy Baocia's transition was a little less smooth, but on the whole he seemed to be managing the leap to the new Ista reasonably well, she thought. He avoided discussing the disturbing part about eating demons, seldom mentioned the god, but he'd entered into the material practicalities of her new vocation with gratifying attention to detail.

"We must determine the size of your personal guard," he remarked as they passed under Porifors's gates. "Too many will be a drain on your purse, but too few could prove a false economy."

"Very true. My needs will, I expect, vary with my locale. Add it to your list to discuss with my seneschal; he'll be the best judge of what this region requires."

"Will your seneschal also serve as your master of horse, as he did for his late brother? Or shall I recommend you a man?"

"Ser dy Arbanos's duties will be too demanding. I have another man in mind, though I'm not sure yet if he will accept. I may return for your recommendation, if not."

"What, not dy Gura, here?" dy Baocia inquired. Foix gave a little agreeable bow. "Or his good brother?"

"Ferda is claimed for the coming campaign by his cousin, Marshal dy Palliar, and must be off to join him shortly. Even as an officer of my household, Foix will likely do considerable traveling back and forth on Temple business; but a horse-master's tasks are daily. I am not sure what title I shall offer Foix. Royal Sorcerer? Master of Demons?"

"I should be perfectly content to retain officer-dedicat, Royina," Foix put in hastily, sounding slightly alarmed, then narrowing his eyes in suspicion at her primly pursed lips.

"I shall find you the work first, and the title later, then," she said. "You'll need something to swagger with, when we visit other courts, to keep up the expected royal hauteur on my behalf."

A grin flitted over his mouth. "As you command, Royina."

They turned into the stone court and mounted to the gallery, Ista controlled a shiver, passing up the steps on which she'd once faced a god. From the open door of her double chamber, a familiar but unexpected voice floated.

"She doesn't want you," Lady dy Hueltar said severely. "She doesn't need you. I am here now, and I assure you, I am far better acquainted with all her requirements than you will ever be. So just you run along back to the stables, or wherever you came from. Out, out!"

"Madam, it cannot be so," said Liss in a puzzled tone.

Foix's brows climbed, then drew back down, darkly. Ista motioned him to patience and shouldered within, the men following.

"What is this argument?" Ista inquired.

Colored spots flared on Lady dy Hueltar's cheeks; she hesitated, then drew in her breath. "I was just explaining to this rude girl here that now you are done with that rash pilgrimage, dear Ista, you will be requiring a more befitting lady-in-waiting again. Not a girl groom."

"On the contrary, I need Liss very much."

"She isn't suited to be lady-in-waiting to a royina. She's not even a lady!"

Liss scratched her head. "Well, that's true enough. I'm not much good at waiting, either. I'm better at riding very fast."

Ista smiled. "Indeed." Her smile tightened a little, as she considered the scene she'd interrupted. Had Lady dy Hueltar actually imagined she might trick or drive Liss off, send her away believing herself dismissed?

Lady dy Hueltar made a little nervous gesture, under Ista's cool gaze. "Now that you are calmer, Lady Ista, surely it is time we began to think of returning safely to Valenda. Your good brother here will lend us a more adequate escort for the return journey, I'm sure."

"I'm not going back to Valenda. I'm going to follow the army into Jokona to hunt demons for the Bastard," said Ista. "Safety has little to do with the god's chores." Her lips curved up, but it was scarcely a smile anymore. "Has no one explained anything to you yet, dear Lady dy Hueltar?"

"I did," said Liss. "Several times." She lowered her voice to Ista. "It's all right. I had a great-aunt who grew very confused in her age like this, poor thing."

"I am not," Lady dy Hueltar began in rising tones, then stopped. She started again. "It's much too dangerous. I beg you to reconsider, dear Ista. My lord dy Baocia—as the head of the family now, it's your place to insist she be more sensible!"

"Actually," Ista noted, "he's been head of the family for a decade and a half."

Dy Baocia snorted, and muttered under his breath, "Aye—anyplace in Baocia but Valenda ..."

Ista took Lady dy Hueltar's hand and set it firmly on her brother's arm. "I'm sure you're very tired, dear lady, to have ridden so far, so fast, for so little need. But my brother will see you safely on your way back home tomorrow—or possibly tonight."

"I have already moved my things here—"

Ista cast an eye at the piles of luggage. "The servants will move them back. I will speak with you more later, dy Baocia." With a few more not terribly gentle hints, Ista maneuvered them both out the door. Her last hope of support from dy Baocia failing, Lady dy Hueltar moved off with him in a cloud of mutual exasperation, looking very crushed.

"Where did that woman come from?" Foix asked, shaking his head in wonder.

"I inherited her."

"My condolences."

"She'll be all right. My brother will find some other corner of the family to tuck her into; it won't please her as well as a higher household, but perhaps she'll get some satisfaction out of parading her former glories. She doesn't batten, you know; in certain narrow ways, she makes herself quite useful. It is sad, though, that she herself destroys the gratitude that ought to be her reward."

Foix glanced at Liss, whose face was a trifle set. He said, "I find my gratitude quite limited, I'm afraid."

Liss tossed her braid. "It doesn't matter."

"Was she trying to convince you that I'd dismissed you?" asked Ista.

"Oh, yes. It made her quite cross when I played the fool and failed to take her hints." Liss's mouth twitched up, then down. "It's true, though. I'm not a proper highborn lady."

Ista smiled. "I expect we shall rendezvous with Iselle and Bergon's court before the year is up—in Visping, if not sooner. At which point, by my request and your valiancy, a lady you shall be made in fact - Sera Annaliss dy . . . what was the name of that sheep-infested village, again?"

Liss breathed, "Teneret, Royina."

"Sera Annaliss dy Teneret, lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Royina Ista. Sounds very dignified, don't you think, Foix?"

He grinned. "Aye—I think m'mother will like it quite well. Well, Bastard knows I've got to offer something, now, to make it up to her for, er, the Bastard."

"Ah, you aspire to some social climbing, do you? Well, it's not impossible; this year will offer young officers many opportunities for advancement, I suspect."

Foix swept Liss a courtier's bow. "May I aspire, lady?"

Liss eyed him with smiling speculation, and drifted across the chamber to start putting Ista's things in order. "Ask again in Visping, dedicat."

"I shall."

*     *     *

ISTA HAD DY CABON BRING GORAM TO HER IN THE STONE COURT. SHE sat in the colonnade's shade on the bench where they had first spoken, and studied the differences.

Goram dy Hixar's clothing was still that of the groom, his figure still short, his legs still bowed, his beard still grizzled. But he had lost the turtle hunch; he moved now with a swordsman's balance. And tension. His polite bow was supple enough for any provincial court.

"Learned dy Cabon has told you, I think, of my need for a master of horse, yes?" Ista began.

"Yes, Royina." Dy Hixar cleared his throat, uncomfortably, and swallowed his spit in her presence. Goram, she thought, would have let the gobbet fly.

"Can you undertake the task?"

He grimaced. "The work, aye. But Royina . . . I'm not sure if you understand who I was. Am. Why I was not ransomed."

She shrugged. "Captain of horse, swordsman, bravo, quondam murderer, destroyer of lives—not just of enemies', but friends'—shall I go on? The sort of fellow whose funeral's orations are all on the theme of Well, that's a relief."

He winced. "I see I need not confess to you."

"No. I saw."

He looked away. "All my sins delivered . . . it's a strange, strange thing, Royina. The lifting of one's sins is usually considered a miracle of the gods. But your god has brought all mine back to me. Goram the groom . . . was a hundred times better a man than Goram dy Hixar will ever be. I was a blank slate, brought—saved, for no merit of mine—to live for three years with the two best men in Caribastos. Not just best swordsmen—best men, you understand?"

She nodded.

"I scarcely knew such lives were possible, before. Nor wanted to know. I would have mocked their virtues, and laughed. Lord Illvin thought I was overwhelmed with joy when I fell to my knees before you in the forecourt. It wasn't joy that knocked me down. It was shame."

"I know."

"I don't want to be ... who I am. I was happier before, Royina. But everyone thinks I should be praying my thanks."

She returned him an ironic smile. "Be sure, I am not one of them. But—your soul is your own, now, to make of what you will. We are all of us, every one, our own works; we present our souls to our Patrons at the ends of our lives as an artisan presents the works of his hands."

"If it is so, I am too marred, Royina."

"You are unfinished. They are discerning Patrons, but not, I think, impossible to please. The Bastard said to me, from His own lips—"

Dy Cabon's breath drew in.

"—that the gods did not desire flawless souls, but great ones. I think that very darkness is where the greatness grows from, as flowers from the soil. I am not sure, in fact, if greatness can bloom without it. You have been as god-touched as any here; do not despair of yourself, for I think the gods have not."

The dim gray eyes reddened, edged with water's gleam. "I am too old to start over."

"You have more years ahead of you now than Pejar, half your age, whom we buried outside these walls these two days past. Stand before his grave and use your gift of breath to complain of your limited time. If you dare."

He jerked a little at the steel in her voice.

"I offer you an honorable new beginning. I do not guarantee its ending. Attempts fail, but not as certainly as tasks never attempted."

He vented a long exhalation. "Then . . . that being so, and knowing what you know of me—which is, I think, more than ever I confessed to anyone, living or dead—I am your man if you will have me, Royina."

"Thank you, Captain: I shall. As my master of horse, you will take your instructions from my seneschal. I think you will find him a tolerable commander."

Goram smiled a little at that, and saluted her farewell.

Dy Cabon stood by her a moment, watching him exit the court. His face was troubled.

"Well, Learned? How do you feel about your witnessing now?"

He sighed. "You know, this god-touched business wasn't as much . .. urn ... as much pleasure as I thought it would be, back in Valenda when we started. I was terribly excited, in secret, to be picked out to do the god's work."

"I did try to tell you, back in Casilchas."

"Yes. I think I understand better, now."

"My court is going to need a divine, too, you know. As I am to become a lay dedicat of the Bastard's Order, of a sort, I think you might suit me very well. We will likely be riding into the Five Princedoms. If you truly aspire to martyrdom, as your early sermons to me implied, you may still have a chance."

He blushed deeply. "Five gods, but those were stupid sermons." He took a deep breath. "I'll be glad to forgo the martyr part. As for the rest, though—I will say you yes, Royina, with a glad heart. Even though I've had no dreams directing me. Well, especially as I've had no dreams directing me. Not so sure I want them, anymore." He hesitated, and added with a wholly inconsistent longing in his voice, "You did say— you did see Him face-to-face, in your dreams? Your real dreams?"

"Yes." Ista smiled. "Once, He borrowed your face to speak through. It appears that Someone thinks you not unworthy to wear His colors, Learned, to wear in turn the semblance of your flesh."

"Oh." Dy Cabon blinked, taking this in. "Is that so? Really? My goodness." He blinked some more. When he took his leave of her, his mouth was still tugging up.

*     *     *

IN THE EVENING AFTER SUPPER, WHEN THE SUN HAD SET AND WHITE stars were coming out in the cobalt sky above the stone court, Lord Illvin climbed the stairs and knocked on Ista's door. Liss admitted him to the outer chamber with a friendly dip of her knees. With a look of extreme bemusement on his face, he held out his hands to Ista.

"Look. I found these growing on the apricot tree in the forecourt, as I was passing through just now."

Liss peered. "They're apricots. Makes sense that's where they'd be ... doesn't it?" She hesitated.

The fruits were large and deeply colored, with a faint red blush upon their dark golden skins. Ista, bending to look, flared her nostrils at their heavy perfume. "They smell lovely."

"Yes, but... it is not the season. My mother planted that tree when I was born, and the almond for Arhys. I know when they're supposed to come ripe, I've watched them all my life. Not for months yet. There are still a few blossoms that haven't fallen, though half the leaves are gone. These two were hiding amongst the few that held on—I saw them by chance."

"How do they taste?"

"I was a little afraid to bite into them."

Ista smiled. "Out of season they may be, but I think they are not a disaster. I think they may be a gift. It will be all right." She pushed open the door of her inner chamber with one foot. "Come in. Let us try them."

"Urn," said Liss. "I can stay in sight, if you leave the door open, but I don't think I can get out of earshot."

Ista gave Illvin a tilt of her head, toward the inner door. "Excuse us a moment."

A little smile turning his mouth, he gave her a courtly nod and passed within. Ista pulled the door shut behind him, briefly, and turned to Liss. "I don't think I have explained to you yet about the other set of rules for discreet ladies-in-waiting ..."

She did so, in clear, succinct, but on the whole polite terms. Liss's eyes grew bright as the stars outside, as she listened attentively. Ista was relieved, though not surprised, that Liss seemed neither confused nor shocked. Ista hadn't quite expected enthusiastic, however. She found herself swept within, and the door firmly closed behind her, almost before she'd finished speaking.

"I think I shall go sit on the steps a while, dear Royina," Liss's voice called back faintly through the wood. "It's cooler. I think I shall like to sit out for quite a long time." Ista heard the outer door close, as well.

Illvin's eyes were crinkling with silent laughter. He held out one of the fruits to her; she took it, her hand jerking a little when her fingers accidentally brushed his. "Well," he said, raising his to his lips. "Let us both be brave, then ..."

She matched his bite. The apricot tasted as wonderful as it looked and smelled, and despite her attempts at daintiness, she ended with juice dribbling down her chin. She dabbed at it. "Oh, dear . . ."

"Here," he said, moving closer, "let me help you . . ."

The kiss lasted quite a long time, with his apricot-scented fingers winding pleasurably in her hair. When they paused for breath, she remarked, "I always feared it would take divine intervention to find me a lover ... I do believe I was right."

"Tch, tch, look at yourself, bittersweet Ista. Saint, sorceress, dowager royina of all Chalion-Ibra, converses with gods, when not cursing them—a man would have to be maniacally intrepid to even think of you in that rude way. . . . This is good. It will cut down on my rivals."

She couldn't help it; she giggled. She heard herself, and laughed, in wonder, in joy, in huge surprise. He tasted her laughter, too, as though it were miraculous apricots.

And I was afraid I wouldn't know how to do this.

He'd looked tall and splendid, in the long sweep of black tunic and trousers and boots, but he looked even better out of them, she thought, as she pulled him down beside her on her bed. The warm night demanded neither sheets nor blankets. She left a brace of candles burning, the better to see the god's gifts.