After a few more words on the subject of Cazaril’s diet and duties, Rojeras made a courteous departure.

Betriz, tears blurring her velvety brown eyes, choked, “I didn’t think it was going to be—had you guessed this when—Cazaril, I don’t want you to die!”

Cazaril replied ruefully, “Well, I don’t want me to die either, so that makes two of us.”

“Three,” said Iselle. “Cazaril—what can we do for you?”

Cazaril, about to reply, nothing, seized this opportunity instead to rap out firmly, “This above all—kindly do not discuss this with every castle gossiper. It is my earnest desire that this stay private information for—for as long as may be.” For one thing, the news that Cazaril was dying might give dy Jironal some fresh ideas about his brother’s death. The chancellor had to return to Cardegoss soon, possibly frustrated enough to start rethinking his missing corpse problem.

Iselle accepted this with a slow nod, and Cazaril was permitted to return to his antechamber, where he failed to concentrate upon his account books. After the third time Lady Betriz tiptoed out to inquire if he wanted anything, once at the royesse’s instigation and twice on her own, Cazaril counterattacked by declaring it was time for some long-neglected grammar lessons. If they weren’t going to leave him alone, he might as well make use of their company. His two pupils were very subdued, ladylike, and submissive this afternoon. Even though this meek studious virtue was something he’d long wished for, he found himself hoping it wouldn’t last.

Still, they brushed through the lessons pretty well, even the long drill on court Roknari grammatical modes. His prickly demeanor did not invite consolation. The ladies, bless their steadfast wits, did not attempt to inflict any on him. By the end the two young women were treating him almost normally again, as he plainly desired, though around Betriz’s grave mouth no dimples solaced him.

Iselle rose to shake out her knots by pacing about the chamber; she stopped to stare out the window at the chill winter mist that filled the ravine below the Zangre’s walls. She rubbed absently at her sleeve, and remarked querulously, “Lavender is not my color. It’s like wearing a bruise. There is too much death in Cardegoss. I wish we’d never come here.”

Considering it impolitic to agree, Cazaril merely bowed, and withdrew to make himself ready to go down to dinner.

* * *

THE FIRST FLAKES OF WINTER SNOW POWDERED THE streets and walls of Cardegoss that week, but melted off in the afternoons. Palli kept Cazaril informed of the arrival of his fellow lord dedicats, filtering in to the capital one by one, and in turn decanted Zangre gossip from his friend. Mutual aid and trust, Cazaril reflected, but also a dual breach of the walls that each of them, in theory, helped to man. Yet if it ever came down to choosing sides between the Temple and the Zangre, Chalion would already have lost.

Dy Jironal, Royse Teidez in tow, returned as if blown in by the cold southeast wind that also dumped an unwelcome gift of sleet on the town in passing. To Cazaril’s relief, the chancellor was empty-handed, balked of quarry in his quest for justice and revenge. No telling from dy Jironal’s set face if he had despaired of his hunt, or had just been drawn back by spies, riding hard and fast, to tell him of the forces gathering in Cardegoss that were not of his own summoning.

Teidez dragged back to his quarters in the castle looking tired, sullen, and unhappy. Cazaril was not surprised. Chasing down every death for three provinces around that had occurred during the night of Dondo’s taking-off had surely been gruesome enough even without the vile weather.

During his bedazzlement by Dondo’s practiced sycophancy, Teidez had neglected his elder sister’s company. When he came to visit Iselle’s chambers that afternoon, he both accepted and returned a sisterly embrace, seeming more eager to talk to her than he had for a long time. Cazaril withdrew discreetly to his antechamber and sat with his account books open, fiddling with his drying quill. Since Orico had for a betrothal gift assigned the rents of six towns to the support of his sister’s household, and not taken them back when funeral had replaced wedding, Cazaril’s accounts and correspondence had grown more complex.

He listened meditatively through the open door to the rise and fall of the young voices. Teidez detailed his trip to his sister’s eager ears: the muddy roads and floundering horses, the tense and cranky men, indifferent food and chilly quarters. Iselle, in a voice that betrayed more envy than sympathy, pointed out how good a practice it was for his future winter campaigns. The cause of the journey was scarcely touched upon between them, Teidez still baffled and offended by his sister’s rejection of his late hero, and Iselle apparently unwilling to burden him with knowledge of the more grotesque causes of her antipathy.

Besides being shocked by the sudden and dreadful nature of Lord Dondo’s murder, Teidez must be one of the few who’d known the man who genuinely mourned him. And why not? Dondo had flattered and cajoled and made much of Teidez. He’d showered the boy with gifts and treats, some toxically inappropriate for his age, and how was Teidez to grasp that grown men’s vices were not the same as grown men’s honors?

The elder dy Jironal must seem a cold and unresponsive companion by comparison. The expedition had apparently left a trail of disruption behind as its inquiries grew rough and ready in dy Jironal’s frustration. Worse, dy Jironal, who needed Teidez desperately, was insufficiently adept at concealing how little he liked him, and had left him to his handlers—secretary-tutor, guards, and servants—treating him as tailpiece rather than lieutenant. But if, as his surly words hinted, Teidez had begun to reciprocate his chief guardian’s dislike, it was surely for all the wrong reasons. And if his new secretary was taking up any of the abandoned load of his noble education, nothing in Teidez’s tale gave hint of it.

At length, Nan dy Vrit bade the young people prepare for dinner, and drew the visit to a close. Teidez walked slowly out through Cazaril’s antechamber, frowning at his boots. The boy was grown almost as tall as his half brother Orico, his round face hinting that in future he might grow as broad as well, though for now he kept youth’s muscular fitness. Cazaril turned a leaf in his account book at random, dipped his pen again, and glanced up with a tentative smile. “How do you fare, my lord?”

Teidez shrugged, but then, halfway across the room, wheeled back, and came to Cazaril’s table. His expression was not miffed—or not merely miffed—but tired and troubled as well. He drummed his finger briefly on the wood, and stared down over the pile of books and papers. Cazaril folded his hands and cast him an encouraging look of inquiry.

Teidez said abruptly, “There’s something wrong in Cardegoss. Isn’t there.”

There were so many things wrong in Cardegoss, Cazaril scarcely knew how to take Teidez’s words. He said cautiously, “What makes you think that?”

Teidez made a little gesture, pulled short. “Orico is sickly, and does not rule as he should. He sleeps so much, like an old man, but he’s not that old. And everyone says he’s lost his”—Teidez colored slightly, and his gesture grew vaguer—“you know . . . cannot act as a man is supposed to, with a woman. Has it never struck you that there is something uncanny about his strange illness?”

After a slight hesitation, Cazaril temporized, “Your observations are shrewd, Royse.”

“Lord Dondo’s death was uncanny, too. I think it’s all of a piece!”

The boy was thinking; good! “You should take your thoughts to . . .” not dy Jironal, “your brother Orico. He is the most proper authority to address them.” Cazaril tried to imagine Teidez getting a straight answer out of Orico, and sighed. If Iselle could not draw sense from the man, with all her passionate persuasion, what hope had the much less articulate Teidez? Orico would evade answer unless stiffened to it in advance.

Should Cazaril take this tutelage into his own hands? Not only had he not been given authority to disclose the state secret, he wasn’t even supposed to know it himself. And . . . the knowledge of the Golden General’s curse needed to come straight to Teidez from the roya, not around him or despite him, lest it take up a suspicious tinge of conspiracy.

He’d been silent too long. Teidez leaned forward across the table, eyes narrowing, and hissed, “Lord Cazaril, what do you know?”

I know we dare not leave you in ignorance much longer. Nor Iselle either. “Royse, I shall talk to you of this later. I cannot answer you tonight.”

Teidez’s lips tightened. He swiped a hand through his dark amber curls in a gesture of impatience. His eyes were uncertain, untrusting, and, Cazaril thought, strangely lonely. “I see,” he said in a bleak tone, and turned on his heel to march out. His low-voiced mutter carried back from the corridor, “I must do it myself . . .”

If he meant, talk to Orico, good. Cazaril would go to Orico first, though, yes, and if that proved insufficient, return with Umegat to back him up. He set his pens in their jar, closed his books, took a breath to steel himself against the twinges that stabbed him with sudden movement, and pushed to his feet.

AN INTERVIEW WITH ORICO WAS EASIER RESOLVED upon than accomplished. Taking him as still an ambassador for Iselle’s Ibran proposal, the roya ducked away from Cazaril on sight, and set the master of his chamber to offer up a dozen excuses for his indisposition. The matter was made more difficult by the need for this conversation to take place in private, just between the two of them, and uninterrupted. Cazaril was walking down the corridor from the banqueting hall after supper, head down and considering how best to corner his royal quarry, when a thump on his shoulder half spun him around.

He looked up, and an apology for his clumsy abstraction died on his lips. The man he’d run into was Ser dy Joal, one of Dondo’s now-unemployed bravos—and what were all those ripe souls doing for pocket money these days? Had they been inherited by Dondo’s brother?—flanked by one of his comrades, half-grinning, and Ser dy Maroc, who frowned uneasily. The man who’d run into him, Cazaril corrected himself. The candlelight from the mirrored wall sconces made bright sparks in the younger man’s alert eyes.

“Clumsy oaf!” roared dy Joal, sounding just a trifle rehearsed. “How dare you crowd me from the door?”

“I beg your pardon, Ser dy Joal,” said Cazaril. “My mind was elsewhere.” He made a half bow, and began to go around.

Dy Joal dodged sideways, blocking him, and swung back his vest-cloak to reveal the hilt of his sword. “I say you crowded me. Do you give me the lie, as well?”

This is an ambush. Ah. Cazaril stopped, his mouth tightening. Wearily, he said, “What do you want, dy Joal?”

“Bear witness!” Dy Joal motioned to his comrade and dy Maroc. “He crowded me.”

His comrade obediently replied, “Aye, I saw,” though dy Maroc looked much less certain.

“I seek a touch with you for this, Lord Cazaril!” said dy Joal.

“I see that you do,” said Cazaril dryly. But was this drunken stupidity, or the world’s simplest form of assassination? A duel to first blood, approved practice and outlet for high spirits among young courtly hotheads, followed by The sword slipped, upon my honor! He ran upon it! and whatever number of paid witnesses one could afford to confirm it.

“I say I will have three drops of your blood, to clear this slight.” It was the customary challenge.

“I say you should go dip your head in a bucket of water until you sober up, boy. I do not duel. Eh?” Cazaril lifted his arms briefly, hands out, flipping his own vest-cloak open to show he’d borne no sword in to dinner. “Let me pass.”

“Urrac, lend the coward your sword! We have our two witnesses. We’ll have this outside, now.” Dy Joal jerked his head toward the doors at the corridor’s end that led out into the main courtyard.

The comrade unbuckled his sword, grinned, and tossed it to Cazaril. Cazaril lifted an eyebrow, but not his hand, and let the sheathed weapon clatter, uncaught, to his feet. He kicked it back to its owner. “I do not duel.”

“Shall I call you coward direct?” demanded Joal. His lips were parted, and his breath already rushing in his elation, anticipating battle. Cazaril saw out of the corner of his eye a couple of other men, attracted by the raised voices, advance curiously down the corridor toward this knot of altercation.

“Call me anything you please, depending on how much of a fool you want to sound. Your mouthings are naught to me,” sighed Cazaril. He did his best to project languid boredom, but his blood was pulsing faster in his ears. Fear? No. Fury . . .

“You have a lord’s name. Have you no lord’s honor?”

One corner of Cazaril’s mouth turned up, not at all humorously. “The confusion of mind you dub honor is a disease, for which the Roknari galley-masters have the cure.”

“So much for your honor, then. You shall not refuse me three drops for mine!”

“That’s right.” Cazaril’s voice went oddly calm; his heart, which had sped, slowed. His lips drew back in a strange grin. “That’s right,” he breathed again.

Cazaril held up his left hand, palm out, and with his right jerked out his belt knife, last used for cutting bread at supper. Dy Joal’s hand spasmed on his sword hilt, and he half drew.

“Not within the roya’s hall!” cried dy Maroc anxiously. “You know you must take it outside, dy Joal! By the Brother, he has no sword, you cannot!”

Dy Joal hesitated; Cazaril, instead of advancing toward him, shook back his left sleeve—and drew his knife blade shallowly across his own wrist. Cazaril felt no pain, none. Blood welled, gleaming dark carmine in the candlelight, though not spurting dangerously. A kind of haze clouded his vision, blocking out everyone but himself and the now uncertainly grinning young fool who’d hustled him for a touch. I’ll give you touch. He spun his knife back into its belt sheath. Dy Joal, not yet wary enough, let his sword slide back and lifted his hand from it. Smiling, Cazaril held up his hands, one arm bleeding, the other bare. Then he lunged.

He caught up the shocked dy Joal and bore him backward to the wall, where he landed with a thump that reverberated down the corridor, one arm trapped behind him. Cazaril’s right hand pressed under dy Joal’s chin, lifting him from his feet and pinning him to the wall by his neck. Cazaril’s right knee ground into dy Joal’s groin. He kept up the pressure, to deny dy Joal his trapped arm; the other clawed at him, and he pinned it, too, to the wall. Dy Joal’s wrist twisted in the slippery blood of his grip, but could not break free. The purpling young man did not, of course, cry out, though his eyes rolled whitely, and a grunting gargle broke from his lips. His heels hammered the wall. The bravos knew Cazaril’s crooked hands had held a pen; they’d forgotten he’d held an oar. Dy Joal wasn’t going anywhere now.

Cazaril snarled in his ear, low-voiced but audible to all, “I don’t duel, boy. I kill as a soldier kills, which is as a butcher kills, as quickly, efficiently, and with as least risk to myself as I can arrange. If I decide you die, you will die when I choose, where I choose, by what means I choose, and you will never see the blow coming.” He released dy Joal’s now-enfeebled arm and brought his left wrist up, and pressed the bloody cut to his terrified victim’s half-open, trembling mouth. “You want three drops of my blood, for your honor? You shall drink them.” Blood and spittle spurted around dy Joal’s chattering teeth, but the bravo didn’t even dare try to bite, now. “Drink, damn you!” Cazaril pressed harder, smearing blood all over dy Joal’s face, fascinated with the vividness of it, red streaks on livid skin, the catch of rough beard stubble against his wrist, the bright blur of the candlelight reflected in the welling tears spilling from the staring eyes. He stared into them, watching them cloud.

“Cazaril, for the gods’ sake let him breathe.” Dy Maroc’s distressed cry broke through Cazaril’s red fog.

Cazaril reduced the pressure of his grip, and dy Joal inhaled, shuddering. Keeping his knee in place, Cazaril drew back his bloodied left hand in a fist, and placed, very precisely, a hard blow to the bravo’s stomach that shook the air again; dy Joal’s knees jerked up with it. Only then did Cazaril step back and release the man.

Dy Joal fell to the floor and bent over himself, gasping and choking, weeping, not even trying to get up. After a moment, he vomited.

Cazaril stepped across the mess of food and wine and bile toward Urrac, who lurched backward until stopped by the far wall. Cazaril leaned into his face and repeated softly, “I don’t duel. But if you seek to die like a bludgeoned steer, cross me again.”

He turned on his heel; dy Maroc’s face, drained white, wavered past his vision, hissing, “Cazaril, have you gone mad?”

“Try me.” Cazaril grinned fiercely at him. Dy Maroc fell back. Cazaril strode down the corridor past a blur of men, blood drops still spattering off his fingers as he swung his arms, and out into the chill shock of the night. The closing door cut off a rising babble of voices.

He almost ran across the icy cobbles of the courtyard toward the main block and refuge, both his steps and his breath growing faster and less even as something—sanity, delayed terror?—-seeped back into his mind. His belly cramped violently as he mounted the stone stairs. His fingers shook so badly as he fumbled out his key to let himself into his bedchamber that he dropped it twice and had to use both hands, braced against the door, to finally guide it into the lock. He locked the door again behind him, and fell, wheezing and groaning, across his bed. His attendant ghosts had fled into hiding during the confrontation, their desertion unnoticed by him at the time. He rolled onto his side, and curled around his aching stomach. Now, at last, his cut wrist began to throb. So did his head.

He’d seen men go berserk a few times, in the madness of battle. He’d just never imagined what it must feel like from the inside, before. No one had mentioned the floating exhilaration, intoxicating as wine or sex. An unusual, but natural, result of nerves, mortality, and fright, jammed together in too small a space, too short a time. Not unnatural. Not . . . the thing in his belly reaching out to twist and taunt and trick him into death, and its own release. . . .

Oh.

You know what you did to Dondo. Now you know what Dondo is doing to you.

It was by chance, late the following morning, that Cazaril spied Orico ambling out the Zangre gates toward the menagerie with only a page at his heels. Cazaril tucked the letters he’d been carrying to the Chancellery office into the inner pocket of his vest-cloak, turned from the door of Ias’s Tower, and followed. The roya’s master of the chamber had earlier refused to disturb his lord’s after-breakfast nap; clearly, Orico had finally roused himself and now sought comfort and solace among his animals. Cazaril wondered if the roya had awoken with as bad a headache as he had.

As he strode across the cobbles, Cazaril marshaled his arguments. If the roya feared action, Cazaril would point out that inaction was equally likely to be bent to ill by the curse’s malign influence. If the roya insisted that the children were too young, he would note that they should not then have been ordered to Cardegoss in the first place. But now that they were here, if Orico could not protect them then he had an obligation to both Chalion and the children to tell them of their danger. Cazaril would call on Umegat to confirm that the roya could not, did not, in fact, hold the curse all to himself. Do not send them blindfolded into battle he would plead, and hope Palli’s cry would strike Orico as much to the heart as it had him. And if it didn’t . . .

If he took this into his own hands, should he first tell Teidez, as Heir of Chalion, and appeal for his aid in protecting his sister? Or Iselle, and enlist her help in managing the more difficult Teidez? The second choice would better allow him to hide his complicity behind the royesse’s skirts, but only if the secret of his guilt survived her shrewd cross-examination.

A scraping of hooves broke into his self-absorption. He looked up just in time to dodge from the path of the cavalcade starting out from the stables. Royse Teidez, mounted on his fine black horse, led a party of his Baocian guards, their captain and two men. The royse’s black-and-lavender mourning garb made his round face appear drawn and pale in the winter sunlight. Dondo’s green stone glinted on the guard captain’s hand, raised to return Cazaril’s polite salute.

“Where away, Royse?” Cazaril called. “Do you hunt?” The party was armed for it, with spears and crossbows, swords and cudgels.

Teidez drew up his fretting horse and stared briefly down at Cazaril. “No, just a gallop along the river. The Zangre is . . . stuffy, this morning.”

Indeed. And if they just happened to flush a deer or two, well, they were prepared to accept the gods’ largesse. But not really hunting while in mourning, no. “I understand,” said Cazaril, and suppressed a smile. “It will be good for the horses.” Teidez lifted his reins again. Cazaril stepped back, but then added suddenly, “I would speak to you later, Royse, on the matter that concerned you yesterday.”

Teidez gave him a vague wave, and a frown—not exactly assent, but it would do. Cazaril bowed farewell as they clattered out of the stable yard.

And remained bent over, as the worst cramp yet kicked him in the belly with the power of a horse’s hind hooves. His breathing stopped. Waves of pain seemed to surge through his whole body from this central source, even to burning spasms in the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet. A hideous vision shook him of Rojeras’s postulated demon-monster preparing to bloodily claw its way out of him into the light. One creature, or two? With no bodies to keep their spirits apart, bottled under the pressure of the Lady’s miracle, might Dondo and the demon have begun to blend together into one dreadful being? It was true that he’d distinguished only one voice, not a duet, baying at him from his belly in the night. His knees sank helplessly to the cold cobbles. He drew in a shuddering breath. The world seemed to churn around his head in short, dizzy jerks.

After a few minutes, a shadow trailing a powerful aroma of horses loomed at his shoulder. A gruff voice muttered in his ear, “M’lord? You all right?”

Cazaril blinked up to see one of the stable grooms, a middle-aged fellow with bad teeth, bending over him. “Not . . . really,” he managed to reply.

“Ought you go indoors, sir?”

“Yes . . . I suppose . . .”

The groom helped him to his feet with a hand under his elbow, and steadied him back through the gates to the main block. At the bottom of the stairs Cazaril gasped, “Wait. Not yet,” and sat heavily upon the steps.

After an awkward minute the groom asked, “Should I get someone for you, m’lord? I should return to my duties.”

“It’s . . . just a spasm. It will pass off in a few minutes. I’m all right now. Go on.” The pain was dwindling, leaving him feeling flushed and strange.

The groom frowned uncertainly, staring down at Cazaril, but then ducked his head and departed.

Slowly, as he sat quietly on the stair, he began to regain his breath and balance, and was able to straighten his back again. The world stopped pulsing. Even the couple of ghost-blotches that had crept out of the walls to cluster at his feet grew quiescent. Cazaril eyed them in the shadows of the stairwell, considering what a cold and lonely damnation was their slow erosion, loss of all that had made them individual men and women. What must it be like, to feel one’s very spirit slowly rot away around one, as flesh rotted from dead limbs? Did the ghosts sense their own diminishment, or did that self-perception, too, mercifully, wear away in time? The Bastard’s legendary hell, with all its supposed torments, seemed a sort of heaven by comparison.

“Ah! Cazaril!” A surprised voice made him look up. Palli stood with one booted foot on the first step, flanked by two young men also wearing the blue and white of the Daughter’s Order beneath gray wool riding cloaks. “I was just coming to find you.” Palli’s dark brows drew down. “What are you doing sitting on the stairs?”

“Just resting a moment.” Cazaril produced a quick, concealing smile, and levered himself up, though he kept a hand on the wall, as if casually, for balance. “What’s afoot?”

“I hoped you would have time to take a stroll down to the temple with me. And talk to some men about that”—Palli made a circling gesture with his finger—“little matter of Gotorget.”

“Already?”

“Dy Yarrin came in last night. We are now a sufficient assembly to make binding decisions. And with dy Jironal also arrived back in town, it’s as well we chart our course without further delay.”

Indeed. Cazaril would search out Orico immediately upon his return, then. He glanced at the two companions and back at Palli, as if seeking introduction, but with the hidden question in his glance, Are these safe ears?

“Ah,” said Palli cheerfully. “Permit me to make known to you my cousins, Ferda and Foix dy Gura. They rode with me from Palliar. Ferda is lieutenant to my master of horse, and his younger brother Foix—well, we keep him for the heavy lifting. Make your bow to the castillar, boys.”

The shorter, stouter of the two grinned sheepishly, and they both managed reasonably graceful courtesies. They bore a faint family resemblance to Palli in the strong lines of jaw and the bright brown eyes. Ferda was of middle height and wiry, an obvious rider, his legs already a little bowed, while his brother was broad and muscular. They seemed a pleasant enough pair of country lordlings, healthy, cheerful, and unscarred. And appallingly young. But Palli’s faint emphasis on the word cousins answered Cazaril’s silent question.

The two brothers fell in behind as Cazaril and Palli walked out the gates and down into Cardegoss. Young they might be, but their eyes were alert, looking all around, and they casually kept their sword hilts free of entanglement with cloak and vest-cloak. Cazaril was glad to know Palli did not go about the streets of Cardegoss unattended even in this bright gray winter noon. Cazaril tensed as they passed under the dressed-stone walls of Jironal Palace, but no armed bravos issued from its ironbound doors to molest them. They arrived in the Temple Square having encountered no one more daunting than a trio of maidservants. They smiled at the men in the colors of the Daughter’s Order and giggled among themselves after passing, which slightly alarmed the dy Gura brothers, or at least made them stride out more stiffly.

The great compound of the Daughter’s house made a wall along one whole side of the temple’s five-sided square. The main gate was devoted to the women and girls who were the house’s more usual dedicats, acolytes, and divines. The men of its holy military order had their own separate entrance, building, and stable for couriers’ horses. The hallways of the military headquarters were chilly despite a sufficiency of lit sconces and the abundance of beautiful tapestries and hangings, woven and embroidered by pious ladies all over Chalion, blanketing its walls. Cazaril started toward the main hall, but Palli drew him down another corridor and up a staircase.

“You do not meet in the Hall of the Lord Dedicats?” Cazaril inquired, looking over his shoulder.

Palli shook his head. “Too cold, too large, and too empty. We felt excessively exposed there. For these sealed debates and depositions, we’ve taken a chamber where we can feel a majority, and not freeze our feet.”

Palli left the dy Gura brothers in the corridor to contemplate a brightly colored quilted rendering of the legend of the virgin and the water jar, featuring an especially voluptuous virgin and goddess. He ushered Cazaril past a pair of Daughter’s guardsmen, who looked closely at their faces and returned Palli’s salute, and through a set of double doors carved with interlaced vines. The chamber beyond held a long trestle table and two dozen men, crowded but warm—and above all, Cazaril noted, private. In addition to the good wax candles, a window of colored glass depicting the Lady’s favorite spring flowers fought the winter gloom.

Palli’s fellow lord dedicats sat at attention, young men and graybeards, in blue-and-white garb bright and expensive or faded and shabby, but all alike in the grim seriousness of their faces. The provincar of Yarrin, ranking lord of Chalion present, held down the head of the table beneath the window. Cazaril wondered how many here were spies, or at least careless mouths. The group seemed already too large and diverse for successful conspiracy, despite their outward precautions to seal their conclave. Lady, guide them to wisdom.

Palli bowed, and said, “My lords, here is the Castillar dy Cazaril, who was my commander at the siege of Gotorget, to testify before you.”

Palli took an empty seat halfway around the table and left Cazaril standing at its foot. Another lord dedicat had him swear an oath of truth in the goddess’s name. Cazaril had no trouble repeating with sincerity and fervor the part about, May Her hands hold me, and not release me.

Dy Yarrin led the questioning. He was shrewd and clearly well primed by Palli, for he had the whole tale of the aftermath of Gotorget out of Cazaril in a very few minutes. Cazaril added no coloring details. For some here, he didn’t need to; he could mark by the tightening of their lips how much of what was unspoken they understood. Inevitably, someone wanted to know how he had first come to such enmity with Lord Dondo, and he was reluctantly compelled to repeat the story of his near beheading in Prince Olus’s tent. It was normally considered bad manners to denigrate the dead, on the theory that they could not defend themselves. In Dondo’s case, Cazaril wasn’t so sure. But he kept that account, too, as brief and bald as possible. Despite his succinctness, by the time he was done he was leaning on his hands on the table, feeling dangerously light-headed.

A brief debate followed on the problem of obtaining corroborating evidence, which Cazaril had thought insurmountable; dy Yarrin, it seemed, did not find it so. But then, Cazaril had never thought to try to obtain testimony from surviving Roknari, or via sister chapters of the Daughter’s Order across the borders in the princedoms.

“But my lords,” Cazaril said diffidently into one of the few brief pauses in the flow of suggestion and objection, “even if my words were proved a dozen times over, mine is no great matter by which to bring down a great man. Not like the treason of Lord dy Lutez.”

“That was never well proved, even at the time,” murmured dy Yarrin in a dry tone.

Palli put in, “What is a great matter? I think the gods do not calculate greatness as men do. I for one find a casual destruction of a man’s life even more repugnant than a determined one.”

Cazaril leaned more heavily on the table, in the interests of not collapsing in an illustrative way at this dramatic moment. Palli had insisted his voice would be listened to in council; very well, let it be a voice of caution. “Choosing your own holy general is surely within your mandate, lords. Orico may well even accede to your selection, if you make it easy for him. Challenging the chancellor of Chalion and holy general of your brother order is reaching beyond, and it is my considered opinion that Orico will never be persuaded to support it. I recommend against it.”

“It is all or nothing,” broke in one man, and “Never again will we endure another Dondo,” began another.

Dy Yarrin held up his hand, stemming the tide of hot comment. “I thank you, Lord Cazaril, for both your testimony and your opinion.” His choice of words invited his fellows to note which was which. “We must continue this debate in private conclave.”

It was a dismissal. Palli pushed back his chair and rose to his feet. They collected the dy Guras from the corridor; Cazaril was a little surprised when Palli’s escort did not stop at the house’s gates. “Should you not return to your council?” he asked, as they turned into the street.

“Dy Yarrin will tell me of it, when I get back. I mean to see you safe to the Zangre’s gates. I’ve not forgotten your tale of poor Ser dy Sanda.”

Cazaril glanced over his shoulder at the two young officers pacing behind as they crossed over to the temple plaza. Oh. The armed escort was for him. He decided not to complain, asking Palli instead, “Who looks like your prime candidate for holy general, then, to present to Orico? Dy Yarrin?”

“He would be my choice,” said Palli.

“He does seem a force in your council. Has he a little self-interest, there?”

“Perhaps. But he means to hand the provincarship of Yarrin down to his eldest son, and devote his whole attention to the order, if he is chosen.”

“Ah. Would that Martou dy Jironal had done likewise for the Son’s Order.”

“Aye. So many posts, how is he serving any of them rightly?”

They climbed uphill, threading their way through the stone-paved town, stepping carefully across central gutters well rinsed by the recent cold rains. Narrow streets of shops gave way to wider squares of fine houses. Cazaril considered dy Jironal, as his palace loomed once more on their route. If the curse worked by distorting and betraying virtues, what good thing had it corrupted in Martou dy Jironal? Love of family, perhaps, turning it into mistrust of all that was not family? His excessive reliance on his brother Dondo was surely turning to weakness and downfall. Maybe. “Well . . . I hope that level heads prevail.”

Palli grimaced. “Court life is turning you into a diplomat, Caz.”

Cazaril returned a bleak smile. “I can’t even begin to tell you what court life is turning me—ah!” He ducked as one of Fonsa’s crows popped over a nearby housetop and came hurtling down at his head, screaming hoarsely. The bird almost tumbled out of the air at his feet, and hopped across the pavement, cawing and flapping. It was followed by two more. One landed on Cazaril’s outflung arm and clung there, shrieking and whistling, its claws digging in. A few black feathers spiraled wildly in the air. “Blast these birds!” He’d thought they had lost interest in him, and here they were back, in all their embarrassing enthusiasm.

Palli, who had jumped back laughing, glanced up over the roof tiles and said, “Five gods, something has stirred them up! The whole flock is in the air above the Zangre. Look at them circle about!”

Ferda dy Gura shielded his eyes and stared where Palli pointed at the distant whirl of dark shapes, like black leaves in a cyclone, dipping and swooping. His brother Foix pressed his hands to his ears as the crows continued to shriek around their feet, and shouted over the din, “Noisy, too!”

These birds were not entranced, Cazaril realized; they were hysterical. His heart turned cold in his chest. “There’s something very wrong. Come on!”

He was not in the best shape for running uphill. He had his hand pressed hard to the violent stitch in his side as they approached the stable block at the Zangre’s outskirts. His courier birds flapped above his head in escort. By that time, men’s shouts could be heard beneath the crows’ continued screaming, and Palli and his cousins needed no urging to keep pace with him.

A groom in the royal tabard of the menagerie was staggering in circles before its open doors, screaming and crying, blood running down his face. Two of Teidez’s green-and-black-clad Baocian guards stood before the doors with swords drawn, holding off three Zangre guards who hovered apprehensively before them, also with blades out, seeming not to dare to strike. The crows lacked no such courage. They stooped awkwardly at the Baocians, trying to claw with their talons and stab with their beaks. The Baocians cursed and beat them off. Two bundles of black feathers lay on the cobbles already, one still, one twitching.

Cazaril strode up to the menagerie doors, roaring, “What in the Bastard’s name is going on here? How dare you slay the sacred crows?”

One of the Baocians pointed his sword toward him. “Stay back, Lord Cazaril! You may not pass! We have strict orders from the royse!”

Lips drawn back in fury, Cazaril knocked the sword aside with his cloaked arm, lunged forward, and wrenched it from the guardsman’s grasp. “Give me that, you fool!” He flung it to the stones in the general direction of the Zangre guards, and Palli, who had drawn in a panic when the unarmed Cazaril had waded into the fray. The sword clanged and spun across the cobbles, till Foix stopped it with a booted foot stamped down upon it, and held it with a challenging weight and stare.

Cazaril turned on the second Baocian, whose blade drooped abruptly. Recoiling from Cazaril’s step, the guardsman cried hastily, “Castillar, we do this to preserve the life of Roya Orico!”

“Do what? Is Orico in there? What are you about?”

A feline snarl, rising to a yowl, from inside whirled Cazaril around, and he left the daunted Baocian to the Zangre guards, now encouraged to advance. He strode into the shadowed aisle of the menagerie.

The old tongueless groom was on his knees on the tiles, bent over, making choked weeping sounds. His thumbless hands were pressed to his face, and a little blood ran between his fingers; he looked up at the sound of Cazaril’s step, his quavering wet mouth ravaged with woe. As he ran past the bears’ stalls, Cazaril glimpsed two inert black heaps studded with crossbow bolts, fur wet and matted with blood. The vellas’ stall door was open, and they lay on their sides in the bright straw, eyes open and fixed, throats slashed.

At the far end of the aisle, Royse Teidez was rising to his feet from the limp body of the spotted cat. He pushed himself up with his bloodied sword, and leaned upon it, panting, his face wild and exultant. His shadow roiled around him like thunderclouds at midnight. He looked up at Cazaril and grinned fiercely. “Ha!” he cried.

The Baocian guard captain, a twisted little bird still in his hand, plunged out of the aviary into Cazaril’s path. Bundles of colored feathers, dead and dying birds of all sizes, littered the aviary floor, some still fluttering helplessly. “Hold, Castillar—” he began. His words were whipped away as Cazaril grasped him by the tunic and spun him around, throwing him to the floor into the path of Palli, who was following on his heels muttering in astonished dismay, “Bastard weeps. Bastard weeps . . .” That had been Palli’s battle-mumble at Gotorget, when his sword had risen and fallen endlessly on men coming up over the ladders, and he’d had no breath for cries.

“Hold him,” Cazaril snarled over his shoulder, and strode on toward Teidez.

Teidez threw back his head and met Cazaril’s eyes square-on. “You can’t stop me—I’ve done it! I have saved the roya!”

“What—what—what—” Cazaril was so frightened and furious, his lips and mind could scarcely form coherent words. “Fool boy! What destructive madness is this, this . . . ?” His hands opened, shaking, and jerked about.

Teidez leaned toward him, his teeth glinting in his drawn-back lips. “I’ve broken the curse, the black magic that has been making Orico sick. It was coming from these evil animals. They were a secret gift from the Roknari, meant to slowly poison him. And we’ve slain the Roknari spy—I think . . .” Teidez glanced somewhat doubtfully over his shoulder.

Only then did Cazaril notice the last body on the floor at the far end of the aisle. Umegat lay on his side in a heap, as unmoving as the birds or the vellas. The carcasses of the sand foxes lay tumbled nearby. Cazaril had not seen him at first, because his clear white glow was extinguished. Dead? Cazaril moaned, lurched toward him, and fell to his knees. The left side of Umegat’s head was lacerated, the gray-bronze braid disheveled and soaked with gore. His skin was as gray as an old rag. But his scalp was still sluggishly bleeding, therefore . . .

“Does he still breathe?” asked Teidez, advancing to peer over Cazaril’s shoulder. “The captain hit him with his sword pommel, when he would not give way . . .”

“Fool, fool, fool boy!”

“No fool I! He was behind it all.” Teidez nodded toward Umegat. “A Roknari wizard, sent to drain and kill Orico.”

Cazaril ground his teeth. “Umegat is a Temple divine. Sent by the Bastard’s Order to care for the sacred animals, who were given by the god to preserve Orico. And if you have not slain him, it is the only good luck here.” Umegat’s breath came shallow and odd, his hands were cold as a corpse’s, but he did breathe.

“No . . .” Teidez shook his head. “No, you’re wrong, that can’t be . . .” For the first time, the heroic elation wobbled in his face.

Cazaril uncoiled and rose to his feet, and Teidez stepped back a trifle. Cazaril turned to find Palli, blessedly, at his back, and Ferda at Palli’s shoulder, staring around at it all in horrified amazement. Palli, at least, Cazaril could trust to know field aid.

“Palli,” he rasped out, “take over here. See to the wounded grooms, this one especially. His skull may be broken.” He pointed down to Umegat’s darkened body. “Ferda.”

“My lord?”

Ferda’s badge and colors would gain him admittance anywhere in the sacred precincts. “Run to the temple. Find Archdivine Mendenal. Let no one and nothing keep you from coming instantly to him. Tell him what has transpired here, and have him send Temple physicians—tell him, Umegat needs the Mother’s midwife, the special one. He’ll know what you mean. Hurry!”

Palli, already kneeling beside Umegat, added, “Give me your cloak. And run, boy!”

Ferda tossed his cloak at his commander, whirled, and was gone before Palli drew a second breath. Palli began to wrap the gray wool around the unconscious Roknari.

Cazaril turned back to Teidez, whose eyes were darting this way and that in growing uncertainty. The royse retreated to the life-emptied husk of the leopard, six feet from nose to tail tip lying limply on the tiles. Its beautiful spotted fur hid the mouths of its wounds, marked by matted blood on its sides. Cazaril thought of dy Sanda’s pierced corpse.

“I slew it with my sword, because it was a royal symbol of my House even if it was ensorcelled,” Teidez offered. “And to test my courage. It clawed my leg.” He bent and rubbed awkwardly at his right shin, where his black trousers were indeed ripped and hanging in blood-wet ribbons.

Teidez was the Heir of Chalion, and Iselle’s brother. Cazaril could not wish the beast had bitten out his throat. Should not, anyway. “Five gods, how did you come by this black nonsense?”

“It is not nonsense! You knew Orico’s illness was uncanny! I saw it in your face—Bastard’s demons, anyone could see it. Lord Dondo told me the secret, before he died. Was murdered—murdered to keep the secret, I think, but it was too late.”

“Did you come up with this . . . plan of attack, on your own?”

Teidez’s head came up, proudly. “No, but when I was the only one left, I carried it through all by myself! We had been going to do it together, after Dondo married Iselle—destroy the curse, and free the House of Chalion from its evil influence. But then it was left to me. So I made myself his banner-carrier, his arm to reach from beyond the grave and strike one last blow for Chalion!”

“Ah! Ah!” Cazaril was so overcome, he stamped in a circle. But had Dondo believed his own rubbish, or had this been a clever plan to use Teidez, obliquely and unprovably, to disable or assassinate Orico? Malice, or stupidity? With Dondo, who could tell? “No!”

“Lord Cazaril, what should we do with these Baocians?” Foix’s voice inquired diffidently.

Cazaril looked up to find the disarmed Baocian guard captain held between Foix and one of the Zangre guards. “And you!” snarled Cazaril at him. “You tool, you fool, you lent yourself to this, this stupid sacrilege, and told no one? Or are you Dondo’s creature still? Ah! Take him and his men and lock them in a cell, until . . .” Cazaril hesitated. Dondo was behind this, oh yes, reaching out to wreak chaos and disaster, it bore his stamp—but for once, Cazaril suspected, Martou was not behind Dondo. Quite the opposite, unless he missed his guess. “Until the chancellor is notified,” Cazaril continued. “You there—” A downward sweep of his arm commanded another Zangre guard’s attention. “Run to the Chancellery, or Jironal Palace or wherever he may be found, and tell him what has happened here. Beg him to wait upon me before he goes to Orico.”

“Lord Cazaril, you cannot order my guards arrested!” cried Teidez.

Cazaril was the only one here with the air, if not the fact, of authority needed to carry out this next step. “You are going straight to your chamber, until your brother orders otherwise. I will escort you there.”

“Take your hand off me!” Teidez yelped, as Cazaril’s iron grip closed around his upper arm. But he did not quite dare to struggle against whatever he was seeing in Cazaril’s face.

Cazaril said through his teeth, in a voice dripping false cordiality, “No, indeed. You are wounded, young lord, and I have a duty to help you to a physician.” He added under his breath, to Teidez’s ear alone, “And I will knock you flat and drag you, if I have to.”

Teidez, recovering what dignity he could, grumbled to his guard captain, “Go quietly with them, then. I’ll send for you later, when I have proved Lord Cazaril’s error.” Since his two captors had already spun the captain around and were marching him out, this ended up addressed to the Baocian’s back, and fell a little flat. The injured grooms had crept up to Palli’s side, and were trying to help him with Umegat. Palli glanced over his shoulder and gave Cazaril a quick, reassuring wave.

Cazaril nodded back, and, under the guise of lending support, strong-armed the royse out of the nightmarish abattoir he had made of the roya’s menagerie. Too late, too late, too late . . . beat in his brain with every stride. Outside, the crows were no longer whirling and screaming in the air. They hopped about in agitation upon the cobbles, seeming as bewildered and directionless as Cazaril’s own thoughts.

Still keeping a grip on Teidez, Cazaril marched him through the Zangre’s gates, where, now, more guards had appeared. Teidez closed his lips on further protest, though his sullen, angry, and insulted expression boded no good for Cazaril later on. The royse scorned to favor his wounded leg, though it left a trail of bloodied footprints across the cobbles of the main courtyard.

Cazaril’s attention was jerked leftward when one of Sara’s waiting women and a page appeared in the doorway to Ias’s Tower. “Hurry, hurry!” the woman urged the boy, who dashed toward the gates, white-faced. He nearly caromed off Cazaril in his haste.

“Where away, boy?” Cazaril called after him.

He turned and danced backward for a moment. “Temple, lord. Dare not stay—Royina Sara—the roya has collapsed!” He turned and sprinted in earnest through the gates; the guards stared at him, and, uneasily, back toward Ias’s Tower.

Teidez’s arm, beneath Cazaril’s hand, lost its stiff resistance. Beneath his scowl, a scared look crept into his eyes, and he glanced aside warily at his self-appointed detainer.

After a moment’s indecision, Cazaril, not letting go of Teidez, wheeled around and started for Ias’s Tower instead. He hurried to catch up with the waiting woman, who had ducked back inside, and called after her, but she seemed not to hear him as she scurried up the end stairs. He was wheezing as he reached the third floor, where Orico kept his chambers. He stared in apprehension down its central corridor.

Royina Sara, her white shawl bundled about her and a woman at her heels, was hurrying up the hall. Cazaril bowed anxiously as she came to the staircase.

“My lady, what has happened? Can I help?”

She touched her hand to her frightened face. “I scarcely know yet, Castillar. Orico—he was reading aloud to me in my chambers while I stitched, as he sometimes does, for my solace, when suddenly he stopped, and blinked and rubbed his eyes, and said he could not see the words anymore, and that the room was all dark. But it wasn’t! Then he fell from his chair. I cried for my ladies, and we put him in his bed, and have sent for a Temple physician.”

“We saw the roya’s page,” Cazaril assured her. “He was running as fast as he could.”

“Oh, good . . .”

“Was it an apoplexy, do you think?”

“I don’t think . . . I don’t know. He speaks a little, and his breath is not very labored . . . What was all that shouting, down by the stables, earlier?” Distractedly, not waiting for an answer, she passed him and mounted the stairs.

Teidez, his face gone leaden, licked his lips but said no more as Cazaril turned him around and led him down to the courtyard.

The royse did not find his voice again till they were mounting the stairs in the main block, where he repeated breathlessly, “It cannot be. Dondo told me the menagerie was black sorcery, a Roknari curse to keep Orico sick and weak. And I could see that it was so.”

“A Roknari curse, there truly is, but the menagerie is a white miracle that keeps Orico alive despite it. Was. Till now,” Cazaril added bitterly.

“No . . . no . . . it’s all wrong. Dondo told me—”

“Dondo was mistaken.” Cazaril hesitated briefly. “Or else Dondo wished to hurry the replacement of a roya who favored his elder brother with one who favored himself.”

Teidez’s lips parted in protest, but no sound came from them. Cazaril didn’t think the royse could be feigning the shocked look in his eyes. The only mercy in this day, if mercy it was—Dondo might have misled Teidez, but he seemed not to have corrupted him, not to that extent. Teidez was tool, not co-conspirator, not a willing fratricide. Unfortunately, he was a tool that had kept on functioning after the workman’s hand had fallen away. And whose fault was it that the boy swallowed down lies, when no one would feed him the truth?

The sallow fellow who was the royse’s secretary-tutor looked up in surprise from his writing desk as Cazaril swung the boy into his chambers.

“Look to your master,” Cazaril told him shortly. “He’s injured. He is not to quit this building until Chancellor dy Jironal is informed what has occurred, and gives him leave.” He added, with a little sour satisfaction, “If you knew of this outrage, and did nothing to prevent it, the chancellor will be furious with you.”

The man paled in confusion; Cazaril turned his back on him. Now to go see what was happening with Umegat . . .

“But Lord Cazaril,” Teidez’s voice quavered. “What should I do?”

Cazaril spat over his shoulder, as he strode out again, “Pray.”

As he turned onto the end stairs, Cazaril heard a woman’s slippers scuffing rapidly on the steps. He looked up to find Lady Betriz, her lavender skirts trailing, hurrying down toward him.

“Lord Cazaril! What’s going on? We heard shouting—one of the maids cried Royse Teidez has run mad, and tried to slay the roya’s animals!”

“Not mad—misled. I think. And not tried—succeeded.” In a few brief, bitter words, Cazaril described the horror in the stable block.

“But why?” Her voice was husky with shock.

Cazaril shook his head. “A lie of Lord Dondo’s, nearly as I can tell. He convinced the royse that Umegat was a Roknari wizard using the animals to somehow poison the roya. Which turned the truth exactly backwards; the animals sustained Orico, and now he has collapsed. Five gods, I cannot explain it all here upon the stairs. Tell Royesse Iselle I will attend upon her soon, but first I must see to the injured grooms. Stay away—keep Iselle away from the menagerie.” And if he didn’t give Iselle action, she’d surely take it for herself . . . “Wait upon Sara, both of you; she’s half-distracted.”

Cazaril continued on down the stairs, past the place where he had been—deliberately?—decoyed away by his own pain, earlier. Dondo’s demonic ghost made no move to grip him now.

Back at the menagerie, Cazaril found that the excellent Palli and his men had already carried off Umegat and the more seriously injured of the undergrooms to the Mother’s hospital. The remaining groom was stumbling around trying to catch a hysterical little blue-and-yellow bird that had somehow escaped the Baocian guard captain and taken refuge in the upper cornices. Some servants from the stable had come over and were making awkward attempts to help; one had taken off his tabard and was sweeping it up, trying to knock the bird out of the air.

“Stop!” Cazaril choked back panic. For all he knew, the little feathered creature was the last thread by which Orico clung to life. He directed the would-be helpers instead to the task of collecting the bodies of the slain animals, laying them out in the stable courtyard, and cleaning up the bloody mess on the tiles inside. He scooped up a handful of grains from the vellas’ stall, remains of their last interrupted dinner, and coaxed the little bird down to his own hand, chirping as he’d seen Umegat do. Rather to his surprise, the bird came to him and suffered itself to be put back into its cage.

“Guard it with your life,” he told the groom. Then added, scowling for effect, “If it dies, you die.” An empty threat, though it must do for now; the grooms, at least, looked impressed. If it dies, Orico dies? That suddenly seemed frighteningly plausible. He turned to lend a hand in dragging out the heavy bodies of the bears.

“Should we skin them, lord?” one of the stable hands inquired, staring at the results of Teidez’s hellish hunt piled up outside on the paving stones.

“No!” said Cazaril. Even the few of Fonsa’s crows still lingering about the stable yard, though they regarded the bloody carcasses with wary interest, made no move toward them. “Treat them . . . as you would the roya’s soldiers who had died in battle. Burned or buried. Not skinned. Nor eaten, for the gods’ sakes.” Swallowing, Cazaril bent and added the bodies of the two dead crows to the row. “There has been sacrilege enough this day.” And the gods forfend Teidez had not slain a holy saint as well as the sacred animals.

A clatter of hooves heralded the arrival of Martou dy Jironal, fetched, presumably, from Jironal Palace; he was followed up the hill by four retainers on foot, gasping for breath. The chancellor swung down from his snorting, sidling horse, handed it off to a bowing groom, and advanced to stare at the row of dead animals. The bears’ dark fur riffled in the cold wind, the only movement. Dy Jironal’s lips spasmed on unvoiced curses. “What is this madness?” He looked up at Cazaril, and his eyes narrowed in bewildered suspicion. “Did you set Teidez onto this?” Dy Jironal was not, Cazaril judged, dissimulating; he was as off-balance as Cazaril himself.

“I? No! I do not control Teidez.” Cazaril added sourly, “And neither, it appears, do you. He was in your constant company for the past two weeks; had you no hint of this?”

Dy Jironal shook his head.

“In his defense, Teidez seems to have had some garbled notion that this act would somehow help the roya. That he’d no better sense is a fault of his age; that he had no better knowledge . . . well, you and Orico between you have served him ill. If he’d been more filled with truth, he’d have had less room for lies. I’ve had his Baocian guard locked up, and taken him to his chambers, to await . . .” the roya’s orders would not be forthcoming now. Cazaril finished, “your orders.”

Dy Jironal’s hand made a constricted gesture. “Wait. The royesse—he was closeted with his sister yesterday. Could she have set him on?”

“Five witnesses will say no. Including Teidez himself. He gave no sign yesterday that this was in his mind.” Almost no sign. Should have, should have, should have . . .

“You control the Royesse Iselle closely enough,” snapped dy Jironal bitterly. “Do you think I don’t know who encouraged her in her defiance? I fail to see the secret of her pernicious attachment to you, but I mean to cut that connection.”

“Yes.” Cazaril bared his teeth. “Dy Joal tried to wield your knife last night. He’ll know to charge you more for his services next time. Hazard pay.” Dy Jironal’s eyes glittered with understanding; Cazaril took a breath, for self-control. This was bringing their hostilities much too close to the surface. The last thing he desired was dy Jironal’s full attention. “In any case, there is no mystery. Teidez says your amiable brother Dondo plotted this with him, before he died.”

Dy Jironal stepped back a pace, eyes widening, but his teeth clenched on any other reaction.

Cazaril continued, “Now, what I should dearly like to know is—and you are in a better position to guess the answer than I am—did Dondo know what this menagerie really did for Orico?”

Dy Jironal’s gaze flew to his face. “Do you?”

“All the Zangre knows by now: Orico was stricken blind, and fell from his chair, during the very moments his creatures were dying. Sara and her ladies brought him to his bed, and have sent for the Temple physicians.” This answer both evaded the question and abruptly redirected dy Jironal’s attention; the chancellor paled, whirled away, and made for the Zangre gates. He did not, Cazaril noted, stay to inquire after Umegat. Clearly, dy Jironal knew what the menagerie did; did he understand how?

Do you?

Cazaril shook his head and turned the other way, for yet another weary march down into town.

Cardegoss’s Temple Hospital of the Mother’s Mercy was a rambling old converted mansion, bequeathed to the order by a pious widow, on the street beyond the Mother’s house from the Temple Square. Cazaril tracked Palli and Umegat through its maze to a second-floor gallery above an inner courtyard. He spotted the chamber readily by the reunited dy Gura brothers standing guard outside its closed door. They saluted and passed him through.

He entered to find Umegat laid out unconscious upon a bed. A white-haired woman in a Temple physician’s green robes bent over him stitching up the lacerated flap of his scalp. She was assisted by a familiar, dumpy middle-aged woman whose viridescent tinge owed nothing to her green dress. Cazaril could still see her faint effulgence with his eyes closed. The archdivine of Cardegoss himself, in his five-colored vestment, hovered anxiously. Palli leaned against a wall with his arms crossed; his face lightened, and he pushed to his feet when he saw Cazaril.

“How goes it?” Cazaril asked Palli in a low voice.

“Poor fellow’s still out cold,” Palli murmured back. “I think he must have taken a mighty whack. And you?”

Cazaril repeated the tale of Orico’s sudden collapse. Archdivine Mendenal stepped closer to listen, and the physician glanced over her shoulder. “Had they told you of this turn, Archdivine?” Cazaril added.

“Oh, aye. I will follow Orico’s physicians to the Zangre as soon as I may.”

If the white-haired physician wondered why an injured groom should claim more of the archdivine’s attention than the stricken roya, she gave no more sign than a slight lifting of her eyebrows. She finished her last neat stitch and dipped a cloth in a basin to wash the crusting gore from the shaved scalp around the wound. She dried her hands, checked the rolled-back eyes under Umegat’s lids, and straightened. The Mother’s midwife gathered up Umegat’s cut-away left braid and the rest of the medical mess, and made all tidy.

Archdivine Mendenal clutched his fingers together, and asked the physician, “Well?”

“Well, his skull is not broken, that I can feel. I shall leave the wound uncovered to better mark bleeding or swelling. I can tell nothing more until he wakes. There’s naught to do now but keep him warm and watch him till he stirs.”

“When will that be?”

The physician stared down dubiously at her patient. Cazaril did, too. The fastidious Umegat would have hated his present crumpled, half-shorn, desperately limp appearance. Umegat’s flesh was still that deathly gray, making his golden Roknari skin look like a dirty rag. His breath rasped. Not good. Cazaril had seen men who looked like that go on to recover; he’d also seen them sink and die.

“I cannot say,” the physician replied at last, echoing Cazaril’s own mental diagnosis.

“Leave us, then. The acolyte will watch him for now.”

“Yes, Your Reverence.” The physician bowed, and instructed the midwife, “Send for me at once if he either wakes, or takes a fever, or starts to convulse.” She gathered up her instruments.

“Lord dy Palliar, I thank you for your aid,” the archdivine said. He added, “Lord Cazaril, please stay.”

Palli said merely, “You’re entirely welcome, Your Reverence,” then after a heartbeat, as the hint penetrated, “Oh. Ah. If you’re all right, Caz . . . ?”

“For now.”

“Then I should perhaps return to the Daughter’s house. If you need anything, at any time, send for me there, or at Yarrin Palace, and I’ll ‘tend upon you at once. You should not go about alone.” He gave Cazaril a stern look, to be sure this was understood as command and not parting pleasantry. He, too, then bowed, and, opening the door for the physician, followed in her wake.

As the door closed, Mendenal turned to Cazaril, his hands outstretched in pleading. “Lord Cazaril, what should we do?”

Cazaril recoiled. “Five gods, you’re asking me?”

The man’s lips twisted ruefully. “Lord Cazaril, I’ve only been the archdivine of Cardegoss for two years. I was chosen because I was a good administrator, I fancy, and to please my family, because my brother and my father before him were powerful provincars. I was dedicated to the Bastard’s Order at age fourteen, with a good dower from my father to assure my care and advancement. I have served the gods faithfully all my life, but . . . they do not speak to me.” He stared at Cazaril, and glanced aside to the Mother’s midwife, with an odd hopeless envy in his eyes, devoid of hostility. “When a pious ordinary man finds himself in a room with three working saints—if he has any wits left—he seeks instruction, he does not feign to instruct.”

“I am not . . .” Cazaril bit back the denial. He had more urgent concerns than arguing over the theological definition of his current condition, though if this was sainthood, the gods must exceed themselves for damnation. “Honorable Acolyte—I’m sorry, I have forgotten your name?”

“I am Clara, Lord Cazaril.”

Cazaril gave her a little bow. “Acolyte Clara. Do you see—do you not see—Umegat’s glow? I’ve never seen him when—is it supposed to go out when a man is asleep or unconscious?”

She shook her head. “The gods are with us waking and sleeping, Lord Cazaril. I’m sure I don’t have the strength of sight you do, but indeed, the Bastard has withdrawn his presence from Learned Umegat.”

“Oh, no,” breathed Mendenal.

“Are you sure?” said Cazaril. “It could not be a defect in my—in your second sight?”

She glanced at him, wincing a little. “No. For I can see you plainly enough. I could see you before you came in the door. It is almost painful to be in the same room with you.”

“Does this mean the miracle of the menagerie is broken?” asked Mendenal anxiously, gesturing at the unconscious groom. “We have no dike now against the tide of this black curse?”

She hesitated. “Umegat no longer hosts the miracle. I do not know if the Bastard has transferred it to another’s will.”

Mendenal wheeled to stare hopefully at Cazaril. “His, perhaps?”

She frowned at Cazaril, absently holding her hand to her brow as if to shade her eyes. “If I am a saint, as Learned Umegat has named me, I am only a small domestic one. If Umegat’s tutelage had not sharpened my perceptions over the years, I should merely have thought myself unusually lucky in my profession.”

Luck, Cazaril couldn’t help reflecting, had not been his most salient experience since he’d stumbled into the gods’ maze.

“And yet the Mother only reaches through me from time to time, then passes on. Lord Cazaril . . . blazes. From the day I first saw him at Lord Dondo’s funeral. The white light of the Bastard and the blue clarity of the Lady of Spring, both at once, the constant living presence of two gods, all mixed with some other dark thing I cannot make out. Umegat could see more clearly. If the Bastard has added more to the roil already there, I cannot tell.”

The archdivine touched brow, lips, navel, groin, and heart, fingers spread wide, and stared hungrily at Cazaril. “Two gods, two gods at once, and in this room!”

Cazaril bent forward, hands clenching, hideously reminded by the pressure of his belt of the terrifying distention beneath it. “Did Umegat not make known to you what I did to Lord Dondo? Did you not talk to Rojeras?”

“Yes, yes, and I spoke to Rojeras too, good man, but of course he could not understand—”

“He understood better than you seem to. I bear death and murder in my gut. An abomination, for all I know taking physical and not just psychic form, engendered by a demon and Dondo dy Jironal’s accursed ghost. Which screams at me nightly, by the way, in Dondo’s voice, with all his vilest vocabulary, and Dondo had a mouth like the Cardegoss main sewer. With no way out but to tear me open. It is not holy, it is disgusting!”

Mendenal stepped back, blinking.

Cazaril clutched his head. “I have terrible dreams. And pains in my belly. And rages. And I’m afraid Dondo is leaking.”

“Oh, dear,” said Mendenal faintly. “I had no idea, Lord Cazaril. Umegat said only that you were skittish, and it was best to leave you in his hands.”

“Skittish,” Cazaril repeated hollowly. “And oh, did I mention the ghosts?” It was surely a measure of . . . something, that they seemed the least of his worries.

“Ghosts?”

“All the ghosts of the Zangre follow me about the castle and cluster around my bed at night.”

“Oh,” said Mendenal, looking suddenly worried. “Ah.”

“Ah?”

“Did Umegat warn you about the ghosts?”

“No . . . he said they could do me no harm.”

“Well, yes and no. They can do you no harm while you live. But as Umegat explained it to me, the Lady’s miracle has delayed the working out of the Bastard’s miracle, not reversed it. It follows that, hm, should Her hand open, and the demon fly away with your soul—and Dondo’s, of course—it will leave your husk with a certain, um, dangerous theological emptiness which is not quite like natural death. And the ghosts of the excluded damned will attempt to, er, move in.”

After a short, fraught silence, Cazaril inquired, “Do they ever succeed?”

“Sometimes. I saw a case once, when I was a young divine. The degraded spirits are shambling stupid things, but it’s so very awkward to get them out again once they take possession. They must be burned . . . well, alive is not quite the right term. Very ugly scene, especially if the relatives don’t understand, because, of course, being your body, it screams in your voice. . . . It would not, in the event, be your problem, of course, you would be, um, elsewhere by then, but it might save, hm, others some painful troubles, if you make sure you always have someone by you who would understand the necessity of burning your body before sunset . . .” Mendenal trailed off apologetically.

“Thank you, Your Reverence,” said Cazaril, with awful politeness. “I shall add that to Rojeras’s theory of the demon growing itself a new body in my tumor and gnawing its way out, should I ever again be in danger of getting a night’s sleep. Although I suppose there’s no reason both could not occur. Sequentially.”

Mendenal cleared his throat. “Sorry, my lord. I thought you should know.”

Cazaril sighed. “Yes . . . I suppose I should.” He looked up, remembering last night’s scene with dy Joal. “Is it possible . . . suppose the Lady’s grip loosened just a little. Is it possible for Dondo’s soul to leak into mine?”

Mendenal’s brows rose. “I don’t . . . Umegat would know. Oh, how I wish he would wake up! I suppose it would be a faster way for Dondo’s ghost to get a body than to grow one in a tumor. You would think it would be too small.” He made an uncertain measuring gesture with his hands.

“Not according to Rojeras,” said Cazaril dryly.

Mendenal rubbed his forehead. “Ah, poor Rojeras. He thought I had taken a sudden interest in his specialty when I asked about you, and of course, I did not correct his misapprehension. I thought he was going to talk for half the night. I finally had to promise him a purse for his ward, to escape the tour of his collection.”

“I’d pay money to escape that, too,” Cazaril allowed. After a moment he asked curiously, “Your Reverence . . . why was I not arrested for Dondo’s murder? How did Umegat finesse that?”

“Murder? There was no murder.”

“Excuse me, the man is dead, and by my hand, by death magic, which is a capital crime.”

“Oh. Yes, I see. The ignorant are full of errors about death magic, well, even the name is wrong. It’s a nice theological point, d’you see. Attempting death magic is a crime of intent, of conspiracy. Successful death magic is not death magic at all, but a miracle of justice, and cannot be a crime, because it is the hand of the god that carries off the victim—victims—I mean, it’s not as if the roya can send his officers to arrest the Bastard, eh?”

“Do you think the present chancellor of Chalion will appreciate the distinction?”

“Ah . . . no. Which is why Umegat advised that the Temple prefer a discreet approach to this . . . this very complicated issue.” Mendenal scratched his cheek in new worry. “Not that the supplicant of such justice has ever lived through it, before . . . the distinction was clearer when it was all theoretical. Two miracles. I never thought of two miracles. Unprecedented. The Lady of Spring must love you dearly.”

“As a teamster loves his mule that carries his baggage,” said Cazaril bitterly, “whipping it over the high passes.”

The archdivine looked a little distraught; only Acolyte Clara’s lips twisted in appreciation. Umegat would have snorted, Cazaril thought. He began to understand why the Roknari saint had been so fond of talking shop with him. Only the saints would joke so about the gods, because it was either joke or scream, and they alone knew it was all the same to the gods.

“Yes, but,” said Mendenal. “Umegat concurred—so extraordinary a preservation must surely be for an extraordinary purpose. Have you . . . have you no guess at all?”

“Archdivine, I know naught.” Cazaril’s voice shook. “And I am . . .” he broke off.

“Yes?” encouraged Mendenal.

If I say it aloud, I will fall to pieces right here. He licked his lips, and swallowed. When he forced the words from his tongue at last, they came out a hoarse whisper. “I am very frightened.”

“Oh,” said the archdivine after a long moment. “Ah. Yes, I . . . I see that it would be . . . Oh, if only Umegat would wake up!”

The Mother’s midwife cleared her throat, diffidently. “My lord dy Cazaril?”

“Yes, Acolyte Clara?”

“I think I have a message for you.”

“What?”

“The Mother spoke to me in a dream last night. I was not altogether sure, for my sleeping brain spins fancies out of whatever is common in my thoughts, and I think often of Her. So I had meant to take it to Umegat today, and be guided by his good advice. But She said to me, She said”—Clara took a breath, and steadied her voice, her expression growing calmer—” ‘Tell my Daughter’s faithful courier to beware despair above all.’”

“Yes?” said Cazaril after a moment. “And . . . ?” Blast it, if the gods were going to trouble to send him messages in other people’s dreams, he’d prefer something less cryptic. And more practical.

“That was all.”

“Are you sure?” asked Mendenal.

“Well . . . She might have said, her Daughter’s faithful courtier. Or castle-warder. Or captain. Or all four of them—that part’s blurred in my memory.”

“If it is so, who are the other three men?” asked Mendenal, puzzled.

The unknowing echo of the Provincara’s words to him in Valenda chilled Cazaril to the pit of his aching belly. “I . . . I am, Archdivine. I am.” He bowed to the acolyte, and said through stiff lips, “Thank you, Clara. Pray to your Lady for me.”

She gave him a silent, understanding smile, and a little nod.

Leaving the Mother’s acolyte to keep close watch over Umegat, the archdivine excused himself to go attend upon Roya Orico, and with a shy diffidence invited Cazaril to accompany him to the Zangre gates. Cazaril found himself grateful for the offer and followed him out. His earlier towering rage and terror had long since passed, leaving him limp and weak. His knees buckled on the gallery stairs; but for catching the railing he would have tumbled down half a flight. To his embarrassment, the solicitous Mendenal insisted Cazaril be carried up the hill in his own sedan chair, hoisted by four stout dedicats, with Mendenal walking beside. Cazaril felt a fool, and conspicuous. But, he had to admit, vastly obliged.

THE INTERVIEW CAZARIL HAD BEEN DREADING DID not take place until after supper. Summoned by a page, he climbed reluctantly to the royesse’s sitting room. Iselle, looking strained, awaited him attended by Betriz; the royesse waved him to a stool. Candles burning brightly in all the mirrored wall sconces did not drive away the shadow that clung about her.

“How does Orico go on?” he asked the ladies anxiously. They had neither of them come to supper in the banqueting hall, instead remaining with the royina and the stricken roya above stairs.

Betriz answered, “He seemed calmer this evening, when he found he was not completely blind—he can see a candle flame with his right eye. But he is not passing water properly, and his physician thinks he is in danger of growing dropsical. He does look terribly swollen.” She bit her lip in worry.

Cazaril ducked his head at the royesse. “And were you able to see Teidez?”

Iselle sighed. “Yes, right after Chancellor dy Jironal dressed him down. He was too distraught to be sensible. If he were younger, I would name it one of his tantrums. I’m sorry he is grown too big to slap. He takes no food, and throws things at his servants, and now he’s freed from his chambers, is refusing to come out. There’s nothing to do when he gets like this but to leave him alone. He’ll be better tomorrow.” Her eyes narrowed at Cazaril, and her lips compressed. “And so, my lord. Just how long have you known of this black curse that hangs over Orico?”

“Sara finally talked to you . . . did she?”

“Yes.”

“What exactly did she say?”

Iselle gave a tolerably accurate summation of the story of Fonsa and the Golden General, and the descent of the legacy of ill fortune through Ias to Orico. She did not mention herself or Teidez.

Cazaril chewed on a knuckle. “You have about half the facts, then.”

“I do not like this half portion, Cazaril. The world demands I make good choices on no information, and then blames my maidenhood for my mistakes, as if my maidenhood were responsible for my ignorance. Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be. And I do not like feeling stupid.” Steel rang in these last words, unmistakably.

He bowed his head in apology. He wanted to weep for what he was about to lose. It was not to shield her maiden innocence, nor Betriz’s, that he had kept silent for too long, nor even dread of arrest. He had feared to lose the paradise of their regard, been sickened with the horror of becoming hideous in their eyes. Coward. Speak, and be done.

“I first learned of the curse the night after Dondo’s death, from the groom Umegat—who is no groom, by the way, but a divine of the Bastard, and the saint who hosted the miracle of the menagerie for Orico.”

Betriz’s eyes widened. “Oh. I . . . I liked him. How does he go on?”

Cazaril made a little balancing gesture with one hand. “Badly. Still unconscious. And worse, he’s”—he swallowed, Here we go—“stopped glowing.”

“Stopped glowing?” said Iselle. “I didn’t know he’d started.”

“Yes. I know. You cannot see it. There’s . . . something I haven’t told you about Dondo’s murder.” He took a breath. “It was me who sacrificed crow and rat, and prayed to the Bastard for Dondo’s death.”

“Ah! I’d suspected as much,” said Betriz, sitting straighter.

“Yes, but—what you don’t know is, I was granted it. I should have died that night, in Fonsa’s tower. But another’s prayers intervened. Iselle’s, I think.” He nodded to the royesse.

Her lips parted, and her hand went to her breast. “I prayed that the Daughter spare me from Dondo!”

“You prayed—and the Daughter spared me.” He added ruefully, “But not, as it turned out, from Dondo. You saw how at his funeral all the gods refused to sign that his soul was taken up?”

“Yes, and so he was excluded, damned, trapped in this world,” said Iselle. “Half the court feared he was loose in Cardegoss, and festooned themselves with charms against him.”

“In Cardegoss, yes. Loose . . . no. Most lost ghosts are bound to the place where they died. Dondo’s is bound to the person who killed him.” He shut his eyes, unable to bear looking at their draining faces. “You know my tumor? It’s not a tumor. Or not only a tumor. Dondo’s soul is trapped inside of me. Along with the death demon, apparently, but the demon, at least, is blessedly quiet about it all. It’s Dondo who won’t shut up. He screams at me, at night. Anyway.” He opened his eyes again, though he still did not dare look up. “All this . . . divine activity has given me a sort of second sight. Umegat has it—there is a little saint of the Mother in town who has it—and I have it. Umegat has—had—a white glow. The Mother Clara shines a faint green. They have both told me I am mostly blue and white, all roiling and blazing.” At last, he forced himself to look up and meet Iselle’s eyes. “And I can see Orico’s curse as a dark shadow. Iselle, listen, this is important. I don’t think Sara knows this. It’s not just a shadow on Orico. It’s on you and Teidez, too. All the descendants of Fonsa seem to be smeared by this black thing.”

After a little silence, sitting stiff and still, Iselle said only, “That makes a sort of sense.”

Betriz was eyeing him sideways. By the testimony of his belt, his tumor was not grown more gross than before, but her gaze made him feel monstrous. He bent a little over his belly and managed a weak, unfelt grin in her direction.

“But how do you get rid of this . . . haunting?” Betriz asked slowly.

“Um . . . as I understand it, if I am killed, my soul will lose its anchor in my body, and the death demon will be released to finish its job. I think. I’m a little afraid the demon will try to trick or betray me to my death, if it can; it seems a trifle single-minded. It wants to go home. Or, if the Lady’s hand opens, the demon will be released, and wrench my soul from my body, and off we all go together again the same.” He decided not to burden her with Rojeras’s other theory.

“No, Lord Caz, you don’t understand. I want to know how you can get rid of it without dying.”

“I’d like to know that, too,” Cazaril sighed. With an effort, he straightened his spine and managed a better smile. “It doesn’t matter. I traded my life for Dondo’s death of my own free will, and I’ve received my due. Payment of my debt is merely delayed, not rescinded. The Lady apparently keeps me alive for some service I have yet to perform. Or else I would slay myself in disgust and end it.”

Iselle, eyes narrowing at this, sat up and said sharply, “Well, I do not release you from my service! Do you hear me, Cazaril?”

His smile grew more genuine, for an instant. “Ah.”

“Yes,” said Betriz, “and you can’t expect us to get all squeamish just because you’re . . . inhabited. I mean . . . we’re expected to share our bodies someday. Doesn’t make us horrible, does it?” She hesitated at where this metaphor was taking her.

Cazaril, whose mind had been shying from just that parallel for some time, said mildly, “Yes, but with Dondo? You both drew the line at Dondo.” In truth, every man he’d ever killed had traveled back up the shock of his sword arm into his memory, and rode with him still, in a sense. And so we bear our sins.

Iselle put her hand to her lips in sudden alarm. “Cazaril—he can’t get out, can he?”

“I pray to the Lady he may not. The idea of him seeping into my mind is . . . is the worst of all. Worse even than . . . never mind. Oh. That reminds me, I should warn you about the ghosts.” Briefly, he repeated what the archdivine had told him about making sure his body was burned, and why. It afforded him an odd relief, to have that out. They were dismayed, but attentive; he thought he might trust them to have the courage for the task. And then was ashamed to have not trusted their courage earlier.

“But listen, Royesse,” he went on. “The Golden General’s curse has followed Fonsa’s get, but Sara is shadowed, too. Umegat and I both think she married into it.”

“Her life has certainly been made miserable enough by it,” agreed Iselle.

“It therefore follows logically, that you might marry out of it. It is a hope, anyway, a great hope. I think we should turn our minds to the matter—I would have you out of Cardegoss, out of the curse, out of Chalion altogether, as soon as may be arranged.”

“With the court in this uproar, marriage arrangements are out of—” Iselle paused abruptly. “But . . . what about Teidez? And Orico? And Chalion itself? Am I to abandon them, like a general running away from a losing battle?”

“The highest commanders have wider responsibilities than a single battle. If a battle may not be won—if the general cannot save that day, at least such a retreat saves the good of another day.”

She frowned doubtfully, taking this in. Her brows lowered. “Cazaril . . . do you think my mother and grandmother knew of this dark thing that hangs over us?”

“Your grandmother, I don’t know. Your mother . . .” If Ista had seen the ghosts of the Zangre for herself, she must have been lent the second sight for a time. What did this imply? Cazaril’s imagination foundered. “Your mother knew something, but I don’t know how much. Enough to be terrified when you were called to Cardegoss, anyway.”

“I’d thought her overfussy.” Iselle’s voice lowered. “I’d thought her mad, as the servants whispered.” Her frown deepened. “I have a lot to think about.”

As her silence lengthened, Cazaril rose, and bade both ladies a polite good night. The royesse acknowledged him with an absent nod. Betriz clasped her hands together, staring at him in agonized searching, and dipped a half curtsey.

“Wait!” Iselle called suddenly as he reached the door. He wheeled around; she sprang from her chair, strode up to him, and gripped both his hands. “You are too tall. Bend your head,” she commanded.

Obligingly, he ducked his head; she stood on tiptoe. He blinked in surprise as her young lips planted a firm and formal kiss upon his brow, and then upon the back of each hand, lifted to her mouth. And then she sank to the floor in a rustle of perfumed silk, and as his mouth opened in inarticulate protest, she kissed each booted foot with the same unhesitating firmness.

“There,” said Iselle, rising. Her chin came up. “Now you may be dismissed.”

Tears were running down Betriz’s face. Too shaken for words, Cazaril bowed deeply and fled to his unquiet bed.

Cazaril found the Zangre eerily quiet the following day. After Dondo’s death the court had been alarmed, yes, but excited and given over to gossip and whispering. Now even the whispering was stilled. All who had no direct duties stayed away, and those who had inescapable tasks went about them in a hurried, apprehensive silence.

Iselle and Betriz spent the day in Ias’s tower, waiting upon Sara and Orico. At dawn, Cazaril and the grim castle warder oversaw the cremation and burial of the remains of the animals. For the rest of the day, Cazaril alternated feeble attempts to attend to the mess on his desk with trudges down to the temple hospital. Umegat lay unchanged, gray and rasping. After his second visit, Cazaril stopped in at the temple itself and prayed, prostrate and whispering, before all five altars in turn. If he was in truth infected with this saint-disease, dammit, shouldn’t it be good for something?

The gods do not grant miracles for our purposes, but for theirs, Umegat had said. Yes? It seemed to Cazaril that this bargain ought to run two ways. If people stopped lending the gods their wills by which to do miracles, eh, what would the gods do about it then? Well, the first thing to happen would be that I’d drop dead. There was that. Cazaril lay a long time before the altar of the Lady of Spring, but here found himself mute, not even his lips moving. Abashed, ashamed, despairing? But wordy or wordless, the gods returned him only the same blank silence, five times over.

He was reminded of Palli’s insistence that he not go about alone when, slogging back up the hill, he passed dy Joal and another of dy Jironal’s retainers entering Jironal Palace. Dy Joal’s hand curled on his sword hilt, but he did not draw; with polite, wary nods, they walked wide about each other.

Back in his office, Cazaril rubbed his aching brow and turned his thoughts to Iselle’s marriage. Royse Bergon of Ibra, eh. The boy would do as well as any and better than most, Cazaril supposed. But this turmoil in the court of Chalion made open negotiations impossible to carry out; it would have to be a secret envoy, and soon. Running down the list in his mind of courtiers capable of such a diplomatic mission turned up none Cazaril would trust. Running down the much shorter list of men he could trust turned up no experienced diplomats. Umegat was laid low. The archdivine could not leave in secret. Palli? March dy Palliar had the rank, at least, to demand Ibra’s respect. He tried to imagine honest Palli negotiating the subtleties of Iselle’s marriage contract with the Fox of Ibra, and groaned. Maybe . . . maybe if Palli were sent with an extremely detailed and explicit list of instructions . . . ?

Needs must drive. He would broach it to Palli tomorrow.

CAZARIL PRAYED ON HIS KNEES BEFORE BED TO BE spared from the nightmare that had recurred three nights running, where Dondo grew back to life size within his swelling stomach and then, somehow dressed in his funeral robes and armed with his sword, carved his way out. Perhaps the Lady heard his plea; at any rate, he woke at dawn, his head and heart pounding, from a new nightmare. In this one, Dondo somehow sucked Cazaril’s soul into his own belly in his place, and escaped to take over Cazaril’s body. And then embarked on a career of rapine in the women’s quarters while Cazaril, helpless to stop him, watched. To his dismay, as he panted in the gray light and regained his grip on reality, Cazaril realized his body was painfully aroused.

So, was Dondo plunged into a lightless prison, sealed from sound, deprived of sensation? Or did he ride along as the ultimate spy and voyeur? Cazaril had not imagined making love to Be—to any lady since this damned affliction had been visited upon him; he imagined it now, a crowded quartet between the sheets, and shuddered.

Briefly, Cazaril envisioned escaping by the window. He might squeeze his shoulders through, and dive; the drop would be stupendous, the crunch at the end . . . quick. Or with his knife, taken to wrists or throat or belly or all three . . . He sat up, blinking, to find a half a dozen phantasms gathered avidly around him, crowding each other like vultures around a dead horse. He hissed, lurched, and swiped his arm through the air to scatter them. Could a body with its head smashed in be animated by one of them? The archdivine’s words implied so. Escape through suicide was blocked by this ghastly patrol, it seemed. Dreading sleep, he stumbled from bed and went to wash and dress.

Coming back from a perfunctory breakfast in the banqueting hall, Cazaril encountered a breathless Nan dy Vrit upon the stairs.

“My lady begs you ‘tend upon her at once,” Nan told him, and Cazaril nodded and pushed up the steps. “Not in her chambers,” Nan added, as he started past the third floor. “In Royse Teidez’s.”

“Oh.” Cazaril’s brows rose, and he turned instead to pass his own chamber and go down the hall to Teidez’s, Nan at his heels.

As he entered the office antechamber, twin to Iselle’s above, he heard voices from the rooms opening beyond; Iselle’s murmur, and Teidez’s, raised: “I don’t want anything to eat. I don’t want to see anyone! Go away!”

The sitting room was cluttered with weapons, clothes, and gifts, strewn about haphazardly. Cazaril picked his way across to the bedchamber.

Teidez lay back on his pillows, still in his nightgown. The close, moist air of the room smelled of boy sweat, and another tang. Teidez’s secretary-tutor hovered anxiously on one side of the bed; Iselle stood with her hands on her hips on the other. Teidez said, “I want to go back to sleep. Get out.” He glanced up at Cazaril, cringed, and pointed. “I especially don’t want him in here!”

Nan dy Vrit said, in a very domestic voice, “Now, none of that, young lord. You know better than to talk to old Nan that way.”

Teidez, cowed by some ancient habit, went from surly to whiney. “I have a headache.”

Iselle said firmly, “Nan, bring a light. Cazaril, I want you to look at Teidez’s leg. It looks very odd to me.”

Nan held a brace of candles high, supplementing the wan gray daylight from the window. Teidez at first clutched his blankets to his chest, but didn’t quite dare fight his older sister’s glare; she twitched them out of his hands and folded them aside.

Three scabbed, parallel grooves ran in a spiral partway around the boy’s right leg. In themselves, they did not appear deep or dangerous, but the flesh around them was so swollen that the skin was shiny and silvery. Translucent pink drainage and yellow pus oozed from their edges. Cazaril forced himself to keep his expression even as he studied the hot red streaks climbing past the boy’s knee and winding up the inside of his thigh. Teidez’s eyes were glazed. He jerked back his head as Cazaril reached for him. “Don’t touch me!”

“Be still!” Cazaril commanded in a low voice. Teidez’s forehead, beneath Cazaril’s wrist, was scorching.

He glanced up at the sallow-faced secretary, watching with a frown. “How long has he been feverish?”

“Just this morning, I believe.”

“When did his physician last see this?”

“He would not have a physician, Lord Cazaril. He threw a chair at me when I tried to help him, and bandaged it himself.”

“And you let him?” Cazaril’s voice made the secretary jump.

The man shrugged uneasily. “He would have it so.”

Teidez grumbled, “Some people obey me. I’ll remember who, too, later.” He glowered up at Cazaril through half-lowered lashes, and stuck out his lower lip at his sister.

“He’s taken an infection. I’ll see that a Temple physician is sent in to him at once.”

Teidez, disgruntled, wriggled back down under his covers. “Can I go back to sleep now? If you don’t mind. And draw the curtain, the light hurts my eyes.”

“Yes, stay abed,” Cazaril told him, and withdrew.

Iselle followed him into the antechamber, lowering her voice. “It’s not right, is it?”

“No. It’s not. Good observation, Royesse. Your judgment was correct.”

She gave him a satisfied nod, and he bowed himself out and made for the end stairs. By Nan dy Vrit’s shadowed face, she at least understood just how not-right it was. All Cazaril could think of, as he hastened down the stairs and back across the stones of the courtyard toward Ias’s Tower, was how very seldom he’d seen any man, no matter how young or strong, survive an amputation that high upon the thigh. His stride lengthened.

By good luck, Cazaril found dy Jironal at once, in the Chancellery. He was just sealing a saddlebag and dispatching a courier with it.

“How are the roads?” dy Jironal asked the fellow, who was typically lean and wiry and wore the Chancellery’s tabard over an odd assortment of winter woolens.

“Muddy, m’lord. It will be dangerous to ride after dark.”

“Well, do your best,” dy Jironal sighed, and clapped him on the shoulder. The man saluted and made his way out past Cazaril.

Dy Jironal scowled at his new visitor. “Cazaril.”

“My lord.” Cazaril offered a fractional bow and entered.

Dy Jironal seated himself on the edge of his desk, and folded his arms. “Your attempt to hide behind the Daughter’s Order in its plot to unseat me is doomed to fail, you know,” he said conversationally. “I intend to see that its failure will be miserable.”

Impatiently, Cazaril waved this aside. He’d have been more surprised had dy Jironal not had an ear in the order’s councils. “You have much worse troubles this morning than anything I can offer you, my lord.”

Dy Jironal’s eyes widened in surprise; his head tilted in an attitude of sudden attention. “Oh?”

“What did Teidez’s wound look like when you saw it?”

“What wound? He showed me no wound.”

“On his right leg—he was scratched by Orico’s leopard, apparently, while he was killing the poor beast. In truth, the marks didn’t look deep, but they’ve taken an infection. His skin burns. And you know how a poisoned wound sometimes throws out feverish marks upon the skin?”

“Aye,” said dy Jironal uneasily.

“Teidez’s run from ankle to groin. They look like a bloody conflagration.”

Dy Jironal swore.

“I advise you pull that troop of useless physicians off of Orico for a moment and send them across to Teidez’s chambers. Or you could lose two royal puppets in one week.”

Dy Jironal’s glare met Cazaril’s like flint on steel, but after one fierce inhalation he nodded and shifted to his feet. Cazaril followed him out. Corrupted with greed and familial pride dy Jironal might be, but he wasn’t incompetent. Cazaril could see why Orico might have chosen to endure much, in exchange for that.

After assuring himself that dy Jironal was climbing the stairs to Orico’s chambers with due haste, Cazaril turned back down them. He’d had no word from the temple hospital since last night; he wanted to check again on Umegat. He made his way out the Zangre gates past the ill-fated stable block. A little to his surprise, he spotted Umegat’s tongueless undergroom climbing the hill toward him. The man waved his thumbless hand when he saw Cazaril, and hurried his step.

He arrived breathless and smiling. His face was marked with livid bruises, red-purple around one eye, from the futile fight in the menagerie, and his broken nose was still swollen, its lacerated edge dark and scabbed. But his eyes were shining in their wrecked matrix; he almost danced up to Cazaril.

Cazaril’s brows rose. “You look happy—what, man, is Umegat awake?”

He nodded vigorously.

Cazaril grinned back at him, faint with relief.

He spoke a mumbled sort of gargle, of which Cazaril made out perhaps one word in four, but enough to gather he was on some urgent errand. He motioned Cazaril to wait outside the silent, dark menagerie, and returned in a few minutes with a sack tied to his belt and clutching a book, which he brandished happily. By which Cazaril understood Umegat was not only awake, but well enough to want his favorite book—Ordol, Cazaril noted with bemusement. Glad of the stout little man’s company, Cazaril walked beside him down into town.

Cazaril reflected on the fellow’s stigmata of martyrdom, displayed with such seeming indifference. It was silent testimony of horrendous torment, endured in the name of his god. Had his terror lasted an hour, a day, months? It was not quite possible to be sure whether the softened roundness of his appearance was the result of castration or just old age. Cazaril couldn’t very well ask him his story. Just attempting to listen to his badly mouthed ordinary exchanges was a painful strain upon the ears and attention. He didn’t even know if the fellow was Chalionese or Ibran, Brajaran or Roknari, or how he had come to Cardegoss, or how long he had served with Umegat. Doing his daily duties as they came to him. He stumped along now with the book under his arm, eyes bright. So, this was what a faithful servant of the gods, heroic and beloved, ended up looking like.

They arrived at Umegat’s chamber to find him sitting up in bed against some pillows. He was pale and washed-out, his prickly scalp puckered along its stitches, remaining hair a tumbled rat’s nest, lips crusted, his face unshaved. The tongueless groom rummaged in his sack, pulled out some shaving gear, and waved it triumphantly in the air; Umegat smiled wanly. He stared at Cazaril, not lifting his head from the pillow. He rubbed his eyes, and squinted uncertainly.

Cazaril swallowed. “How do you feel?”

“Headache,” Umegat managed. He snorted softly. Finally, he said, “Are all my beautiful creatures dead?” His tongue was thick, his voice low and a little slurred, but he seemed coherent enough.

“Nearly all. There was one little blue-and-yellow bird got away. It’s back safely in its cage now. I let no one make trophies of them. I saw them cremated like fallen soldiers yesterday. Archdivine Mendenal has undertaken to find their ashes a place of honor.”

Umegat nodded, then winced. His crusted lips tightened.

Cazaril glanced at the undergroom—yes, this man had to be one of those who knew the truth—and back to Umegat, and said hesitantly, “Do you know you’ve stopped glowing?”

Umegat blinked rapidly at him. “I . . . suspected it. At least you are much less disturbing to look upon, this way.”

“Your second sight is taken from you?”

“Mm. Second sight is redundant to reason anyway. You live, therefore I know perfectly well the Lady’s hand still grips you.” He added after a moment, “I always knew it was only lent to me for a time. Well, it was quite a ride while it lasted.” His voice fell to a whisper. “Quite a ride.” He turned his face away. “I could have borne it being taken back. To have it knocked from my hands . . . I should have seen it coming.”

The gods should have warned you . . .

The little elderly undergroom, whose face had drooped at the pain in Umegat’s voice, picked up the book and held it out consolingly.

Umegat smiled weakly and took it tenderly from him. “At least I have my old profession to fall back on, eh?” His hands smoothed the pages open to some familiar spot, and he glanced down. His smile faded. His voice sharpened. “Is this a joke?”

“Is what a joke, Umegat? It is your book, I saw him bring it from the menagerie.”

Umegat struggled awkwardly to sit upright. “What language is this?”

Cazaril advanced and glanced over his shoulder. “Ibran, of course.”

Umegat paged through the book, fingers shaking, his eyes twitching over the pages, his breath coming faster through lips open in something like terror. “It is . . . it is gibberish. It’s just, just . . . little blotches of ink. Cazaril!”

“It is Ibran, Umegat. It’s just Ibran.”

“It is my eyes. It is something in me . . .” He clutched his face, rubbed his eyes, and cried suddenly, “Oh, gods!” and burst into tears. The tears became wracking sobs on the third breath. “I am punished!”

“Get the physician, fetch the physician,” Cazaril cried to the frightened-looking undergroom, and the man nodded and sped away. Umegat’s clutching fingers were tearing the pages in his blind grip. Awkwardly, Cazaril tried to help him, patting his shoulder, straightening the book and then taking it away altogether. The coolly resisted breakdown, having breached Umegat’s walls in this unguarded spot, poured through, and the man wept—not like a child. No child’s sobs were ever this terrifying.

After agonizing minutes, the white-haired physician arrived and soothed the distraught divine; he seized upon her in hope, and would scarcely let her hands go free to carry out her business. Her explanation that many men and women taken with a palsy-stroke improved in a few days, people carried in by anxious relatives even walking out on their own a few days later, did the most to help him regain his shattered self-control. It took all his strength of mind, for her further tests, conducted after sending a passing dedicat running to the order’s library, revealed he could not read Roknari nor Darthacan either, and furthermore, his hands had lost the ability to wield a pen to make any kind of letters.

The quill fell from his awkward grip, trailing ink across the linens, and he buried his face in his hands, groaning again, “I am punished. My joy and my refuge, taken from me . . .”

“Sometimes, people can relearn things they have forgotten,” the physician said tentatively. “And your understanding of the words in your ears has not been taken, nor your recognition of the people you know. I have seen that happen, with some afflicted people. Someone could still read books aloud to you . . .”

Umegat’s eyes met those of the tongueless groom, who was standing to one side still holding the Ordol. The old man scrubbed his fist across his mouth and made an odd noise down in his throat, a whimper of pure despair. Tears were running from the corners of his eyes down his seamed face.

Umegat’s breath puffed from his lips, and he shook his head; drawn from his trouble by its reflection in that aged face, he reached across to grip the undergroom’s hand. “Sh. Sh. Aren’t we a pair, now.” He sighed, and sank back on his pillows. “Never say the Bastard has no sense of humor.” After a moment his eyes closed. Exhausted, or shutting it all out, Cazaril was not sure which.

He choked down his own terrified demand of, Umegat, what should we do now? Umegat was in no condition to do anything, even give direction. Even pray? Cazaril hardly dared ask him to pray for Teidez, under the circumstances.

Umegat’s breath thickened, and he dropped into an uneasy doze. Softly, careful to make no sound, the undergroom laid out his shaving gear on a side table and sat patiently to await his wakening again. The physician made notes and left quietly. Cazaril followed her out to the gallery overlooking the courtyard. Its central fountain was not playing in this chill, and the water in it was dark and scummy in the gray winter light.

“Is he punished?” he asked her.

She rubbed the back of her neck in a weary gesture. “How do I know? Head injuries are the strangest of all. I once saw a woman whose eyes appeared wholly undamaged go blind from a blow to the back of her head. I’ve seen people lose speech, lose control of half their body but not the other half. Are they punished? If so, the gods are evil, and that I do not believe. I think it is chance.”

I think the gods load the dice. He wanted to urge her to take good care of Umegat, but clearly she already was doing so, and he didn’t want to sound frantic, or as though he doubted her skill or dedication. He bade her a polite good morning instead, and took himself off to track down the archdivine and apprise him of the ugly turn of Teidez’s wound.

He found Archdivine Mendenal in the temple at the Mother’s altar, celebrating a ceremony of blessing upon a rich leather merchant’s wife and newborn daughter. Cazaril perforce waited until the family had laid their thanksgiving offerings and filed out again before approaching him and murmuring his news. Mendenal turned pale, and hurried off to the Zangre at once.

Cazaril had developed unsettling new views of the efficacy and safety of prayer, but laid himself down on the cold pavement before the Mother’s altar anyway, thinking of Ista. If there was little hope of mercy for Teidez’s own sake, lured into violent sacrilege and left there by Dondo, surely the Mother might spare some pity for his mother Ista? The goddess’s message to him via Her acolyte’s dream the other day had sounded merciful. In a way. Though it might prove to be merely brutally practical. Prone on the polished patterned slates, he could feel the lethal lump in his belly, an uncomfortable mass seeming the size of his doubled fists.

He rose at length and sought out Palli at Provincar dy Yarrin’s narrow old stone palace. Cazaril was conducted by a servant to a guest chamber at the back of the house. Palli was seated at a small table, writing in a ledger, but laid his quill aside when Cazaril entered and motioned his visitor to a chair across from him.

As soon as the servant had shut the door behind him Cazaril leaned forward and said, “Palli, could you, at need, ride courier to Ibra in secret for the Royesse Iselle?”

Palli’s brows climbed. “When?”

“Soon.”

He shook his head. “If by soon you mean now, I think not. I am much taken up with my duties as a lord dedicat—I have promised dy Yarrin my voice and my vote in the Council.”

“You could leave a proxy with dy Yarrin, or some other trusted comrade.”

Palli rubbed his shaven chin, and vented a dubious, “Hm.”

Cazaril considered claiming to be a saint of the Daughter, and pulling rank on Palli, dy Yarrin, and their entire military order. It would require complicated explanations. It would require divulging the secret of Fonsa’s curse. It would entail not merely admitting, but asserting, his . . . peculiar disorder. God-touched. God-ravished. And sounding as mad or madder than Ista ever had. He compromised. “I think this may be the Daughter’s business.”

Palli’s lips screwed up. “How can you tell?”

“I just can.”

“Well, I can’t.”

“Wait, I know. Before you go to sleep tonight, pray for guidance.”

“Me? Why don’t you?”

“My nights are . . . full.”

“And since when did you believe in prophetic dreams? I thought you always claimed it was nonsense, people fooling themselves, or pretending to an importance they could otherwise never claim.”

“It’s a . . . recent conversion. Look, Palli. Just do it for, for the experiment. To please me, if you will.”

Palli made a surrendering gesture. “For you, yes. For the rest of it . . .” His black brows lowered. “Ibra . . . ? Just who would I be riding in secret from?”

“Dy Jironal. Mostly.”

“Oh? Dy Yarrin might be interested in that. Something in it for him?”

“Not in any direct way, I don’t think.” Cazaril added reluctantly, “And likewise secret from Orico.”

Palli sat back, his head tilting. His voice lowered. “Coy, Caz. Just what kind of noose are you offering to put round my neck, here? Is this treason?”

“Worse,” Cazaril sighed. “Theology.”

“Eh?”

“Oh, that reminds me.” Cazaril pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to decide if his headache was getting worse. “Tell dy Yarrin his councils are being reported by some spy to dy Jironal. Though he may be canny enough to realize it already, I don’t know.”

“Worse and worse. Are you getting enough sleep, Caz?”

A bark of bitter laughter broke from Cazaril’s lips. “No.”

“You always did go strangely fey when you were overtired, y’know. Well, I’m not riding anywhere on the basis of a bunch of dark hints.”

“In the event, you’d be given full knowledge.”

“When I am given full knowledge, then I’ll decide.”

“Fair enough,” Cazaril sighed. “I will discuss it with the royesse. But I didn’t want to propose to her a man who would fail her.”

“Hey!” said Palli indignantly. “When have I failed?”

“Never, Palli. That’s why I thought of you.” Cazaril grinned and, with a little grunt of pain, pushed to his feet. “I must return to the Zangre.” Briefly, he described the unpleasant progression of Teidez’s claw mark.

Palli’s face grew very sober indeed. “Just how bad is it?”

“I don’t . . .” Caution tempered Cazaril’s frankness. “Teidez is young, strong, well fed. I see no reason why he cannot throw off this infection.”

“Five gods, Caz, he’s the hope of his House. What will Chalion do if he doesn’t? And Orico laid low as well!”

Cazaril hesitated. “Orico . . . hasn’t been well for some time, but I’m sure dy Jironal never imagined them both becoming so sick at once. You might note to dy Yarrin that our dear chancellor is going to be fairly distracted for the next few days. If the lord dedicats want to get past him to Orico’s bed and get anything signed, now might be their best chance.”

He extracted himself from Palli’s cascade of second thoughts, although not from Palli’s insistence that he take the dy Gura brothers for escort. Climbing the hill once more, his circling calculations of how to effect Iselle’s escape from the wreck of her cursed House spiraled inward on a much simpler grim determination not to fall down in front of these earnest young men, to be hauled home stumbling with his arms across their shoulders.

CAZARIL FOUND THE THIRD-FLOOR CORRIDOR OF THE main block promisingly crowded upon his return. Green-robed physicians and their acolyte assistants scurried in and out. Servants hurried with water, linens, blankets, strange drinks in silver ewers. As Cazaril lingered, wondering what assistance he might offer, the archdivine emerged from the antechamber and started down the corridor, his face set and introspective.

“Your Reverence?” Cazaril touched his five-colored sleeve in passing. “How goes the boy?”

“Ah, Lord Cazaril.” Mendenal turned aside briefly. “The chancellor and the royesse have given me purses for prayers on his behalf. I go to set them in motion.”

“Do you think . . . prayers will do any good?” Do you think any prayers will do good?

“Prayer is always good.”

No, it’s not, Cazaril wanted to reply, but held his tongue.

Mendenal added suggestively, lowering his voice, “Yours might be especially efficacious. At this time.”

Not so far as Cazaril had noticed. “Your Reverence, I do not hate any man in this world enough to inflict the results of my prayers upon him.”

“Ah,” said Mendenal uneasily. He managed a smile, and took polite leave.

Royesse Iselle stepped into the corridor and glanced up and down it. She spied Cazaril and motioned him to her.

He bowed. “Royesse?”

She, too, lowered her voice; everyone here seemed to speak in hushed tones. “There is talk of an amputation. Can you—would you be willing—to help hold him down, if it chances so? I think you are familiar with the procedure?”

“Indeed, Royesse.” Cazaril swallowed. Nightmare memories of bad moments in field hospitals flitted through his mind. He had never been able to decide if the men who tried to take it bravely or the men whose minds broke in terror were the hardest for their helpers to endure. Better by far the men who were unconscious to start with. “Tell the physicians I am at their service, and Lord Teidez’s.”

Cazaril could hear from the antechamber where he leaned against the wall to wait just when the proposal was floated to Teidez. The boy was going to be of the second category, it seemed. He cried, and bellowed that he would not be made a cripple by traitors and idiots, and threw things. His rising hysteria was only calmed when a second physician opined that the infection was not gangrene after all—Cazaril’s nose agreed—but rather, blood poisoning, and that amputation would do more harm than good now. Treatment was reduced to a mere lancing, although from Teidez’s yells and struggles it might as well have been an amputation. Despite the draining of the wound, Teidez’s fever soared; servants brought buckets of cold water to make him a bath in a copper tub in the sitting room, then the physicians had to wrestle him into it.

Between physicians, acolytes, and servants, they seemed to have enough hands for these practical tasks, and Cazaril withdrew for a time to his own office on the floor above. There he diverted his mind by writing tart letters to those town councils late with their royally mandated payments to the royesse’s household, which was all of them. They had sent letters of excuse claiming poor crops, banditry, plague, evil weather, and cheating tax gatherers. Six towns’ worth of troubles; Cazaril wondered if Orico had pulled a fast one with his betrothal gift and dumped the six worst towns on his rent rolls onto his sister and Dondo, or whether all of Chalion was in such disarray.

Iselle and Betriz came in, looking weary and strained.

“My brother is more ill than I have ever seen him,” Iselle confided to Cazaril. “We are going to set up my private altar and pray before dinner. I’m wondering if we should perhaps fast as well.”

“I think what may be needed here are not others’ prayers, but Teidez’s himself; and not for health, but for forgiveness.”

Iselle shook her head. “He refuses to pray at all. He says it’s not his fault, but Dondo’s, which is certainly true up to a point. . . . He cries he never intended to hurt Orico, and they are slanderers who say so.”

“Is anyone saying so?”

Betriz put in, “No one says it to the royesse’s face. But there are strange rumors among the servants, Nan says.”

Iselle’s frown deepened. “Cazaril . . . could it be?”

Cazaril leaned his elbows on his table and rubbed the ache between his brows. “I think . . . not on Teidez’s part. I believe him when he says it was Dondo’s idea. Dondo, now, of him I would believe anything. Think it through from his point of view. He marries Teidez’s sister, then arranges for Teidez to ascend the throne while still a minor. He knew from watching his brother Martou just how much power a man may wield sitting in a roya’s pocket. Grant you, I don’t know how he intended to rid himself of Martou, but I am certain Dondo meant to be the next chancellor, perhaps regent, of Chalion. Maybe even roya of Chalion, depending on what evil chances he could arrange for Teidez.”

Iselle caught her lower lip in her teeth. “And here I thought you had only saved me.” She touched Cazaril briefly on the shoulder and passed on into her chambers.

Cazaril accompanied Iselle and Betriz on their predinner visit to Orico. Orico, though no better, was no worse. They found him arrayed in fresh linens, sitting up in bed, and being read to by Sara. The roya spoke hopefully of an improvement in his right eye, for he thought he could now see shapes moving. Cazaril thought the physician’s diagnosis of dropsy all too likely, for Orico’s gross flesh was swollen even more grossly; the roya’s thumbprint, placed upon the tight fat of his face, stayed pale and visible for a long time. Iselle downplayed the alarming reports of Teidez’s infection to Orico, but in the antechamber on the way out spoke frankly to Sara. Sara’s lips tightened; she made little comment to Teidez’s sister, but Cazaril thought that here at least was one who did not pray for the bewildered brutal boy.

After supper, Teidez’s fever rose even higher. He stopped fighting and complaining, and fell into lassitude. A couple of hours before midnight, he seemed to fall to sleep. Iselle and Betriz at last left the royse’s antechamber and climbed to their own rooms for some rest.

Close to midnight, unable to sleep for sake of his usual anticipations, Cazaril again went down the corridor to Teidez’s chambers. The chief physician, going to wake the boy to administer some fever-reducing syrup, fresh-concocted and delivered by a panting acolyte, found that Teidez could not be roused.

Cazaril trudged up the stairs to report this to a sleepy Nan dy Vrit.

“Well, there’s naught Iselle can do about it,” opined Nan. “She’s just dropped off, poor girl. Can we not let her sleep?”

Cazaril hesitated, then said, “No.”

So the two tired, worried young women dressed themselves again and trooped back down to Teidez’s crowded sitting room. Chancellor dy Jironal arrived, fetched from Jironal Palace.

Dy Jironal frowned at Cazaril, and bowed to Iselle. “Royesse. This sickroom is no place for you.” His sour glance back to Cazaril silently added, Or you.

Iselle’s eyes narrowed, but she replied in a quiet, dignified voice, “None here has a better right. Or a greater duty.” After a brief pause, she added, “And I must bear witness on my mother’s behalf.”

Dy Jironal inhaled, then apparently thought better of whatever he’d been about to say. He might profitably save the clash of wills for some other time and place, Cazaril thought. There would be opportunities enough.

Cold compresses failed to lower Teidez’s fever, and needle pricks failed to rouse him. His anxious attendants were thrown into a flurry when he had a brief seizure. His breathing became even more rasping and labored than the unconscious Umegat’s had been. Out in the corridor, a quintet of cantors, one voice from each of the five orders, sang prayers; their voices blended and echoed, a heartbreakingly beautiful background of sound to these dreadful doings.

The harmonies paused. In that moment, Cazaril realized the labored breathing from the bedchamber beyond had stopped. Everyone fell silent in the face of that silence. One of the several attendant physicians, his face drained and wet with tears, came to the antechamber and called in dy Jironal and Iselle for witnesses. Voices rose and fell, very soft and low, from Teidez’s bedchamber for a moment or two.

Both were pale when they came out again. Dy Jironal was pale and shocked; even to the last, Cazaril realized, the man had been expecting Teidez to pull through and recover. Iselle was pale and nearly expressionless. The black shadow boiled thickly about her.

Every face in the antechamber turned toward her, like compass needles swinging. The royacy of Chalion had a new Heiress.

Iselle’s eyes, though reddened with fatigue and grief, were dry. Betriz, going to support her, dashed tears from the corners of hers. It was a little hard to tell which young woman leaned upon the other.

Chancellor dy Jironal cleared his throat. “I will take word of this bereavement to Orico.” Belatedly, he added, “Allow me to serve you in this, Royesse.”

“Yes . . .” Iselle looked around the chamber a little blindly. “Let all these good people go about their tasks.”

Dy Jironal’s brows drew down, as though a hundred thoughts flitted behind his eyes, and he scarcely knew which to grasp first. He glanced at Betriz, and at Cazaril. “Your household . . . your household must be increased to match your new dignity. I shall see to it.”

“I cannot think about all these things now. Tomorrow will be soon enough. For tonight, my lord Chancellor, please leave me to my sorrow.”

“Of course, Royesse.” Dy Jironal bowed, and made to depart.

“Oh,” Iselle added, “pray do not dispatch any courier to my mother until I can write a letter to include.”

In the doorway, dy Jironal paused and gave another half bow in acknowledgment. “Certainly.”

As Betriz escorted Iselle out, the royesse murmured to Cazaril in passing, “Cazaril, ‘tend on me in half an hour. I must think.”

Cazaril bent his head.

The crowd of courtiers in the antechamber and sitting room dispersed, but for Teidez’s secretary, who stood looking bereft and useless. Only the acolytes and servants whose task it now was to wash and prepare the royse’s body remained. The stunned and distraught chorus of cantors sang one last prayer, this time a threnody for the passage of the dead, their voices choked and wavering, and then they, too, turned to make their way out.

Cazaril was not sure if his head or his belly ached more. He fled into his own chamber at the end of the hallway, shut the door behind him, and braced himself for Dondo’s nightly onslaught, not, his knotting stomach told him, to be any further delayed.

His familiar cramps doubled him over as usual, but to his surprise, Dondo was silent tonight. Was he, too, daunted by Teidez’s death? If Dondo had intended the boy’s destruction to follow from Orico’s, he had it now—too late to serve any purpose he’d pursued in life.

Cazaril did not find the silence a respite. His heightened sensitivity to that malevolent presence assured him Dondo was still trapped within him. Hungry. Angry. Thinking? Intelligence had not been a notable characteristic of Dondo’s spewing before now. Perhaps the shock of his death was passing off. Leaving . . . what? A waiting. A stalking? Dondo had been a competent hunter, once.

It occurred to Cazaril that while the demon might seek only to fill its two soul-buckets and return to its master, Dondo likely did not share that desire. The belly of his best enemy was a hateful prison to him, but neither the Bastard’s purging hell nor the chilled forgetfulness of a gods-rejected ghost was a very satisfactory alternative fate. Exactly what else might be possible Cazaril could scarcely imagine, but he was intensely aware that if Dondo sought a physical form through which to reenter the world, his own was closest to hand. One way or another. His hands kneaded his belly, and he tried to decide, for the hundredth time, how fast his tumor was really growing.

The cramps and the wracking quarter hour of terror passed. Iselle’s request returned to his mind. Composing the necessary letter to Ista informing her of her son’s death would be excruciating; little wonder Iselle should desire assistance. Unequal to the task though Cazaril felt himself to be, whatever she asked of him in her grief and devastation he must undertake to supply. He uncurled himself, heaved out of bed, and climbed the stairs.

He found Iselle already seated at his antechamber desk, his best parchment, pens, and sealing wax laid out before her. Extra candles were lit all around the chamber, driving back the dark. Upon a square of silk, Betriz was just laying out and counting over an odd little pile of ornaments: brooches, rings, and the pale glowing heap of Dondo’s rope of pearls that Cazaril had not yet had opportunity to deliver to the Temple.

Iselle was frowning down at the blank page and turning her seal ring round and round on her thumb. She glanced up, and said in a low voice, “Good, you’re here. Close the door.”

He shut it quietly behind him. “At your service, Royesse.”

“I pray so, Cazaril: I pray so.” Her eyes searched him.

Betriz said, in a worried voice, “He is so sick, Iselle. Are you sure?”

“I am sure of nothing but that I have no time left. And no other choices.” She drew a long breath. “Cazaril, tomorrow morning I want you to ride to Ibra as my envoy to arrange my marriage to Royse Bergon.”

Cazaril blinked, laboring to catch up with a baggage train of thought evidently already far down the road. “Chancellor dy Jironal will never let me leave.”

“Of course it can’t be openly.” Iselle made an impatient gesture. “So you will ride first to Valenda, which is nearly on the way, as my personal courier to take the news of my brother’s death to my mother. Dy Jironal will agree, delighted, he’ll think, to see the back of you—he’ll doubtless even lend you a courier’s baton by which to commandeer horses from the Chancellery’s posting houses. You know by noon tomorrow he’ll have stuffed my household with his spies.”

“That was very clear.”

“But after you stop in Valenda, you’ll ride not back to Cardegoss, but on to Zagosur, or wherever Royse Bergon is to be found. In the meantime, I will insist that Teidez be buried in Valenda, his beloved home.”

“Teidez couldn’t wait to get out of Valenda,” Cazaril pointed out, beginning to feel dizzy.

“Yes, well, dy Jironal doesn’t know that, does he? The chancellor would not let me out of Cardegoss and his eye for any other reason, but he cannot deny the demands of family piety. I will enlist Sara’s support in the project, too, first thing tomorrow morning.”

“You are doubly in mourning now, for your brother and his. He cannot foist another fiancé upon you for months yet.”

She shook her head. “An hour ago, I became the future of Chalion. Dy Jironal must take and keep hold of me if he means to control that future. The critical moment is not the beginning of my mourning for Teidez, but of the beginning of my mourning for Orico. At which time—and not before—I pass into dy Jironal’s control absolutely. Unless I am married first.

“Once I’m out of Cardegoss, I mean not to go back. In this weather, Teidez’s cortege could be weeks on the road. And if the weather doesn’t cooperate, I’ll find other delays. By the time you return with Royse Bergon, I should still be safe in Valenda.”

“Wait, what—return with Royse Bergon?”

“Yes, of course you must bring him to me. Think it through. If I leave Chalion to be wed in Ibra, dy Jironal will declare me in rebellion, forcing me to return at the head of a column of foreign troops. But if I seize my ground from the very first instant, I will never have to wrest it back. You taught me that!”

I did . . . ?

She leaned forward, growing more intent. “I will have Royse Bergon, yes, but I will not give up Chalion to get him, no, not one yard of soil. Not to dy Jironal, and not to the Fox either. These are my terms. Bergon and I will each of us inherit our respective crowns to ourselves. Bergon will hold authority in Chalion as roya-consort, and I will hold authority in Ibra as royina-consort, each through the other, reciprocally and equally. Our future son—the Mother and Father willing—to inherit and join them into one crown thereafter. But my future authority in Chalion is to be mine, not made over as dowry to my spouse. I will not be turned into a Sara, a mere and disregarded wife, silenced in my own councils!”

“The Fox will be greedy for more.”

Her chin came up. “This is why I must have you as my envoy and no other. If you cannot get me Royse Bergon on terms that do not violate my future sovereignty, then turn around and ride home. And upon Orico’s death, I will raise my banner against dy Jironal myself.” Her mouth set in a grim line; her black shadow roiled. “Curse or no curse, I will not be Martou dy Jironal’s bridled mare to ride to his spurring.”

Yes—Iselle had the nerve, the will, and the wit to resist dy Jironal as Orico did not; as Teidez would never have. Cazaril could see it in her eyes, could see armies with pennoned lances writhing in the black dark hanging around her like a pall of smoke from a burning town. This was the form that the curse of her House would take in the next generation: not personal sorrow, but civil war between royal and noble faction, tearing the country apart from end to end.

Unless she could shrug off House and curse both, and pass into the protection of Bergon . . .

“I will ride for you, Royesse.”

“Good.” She sat back and swept her hand over the blank parchments. “Now we must make several letters. The first shall be your letter of authority to the Fox, and I think it should be in my own hand. You’ve read and written treaties. You must tell me all the right phrases, so I do not sound like an ignorant girl.”

“I’ll do my best, but am no lawyer, Iselle.”

She shrugged. “If we succeed, I will have swords to back my words. And if we do not, no legal niceties will make them stand. Let them be plain and clear. Begin . . .”

A grueling three-quarters of an hour of lip-biting concentration resulted in a clean draft, which Iselle signed with a flourish and sealed with her seal ring. Betriz, meanwhile, had finished collecting and inventorying the little pile of coins and jewelry.

“Is that all the coin we have?” asked Iselle.

“Unfortunately, yes,” sighed Betriz.

“Well, he’ll just have to pawn the jewelry when he gets to Valenda, or some other safe place.” Iselle wrapped the silk around the gauds and shoved them across the table to Cazaril. “Your purse, my lord. Daughter grant it is enough to get you there and back.”

“More than enough, if I am not cheated.”

“Mind you, this is to spend, not save. You are to put on a good show as my representative in Ibra. Remember to dress. And Royse Bergon is to travel in a style befitting his rank and mine, and no shame to Chalion.”

“That could be tricky. I mean, without the army. I will bend my thoughts to it. Much will depend on, well, a number of unsettled things. Which reminds me. We must have a secure means of communication. Dy Jironal or his spies will surely be making all efforts to intercept any letters you receive.”

“Ah.”

“There is a very simple cipher that is nonetheless nearly impossible to break. It depends upon having two copies of the same printing of some book. One goes with me, one stays with you two. Three-number sequences pick out words—page number, line number, and rank in the line—which the recipient then works backward to find the word again. You do not always use the same numberings for the same words, but find them on another page, if you can. There are better ciphers, but there is no time to teach them to you. I, uh . . . have not two of any book, though.”

“I will find two such books before you leave tomorrow,” said Betriz sturdily.

“Thank you.” Cazaril rubbed his forehead. It was madness to undertake to ride, sick and maybe bleeding, over the mountains in midwinter. He would fall off his horse into the snows and freeze, and he and his horse and his letters of authorization would all be eaten by the wolves.

“Iselle. My heart is willing. But my body is occupied territory, halflaid waste. I am afraid I will fail in the journey. My friend March dy Palliar is a good rider and a strong sword arm. May I offer him as your envoy instead?”

Iselle frowned in thought. “I think it will be a duel of wits with the Fox for the hand of Bergon, not a duel of steel. Better to send the wits to Ibra and keep the sword in Chalion.”

Beguiling thought, to leave Iselle and Betriz not unguarded after all, but with a strong friend to call upon . . . a friend with friends, aye. “In either case, may I bring him into our councils tomorrow?”

Iselle glanced across at Betriz; Cazaril did not see any clear signal pass between them, but Iselle nodded decisively. “Yes. Bring him to me at the earliest possible instant.”

The royesse pulled another piece of paper toward her and picked up a fresh quill. “Now I shall write a personal letter to the Royse Bergon, which you shall take sealed and pass to him unopened. And after that”—she sighed—“the letter to my mother. I think you cannot help me with either of these. Go get some sleep, while you can.”

Dismissed, he rose and bowed.

As he reached the door, she added softly, “I’m glad it shall be you to tell her the news, Cazaril, and not some random Chancellery courier. Though it will be hard.” She drew a deep breath and bent to the paper. The candlelight made her amber hair glow in an aureole about her abstracted face. Cazaril left her in the pool of light, and stepped into the darkness of the cold corridor.

CAZARIL WAS AWAKENED AT DAWN BY INSISTENT KNOCKING at his chamber door. When he stumbled out of bed and went to unlock it he found not the page with some summons that he’d expected, but Palli.

The normally neat Palli looked as though he had dressed in the dark, by guess; his hair was bent with sleep and sticking out in odd directions. His eyes were wide and dark. The yawning dy Gura brothers, looking sleepy but cheerful, smiled at Cazaril from their station in the corridor as Palli shouldered within. Cazaril handed out his bedside candle for the taller of them, Ferda, to light from the wall sconce; he handed it back to his lord and commander Palli, who took it with hands that shook slightly. Palli didn’t speak till the door closed behind him and Cazaril.

“Bastard’s demons, Caz! What is all this about?”

“Which what?” asked Cazaril in some confusion.

Palli lit another brace of candles on Cazaril’s washstand and whirled about. “Pray for guidance, you said. In my sleep, if you please. I was killed five times in my dreams last night, I’ll have you know. Riding somewhere. Each time more horribly. In the last dream, my horses ate me. I don’t want to put my leg across anything, horse, mule, or sawhorse, for a week at least!”

“Oh.” Cazaril blinked, taking this in. It seemed clear enough. “In that case, I don’t want you to ride anywhere.”

“That’s a relief.”

“I must go myself.”

“Go where? In this weather? It’s snowing now, you know.”

“Ah, it wanted only that. Hasn’t anyone told you yet? Royse Teidez died about midnight last night, of his infected wound.”

Palli’s face abruptly sobered; his mouth formed a silent “O.” “That changes things in Chalion.”

“Indeed. Let me dress, and then come upstairs with me.” Hastily, Cazaril splashed chill water on his face and shrugged into yesterday’s clothes.

In the chambers above, Cazaril found Betriz also still dressed in last night’s black-and-lavender court mourning. It was plain she had not yet slept. Cazaril drew the dy Gura brothers out of sight of the corridor and closed them in his office antechamber. He and Palli entered the sitting room.

Betriz’s hand touched a sealed packet waiting on a small table. “All the letters are ready to go to”—she glanced at Palli and hesitated—“Valenda.”

“Is Iselle asleep?” Cazaril asked quietly.

“Resting only. She’ll want to see you. Both.” Betriz disappeared into the bedchambers for a moment, from which floated low murmuring, then returned with a pair of books under her arm.

“I sneaked down to the roya’s library and found two identical volumes. There weren’t many true duplicates. I thought I’d better take the biggest, so as to have more words to choose from.”

“Good,” said Cazaril, and took one from her. He glanced at it, and choked back a black laugh. Ordol, read the gold letters on the spine. The Fivefold Pathway. “Perfect. I need to brush up on my theology.” He laid it down with the packet of letters.

Iselle emerged, wrapped in a heavy blue velvet dressing gown from which the white lace of her nightgown peeped. Her amber hair cascaded down across her shoulders. Her face was as pale and puffy with lack of sleep as Betriz’s. She nodded to Cazaril and to Palli. “My lord dy Palliar. Thank you for coming to my aid.”

“I, uh . . .” said Palli. He cast a rather desperate glance at Cazaril, What am I agreeing to?

“Will he ride for you?” Betriz asked Cazaril anxiously. “You should not attempt this, you know you should not.”

“Ah . . . no. Palli, instead I’m asking you to swear service and protection to the Royesse Iselle, personally, in the names of the gods, and especially the Lady of Spring. There is no treason in this; she is the rightful Heiress of Chalion. And you will thus have the honor of being the first of her courtiers to do so.”

“I, I, I . . . I can swear my fealty in addition to what I have sworn to your brother Orico, lady. I cannot swear to you instead of to him.”

“I do not ask for your service before what you give to Orico. I only ask for your service before what you give to Orico’s chancellor.”

“Now, that I can do,” said Palli, brightening. “And with a will.” He kissed Iselle’s forehead, hands, and slippers, and, still kneeling before her skirts, swore the oaths of a lord of Chalion, witnessed by Betriz and Cazaril. He added, still on his knees, “What would you think, Royesse, of Lord dy Yarrin as the next holy general of the Daughter’s Order?”

“I think . . . such great preferences are not yet mine to give. But he would certainly be more acceptable to me than any candidate from dy Jironal’s clan.”

Palli nodded slow approval of her measured words and rose to his feet. “I’ll let him know.”

“Iselle will need all the practical support you can give her, all through the funeral for Teidez,” said Cazaril to Palli. “He is to be buried in Valenda. Might I suggest she select your troop from Palliar to be part of the royse’s cortege? It will give you good excuse to confer often, and will assure that you are by her side when she rides out of Cardegoss.”

“Oh, quick thinking,” said Iselle.

Cazaril didn’t feel quick. He felt his wits were laboring along after Iselle’s as though in boots coated with twenty pounds of mud. Each. The authority that had fallen to her last night seemed to have released some coiled energy within her; she burned with it, inside her cocoon of darkness. He was afraid to close his eyes, lest he see it blazing in there still.

“But must you ride alone, Cazaril?” asked Betriz unhappily. “I don’t like that.”

Iselle pursed her lips. “As far as Valenda, I think he must. There is scarcely anyone in Cardegoss I would trust to dispatch with him.” She studied Cazaril in doubt. “In Valenda, perhaps my grandmother may supply men. In truth, you should not arrive at the Fox’s court alone and unattended. I don’t want us to appear desperate to him.” She added a trifle bitterly, “Although we are.”

Betriz plucked at her black velvets. “But what if you fall ill on the road? Suppose your tumor grows worse? And who would know to burn your body if you die?”

Palli’s head swiveled round. “Tumor? Cazaril! What is this, now?”

“Cazaril, didn’t you tell him? I thought he was your friend!” Betriz turned to Palli. “He means to jump on a horse and ride—ride!—off to Ibra with a great uncanny murderous tumor in his gut, and no help on the road. I don’t think that’s brave, I think it’s stupid. To Ibra he must go, for want of any other equal to the deed, but not alone like this!”

Palli sat back, his thumb across his lips, and studied Cazaril through narrowing eyes. He said at last, “I thought you looked sick.”

“Yes, well, there’s nothing to be done about it.”

“Um . . . just how bad . . . I mean, um, are you . . .”

“Am I dying? Yes. How soon? No one knows. Which makes my life different from yours, as Learned Umegat points out, not at all. Well, who wants to die in bed?”

“You did, you always said. Of extreme old age, in bed, with somebody’s wife.”

“Mine, by preference,” Cazaril sighed. “Ah, well.” He managed not to look at Betriz. “My death is the gods’ problem. For me, I ride as soon as a horse can be saddled.” He grunted to his feet, and collected the book and the packet.

Palli glanced at Betriz, who clenched her hands together and stared beseechingly at him. He muttered an oath under his breath, stood, and strode abruptly to the door to the antechamber, which he jerked open. Foix dy Gura, his ear to the other side, staggered upright, and blinked and smiled at his commander. His brother Ferda, leaning on the opposite wall, snorted.

“Hello, boys,” said Palli smoothly. “I have a little task for you.”

CAZARIL, PALLI AT HIS HEELS, STRODE OUT THE ZANGRE gates dressed for winter riding, the saddlebag slung over his shoulder heavy with a change of clothes, a small fortune, theology, and arguable treason.

He found the dy Gura brothers already in the stable yard before him. Sped back to Yarrin Palace by Palli’s urgent orders, they had also changed out of their blue-and-white court dress into garb more practical for riding, with tall and well-worn boots.

Betriz was with them, wrapped in a white wool cloak. They had their heads close together, and Betriz was gesticulating emphatically. Foix glanced up to see Cazaril approaching; his broad face set in a sober and rather intimidated expression. He made a motion, and said something; Betriz glanced over her shoulder, and the conversation abruptly ceased. The brothers turned around and made small bows to Cazaril. Betriz stared at him steadily, as if his face were some lesson he’d set her to memorize.

“Ferda!” said Palli. The horse-master came to attention before him. Palli withdrew two letters from his vest-cloak, one sealed, one merely folded. “This”—he handed the folded paper to Ferda—“is a letter of authorization from me, as a lord dedicat of the Daughter’s Order, entitling you to whatever assistance you may need to draft from our sister chapters on your journey. Any costs to be settled up with me at Palliar. This other”—he handed across the sealed letter—“is for you to open in Valenda.”

Ferda nodded, and tucked them both away. The second letter of hand put the dy Gura brothers under Cazaril’s command in the name of the Daughter, with no other details. Their trip to Ibra was going to make an interesting surprise for them.

Palli walked about them, inspecting with a commander’s eye. “You have enough warm clothes? Armed for bandits?” They displayed polished swords and readied crossbows—bowstrings protected from dampness, with a sufficiency of quarrels—gear all in good condition. Only a few flakes of snow now spun through the moist air to land on wool and leather and hair, there to melt to small droplets. The dawn snowfall had proved a mere dusting, here in town. In the hills it would likely be heavier.

From beneath her cloak, Betriz produced a fluffy white object. Cazaril blinked it into focus as a fur hat in the style of Chalion’s hardy southern mountaineers, with flaps meant to be folded down over the ears with the fur inward and tied under the chin. While both men and women wore similar styles, this one was clearly meant for a lady, in white rabbit skin with flowers brocaded in gold thread over the crown. “Cazaril, I thought you might need this in the high passes.”

Foix raised his brows and grinned, and Ferda snickered behind his hand. “Fetching,” he said.

Betriz reddened. “It was the only thing I could find in the time I had,” she said defensively. “Better than having your ears freeze!”

“Indeed,” said Cazaril gravely. “I do not have so good a hat. I shall be very grateful.” Ignoring the grinning youths, he took it from her and knelt to pack it carefully in his saddlebag. It wasn’t just a gesture to gratify Betriz, though he smiled inwardly at her sniff in Ferda’s direction; when the brothers met the winter wind in the border mountains, those grins would vanish soon enough.

Iselle appeared through the gates, in a velvet cloak so dark a purple as to be almost black, attended by a shivering Chancellery clerk who handed over a numbered courier’s baton in exchange for Cazaril’s signature in his ledger. He clapped the ledger shut and scurried back over the drawbridge and out of the cold.

“You were able to get dy Jironal’s order?” Cazaril inquired, tucking the baton into a secure inner pocket of his coat. The baton would command its bearer fresh horses, food, and clean, if hard and narrow, beds in any Chancellery posting house on the main roads across Chalion.

“Not dy Jironal’s. Orico’s. Orico is still roya in Chalion, though even the Chancellery clerk had to be reminded of the fact.” Iselle snorted softly. “The gods go with you, Cazaril.”

“Alas, yes,” he sighed, then realized that had been not an observation, but a farewell. He bowed his head to kiss her chilled hands. Betriz eyed him sideways. He hesitated, then cleared his throat and took her hands as well. Her fingers spasmed around his at the touch of his lips, and her breath drew in, but her eyes stared away over his head. He straightened to see the dy Gura brothers shrinking under her glower.

A Zangre groom led out three saddled courier horses. Palli clasped hands with his cousins. Ferda took the reins of what proved to be Cazaril’s horse, a rangy roan that matched his height. The muscular Foix hastened to give him a leg up, and as he settled in the saddle with a faint grunt inquired anxiously, “Are you all right, sir?”

They hadn’t even started yet; what had Betriz been telling them? “Yes, it’s all fine,” Cazaril assured him. “Thank you.” Ferda presented him with his reins, and Foix assisted him in tying on his precious saddlebags. Ferda leapt lightly aboard his horse, his brother climbed more heavily onto his, and they started out of the stable yard. Cazaril turned in his saddle to watch Iselle and Betriz making their way back across the drawbridge and through the Zangre’s great gate. Betriz looked back, and raised her hand high; Cazaril returned the salute. Then the horses rounded the first corner, and the buildings of Cardegoss hid the gate from his view. A single crow followed them, swooping from gutter to cornice.

On the first street, they met Chancellor dy Jironal riding slowly up from Jironal Palace, flanked by two armed retainers on foot. He’d obviously been home to wash and eat and change his clothes, and attend to his more urgent correspondence. Judging from his gray face and bloodshot eyes, he’d had no more sleep than Iselle the night past.

Dy Jironal reined in, and gave Cazaril an odd little salute. “Where away, Lord Cazaril”—his eye took in the light courier saddles, stamped with the castle-and-leopard of Chalion—“upon my Chancellery’s horses?”

Cazaril returned a half bow from his saddle. “Valenda, my lord. The Royesse Iselle decided she did not want some stranger bearing the bad news to her mother and grandmother, and has dispatched me as her courier.”

“Mad Ista, eh?” Dy Jironal’s lips screwed up. “I do not envy you that task.”

“Indeed.” Cazaril let his voice go hopeful. “Order me back to Iselle’s side, and I shall obey you at once.”

“No, no.” Dy Jironal’s lip curled just slightly in satisfaction. “I can think of no man more fitted for this sad duty. Ride on. Oh—when do you mean to return?”

“I’m not yet sure. Iselle desired me to be sure her mother was going to be all right before I returned. I do not expect Ista to take the news well.”

“Truly. Well, we’ll watch for you.”

I wager you will. He and dy Jironal exchanged guarded nods, and the two parties rode on in their opposite directions. Cazaril glanced back to catch dy Jironal glancing back, just before he turned the corner toward the Zangre’s gates. Dy Jironal would know no ambush could now catch Cazaril’s start on the courier horses. The return was another opportunity. Except that I won’t be coming back on this road.

Or at all? He’d turned over in his mind all the disasters that might follow failure; what would be his fate if he succeeded? What did the gods do with used saints? He’d never to his knowledge met one, save perhaps, now, Umegat . . . a thought that was not, upon consideration, very reassuring.

They reached the city gate and crossed over the bridge to the river road. Fonsa’s crow did not follow farther, but perched upon the gate’s high crenellations and vented a few sad caws, which echoed as they descended into the ravine. The Zangre’s cliff wall, naked of verdure in the winter, rose high and stark across the dark, rapid water of the river. Cazaril wondered if Betriz would watch from one of the castle’s high windows as they passed along the road. He wouldn’t be able to see her up there, so high and shadowed.

His bleak thoughts were scattered by the thud and splash of hooves. An inbound courier flashed past them, galloping horse lathered and blowing. He—no, she—waved at them in passing. Female couriers were much favored by some of the Chancellery’s horse-masters, at least on the safer routes, for they claimed their light weight and light hands spared the animals. Foix waved back, and turned in his saddle to watch her flying black braids. Cazaril didn’t think he was just admiring her horsemanship.

Ferda nudged his mount up next to Cazaril’s. “May we gallop now, my lord?” he asked hopefully. “Daylight is dear, and these beasts are fresh.”

But five gods, I’m not. Cazaril took a breath of grim anticipation. “Yes.”

He clapped his booted heels to the roan’s side, and the animal bounded into a long-strided canter. The road opened before them across the snow-streaked dun landscape, winding into gray mists heavy with the faint sweet rot of winter vegetation. Vanishing into uncertainty.

They came to Valenda at dusk on the following day. The town bulked black against a pewter sky, its deepening shadows relieved here and there by the orange flare of some torch or candle, faint sparks of light and life. They’d had no remounts on the branch road to Valenda, courier stations being reserved for the route to the Baocian provincial seat of Taryoon, so the last leg had been a long one for the horses. Cazaril was content to let the tired beasts walk, heads down on a long rein, the remaining stretch through the city and up the hill. He wished he could stop here, stop, and sink down by the side of the road, and not move for days. In minutes, it would be his task to tell a mother that her son was dead. Of all the trials he expected to face on this journey, this was the worst.

Too soon, they reached the Provincara’s castle gates. The guards recognized him at once and ran shouting for the servants; the groom Demi held his horse, and was the first to ask, Why are you here, my lord? The first, but not the last.

“I bear messages to the Provincara and the Lady Ista,” Cazaril replied shortly, bent over his pommel. Foix popped up at his horse’s shoulder, staring up expectantly; Cazaril heaved his off leg up over the horse’s haunches, kicked free of the other stirrup, and dropped to his feet. His knees buckled, and he would have fallen then, but for the strong hand that caught his elbow. They’d made good time. He wondered dizzily how dearly he would pay for it. He stood a moment, trembling, till his balance returned to him. “Is Ser dy Ferrej here?”

“He has escorted the Provincara to a wedding feast in town,” Demi told him. “I don’t know when they mean to return.”

“Oh,” said Cazaril. He was almost too tired to think. He’d been so exhausted last night, he’d fallen asleep in the posting-house bunk within minutes of being steered to it by his helpers, and slept even through Dondo. Wait for the Provincara? He’d meant to report to her first, and let her determine how to tell her daughter. No. This is unbearable. Get it over with. “In that case, I will see the Lady Ista first.”

He added, “The horses need to be rubbed down and watered and fed. These are Ferda and Foix dy Gura, men of good family in Palliar. Please see that they are given . . . everything. We’ve not eaten.” Nor washed, but that was obvious; everyone’s sweat-soaked woolens were splashed with winter road mud, hands grimed, faces streaked with dirt. They were all three blinking and weary in the torchlight of the courtyard. Cazaril’s fingers, stiff from clutching his reins in the cold since dawn, plucked at the ties of his saddlebags. Foix took that task from him, too, and pulled the bags off the horse. Cazaril rather determinedly took them back from him, folded them over his arm, and turned. “Take me to Ista now, please,” he said faintly. “I have letters for her from the Royesse Iselle.”

A house servant led him within, and up the stairs in the new building. The man had to wait for Cazaril to climb slowly after him. His legs felt like lead. Murmurs rose and fell between the man and the royina’s attendants, as he negotiated Cazaril’s entry to her chambers. The air within was perfumed with bowls of dried flower petals and aglow with candlelight and warmth from the corner fireplace. Cazaril felt huge and awkward and filthy in this dainty sitting room.

Ista sat on a cushioned bench, dressed in warm wraps, her dun hair bound in a thick rope down her back. Like Sara, the inky shadow of the curse hung about her. So. I was right in that guess.

Ista turned toward him; her eyes widened, and her face stiffened. She surely knew something was terribly wrong just by his sudden presence here. The hundred ways to break the news to her gently that he’d rehearsed during the long hours of riding seemed to fall through his fingers, under the pressure of those dark, dilated eyes. Any delay now would be cruel beyond measure. He fell to one knee before her, and cleared his throat.

“First. Iselle is well. Hold to that.” He inhaled. “Second. Teidez died two nights ago, from an infected wound.”

The two women attending upon Ista cried out, and clutched each other. Ista barely moved, but for a little flinch, as if an invisible arrow had struck her. She vented a long, wordless exhalation.

“You understand my words, Royina?” Cazaril said hesitantly.

“Oh, yes,” she breathed. One corner of her mouth turned up; Cazaril could not call it a smile. It was nothing like a smile, that black irony. “When it is too-long-anticipated, a blow falls as a relief, you see. The waiting is over. I can stop fearing, now. Can you understand that?”

Cazaril nodded.

After a moment of silence, broken only by the sobbing of one of her women, she added quietly, “How came he by this wound? Hunting? Or something . . . else?”

“Not . . . hunting exactly. In a way it was . . .” Cazaril licked his lips, chapped with the cold. “Lady, do you see anything odd about me?”

“I see only with my eyes, now. I’ve been blind for years, you see. You see?”

Her emphasis made her meaning very plain, Cazaril thought. “Yes.”

She nodded and sat back. “I thought so. There is a look about one who sees with those eyes.”

A trembling attendant crept up to Ista, and said in an overly light voice, “Lady, perhaps you should come away to bed, now. Your lady mother will surely be back soon . . .” She shot Cazaril a meaningful look over her shoulder; clearly, the woman thought Ista was going into one of her mad fugues. Into what everyone thought was one of her fugues. Had Ista ever been mad?

Cazaril sat back on his heels. “Please leave us now. I must have some private speech with the royina on matters of some urgency.”

“Sir, my lord . . .” The woman managed a false smile, and whispered in his ear, “We dare not leave her in this stricken hour—she might do herself some harm.”

Cazaril climbed to his full height, and took both ladies by the arms, and steered them gently but inexorably out the door. “I will undertake to guard her. Here, you may wait in this chamber across the hall, and if I need you, I will call out, all right?” He shut both doors upon their protests.

Ista waited unmoving, but for her hands. She held a fine lace handkerchief, which she commenced to folding, over and over, into smaller and smaller squares. Cazaril grunted down to sit cross-legged on the floor at her feet and stare up into that wide-eyed, chalky face.

“I have seen the Zangre’s ghosts,” he said.

“Yes.”

“More. I have seen the dark cloud that hangs over your House. The Golden General’s curse, the bane of Fonsa’s heirs.”

“Yes.”

“You know of it, then?”

“Oh, yes.”

“It hangs about you now.”

“Yes.”

“It hung about Orico, and Sara. Iselle—and Teidez.”

“Yes.” She tilted her head and stared away.

Cazaril thought about a state of shock he had seen sometimes come upon men in battle, between the moment a blow fell, and the time their bodies fell; men who should have been unconscious, should have been dead, staggering about yet for a time, accomplishing, sometimes, extraordinary acts. Was this quiet coherence such a shock, soon to melt—should he seize it? Or had Ista ever really been incoherent? Or did we just not understand her?

“Orico has become very ill. How I came by my second sight is all of a piece with this black tangle. But please, please, lady, tell me how you came to know. What did you see, and when, and how? I must understand. Because I think—I fear—it has been given to me, it has fallen to me, to act. Yet nothing has told me what that action must be. Even second sight cannot pierce this dark.”

Her brows went up. “I can tell you truths. I cannot give you understanding. For how can one give what one does not possess? I have always told the truth.”

“Yes. I see that now.” He took a daring breath. “But have you ever told all of it?”

She sucked on her lower lip a moment, studying him. Her trembling hands, seeming to belong to some other Ista than the one of this carven face, began unfolding the tight knot of the handkerchief again upon her knee. Slowly, she nodded. Her voice was so low, Cazaril had to tilt his head to be sure of catching all her words.

“It began when I became pregnant with Iselle. The visions. The second sight came and went. I thought it was an effect of my pregnancy—bearing turns some women’s brains. The physicians convinced me of that, for a time. I saw the blind ghosts drifting. I saw the dark cloud hanging upon Ias, and young Orico. I heard voices. I dreamed of the gods, of the Golden General, of Fonsa and his two faithful companions burning in his tower. Of Chalion burning like the tower.

“After Iselle was born, the visions ceased. I thought I had been mad, and then got well again.”

The eye could not see itself, not even the inner eye. He had been granted Umegat, been granted knowledge bought at others’ cost and handed to him as a gift. How frightened would he be by now, if he were still groping for explanations of the inexplicable?

“Then I became pregnant again, with Teidez. And the visions began again, twice as bad as before. It was unbearable to think myself mad. Only when I threatened to kill myself did Ias confess to me that it was the curse, and that he knew it. Had always known of it.”

And how betrayed, to find that those who’d known the truth hadn’t told him, had left him to stagger about in isolated terror?

“I was horrified that I had brought my two children into this dire danger. I prayed and prayed to the gods that it might be lifted, or that they would tell me how it might be lifted, that they would spare the innocent.

“Then the Mother of Summer came to me, when I was round to bursting with Teidez. Not in a dream, not while I was sleeping, but when I was awake and sober, in the broad day. She stood as close to me as you are now, and I fell to my knees. I could have touched her robe, if I’d dared. Her breath was a perfume, like wildflowers in the summer grasses. Her face was too beautiful for my eyes to comprehend, it was like staring into the sun. Her voice was music.”

Ista’s lips softened; even now, the peace of that vision echoed briefly in her face, a flash of beauty like the reflection of sunlight on dark waters. But her brows tightened again, and she spoke on, bending forward, growing, if possible, more shadowed, more intent.

“She said that the gods sought to take the curse back, that it did not belong in this world, that it was a gift to the Golden General that he had spilt improperly. She said that the gods might draw the curse back to them only through the will of a man who would lay down his life three times for the House of Chalion.”

Cazaril hesitated. The sound of his own breath in his nostrils seemed enough to drown out that quiet voice. But the question rose helplessly to his lips, though he cursed himself for sounding a fool. “Um . . . I don’t suppose that three men could lay down their lives once each, instead?”

“No.” Her lips curved in that weird ironic not-smile. “You see the problem.”

“I . . . I . . . I don’t see the solution, though. Was it a trick, this . . . prophecy?”

Her hands opened briefly, ambiguously, then began folding the handkerchief again. “I told Ias. He told Lord dy Lutez, of course; Ias kept nothing from dy Lutez, except for me. Except for me.”

Historical curiosity overcame Cazaril. Now that they were comrades in . . . sainthood, or something like it, it seemed easy to talk to Ista. The ease was lunatic, tilted, fragile, if he blinked it would be gone beyond recall, and yet . . . saint to saint and soul to soul, for this floating moment it was an intimacy stranger and more soaring than lover to lover. He began to understand why Umegat had fallen upon him with such hunger. “What was their relationship, really?”

She shrugged. “They were lovers since before I was born. Who was I to judge them? Dy Lutez loved Ias; I loved Ias. Ias loved us both. He tried so hard, cared so much, trying to bear the weight of all his dead brothers and his father Fonsa, too. He’d worn himself near to death with the caring, and yet it all went wrong, and wrong again.”

She hesitated for a time, and Cazaril was terrified for an instant that he had inadvertently done something to bring this flow of confidences to an end. But apparently she was marshaling . . . not her thoughts, but her heart: for she went on, even more slowly. “I don’t remember now whose idea it first was. We sat in a night council, the three of us, after Teidez was born. I still had the sight. We knew both of our children were drawn into this dark thing, and poor Orico, too. ‘Save my children,’ Ias cried, laying his forehead down upon the table, weeping. ‘Save my children.’ And Lord dy Lutez said, ‘For the love I bear you, I will try; I will dare this sacrifice.’ “

He scarcely dared whisper it. “But five gods, how?”

Her head jerked. “We discussed a hundred schemes; how might one kill a man, and yet bring him back to die again? Impossible, and yet not quite. We finally settled on drowning as the best to try. It would occasion the least physical injury, and there were many stories of people who’d been brought back from drowning. Dy Lutez rode out to investigate some of them, to try to determine the trick of it.”

Cazaril’s breath huffed out. Drowning, oh, gods. And in the coldest of cold blood . . . his hands were shaking, too, now. Her voice went on, quiet and relentless.

“We swore a physician to secrecy, and descended to the dungeons of the Zangre. Dy Lutez let himself be stripped and bound, arms and legs tight to his body, and hung upside down over the tank. We lowered him down headfirst. And raised him again, when he stopped struggling at last . . .”

“And he’d died?” said Cazaril softly. “Then the treason charge was . . .”

“Died indeed, but not for the last time. We revived him, just barely.”

“Oh.”

“Oh, it was working, though!” Her hands clenched. “I could feel it, I could see it, the crack in the curse! But dy Lutez—his nerve broke. The next night, he would not undertake the second immersion. He cried I was trying to assassinate him, for jealousy’s sake. Then Ias and I . . . made a mistake.”

Cazaril could see where this was going, now. Closing his eyes would not spare him from seeing. He forced them to stay open, and on her face.

“We seized him, and made the second trial by force. He screamed and wept . . . Ias wavered, I cried, ‘But we have to! Think of the children!’ But this time when we drew him out, he was drowned dead, and not all our tears and prayers revived him then.

“Ias was shattered. I was distraught. My inner vision was stripped from my eyes. The gods turned their faces from me . . .”

“Then the treason charge was false.” Profoundly false.

“Yes. A lie, to hide our sins. To explain the body.” Her breath drew in. “But his family was allowed to inherit his estate—nothing was attaindered.”

“Except his reputation. His public honor.” An honor that had been all in all to proud dy Lutez; who had valued all his wealth and glory but as outward signs of it.

“It was done in the panic of the moment, and then we could not draw back from it. Of all our regrets, I think that one gnawed Ias the most, in the months after.

“Ias would not try again, would not try to find another volunteer. It had to be a willing sacrifice, you see; no struggling murder would have done it, but only a man stepping forth of his own volition, with eyes wide-open. Ias turned his face to the wall and died of grief and guilt”—her hands stretched the scrap of lace almost to tearing—“leaving me alone with two little children and no way to protect or save them from this . . . black . . . thing . . .” She drew breath, her chest heaving. But she did not spiral into hysteria, as Cazaril, tensing to spring up and call for her attendants, feared. As her breathing slowed, he let his muscles slacken again. “But you,” she said at last. “The gods have touched you?”

“Yes.”

“I am sorry.”

An unsteady laugh left his lips. “Aye.” He rubbed the back of his neck. It was his turn for confession, now. He might shade the truth with others, for expediency’s sake. Not with Ista. He owed her weight for weight and value for value. Wound for wound. “How much news had you from Cardegoss of Iselle’s brief betrothal, and Lord Dondo dy Jironal’s fate?”

“One messenger followed atop another before we could celebrate—we could not tell what to make of it.”

“Celebrate? A forty-year-old matched to a sixteen-year-old?”

Her chin came up, for a moment so like Iselle that Cazaril caught his breath. “Ias and I were further apart in age than that.”

Ah. Yes. That would tend to give her a different view of such things. “Dondo was no Ias, my lady. He was corrupt—debauched—impious, an embezzler—and I am almost certain he had Ser dy Sanda murdered. Maybe even by his own hand. He was colluding with his brother Martou to gain complete control of the House of Chalion, through Orico, Teidez—and Iselle.”

Ista’s hand touched her throat. “I met Martou, years ago, at court. He already aspired then to be the next Lord dy Lutez. Dy Lutez, the brightest, noblest star ever to shine in the court of Chalion—Martou might have studied to clean his boots, barely. Dondo, I never met.”

“Dondo was a disaster. I first encountered him years ago, and he had no character then. He grew worse with age. Iselle was distraught, and furious to have him forced upon her. She prayed to the gods to release her from this abominable match, but the gods . . . didn’t answer. So I did.

“I stalked him for a day, intending to assassinate him for her, but I couldn’t get near him. So I prayed to the Bastard for a miracle of death magic. And I was granted it.”

After a moment, Ista’s eyebrows went up. “Why aren’t you dead?”

“I thought I was dying. When I awoke to find Dondo dead without me, I didn’t know what to think. But Umegat determined Iselle’s prayers had brought down a second miracle, and the Lady of Spring had spared my life from the Bastard’s demon, but only temporarily. Saint Umegat—I thought he was a groom—” His story was growing hopelessly tangled. He took a deep breath, and backed up and explained about Umegat and the miracle of the menagerie, and how it had preserved poor Orico in the teeth of the curse.

“Except that Dondo, before he died, when he still thought he was about to be married to Iselle, told Teidez it was the other way around—that the menagerie was an evil Roknari sorcery set up to sicken Orico. And Teidez believed him. Five days ago, he took his Baocian guard and slew nearly every sacred animal in it, and only by chance failed to slay the saint as well. He took a scratch from Orico’s dying leopard—I swear, it was only a scratch! If I had realized . . . The wound became poisoned. His end was . . .” Cazaril remembered who he was talking to. “. . . was very quick.”

“Poor Teidez,” whispered Ista, staring away. “My poor Teidez. You were born to be betrayed, I think.”

“Anyway,” finished Cazaril, “because of this strange concatenation of miracles, the death demon and the ghost of Dondo were bound in my belly. Encapsulated in some kind of tumor, evidently. When they are released, I will die.”

Ista’s grieving face went still. Her eyes rose to search Cazaril’s face. “That would be twice,” she said.

“Ah . . . eh?”

Her hands abandoned the tortured handkerchief, and went out to grip Cazaril’s collar. Her gaze became scorching, almost painful in its intensity. Her breath came faster. “Are you Iselle’s dy Lutez?”

“I, I, I,” stammered Cazaril; his stomach sank.

“Twice. Twice. But how to accomplish the third? Oh. Oh. Oh . . .” Her eyes were dilated, the pupils pulsing. Her lips shivered with hope. “What are you?”

“I, I, I’m only Cazaril, my lady! I am no dy Lutez, I am sure. I am not brilliant, or rich, or strong. Or beautiful, the gods know. Or brave, though I fight when I’m trapped, I suppose.”

She made an impatient gesture. “Take away all those ornaments—stripped, naked, upside down, the man still shone. Faithful. Unto death. Only . . . not unto two deaths. Or three.”

“I—this is madness, now. This is not the way I intend to break the curse, I promise you.” Five gods, not drowning. “I have another plan to rescue Iselle from it.”

Her eyes probed him, still with that frightening wildness. “Have the gods spoken to you, then?”

“No. I go by my reason.”

She sat back, to his relief releasing him, and her brows crimped in puzzlement. “Reason? In this?”

“Sara—and you—married into the House and the curse of Chalion. I think Iselle can marry out of it. This escape could not have been available to Teidez, but now . . . I am on my way to Ibra, to try to arrange Iselle’s marriage with Ibra’s new Heir, Royse Bergon. Dy Jironal will seek to prevent this, because it will spell the end of his power in Chalion. Iselle means to slip away from him by bringing Teidez’s body back here to Valenda to be buried.” Cazaril detailed Iselle’s plan to ride with the cortege, then rendezvous with Bergon in Valenda.

“Maybe,” breathed Ista. “Maybe . . .”

He was unsure what she was referring to. She was still giving him an extremely unsettling look.

“Your mother,” he said. “Does she know of all this? The curse, the true tale of dy Lutez?”

“I tried to tell her, once. She decided I was truly mad. It’s not a bad life, being mad, you know. It has its advantages. You don’t have to make any decisions. What to eat, what to wear, where to go . . . who lives, who dies . . . You can try it yourself, if you like. Just tell the truth. Tell people you are pregnant with a demon and a ghost, and you have a tumor that talks vilely to you, and the gods guard your steps, and see what happens next.” Her throaty laugh did not incline Cazaril to smile along. Her lips twisted. “Don’t look so alarmed, Lord Cazaril. If I repeat your story, you have only to deny me, and I will be thought mad, not you.”

“I . . . think you have been denied enough. Lady.”

She bit her lip and looked away; her body trembled.

Cazaril shifted, and was reminded of his saddlebag, leaning against his hip. “Iselle wrote you a letter, and one to her grandmother, and charged me to deliver them to you.” He burrowed into the bag, found his packet of correspondence, and handed Ista her letter. His hands were shaking from fatigue and hunger. Among other things. “I should go get rid of this dirt and eat something. By the time the Provincara returns, perhaps I can make myself fit for her company.”

Ista held the letter to her breast. “Call my ladies to me, then. I shall retire now, I think. No reason more to wake . . .”

Cazaril glanced up sharply. “Iselle. Iselle is a reason to wake.”

“Ah. Yes. One more hostage to go. Then I can sleep forever.” She leaned forward and patted his shoulder in an odd reassurance. “But for now I will just sleep tonight. I’m so tired. I think I must have done all my mourning and wailing in advance, and there is none left in me now. All emptied out.”

“I understand, lady.”

“Yes, you do. How strange.”

Cazaril reached gingerly out to the bench, pushed himself up, and went to let the weepy attendants back in. Ista set her teeth and suffered them to descend upon her. Cazaril hoisted his saddlebags and bowed himself out.

A WASH, A CHANGE OF CLOTHES, AND A HOT MEAL did much to restore Cazaril physically, though his mind still reeled from his conversation with Ista. When the servants set him to await the Provincara’s return in her quiet little parlor in the new building, he was grateful for the chance to marshal his thoughts. A cheerful fire was set for him in the chamber’s excellent fireplace. Aching in every bone, he sat in her cushioned chair, sipped well-watered wine, and tried not to nod off. The old lady was not likely to stay out very late.

Indeed, she soon appeared, flanked by her cousin-companion Lady dy Hueltar and the grave Ser dy Ferrej. She was dressed in gala splendor in green satins and velvets, glittering with jewels, but one look at her ashen face told Cazaril that the bad news had already been blurted to her by some excited servant. Cazaril lurched to his feet, and bowed.

She gripped his hands, searching his face. “Cazaril, is it true?”

“Teidez has died, suddenly, of an infection. Iselle is well”—he took a breath—“and Heiress of Chalion.”

“Poor boy! Poor boy! Have you told Ista yet?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, dear. How did she take it?”

Well did not describe it. Cazaril chose, “Calmly, Your Grace. At least, she did not fly into any sort of wild pelter, as I’d feared. I think the blows her life has dealt her have left her numb. I don’t know how she’ll be tomorrow. Her attendants have put her to bed.”

The Provincara vented a sigh and blinked back tears.

Cazaril knelt to his saddlebags. “Iselle entrusted me with a letter for you. And there is a note for you, Ser dy Ferrej, from Betriz. She did not have time to write much.” He handed out the two sealed missives. “They will both be coming here. Iselle means to have Teidez buried in Valenda.”

“Oh,” said the Provincara, cracking the cold wax of the letter’s seal, careless of where the sprinkles fell. “Oh, how I long to see her.” Her eyes devoured the penned lines. “Short,” she complained. Her gray eyebrows went up. “Cazaril will explain everything to you, she says.”

“Yes, Your Grace. I have much to tell you, some of it in confidence.”

She waved out her companions. “Go, I will call you back.” Dy Ferrej was breaking open his letter by the time he reached the door.

She sat with a rustle of fabric, still clutching the paper, and gestured Cazaril to another chair, which he pulled up to her knee. “I must see to Ista before she sleeps.”

“I’ll try to be succinct, Your Grace. This is what I have learned this season in Cardegoss. What I went through to learn it . . .” That cost, the cracking open of his world, Ista had understood at once; he was not sure the Provincara would grasp it. “Doesn’t matter now. But Archdivine Mendenal in Cardegoss can confirm the truth of it all, if you get a chance at him. Tell him I sent you, and he will deny you nothing.”

Her brows went up. “How is it you bend an archdivine?”

Cazaril snorted softly. “I pull rank.”

She sat up, her lips thinning. “Cazaril, don’t make stupid jokes with me. You grow as cryptic as Ista.”

Yes, Ista’s self-protective sense of—not humor, irony—likely was irritating, at close quarters. Ista. Who spoke for Ista? “Provincara . . . your daughter is heartbroken, ravaged in will. She longs for the release of death. But she is not mad. The gods are not so merciful.”

The old woman hunched, as though his words grated over a raw spot. “Her grief is extravagant. Was no woman ever widowed before? Has none lost a child? I’ve suffered both, but I did not moan and mope and carry on so, not for years. I cried my hour, yes, but then I continued about my duties. If she is not broken in reason, then she is vastly self-indulgent.”

Could he make her understand Ista’s differences without violating Ista’s tacit confidences? Well, even a partial truth might help. He bent his head to hers. “It all goes back to the great war of Fonsa the Fairly-Wise with the Golden General . . .” In the plainest possible terms, he detailed the inner workings of the curse upon the history of the House of Chalion. There were enough other disasters in Ias’s reign that he scarcely needed to touch on the fall of dy Lutez. Orico’s impotence, the slow corruption of his advisors, the failure of both his policies and his health brought the tale to the present.

The Provincara scowled. “Is all this vile luck a work of Roknari black magic, then?”

“Not . . . as I understand it. It is a spillage, a perversion of some ineffable divinity, lost from its proper place.”

She shrugged. “Close enough. If it acts like black magic, then black magic it is. The practical question is, how to counter it?”

Cazaril wasn’t sure about that close enough. Surely only correct understanding could lead to correct action. Ista and Ias had tried to force a solution, as though the curse were magic, to be countered by magic. A rite done by rote.

She added, “And does this link to this wild tale we heard of Dondo dy Jironal being murdered by death magic?”

That, at least, he could answer, none better. He had already decided to strip out as much of the unnatural detail as possible from her version of events. He did not think her confidence in him would be augmented by his babbling of demons, ghosts, saints, second sight, and even more grotesque things. More than enough remained to astound her. He began with the tale of Iselle’s disastrous betrothal, although he did not attribute the source of Dondo’s death miracle, concealing his act of murder as he’d concealed Ista’s.

The Provincara was not so squeamish. “If Lord Dondo was as bad as you say,” she sniffed, “I shall say prayers for that unknown benefactor!”

“Indeed, Your Grace. I pray for him daily.”

“And Dondo a mere younger son—for Iselle! What was that fool Orico thinking?”

Abandoning the ineffable, he presented the menagerie to her as a marvel devised by the Temple to preserve Orico’s failing health, true enough as far as it went. She grasped instantly the secret political purpose of Dondo’s setting Teidez to its—and Orico’s—destruction, and ground her teeth. She moaned for Teidez’s betrayal. But the news that Valenda must now prepare for a funeral, a wedding, and a war, possibly simultaneously, revitalized her.

“Can Iselle count on her uncle dy Baocia’s support?” Cazaril asked her. “How many others can he and you bring in against dy Jironal’s faction?”

The Provincara made rapid inventory of the lords she might draw in to Valenda, ostensibly for Teidez’s funeral, in fact to pry Iselle from dy Jironal’s hands. The list impressed him. After all her decades of political observation in Chalion, the Provincara didn’t even need to look at a map to plan her tactics.

“Have them ride in for Teidez’s funeral with every man they can muster,” said Cazaril. “Especially, we must control the roads between here and Ibra, to guarantee the safety of Royse Bergon.”

“Difficult,” said the Provincara, sitting back with her lips pursing. “Some of dy Jironal’s own lands, and those of his brothers-in-law, lie between here and the border. You should have a troop to ride with you. I will strip Valenda to give you the men.”

“No,” said Cazaril slowly. “You’ll need all your men when Iselle arrives, which may well be before I can return. And if I take a troop to Ibra, our speed will be limited. We cannot hope to obtain remounts on the road for so large a company, and maintaining secrecy would become impossible. Better we should travel outward light and fast and unmarked. Save the troop to meet us coming back. Oh, and beware, your Baocian captain you sent with Teidez sold himself to Dondo—he cannot be trusted. You’ll have to find some way to replace him when he returns.”

The Provincara swore. “Bastard’s demons, I’ll have his ears.”

They made plans to pass his ciphered letters to Iselle, and hers to him, through Valenda, making it appear to dy Jironal’s spies that Cazaril still was in her grandmother’s company. The Provincara undertook to pawn some of Iselle’s jewelry for him on the morrow, at the best rate, to raise the coin he’d need for the next part of his journey. They settled a dozen other practical details in as many minutes. Her very determination made her god-proof, Cazaril imagined; for all her attention to pious ceremony, no god was going to slip into that iron will even edgewise. The gods had given her less perilous gifts, and he was grateful enough for them.

“You understand,” he said at last, “I think this marriage scheme may rescue Iselle. I don’t know that it will also save Ista.” Neither Ista, drifting sadly about the castle of Valenda, nor Orico, lying blind and bloated in the Zangre. And no exhortation of the Provincara to Ista to bestir herself would be of any use, while this black thing still choked her like a poisoned fog.

“If it only rescues Iselle from the clutches of Chancellor dy Jironal, it will satisfy me. I can’t believe Orico made such vile provisions in his will.” That legal note had exercised her almost more than the supernatural matters. “Taking my granddaughter from me without even consulting me!”

Cazaril fingered his beard. “You realize, if all this succeeds, your granddaughter will become your liege lord. Royina in her own right of all Chalion, and royina-consort of Ibra.”

Her lips screwed up. “That’s the maddest part of all. She’s just a girl! Not but that she always had more wits than poor Teidez. What can all the gods of Chalion be thinking, to place such a child on the throne at Cardegoss!”

Cazaril said mildly, “Perhaps that the restoration of Chalion is the work of a very long lifetime, and that no one so old as you or I could live to see it through.”

She snorted. “You’re barely more than a child yourself. Children in charge of the whole world these days, no wonder it’s all gone mad. Well . . . well. We must bustle about tomorrow. Five gods, Cazaril, go sleep, though I doubt I shall. You look like death warmed over, and you haven’t my years to excuse you.”

Creakily, he clambered to his feet and bowed himself out. The Provincara’s bursts of irate energy were fragile. It would take all her retainers’ aid to prevent her from exhausting herself dangerously. He found the anxiously waiting Lady dy Hueltar in the next room, and sent her in to attend upon her lady cousin.

THEY GAVE CAZARIL BACK HIS CHILLY, HONORABLE, customary chamber in the main keep. He slid gratefully between heated sheets. It was as much like coming home as anything he’d experienced for years. Yet his new eyes rendered familiar places strange again; the world made strange as he was remade, over and over, and no place to rest at last.

Dondo, in all his motley ghostly glory, scarcely kept Cazaril awake that night. He had become a danger almost too routine to be dreaded. Fresh fears assailed Cazaril now.

Memory of the terrible hope in Ista’s eyes unnerved him. And the reflection that tomorrow, he would mount a horse whose every stride would carry him closer to the sea.

Cazaril regretfully gave up use of the Chancellery’s courier remounts when they left Valenda, in favor of secrecy. No merit in handing dy Jironal a signed record of their route and destination. Armed with Palli’s letter of recommendation, they instead arranged exchanges for fresh horses at local town chapters of the Daughter’s Order. At the foot of the mountains on the western frontier, they were obliged to deal with a local horse trader for the sturdy and surefooted mules to carry them over the heights.

The man had clearly been making a fine living for years skinning desperate travelers. Ferda looked over the beasts offered them, and said indignantly, “This one has heaves. And if that one isn’t throwing out a splint, my lord, I’ll eat your hat!” The horse trader and he fell at once into acrimonious argument.

Cazaril, leaning in exhaustion on the corral rail and thinking only of how much he didn’t want to throw a leg over any animal, spavined or not, for the next thousand years, at last straightened and let himself through the gate. He walked out into the herd of milling horses and mules, stirred up by the rough-and-ready capture of their rejected comrades, spread his hands, and closed his eyes. “If it please you, Lady, give us three good mules.”

At a nudge at his side, he opened them again. A curious mule, its brown eyes limpid, stared at him. Two more muscled in, their long ears waggling; the tallest one, dark brown with a creamy nose, rested its chin on his shoulder and breathed out a contented-sounding snort, spraying the environs.

“Thank you, Lady,” muttered Cazaril. And more loudly, “All right. Follow me.” He plodded back through the hoof-pocked muck to the gate. The three mules fell in behind, snuffling with interest.

“We’ll take these three,” he told the horse trader, who, along with Ferda, had fallen silent and was staring openmouthed.

The horse trader found his voice first. “But—but those are my three best animals!”

“Yes. I know.” He let himself back out, leaving the horse trader to hold the gate against the three mules who still tried to follow him, shouldering up heavily against the boards and making anxious mulish noises. “Ferda, come to a price. I’m going to go lie down in that lovely straw stack. Wake me when we’re saddled up . . .”

His mule proved healthy, steady, and bored. There was nothing better, in Cazaril’s view, on these treacherous mountain trails than a bored mule. The fiery steeds Ferda favored for making time over the flats could have climbed no faster on these breath-stealing slopes, besides making a menace of themselves with their nervous sidling on the narrow places. And the mule’s gentle amble didn’t churn his guts. Although if the goddess granted Her saint mules, he didn’t know why She didn’t also give him better weather.

The dy Gura brothers stopped laughing at Cazaril’s hat about halfway up the pass over the Bastard’s Teeth range. He folded the fine fur flaps down over his ears and tied their strings under his chin before the sleet, driven by the tumbling updrafts, started stinging their faces. He squinted into the wind between the laid-back ears of his laboring mule at the track winding up through rocks and ice, and mentally measured out the daylight left to them.

After a time, Ferda reined back beside him. “My lord, should we take shelter from this blizzard?”

“Blizzard?” Cazaril brushed ice spicules from his beard, and blinked. Oh. Palliar’s winters were mild, sodden rather than snowy, and the brothers had never been out of their province before. “If this were a blizzard, you wouldn’t be able to see your mule’s ears from where you sit. This isn’t unsafe. Merely unpleasant.”

Ferda made a face of dismay, but pulled his hood strings tighter and bent into the wind. Indeed, in a few more minutes they broke out of the squall, and visibility returned; the high vale opened out before their eyes. A few fingers of pale sunlight poked down through silvery clouds to dapple the long slopes—falling away downward.

Cazaril pointed, and shouted encouragingly, “Ibra!”

THE WEATHER MODERATED AS THEY STARTED THE long descent toward the coast, though the grunting mules shuffled no faster. The rugged border mountains gave way to less daunting hills, humped and brown, with broad valleys winding between. When they left the snow behind Cazaril reluctantly permitted Ferda to trade in their excellent mules for swifter horses. A succession of improving roads and increasingly civilized inns brought them in just two more days to the river course that ran down to Zagosur. They passed through outlying farms, and over bridges across irrigation canals swollen with the winter rains.

They debouched from the river valley to find the city rising up before them: gray walls, a blocky jumble of whitewashed houses with roofs of the distinctive green tile of this region, the fortress at its crown, the famous harbor at its feet. The sea stretched out beyond, steel gray, the endless level horizon of it streaked with aqua light. The salt-and-sea-wrack smell of low tide, wafting inland on a cold breeze, made Cazaril’s head jerk back. Foix inhaled deeply, his eyes alight with fascination as he drank in his first sight of the sea.

Palli’s letter and the dy Gura brothers’ rank secured them shelter at the Daughter’s house off Zagosur’s main Temple plaza. Cazaril sent the boys to buy, beg, or borrow formal dress of their order, while he took himself off to a tailor. The news that the tailor might name his price so long as he produced something swiftly launched a flurry of activity that resulted in Cazaril emerging, little more than an hour later, with a tolerable version of Chalionese court mourning garb under his arm.

After a chilly sponge bath, Cazaril quickly slipped into a heavy lavender-gray brocade tunic, very high-necked, thick dark purple wool trousers, and his cleaned and polished boots. He adjusted the sword belt and sword Ser dy Ferrej had lent him so long ago, rather worn but looking more honorable thereby, and swung the satisfying weight of a black silk-velvet vest-cloak over the whole. One of Iselle’s remaining rings, a square-cut amethyst, just fit over Cazaril’s little finger, its isolated heavy gold suggesting restraint rather than poverty. Between the court mourning and the gray streaks in his beard, he fancied the result was as grave and dignified as could be wished. Serious. He packaged up his precious diplomatic letters and tucked them under his arm, collected his outriders, who had refurbished themselves in neat blue and white, and led the way through the narrow, winding streets up the hill to the Great Fox’s lair.

Cazaril’s appearance and bearing brought him before the Roya of Ibra’s castle warder. Showing his letters and their seals to this official sped him in turn to the roya’s own secretary, who met them standing in a bare whitewashed antechamber, chilly with Zagosur’s perpetual winter damp.

The secretary was spare, middle-aged, and harried. Cazaril favored him with a half bow, equal to equal.

“I am the Castillar dy Cazaril, and I come from Cardegoss on a diplomatic mission of some urgency. I bear letters of introduction to the roya and Royse Bergon dy Ibra from the Royesse Iselle dy Chalion.” He displayed their seals, but folded them back to his chest when the secretary reached for them. “I received these from the royesse’s own hand. She bade me deliver them into the roya’s own hand.”

The secretary’s head tilted judiciously. “I’ll see what I can do for you, my lord, but the roya is very plagued with petitioners, mostly relatives of former rebels attempting to intercede for the roya’s mercy, which is stretched thin at present.” He looked Cazaril up and down. “I think perhaps no one has warned you—the roya has forbid the court to wear mourning for the late Heir of Ibra, as he died in a state of unreconciled rebellion. Only those who wish to cast their defiance in the roya’s teeth are wearing that sad garb, and most of them have the presence of mind to do it in, ah, absence. If you do not intend the insult, I suggest you go change before you beg an audience.”

Cazaril’s brows went up. “Is no one here before me with the news? We rode fast, but I didn’t think we had outdistanced it. I do not wear these bruised colors for the Heir of Ibra, but for the Heir of Chalion. Royse Teidez died barely a week ago, suddenly, of an infection.”

“Oh,” said the secretary, startled. “Oh.” He regained his balance smoothly. “My condolences indeed to the House of Chalion, to lose so bright a hope.” He hesitated. “Letters from the Royesse Iselle, do you say?”

“Aye.” Cazaril added, for good measure, “Roya Orico lies gravely ill, and does not do business, or so it was when we left Cardegoss in haste.”

The secretary’s mouth opened, and closed. He finally said, “Come with me,” and led them to a more comfortable chamber, with a small fire in a corner fireplace. “I’ll go see what I can do.”

Cazaril lowered himself into a cushioned chair near the gentle glow. Foix took a bench, though Ferda prowled about, frowning in an unfocused fashion at the wall hangings.

“Will they see us, sir?” asked Ferda. “To have ridden all this way, only to be kept waiting on the doorstep like some peddler . . .”

“Oh, yes. They’ll see us.” Cazaril smiled slightly, as a breathless servant arrived to offer the travelers wine and the little spiced shortbread cakes, stamped with an Ibran seal, which were a Zagosur specialty.

“Why does this dog have no legs?” Foix inquired, staring a trifle cross-eyed at the indented creature before biting into his cake.

“It is a sea dog. It has paddles in place of paws, and chases fish. They make colonies upon the shore, here and there down the coast toward Darthaca.” Cazaril allowed the servant to pour him but a swallow of wine, partly for sobriety, partly to avoid waste; as he’d anticipated, he’d barely wet his lips before the secretary returned.

The man bowed lower than before. “Come this way, if it please you, my lord, gentlemen.”

Ferda gulped down his glassful of dark Ibran wine, and Foix brushed crumbs from his white wool vest-cloak. They hastily followed Cazaril and the secretary, who led them up some stairs and across a little arched stone bridge to a newer part of the fortress. After more turnings, they came to a pair of double doors carved with sea creatures in the Roknari style.

These swung open to emit a well-dressed lord, arm in arm with another courtier, complaining, “But I waited five days for this audience! What is this foolery—!”

“You’ll just have to wait a little longer, my lord,” said the courtier, guiding him off with a firm hand under his elbow.

The secretary bowed Cazaril and the dy Gura brothers inside, and announced their names and ranks.

It was not a throne room, but a less formal receiving chamber, set up for conference, not ceremony. A broad table, roomy enough to spread out maps and documents, occupied one end. The long far wall was pierced with a row of doors with square windowpanes set top to bottom, giving onto a balcony-cum-battlement that in turn overlooked the harbor and shipyard that were the heart of Zagosur’s wealth and power. The silvery sea light, diffuse and pale, illuminated the chamber through the generous glass, making the candle flames in the sconces seem wan.

Half a dozen men were present, but Cazaril’s eye had no trouble picking out the Fox and his son. At seventy-odd, the roya of Ibra was stringy, balding, the russet hair of his younger days reduced to a wispy fringe of white around his pate. But he remained vigorous, not fragile with his years, alert and relaxed in his cushioned chair. The tall youth standing at his side had the straight brown Darthacan hair of his late mother, though tinged with reddish highlights, worn just long enough to cushion a helmet, cut bluntly. He looks healthy, at least. Good . . . His sea-green vest-cloak was set with hundreds of pearls in patterns of curling surf, which made it swing in elegant, weighty ripples when he turned toward these new visitors.

The man standing on the Fox’s other side was proclaimed by his chain of office to be the chancellor of Ibra. A wary and intimidated-looking fellow, he was the—from all reports, overworked—servant of the Fox, not a rival for his power. Another man’s badges marked him as a sea lord, an admiral of Ibra’s fleet.

Cazaril went to one knee before the Fox, not too ungracefully despite his saddle-stiffness and aches, and bowed his head. “My lord, I bring sad news from Ibra of the death of Royse Teidez, and urgent letters from his sister the Royesse Iselle.” He proffered Iselle’s letter of his authority.

The Fox cracked the seal, and scanned rapidly down the simple penned lines. His brows climbed, and he glanced back keenly at Cazaril. “Most interesting. Rise, my lord Ambassador,” he murmured.

Cazaril took a breath, and managed to surge back to his feet without having either to push off the floor with his hand or, worse, catch himself on the roya’s chair. He looked up to find Royse Bergon staring hard at him, his lips parted in a frown. Cazaril blinked, and favored him with a tentative nod and smile. He was quite a well-made young man, withal, even-featured, perhaps handsome when he wasn’t scowling so. No squint, no hanging lip—a little stocky, but fit, not fat. And not forty. Young, clean-shaven, but with a vigor in the shadow on his chin that promised he was grown to virility. Cazaril thought Iselle should be pleased.

Bergon’s stare intensified. “Speak again!” he said.

“Excuse me, my lord?” Cazaril stepped back, startled, as the royse stepped forward and circled him, his eyes searching him up and down, his breath coming faster.

“Take off your shirt!” Bergon demanded suddenly.

“What?”

“Take off your shirt, take off your shirt!”

“My lord—Royse Bergon—” Cazaril was thrown back in memory to the ghastly scene engineered by dy Jironal to slander him to Orico. But there were no sacred crows here in Zagosur to rescue him. He lowered his voice. “I beg you, my lord, do not shame me in this company.”

“Please, sir, a year and more ago, in the fall, were you not rescued from a Roknari galley off the coast of Ibra?”

“Oh. Yes . . . ?”

“Take off your shirt!” The royse was practically dancing, circling around him again; Cazaril felt dizzy. He glanced at the Fox, who looked as baffled as everyone else, but waved his hand curiously, endorsing the royse’s peculiar demand. Confused and frightened, Cazaril complied, popping the frogs of his tunic and slipping it off together with his vest-cloak, and folding the garments over his arm. He set his jaw, trying to stand with dignity, to bear whatever humiliation came next.

“You’re Caz! You’re Caz!” Bergon cried. His frown had changed to a demented grin. Ye gods, the royse was mad, and after all this pelting gallop over plain and mountain, unfit for Iselle after all—

“Why, yes, so my friends call me—” Cazaril’s words were choked off as the royse abruptly flung his arms around him, and nearly lifted him off his feet.

“Father,” Bergon cried joyously, “this is the man! This is the man!”

“What,” Cazaril began, and then, by some trick of angle and shift of voice, he knew. Cazaril’s own gape turned to grin. The boy has grown! Roll him back a year in time and four inches in height, erase the beard-shadow, shave the head, add a peck of puppy fat and a blistering sunburn . . . “Five gods,” he breathed. “Danni? Danni!”

The royse grabbed his hands and kissed them. “Where did you go? I fell sick for a week after I was brought home, and when I finally set men to look for you, you’d disappeared. I found other men from the ship, but not you, and none knew where you’d gone.”

“I was ill also, in the Mother’s hospital here in Zagosur. Then I, um, walked home to Chalion.”

“Here! Right here all the time! I shall burst. Ah! But I sent men to the hospitals—oh, how did they miss you there? I thought you must have died of your injuries, they were so fearsome.”

“I was sure he must have died,” said the Fox slowly, watching this play with unreadable eyes. “Not to have come to collect the very great debt my House owed to him.”

“I did not know . . . who you were, Royse Bergon.”

The Fox’s gray eyebrows shot up. “Truly?”

“No, Father,” Bergon confirmed eagerly. “I told no one who I was. I used the nickname Mama used to call me by when I was little. It seemed to me more unsafe to claim my rank than to pass anonymously.” He added to Cazaril, “When my late brother’s bravos kidnapped me, they did not tell the Roknari captain who I was. They meant me to die on the galley, I think.”

“The secrecy was foolish, Royse,” chided Cazaril. “The Roknari would surely have set you aside for ransom.”

“Yes, a great ransom, and political concessions wrung from my father, too, no doubt, if I’d allowed myself to be made hostage in my own name.” Bergon’s jaw tightened. “No. I would not hand myself to them to play that game.”

“So,” said the Fox in an odd voice, staring up at Cazaril, “you did not interpose your body to save the royse of Ibra from defilement, but merely to save some random boy.”

“Random slave boy. My lord.” Cazaril’s lips twisted, as he watched the Fox trying to work out just what this made Cazaril, hero or fool.

“I wonder at your wits.”

“I’m sure I was half-witted by then,” Cazaril conceded amiably. “I’d been on the galleys since I was sold as a prisoner of war after the fall of Gotorget.”

The Fox’s eyes narrowed. “Oh. So you’re that Cazaril, eh?”

Cazaril essayed him a small bow, wondering what he had heard of that fruitless campaign, and shook out his tunic. Bergon hastened to help him don it again. Cazaril found himself the object of stunned stares from every man in the room, including Ferda and Foix. His tilted grin barely kept back bubbling laughter, though underneath the laughter seethed a new terror that he could scarcely name. How long have I been walking down this road?

He pulled out the last letter in his packet, and swept a deeper bow to Royse Bergon. “As the document your respected father holds attests, I come as spokesman for a proud and beautiful lady, and I come not just to him, but to you. The Heiress of Chalion begs your hand in marriage.” He handed the sealed missive to the startled Bergon. “In this, I will let the Royesse Iselle speak for herself, which she is most fit to do by virtue of her singular intellect, her natural right, and her holy purpose. After that, I will have much else to tell you, Royse.”

“I’m eager to hear you, Lord Cazaril.” Bergon, after a taut glance around the chamber, took himself off to a window-door, where he popped the letter’s seal and read it at once, his lips softening with wonder.

Amazement, too, touched the Fox’s lips, though it rendered them anything but soft. Cazaril had no doubt he’d put the man’s wits to the gallop. For his own wits he now prayed for wings.

CAZARIL AND HIS COMPANIONS WERE, OF COURSE, invited to dine that night in the roya’s hall. Near sunset, Cazaril and Bergon went walking together along the sea strand below the fortress. It was as close to private speech as he was likely to obtain, Cazaril thought, waving the dy Guras back to trail along through the sand out of earshot. The growl of the surf cloaked the sound of their voices. A few white gulls swooped and cried, as piercing as any crow, or pecked at the smelly sea wrack on the wet sand, and Cazaril was reminded that these scavengers with their cold golden eyes were sacred to the Bastard in Ibra.

Bergon bade his own heavily armed guard walk at a distance, too, though he did not seek to dispense with them. The silent routine of his precautions reminded Cazaril once more that civil war in this country was but lately ended, and Bergon had been both piece and player in that vicious game already. A piece that had played himself, it seemed.

“I’ll never forget the first time I met you,” said Bergon, “when they dropped me down beside you on the galley bench. For a moment you frightened me more than the Roknari did.”

Cazaril grinned. “What, just because I was a scaly, scabbed, burnt scarecrow, hairy and stinking?”

Bergon grinned back. “Something like that,” he admitted sheepishly. “But then you smiled, and said Good evening, young sir, for all the world as if you were inviting me to share a tavern bench and not a rowing bench.”

“Well, you were a novelty, of which we didn’t get many.”

“I thought about it a lot, later. I’m sure I wasn’t thinking too clearly at the time—”

“Naturally not. You arrived well roughed-up.”

“Truly. Kidnapped, frightened—I’d just collected my first real beating—but you helped me. Told me how to go on, what to expect, taught me how to survive. You gave me extra water twice from your own portion—”

“Eh, only when you really needed it. I was already used to the heat, as desiccated as I was like to get. After a time one can tell the difference between mere discomfort and the feverish look of a man skirting collapse. It was very important that you not faint at your oar, you see.”

“You were kind.”

Cazaril shrugged. “Why not? What could it cost me, after all?”

Bergon shook his head. “Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I’d always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at his ease before his own hearth.”

“Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice—if not whether, then how, they may endure.”

“Yes, but . . . I hadn’t known that before I saw it. That was when I began to believe it was possible to survive. And I don’t mean just my body.”

Cazaril smiled wryly. “I was taken for half-cracked by then, you know.”

Bergon shook his head again, and kicked up a little silver sand with his boot as they paced along. The westering sun picked out the foxy copper highlights in his dark Darthacan hair.

Bergon’s late mother had been perceived in Chalion as a virago, a Darthacan interloper suspected of fomenting her husband’s strife with his Heir on her son’s behalf. But Bergon seemed to remember her fondly; as a child he’d been through two sieges with her, cut off from his father’s forces in the intermittent war with his half brother. He was clearly accustomed to strong-minded women with a voice in men’s councils. When he and Cazaril had shared the oar bench he had spoken of his dead mother, although in disguised terms, when he’d been trying to encourage himself. Not of his live father. Bergon’s precocious wit and self-control as demonstrated in the dire days on the galley weren’t, Cazaril reflected, entirely the legacy of the Fox.

Cazaril’s smile broadened. “So let me tell you,” he began, “all about the Royesse Iselle dy Chalion . . .”

Bergon hung on Cazaril’s words as he described Iselle’s winding amber hair and her bright gray eyes, her wide and laughing mouth, her horsemanship and her scholarship. Her undaunted, steady nerve, her rapid assessment of emergencies. Selling Iselle to Bergon seemed approximately as difficult as selling food to starving men, water to the parched, or cloaks to the naked in a blizzard, and he hadn’t even touched yet on the part about her being due to inherit a royacy. The boy seemed half in love already. The Fox would be a greater challenge; the Fox would suspect a catch. Cazaril had no intention of confiding the catch to the Fox. Bergon was another matter. For you, the truth.

“There is a darker urgency to Royesse Iselle’s plea,” Cazaril continued, as they reached the end of the crescent of beach and turned about again. “This is in the deepest confidence, as she prays to have safe confidence in you as her husband. For your ear alone.” He drew in sea air, and all his courage. “It all goes back to the war of Fonsa the Fairly-Wise and the Golden General . . .”

They made two more turns along the stretch of sand, crossing back over their own tracks, before Cazaril’s tale was told. The sun, going down in a red ball, was nearly touching the flat sea horizon, and the breaking waves shimmered in dark and wondrous colors, gnawing their way up the beach as the tide turned. Cazaril was as frank and full with Bergon as he’d been with Ista, keeping nothing back save Ista’s confession, not even his own personal haunting by Dondo. Bergon’s face, made ruddy by the light, was set in profound thought when he finished.

“Lord Cazaril, if this came from any man’s lips but yours, I doubt I would believe it. I’d think him mad.”

“Although madness may be an effect of these events, Royse, it is not the cause. It’s all real. I’ve seen it. I half think I am drowning in it.” An unfortunate turn of phrase, but the sea growling so close at hand was making Cazaril nervous. He wondered if Bergon had noticed Cazaril always turned so as to put the royse between him and the surf.

“You would make me like the hero of some nursemaid’s tale, rescuing the fair lady from enchantment with a kiss.”

Cazaril cleared his throat. “Well, rather more than a kiss, I think. A marriage must be consummated to be legally binding. Theologically binding, likewise, I would assume.”

The royse gave him an indecipherable glance. He didn’t speak for a few more paces. Then he said, “I’ve seen your integrity in action. It . . . widened my world. I’d been raised by my father, who is a prudent, cautious man, always looking for men’s hidden, selfish motivations. No one can cheat him. But I’ve seen him cheat himself. If you understand what I mean.”

“Yes.”

“It was very foolish of you, to attack that vile Roknari galley-man.”

“Yes.”

“And yet, I think, given the same circumstances, you would do it again.”

“Knowing what I know now . . . it would be harder. But I would hope . . . I would pray, Royse, that the gods would still lend me such foolishness in my need.”

“What is this astonishing foolishness, that shines brighter than all my father’s gold? Can you teach me to be such a fool too, Caz?”

“Oh,” breathed Cazaril, “I’m sure of it.”

* * *

CAZARIL MET WITH THE FOX IN THE COOL OF THE following morning. He was escorted again to the high, bright chamber overlooking the sea, but this time for a more private conference, just himself, the roya, and the roya’s secretary. The secretary sat at the end of the table, along with a pile of paper, new quills, and a ready supply of ink. The Fox sat on the long side, fiddling with a game of castles and riders, its pieces exquisitely carved of coral and jade, the board fashioned of polished malachite, onyx, and white marble. Cazaril bowed, and, at the roya’s wave of invitation, seated himself across from him.

“Do you play?” the Fox inquired.

“No, my lord,” said Cazaril regretfully. “Or only very indifferently.”

“Ah. Pity.” The Fox pushed the board a little to one side. “Bergon is very warmed with your description of this paragon of Chalion. You do your job well, Ambassador.”

“That is all my hope.”

The roya touched Iselle’s letter of credential, lying on the glossy wood. “Extraordinary document. You know it binds the royesse to whatever you sign in her name.”