KATHARINE KERR

THE BLACK RAVEN
Book Two of the Dragon Mage

DEDICATION

For my grandmother, Elsa Petersen Brahtin 1899–1985

The courage in her life amazed me

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

A Note on the Deverry Sequence

Prologue: Winter, 1117 Bardek

Part One: Winter, 1117 Deverry

Part Two: Deverry

Epilogue: Spring, 1118

Keep Reading

Appendices

Glossary

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

A NOTE ON THE DEVERRY SEQUENCE

It occurs to me that readers might find it helpful to know something about the overall structure of the Deverry series. From the beginning of this rather large enterprise, I have had an actual ending in mind, a set of events that should wrap up all the books in dramatic conclusion. It’s merely taken me much longer to get there than I ever thought it would.

If you think of Deverry as a stage play, the sets of books make up its acts. Act One consists of the Deverry books proper, that is, Daggerspell, Darkspell, Dawnspell, and Dragonspell. The ‘Westlands’ books, A Time of Exile, A Time of Omens, A Time of War, and A Time of Justice, make up Act Two, while Act Three will unfold in the current quintet, ‘The Dragon Mage,’ that is, The Red Wyvern, The Black Raven, the volume you now have in hand, and its ‘sister’, The Fire Dragon. The Gold Falcon and The Silver Wyrm will bring the sequence to its end at last.

As for the way that the series alternates between past and present lives, think of the structure of a line of Celtic interlace, some examples of which have decorated the various books in this set. Although each knot appears to be a separate figure, when you look closely you can see that they are actually formed from one continuous line. Similarly, this line weaves over and under itself to form the figures. A small section of line seems to run over or under another line to form a knot.

The past incarnations of the characters in this book and their present tense story really are one continuous line, but this line interweaves to form the individual volumes. Eventually – soon, I hope – the pattern will complete itself, and you will be able to see that the set of books forms a circle of knots.

Katharine Kerr

PROLOGUE
Winter, 1117 Bardek

Always the sorcerer must prepare for hindrances and set-backs. Before any working of great length and import, he must spend long nights in study of the omens, for if the Macrocosm can find a way to defeat him, it will, preferring in its laziness the natural order over any change wrought by our arts, no matter how greatly that change will be to its benefit.

The Pseudo-Iamblichus Scroll

‘Marka, dearest?’ Keeta said. ‘I’m sorry. There’s something wrong with him.’

Marka tried to answer, but her throat filled with tears. Her youngest son, not yet two years old, sat on a red and blue carpet in a patch of sunlight that spilled through the tent door. He was frowning at the edge of the brightness; over and over again he would reach out a pale brown hand and touch the shadow next to it, then draw his hand back and frown the harder. Tight brown curls hung over his forehead; now and then he would bat at them as if they bothered him, only to forget them again in an instant.

‘He does know his name,’ Marka said. ‘He may not have any other words, but he does know his name.’

Keeta sighed and sat down next to the boy, who ignored her. They made an odd pair, Keeta so massive and dark, Zandro so slender and pale. Even though she had taken over the business end of managing their travelling show, Keeta still juggled, and her long arms sported muscles many a man had envied over the years. In her curly black hair, which she wore cropped close to her skull, grey sprouted at the temples.

‘I’ve been afraid for months,’ Marka said at last. ‘He still can’t use a spoon.’

‘Is it that he can’t use one?’ Keeta held out her hand to Zandro. ‘Or that he simply won’t?’

Zandro whipped his head around and bit her on the thumb. Calmly, without speaking, Keeta put her other hand under his chin, spread her fingers and thumb, and pressed on both points of his jaw. With a squeal he opened his mouth and let her go.

‘That’s better,’ Keeta said to him. ‘No biting.’

His head tilted to one side, he considered her. She pointed to the teeth marks on her thumb.

‘No! No biting!’

All at once he smiled and nodded.

‘Very good,’ Keeta said. ‘You understood me.’

This he ignored; with a yawn he returned to his study of the edge between light and shadow.

‘Ah ye gods!’ Marka said. ‘Just when I think it’s hopeless, he’ll do something like that. Understand a word, I mean, or even do something kind. When Kivva fell and cut herself yesterday? He came running and kissed her and tried to help.’

‘I saw that, yes. At times he’s really very sweet.’

Marka nodded. In the twenty years since her marriage, she’d borne nine pregnancies, not counting the miscarriages. Six of the children had lived past infancy – Kwinto, their first-born son; Tillya, the eldest daughter; Terrenz, born so soon after Tillya that they loved each other like twins; their sisters Kivva and Delya, named after Keeta’s long-time companion, who had died in the same fever that had killed another infant son. Zandro would, she hoped, be the last. She wondered how she was going to find the love and strength to deal with him, who would demand more of both than all the rest of them put together. Keeta must have been thinking along the same lines.

‘It’s not like you don’t have enough troubles on your mind already. What with Ebañy’s’ – a long pause – ‘illness.’

‘Oh, come right out and say it!’ Marka snapped. ‘He’s gone mad. We all know it. And now his youngest son is obviously mad, too. Why are we all being so coy? How would Ebañy put it? He’s demented, lunatic, deranged, insane –’ Tears overwhelmed her.

Marka was aware of Keeta getting up, then kneeling again next to her. She turned into her friend’s embrace and sobbed. Keeta stroked her hair with a huge hand.

‘There, there, little one. We’ll find a way to heal your husband yet. We’ll be playing in Myleton next. They have physicians and priests and the gods only know who else, and one of them will know what to do.’

‘Do you think so?’ Marka raised a tear-stained face. ‘Do you really think so?’

‘I have to. And so do you.’

The tears stopped. Marka sat back on her heels and wiped her face on the sleeve of her tunic. A sudden thought turned her cold.

‘Wait – where is Ebañy?’ Marka scrambled to her feet. ‘Here we are, on the coast, with the cliffs –’

‘I’ll stay here with the child.’

Marka ducked out of the tent, then stood blinking for a moment in the bright sunlight. Around her the camp spread out, a grand thing of white tents and painted wagons, the biggest travelling show that Bardek had ever seen. At the moment, however, the camp seemed curiously empty. Most of the performers had retired to their tents to sleep away the noon heat. Since she could see none of their animals, some of the men must have led them to the water trough by the public fountain, hidden from her sight by trees. Nowhere did Marka find Ebañy, but in the far view, at the edge of the caravanserai, between the palms and the plane trees, she could see the cliffs and distantly hear the sea, pounding on rocks below.

Marka trotted off, panting a little for breath in the hot sun. All those pregnancies had buried the slender girl acrobat somewhere deep inside a thick-waisted matron who had to bind up her heavy breasts for comfort’s sake. At those moments when she had the leisure to remember her younger self, Marka hated what she had become. Especially when she looked at her husband – as she hurried along the cliffs, she saw him at last, strolling along and singing to himself a good safe distance back from the edge. Her relief mingled with anger, that he could still look so young and so handsome, with his pale blond hair and his pale grey eyes, his pinkish-white skin just glazed with tan and as smooth as a young lad’s. When he saw her, he smiled and waved.

‘There you are, my love,’ he called out. ‘Do you have need of me for something?’

‘Oh, I was just wondering where you were.’

‘Enjoying this glorious day under the dome of the sky. The sea’s full of spirits, and so is the wind, and they’re all enjoying it with me.’

‘Ah. I see.’

Not of course that she did see the spirits teeming. He often spoke of spirits, as well as demons, portents, and visions, all of them invisible to everyone else. Still, she had to agree about the glory of this particular day, with the sea a winter-dark blue, scoured into white caps by the fresh wind.

‘I’ve been thinking about the show,’ Ebañy said. ‘I want to add something new to my displays, in the parts with the coloured lights. I’m just not sure what yet.’

‘It’ll come to you. I have faith.’

‘Well, so do I.’

They shared a smile. Hand in hand they walked back to the camp while he sang in the language of far-off Deverry.

‘A love song,’ he said abruptly. ‘For you, my beautiful darling.’

And he did love her, of that she was sure. Never in their years together had he spurned her, never had he amused himself with the young women who performed in the troupe, not even once, no matter how old and thick and worn she’d become. For that alone she would always love him, even though at times, such as now, when he studied her face with a strange intensity, she wondered what he was seeing when he looked at her.

With a squeal of delight Zandro came trotting to meet them. Keeta strolled after, shaking her head, as if to say that he was beyond her control. It was one of the strangest things about the boy, that he could walk as well as a much older child, yet not be able to form a single word.

‘Well!’ Marka pointed them out. ‘Look who’s coming.’

‘I see him, and a fine sight he is.’

When Marka said nothing, Ebañy paused to look at her.

‘You’re frowning,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘I’m just so worried about our Zan. He’s just not right. We can’t go on hiding it from ourselves. I mean, he should be talking more, and then –’

‘What? No, he’s fine for what he is. He’s a very young soul, just born for the first time. And he’s not human, truly. You can see it in his aura.’

He bent down and scooped the boy up. Laughing, Zandro buried his face in his father’s shoulder.

‘What do you mean, aura?’ Marka said.

‘Look for yourself.’ Ebañy waved his free hand around the boy’s head. ‘All the colours are wrong. What are you, my son? One of the Wildfolk, seeing what flesh feels like? Did you choose this, or did we trap you, my wife and I, when we were making a body for someone to wear?’

Marka felt her hands clenching into fists as if she could pummel his madness into silence. When Ebañy looked into Zandro’s eyes, the boy stared steadily back.

‘Not one of the Wildfolk,’ Ebañy said at last. ‘But some spirit whose time has come to be born. You’ve a lot to learn, my darling, but now the world is yours and all its marvels too.’

Carrying Zandro, Ebañy walked back toward their tent. Marka lingered, fighting back tears, until Keeta laid an enormous hand on her shoulder.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she murmured. ‘It’s so sad.’

‘Yes.’ Marka wiped her eyes on her sleeve. ‘It came on so slowly, didn’t it? I wonder now how long he’s been this way, and I never would let myself notice.’

‘None of us wanted to notice. Don’t berate yourself.’

‘Thank you. When he’s not – well, when he’s not saying peculiar things, I can pretend that we still have our wonderful life. But then he’ll come out with something, like just now, and I don’t know what to say.’

‘There probably isn’t anything to say. Ah well, we’ll see what Myleton brings us.’

* * *

Wherever Ebañy walked, the Wildfolk went with him, sylph, sprite, and gnome, and in the water undines, rising up to beckon him into the waves. In the fires the salamanders played, rubbing their backs on the logs like cats, leaping up with the flames. At one time in his life he’d called himself Salamander, back in the land of his birth. That he did remember, though a great many other memories escaped him. The world teemed with visions that drove out the ordinary details, such as the names of the cities they visited and at times even the names of his wife and children. That they were his wife and children he never forgot.

At night when he slept, his dreams took him to strange worlds filled with stranger spirits. On purple seas he travelled in a barge while a sun of poison green hung at zenith. Enormous undines followed and held out long grey hands while they asked him questions in a language he’d never heard. Other nights he climbed mountains of crystal where the rivers ran with blood, or he would ride six-legged beasts like emerald insects across sand dunes to the ruins of cities.

Every dream ended the same way. He would reach his destination, whether a city of gold by a harbour or a cavern glittering with sapphires and emeralds, and walk into a building – a temple, perhaps, to unknown gods or a tavern filled with incense smoke and plangent music. The room would annoy him, and he would leave it, going from chamber to chamber or down long halls until at last he would see the door. It was always the same, this door, a solid thing of dark wood bound with iron. He would remember that in the room behind this door lay a magical book. If he could read that book, he would once again know who he was.

When he pushed on it, the door opened easily, but instead of a room, he would find himself in a large canvas tent, lying on a sleeping mat. Usually sunlight would glow through the walls, and he would see wealth around him: brightly-coloured tent bags and carpets, rolled mats, wooden stools, big pottery jars. Sometimes people with dark skins and black hair would be sitting nearby. He would find his clothes lying beside him on the floor cloth, and he would dress, looking round at the objects in the tent and trying to remember their names while the Wildfolk flocked around him or chased each other back and forth.

Some while later, he would realize that he was awake.

A city of trees and broad avenues, Myleton lay on the northern seacoast of Bardektinna, the biggest island in the vast and complex archipelago that Deverry men call Bardek, lumping all the islands together with a fine disregard for their inhabitants’ politics and geography both. It was a rich city, too, where the public buildings gleamed with pale marble and the homes of the prosperous aped them with white stucco walls. Just to the south stood a public caravanserai with good deep wells and shade trees. After Keeta bargained with the archon’s men – public servants in charge of the campground – the troupe pulled in and got itself settled. Since the rainy season had begun, they had the caravanserai to themselves.

‘At least there won’t be strangers,’ Marka said. ‘Sometimes when Ebañy’s babbling, and there are strangers listening, I just want to die.’

‘Now, now, little one,’ Keeta said. ‘It’s no fault of yours, and who cares what strangers think? I’m more worried about the children, myself. Their father’s madness – it can’t be good for them to see him like this.’

‘It’s not, no. I try to talk with Kwinto, but he just shrugs me off. After all, he’s almost a man now, he keeps things to himself. But Tillya – she’s truly upset. She loves her father so much, and she’s old enough to understand.’

Marka and Keeta were walking through the public bazaar, which, here in winter, stayed open through the midday. In the centre of the white plaza, public fountains gushed and glittered in the cool sunlight. Around them a sea of brightly-coloured sunshades rippled in the wind over the hundreds of booths. Close to the fountains lay luxury goods such as silver work and brass ware, oil lamps, silks, perfumes, jewellery, strangely shaped knives, and decorative leather work, while the practical vegetable and fish stands stood at the downwind edge of the market. Here and there a few performers struggled to get the crowd’s attention – inept tumblers, a clumsy juggler, a pair of musicians who showed talent but needed practice.

‘There’s nothing here to compete with us,’ Marka said. ‘Good. And Myleton knows us. Everyone will come running to see us. Particularly Ebañy’s act.’

‘And so they should,’ Keeta said. ‘It’s spectacular. I’m not prying into his trade secrets, mind, but you can’t help wondering how he gets those effects. I’ve never seen him mixing chemicals or anything like that.’

‘Do you want to know what’s really strange? I don’t know how he does it, either.’

‘Really?’ Keeta stared for a moment. ‘Well, by the Wave Father! Your man’s a tight-lipped fellow, that’s for sure. I hope he’s at least teaching Kwinto.’

‘No, he’s not. He keeps saying it’s all real magic, just like they have in Deverry. There’s a funny name for it. Dwimmer or something. But Ebañy said Kwinto doesn’t have the talent for it. That’s why we have him juggling instead.’

They walked a ways in silence, then paused by the fountains, where clean water bubbled up into white marble basins.

‘I know it sounds like I’ve gone mad myself,’ Marka said at last. ‘Talking of magic, real magic I mean.’

‘Well, yes, but what if it isn’t mad? What if your husband’s telling the plain and simple truth? They always say that studying sorcery drives men insane, don’t they?’

‘But it can’t be true!’

‘Why not? The sun rises and sets again on many a strange thing. If Ebañy says he calls fire out of the sky with magic – well, do we have a better explanation?’

Marka merely shook her head.

‘I keep thinking about Jill,’ Keeta went on. ‘You remember her – she was travelling with Ebañy when we first met him, all those years ago now, but I can still see her in my mind quite clearly. A wandering scholar, she called herself. Huh. She was a lot more impressive than that.’

‘Well, that’s true,’ Marka said. ‘And Ebañy was always trying to get her approval for things, but he was afraid of her, too. I never knew why. Ye gods, I was so young then! I don’t suppose I really cared.’

‘Well yes, it was a long time ago, all right. My memory could be playing tricks on me, but you know, looking back, I really do wonder if Jill was a sorcerer, and if your husband knew a great deal more about such things than we would ever have believed.’

Marka could think of nothing to say. The idea made a certain bitter sense.

‘Ah well,’ Keeta went on. ‘After the show tonight, when we know how much coin we have to spend, I’ll come back into town and start asking about the priests. If one of them can drive out demons, everyone will know about it, and maybe it’s only a demon that’s troubling Ebañy so.’

Since in winter the Bardekian days ended early and lacked a proper twilight, the troupe of performers went into Myleton well before sunset. At nightfall the western sea swallowed the sun in one gulp to leave only a faint greenish glow at the horizon. As oil lamps began to flicker into life in the bazaar, the troupe set up for a show. Although they carried a portable stage of planks in their caravan, Myleton supplied – for a suitable bribe to the archon’s men – a better stage than that, the long marble terrace running alongside the Customs House at the edge of the bazaar. While some of the acrobats set up brass poles for the standing torches, the musicians, led by Kwinto and Tillya, paraded through the crowd and cried the show with a loud banging of drums. Below an audience gathered, small at first, then suddenly swelling as the word went round the bazaar: the Great Krysello is here! He’s going to perform! By the time the parade returned, there were too many spectators to count.

The Great Krysello, or Salamander, as Ebañy thought of himself, because on that particular night Salamander was the only name he could remember, waited in the darkness at the far side of the stage while the dancers performed, swirling with scarves to a flute and drum accompaniment. While he watched, he sang along to the music and laughed. Once he stepped onto the stage, he felt in command of himself again, sure of where he was and what exactly he should do there.

Many years ago he’d been a juggler, and juggler only, and to warm up the crowd he still tossed scarves and juggled eggs and such, talking and singing all the while. But somewhere along the years he’d discovered he could do much more to entertain. Or had he perhaps always known he could summon the Wildfolk of Fire and Aethyr to fill the sky with fire in lurid colours? Dimly he could remember being warned against such things. An old man had spoken to him harshly about it, once a long time ago. Somewhere in his mind, however, he also remembered that this fellow was no one. Since nothing was left of the memory but those words, ‘he’s no one,’ Salamander could assume the memory image of a tall old man with ice-blue eyes and white hair was just another dream come to walk the day.

And on nights like this one, when he walked onto the stage and looked out at the dark swelling shape of the audience, a single animal it seemed, lying just beyond the glare of oil lamps and the torchlight, he forgot any strictures he might have once heard. When the crowd roared and clapped, he felt its love pour over him, and he laughed, throwing his arms into the air.

‘Greetings!’ he called out. ‘The Great Krysello gives you his humble thanks!’

From his sleeves he flicked scarves and began to circle them from hand to hand, but always he was aware of the Wildfolk, sylphs and sprites, gnomes and salamanders, gathering on the stage, forming above the incense braziers, flocking around him and flitting this way and that, grinning and pointing at the crowd. In a flood of Elvish words he called out orders, and for the sheer love of play they obeyed him. Suddenly, far above the crowd, red and blue lightning crackled. With each boom of false thunder, sheets of colour fell and twisted in every rainbow the Wildfolk knew. The crowd roared its approval as the sheets broke into glowing drops and vanished just above their heads.

A green and purple mist burst into being around the stage, and deep within it voices sang alien songs. Once the crowd fell silent to listen, Salamander added explosions and bursts of gold and silver. Then back to the colours sheeting the sky – on and on he went until sweat soaked his costume and plastered his hair to his head. He let the colours fade and the music die away, then bowed deeply to the crowd.

‘The Great Krysello is weary! But lo! we have other wonders to show you.’

At the signal Vinto’s acrobats, all dressed in gaudy silks, rushed onto the stage. The crowd roared and threw coins in a copper and silver rain. As they tumbled around the stage, the acrobats scooped them up. Salamander stepped back to the shadows at the rear. While he mopped the sweat from his face and hair with a scarf, he looked out over the crowd.

One man caught his attention immediately, a tall fellow, standing right in front. His body seemed to waver like a reflection on moving water, and his clothes looked more like wisps of fog or smoke hung around him, or maybe just placed in his general vicinity, than solid cloth. Yet no one standing near him seemed to notice the least thing unusual. When the acrobats arranged themselves into a human pyramid, he clapped and smiled like anyone else. The flute and drums began their music; applause rippled, then died. The flickering stranger crossed his arms over his chest and stood reasonably still.

But always his eyes searched through the shadows. Salamander knew at once that the man – no, the being, some strange non-human thing – was looking for him. He could feel a gaze probing, feel alien sight run down his body like clammy hands. With a shriek lost in the music, he turned and leapt down from the stage, then took out running through the night. Down long streets he raced, panting for breath; in alleyways he stopped and looked around him. The door. He had to find the dark wood door bound in iron.

Past taverns, past craftsmen’s shops he jogged, looking at each door, peering into shadows while cold sweat ran down his back and his chest ached – nowhere did he find it. He ran again, then slowed to a stumbling walk. Around him the city lay dark and silent. The night hung over the river, an oily rush of dark water against a darker sky. Salamander stopped, listening. Water slapped against wooden docks. Footsteps rustled on stone. With a roar to the Lords of Fire, he spun around and flung up both hands. A gust of silver flame towered up and lit the alley in a cold glare. Black shadow outlined every stone on wall and street and seemed to carve some incomprehensible meaning into them. Thieves shrieked and ran, dashing away down the alley – two small men, carrying knives. In the dying light from the silver flare he watched them till they skittered around a corner and disappeared. Salamander laughed, then headed to the river bank. He could follow it upstream to the caravanserai.

He arrived to find the troupe clustering around a fire and talking. Marka paced back and forth at the edge of the pool of light, and every now and then she raised her hands to her face as if she wept.

‘Here!’ Salamander called out. ‘What’s so wrong?’

The troupe froze, then burst out laughing and cheering all at once. Marka ran to him and flung her arms around him.

‘My thanks to every god!’ Her voice quavered on the edge of sobs. ‘I was so worried.’

Salamander slipped his arms around her waist and held her while he murmured small soothing noises. At last her trembling quieted.

‘Have I been gone so long?’ he said.

‘Well past the midnight bells, yes.’ She looked up at him. ‘Why did you run like that?’

‘I don’t remember.’ He felt himself yawn and shook his head. ‘I’m exhausted, my love. I’ve got to go lie down.’

That morning Marka gave up on sleep early. When the sun was rising in a pink blaze of distant fog, and the sea wind was making the tents flap and rustle, she put on a short dress and went outside, yawning and stretching in the cool air. As she glanced around, she saw a stranger, dressed in Bardekian tunic and sandals, leading his horse through the camp. He saw her, waved, and strolled over. His skin was as pale as Ebañy’s, and his eyes a strange turquoise colour, as vivid as the stones, but since he wore a leather riding hat pulled down over his ears, she could see nothing of his hair.

‘Good morning,’ Marka said. ‘Are you looking for someone?’

‘Yes, actually. The magician who performed in the market place last night.’

‘Indeed? Well, I happen to be his wife.’

‘Ah. How do you do?’ The stranger swept off his hat and bowed to her. ‘I’m a friend of his father’s.’

Marka stared like a rude child, then pulled her gaze away. His ears were impossibly long, impossibly furled, and pointed.

‘Well, then, good sir.’ She found her voice with a little gulp. You’re certainly welcome in our humble camp.’

‘Thank you. My name is Evandar.’

‘My husband’s still asleep.’ Marka glanced back at the tent and saw the flap moving. ‘Or no, here he is.’

Salamander stepped outside, saw Evandar, and screamed aloud.

‘No, no, no!’ Evandar said. ‘I’m here to help you, truly I am. What’s so wrong?’

‘There’s nothing to you,’ Salamander said, and he was shaking so badly his hands knocked together. ‘You’re not really here.’

‘Well, I’m here as much I can be anywhere.’ Evandar looked down at himself and frowned. ‘Everyone else always thinks I look solid enough. Your charming wife, for instance, didn’t shriek at the sight of me.’

‘Indeed?’ Ebañy turned to her. ‘What do you see, when you look at him?’

‘Just a man like any other, as pale as you are, and so I guess he must be from your homeland. But I don’t understand what you’re saying. His ears are – well, forgive me, sir – but they’re awfully strange, but otherwise, he looks ordinary enough.’

For a long moment Ebañy stood unspeaking, glancing back and forth between the two of them. Behind him Kivva, their second daughter, flung open the tent flap and stared out, a tall girl, dark like her mother, with tight black curls cut close to her head. Zandro wiggled out between his sister’s legs, saw Evandar, and squealed one high-pitched note. He laughed, stuck out his tongue, then threw his head back and pranced around in a tight circle whilst waggling his fingers in Evandar’s general direction. Everyone stared, speechless, until Marka found her voice.

‘Zan! What are you doing? Stop that!’ Marka stepped forward and grabbed. ‘This man is our guest, and taunting him is very rude.’

Giggling, Zandro raced back into the tent. When Marka pointed, Kivva obligingly went in after him. Marka turned back to find Evandar considering her with a smile as sly as any merchant closing a deal.

‘Please, let me apologize for my son,’ Marka said.

‘Oh, no apologies needed,’ Evandar said. ‘He must be an unusual child, yes? Difficult to handle, perhaps?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘I’m not surprised. He’s not really human, you see.’

‘That’s what my husband says!’ Marka turned to Ebañy. ‘I don’t understand any of this!’

‘No doubt.’ Evandar bowed to her. ‘But I see this interests you. Perhaps we can discuss it?’

Ebañy merely glared at him, trembling on the edge of rage.

‘The Guardians,’ Evandar hissed. ‘Does that name mean anything to you?’

All at once Ebañy laughed, relaxed, and began speaking to him in an incomprehensible language. For a moment Marka felt like screaming herself, but the stranger seemed to understand the words; he answered in the same tongue. When she started to ask them what it was, Ebañy silenced her with a wave.

‘I’m sorry, my love, and truly, I’m forgetting all my manners.’ Ebañy laid a soft hand on her arm. ‘We have a guest, a stranger in our camp!’

‘So we do.’ She saw her chance for escape and took it. ‘We’ll all have a lovely breakfast. I’ll go attend to it.’

‘None for me!’ Evandar broke in. ‘I don’t exactly eat, you see.’

There seemed to be nothing to say to this announcement. Marka hurried away, calling to her daughters to come help with the meal.

Inside the tent Salamander offered his guest cushions, and they sat across from each other on a flat-woven carpet of green and blue. Kwinto, dark and graceful with his father’s long fingers and slight build, sat cross-legged on the floor cloth nearby. When Salamander glanced his way he found the boy’s face a tightly-controlled mask.

‘Did I ever tell you about the Guardians?’ Salamander said.

Kwinto shook his head.

‘They’re a race of spirits, like the Elementals, but far far more advanced and more powerful than that. This fellow, sitting here? The man you see is just an illusion.’

‘A bit more than that, please,’ Evandar said. ‘I don’t know what I make myself out of, exactly, but it suffices.’ He picked up a silk scarf, flicked it, then tossed it to Kwinto. ‘Illusions don’t have hands that hold and touch.’

Kwinto smiled briefly, then ducked his head to study the scarf as if perhaps he could read the secrets of the universe from the pale gold silk. Marka and the girls came in, set down plates of bread and fruit, cups, and a pitcher of water laced with wine. When they started out, Salamander called Marka back but let the girls run off.

‘Come sit with me, my love,’ he said. ‘I think this news concerns you, too.’

‘Where’s Zandro?’ Marka said. ‘I should go see –’

‘Terrenz has him.’ Kwinto spoke up, his boy’s voice cracking. ‘They went out the back when we came in.’

‘Leave him be, my love,’ Salamander said. ‘Sit down.’

When he shoved a cushion her way she sank onto it. For a long moment an awkward silence held, as Evandar studied her and Kwinto both, but neither would look his way. Salamander poured himself a cup of water.

‘I should tell you why I’m here,’ Evandar said at last. ‘Your father is worried about you. He wants you to come home.’

‘My life lies here.’

‘And it seems to be a busy one, I must say.’ Evandar glanced around the tent. ‘And prosperous. Your tents are much richer than your father’s.’

‘Bardek’s a richer country than the Westlands.’

‘Just so, but your father’s getting on in years. He desperately wants to see you. He worries about you, too, off in this far country. And now I see that he has grandchildren, and here he doesn’t even know it.’

At that Marka made a little whimpering sound, quickly stifled. Salamander glanced her way.

‘If he dies without seeing you,’ Marka started, then let her voice fade away.

‘And then there’s your brother.’ Evandar leaned forward, smiling at Kwinto, to press his advantage. ‘Did you know you have an uncle, boy? In far-off Deverry? His name is Rhodry Maelwaedd, and he’s a great warrior, one that poets make songs about.’

Kwinto’s eyes widened. Salamander held up a hand to keep him silent.

‘My father’s concern,’ Salamander said, and he could hear the bitterness in his own voice, ‘my father’s concern comes a bit late. When I rode with him at home all he ever felt for me was contempt.’

His voice drained all the colour from the tent and the people in it. He saw them all turn grey and as stiff as those little drawings a scribe makes in the margins of a scroll. The wind lifted the tent flap, and Devaberiel walked in to stand with his thumbs hooked in his belt. Salamander got to his feet.

‘What are you doing here?’ he snapped. ‘Evandar just said you were back in Deverry.’

His father ignored the question and stood looking around the tent with a little twisted smile. He was a handsome man, Devaberiel, in the elvish manner, with moon-beam pale hair, and tall, walking round with a warrior’s swagger as he looked over the tent and its contents.

‘You could at least talk to me!’ Salamander took one step toward him.

Devaberiel yawned in complete indifference.

‘Curse you!’

‘Oh please!’ Marka rose to her knees and grabbed the edge of his tunic. ‘Ebañy, stop it! There’s no one there!’

She was right. His father had disappeared. No – he’d never really been there, had he? Salamander turned toward Marka and found her weeping. He could think of nothing to say, nothing at all, but he sat down next to her and reached out a hand. She clasped it in both of hers while the tears ran down her face. In a rustle of wind the Wildfolk crept into the tent and stood round the edge like a circle of mourners. Am I dead then? he thought.

At the thought he felt his consciousness rise and drift free of his body. Although the light turned bluish and dim, he could see his body slump and fall forward, spilling plates and cups alike. He could also see that he now occupied a strange silver flame-like shape, joined to that body by a mist of silver cord. Marka clasped her hands to her mouth to stifle a scream; Kwinto leapt to his feet. Evandar got up more slowly.

‘Follow the cord,’ he said. ‘Follow the cord back.’

With a rush of dizzy fall Salamander felt himself descend and slam back into the flesh so hard he groaned aloud. He lay on his back amid spilled food and stared at the peak of the tent’s roof, which seemed to be slowly turning.

‘This is terrible,’ Evandar was saying. ‘What’s happened to him?’

‘He’s gone mad,’ Marka said. ‘It’s been coming on for a long time, but now – it’s – it’s taken him over.’

Salamander watched the roof spin and tried to think. He could hear Marka and Evandar talking, but their words made no sense. Was he mad, then? Were the marvels he’d been seeing signs of madness and naught more?

‘It’s the curse,’ he whispered. ‘When Jill left us she cursed me. That much I can remember.’

Evandar dropped to one knee next to him and caught his hand.

‘Try to remember. Why would Jill –’

‘I don’t know. Something about dweomer.’

The tent spun to match the roof and dropped him into darkness.

With Kwinto’s help Marka got Ebañy settled, then left the boy there to watch his father and followed Evandar out of the tent. Sun and air had never seemed so wholesome, nor a breeze so clean. Together they walked to the edge of the caravanserai and stood in the shade of the rustling trees. Far below them on its rocks the ocean boomed and hissed.

‘Good sir,’ Marka said. ‘You seem to know a lot about all these strange things. Is Jill really working a curse against my husband?’

‘Hardly.’ Evandar paused for a short bark of a laugh. ‘She’s dead.’

Marka felt hot blood rush into her face. She could think of no apology that would matter.

‘I’m very very sorry to see your husband in this state,’ Evandar said after a moment. ‘I’ll have to do something about this.’

‘Can you help him? Oh, if you only could, I’d – well, I don’t know how we’d repay you, but we do have coin.’

‘Hush! No payment needed. I made his father a promise, and I intend to keep it. I can’t cure your husband, no. But I might know someone who can.’

Marka wept in sheer relief.

‘But it’s not going to be such an easy thing,’ Evandar went on. ‘This person is far away in your husband’s homeland. The kingdom of Deverry. Do you know about it?’

‘Well, a little. It’s supposed to be a horrible place where everyone’s a barbarian, and all the men carry swords and get drunk and chop each other to pieces.’

‘A slight exaggeration.’ Evandar grinned at her. ‘Be that as it may, Deverry’s also a wretchedly long way away, across a mighty ocean and all that, and I’m not truly sure of how we’ll get there, or if she – the person I’m thinking of – can truly heal him once we do.’

Hope sank and left her exhausted. She rubbed her face with both hands and tried to think.

‘My apologies,’ Evandar said. ‘I wish I could offer you a certainty. Although, don’t lose heart! If the person I’m thinking of can’t help, there may be others.’

‘If anyone could do something – I’m just so frightened.’

‘No doubt. Well, I’ll be off then to see what I can find.’

Evandar bowed to her, then turned and began to walk toward the cliff’s edge. He stopped and glanced back.

‘Take care of my horse, will you?’ he called out. ‘I won’t be needing him.’

He walked two paces more, then set one foot on the air as if it were as solid as a step, hauled himself up, and disappeared.

PART ONE
Winter, 1117 Deverry

Kings in their arrogance say, ‘We were born to rule any land we can conquer.’ I say to you, ‘The universe holds lands beyond our imagining and peoples beyond our conquering.’ Be ye always mindful that your sight is short and the universe, long.

The Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid

In Dun Cengarn, up in the far northlands of Deverry, snow lay thick on field and thatch. The lazy sun stayed above the horizon a little longer each day, but still it seemed that the servants had barely cleared away the midday meal before the darkness closed in again. On these frozen days the life of the dun moved into the great hall. Servants, the nobleborn, the men of the warband, the dogs – they all clustered at one or the other of the two enormous hearths. On the coldest days, when the wind howled around the towers of the dun and banged at the doors and gates, everyone stayed in bed as long as possible and crawled back into their blankets again as soon as they could.

At night, up in her tower room, Dallandra and Rhodry huddled together under all the blankets they owned between them. They slept in their clothes for the warmth, then stayed late a-bed as well.

‘You’re much nicer than a pair of dogs,’ she remarked one morning. ‘Warmer, too.’

‘I’m glad I please my lady,’ Rhodry said, yawning. ‘I was thinking much the same about you, actually. And no fleas.’

She laughed and kissed him, then rested her head on his chest with the blanket drawn up around her ears.

‘Is it snowing out?’ Rhodry said. ‘With the leather over the shutters, I can’t tell.’

‘How would I know? Dweomer doesn’t let you see through stone walls.’

‘That’s a cursed pity. I don’t care enough to get up and see. I –’ He paused, listening. ‘Someone’s at the door?’

Dalla poked her head out of the blankets. Sure enough, she could hear someone shuffling on the landing outside, with the occasional deep sigh, as if whoever it was feared to knock.

‘Who’s there?’ she called out.

‘Jahdo, my lady.’ The boy’s voice sounded of tears. ‘I were wondering if you or my lord should be needing somewhat.’

‘Come in, lad. I think me you’re the one who needs a bit of company.’

Bundled up in a cloak, Jahdo opened the door and slipped in, ducking his head and rubbing his eyes with the back of one hand.

‘Sit down at the end of the bed,’ Dallandra said. ‘There’s enough room to get most of you under the blankets.’

Jahdo did as he was told, sitting crosswise with the cloak around his back and the blankets over his legs. Dalla could see the streaks of tears down his dirty face.

‘What’s so wrong?’ she said.

‘I be bereft, my lady, a-missing my Mam and Da and my sister and my brother and all our weasels.’ Jahdo paused for a moist gulp. ‘There be a longing on my heart for home.’

‘Well, I understand. I miss my homeland, too, and Evandar,’ Dallandra said. ‘My heart aches for you, but soon with the spring, we’ll be riding west.’

‘So I do hope.’

‘Oh come now, lad,’ Rhodry said. ‘I made you a promise, didn’t I?’

‘You did, but so did Jill, and then she –’ His voice cracked. ‘And then she died.’

‘True spoken, but I’m too daft and mean and ugly to die.’ Rhodry sat up, grinning. ‘At least when there’s no war to ride, and truly, my lady Death seems to be spurning my suit even then. When Arzosah flies back to Cerr Cawnen, we’ll be on our way. She knows the weather and the seasons better than any sage or bard.’

Jahdo nodded, considering this. Privately Dallandra wondered if they’d ever see the dragon again. Wyrmkind was not known for its faithfulness.

‘It won’t be so long till spring,’ she said to the boy. ‘We’re well past the shortest day.’

‘I know, my lady. And truly do I think I could wait with good heart but for my worrying about my kin. My Mam, she be frail in the winter, and then my sister, she were to be married, and here I don’t even know which man they picked for her.’ Jahdo paused and took a deep breath. ‘Uh, my lady, I did wonder somewhat, you see.’

‘Could I scry your family out, you mean?’

‘Just that.’ He was looking at her with begging eyes.

‘Jahdo, I’m so sorry, but I can’t. I can only scry someone out if I’ve seen them in the flesh first.’

‘Oh.’ He gulped back tears. ‘Why?’

‘It’s just the way dweomer works. I don’t truly know why. I’m sorry. It’s a hard thing to be missing your kin and have no way to get news of them.’

‘That be true, sure enough. At least Evandar comes and goes, and you do see him now and again.’ Jahdo paused to wipe his eyes with the back of a grubby hand. ‘I did wake so cold this morning, and I did think on how warm it be at home.’

‘Oh come now!’ Dallandra said with a laugh. ‘Cerr Cawnen’s a good bit farther north than we are. It must be even colder.’

‘Ah, you know not about the lake. Our lake, it be warm, my lady, even in winter. My Da did tell me once that way down in the deeps of the lake lie springs, where water bubbles up from the fire mountain, and it be as hot as you’d heat for a bath, hotter even.’

‘Fire mountain?’ Rhodry said. ‘Does your town lie near a fire mountain?’

‘Too near, some say. I mean, we sit not in its shadow, but it be close enough. One of our gods does live in it, you see. As long as we do honour him and bring him gifts, he’ll not harm us.’

Dallandra had grave doubts, but she saw no use in worrying the lad when there was naught to be done about it.

‘So,’ she said instead. ‘Your town stands on the shores of this warm lake?’

‘On them and in them, my lady. You’ll see, or so I do hope. But truly, I might not shiver so badly now if my kin were here with me. Rori, and what of your kin? Never have I heard you speak of them, not once.’

‘Probably you never will,’ Rhodry said. ‘I’ve no idea if they ride above the earth or under it, and I care even less.’

Jahdo stared open-mouthed.

‘A silver dagger can’t afford a warm heart,’ Rhodry went on. ‘Think on Yraen, as much a friend as I’ve ever had, and ye gods, I don’t even know where he lies buried, do I? You learn, lad, after a while and all, to keep your heart shut as tight as a miser’s moneybox.’

‘Mayhap so,’ Jahdo said. ‘But never could I be a silver dagger.’

‘Good,’ Rhodry said, smiling. ‘You’re a lucky man, then. Although, truly, there’s one kinsman I do wonder over, just at times, and that’s my brother Salamander, as his name goes in this country.’ He glanced at Dallandra. ‘Did you ever meet him? In our father’s country he’s called Ebañy Salomanderiel tran Devaberiel.’

‘I’ve not,’ Dallandra said. ‘Although Jill told me a lot about him. He seemed to irritate her beyond belief.’

‘He takes some people that way. What’s so wrong, Jahdo? You look like you’ve just heard one of Evandar’s riddles.’

‘That be the longest name that ever I’ve heard in my life,’ Jahdo said. ‘How do you remember such?’

‘Practice.’ Rhodry suddenly laughed. ‘Let’s get up, shall we? I’m hungry enough to eat a wolf, pelt and all.’

‘So am I,’ Dallandra said. ‘And speaking of Evandar, I dreamt about him last night, and I have an errand to run.’

Since the presence of iron caused him agony, and the dun held an enormous amount of the stuff, Evandar had taken to finding Dallandra in the Gatelands of Sleep. They would then arrange a meeting somewhere free of the demon metal, as he called it. In the brief afternoon, when the air felt not warm but certainly less cold, Dalla wrapped herself in a heavy cloak and trudged through Cengarn to the market hill. At its crest the open commons lay thick with snow, crusted black with soot and ash from household fires. A group of children ran and played, their young voices sharp as the wind as they dug under the crust to find clean snow. Dallandra suppressed the urge to make a few snowballs herself and slogged across to a small copse of trees, where in the streaky shade of bare branches Evandar waited, wrapped in his blue cloak.

‘There you are, my love,’ he said.

‘I am indeed,’ Dallandra said. ‘Now what’s this urgent matter?’

‘Rhodry’s brother. Ebañy, as his name goes in Bardek.’

‘How very odd! We were just speaking of him, Rhodry and I.’

‘Not odd at all. You were feeling his approach, my love, through the mists of the future.’

‘His approach?’

‘That’s what I’ve come to ask you about. You see, he’s gone quite mad, and I don’t have the slightest idea of what to do about it.’

‘Ah. And I suppose you think I do.’

‘Don’t you?’

Dalla considered for a long moment.

‘Perhaps,’ she said at last. ‘I’m remembering some of the things Jill told me about him. He had a great talent for dweomer, so she said. He studied it for many years, but then he just walked away from it.’

‘Will that drive someone mad?’

‘Indeed it will. You can’t just stop your studies once you’ve reached a certain point.’

‘Imph.’ Evandar rubbed his chin with one hand. ‘This world of yours, my love. Everything here seems so – so wretchedly irrevocable.’

‘Not exactly.’ Dallandra paused for a laugh. ‘He could have left the dweomer, certainly, if he’d wished. But he needed to go back to his teacher and have her help him. How to explain this – let me think – well, I can’t, really, but there are rituals that seal things off properly, that stop certain processes which studying dweomer starts in motion.’

Evandar blinked rapidly several times.

‘Oh well,’ Dallandra went on. ‘It doesn’t particularly matter. I suppose you want me to try to cure Ebañy for you.’

‘Not so much for me, but for his own self and his father. You see, I promised Devaberiel that I’d bring his son home. And so I went looking for him in Bardek, and I found him quite deranged. His wife’s frantic about it.’

‘He has a wife, then.’

‘And children. A lot of children, actually. I didn’t get a chance to count them.’

‘Well, you can’t just snatch him away from his family.’

‘Here’s a great marvel. I realized that all on my own.’ Evandar smiled and leaned over to kiss her. ‘So I thought I’d bring them all over.’

‘Over where?’ Dallandra grabbed his shoulders and pushed him to arm’s length. ‘And when? There’s not enough food in the dun for everyone who’s already in it. You’ll have to wait until the first harvest – early summer, that will be.’

‘Well, then, you see? It’s a grand thing that I thought to consult with you first. Especially since there’s also the little matter of his travelling show.’

‘Travelling show?’

‘His eldest son juggles. His eldest daughter and her brother walk the slack wire.’ Evandar held up one hand and began counting things off on his fingers. ‘Then he’s got friends who are jugglers and acrobats. Rather a lot of those, actually. Some lasses rescued from slavery who dance with scarves. Servants. Horse handlers, and of course, the horses and wagons. And then –’

‘That’s quite enough.’

‘And then,’ Evandar went inexorably on, ‘the elephant.’

Dallandra goggled at him.

‘An elephant, my love,’ Evandar said, grinning, ‘is an enormous beast. Not quite so big as a dragon, but large enough. It has a thick grey hide, a pair of huge ears, and then a long nose that acts like a hand. It picks things up.’

‘I don’t care about its nose. You can’t bring it here.’

‘I did come to that conclusion.’ He went on grinning. ‘So where, my love, shall I bring it and all the rest of them?’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea. Let me think on it.’ Dallandra paused for a sigh that came out more like a growl. ‘I’m beginning to understand why the very mention of Salamander made Jill furious.’

‘Indeed? Here, Salamander claims that Jill cursed him when they parted, but frankly, I can’t believe it of her.’

‘No more can I. How very very odd! I’ll ask Rhodry what he thinks.’

‘Do that, if you’d be so kind.’ Evandar frowned down at the filthy snow. ‘And now I’d best be off again. I’ve a great many concerns these days, and they seem to have got themselves all tangled in my mind.’

From Cengarn Evandar took to the mothers of all roads. It seemed to him that he walked on the north wind like a long grey path in the sky. When he travelled between worlds, he heard now and again scattered words and snatches of conversations, and at other times he saw visions in brief glimpses, as if he looked through windows into the future, a vast shadowed room. Today, however, the omens shunned him. The silence irked; he found himself pausing to listen, but all he ever heard was the whistle and churn of the air, and all he saw were clouds.

When he left the north wind’s road, he found himself at the edge of the forest that marked the border of his own true country. Instead of crossing it, he turned to his right and found a path that led into a scatter of boulders. As he strode along, the air grew colder; suddenly the sky turned grey, and snow fell in a scatter of flakes. It seemed that he was walking downhill; below him in the sunset light Loc Vaedd gleamed, a green jewel set in snow. Evandar took another step and found himself standing on Citadel’s peak among the wind-twisted trees, the highest point of Cerr Cawnen, a city of circles. In the middle stood the rocky peak of Citadel Island. Around it stretched the blue-green lake, fed by hot springs and thus free of ice even in the dead of winter. At the edge of the lake on crannogs and shore stood the tangled houses of the city proper, while around them ran a huge circle of stone walls, where the town militia guarded shut gates. Just the summer before, Cerr Cawnen had received a warning that the savage Horsekin tribes of the far north were on the move, and such warnings were best attended to.

In fact, even though the town drowsed in blessed ignorance, a human being lived among them who spied for the Horsekin. Some twenty feet below Evandar’s perch, on the east side of Citadel’s peak a tunnel mouth gaped among tumbled chunks of stone and broken masonry. It led to an ancient temple, cracked and half-buried by an earthquake a long while previous. Evandar started to go down, but he saw the spy – Raena, her name was – climbing up the path from the town below. He stepped back into the trees to avoid her. Even though she was young and pretty in a fleshy sort of way, she walked bent over like an old woman as she struggled up the slope in her long cloak. When at the tunnel mouth she paused to pull her dark hair back from her face, Evandar could see the livid marks like bruises under her eyes and the pallor of her skin. Quite possibly Shaetano was using her as wood to fuel his fires even as she thought she was using him to serve her Horsekin masters.

Raena climbed down into the tunnel. Evandar waited a long moment, then shrank his form and turned himself into a large black dog. His nails clicked on stone as he followed her in. After a few yards the tunnel turned dark enough to hide him, but ahead, through the big split in the wall that formed the entrance to the temple room, he could see the silver glow of Raena’s dweomer light. He stopped to one side of the narrow entrance and listened, head cocked to one side, ears pricked, long tongue lolling. At first he heard nothing but Raena’s voice, chanting in a long wail and rise; then Shaetano joined her, speaking in the dialect of the Rhiddaer.

‘What would you have of me, O my priestess?’

‘To worship thee, Lord Havoc, O great one, and beg for knowledge.’

Evandar growled, then let himself expand until he could take back his normal elven form.

‘All my knowledge shall be yours,’ Shaetano was saying. ‘What wouldst thou learn?’

‘One riddle does make my heart burn within me. Where does she dwell now, my Alshandra? Why will she not come to me again? Why has she deserted me, my own true goddess, she whom I worship above all other gods?’

‘Ah, this be a matter most recondite and admirable. Far far beyond what you would call the world does she dwell, in an ineffable refulgence.’

Evandar stepped through the opening. Dressed all in black, one arm raised in a dramatic flourish, Shaetano stood before a kneeling Raena.

‘You might at least speak clearly,’ Evandar remarked. ‘How is the poor woman supposed to understand nonsense like that?’

Raena screamed. Shaetano’s form wavered, as if he were about to step onto a Mother-road and disappear, then held steady as he held his ground. Evandar turned to Raena with a sigh.

‘She never was a goddess, woman!’ Evandar snapped. ‘And now she’s dead. You were there, you saw her die.’

‘I saw naught of the sort!’ Raena scrambled to her feet. ‘She did but return to her own country. And she be a goddess. I do ken this deep in my heart, you stinking blasphemer! And she lives, I do ken that she lives still. Who are you, that lies like maggots fall from your lips?’

‘I am Lord Harmony,’ Evandar said to her. ‘And your Lord Havoc is my brother. Flee this place! Leave us!’

Raena hesitated. Evandar raised a hand and called down the blue etheric fire, leaping and flashing at his fingertips. Raena squealed, then edged past him to squeeze through the entrance. He could hear her footsteps as she dashed down the tunnel. When he turned back, Shaetano was leaning insolently against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. In the shifting silver light he looked very like a fox in man’s clothing. Russet hair sprouted from his face; his ears stood up sharply on the top of his head; his nose was black and shiny. Only his eyes were fully elven, a shifting gold and green.

‘More and more you become your avatar, brother,’ Evandar said.

Shaetano swore. For a moment his image wavered; when it stabilized, his ears had migrated back to the sides of his head, and his skin was smooth, with only a roach of red hair pluming on his skull. His shiny black nose, however, seemed permanently fox, twitching a little in the cold damp air.

‘That’s better,’ Evandar said. ‘Now then, I want a word with you. Though I’ll admit to being surprised you’ll stay and listen to it.’

‘You can’t kill me. Don’t you remember what you said, that day upon the battle plain? You and I were born joined. You were the candle flame and I the shadow it cast? Well, elder brother,’ Shaetano paused for a smile, ‘if you kill me, who knows what will happen to you?’

‘Here! How do you know that? I was talking with Dalla, and you were long gone by then.’

‘I have my ways.’ He curled a hand that was more like a paw and smiled at his black claws. ‘And my allies.’

‘Ah, I see. Your little raven was spying even then, was she? Very well. Say it I did. You learn your lessons well.’

‘And haven’t you been my most excellent teacher?’ Again that smug smile. ‘So talk away. What is it that you want with me now? I’ll listen, though I may not answer.’

Evandar restrained the impulse to strangle him there and then, even if his own neck twisted.

‘Ask I shall,’ Evandar said aloud. ‘What are you doing to this woman, pretending to be a god and filling her head with portentous words?’

‘Doing to her? She’s grateful. She begs me for knowledge.’

‘And did she beg you to kill young Demet the weaver’s son?’

Shaetano winced and looked down at the floor.

‘I didn’t mean to do that. Truly! He came bursting in here with a sword in his hand and iron cloth all over his chest. It stung me like fire. I was half-mad from it.’

‘And you did what?’

‘I just wanted to make him go away.’ Shaetano’s voice slipped and wavered. ‘I shoved him, and the iron stung me, and so I threw him back against the wall.’ He looked up, and his eyes gleamed green in the silver witch-light. ‘I didn’t know how hard. His head – it hit the stone.’

‘Why wasn’t there a mark on him then, where his skull got smashed?’

Caught in his lie Shaetano snarled and flung up both hands. Evandar crossed his arms over his chest and merely looked at him. In a moment Shaetano looked down.

‘I don’t know how I killed him. I did somewhat, I waved my hands at him because of the stinking iron. And rage flew out, and somehow his life – it spilled away.’

‘What did this rage look like?’

‘Naught. I mean, it wasn’t a thing you could see. But he screamed and flung himself back and – and died.’

‘You truly don’t know what killed him?’

‘I don’t.’ Shaetano looked up, and suddenly he snarled again. ‘Oh, and what’s it to you?’

‘My heart aches for his young widow. Little Niffa. She mourns him every day still.’

Shaetano stared at him, his mouth half-open. White fangs gleamed.

‘What’s this, younger brother?’ Evandar said with a grin. ‘I see the word grief means naught to you. Let me tell you an interesting thing. I now know a great many things that you don’t. I learn more daily, and soon one of them will be how I may dispose of you.’

With one last snarl, Shaetano vanished. Evandar stood in the empty temple and laughed.

* * *

Councilman Verrarc was sitting at a table in his great room when Raena came home. As a merchant’s son, Verrarc had learned to read, but books to practise upon, as opposed to merchants’ agreements and city laws, were scarce in Cerr Cawnen. He still read slowly, sounding words out one at a time, pausing often to look terms up in the home-made word list at his elbow. He was glad enough to lay his scroll aside at the distraction when, shivering in her thick green cloak, Raena hurried in. Without a word to him she rushed to the fire burning in the hearth and held her hands out to the warmth.

‘What be wrong, my sweet?’ he said.

‘Naught.’ Raena busied herself in taking off the cloak.

‘Somewhat did turn you all pale and shivering.’

‘It be cold out there, Verro.’

‘Not as cold as all that.’

With a toss of her long black hair, Raena turned her back on him. She hung the cloak on a peg on the wall, then walked over to look at his work.

‘What be those squiggly things?’ she said.

‘Words.’ He paused, smiling at her. ‘Here, look! To read these out, you do start here at the top on the right, and you do read straight across. At the end of the row you do drop down and read back the other way.’

‘Ah.’ She nodded as if in understanding, but he knew that she could read none of it. ‘What does that scroll be saying, then?’

‘I’ll not tell you unless you do tell me where you’ve been this long while.’

‘Oh, be not a beast, Verro!’

Verrarc shoved his chair back and stood up.

‘Rae, it be time we had a talk. I do be sick to my heart of all your secrets. You do come and go at whim and never will you tell me where you’ve been.’

‘Oh here, you don’t think I have another man or suchlike, do you?’ Raena laughed, and easily. ‘I do swear to you, my love, that such be not true.’

‘I believe you, but your secrets still vex me. How can I but wonder where you go?’

Raena considered him for a moment, then shrugged.

‘To the temple in the ruins,’ she said. ‘I do go there to summon Lord Havoc.’

‘Ah. So I thought. The fox spirit.’

‘He be more than that. He does ken lore that I would have.’

When Verrarc said nothing, Raena sat down in a cushioned chair in front of the fire.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘and what about your half of our bargain? What be this thing you read?’

‘Some small part of a book of the witch lore.’

At that she twisted round in her chair to look up at him. Smiling, he rolled up the scroll and tied it with a thong.

‘What sort of lore?’ Raena said at last.

‘Tell me what sort of lore you do seek from your Lord Havoc, and I’ll tell you what this be.’

‘I be not so curious as all that.’ She turned back round to face the fire.

With a sigh that was near a snarl, Verrarc sat down in the matching chair opposite hers. For a long moment the only sound in the room was the roar and crackle of the fire.

‘Soon, my love.’ Raena spoke abruptly. ‘Soon, I promise you, you shall hear the secret I do guard so carefully. It be a grand thing, I promise you, with naught of harm in it. But there be one last thing that escapes me, and it truly is needful for me to learn it before I may speak.’

‘Well and good, then. But I’ll hold you to that “soon”, Rae, I truly will.’

‘Fair enough. Tell me somewhat, if you can. What does this word mean: refulgence, I think it were?’

‘I’ve not the slightest idea.’

‘I were afraid of that. And if you ken it not, I doubt me if anyone in this town does. A nuisance, but not more.’ She turned to him and gave him a slow, soft smile that warmed him more than the fire. ‘It be a good day to spend a-bed, my love.’

‘Just so.’

Verrarc rose, caught her hand, and as she got up pulled her into his arms. She kissed him, let him take another, and giggled like a lass as she squirmed free. As he followed her, he knocked against the little table and swept the scroll to the floor. With a soft curse he stooped and retrieved it, dusting a bit of soot from the roll.

‘That be a valuable thing?’ Raena remarked.

‘It is. I did pick it up in trade, this summer past. It has no proper beginning nor an end, so I do think it were torn apart some while past, but still, the man who owned it did drive a hard bargain.’

‘You did find it in a border village or suchlike?’

‘I didn’t, but in a dwarven holt. It be about the telling of omens in the signs of Earth.’

Raena tossed up her head and took a quick step back. Verrarc laid the scroll onto the table.

‘What be so wrong?’ he said.

‘Oh, naught, naught.’ Yet she laid a hand on her throat, and her face had turned a bit pale. ‘I did forget that you trade among the Mountain Folk.’

‘Every summer, truly.’ Verrarc caught her hand and drew her close. ‘You look frightened.’

‘Be not so foolish!’ Raena laughed, but it was forced. ‘Come, my love, kiss me.’

It was an order he followed gladly, but later, when he had time to think, he wondered why she’d looked so afraid of his going among the Mountain People. Was there something there she didn’t want him to find? Or could it be that she’d sheltered among them during one of her strange disappearances? Her secrets again, her cursed wretched secrets!

All his life Verrarc had craved the witch-knowledge and magical power. When he thought back, it seemed to him that he’d always known that such things existed, even though logically there was no way he could have known. As a child, he’d sought out the tales told in the market place or in the ancient songs, passed down from one scop to another, that told of sorcery and the strange powers of the witch road. When, as an older boy, he’d travelled with his father to Dwarveholt, he’d heard more and learned more in the strange little human villages on the borders of that country. Here and there he asked questions; once he grew into a man, he’d been given a few cautious answers.

The men of Dwarveholt proper professed to know nothing about such things, but the odd folk in the villages always had some tale or bit of lore to pass on. Finally his persistence brought success. On one journey a half-human trader had offered him a leather-bound book, written in the language of the Slavers. It was old, very old, or so the trader said, written by a priest named Cadwallon when the Slavers had first invaded the western lands. The price was steep, the writing faded and hard on the eyes – he’d paid over the jewels demanded without hesitating.

Together he and Raena had studied that book. He would read a passage aloud; they would puzzle over it until they forced some sense out of the lines. Both of them showed a gift for the witch road, as Rhiddaer folk called the dweomer, and together they learned a few tricks and a fair bit of lore. The marriage her parents arranged for her had interrupted them – for a while. On the pretext of visiting her husband, Chief Speaker in the town of Penli, he’d ridden her way often and spent time with her, until their studies revived their love-affair one drowsy summer afternoon. Her husband had discovered the truth and cast her out, setting her free to disappear from the Rhiddaer for two years.

Where had she gone? Verrarc could only wonder. She had never told him. Now and then she would visit him, turning up suddenly from nowhere, it seemed, as on that morning when he’d ensorcelled young Jahdo. She would drop a few hints about strange gods and stranger magicks, then be off once more. Certainly she’d learned more about witchery than he had thought possible. But this knowledge she refused to share.

In the middle of the night Verrarc woke to find Raena gone. On the hearthstone a candle stood burning in a punched tin lantern. He lay awake in their bed, watching the candle-thrown shadows dance on the ceiling. She had gone back to the temple, he supposed, and left the candle burning against her return. She might take all night for her scrying, but try as he might, he could not fall asleep with her gone. Although he tried to convince himself that he worried about her, he knew that in truth he was jealous.

Verrarc got up and dressed. From the stub of the dying candle he lit a fresh taper and placed it in the lantern. Just what was she doing with that Lord Havoc? If he wasn’t truly a god, and Verrarc tended to believe his brother, Lord Harmony, on that point, then he was some sort of powerful spirit, and everyone knew that spirits took a fancy to flesh and blood women on occasion. The thought made Verrarc’s fists clench. He grabbed the lantern and left the house by the back door.

Outside, the winter night lay damp around him. One of his watchdogs roused in its kennel, but he whispered, ‘Good dog, Grey, good dog,’ and the big hound lay back down. He unlatched the gate and left the courtyard, then turned uphill. By lantern light he picked his way across snow-slick cobblestones till he reached the frozen path that led to the ruined temple, directly above his compound on the east side of Citadel. Where the path levelled out, he paused in the shelter of a pair of huge boulders. If Raena should be leaving and see his light, she would throw a raging fit that he’d come spying on her. Let her! He walked on.

At the entrance to the tunnel he hesitated. Although he could hear nothing, he could see a faint silver glow down at the far end. She was working witchery, all right, and hiding it from him yet again. With a soft curse under his breath, he climbed through the narrow entrance. On the packed dry earth inside, his leather boots made no sound. Slowly, a few steps at a time, stopping often to listen, Verrarc crept toward the silver glow, which spilled out of the door to the inner chamber. Although he considered blowing out the candle, he had no way of lighting it again. He set the lantern down and edged forward until he could peer round the broken doorway into the chamber.

Naked to the cold Raena was kneeling on the cold dirt floor and staring at a pool of silver light that seemed to drip from the stone wall like water. All at once she flung her head back and began to chant in some language that he didn’t know. She raised her arms and let her body sway back and forth as her voice sobbed and growled in a long sprung melody. Despite the cold she was sweating; he could see her face glistening in the silver light. Her black hair hung in thick damp strands like snakes. Even though he couldn’t understand her words, he could recognize her tone of voice. She was begging someone or something; now and again she wailed on the edge of tears as if she keened at a wake.

The silver glare filled the corners of the chamber with night-dark shadows, and as Raena’s swaying body blocked the light, her own shadow swayed and flickered on the far wall. Out of the corner of his eye Verrarc saw creatures standing in the dark, small things, half-human and half-beast, all blurred and faint as if they were but shadows themselves. One stepped far enough forward that he saw it clearly: the body of a wizened old woman, all bone and flabby skin, topped with the head of a drooling hound. It knelt down beside Raena’s piled clothing and fingered the edge of her cloak while it watched Raena sway and sob. Involuntarily Verrarc shuddered in disgust. It looked up, saw him, and disappeared. Locked in her chant, Raena never noticed either of them.

Slowly, silently, Verrarc made his way out of the ruins. The air outside had never smelled so sweet, despite its biting cold, and he realized that he had felt close to vomiting, watching Raena plead with her spirits. For some while he stood among the tangled blocks of stone and looked down at the mists rising from the warm lake. Why was he waiting for her, he wondered? She would find her own way home easily enough. With a shrug he picked his way back to the path. By the time he got back to the house, he was tired enough to go back to bed, and this time he slept through till morning.

When he woke, Raena lay next to him, curled up on her side and breathing softly. Around the shutters a gleam of grey light announced dawn. In her sleep she smiled, a curve of her mouth that seemed to hint of secrets. He left their bed without waking her, and when some while later she joined him for breakfast, he said nothing about the night just past.

Dressed in green she sat down across from him at the little table near the fire. For a while they ate porridge in silence.

‘My love?’ Raena said at last. ‘Is it that you must be about council business this afternoon?’

‘It’s not, truly, unless some sort of messenger does come from the Chief Speaker.’

‘That gladdens my heart.’

‘Indeed? Why?’

She shrugged, ate a few more mouthfuls, then laid her spoon down in the bowl.

‘I did wish to walk about the town, tis all,’ Raena said, ‘and I fear to do it alone. The citizens, they do stare at me so, and I know they do whisper about me, too, behind my back.’

‘Well, curse them all! One day soon, Rae, I do promise you, you’ll be my wife, and none will dare say one word.’

‘But till then –’

‘True spoken. It would do me good to get out of this house, too. We’ll have our stroll.’

In winter air Loc Vaedd steamed. From Citadel, the town below round its shore lay hidden in white mists. On the public plaza that graced the peak of the island, the cobbles lay slick and treacherous. Bundled in their winter cloaks, Verrarc and Raena walked slowly, side by side. In the brief daylight a number of other people were about, mostly servants of the wealthy and important souls who lived on Citadel. Some hurried past with buckets of water, drawn from the public well across from the Council House; others had been down in town, judging from the market baskets and bundles they carried.

About halfway through their slow circuit, however, they met Chief Speaker Admi, waddling along wrapped in a streaky scarlet cloak much like Verrarc’s own – a mark of their position on the town council. Admi bobbed his head in Raena’s direction with a pleasant enough smile, but when he spoke, he spoke only to Verrarc.

‘And a good morrow to you, Councilman,’ Admi said. ‘There be luck upon me this morn, to meet up with you like this.’

‘Indeed?’ Verrarc said. ‘Here, if you wish to speak with me, you be most welcome at my house.’

‘Ah well, my thanks, but truly, just a word with you will do. I did speak last night with some of the townsfolk, and they be sore afraid still, due to young Demet’s death. I did wonder if you might have some new understanding of the matter?’

‘Not yet, truly.’ Verrarc licked nervous lips. ‘I did talk most carefully with Sergeant Gart and the men who were on watch that night. Many a time have I returned to the ruins where he were slain, as well, but never have I found a trace that might lead us to his killer. To hear the men talk, Demet had not an enemy in the world, much less in the town. Truly, I do wonder if the townsfolk have the truth of it, when they whisper of evil spirits.’

Admi shuddered, drawing his cloak tighter around his enormous belly. Still, Verrarc was aware of how shrewdly Admi studied him behind this little gesture of fear. Verrarc glanced away, but he made sure he didn’t look at Raena.

‘Tomorrow,’ Admi said finally, ‘I think me we should call a meeting of the council. Tomorrow, say?’

‘Uh well, I’ll not be ready by then. The day after?’

‘Very well. When the sun’s at its highest. There’s a need on the full five of us to go over this matter and see what may be done to lay it to rest.’

‘Well and good, then. Shall I go round to the others and tell them about the meeting?’

‘Oh, I be out for a stroll alone, and it be no trouble for me to stop by their houses.’ Admi patted his belly. ‘My wife, she does say I grow too stout, and so she does turn me out into the cold like a horse into pasture to trot some of the flesh away.’

Admi laughed, but Verrarc found merriment beyond him. Raena stood watching the pair of them with eyes that revealed nothing. Admi nodded her way with another smile.

‘My farewell to you both,’ Admi said. ‘I’ll be off, then.’

For a moment they stood watching him waddle across the plaza, stepping carefully on the slick cobblestones. He turned down the narrow path that led to the western flank of Citadel, where the temple of the local gods and the cottage belonging to Werda, the town’s Spirit Talker, stood close together.

‘My curse upon him!’ Raena snarled. ‘Will no one in this stinking town even speak my name?’

‘Here, he did give you a greeting of a sort. Some weeks past he’d not have done that much. Patience, my love.’

Raena tossed her head in such anger that the hood of her cloak fell back. With a muffled oath she pulled it back up again.

‘Patience!’ she snarled. ‘I be sick of that as well.’

‘Well, no doubt, and I can’t hold it to your blame. I did speak with some of the townswomen and did ask them to intercede for us with the Spirit Talker. If only she’d bless our marriage –’

Raena jerked her head around and spat on the cobbles. Two of the passing servants stopped to consider her, and Verrarc could see the twist of contempt on their faces.

‘Shall we go home?’ Verrarc grabbed Raena’s arm through the muffling cloak.

‘I’d rather not!’ She pulled away and strode off fast across the plaza, though in but a few steps she nearly slipped. With another curse she slowed down to let Verrarc catch up with her. When he touched her arm she turned and suddenly smiled at him.

‘My apologies, my love,’ she said. ‘It does gripe my heart, is all, to see your fellow citizens look down long noses at me.’

‘It does gripe mine, too.’

They walked on, past the stone council house that graced the side of the plaza opposite the temple. At the stone well Verrarc paused. Wrapped in her shabby cloak Dera was hauling up a bucket of water. He’d not heard that she’d mended from her latest bout of winter rheum, and her face seemed thinner than ever, framed by wisps of grey hair.

‘Here!’ Verrarc called out. ‘Let me take that for you.’

He hurried over, leaving Raena to follow after, and grabbed the heavy bucket’s handle in both hands. Dera let it go with a sigh of thanks. Her face was pale, as well as thin, and scored with deep wrinkles across her cheeks.

‘You’ll not be carrying such when I’m about,’ Verrarc said, smiling. ‘I do ken that Kiel be on watch, but surely your man or your daughter could have fetched this.’

‘Lael be off setting traps in the granary.’ Dera’s voice rasped, all parched. ‘And Niffa? Well, the poor little thing be wrapped in her grief. Sometimes she does stay abed all through the daylight, only to sit up weeping in the night.’

‘Ai!’ Verrarc shook his head and sighed. ‘That be a sad thing, truly, and her so young.’

‘It is. Well, good morrow, Mistress Raena! Taking a bit of air with your man?’

‘I am indeed.’ Raena had come up beside him. ‘And a good morrow to you, Mistress Dera.’ She smiled, nearly radiant. ‘It does gladden my heart to see you well.’

‘My thanks,’ Dera said. ‘But I’d best not stay out in this cold, alas.’

‘Indeed you shouldn’t,’ Verrarc said. ‘I’ll just be carrying this down for you.’

‘I’ll be going back home, then.’ Raena glanced his way. ‘This winter air, it does cut like ice. But Mistress Dera, might I come pay a call on your daughter? Mayhap I could help cheer her.’

‘Why, now, that would be most kind of you!’

Dera smiled, Raena smiled, but Verrarc found himself suddenly wondering if Raena would harm the lass. His fear shamed him; it seemed such a foreign thought, dropped into his mind by some other person or perhaps even a spirit. He carried the water bucket down the twisting path to Dera’s rooms behind the public granary and saw her safely inside, then hurried back to the house. By then the sun hung close to the horizon, and the winter night loomed.

When he came in, Raena was sitting in her chair near the roaring fire. He hung his cloak on the peg next to hers and joined her, stretching out grateful hands to the warmth.

‘Dera, she be a decent soul indeed,’ Raena said.

‘She is,’ Verrarc said, ‘and I trust you’ll remember how highly I honour her and hers. No harm to her kin, Rae. I mean it.’

‘Of course not! What do you think I might do?’

‘I did wonder why you showed such interest in Niffa, naught more.’

They considered each other, and once again Verrarc felt his old suspicion rise. Had Raena somehow murdered Niffa’s husband? She’d been worshipping her wretched Lord Havoc in the ruins when Demet had been slain, after all. Don’t be a fool, he told himself. How could she possible have harmed a strong young lad such as he? Lord Havoc, now – him he could believe a murderer.

‘Oh come now, Verro.’ Raena lowered her voice. ‘Remember you not the omen I did see, that Niffa does have the gifts of the witch road? Twere a grand thing if I did enlist her in our studies.’

‘Ah. True spoken.’

Yet the fear returned from its hiding place, somewhere deep in his mind beyond his rational understanding. He felt as if he were remembering some incident, some time when she’d done something to earn this distrust, but no matter how hard he tried, the memory stayed stubbornly beyond his conscious mind.

* * *

A bowl of dried apples preserved in honey made a generous gift, here in winter when food was scarce, but Niffa felt like knocking it out of Raena’s hands. Dera, however, smiled as she took it from their guest. She set it on the table, then bent her knees in an awkward curtsey.

‘This be so generous of you, Mistress Raena,’ Dera said. ‘It will do my poor raw throat good.’

If it doesn’t poison you, Niffa thought. She wanted to snatch the bowl and hurl it to the floor so badly that her hands shook. She clasped them tightly behind her and wondered if she were going daft, to believe that Verrarc’s woman meant them harm, when she knew with equal certainty that the councilman would never allow anyone to injure Dera.

‘My poor child!’ Raena said. ‘You do look so wan. You’d best sit down and close to your hearth too.’

Niffa managed to mumble a pleasantry and sat on the floor, leaving their only chair for the visitor and the bench for her mother. Raena sat down, opened her cloak, and pulled it back, but she left it draped over her shoulders to ward off the chill. Around her neck hung a silver pomander; she raised it to her nose and breathed deeply.

‘I do apologize,’ Dera said. ‘The ferrets, they have a strong stench about them in winter. It be too cold, you see, to risk giving them a good wash.’

‘Ah well, I mean not to be rude.’ Raena sounded a bit faint. She raised the pomander again.

‘It be kind of you to visit the likes of us,’ Dera said. ‘It be a long while since we’ve had a treat such as this.’

‘Most welcome, I’m sure. Verrarc did think the honey might ease your throat.’

There, you see? Niffa told herself. If Verrarc sent it, then it must be harmless.

‘It might at that,’ Dera said. ‘The herbwoman did suggest the same, but my man couldn’t find any honey to be had in town, not for trade or coin.’

‘Ah, then it be a good thing that we did have some laid by.’ Raena glanced at Niffa and gave her a sad-eyed look that was doubtless meant to be sympathetic. ‘It be a great pity that there be no herb or simple that might ease your grief.’

Niffa rose, staring at her all the while. Abruptly Raena looked down at the floor.

‘Er, well,’ Raena went on, ‘I mean not to press upon a wound or suchlike.’

‘I be but sore surprised, is all,’ Niffa felt her voice turn to a snarl, ‘that you of all people would say such a thing.’

Raena went dead-white and crouched back in her chair.

‘Now here!’ Dera snapped. ‘Mind your manners!’

Niffa turned and ran into the far chamber. She slammed the door behind her and leaned against it, her shoulders shaking. She could hear her mother’s startled voice, and Raena murmuring a frightened goodbye. In a moment the voices stopped, and Dera came knocking on the door.

‘Niffa! You come out of there!’

Niffa did. Her mother was standing with her arms crossed over her chest.

‘Never did I raise my children to be as nasty as wild weasels,’ Dera said. ‘What meant you by –’

‘She were there when my Demet died, and I wager she did kill him herself. I be as sure as I can be of that, and here she was, the filthy murderess, as bold as brass in our own house.’

Dera stared, open-mouthed.

‘I did see it in vision,’ Niffa went on. ‘The night he were slain, that was, and I did see her, gloating and laughing as he did lie there dead. Think, Mam! Why else does Verrarc drag his feet and refuse to look into the murder? Kiel does agree with me. Ask him if you believe me not!’

With a long sigh Dera sat down on the bench by the fire.

‘Well, now,’ Dera said. ‘Your visions, they be true things, by and large, but –’

‘But what?’

‘This be too grave a charge to trust to vision, lass. I do believe you saw what you say you saw, mind. Never would I call you a liar. But I do wonder if you did see the truth or only some part of it. Here, you’ve not told anyone else this but Kiel, have you?’

‘I’ve not. There be fear in my heart, Mam. What if the townsfolk, they do think me the sort of witch who dabbles in evil things? Would they not drive me out of town into the snows?’

‘That be my worst fear too.’ Dera sat for a long while, staring silently into the fire. ‘Ah ye gods! Well, if Kiel does come home before your father, I’ll be asking him about all of this. Say naught to your father, lass, till I’ve had a chance to speak with him.’

‘I shan’t. But you saw that Raena. She went as pale as milk, didn’t she? It were her guilt taking the blood from her face.’

‘If that be true, then it’s a dangerous thing you’ve done.’

Niffa felt herself turn cold. She sat down next to her mother and held trembling hands out to the fire.

‘So it was,’ Niffa said. ‘I do wish I’d thought of that before I spoke, but truly, the words wouldn’t stay in my mouth.’

‘Well, there be little Raena could do to us, whether your charge be true or false.’ Dera turned, looking at the bowl of honeyed apples. ‘I did think she meant us well.’

‘That be safe enough to eat, coming from our Verro,’ Niffa said. ‘But I’d not eat of any dish the bitch sends us from now on.’

‘Hush! Don’t you be calling anyone names such as that! We ken it not if Raena be guilty, and until we do, well then, let’s not speak ill of her or anyone.’

Niffa merely nodded a hypocritical agreement. She had learned young that it was futile to argue with her mother’s relentless desire to think the best of everyone.

Verrarc was puzzling over a strange passage in his dweomer scroll when Raena ran in, slamming the door behind her. She threw off her cloak and sank into her chair by the fire, then covered her face with trembling hands. For what seemed a long while she merely sat and shook.

‘What be so wrong?’ Verrarc said at last. ‘My love –’

‘That lass.’ Raena let her hands fall into her lap and turned a dead-white face his way. ‘Niffa. She did come as close as close can be to saying I murdered her man.’

‘What? How would –’

‘I ken it not! But she did let me see, oh and so full of hate she were as well, she did let me see that she thinks this ill lies at my door.’

Verrarc hesitated. All her life Raena had been prone to embroidering her truths to present them in the most exciting possible light, but this time there was no denying her terror. He stood and took a few steps toward her.

‘Listen to me, Rae. The time be here for the truth. There be naught I can do to keep you safe without the truth.’

She leaned back in her chair and looked up at him, her lips trembling.

‘Well, did you slay him?’ Verrarc said. ‘You do have strong witchery, Rae, and I ken not its limits. Did you slay Demet?’

‘Never!’ Her eyes glazed with tears. ‘I swear it to you, Verro. Never would I do such a thing.’

‘Then who did? Your Lord Havoc?’

‘He were the one.’ Raena started to get up, but she was shaking too hard. ‘Demet did come blundering in. The silver light, it were so strong I never did see nor hear him till there he was. And Havoc – I ken not what he did. But the lad screamed and fell back dead.’

Verrarc realized that he’d been holding his breath and let it out in a long sigh. Raena raised one hand as if she feared he would strike her. Sweat was beading on her upper lip and forehead.

‘I do believe you,’ Verrarc said. ‘But do you see what this means? Your Lord Havoc. He be no god, Rae, but an evil spirit indeed. It were best if never you invoked him again.’

‘I must! You don’t understand! There be a need on me to find out what he does ken about –’ Her voice caught and stumbled. ‘About a certain matter.’

‘Rae! These cursed secrets!’

She moaned and let her head flop back, then forward. For a moment he stood staring at her until he at last realized that she had fainted. He ran to the door that led to the back of the house and called for his manservant.

‘Harl! Come here!’ Verrarc shouted. ‘Your aid!’

Verrarc ran back to Raena, who lay sprawled in the chair. He knelt beside her and caught her cold hand between both of his. All at once her head jerked up, and she seemed to be looking about her.

‘Rae?’ he whispered.

Her head turned toward the sound, but her eyes – he’d never seen eyes so blank and dead. It seemed to him that her soul had fled, yet left her body still alive to move about and breathe like some mindless animal.

‘Master!’ Young Harl came running into the room. ‘What – Ye gods! Your lady!’

Raena’s head turned toward the sound of his voice, but her eyes stayed dead-seeming. Her mouth flopped open, and she began to make noises, first a sputter, then a gurgling ugly rumble in her throat that nonetheless had the cadence of words. Harl gasped and stepped back fast.

‘Run get the herbwoman!’ Verrarc snapped. ‘I’ll tend my lady.’

Harl nodded and raced out of the room. Verrarc squeezed Raena’s hand hard.

‘Rae, Rae,’ he whispered. ‘Come back!’

Her head flopped back with a long moist sigh. Verrarc stood, then picked her up, settling her head against his shoulder. Once she’d been a solid young woman, but now – he was shocked at how light she seemed. Without much difficulty he carried her into their bed chamber and laid her down on the bed. In the small hearth, wood and kindling stood stacked and ready. Verrarc hurried back into the reception chamber and grabbed a long splint from the woodpile.

‘Master?’ Old Korla came shuffling in. ‘Has Harl gone daft? He did come into my kitchen babbling of evil spirits.’

‘Not daft in the least,’ Verrarc heard his voice shaking. ‘Did he go fetch Gwira as I asked him?’

‘He did, truly.’

‘Good. My lady does lie in our chamber. Go sit with her whilst I take some of this fire.’

When Verrarc came in with the blazing splint, he saw that Korla had spread a blanket over Raena, who lay unmoving, her open eyes staring at the ceiling. For a horrible moment he thought her dead, but she moaned and stirred. He knelt down by the hearth and touched the splint to the kindling, blew on the tentative flames, and tossed the splint into the fire as it blazed up.

‘Well, Korla?’ Verrarc got up and walked over to the bedside. ‘What might this be but evil spirits?’

‘Ah, gods protect!’ She crossed her fingers in the sign of warding off witchcraft and stepped back from the bedside. ‘I fear me you be right, unless Gwira does ken some other thing it might be.’

But the herbwoman had no other explanation to offer when she at last arrived. With Harl right behind, Gwira bustled in, carrying a big market basket crammed with little packets of medicaments. She took off her cloak and tossed it over a chair.

‘Does she live?’ Gwira snapped.

‘She does,’ Verrarc said. ‘I did hold my hand in front of her mouth, and I did feel her breath.’

Gwira set the basket down on the floor, then wrapped one hand around her chin and considered Raena, who lay unmoving, her pale face and her hair soaked in sweat. After a moment she walked over to the side of the bed.

‘Harl did tell me that this came on all of a sudden, like.’ Gwira laid a hand on Raena’s face. ‘Huh, I like not how cold she be.’

She leaned over and pried open the lids of Raena’s right eye. For a moment more Raena lay wrapped in her faint, but the fire crackled, a log burned through and dropped, and a brief flood of light leapt up and washed the room. Raena suddenly moaned. Gwira let her go and stepped back just as she woke, twisting under the blanket and moaning again. When she opened her eyes, Verrarc nearly wept with relief at seeing her soul look out of them. When he held out his hand, she worked hers free of the blanket and laid it in his grasp. It felt as cold and wet as if she’d grasped snow.

‘The light upon the eye, it do work wonders,’ Gwira said. ‘It does drive the spirit away.’

‘Here!’ Verrarc said. ‘You too think her possessed!’

‘I ken naught else that it might be.’ Gwira glanced at Korla. ‘Fetch me water, if you please. I can brew her up somewhat with a bit of strength in it, but after that, this be a matter for our Spirit Talker, not me.’

Korla shuddered and crossed her fingers again.

‘So,’ Verrarc whispered. ‘So! I wonder, then, if it truly were a spirit who did kill our Demet.’

‘It may be,’ Gwira said. ‘And if so, then it does threaten the town still.’

‘Harl?’ Verrarc turned to find him trembling in the doorway. ‘Go fetch Mistress Werda. It were best she knew of this and now.’

‘Evil spirits,’ Kiel said. ‘Councilman Verrarc did say that he be as sure as sure that evil spirits murdered your man. They did try to possess his lady last night, says he.’

Niffa snorted and rolled her eyes heavenward.

‘Gwira does say it be true,’ Kiel went on, ‘and Harl and Korla, too. You see, the councilman came to my squad on the wall this dawn, and he did tell us all about it.’

‘That be hogwash!’ Niffa snarled. ‘I did see her, I tell you, laughing and prancing over Demet’s body.’

‘Ah, but did you see her slay him? Mayhap she did call up these spirits, but they did the murdering, not her. Or even, what if they did possess her that night, so she kenned not what she did?’

Niffa felt like slapping him. The whole family had gathered round the table in their main room, Dera in the chair at the head, Lael on one bench, Niffa and Kiel on the other. Dera sat twisting and untwisting a bit of rag with both hands. Lael leaned forward, elbows on the table. The fire in the hearth crackled and flared, sending a wash of light over Lael’s worn face. Niffa realized that she and Kiel both were waiting for their father to speak.

‘Did the Council of Five believe Verrarc?’ Lael said at last.

‘They did. Gwira did speak before them, but truly, what did make up their minds, it were the silver light that Gart and the watch saw that night. I mean, who but a spirit could have made that light glow on Citadel? The sergeant, he did see it clear as clear, and he be not a fanciful man.’

‘That be true a thousand times.’ Lael glanced her way. ‘Niffa, you do look as angry as a balked weasel!’

‘Well, if they do think it were a murdering spirit, never will they try Raena under our laws. Huh, if I did speak of visions and such, who would believe me?’

‘No one,’ Lael said. ‘And so you’d best not say one word.’

‘Da! How can you –’

‘Hush!’ Lael held up a broad hand for silence. ‘Think you I be happy with this whole thing? Demet’s mother and I, we did speak together but the other morn, and both of our hearts ache to see Demet’s death lawfully avenged. Yet would it gladden our hearts to lose you too? I’ve no heart to see you turned out of the town because the citizens, they do think you the worst sort of witch.’

Niffa opened her mouth and shut it again. When Dera made a little sound, the family turned toward her.

‘Your father be right.’ Dera wiped her eyes on the rag.

‘Of course I be so,’ Lael snapped. ‘Niffa, think! You be sure as sure the woman’s a murderer, when the whole town, it does think the opposite. Why?’

Niffa opened her mouth to answer only to have her words desert her. But a moment before she had known deep in her soul that Raena had murdered Demet and a host of other persons as well. She poisoned them. The words rang in her mind, but faced with Lael’s rational question, her mind refused to say more.

‘I know not,’ Niffa stammered. ‘I just do.’

‘Here, lass.’ Lael made his voice gentle. ‘Grief does put strange fancies in our minds. We all ken how well you loved your Demet. To lose him with not even a soul to blame – well, now.’

Niffa felt tears burn her eyes. She tried to wipe them away, but they spilled over and ran. Kiel flung one arm around her shoulders and pulled her close.

‘Hush, hush!’ he said. ‘Even if Raena did hang in the market square, would it bring our Demet back? Here, here, little sister! It aches my heart to see you so sad.’

Slowly the tears stopped. Niffa wiped her face on her sleeve and grabbed a twist of straw from the floor to blow her nose. She tossed the twist into the fire and watched it flare. May Raena burn with shame just as the straw burns! She looked up to find Lael watching her, one eyebrow raised, as if he knew she worked a wishing charm.

‘I do wonder one thing,’ Dera said. ‘What does Werda think of all this talk of spirits?’

‘I know not,’ Kiel said. ‘A fair bit, I should think.’

Later that same day Niffa learned Werda’s opinions on the matter. Lael and Niffa were sitting by their fire, while Dera lay tucked up in the big bed across the room to rest. Kiel had already gone to sleep in the other room, since he would be standing watch on the town walls again that night. At the door someone knocked in a loud quick drumming. Niffa ran to open it and found Werda, followed by her apprentice. She was a tall woman, Werda, and lean as well, all long bones and sharp angles, muffled up that morning in her white ceremonial cloak. Athra, her apprentice, wore an ordinary grey cloak, splashed here and there with whitewash, doubtless from the large bucket of the stuff that she was carrying. Athra’s face gleamed with ointment, thick smears of lard flecked with some sort of herb from the smell of it. Blonde and round, Athra had the sort of rosy skin that chaps from a wrong look.

‘Come in quick,’ Niffa said. ‘Do take of the warmth of our fire.’

‘My thanks,’ Werda said. ‘It be powerful cold still.’

All three of them trooped in. Athra set herself and her bucket down by the fire, but Lael insisted that Werda take their only chair. She sat and for a moment busied herself with untying the hood of her cloak and pulling it back.

‘How do you all fare?’ Werda said finally.

‘We all be well at long last,’ Lael said, glancing Dera’s way. ‘Thanks to the gods and to Gwira’s herbs.’

Werda nodded unsmiling. For a moment the silence held as she sat looking back and forth twixt Lael and Niffa.

‘There be no use in polite chatter,’ Werda said finally. ‘I did come to see you, young Niffa. No doubt you’ve heard of the evil spirit loose in town?’

‘I have,’ Niffa said. ‘They say it did kill my Demet.’

‘Is it that you believe this?’

Niffa hesitated, gauging the black look on her father’s face. She was aware of Athra watching her from one side and Werda from the other.

‘I know not if I believe or disbelieve,’ Niffa said. ‘Think you it be the case?’

‘I do. I did see that woman of the councilman’s with my own eyes, and I talked a long time with Gwira and Korla about her faint. Truly, naught else could have caused her trouble but spirit possession. And then I did walk about the councilman’s house and compound, and there be spirits there, sure enough. I did feel them like a tingling in the air round the walls. With the witch-vision the gods give me, I did see an evil thing: a creature much like a stork, but it had the arms and face of a man.’

Lael swore under his breath. Niffa clasped her hands together so hard they ached.

‘Huh!’ Werda said. ‘You’ve gone pale, lass, and I blame you not, quite frankly. I did come to ask if these spirits, they’ve been a-troubling you.’

‘They’ve not.’

‘Good.’ Werda rose, gathering her cloak around her. ‘If you do feel the slightest alarm, then come to me straightaway. I care not if it be in the middle of the night, young Niffa. You find yourself a lantern, Lael, and bring your daughter to my house. Do you understand me?’

‘I do,’ Lael said.

‘But I don’t understand,’ Niffa said. ‘Why would they come plaguing me?’

Werda merely looked at her with a twist to her mouth, as if she were wondering how Niffa could be so stupid. Lael sat like stone, but Niffa knew he was watching her. Her mouth went so dry she couldn’t force out one word.

‘Ah well,’ Werda said at last. ‘The time will come when you’ll not be able to deny the truth. When it does, you come to me, and we shall talk.’ She turned to Lael. ‘Master Lael, I wish to paint a warding on the outside of your door. I do trust you’ll not object.’

‘Of course not.’ Lael got up and bowed to her. ‘If there be aught I can do –’

‘Nah, nah, nah. Today we’ll do naught but prepare the door.’ Werda nodded at Athra and the bucket. ‘On the morrow we’ll be back to work the charm, once the whitewash does dry.’

‘Well and good, then. Will you be painting such on the entire town?’

‘We won’t.’ Werda paused for a significant look Niffa’s way. ‘Only on the public places, the council house and suchlike, and then on those few homes that I do deem vulnerable.’

They went out, and Lael closed the door and latched it against the wind while Niffa mended up the fire again. They could hear Werda through the door, instructing Athra, and the soft whisk of the brush. Until the holy woman and her apprentice had finished, no one said a word. At the sound of their leaving, Dera sat up in bed and ran her hands through her hair to push it back from her face.

‘You did well, lass,’ Lael said to Niffa.

Dera nodded her agreement. Niffa managed a brief smile and stood up.

‘I be weary again,’ Niffa said. ‘I’d best go lie down.’

‘Ai, my poor lass!’ Dera said. ‘It does seem that all you do is sleep.’

‘Mayhap. But this news – whose heart wouldn’t it weary?’

In the long weeks since Demet’s death, Niffa had indeed been hiding from her grief in the refuge of her dreams. Since childhood she had spent her nights in many-coloured kingdoms of sleep, had longed for sleep and dreams and treasured those she remembered upon waking. Now, however, the dreams had become more urgent than the doings of the day. While her parents talked in the great room, she crawled into her blankets, across the room from Kiel, who was snoring worse than the wind in the chimney. In their wooden pen the weasels chirped to her, but she lacked the strength to say a word to them.

As soon as she lay down, she felt as if she’d stepped into a boat and glided effortlessly out into a strange lake, huge and rippled with waves. She dreamt, as she often had, of Demet. Tonight she saw him standing on the far shore of the pale turquoise water. Her boat sailed steadily forward, but the shore just as steadily receded. At last she saw him turn and walk away into the white mists, and her dream faded.

In the middle of the night she suddenly woke. Kiel’s bed lay empty. She could guess that the noise he’d made leaving to go on watch had wakened her. She got up, went to the tiny window, and pulled back the thick hide that kept the wind out. By craning her neck she could just see over the rooftops of Citadel, falling away down to the lake. A sliver of moon hung over the town, and she realized that soon the moon would go into its dark time. It had been full when they’d laid Demet’s dead body out in the forest for the wild things. A half turn of the moon gone, she thought, and my grief rules me still.

All at once she heard someone come into the room. She turned, smiling, expecting to see Kiel, returned for some forgotten bit of his gear. No one was there. The cold draught from the window ran down her back and made her gasp, but she held the hide up nonetheless for the little light the moon gave her. In their pens the ferrets suddenly began rustling the straw. She could recognize Ambo’s chuckle of warning; as their hob he would defend his pack. Someone, something stood in the doorway across the room. She was sure of it, could see nothing – but Ambo must have smelled it, whatever it was. He began to hiss in little moist bursts of sound like a sucked-in breath. Her danger-warning grew stronger. His hissing turned into one long threat. She could hear him rushing around the pen and scattering straw as he searched for this unseen intruder.

Suddenly the presence vanished. Ambo stopped hissing. The other ferrets chuckled, then fell silent; she could hear them all moving in the straw again. The icy air from the window was making her shiver so badly that she let the oxhide fall. In the dark she made her way back to bed and lay down, huddling and shivering under the blankets. She knew that she should wake the house and run to Werda, but the cold had got into her bones, or so she felt, and she couldn’t make herself get out of the warm wrap of her bed.

‘The jeopard, it be gone.’ The voice was Werda’s, but Niffa heard it only in her mind. ‘You may sleep, child.’

Niffa sobbed once. Slowly the ferrets quieted. For a long while she lay shivering, sure that she would stay awake the entire night.

But suddenly she woke to morning and the sound of her mother and father talking in the room just beyond her door. She sat up and looked around. The ferrets lay piled on top of each other, asleep in the straw. Had she dreamt their ghostly visitor and Ambo’s hiss?

‘I do dream so many strange things,’ she muttered to herself.

But Werda’s voice, she knew, had been real, no matter how hard she tried to explain it away. She said nothing to her kinsfolk, but all that morning she noticed them watching her as she sat in her corner by the hearth with one or another of the ferrets in her lap.

Werda returned near mid-day, her arms full of bundles wrapped in rough sacking. Athra trailed after, carrying a big covered kettle. The kettle went by the fire to warm, whilst the bundles got set down carefully on the plank table.

‘The warding black, it does contain pitch,’ Werda said, pointing at the kettle. ‘In this cold weather, it does grow too stiff to use after a bit.’ She considered the bundles for a moment, then picked one up and handed it to Niffa. ‘This be for you. Set it at the head of your bed.’

The bundle contained what at first glance seemed to be an ordinary pottery bowl. When Niffa took it, she could see that in truth it was a pair of bowls, the outer stuck to the inner with more pitch. A thin black line of squiggly decoration covered the inner bowl, starting at the middle of the flat bottom, then winding in a tight spiral out to the rim.

‘It does confuse the spirits,’ Werda said. ‘That line of writing be a spell, and their curiosity does drive them into the bowl to read it, and then they slip between the bowls and cannot find their way out again. Once every some days Athra will fetch the trap away and leave another, that we may deal with the spirits in it once and for all.’

‘My thanks,’ Niffa said, stammering a little. ‘I do ken that I need such.’

‘Indeed?’ Werda looked at her with a twist to her mouth. ‘It gladdens my heart that you do.’

* * *

When the sun hung at the peak of the sky, Verrarc went to the stone council house, which stood on the north side of Citadel’s plaza. In front of it rose a line of stone columns, a reminder of the trees that had surrounded the meeting places of the Ancestors, back before any of the Rhiddaer folk lived in cities. With him Verrarc carried a lit candle in a tin lantern, though the day was bright through thin clouds. At the door he paused to examine the wardings painted on its white-washed surface. Against the fresh whitewash the thick black lines of Werda’s pitch and lampblack concoction stood out sharp and shiny. She had painted a design of two spiral mazes, one above the other, both amazingly intricate, to fascinate the spirits and keep them outside.

When Verrarc went inside, he closed the door carefully behind him. The stone room, with its high ceiling and rank of windows covered only by wooden shutters, was as cold as the open plaza. Earlier, Harl had on his orders laid a fire in the hearth and arranged the council’s round table and chairs in front of it. Verrarc knelt down and used his candle to get the tinder started. A few quick breaths and the kindling caught as well, but Verrarc kept his cloak wrapped around him. The fire would do little but take off the chill.

Chief Speaker Admi joined him in but a few moments, still wheezing from his climb up the steep path to the plaza. He waddled across the room and stood in front of the crackling fire.

‘Good morrow,’ Verrarc said.

Admi nodded and fumbled inside his cloak for a rag to mop his face. When Verrarc pulled out a chair, Admi sank into it with a little nod of thanks in his direction. Verrarc took a chair next to his.

‘Ah, there, my breath returns,’ Admi said finally. ‘Which does remind me. How fares your poor woman?’

‘Better, my thanks.’ Verrarc shuddered as the memory rose of Raena’s dead gaze. ‘Gwira did fear that fever would set in, but Raena, she’s been naught but sleepy. This sort of possession, Gwira did tell me, exhausts the poor soul who suffers it.’

‘No doubt.’ Admi’s fingers twitched in the warding sign. ‘It gladdens my heart that she came to no harm.’

‘My thanks. I do appreciate your nicety of feeling.’

‘Welcome, I’m sure.’

‘If only –’ Verrarc hesitated, but Admi’s eyes were all sympathy. ‘If only my cursed father had let me marry Raena, back before her father did betroth her elsewhere, none of this trouble would have fallen upon us.’

Admi nodded, considering.

‘True spoken,’ Admi said at last. ‘He did think her beneath you – ah. Here be Frie.’

The stocky blacksmith opened the door, then stood half in and half out while he looked over the warding.

‘No use in discussing your woman in front of him,’ Admi whispered.

‘I know,’ Verrarc said, and as softly. ‘It be his wife, she did always hate my Raena.’

Admi raised one eyebrow, then forced out a bland smile. Frie had shut the door; he strolled over, wrapped in a thick grey cloak with his ceremonial scarlet draped on top. His thick dark moustache glittered with frozen breath.

‘Good morrow, Frie,’ Admi said.

‘And to you both.’ Frie sat down across the table. ‘I did stop at old Hennis’s house, and he be too ill to come out in this cold, or so his servants did tell me.’

‘Huh!’ Admi snorted. ‘I’ll wager I know what does sicken him. He does hate to hold his tongue and smile when Werda talks of the gods and spirits.’

‘Can’t understand the man,’ Frie said. ‘Cursed obvious, it is, that the world be full of gods and spirits. Makes you wonder, it does, if his long years be muddling his mind.’

‘Well, now,’ Verrarc put in, ‘he does know the city laws off by heart still. His mind be sound enough on those matters.’

‘True enough,’ Admi said. ‘Now, where be Burra? Late, no doubt, as always.’

Frie grunted his agreement and wiped the melting frost from his moustache with the back of a soot-stained hand.

‘I’d hoped for a little chat among us before the Spirit Talker arrived,’ Admi went on. ‘Which we’ll not have if he doesn’t get himself here soon. I’d best have a private word with him. If he takes not his duty to the town seriously, well, then, there are others who long for a council seat.’

Not long after Burra did arrive, a skinny man with yellow hair, not much older than Verrarc and like him, a merchant who traded in the east. The councilmen barely had a chance at two private words, however, before Werda opened the door and strode in. Her apprentice followed with her arms full of bundled things. The Spirit Talker had bound her grey hair up into braids coiled round her head, and she wore the white cloak that normally she kept for ceremonial occasions. Without waiting to be asked, she pulled out a chair and sat down with her back to the fire. Athra laid her bundles down on the table, then stood behind her master’s chair.

‘I see that Hennis, he deigns not to join us,’ Werda said.

‘Er, just so,’ Admi said. ‘His servants did say that he be somewhat ill.’

‘Huh.’ Werda rolled her eyes. ‘It be a foolish thing to deny the power of the gods. He does get his blasphemies from the Mountain Folk, no doubt. They do mock the spirits, calling them but idle fancies.’

‘Er, mayhap,’ Admi said, ‘but no matter. There be four of us here in attendance upon the council, enough to make our decidings official.’ He paused, glancing around the table. ‘Now, then, by the power invested in me as Chief Speaker, I do open this meeting, come together to discuss the death of Demet, the weaver’s second son. Yesterday morn Verrarc, chief officer of the town militia, did venture that evil spirits did slay the lad. Does any here dispute this finding?’

Frie and Burra shook their heads in a no. Admi turned to Werda.

‘I too agree with Councilman Verrarc,’ Werda said. ‘This night past have I walked round Citadel, and in many a place did I find spirits lurking. These were all weak little things, and I did invoke the gods upon them, and they did flee. No one of them could have slain Demet, but together, in a pack, they would be dangerous.’

‘You have the thanks of the council,’ Admi said, ‘for sending them on their way.’

‘But will they come right back again?’ Frie broke in. ‘That’s what I be wanting to know.’

‘With spirits, it be a constant battle.’ Werda gestured at the bundles on the table. ‘I did bring spirit traps for each of you to take to your dwellings and one to stay here in the council house.’

‘You have our thanks,’ Admi said.

‘Most welcome,’ Werda continued. ‘And now I do ken that I’d best stay on guard against the spirits, which kenning be a weapon in itself. I have my own ways of standing watch.’

The councilmen all nodded as if they understood. Verrarc felt his stomach clench cold. If Raena insisted upon invoking her Lord Havoc again, Werda would be sure to know.

Lael brought Niffa the news of the council’s decision, when, late that afternoon, he carried home the wicker cage of ferrets from their day’s ratting. Niffa took the cage into the other room and released the weasels into their pen; Lael had already taken off their hunting hoods. She came back out to the great room and found him ladling himself a tankard of flat ale from the barrel near the hearth. Dera sat at table, eating a few slices of honeyed apples.

‘Do have some of this,’ she was saying.

‘I won’t,’ Lael said. ‘It be your medicaments, and I’d have you eat the lot, my love.’

Niffa set the empty cage down by the hearth. She was aware of her father watching her with sad eyes.

‘What be so wrong, Da?’ Niffa said.

‘Well, when I were down in town, I did hear the crier. The council, they do say that the matter of Demet’s death be closed. Evil spirits, and Werda, she did sanction their decision.’

Niffa stared down at the straw on the floor and wondered if she were going to weep.

‘Here now,’ Lael said softly. ‘Had they ruled different, he still would have been gone.’

‘Oh, true spoken. But now I’ve naught left of him, but my memories. Not even vengeance – not so much as that for a keepsake.’

Still, she did have one thing more, of course: her dreams. That evening and in those that followed she turned to her childhood refuge, where she could see Demet and pretend that he lived again. In those dreams she would perhaps come into a room and find him sitting there, laughing at her while she reproached him for pretending to die, or perhaps they would walk together by the lake and talk of what they would do come spring. Yet she always knew that she was dreaming, no matter how urgently she wanted the dream to last forever. Other times she would dream they were making love in their bed back in his family’s house, and from those dreams she woke in tears. Yet as time went on, those dreams faded, to be replaced by something far stranger.

Many-towered cities rose in her nights, where she wandered with a lantern in hand while she searched for something she’d lost, though she could put no name to it. At other times she had walked in the city during a summer’s day and marvelled at the strange buildings and the people she saw among them. In the centre of this city rose a hill, circled at intervals by five stone walls. At the top, inside the highest wall, stood a fortress of some kind. In her dreams all she could see were squat towers clustering behind the stone. Sometimes she knew that she had to get into that fortress; in other dreams, she needed to escape it – though paradoxically, she never dreamt of being inside it.

When she woke of a morning, she would lie in bed and marvel at how clearly she saw the dream city. Even though its central hill reminded her of Citadel, the rest of it – the buildings, the people’s clothing – looked nothing like Cerr Cawnen, the only city she’d ever seen. By brooding over the dream images this way she reinforced them, so that the city took a permanent form. Whenever she went back, the same houses and shops would occupy the same locations; the same hill would loom over the familiar streets.

Finally Niffa turned bold. When in her dream she came to its gate, she walked through. All around the city lay meadows where the grass grew as high as her waist, but narrow paths ran through them. She followed one a little ways down the road, stopping often to look back at the towered hill to keep within its sight, but she woke before she’d gone far. Over the next few nights she would walk a little way through these meadows, then rush back to the city before it could disappear. She had learned, just lately, that things you loved could disappear without warning.

Eventually, as she walked through the grass she saw far off to one side something gleaming like fire in the green, but no smoke rose. She left the road and struggled through the grass under a sky growing dim with twilight. Off to her right a huge purple moon trembled on the horizon as night deepened. When she looked back, the city walls still rose nearby, with here and there a point of lantern light upon them. The sight gave her the courage to keep going toward the fire-gleam, a strange red glow like a beacon in the grass.

Two huge five-pointed stars, each taller than a man and twined of stranded red and gold light, hung in the air just above a stretch of beaten-down grass. Between them the earth opened into the mouth of a tunnel sloping down into some unseeable darkness. On the other side of the stars someone was standing in the grass – a woman, judging from her long ash-blonde hair, but she wore tight leather trousers and a tunic rather than dresses.

‘Here!’ the woman called out. You’re not Raena.’

‘And I do thank every god in my heart for that,’ Niffa called back. ‘Who be you?’

The woman walked around the stars and stood looking her over with her hands on her hips. Niffa had never seen anyone so beautiful, or so she thought at first glance. She had silver blonde hair with silver eyes that matched it. Her features were even and perfect – but her ears! They were long and strangely furled like a new fern in spring.

‘My name is Dallandra,’ the woman said at last. ‘And I made these wards to keep Raena away from a thing she seeks. Who are you?’

‘Niffa be my name.’

‘Jahdo’s sister!’

‘And is it that you know our Jahdo?’ In her joy Niffa forgot her fear. ‘Fares he well? Oh please, do tell me.’

‘Well and safe, truly, and you’ll be seeing him in the spring.’

The joy rose like a wave of pure water. All at once Niffa lay awake, tucked into her blankets with a ferret asleep on her chest and grey dawn flooding the window.

‘Tek-tek, whist!’ She shook the ferret awake, then picked her up and put her down on the bed next to her. ‘It’s needful I tell Mam straightaway.’

She found Dera awake, kneeling by the hearth and laying twigs upon blazing tinder. In the big bed at the far side of the room Lael still slept, wrapped around a pillow and snoring. Dera was concentrating on the fire, but she’d apparently heard her daughter approach.

‘Early for you to be up and about,’ Dera said.

‘Mam, I did have the most wonderful dream, and it be one of my true ones, I do know it deep my heart. I did meet a woman who does know our Jahdo. He be safe and well, she did tell me, and he’ll be returning in the spring.’

At that Dera did look up, and the warmth of her smile glowed like the spreading fire.

‘I’ll look forward, then,’ Dera said. ‘It does my heart no good, all this looking back.’

‘I’ve got somewhat else for you to look forward to, Mam. I’ve not had my monthly bleeding.’

Dera rose, studying Niffa’s face.

‘Now here, don’t you be getting your hopes up, lass. Grief will do strange things to a woman; it well might dry her up for a while, like.’

Niffa felt tears rise, choked them back, and turned away. She felt her mother’s gentle hand on her shoulders.

‘I know how much you did love your Demet,’ Dera said. ‘Mayhap the goddesses will bless you after all. There be a need on us to wait and see.’

When Dallandra woke in the morning, she lay in bed for a while, considering Jahdo’s sister. How had Niffa got into the Gatelands of Sleep, and why did she seem so at home there? Later in the day Dallandra tracked Jahdo down, finding him at the servants’ hearth in the great hall with Cae, an orphan boy who worked in the kitchens. On the smooth stones in front of the fire, they were playing with little wooden tops. For a moment she watched as each boy set his top spinning with a flick that bumped it against another. She waited until Jahdo had lost a match, then called him away. They stood to one side where they wouldn’t be overheard.

‘I want to ask you somewhat about your sister,’ Dallandra said. ‘And it’s a very odd question.’

‘Very well, my lady,’ Jahdo said. ‘Niffa be a very odd lass, so fair’s fair.’

‘Odd? How do you mean, odd?’

‘Oh, all the folk in Cerr Cawnen, that’s what they did always say. Our Niffa, she be an odd little soul.’ Jahdo thought for a moment. ‘She did see things. And she had dreams.’

‘Tell me a bit more about that.’

‘We’d be sitting at our fire, and you’d look at Niffa, and her eyes – they’d be moving back and forth, and she’d smile, too, at whatever it was. Or in the lake, she’d be seeing things. And the clouds sometimes too. And then there be her dreams. Mam stopped her from telling them after a while, because when they did come true, our neighbours and townsfolk would be ever so scared by it.’

‘No doubt! Well, my thanks, Jahdo.’

‘But my lady, what be your question?’

‘You just answered it, lad. Now run along, go back to your game. The other lads are waiting for you.’

Only later did Dallandra remember that Jahdo was desperate for news of his family. How selfish of me! she thought. I’d best see what I can find out from Niffa – well, if I ever see her again! A girl little older than a child, with a raw gift for dweomer, wandering unknowingly around the astral plane – she might never stumble upon Dallandra’s vigil again. And yet, as she thought about it, Dallandra realized with an odd certainty that she would see Niffa again in the lands of sleep. The thought was so clear that she knew it must be a message from the Great Ones. Why they’d sent the message was a question of the sort they never answered directly, but Dallandra could venture a guess. No doubt Raena was continuing to work her evil magicks. And no doubt, Dallandra thought, it’s fallen to me to stop her.

‘And just where, pray tell, have you been?’ Verrarc felt his voice catch and growl.

In the pool of lantern light Raena half-crouched against the wall. Her cloak dripped wet snow onto the floor.

‘As if I knew not!’ Verrarc went on. ‘Up in the ruins, bain’t, with that cursed Havoc creature?’

‘And what’s it to you?’

‘What be it to me? Ye gods, have you gone daft? If the town should find out – you up there, consorting with evil spirits – ye gods! I could be ruined! And you – think, woman! They love you not as it is. If they thought you to bring evil among them –’

With a toss of her head Raena tried to push past him. Verrarc caught her wrist in one hand and pulled her round to face him. He held the lantern high and let the light shine down upon her. In the flickering glow her lips seemed bruised, her entire face swollen.

‘And just what might be so cursed important, Rae, that you would risk so much to have it? I’ll have the truth, and I’ll have it now.’

‘Let me go!’ She tried to pull her hand free, but he held on. ‘Oh very well! Truly, it were time. Let me go, and I’ll tell you.’

When he released her she walked a few steps away, then took off the damp cloak. Except for the dancing gleam of his lantern, the great room lay dark around them, silent in the dead of night.

‘Come into our chamber,’ Verrarc said. ‘I’d not have the servants waking to hear this.’

Raena threw the cloak onto the floor and stomped off into the bedchamber, where a small fire burned in the hearth. She flopped down on the edge of the bed like a sulky child and began to pull off her wet boots. He set the lantern down on the mantle and took a chair opposite her. Once the boots were off she calmed. She set them carefully to dry near the hearthstone, then perched on the bed again.

‘Truly, I did promise that you should know,’ Raena said. ‘I were but angry that you did snap at me.’

‘I be frightened, Rae. That’s the sad truth of it.’

She stopped on the edge of speaking and considered him.

‘Not of you,’ Verrarc went on, ‘nor truly of what witchery you might work, but of the town and for the town. I’d not have any more of my fellow citizens murdered by your treacherous little spirits.’

‘Well, that be fair, and my heart does ache for poor Niffa.’ Raena sounded surprisingly genuine. ‘But there were a need on me, a desperate need, Verro, to learn a thing Havoc could tell me.’

‘It must have been desperate, all right, to risk so much for it.’

‘It is, truly it is.’ Raena looked at the fire and frowned, thinking. ‘It be such a hard tale to start, my love. Here – what would you say if I did tell you that there be a new goddess in the world?’

For a long moment Verrarc could only stare at her.

‘A what?’ he said at last. ‘A goddess? This be the last thing I thought you’d –’

‘No doubt.’ All at once Raena smiled in gathered confidence. ‘It came as a strike of lightning to me as well, such a strange and marvellous thing it were. But she did reveal herself to me, and she did mark me out to be her priestess, to serve her all my born days and to live with her ever after in her glorious country beyond death.’ She paused, and never had he seen her smile this way, as if she looked through the dark snowy night around them to the warm light of a spring day. ‘Her name, it be Alshandra.’

Verrarc felt like a sudden half-wit, stripped of words.

‘What?’ he managed to say. ‘What do you mean? A new goddess? How can there be such a thing? The gods did make the world, and they’ve been in it always.’

‘Mayhap I speak wrongly, then.’ Raena considered the fire and frowned again. ‘She were hidden before, you see. Always has she been in the world, off in her own true country, but she never did show herself to the world.’

‘Ah.’ He felt his mind turn to an ugly thought: had Raena gone utterly mad? ‘But she did show herself to you. Somehow.’

‘It be a simple tale. When I was still the wife of my pig of a husband I did spend long hours weeping. You do remember that, I’m sure. And I would leave Penli and go walk among the trees, and I would sit upon the ground and weep some more. One afternoon she did come to me and ask me why I wept.’ Raena’s voice dropped, heavy with awe. ‘She were huge and tall, floating down from the sky to stand before me, and she were so beautiful, too, and so kind, I did fall to my knees before her. That pleased her. She did tell me how to call to her, and when I would call, she would come to me.’

‘Wait! Why did you not tell me about her, back then?’

‘I did think you’d mock and say that she were but my fancy, and truly, I see naught but doubt upon your face now.’

‘How could I not doubt, since you did never so much as mention her before?’

Raena shrugged his objection away.

‘She did call me her chosen one,’ Raena continued. ‘She did tell me that she had watched me always, long before I were born, even. Oh, she did tell me so many marvellous things, and she did take me to her beautiful country, where there were green meadows and a river like silver, and strange cities to walk within! Gone now, all of it but the meadows, because her enemies, and she does have many, all of them evil in their very hearts, but they did destroy it to spite her. But she has another country, she told me, where there be no Time and no Death, and those that worship her shall travel there with her, to live forever in joy.’

Her eyes seemed to glow from within, all silver. She spoke so warmly, so sincerely, that Verrarc found himself wondering if she could possibly be speaking the truth.

‘It would be a grand thing,’ he said, ‘never to die.’

‘And with her there shall be no death, Verro. I have seen her country, and I have seen her miracles. I do more than know these things, I ken them, I tell you. They be the deepest truth that ever a woman could see.’

‘Here, think you that she’d show them to me?’

‘Ah, that’s the bitter thing. She has withdrawn to her own true country, and she shows herself not to men or –’ She hesitated, stumbling on some word, ‘or to women either.’

The doubt rose up strong. Daft! he told himself. What if she’s gone daft?

‘My love, ponder this.’ Raena leaned forward, suddenly urgent. ‘In the past, when we did study witchlore together, could I call down the silver light and invoke mighty spirits?’

‘Truly, you couldn’t. And I do wonder, Rae, just where you might have learned it.’

‘No doubt! It was Alshandra. She did teach me, she did lay her hands upon me, and she did give me freely of her power, that I might work magicks in the world. And those that will see them, well, then, they will believe what I say, that Alshandra is a goddess who blesses her worshippers. Where else might I have learned these things, Verro? Do you know a teacher somewhere in the Rhiddaer where I might have studied?’

‘I don’t.’

‘And would I lie to you, the man I love second only to her?’

Verrarc was tempted to say that after all, she’d lied to him often enough before. But this time she was looking him straight in the face, her eyes focused on his, as if she were wishing she could show him her goddess by forcing the image into his mind. What if, just what if this were true, that her goddess would give him magical power beyond any he’d hoped to have? And if there would be no death –

‘If only I could take you to her,’ Raena said, and her voice stumbled in sheer urgency, ‘if only you could see her!’

‘Truly, I do wish I could. Why has she –’

‘I know not.’ Raena’s voice shook, and she looked away.

There she was indeed lying; he recognized all the signs from past experience. Paradoxically, however, this lie brought home the truth of what she’d said before, just by the contrast in her telling.

‘It be the reason that forces me to summon Lord Havoc,’ Raena went on, staring at the far wall. ‘There be a need on me to find out. Never have I felt such a desperation, Verro! It be like – well, it be like I were an orphan child, starving on the streets, and she were the wife of a rich guildmaster. And she did take me up and bring me to her home. She did feed me, and she did teach me a craft so that never again would I be poor and starving. But then, somewhat did anger her, and she cast me out again.’ Tears sprang up in her eyes. ‘And here I be, wailing and alone.’ The tears ran, but silently, and she made no move to wipe them away.

‘Ah,’ Verrarc said. ‘Then it were somewhat you did that did drive her away?’

‘Somewhat I did not, that I should have done.’ The truth sprang out, as sudden as the tears. ‘She did lay upon me a sacred charge, and I did fail in it. Ah ye gods, that I should have been so weak and unworthy of her love!’

Verrarc moved to sit down with her on the bed. She turned into his arms and sobbed, while he stroked her hair and whispered ‘there, there’ over and over again. At last she quieted, but she clung to him.

‘Well, now,’ Verrarc said, ‘this charge be best done, then, and mayhap she’ll return to you.’

‘So I do hope, though it be not such an easy task. It were about a thing that had been stolen from her, you see, and it does lie now in the midst of her enemies. She did ask me to restore it to her.’

‘What might this thing be?’

She looked up, and he could feel her trembling in his arms.

‘That I can never tell you, Verro,’ she whispered. ‘I beg you, demand not that from me. My secrets you shall have, when the time be ripe for the telling of them. But it were a blasphemy were I to tell you her secrets.’

For a long moment he studied her face. Was she lying or not? He simply couldn’t tell.

‘Well and good then,’ Verrarc said at last. ‘What lies between you and your goddess be not mine to meddle in, anyway.’

Once, long ago, in some immeasurably ancient time, Evandar and his people, Alshandra among them, had dwelt between the stars as beings of pure energy and no form. Somehow, when the Light birthed the vast panoply of worlds, they had been ‘left behind’, as Evandar put it to himself. How or why, he could no longer remember. Yet, since they had been born to follow the path that all souls must take into the physical plane and the world of matter, they had longed for a solid existence in the beauty of a world. To sate their hunger for life he had built that area of the etheric plane he called the Lands, a perfect illusion of the world of Annwn, with its grassy meadows and rivers, its forests and hills – a shadow world so lovely that they had spurned the real world waiting for them on the physical plane.

He had woven them bodies, too, out of the astral substance, modelling them on the elven race he had come to love. Over the aeons Evandar’s dweomer had grown so immensely powerful that he had for a time thought himself as powerful as a god, until the destruction of the Seven Cities of the Far West had stripped him of his arrogance. No matter how much raw dweomer power he expended, no matter how hard he fought with every sort of weapon, in the end the Hordes had won and destroyed every beauty of the elven world. The lesson lived with him still, that as soon as he left his own lands, he too was a slave of change and death, even though his own being seemed immune to both.

And now Time was pursuing him, it seemed, determined to force the lesson home another time. After untold centuries of a perfect spring, the Lands lay besieged by winter. Evandar returned to find his meadows frosted white, his streams frozen, his trees stripped bare, and his people huddled miserably together by the bank of a silver river. When they saw him they cried out.

‘Bring back the spring! Give us summer!’

‘I did that before, and the winter returned to us anyway. Mayhap we’d best just ride the winter out.’

In a screaming pack they rushed forward and surrounded him, yelling, begging, weeping all at once. Evandar raised his arms and shouted for silence. Slowly the babble died.

‘Well and good, then,’ Evandar said. ‘Spring you shall have.’

In his mind he visualized a gigantic silver horn, and in the Lands what Evandar saw appeared for all to see. His folk gasped and moved back to give him room as the horn floated into the air, an apparition the size of a horse and wagon. Through it Evandar called down the astral light. He saw it as a golden surge of raw power that flowed through the horn’s tip and spread out across the meadowlands and into the river. Suddenly the air turned warm; the grass sprang up green; the trees burst into full leaf. On the river bank a cloth-of-gold pavilion sprang into existence.

‘Let us feast,’ Evandar cried out. ‘Let us have music!’

The crowd laughed, calling out his name and cheering him. Yet once they were settled at their feasting, Evandar slipped out of the pavilion. He ran a few steps across the grass, let his elven form dissolve, and as a red hawk he sprang into the air. As he flew in a vast spiral over the river and meadows, he called down the astral light in a hawk’s harsh voice.

Below him snow melted, and grass sprang up, green and lush. Flowers bloomed in an instant, dotting the lawns with white and yellow. In every direction, as far as he could see with a hawk’s long sight, Spring returned, laughing. The hawk cried out once, then broke from his spiral and flew steadily toward the forest at the meeting of the worlds. Shaetano was hiding somewhere, most likely in the part of the Lands that had once been his. Evandar intended to find him.

Down in Deverry, the same storm that was casting its etheric shadow over Evandar’s Lands raged over the northern territories. For three days snow trapped Dun Cengarn in a cage of white. The gwerbret’s men spent their days in the great hall near the two huge hearths and their ever-burning fires, though they made brief forays into the stables to tend their horses. Some even brought their blankets from the barracks and slept on the straw with the servants.

Rhodry stayed mostly among the company of Prince Daralanteriel’s escort of ten elven archers, the last of the large troop he’d assembled for the past summer’s war. With provisions so scarce at Cengarn, the prince had sent the rest of them home long before. Even though his kingdom lay in ruins in the mountains of the far west, by Deverry standards royal blood still ran in Dar’s veins, and he ate and sat at the honour table with Gwerbret Cadmar. Protocol, however, seated his men among the warband, under the captaincy of a pale-haired archer named Vantalaber.

Since the cold draughts bothered the Westfolk men less than it did the human members of Gwerbret Cadmar’s warband, they took the table nearest the back door – they were farther from the human stink that way, too, as the archers often remarked. Just like the human men, they diced to pass their time, although the elven game was a fair bit more complex. Each player took a handful of brightly-coloured wood pieces – cubes and pyramids both – shook them hard, then strewed them in a rough line. Counting the points amounted to another game in itself, with a lot of argument and token cursing from the other players. At times during these sessions one or another man from the warband would stroll over to the elven tables and watch their game, but they never asked to join, and no one invited them, either.

Every now and then a servant girl would come to the table to pour the men ale from a dented flagon or set out a meagre basket of bread. One particular evening, Rhodry realized that it was always the same girl, a buxom little blonde, when she stopped for a moment to chat with one of the archers, Melimaladar, a dark-haired fellow whose eyes were a smoky sort of green, unusual even for one of the People. They whispered together, head to head, until something he said made her giggle, and she trotted off, still smiling to herself.

Vantalaber took a sip of the ale she’d brought and nearly spat it out.

‘Ye gods, it’s watered!’ the captain snarled, but in Elvish. ‘Thin as swill!’

‘The dun’s running out,’ Rhodry said in the same language. ‘Soon enough the steward will be breaking out the vinegar.’

‘What? Why would anyone drink vinegar?’

‘You don’t drink the stuff for itself. You just put a dollop in a tankard of well water. To make it safe, like.’

‘Well, the way these people live in filth, I’m not surprised. But I don’t mean to insult all of humankind. Gwerbret Cadmar’s a fine man in his way.’

‘He is that,’ Rhodry said. ‘Though I worry about his health. He doesn’t have a son to inherit the rhan, and the last thing the Northlands can afford is a cursed feud over rulership.’

‘That doesn’t make any sense. What about his daughters?’

‘Van, they can’t inherit. They’re women. If Cadmar were only a tieryn or a lord, maybe his vassals would back a daughter, but she could never rule as gwerbret.’

Vantalaber rolled his eyes in disgust. Melimaladar, who’d been watching his blonde as she served other tables, leaned forward to join the conversation.

‘The daughters have got sons, right? What about them?’

‘Cadmar can designate a grandson as heir, yes,’ Rhodry said. ‘But the High King will have to approve it.’

‘Huh.’ Mel paused, thinking. ‘It’s a strange place, Deverry. I don’t like it. I feel like riding out right now, snow or no snow.’

‘We’ll all be leaving in the spring,’ Rhodry said. ‘What’s so wrong?’

Melimaladar exchanged a look with Vantalaber. All the archers at the table had fallen silent, Rhodry realized, to listen.

‘Well, look,’ Van said. ‘Here’s our Prince Dar, and he is a prince; none of us would deny it. But he’s a prince of the People, not one of your lords, and before this he’s always known what that means and how he should take it. Now look at him! He’s learning to give himself airs, isn’t he? With all the Round-ears bowing and scraping every time he walks into a room!’

Rhodry slewed round on the bench to look across the great hall. Near the honour hearth Cadmar was sitting in his carved chair with Prince Dar at his right hand and his favourite hounds lying at his feet. Once Cadmar had been a powerful man, but now his hair was white and his face somehow shrunken. Every now and then he would rub his twisted leg and its old injury, as if it pained him despite the warmth of the nearby fire.

By contrast Daralanteriel seemed all youth and strength, even though he sat still, contemplating the enormous sculpture of a dragon that curled around the hearth with its stone back for a mantel. He was an exceptionally handsome man even for one of the Westfolk, and Rhodry could see how a young girl like Carra would have followed him anywhere once he’d been kind to her. Over the winter his pale skin had turned even whiter, setting off his dark hair and violet eyes.

As they watched, Cadmar leaned forward to bark an order at the boys playing by the hearth. Two of them jumped up and ran off to do their lord’s bidding, but not before they’d bowed to both prince and gwerbret.

‘That kind of grovelling around,’ Vantalaber said. ‘I don’t like it. None of us do.’

‘Notice how the boys made their bow to Dar first?’ Melimaladar put in. ‘And how he smiled?’

‘And look at what he’s wearing,’ Vantalaber went on. ‘All the time now.’

Rhodry obligingly looked, though it took him a moment to see what Van meant. Around his neck on a golden chain the prince wore a gold pendant. In the firelight a jewel winked and gleamed.

‘By the Dark Sun herself!’ Rhodry whispered. ‘It’s Ranadar’s Eye.’

‘We all know he’s royal,’ Vantalaber said. ‘He doesn’t need to flaunt it.’

‘Just so,’ Rhodry said. ‘Huh. I’ll try to have a word with him. You’re right. The People will never stand for this, not out on the grass.’

* * *

Despite the cold in the tower room, Dallandra often stayed up late, reading one or another of Jill’s books by the silver light of the Wildfolk of Aethyr. Usually her studies led straight to her sleep work, when she went to the Gatelands to renew the magical wards that kept Rhodry’s dreams safe from Raena. That particular evening she had just finished restoring the flaming stars when Niffa joined her there. For some while they merely considered each other in the red and gold glow from the wards. She was a little thing, to Dalla’s elven way of thinking, not much more than five feet tall and slender with long dark hair that she wore loose over her shoulders.

‘There be a need on me to thank you,’ Niffa said finally. ‘Your news about our Jahdo did do my mam’s heart much good.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Dallandra said. ‘He worries about her and the rest of you as well.’

‘Well, if you’d be so good, do tell him that Mam fares well, though in truth, she be sick again. There be naught he can do, so far away, and I’d not have him fret.’

‘I’ll do that, then. Is there a good herbwoman in your town?’

‘One of the best, or else I’d be sore troubled about my mam. Otherwise, there be much trouble upon us and our town. Tell me if you would – Raena, is it that she does cause grief to you and yours?’

‘She has in the past, truly. What’s she done to you?’

‘Naught that I can prove.’

‘Indeed? What do you think she’s done?’

‘Murdered my man, that’s what. I did see her in vision, like, laughing and laughing when he lay dead, but the councilman, and he be her man and not likely to bring her to trial, is he now? But the councilman, he did say it was evil spirits, and now the whole town does believe him.’

‘I have no idea of what you’re talking about.’ Dallandra paused for a smile. ‘Slowly now, lass. I don’t know the councilman nor much about your town. I didn’t even know you’d been married.’

Niffa’s dream image blushed.

‘My apologies,’ the lass said. ‘I do forget that you be your own self, somehow, and not just some woman in my dreams.’

‘And how do you know that?’

Niffa stared at her for a long moment. All at once her image wavered, turned pale, and faded away. No doubt Dallandra’s call for rational thought had woken her, because it takes long years of practice for dweomerworkers to stay lucid and rational in their dreams. Dallandra could safely assume that Niffa held no real control over her magical gifts. Someone should be teaching the lass, she thought. When she looked at the ward-stars that heralded her skill, she laughed at herself. Most likely that ‘someone’ was her. Paths such as hers and Niffa’s never crossed by pure accident.

With the morning the clouds broke up under a cold north wind and let sunlight flood the dun. In her tower room Dallandra took the oxhides down from the windows to let in light for a task she’d been dreading. Jill’s wooden chest held those few things that could be said to be personally hers, as opposed to things, such as her medicinals and dweomer books, which she had collected only to help others. Among the Westfolk, Jill’s bloodkin would have taken or given away her belongings to those who should have them, but Jill had no bloodkin left. The job had fallen to Dallandra, thanks mostly to their common devotion to the dweomer, which made them clanswomen of a sort.

She pulled over the chair, sat down, and lifted the lid of the chest. One piece at a time, she took out Jill’s spare clothing – two shirts, a pair of brigga, all much washed and patched, and a newish grey cloak – and laid them on the table. The cloak would do for Jahdo, who grew taller daily, or so it seemed. The others? Dallandra supposed that the gwerbret’s women would cut them into useful rags. At the bottom of the chest, however, she found things of more interest: two bundles of brown cloth and a brown cloth sack.

The oblong bundle proved to be another book, a huge volume as long as her arm from fingertips to elbow. It smelled of mildew, and the leather cover was crumbling at the edges. When Dallandra opened it, she found tidy scribal writing, faded to brown, announcing that this book belonged to Nevyn, councillor to Maryn, Gwerbret Cerrmor. No wonder, then, that Jill had kept it apart from the other books on her small shelf. Carefully Dallandra turned a few of the parchment leaves, the writing faded, the sheets all ragged and splitting at the edges, and came to a diagram of concentric circles, each labelled to represent the nested spheres of the universe. The mildew made her sneeze, and she shut the book with some care.

Dallandra had met Nevyn once, towards the beginning of his unnaturally prolonged life. Thanks to her long dwelling in Evandar’s Lands, to her the meeting seemed to have happened no more than a few years past, even though it had been close to four hundred years as men and elves reckon Time. He had brought the Westfolk books of dweomer lore, and she remembered sitting in the warm summer sun and turning each page, staring at the diagrams and at the words she couldn’t read. Later, of course, Aderyn had taught her the Deverry alphabet. Aderyn, her husband, back then so long ago – she could still remember how it had felt to love him, though the feeling was only a memory.

‘Four hundred years ago.’ She said the words aloud, but they carried little meaning, just as her own age meant nothing to her. She’d been born more than four hundred years ago, but of that what had she lived, truly lived in the awareness of time passing? Thirty years perhaps, if that, because she had gone to Evandar’s country so young and stayed there so long. Did she regret it? Since nothing could call the years back, regret would only be a waste of time. She returned to her inventory.

The long narrow bundle turned out to be a sword in a sheath of stained, cracking leather, an odd thing for a dweomermaster to carry with her, as it was no ritual weapon but solid Deverry steel. Dallandra drew the blade and saw marks carved near the hilt: a stylized striking falcon, and just below, a lion device that at one time had sported a touch of red pigment. Out of curiosity she held the blade up to sight along it, looking for other marks. When in the cold room her warm breath touched the steel, a little snake made of moisture squirmed and ran down the blade. Startled, she nearly dropped it. She sheathed it and laid it on the table by the book, then opened the sack.

Inside she found a silver dagger in a much newer leather sheath, and a small something wrapped in silk. She put the dagger on the table and unwrapped the silk to find a squarish bone plaque, a few inches to a side, engraved with a portrait of a Horsekin: a warrior, judging from his huge mane of hair and his facial tattoos. The delicacy and realism of the engraving marked it as elven work, and of great age.

‘Meradan,’ Dallandra said softly. ‘Someone recorded what the invaders looked like. I wonder how long the limner lived afterwards.’

For a moment she held the plaque in both hands, as if it were a talisman that could give her knowledge of those ancient days. She felt nothing. She wrapped it up again in its silk and laid it by the other objects that Jill had treasured enough to carry with her through her wandering life. What to do with them? Dallandra had no idea.

Dallandra had known Jill only a brief time, and Jill had not been an easy person to understand. Her workings were so far beyond mine, Dallandra thought. Her knowledge of dweomer lore, too – gods, a thousand times beyond mine! On the wall hung the small shelf of books that Dallandra had begun to study under Jill’s tutelage. Those, she knew, Jill would have wanted her to keep until the time came to pass them on to another student of the lore. But what she would never learn from books was the way Jill lived her dweomer, in complete surrender and service to the Light that shines beyond all the gods. Although her compassion had at times been a cold and abstract thing, it had never wavered, not even when that service had demanded her life.

And what have I been doing? Dallandra thought. Chasing after glamours, living far from the physical world, turning my back on those I was born to serve! She had come to despise the physical world, in fact, with all its stinks and pain and filth. In Evandar’s fair country life flowed like mead, smooth and intoxicating. Yet like the mead its illusions of pleasure wore off soon enough, leaving the drinker muddled and more than a little sick.

Out in the corridor footsteps were coming toward the door. Dallandra stood just as Rhodry opened it and walked in, glancing at the table.

‘Jill’s things?’ he said in Elvish.

‘Just that. Here, take a look at that sword, will you? I’m curious about those marks on the blade.’

Rhodry obligingly picked the sword up, drew it full out of the sheath, and studied the devices. When he looked up, his eyes glistened with tears.

‘This belonged to Jill’s father, Cullyn of Cerrmor,’ he said. ‘She must have carried it with her for his memory’s sake.’

The tears spilled and ran. For a moment he stood sobbing like a child, yet still he held the sword in a practised grasp. If someone had threatened them, Dallandra felt, Rhodry would have killed him instinctively through his tears. With one last sob he laid the sword down on the table and wiped his eyes on his sleeve.

‘My apologies,’ he said. ‘It’s still hard, thinking that she’s gone.’

‘So it is,’ Dallandra said. ‘Would you like that sword? I’m sure she’d rather you had it than anyone else.’

‘Most like she would.’ He picked up the blade again and sheathed it before he went on. ‘But I own too many things already for a silver dagger. Here, I know. I’ll give it to Dar for a wedding gift – a bit late, but then, he’s cursed lucky he’s getting anything from me at all.’

Dallandra laughed.

‘So he is,’ she said, ‘and what about the silver dagger?’

Rhodry laid down the sword and picked up the dagger. When he slid it free of its sheath, the silver blade flared with a strange bluish light. Rhodry laughed and held it up while the dagger seemed to burn like an etheric torch.

‘What in the name of the gods?’ Dallandra took a quick step back.

‘It’s a dwarven dweomer working.’ Rhodry sheathed the blade again and put it down on the table. ‘It gives warning when anyone with elven blood touches it. It would do the same for you. The Mountain Folk consider us all thieves, you see.’

‘It would scare a thief away, all right, seeing the blade burn like that! Huh, it’s odd. I’ve always heard that the dwarven race shuns dweomer.’

‘That’s true. Ah, who knows?’ Rhodry shrugged and considered the dagger for a long moment. ‘That should have been buried with Jill.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.’

‘Not that it matters to her any more, I’d wager.’ He looked up, his eyes bleak. ‘I could take it, or wait! Jahdo shall have it, because when we captured him and Meer, he lost a knife that his grandfather had given him, and it’s irked him ever since.’

‘It’s rather too grand for him, isn’t it? What if the other boys or one of the servants steals it from him?’

‘He can keep it up here.’ Rhodry picked up the sheathed dagger and gestured at a heap of saddlebags and bundles stacked in the curve of the wall. ‘Along with the goods Meer left him.’

‘I suppose, but I don’t understand. If it’s important enough that it should have been buried with her, why are you going to just give it away?’

‘Because what I’m really doing is throwing it onto the river of Wyrd.’ All at once he laughed with a toss of his head. ‘I lost my silver dagger in Bardek once, you see. But it came back to me, twenty years later, and when it did, it brought change with it. I’ve been thinking, just now and again, about the things you told me, Dalla, last summer, about the way that a man might get reborn – or a woman, since we’re talking about Jill. And I wonder if she’s meant to have this dagger back. If so, it’ll find its way, when the time comes.’

Rhodry laughed again, his high berserk chortle. There were times when Dallandra wondered how she could share her bed with a madman like him. As if he heard her thought, he wiped his daft grin away and looked at her solemnly.

‘But you have the last word, on this dagger,’ Rhodry said. ‘Give it elsewhere if you’d like.’

‘No, do give it to Jahdo. You may be right about it finding Jill again. I’ll keep this book, because I doubt if anyone else here could understand it.’

There remained the bone plaque.

‘Shall I give this to Carra?’ Dallandra said. ‘For a wedding gift?’

‘Why?’ Rhodry smiled briefly. ‘I doubt if it would mean one thing to her. She’s so wretchedly young.’

Dallandra had to agree, but later that day, when she joined the dun’s womenfolk in their private hall, she had a surprise coming. As usual Carra – or Princess Carramaena of the Westlands, to give her full title – sat near the fire with her infant daughter sleeping in her lap. Instead of being swaddled in tight wrappings, little Elessi wore only nappies and a loose tunic while she slept. At Carra’s feet lay Lightning, her dog, though the animal looked more than half a wolf. Across the room at an uncovered window the gwerbret’s lady, Labanna, and her serving woman, Lady Ocradda, sat wrapped in cloaks at a big table frame. They wore fingerless gloves to embroider upon a bed hanging, stretched out tight between them.

Dallandra sat down opposite Carra and little Elessi. For a few moments they chatted about the child, but when conversation lagged, Dallandra thought of the bone plaque, which she had carried with her, tucked into the coin pouch she wore hidden under her tunic.

‘What do you think of this?’ Dallandra brought it out and handed it over. ‘Don’t let Elessi touch it. It’s a good thousand years old.’

Carra took the plaque in both hands and stared at it with a fierce concentration.

‘That old?’ she whispered. ‘How amazing! It shows a Horsekin, doesn’t it? Who drew this?’

‘One of your husband’s ancestors. Well, and mine too.’ Dallandra paused for a smile. ‘A limner, an elven limner from one of the Seven Cities.’

‘Fascinating!’ Carra let out her breath in a soft sigh and went on studying the picture. ‘To hold somewhat this old – ye gods, I can’t find words to tell you how it makes me feel.’

The other women left their embroidery and came over to see. When Carra proffered it to Labanna, the gwerbret’s lady drew back.

‘I’d be afraid to touch it,’ Labanna said, smiling. ‘For fear I’d drop it or suchlike.’

‘It’s . . .’ Ocradda hesitated, ‘very interesting. Awfully faded though, what a pity.’

With polite smiles they returned to their work. Carra turned the bit of bone over and studied the back. ‘No maker’s mark or suchlike. I was rather hoping.’

‘I never thought to look for one,’ Dallandra said. ‘But you’re right, that would have been important.’

‘I love things like this.’ Carra laid the plaque in her palm and held it out to Dallandra. ‘You’d best take it back before I turn thief.’

‘Well, now, here! You should have it since you love it.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t. It’s too valuable.’

‘My dear Carramaena! You’re a princess now, and you should have a few treasures in your possession.’ Dallandra handed over the silk. ‘Here’s the wrap for it.’

‘My thanks and a thousand more!’ Carra took the bit of fabric from her. ‘This is so wonderful, Dalla! When you hold it, you feel like you hold the past itself. As if this was a bit of Time, turned frozen or suchlike like ice. Well, that’s a clumsy way of speaking, but do you understand?’

‘I certainly do. I’d no idea that things of the past mattered so much to you.’

‘Well, they do. Does that make me sound silly?’

‘What? Of course not!’

‘Well, my thanks, but my sisters used to tease me and suchlike, saying I was such an odd duck! I always wanted to know the history of things, you see, and I drove our chamberlain half-mad, when I was a child, asking where did this come from and how old is that.’ Carra paused to look at Dallandra’s face, as if searching for scorn. ‘I do think that’s one reason I fell in love with Dar. He never told me he was a prince, but he did talk of the Seven Cities and the kingdom that had fallen to demons, all those ages ago. I’d never heard such wonderful stories, not even when a travelling bard came our way.’

‘Well, it’s a sweet sort of sadness,’ Dallandra said, ‘thinking of all that vanished splendour and brave heroes fighting to the very end.’

‘Oh, that too. But best of all it explained things. About the Westfolk, I mean, why you always come and go on the border and live with your horse herds instead of in towns and duns. I’d always wondered about that. When Dar talked of the old days, it was like clouds rolling back, and you could see a strange new sky.’

Carra seemed about to say more, but Elessi woke with a complaint, wailing and throwing her arms into the air. Carra wrinkled her nose.

‘Oh what a stink! I know what you need, my beloved poppet. Dalla, please hold this picture for me while I change her?’

Dallandra took the bone plaque and laid it on her knee while Carra took the baby to the far side of the room, where a table stood with a chamber pot ready and a pile of rags for nappies. As she listened to Carra croon and chat to the baby, Dallandra felt ashamed of herself. Have I ever really looked at Carra before? she wondered. She had seen what everyone else had seen in her: a young lass, besotted with love – pretty little Carra, with her heart-shaped face and blonde hair, her enormous blue eyes that stared up at her husband in limpid devotion. None of us ever thought she had a brain in her head, Dalla thought. More fool us!

‘I’ve got a legacy to deliver to you,’ Rhodry said.

‘A what?’ Jahdo said. ‘And who would be leaving a lowly lad such as me a thing?’

‘Jill, of course. Here. This is to take the place of your grandfather’s knife, the one I made you lose.’

Jahdo pulled the silver dagger from its sheath and stared at it for a long long time without speaking. They were standing outside in the late afternoon sunlight, not far from the stables, where Jahdo had been shovelling snow with one of the flat mucking-out shovels.

‘Oh, it be so splendid!’ Jahdo held the dagger up, and the blade caught the light and flashed like a mirror. ‘Here, I could never be taking this!’

‘You can, and you shall,’ Rhodry said, grinning. ‘Though I think you’d best keep it up in Dallandra’s chamber where the other lads can’t find it.’

‘True spoken.’ Jahdo ran a fingertip down the blade. ‘There be a device on it, a little falcon, like.’

‘That was Jill’s father’s mark, and she used it too, of course.’

‘He were a sorcerer, then, such as she?’

‘He wasn’t, but the greatest swordsman in all Deverry.’

‘Ah.’ Jahdo sheathed the blade, hefted the dagger for a moment, then handed it back to Rhodry. ‘I do hate to give it up, but truly, it had best wait for me up in the tower.’

‘I’ll take it. And talking of Jill reminds me, lad. I made you a promise, didn’t I? About teaching you letters. It’s a fair way to spring yet, so let’s make a start.’

‘Oh, my thanks! I did wonder, my lord, but I did hate to vex you or suchlike –’

‘No harm in reminding me, and I’m no lord.’

‘Well, you be so to me, as generous as any man could be.’

For a moment Jahdo thought Rhodry was about to cry, from the way he turned away with a toss of his head.

‘My thanks,’ Rhodry said, and his voice was unsteady. ‘Here, I’ll hunt up a slate or suchlike. Cadmar’s scribe should have one. And we’ll start today.’

Rhodry turned and hurried off across the ward. Jahdo watched him go, then went back to his work before the head groom caught him slacking.

Jahdo was just leaving the stables when he saw a small procession coming from the broch complex. At its head trotted Carra’s dog, with Carra and Lady Ocradda just behind, and two pages following along after them. Jahdo felt himself blush. Here he was, with his clothes filthy on top and sweaty inside, and the princess was heading straight for him.

‘Jahdo!’ Carra called out. ‘It gladdens my heart to see you.’

‘And mine to see you, your highness,’ Jahdo said, stepping back. ‘But er, I be a bit mucky right now, and so –’

‘Do you think that bothers me?’ Carra smiled at him. ‘I’ve come to see how my horse fares. I thought I’d fetch him out for a bit of sun and walk him round the ward.’

Ocradda looked as sour as if she’d bitten into wormy meat. Jahdo could guess that the princess had fought a battle to be allowed to come to the stables at all.

‘I’ll bring Gwerlas out for you,’ Jahdo said. ‘You’d best not be going in there with your long dresses and all. Some of the men, well, they be careless when they do muck out their mounts’ stalls.’

‘Oh here! I’ve always cared for my own horses, all the years that I –’

‘Your highness!’ Ocradda interrupted. ‘The lad’s right. Let him wait upon you! Er, I mean, if you please.’

‘Oh very well. But be careful. Gwer can be a bit bitey.’

More than a bit, or so Jahdo knew from the earlier times when he’d cared for the horse. Still, the big dun gelding seemed to be in a good mood that afternoon; he allowed Jahdo to tie a rope onto his halter and lead him out without showing so much as a tooth. Out in the sun Gwerlas snorted and tossed his mane, then spotted Carra and headed straight for her with Jahdo trotting along at his side.

‘There you are!’ Carra crooned. ‘My darling!’

When she threw her arms around his neck, the horse snuffled at her cloak and nudged her. Lady Ocradda rolled her eyes heavenward in something like despair. For their walk around the ward, Carra insisted on leading the horse herself, but she did allow Jahdo to hold onto the loose end of the rope for appearances’ sake. A disgruntled Ocradda and the pages trailed behind as they followed the exercise path, a broad swathe next to the dun walls that had been cleared of the usual sheds and clutter.

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